Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to our pre New Year's Eve program.
Speaker 2: George Norrie with you our special guest. Doctor Cal Cooper
Speaker 2: is a professor of parapsychology and Public Understanding of human
Speaker 2: Science based at the University of Northampton and the United Kingdom.
Speaker 2: He's also a co director of the Parapsychology Education at
Speaker 2: the California Institute for Human Science, and he has authored
Speaker 2: a number of books, with the most popular being Telephone
Speaker 2: Calls from the Dead, Conversations with Ghosts, and Paracoustics Sound
Speaker 2: in the Paranormal. Cal Cooper was last on our program
Speaker 2: nine years ago.
Speaker 3: Cal, it's been a long time. Welcome back.
Speaker 4: How you doing. It's been a long time.
Speaker 5: How are you doing?
Speaker 3: Been nine years? My gush. What have you been up to?
Speaker 4: Various things, all kinds of things have happen, and a
Speaker 4: lot of PhD candidates.
Speaker 5: To supervise in parapsychology, so we've had.
Speaker 4: A number of different weird and wonderful projects to look
Speaker 4: into since all that time. So there's a lot to
Speaker 4: discuss in the next couple of hours.
Speaker 2: How did you as a parapsychologist get involved in the paranormal.
Speaker 4: Well mind the long story, Really, I have a background
Speaker 4: in performing arts, so I was interested in stage and performance.
Speaker 4: I always really wanted to do that. When I was
Speaker 4: at school, I did a lot of pantomimes and small plays,
Speaker 4: and I was doing street dance as one of the
Speaker 4: kind of side things to get into to help my
Speaker 4: performing arts career. But every week we used to go
Speaker 4: to the local library as a school. They would walkers
Speaker 4: down the road to the local library and heritage shop,
Speaker 4: and in a small corner of the library there was
Speaker 4: about four or five books, some of them on local
Speaker 4: hauntings written by a lady called Jane Peeter. She was
Speaker 4: a local journalist and writer and all she'd done.
Speaker 5: Was go around and interview people locally.
Speaker 4: About their experiences. And those were the best kinds of
Speaker 4: ghost stories that really captured my imagination because I thought
Speaker 4: the people seemed very honest and sincere about the experiences
Speaker 4: that they're having.
Speaker 5: So what's going on there?
Speaker 4: That there must be some sort of area of study
Speaker 4: for this, And I wasn't seeing that in my schooling.
Speaker 4: Aren't going to get that in chemistry, physics or biology.
Speaker 4: And we weren't taught psychology at that level, and some
Speaker 4: of the other books that I was looking at were
Speaker 4: involving fourteen phenomena. So there were the classic pictures as
Speaker 4: we know it was footage of the alleged Bigfoot.
Speaker 5: There were pictures of UFOs.
Speaker 4: There were stories of Jeff the talking mongoose in the
Speaker 4: investigations of the Ghost under Harry Price, who also investigated
Speaker 4: Baally Rectoring. So this all really really captured my imagination,
Speaker 4: and I went to these places, these local haunts, quite alarmed.
Speaker 4: In fact, only yesterday I was at one of them
Speaker 4: that I've been going to ever since I was very young,
Speaker 4: Newstead Abbey, and that's the former home of the poet
Speaker 4: Lord Byron, who became very famous for his works and
Speaker 4: his own character became very famous. And I going to
Speaker 4: those places. My grandmother told me about the White Lady
Speaker 4: and Boast and the dog and the goblin prior and
Speaker 4: all these experiences people had had. So it was by
Speaker 4: the time I was sixteen, was moving into college could
Speaker 4: expand on the subjects. I was doing a bit more
Speaker 4: like electronics and photography and finally got to do psychology
Speaker 4: that I realized at university level, which is where I
Speaker 4: was heading. There were people studying parapsychology, so looking into
Speaker 4: the science of the unusual experiences and or abilities, which,
Speaker 4: if they are as they seem to be, are in
Speaker 4: principle outside of the realms of conventional scientific understanding. So
Speaker 4: I had to pick very carefully which university I wanted
Speaker 4: to go to to study psychology, but it gave a
Speaker 4: platform for parapsychology, and yet I was having to deal
Speaker 4: with college I was still sixteen to eighteen, had to
Speaker 4: deal with this college level and the psychology teachers they said, oh,
Speaker 4: just to let you know, there is no such thing
Speaker 4: as a parapsychologist. And this was a head of psychology,
Speaker 4: and I said, but I know a number of parents
Speaker 4: psychologists and her response was, oh, I would like to
Speaker 4: speak to them. It's just very bizarre. So I pushed through,
Speaker 4: did my qualifications there, got into university and my starting
Speaker 4: point with the University of Northampton, they got a third
Speaker 4: year unit module in the psychology curriculum for parapsychology and
Speaker 4: they had five or six parapsychologists there at the time,
Speaker 4: some very well known ones as well, Professor Chris Rowe,
Speaker 4: Dr Richard Broughton, who was one of the research directors
Speaker 4: for the Ryan Research Center in Durham, North Carolina originally,
Speaker 4: and so that's where I ended up, and throughout all
Speaker 4: my degrees, that's where I've ended up going back to
Speaker 4: and staying that that's my career.
