Duncan Lunan | The Green Children Of Woolpit, Medieval Abductions, & Elite Families

00:13 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man Until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view You'll find the more you think you know, less you really do Where would we be without THC? We know they're lying to us, just don't know to what degree. Where would we be without THC? The highest side chat show. Greg Carlwood and company

00:58 Alright, Hiresite Chatters. If one digs through the vast Fortean archives of this weird world they'll find all sorts of unexplained stories. Encounters with spirits, fairies, strange crafts in the sky missing time foreign beings odd disappearances and everything in between but there are few if any stories that your humble host enjoys more than the classic tale of The Green Children of Woolpit The story goes that in the late 12th century, two very strange children emerged in the village of Woolpit England. Their skin was green and they spoke an unknown language and wore clothes of a color and material the locals had never seen. Weak from their journey from some mysterious place and uneasy about any of the unknown food items presented to them

01:45 The young boy died, leaving only the older sister who is said to have been taken in by a local and eventually grew up to learn English lose her green coloring and speak of a mysterious land of perpetual twilight on the other side of long and mysterious tunnel she says she and her brother traveled through from a subterranean world. A provocative tale that leaves one with all sorts questions and uncertainty about validity of this ordeal Well, today's guest Duncan Lunan is not one to leave something like this so open-ended. And he investigated the story more deeply than any other person on the planet. He tracked back the origins of the tale to its sources, factored in the political climate at that time, examined the elite class characters involved, noted some reports of extremely odd events in the sky that might be connected and has drawn some very different conclusions about what might be at the heart of this strange saga

02:40 A seriously impressive undertaking that is laid out in his 2012 book Children from the Sky, which clocks in at just over 600 pages. To tell you a little bit more about the man, Duncan has been an active author, researcher, broadcaster, editor, critic, tutor and more since 1970 with many contributions to fiction and non-fiction as well as 9 published books with interesting titles such as Man and the Stars, Contact and Communication with Other Intelligence. Man And The Planets, The Resources of Solar System. And Stones & The Stars, Building Scotland's Newest Megalith Just to name a few... A bona fide expert in astronomy journalism and the strange goings on in the villager wool pit in the 12th century gracing us with his presence all the way from Scotland Duncan Lunan my good man welcome to the higher side Thank you Greg it is nice to be here

03:33 Yeah, so man I can't thank you enough for doing this because there's just no one else who could have this in-depth of a conversation about such A unique story and i'm really jazzed up about it clearly when you dig into It this isn't some random lore from the old days This is a real story with elite families involved political intrigue interest from the king And a lot of other reasons to conclude. There's something to it and I guess the best place to start Is with where the original story? originates. There seems to be two main sources, but I guess to get us started walk us through the story as it's told from these sources and we can flesh out some of the discrepancies and misconceptions along the way. Okay i'm going to start with where I found it because when I was a student I wanted to do a degree in astronomy but my maths proved not to be good enough and I ended up taking English and philosophy through to higher degree level

04:30 In the papers, specifically the test paper on medieval and early Elizabethan Jacobean literature. One of the set texts was The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton published in 1613. A quite extraordinary work. The Everyman edition runs to three volumes. In general it's a medical textbook but Burton was a Renaissance man, and he filled it out with everything he knew about everything. He covers a whole vast panorama of subjects in the course of this huge work right in the middle of it—in the middle of what's Volume 2 of The Everyman Edition—he has what he calls a digression of the air in which he discusses meteorology and astronomy. And in the middle of that, he is talking at that point

05:27 about the fact that people like Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others have either observed or postulated the existence of worlds other than the Earth. And that Galileo and Kepler in particular have proved that planets are indeed other worlds in independent orbit around the Sun So, naturally for his time he leaps to the conclusion that in that case they must be occupied. They must be inhabited because God wouldn't have gone through the trouble of creating them otherwise. They must be there to serve a purpose and obviously that's to support more people

06:03 And right in the very center of the whole thing, you get this amazing throwaway remark that it may be those green children that fell from the sky which Newbergensis writes over in his Time Came From Thence. It just leaves at that and keeps going. At the time when I read it as a student, I thought one day I'm going to check that out—the sources were in the footnotes New Brigencis was William of Newborough who was a late 12th century historian regarded as one of the most reliable sources, particularly because he regarded himself as a ghostbuster. Every village was claiming that they had miracles on their patch because if the church would verify this

06:49 As I said at one point in the book, it's like having the US Air Force leave you with a runway that can take jumbo jets. Suddenly the tourist trade coming your way in the form of the pilgrims of the time who would go to pretty well any site that had miraculous connotations. William and Euboera thought there was too much of this going on and he sets out to demolish the claims of a lot of supposedly miraculous events I'm comes down on just four really are for categories that he feels you can't roll out what she wants to begin and end with is the case of the green children, what bothers about it as that doesn't seem to illustrate any point of scripture which is the whole point of miracles.