Speaker 2: It's a remarkable career, isn't it.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 4: I'm certainly in a very unique position because there's probably
Speaker 4: about three hundred parapsychologists worldwide, and there's only a select
Speaker 4: few of them that have it as a full time career.
Speaker 4: So I'm in that privileged position where my job in
Speaker 4: day out is effectively a full time ghostbuster, the scientific type.
Speaker 2: One of your favorite books is called Telephone Calls from
Speaker 2: the Dead.
Speaker 3: How did you key in on that story?
Speaker 5: Well, that was still during my undergraduate training. So as
Speaker 5: I was doing my.
Speaker 4: Psychology degree, I was reading a number of books by d.
Speaker 5: Scott Rogo and Raymond Baylist.
Speaker 4: They were both from California, and scott Rogo, like me,
Speaker 4: had had a very early fascination with paranormal and also
Speaker 4: I think his early writing was on vampires as well,
Speaker 4: and he started to shift away from that and he
Speaker 4: was doing haunting investigations just like I was following up
Speaker 4: with people's interviews of their experiences. And his very first
Speaker 4: book was on paranormal music when people just randomly hear
Speaker 4: musical sounds, and yet it doesn't appear to have any source.
Speaker 4: So where are people hearing this musical this singing from me?
Speaker 4: He wrote that when he was an undergraduate. So all
Speaker 4: the books I was reading, I wrote going bayless, and
Speaker 4: I was just throwing them on a pile of books
Speaker 4: that I got in my room and thinking, oh, I'll
Speaker 4: read that later. And I was reading far more parapsychology
Speaker 4: than I was any other area of psychology. I bought
Speaker 4: one second hand book that was called Phone Calls from
Speaker 4: the Dead, a two year investigation into an incredible phenomenon.
Speaker 4: Just looked at it briefly and then stuck it on
Speaker 4: the pile, and I didn't think anything more of it.
Speaker 4: It didn't capture my attention straight away. I just knew
Speaker 4: that it was just one unique book where they'd co
Speaker 4: written the whole thing, rather than doing a forward for each.
Speaker 5: Other's book or research papers.
Speaker 4: And then it was a news report on MSA News
Speaker 4: at the time regarding a train collision in California. I
Speaker 4: think it was a freight train and a commuter train
Speaker 4: head on collision, and there was a passenger on there
Speaker 4: called Charles Peck.
Speaker 5: His family reported.
Speaker 4: That around I guess ten o'clock at night, the trainer crashed.
Speaker 4: They were receiving multiple calls from his mobile phone to
Speaker 4: theirs and when they picked up, all they could hear
Speaker 4: was static on the line, and when they called back,
Speaker 4: it just went to voicemail, as though the phone was
Speaker 4: switched off or the battery had died. Now there was
Speaker 4: a live I think a live rescue party. It was
Speaker 4: on live new channels that rescuers were going in trying
Speaker 4: to help people from the wreckage of this train crash.
Speaker 4: So the family realized what had happened, and so every
Speaker 4: time they were getting a call, they were saying, don't worry, Dad,
Speaker 4: the rescuers are on the way. They're coming to help you,
Speaker 4: thinking that he's just in reach of his phone, but
Speaker 4: for whatever reason, he can't talk, and he just keeps
Speaker 4: calling his family for help. And it was around three
Speaker 4: am the call stopped, and that was at the very
Speaker 4: point that they found his body. The phone was never recovered,
Speaker 4: but the media widely publicized it as a phone call
Speaker 4: from the dead and the family also seemingly took comfort
Speaker 4: from that idea as well. So that really captured my imagination.
Speaker 4: And then I thought, but there wasn't really a conversation.
Speaker 4: It was just static and repeat a call. So what's
Speaker 4: in this book by Rogo and Baylists? So I picked
Speaker 4: it up and I read it from cover to cover,
Speaker 4: and in some of those instances, people are having some
Speaker 4: five to ten fifteen minute conversations with people, only to
Speaker 4: discover afterwards that person had died some twenty four hours beforehand,
Speaker 4: or in some cases they know the person has died
Speaker 4: and yet they still get a strange call that has
Speaker 4: a few voices and words and phrases.
Speaker 5: Said in it.
Speaker 4: So that's how I discovered the book, and I started
Speaker 4: writing some updated articles on the topic. I was looking
Speaker 4: into how we've got iPhones and text messages and emails,
Speaker 4: started looking for new accounts, and then I got help
Speaker 4: from the Californian Institute at Intecourse Studies in San Francisco.
Speaker 4: They went through Scott Rogo's archive for me and found
Speaker 4: some additional cases, so I looked at those and then
Speaker 4: I started collecting some modern ones as well. That's how
Speaker 4: it all kicked off around two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2: I think nowadays cal the so many phones have caller ideability.
Speaker 2: Do these calls come in with caller ID? And if
Speaker 2: they too, what's the number?
Speaker 4: Well, the thing is with Rogo and Bayliss, we're talking
Speaker 4: about a book that was completed by nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 4: and so a lot of their cases span the nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 4: So everything they go from everything with a wireless telegraph
Speaker 4: of Morse code all the way through to various types
Speaker 4: of landline, but purely landline. I think there were only
Speaker 4: two cases of voicemails because recording systems for mystic calls
Speaker 4: was only just coming in. With the cases that I've
Speaker 4: looked at, sometimes there were instances of no caller ID.
Speaker 4: The unique thing when they looked into their cases was
Speaker 4: that sometimes in following up with the phone company, there
Speaker 4: was no record of a call taking place at the
Speaker 4: time that witnesses say that one did go through, and
Speaker 4: so that's quite unique. Other times it was apparently placed
Speaker 4: through a long distance call exchange. With modern technology now
Speaker 4: there was far more room for fraud and error to
Speaker 4: take place, just because the phones that we work on
Speaker 4: so sophisticated, even fifteen years ago. When I started looking
Speaker 4: into this, there were different methods via the Internet to
Speaker 4: go and send text messages that would not display sender information,
Speaker 4: no name, no date, no number. You would just get
Speaker 4: a blank message if you paid into this original kind
Speaker 4: of website. As things are starting out, I'm sure things
Speaker 4: have advanced far more than that now. So the ruper fraud,
Speaker 4: hoax and error is far greater now. But there have
Speaker 4: been some instances of no care or ID, but that
Speaker 4: just nowadays leads to a lot of suspicion as to well,
Speaker 4: where is it coming from?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 5: That's the problem.
Speaker 3: Are we still getting the calls nowadays? Though?
Speaker 5: Apparently so.
Speaker 4: I mean, we've got a really big show over here.