07:36 He says, well I just can't see what this is about and i thought i was going to leave it out but i have interviewed so many witnesses and witnesses of such quality that i have become convinced that it really happened. So he then tells the story and goes through his other cases which are comparatively mundane fairy stories which he hasn't actually been able to disprove and he concludes that these can all be attributed to the activities of good or bad angels And then he comes back to the green children and says, but as for those children that emerged from the earth. He says I just don't know what to make of it but it does not grieve me to have set down this most strange and wonderful event so there you have William The other account is by Ralph of Coggeshall, the abbot of Coggeshall Abbey

08:28 He wrote it down somewhat later in his old age, but the really remarkable thing here is that where you have miraculous stories in the medieval chronicles almost every time they are simply copying one another. You can determine which one has the oldest and then you can see that others have been copied from it usually by leaving things out rather than adding to them but sometimes adding however obviously the same story from the same original But Ralph of Cornishville is coming at it from a completely different perspective. Where William says that he interviewed witnesses to the children's arrival and events over the next year or so, Ralph is talking from the perspective that he knows the family with whom the formerly green girl is now living at the time of his writing as an adult yet the details of this story are almost identical

09:24 but told in completely different language, different vocabulary and from quite a different perspective. And that is extremely unusual it leads you strongly to think that there is something actually behind this So having got that far and a couple of bursts of research one of which I did in the early 70's another in late 80's shows how long this has been incubating on my mind In 1993 I was covering a conference in London on what became the Rosetta mission, Europe's recent mission to a comet which ended last year. Having done that and phoned in my story, I decided it was time to look into the Green Children mystery and before going home, I went up to East Anglia and went to Bury St Edmunds and out to the village of Woolpit which is about eight miles away

10:23 And before I went, I got together with a friend of mine who's a history graduate and I asked him what questions should we be asking? And we worked out the list of questions. So I got a very warm welcome in Woolpit and other places that I went to round about and I kept asking my questions and people kept replying you'll have to go to the county records office for that sort of thing so i went back into Bury St Edmunds which is a county town I joined the county archives research network give me an idea of how long ago this was nineteen ninety three. They then pointed me to the card index and said there's a filing cabinet where it's all cats you just tell us what you want out of that i'm left with five hours later,

11:13 starting exhausted and dehydrated i really don't have a recent advertisement thinking here comes the best seller because i discovered that there were answers to the questions, add it look as if the line of inquiry that my friend and i had walked out hadn't been pursued at least not in this kind of detail by anyone else. And the answer is what they are defined which is So much unlike your usual experience of investigating stories of contact past or present. I thought well i really got to start taking this seriously now in the end it turned into a 10 year project culminating in the publication as you say children from the sky and 2012 and although that's nearly 500 pages long

11:59 That's about two-thirds of the length of the original manuscript. There was so much that had to be left out simply for lack of space! So I am now convinced that it really happened, and we can go into the reasons for that Yes, that is some great context. I really love hearing about both sources of the original tale Ralph's and Williams that they are from different perspectives just the rarity of That the fact that there's no real moral to this story which might exist in fairy tales And there's no biblical elements so there's all these reasons to suggest yeah This story is real and it did happen again

12:38 I guess when it comes to the story itself, many of the details tend to come out of the children's interrogation or what the girl said later in life. And I guess these would be things that lead people to speculate that the kids came from somewhere underground which is not the conclusion you come to but what about those elements? Or where do we maybe see this story from a different angle or take those elements out of it? How did those parts get injected Well, they did emerge from an ancient earthwork. That's where Woolpit takes its name from. Most sources say that it is a corruption of Wolf Pit but in fact if the pits are the ones surrounding a feature called The Lady's Well which do date back to medieval times and seem to be the only ones that do – the only thing I could find

13:30 If that's the case, the pits there are trenches. It's a heart-shaped feature with a glade like an island in the middle of it and for much of the time these surrounding heart shaped moats are filled with water. They're much too big to be deadfalls they couldn't have ever been wolf traps no sensible wolf would've fallen into anything that big so yeah the derivation of the village is name is a little bit odd but obviously it does relate to the pit And it was from that the children emerged they came out at harvest time made a run for it across the fields and basically rundown by the harvester's captured, it was discovered very fast that they were green all over the same to being quite roughly treated first they will put on public show and what condition you can guess.

14:22 And some time passed before common sense kicked in, particularly because it occurred to someone that miraculous or not they might need to eat and they wouldn't. At that point they were taken to the home of as it says in the text Lord Richard de Calna at Wykes. Now Wykes is part of a place called Nettyshall near the boundary of Norfolk. It's 20 odd miles from Woolpit and to get to it, the villagers would have had to cross the land of two other barons who actually outranked De Calma. The obvious thing for them to do would have been to take their children to Birris and Edmonds itself – to the abbey because that was much closer – and nominally the village belonged to the abbot at Birris and Edmonds although it didn't at that particular moment but we'll come back to that. Anyway they were taken to this chap de Calma who is almost untraceable

15:24 I really had to dig to find him a lot of modern writers are just taking guesses who and what he was you'll find the water books that say here is the local landowner village or. Some things because there's so little record on them she might have been a masterless night this way i also miss all higher but when i started digging into it turns out, no much more to it He was in fact a younger son of a very prominent family, which included most of the bishops in England and a succession of royal chancellors. At least one chaplain to the king and one chap who had actually been Viceroy of England at one point when the King was abroad. The De Calnas were very powerful people. It is curious that De Calna being our younger son should have been knighted

16:22 It wasn't done normally. Just about the only circumstances in which you could come by it would be what we nowadays would call a battlefield promotion, he could have been in combat and distinguished himself sufficiently to be elevated through that status but somehow he reached it and surpassed it. He was in fact a fathasur, he was intermediate in rank between a knight and a baron. He had at least eight or possibly 13 or more other knights in service to him which makes him a very wealthy and powerful man quite apart from his connections. But the most jaw-dropping thing when I came to it was that after the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, when Henry II came to the throne and things calmed down three or four years later, the financial records of the kingdom were restarted in the form of documents which are known as The Pipe Rolls

17:18 And in the very first entry, the very first pipe roll after the war it is stated that Richard de Calna and Richard de Hastings who was the English master of the Knights Templar at the time have both been excused all taxes because of their outstanding service to the king. This is pretty well unheard off if you do the kind of favor you get excuse a tax or some taxes Being excused all taxes makes you invisible. And for the rest of his life, and de Calna appears in the records very occasionally and only as a rule when he's witnessing some document that another member of his family is involved in so essentially it's like the head of the Secret Service His M if you will As in James Bond This is the person whom the villagers went way out of their way to take the Green Children

18:15 Very strongly suggest that somebody had been told if anything happens report to sir richard lord richard and he'll know what to do, i'm probably there was a bag of silver at the end of it for them when they did so already where finding that is much more to this story than the superficial account might suggest. Indeed i just think this is so fascinating because a lot of people you know do take that for granted as a fan of the story we just thank all local landowner some guy who was probably kind enough to take. in the kids know some good samaritan and took in the girl we really never thought to dig much deeper but not only is the break-in protocol interesting that they didn't take it to the nearest. Baron when all the way to his place and also that he was excluded from all taxes i mean these are pretty impressive details than one paragraph by written down here at pre match sums up what you said and adds the fact that there's more context here, is where you say

19:17 Richard de Colna was much more important than people think. His family were highly placed throughout the Church of England, he was very close to the King who took a great deal of interest in Woolpit and in the Green Children after they arrived. The event was anticipated Henry II had already taken control of Woolpit and put one his top officials in charge of it and he put crack troops into the area when the children arrived Almost certainly they were Knights Templar and De Colna was an associate Templar. His manor at Weix was next door to the English masters, and the Pope was at least aware that something was happening in the area." And I love that! It really sets the stage for some big event. It'd be like if the Pentagon sent Insta people to watch over the desert in Roswell a few years before that situation. Clearly there's a lot of context here that's important

20:09 I like that. The bit about the king annexing the village is quite remarkable because you read in the books that he was doing this all the time, but I've studied the history of Henry II in a lot of detail and read a lot of church chronicles and annals and property lists and all of that. I haven't found another instance when he did in 1160 take the village away from the abbey at Birys and Edmonds And his excuse was he had a poor clerk who needed the income from the village. Now Wilpit at that time had about 100 inhabitants and was worth about 10 pounds a year, and the poor clerk to whom he assigned the care of the village was a chap called Geoffrey Riddle

20:58 who was essentially deputy foreign secretary, for want of a better word. He was just about the richest man in the kingdom. Part of his specific job description was that he was supposed to entertain foreign royalty at his own expense when they visited England and he did it! This was a man who thought nothing in those days of spending £10,000 on a single banquet. He was not stuck for 10 pounds And this comment that he was a poor clerk who really needed the money is just ridiculous when you look into it. But the chap, it seems and I am adding two and two in making five here but it looks as if he assigned Woolpert to a key man on his staff called Richard Barr. Barr is an extraordinary character in himself. He comes out of nowhere as it seems

21:53 He's the son of an archdeacon at Lincoln who turns out to be working with a cousin of Richard de Calnais. There is circumstantial reason to think that Richard Barne was actually Richard de Calnais' godson, but at the age of 19 he suddenly rockets up in the diplomatic service. He becomes number two ambassador for Henry II to the Vatican at the time when relations between England and the Vatican are at their lowest until Henry VIII, because the murder of Beckett has just occurred to Canterbury. And the whole country is facing excommunication and the only ambassador that Pope will talk to is 19-year old Richard Barr whom the King has authorized to speak personally with the Pope on his behalf in trying to intercede for the country

22:48 And in the middle of a denunciatory letter to the king by the pope, denouncing that the King had all his works. The Pope throws in an aside which says from all this I exempt our dear son Richard Barr who has labored so tirelessly on your behalf So yeah he's quite something this guy But another aspect is that at the time of the annexation which was ten years or more earlier than Beckett's death A schoolmaster in Bury St Edmunds, who afterwards took holy orders and became abbot went to Rome on his own account to protest the Pope about the annexation of the village. I've talked to medieval historians and said am i the first one to notice that this is out of the question? And the story that he tells doesn't make any sense and details don't add up