Speaker 4: I don't know how many of you are starting to
Speaker 4: hear a bit over there. But we've had various paranormal
Speaker 4: shows over time, and I've been involved in various pilots
Speaker 4: and cable TV shows for the paranormal. But one that's
Speaker 4: really done well is a BBC radio for production called
Speaker 4: on Cap a guy called Danny Robbins, and he did
Speaker 4: a podcast over ten years ago called Haunted, and that's
Speaker 4: when I first met him. He came to the University
Speaker 4: of Northampton and he interviewed as about ghosts and mediumship
Speaker 4: and lab work, and essentially in his show on Canny,
Speaker 4: he just takes a single case from people and then
Speaker 4: goes through their story over the course of half an hour,
Speaker 4: and he breaks it down, this is their backstory, what happened,
Speaker 4: and then the person speaks, and then there's interlude, and
Speaker 4: then he'll bring on two experts. He'll bring in a skeptic,
Speaker 4: usually someone with a parapsychology background, and a believer who
Speaker 4: might be involved with theology or there a ghost hunter
Speaker 4: something like that. And one of the shows on there
Speaker 4: that has become most popular was one called Harry Call,
Speaker 4: and it was of a guy called Will where wherever
Speaker 4: he was going, I think he was in his late
Speaker 4: teens early twenties. He was getting these repeated calls, usually
Speaker 4: once that he'd missed, where someone else answered and they'd
Speaker 4: leave a message for him saying Harry called. And I
Speaker 4: think Harry was someone that he'd known that had passed away.
Speaker 4: And it wasn't just this one off. Wherever he went
Speaker 4: business calls were happening that he was missing and someone
Speaker 4: else is picking up and saying, well, someone called you
Speaker 4: called Harry, So that was really odd and it's really
Speaker 4: captured people's imaginations. And then most recent one they did
Speaker 4: Uncanny USA and it was the fourth series and the
Speaker 4: second episode, Dad's Phone. I did that one as a skeptic,
Speaker 4: and it involved it wasn't a modern phone, but the
Speaker 4: father in the case, he was deceased, his job had
Speaker 4: been a spy.
Speaker 1: He was a.
Speaker 4: Secret agent, and two got this sophisticated telephone system at
Speaker 4: his house that was now disconnected. But his daughter, who
Speaker 4: had not particularly got on well with him, was having
Speaker 4: repeated telephone calls on this sophisticated system, and a guy
Speaker 4: that her father knew was at the house one time
Speaker 4: when one of these calls took place, and he was
Speaker 4: the one who's got to answer it, and he pulled
Speaker 4: it off course to check the whole system and.
Speaker 5: Realized there was no wiring in it.
Speaker 4: So it really freaked them out that there was still
Speaker 4: getting not only a ringing, but there was this strange
Speaker 4: static on the line that they believed was responsive. When
Speaker 4: you spoke to it, you heard these different tones in
Speaker 4: the statics. Yeah, these calls are still happening whenever these
Speaker 4: things like and Kenny has mentioned on the Internet and
Speaker 4: social media. Loads of people seem to be reaching out
Speaker 4: and sharing their strange telephone experiences, particularly around the time
Speaker 4: twenty four hours of losing someone really close. So you know,
Speaker 4: it could be a sense of presence, it could be
Speaker 4: seeing an apparition, it could be dreaming of someone.
Speaker 5: But strange telephone.
Speaker 4: Experiences seem to be quite high up there, So yeah.
Speaker 5: They're there.
Speaker 2: The fact that it's happening and they're using technology and
Speaker 2: electronics tells you what about what the other side might
Speaker 2: be part of.
Speaker 4: I don't know what it particularly tells us, but certainly
Speaker 4: around nineteen twenty it was starting to fascinate a lot
Speaker 4: of people. There were so many amateur inventors that were
Speaker 4: trying to create telephones to the dead. Here in Nottingham
Speaker 4: there was a chap called Frederick Melton, and he produced
Speaker 4: a little book look called a Psychic Telephone, in which
Speaker 4: he discussed his second prototype of this telephone's contact the dead,
Speaker 4: which strangely, of all of its components, contained a.
Speaker 5: Balloon you heard me write, a rubber balloon that.
Speaker 4: He had his son blow up with his own breath.
Speaker 5: His son was very skeptical of the paranormal but he.
Speaker 4: Believed that his son still had some sort of psychic
Speaker 4: ability because whenever he was close by and they were
Speaker 4: holding seances, the activity got heightened.
Speaker 5: So he said to his.
Speaker 4: Son, I need an element of view inside this device.
Speaker 4: So got him to blow up this balloon and attached
Speaker 4: it to all the components.
Speaker 5: And so this was taken.
Speaker 4: Around to very spiritualist churches and apparently with some success.