23:44 It's not something that would ever have happened. He'd been putting his head right on the chopping block if the story was true, but he put it about when he came back that he got a letter from the Pope ordering the king to give the village back which didn't happen for another 12 years but the letter survives in the archives of Bury St Edmunds Abbey is not addressed to the King its address to the abbot and what it says Concerning the church of St Mary Woolpit, and by implication the village. I have given orders that the king is to return it to you when he shall have finished with it." Which is a totally different ballgame again! Something big was going on in Woolpit and the King knew about it and the Pope knew about

24:33 And there's a lot of hidden meaning in the texts. Yes! And when you come to the account that the children gave themselves, which I think we need to turn here it gets almost funny The first thing that I noticed when it came to was this is William O'Neill but it says When they had learned our manner of speaking It seemed to be wise that they might be christened and even that was done At that point, the narrative of both his and Ralford Corbishaw's without explanation go into formal Latin legal parlance. Passages that modern translators have been rendering as he said and they said actually gave us evidence and swore on oath in similar formal terms

25:23 So I rang a friend of mine who had a diploma in theology from the Catholic College of Cardinals, and I said to him have you any idea what that's about? And he said oh everybody knows that. And then well I'm very sorry but i don't um He said well even today in the Roman Catholic Church a christening in controversial circumstances must be preceded by a formal inquiry called an inquisitio with a small eye which must be conducted by a bishop So, immediately you're going anyone reading in those times William of Newburgh's account or Ralph of Corbishells would themselves almost certainly have been churchmen and would have known that. So okay now we're in a formal hearing and the children are asked this is very clever who and from whence they were? And they reply We are people of the land of St Martin

26:23 Modern writers have all been fooled by this into thinking that is the reply to, from whence have you come? But it isn't. It took me quite a while to find it but the land of St Martin in The Doomsday Book and Block Capitals Terra Sanctae Martini as the Essex property of the church of St Martin's Le Grand which was the principal sanctuary in England stood next to St Pauls and was under the Bishop of London, who was the superior of Corgishall Abbey where Ralph wrote his account. He was very much the king's man in the quarrel with Becket both before and after Becket's death. So again anyone reading that at the time is going to say, The Bishop of London has intervened here he has conducted the inquisitio and almost certainly it will be because the King told him

27:21 I think we'll just turn the page and look at something else. A pretty clear indication that you want to keep your nose out of this, because the king isn't mentioned, the Bishop of London isn't mentioned by any knowledgeable churchman would have known what was going on here. Anyway! The bishop pretends not to get it and he says oh that sounds all right do they believe in our savior there my dear which, as the late Roddy Chisholm pointed out is a very strange thing to ask if he believes they've come from a land named after a Christian saint. But the reply from the girl is in effect oh yes you can't see the place for churches which it's pretty clear that she had been told to say because in the version that she told an adult life she doesn't mention this aspect at all however there's one more question to answer before their home free

28:19 And that is, does the sun rise or set there? And all the children have to say at that point is yes. Because it was believed there was no sun in Fairyland but they can't bring themselves to lie and instead they say No we come from a country which exists in permanent twilight and is separated by a very broad river from a country of permanent sunlight They're talking about a planet with a trapped rotation, keeping the same face always towards the Sun and they're saying that they live in the twilight zone. And Richard Burton of course knew enough Renaissance astronomy to realize those conditions couldn't be found anywhere on Earth and that is why he suggested that they come from Mars or Venus because rather than say they came out from underground even although they had emerged from this pit

29:14 Anyway, they get away with it. Orders are duly given that the children shall be christened and having dug into it at great lengths again I can't prove this and in fact there's a chap at Imperial College who has challenged me on this and says my evidence isn't strong enough to argue for it but possibly agree to differ on that because he hadn't read the whole book but it appears that she was christened Agnes and she married Richard Barr subsequently. William of Newver says she married a man who was living at Lynn, and it's quite possible – again evidence is circumstantial but it's quite possible that Richard Barr was living at Lynn at that time under the Bishop of Norfolk who had been the principal ambassador whose deputy he was in the Beckett affair. At any rate though, the thing is yes Agnes, the girl they couldn't burn if you look up the legend of St. Agnes

30:13 She had to be beheaded by her persecutors because when they tried to burn her alive, the faggots wouldn't light. And I can just picture Richard de Calna and Richard Barr walking out of the hearing at the end of it wiping their brows and going that was a close one we'll have to christen Arachnus. It all fits and continues to fit. There is much more circumstantial evidence, I actually admit it is all circumstantial but as you say there are several hundred pages of it in the book and the fact that it all ties together in the way that it does is quite striking when The Fortean Times reviewed the book their reviewer said oh Lunen has simply selected the facts to fit his case and obviously yes I've selected the ones that are relevant

31:03 But I haven't been ignoring any facts that contradict what i'm putting forward. I've been very careful about that when I'd been on it only about six months the late John Braithwaite said to me, you are definitely onto something big here he said if somebody makes up a story like this they tend to make it up out of whole cloth they'll invent a story they'll put in a few real place names and names of real people to make it look convincing But when you research it, and you find out that those people couldn't have been in those places at those times and the story falls apart. A fictitious story will not stand up to the kind of detailed examination you're giving it." And at that point he said if its no extraterrestrial contact then you've got a political thriller of all time! Indeed

31:50 So that would be the question I would ask you is what about that tunnel aspect? Because i think a lot of people who know this story might be confused right now and thinking well, I thought one of the major details was that they traveled through a tunnel from somewhere subterranean because they were watching over their father's livestock and they heard some kind of bells or chimes. And they just followed it and then emerged in the surface world where does that detail come up and why do you think that part might not the literal truth? Well, I mentioned that there are only a very few differences between William of Newburgh's account and Ralph of Coggeshill. That is one of them. The other one which somebody is almost bound to come up with is that William of Newburgh says the event happened during the reign of King Stephen. That is not compatible with Ralph of Coggeshill's account. He didn't go to Coggeshill until 1160 at

32:51 He wasn't old enough, and he was a prior at Barnold in Kimberley before that. Richard de Calna died in 1189 so you've got a fairly narrow time slot in which these events could have occurred. In particular for de Calna to have been visiting Ralph when the girl was an adult it's got to be in the reign of Henry II to fit those facts And whoever told William of Newborough that it happened in the reign of King Stephen was either getting confused, as could well have been the case. Or because they said it happened during The Trouble or when the army was here – you've got two time slots for that in Stephen's reign and Henry II's

33:37 And apparently people interviewing old people now about World War I and about the Blitz, people get their ears mixed up as to which war they were in. It happens even today so that probably accounts for that. Now the other major difference is in Rafa Kogeshel's account and remember this is the girl speaking as an adult she tells this story about following the sound of bells, wandering through a network of caves and coming out in Woolpit. This point certainly is not physically possible. Woolpit stands on Pleistocene clay. Water table even now is only a few feet below the surface. In medieval times it was surrounded by swamp and buildings didn't even have foundations they were built on wooden rafters set to the surface of the ground. Aerial archaeology's no use around there for that reason

34:28 There is no network of caves. It doesn't and couldn't exist, but in the trial as described by William which is the earlier account he's been interviewing witnesses to the events when the children were children what they are asked how did it get here? And they say oh well we don't know. It happened because we were out with our father's livestock on a certain day And the Latin construction here is very strong causative. It happened because they were out on that day with the livestock, in other words they shouldn't have been and they heard a great sound and at this point in most modern accounts it gets elided and says we heard the great sound of the bells of Beresford Edmonds what they actually said was they had a sound like the bells of Beresford Edmonds possibly some kind of alarm because the next line goes

35:25 and then suddenly as if placed in some absence of mind we found ourselves in the field where you were reaping. It's an instantaneous transition, and the most striking thing to my mind is that this kid not only knows what amnesia is she knows she hasn't got it suddenly as if placed in some absence of mind She has not run away from some primitive tribe living in the woods She's educated. But I think the children probably did have more of an understanding of what had happened to them than they're letting on at this point, because they don't want probably to get drawn into the details but it does look as if we're talking about some form of matter transmission and this is where we probably also have to throw in the point that the children were unquestionably human. One of numerous says the girl married

36:19 I think I've identified her as the wife of Richard Barr, Agnes. And if so she had two children and I traced both of their lines of descent one for over a century after the event and the other all the way down to the present remarkably enough one of the descendants of Agnes Barr in the present whoever she was is the current and previous Earls Ferrors a noble line in its current incarnation going back several hundred years, men of distinction. The father of the present Earl was deputy leader of the House of Lords under Margaret Thatcher and when this lot came out he was actually outed by a Scottish paper called The Evening Times after several larger papers had refused to publish

37:14 And he thought it was a hoot. He gave them a quote under the headline, Torrey Peer descended from green woman from outer space. He said, It sounds bizarre I knew my ancestors were colorful but not that colorful. So i wrote to him and said, I'm very glad you've taken this in such good part because I wasn't sure how to approach you with it And you know, but I can add several hundred years to that branch of your family tree going back and he wrote back saying nevermind the family tree tell me about the green woman from outer space. But she was human she married she had children both chronicles are very definite that once they lost the green color the children were indistinguishable from their regular inhabitants of East Anglia right we're talking about

38:05 Some kind of settlement that they were in which has been established probably by mass abduction for experimental purposes and i'm definitely close to the case. It's the X-Files in the 12th century. Yes, I do love that phrase! It's being done with the knowledge if not the active connivance of at least some of the terrestrial authorities—the masters of the Templars, the king and the pope—they at least know about it So that becomes the theory that we have a situation where the government is involved with ETs there are mass abductions going on How do we explain the green color?