Speaker 4: But ghost under Harry Price had to go up building
Speaker 4: this machine and got no success. American psychical researcher Herold Carrington,
Speaker 4: he built this device and got no success. So what
Speaker 4: was going on with the original one? If you look
Speaker 4: into State Magazine and loads of other outlets at the time,
Speaker 4: other people were coming forward claiming that they built these devices.
Speaker 4: But most famous of all would be Thomas Edison. So
Speaker 4: in nineteen twenty he went to Scientific American and gave
Speaker 4: an interview, so really good out there, and he was
Speaker 4: talking generally a bit about his research and interest in spiritualism.
Speaker 4: His parents were spiritualists. He got lab assistants that were
Speaker 4: Polish American psychics some of them, and they were holding
Speaker 4: seances sometimes at the end of the day. And what
Speaker 4: he said in his interview was that he was working
Speaker 4: on a device producers just that he wanted the telephone
Speaker 4: to contact the dead. Whether he was jumping on the
Speaker 4: bandwagon of what people were already saying they'd done and
Speaker 4: were publishing that, I don't know. But he describes in
Speaker 4: detail saying, I want this device to contain components that
Speaker 4: are so delicate that if the dead do indeed leave
Speaker 4: this earth and they want to contact the living, it
Speaker 4: will at least give them a chance to get in touch.
Speaker 4: And so it comes up with this idea, He discusses it,
Speaker 4: it discusses.
Speaker 5: The components, and yet there is nothing.
Speaker 4: Nothing is produced, there's no blueprints, there's no final products.
Speaker 5: Imagine if you could commercialize something like that.
Speaker 4: If it actually worked, you could just go down to
Speaker 4: the local store and buy a telephone that you can
Speaker 4: use to contact your deceased relatives. But by nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 4: Thomas Edison had passed away. There's no such device discovered,
Speaker 4: and the Thomas Edison Museum.
Speaker 5: I think it's in Texas.
Speaker 4: They claim that one of their highest requests is for
Speaker 4: people to see pictures of this device, or to see
Speaker 4: the blueprints as well, but they have no such things,
Speaker 4: and over time people claim that they've discovered such things,
Speaker 4: but it's certainly not reached the Thomas Edison Museum. So
Speaker 4: people have thought that if the deads are surviving in
Speaker 4: some way, you need electrical components, something with delicate instrumentations,
Speaker 4: and it will give them a chance for getting touched.
Speaker 4: It's an idea. I don't know how I feel about
Speaker 4: that as a parapsychologist and a skepe, but there's certainly
Speaker 4: a lot of really really good evidence for the idea
Speaker 4: of something mind personality memory surviving.
Speaker 5: As I was involved in.
Speaker 4: The Robert Bigelow Essay Awards that took place in Las Vegas,
Speaker 4: and many people, many parapsychologists all over the world, came
Speaker 4: forward for that.
Speaker 2: That's one that Jeffrey Misch loved one, I think, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: he did.
Speaker 4: Jeff a good friend. I was texting him last night
Speaker 4: and we've worked together on his recent parapsychology programs. But
Speaker 4: he brought together years and years and years worth of
Speaker 4: his new Thinking Allowed program and where people have discussed
Speaker 4: survival of death. Yeah, Jeff won the half million dollar prize.
Speaker 4: We got an honorable mention, so we were very happy
Speaker 4: with that. Vegas and the people again with it people
Speaker 4: within those essays they've mentioned telephone phenomena. Jeff they did
Speaker 4: in his essay, so it's it's popular.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine the person who receives the phone call, caw,
Speaker 2: the look on their face when they take that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it would be a variety of different things.
Speaker 4: I think some people would think it's a prank. I
Speaker 4: think some people would be absolutely shocked and dumbfounded and not.
Speaker 5: Know what to say. I think that some other people.
Speaker 4: If you've just recently lost that person, they've been in
Speaker 4: such a state of shock that they would forget that
Speaker 4: the person has died. And if they're saying that it
Speaker 4: was like any other call, then that's what they're treating
Speaker 4: it like. They're treating it like you and I are
Speaker 4: talking right now. It's not till after the call that things,
Speaker 4: the reality starts to catch up with them. That hang
Speaker 4: on a minute, They passed away yesterday, This can't.
Speaker 5: Possibly have happened.
Speaker 1: Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
Speaker 1: one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
Speaker 1: com for more