38:47 Well, the really extraordinary thing here to my mind is that nobody actually looks at the text. When as an adult she was asked about it she replied that all the people and all of things in that land but the context imply that she's talking about plants, all the people on all the plants in that land were dyed with the same green color. It's vegetable dye. Why are they all wearing it? Now in Ralph's account I dedicated my book to the principal teacher of Latin at my old school. I could never have done this but for his efforts back then, I found over and over again that I had to look very hard at the Latin accounts either in literal translation or in some cases figurative translation where you can't say the same thing or different things in the same words in some cases. In both accounts, both Williams and Rouse

39:46 When the children say, we were following our father's crops...our father's herds I beg your pardon. The verb is passive it actually says the animals were being followed It could be that there was something else following them and looking for an explanation in Richard Dawkins book A River Out of Eden I came across a fascinating chapter on predator eyesight in which he is emphasizing the fact that Predators' eyesight gets very highly specialized through evolutionary processes. Famously, the frog starves to death if surrounded by dead flies because it has to see movement to recognize prey but polar bears have eyesight adapted to the season in which they emerge from hibernation and have to hunt right away to build up their store of fat again

40:40 And giant cats have preferred times of day at which they hunt, and their eyesight has adapted to those times. So if there's something coming over the river to hunt which is accustomed to permanent bright daylight and is now hunting in twilight... If you've dyed yourself the same color as the vegetation and you stand still perhaps it can't see you because there's no mention of the animals being dyed Perhaps in that situation, whatever it is, it'll take a lamb and not a child. Which takes us back towards the experimental idea who has set this situation up and who's watching? And what are they trying to learn from it? People behind this may not be awfully nice people at least by our standards but we don't know who they are there's very little if any indication of who or what is actually behind this

41:40 But whoever they are, it seems that they can walk between worlds and do as they will. Right You know, you mentioned this isolating this to that very narrow time slot in which it could be possible and 1173 is the year you've pinned down for the emergence of the Green Children. And as you say in the book, It was the peak year for the 12th century's solar activity. You say In the summer in Scotland an extraordinary star was recorded as being seen motionless in the west by day and night. In September in Scotland there was a two-hour

42:16 solar obscuration at noon with no clouds or eclipse so the sun is being blocked for two hours with nothing else in the sky and England reported it in 1172 just a year before the proposed year of the children, two moons were seen in the sky that year. So these are all very really weird interesting things to have recorded even just on their own but you think these elements are too strange to not be connected somehow right? Yeah there was a huge amount of auroral activity at that time And if you look at the tree ring graphs and other indications of how active the sun was, there's a spike in 1173. A spike on what is already a very high peak — the highest peak of solar activity since the Bronze Age. And yeah, extraordinary things were going on in the sky! There's one account that sounds very much like a high-altitude nuclear explosion and others about what appears to be a sonic boom that has held all over England and Wales and Ireland

43:21 Something definitely wasn't synchronized with the rotation of the earth when that was happening. So I went to a physicist friend and said, right imagine a matter transmitter you've got a planet with a trapped rotation at one end which because of its very slow rotation presumably has no magnetic field and this end you've got the Earth's magnetic field violently disturbed can you visualize a matter transmitter that will stop having accidents in that situation?" And he said, oh yes. Tell me what makes it go wrong and its much easier to figure out how it works." So he came out with the purely theoretical account of a matter transmitter that might indeed generate these effects so maybe that is indeed what's going on and what I have found looking around for similar events as there are clusters of them in medieval times

44:17 And yeah, they occur when the sun is disturbed. In the same chronicles and in the same places where you find accounts of violent auroral displays and the like, you tend to find people appearing and disappearing. Lots of correlations when you look into those stories in depth, you start finding connections with Wolpert. That's fascinating that this could be part of a larger tapestry of situations that are kind of similar! Yeah It isn't that common for appearances and disappearances to occur as recorded in the Chronicles, usually with an index entry from a Victorian chronicler saying... compiler I should say editor saying putting it down as legend. But you want to look long and hard at some of these legends especially when you find out that the people owning the ground where these events happened also have connections to Woolpit or two other people in the Green Children's story

45:14 Right there's an awful lot here. Read the book yes there is i almost wanted to call it a textbook in the introduction but just the idea of a textbook on such as strange little story. Is just so far no people but i mean that is what it feels like its very heavy and it's dance and i mean thats great at a good thing for a story like this when you're trying to find Some credible answers and follow every last lead it's important and i'm glad you did the work well yes i felt that in order to put into print, add all i had to justify what i was saying as fully as i could provide the references.

46:02 Even that in having to a budget for location i've been taken to task because they haven't given every single reference and some cases perhaps things are possibly shouldn't have. Yeah i put it as much as i possibly could within the length of the show. For years and years before that, people had been saying to me why don't you publish it as fiction? Why don't you do the sensational account forget all the historical facts and just go for the dramatic. I kept saying no if i do that particularly if i dramatize it If i do that at all people won't be able to tell what's real and what is not real And so they'll just dismiss it also in fact i had to publish this book to get it on record

46:47 But the time is very possibly come i think to do it in a more accessible phone shall we say. On which i can see if you want to know more details on children from the sky, But for the moment, Children from the Sky is available from the publishers. I feel that I could almost paraphrase James Joyce and say it took me 10 years to write it – at least you can do is take ten years to read it! But definitely I am looking for publishers to go further with All of Us. If there are any out there listening, I'd love to hear from you. I would love to see that happen! And I guess I'm curious – are there any other topics getting your attention? Any more books planned? You mentioned there is one about to release right? That's right. There's another first in my background. In 1989, I edited for a small firm called Orkney Press the first ever anthology of science fiction by Scottish writers

47:44 and it suffered the fate of the first of its kind. People said, well why should you do that? Surely Scots don't have anything to say and surely it's parochial as I said to one editor Ray Bradbury says all this stuff in small towns in Kansas Why should something by a Scottish writer be parochial but the book does infact have...it is called Starfield And has some real stars in it when it was first mooted by the late Chris Boyce whom I mentioned before We enlisted Professor Edwin Morgan, Naomi Mitchison and Alistair Gray who's still alive as the stars of the Starfield. And built the book around the contributions that they offered and all three of them strongly supported the project. Below them if you will it's got the writers of the time in the late 80s like myself and Archie Troye and Chris Boyce

48:38 It introduces the winners and runners up of the science fiction competition that i was running for the vasco herald at the time so it's full of talent and some of those newcomers have gone on to do great things since as well. So yeah, it's become very proud of covers by sydney jordan who mentioned before and its now being published in paperback by edinburgh firm called shoreline infinity who have started the first science fiction Scottish magazine for a long time and are doing very well with it, 12 issues to date. And they published an anthology of my time travel stories couple years ago called The Elements of Time which I was very pleased about illustrated by throughout by Sydney Jordan as Children from the Skies by the way

49:24 So after 29 years, Starfield is going to be reprinted in paperback. Which does make me feel that there must be something to it after all! Yeah, well man congrats on just another accomplishment on a long list of them. It's being published the launch will be at a science fiction convention called Satellite 6 which is being held in Glasgow from the 25th to 27th of this month Awesome So I will be there for the launch it's on Friday on the 25th I wish i could be there too. Short hop from where you are? Oh sure, 11 hours the time i did it you're in california right exactly yeah i have flown directly from glasgow to california woo! eleven hours over the pole man can't be done braver man than i i have to stop on the east coast first to stretch my legs i can't do it over six feet and one of those little tin cans but man i wish i could be there and don't

50:24 Duncan, I really am in awe of the amount of research and journalism that went into fleshing out the Green Children story. I'm holding out hope for The Inner Earth threads but no doubt you have uncovered a lot about the validity of this story, the DeCalna family and so much of the surrounding context. It's something you gotta respect, so kudos to you! Children from the Sky is the name of the book what else should people know about following up on your work your website all that good stuff before I cut you loose Yes the website www.duncanloonan.com due for updating but it's gonna get a job i was there, especially with these lectures coming up and i've been asked to write series of articles for a website called ancient origins

51:12 So that's something to look out for. And certainly keeping very busy, there is a lot going on here. Yes man hell of a journey! Solid again great work and keep doing what you do out there thanks for being here Thank you very much for having me let's keep in touch Sweet Dolores to the construct people I hope your still with me but Duncan Lunan bring one hell of story out into light I'm so happy to have been able to do this show and have this book on my shelf because i've always been a big fan of this story in particular. The Green Children Of Woolpit is definitely one of my favorite stories, period!

51:52 So if you don't agree, maybe you didn't like hearing about it for two hours. But to have done this amount of research... To have done this amount of work? I got so much respect for that! I hope sometime someday i can do something as respectable sometimes they get that real itch to do primary research or work on something instead of just talking into a microphone the real champions the people but hey that's my problem Of course, I do still differ from Duncan on his final conclusion. But that doesn't really matter? It doesn't make me like his book or this conversation any less and it happens all the time and people seem to not understand how you can like a person's work... ...and still come to a different conclusion which is pretty silly!

52:37 This is just a great example of it how i can just be in awe and respect of this guys work the detail and the sweat equity that's been put into investigating at in these short lives we have. And i read the book i do this show and im so much more convinced that something happened, We have the details of the geopolitical curiosities, we have Duncan tracing the lineage and story sources. We have some records and it's also super convincing that both accounts as you read them as Duncan said they both break into Latin and it's like what the hell is this doing here? Well all these sorts of things needed a formal clergy interrogation and there's the Latin! This isn't just some vague

53:19 Broad story it's got depth and detail. And with all the respect in the world I just gotta break from Duncan's conclusion that they came from space, i don't see enough to conclude that we don't have a ship We don't really have any solid leads on technology or mechanisms that would put the kids in wool pit randomly. Duncan says matter transmitter but thats not something i can find on Amazon even today hundreds of years later I do think that idea of a medieval abduction campaign is super fascinating, especially if it's tied into the elite of their day. And it is weird that we have some shuffling around as if this event was expected or intercepted but I kind of find a disconnect between the meticulous research he's done on the case, the historic stuff and how Cavalier

54:11 I consider him to be about the wild conclusion that they came from space and were accidentally transported back with a matter transmitter device or some malfunction. I think that's a leap! I know he thinks an inner earth civilization is a huge leap, where is the evidence for that? I also don't have the astronomic expertise that he does either, which weighs pretty heavily on the conclusion that he gives. Maybe if i did, I would see it his way so I don't discount that but the kids did emerge from an ancient earthwork It's a vague term they did say they emerged suddenly maybe it's a dimensional shift maybe it's some kind of Bermuda Triangle ley line rip in reality

54:53 Maybe it's a hidden hyperspace kingdom they came tumbling out of. I think this is just one of those things, if you think it's possible that we have inner-Earth civilizations which doesn't require the Earth to be hollow, although there are plenty examples where the force of spin pushes things outward leaving a cavity rather than the densest spot in the middle but regardless If you're open to the idea of beings in the Earth, obviously some human offshoot. Then with all the context and history Duncan brings, you've got no problem with the story But if you're more of the mind that there can be no or is no inner-Earth civilization And you're confronted with a story that seems to have legs then you need another answer and so Duncan gives his best Yes she says she's from a place of perpetual twilight in a town across the rivers in constant bright Sun

55:43 Duncan sees this as the description of a planet, maybe it is. But we've been through a lot of accounts of inner earth caves and tunnels which describe exactly that perpetual twilight Now it doesn't really make sense to me I don't know what that source of light is but cross-cultural you hear these stories if you read at Adorpha That's how the inner earth is described Shemangineer also read that section from Graham Hancock supernatural And I know I've heard it many other places It's a lot to mull over though, the fact that they were genetically compatible. She had children... I mean yes Duncan never claims these kids are aliens he is clear about that but if they're genetically compatible with us and only have different tint to their skin for most part sure it could be dye from some space zoo or research facility that color codes its abductees and foods they can safely eat

56:35 but you don't need to go to that extent, if your open to offshoots of humanity living in the earth. Ultimately it is still a mystery so I dont want to be too aggressive about that slight disagreement and i'm sure Duncan is very used to going over this work and having someone try to cling to that inner earth element because its such a big part of the legend So im sure he's no stranger the things I'm saying now. He makes a great point about the swampy environment and the clay soil that there just aren't caves and tunnels there, but you know i want to believe so I did some googling and Nottingham is 100 miles away from Woolpit it's a two-hour drive yeah hundred miles isn't necessarily next door but it's closer than San Diego is to LA It's really not that far

57:28 But in Nottingham, there is a place called the City of Caves. Here's what Wikipedia says... The City of Caves is a visitor attraction in Nottingham which consists of a network of caves carved out of sandstone that have been variously used over the years as a tannery public house cellars and an air raid shelter. The city of Nottingham has hundreds of man-made caves which have been in use for over 1,000 years I'm sure Duncan knows about this place. He has to, it's not a secret and yeah Wolpitt is 100 miles closer to the coast which does make a difference geographically with the soil and everything but when you look at a map of the caves in the United Kingdom though none of them land directly on Wolpitt i wouldn't call caves and deep inner earth tunnels in the area impossible

58:23 I also don't think they've all been discovered, but the solar activity he describes again is very interesting too and you got to factor that in. But when I go on other shows and they want to talk weird, I sometimes dust off the Green Children's story and throw it out there. And I always note that geologists have identified a layer of the earth called the Moho Layer. It is 22 miles down. It is super porous like a sponge. And it is a full layer of the earth that has got huge cavities! It is a layer probably everywhere under land and oceans And I contend that a lot of the stories of the inner earth could very well be related to this layer because 22 miles is a long time to travel, especially on foot. But you could imagine that it happens here and there maybe Bigfoot lives in the moho layer and occasionally they just want to see the surface i don't know but 20 or 30 miles seems like just the right amount of distance for crossover to be very rare but to happen every so often

59:23 So I can't say, i think where the children came from is pretty speculative either way. But for someone to investigate this seriously and find that it definitely has legs Is a great and impressive mark on the world in my opinion And mad respect if you liked hearing from Duncan let him know You know he works hard...I don't know if hes as appreciated as he should be And I like when we can make people feel a little bit validated. That's the power of THC, the little power we have Also if you're out there in the publishing game and you heard The Plus Show Duncan has some new stuff he is looking to get published that would be great connection as well

1:00:03 But as always if you only heard the free publicly available show you missed out on half the conversation today we talked about honing in on the prospect of a matter transmitter and what that can mean don't get thoughts on the very lower his region, site hillstone circle the mystery of new grange the wider scope of human alien contact which. may have been initiated in 10,500 BC. The Amuramura object you know that Duncan has a lot to say about space so I had asked him about this recent event seems like a huge deal and he had some thoughts and for good measure we talked about the strange curious body of a quote sort of monster that seemed to have fallen to the ground in 1205

1:00:52 A very creepy description indeed. So come join PLUS at thehighersidechatsplus.com, join the family. Subscriptions have actually been on fire since I quit YouTube which is really appreciated because i have a lot of stress over that situation and I shouldn't even say I quit YouTube they forced my hand! I'd love to keep those 50 000 subs. I think YouTube is a huge vehicle for where people find the show now it's gone But here we are. Thanks to everyone who listens, and I'll see you next time! Your move medieval operators of the space lab facility and the takers of 12th century children... your fucking move. Woke up this morning with light in my eye And then realized it was dark outside It was like coming down from the sky