Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard McLain Smith here, not the impostor you've
been listening to on the podcasts, the real one. Join
me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash
Unexplained pod. In seventeen ninety two, in ching Dinnasty, China,
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a philosopher, politician, and writer named che Lun wrote an
unusual book. Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations
is a collection of over one hundred stories, thought to
be a series of satirical portraits of people and society
at the time. Cleverly concealed within intricate plot lines, ghost
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tales co mingle with history and fantasy in a way
that makes it difficult to separate truth from figs. One
of the stories relates the events surrounding an eighty year
old man living in what today is the city of
Laijo in Shangdong Province. One day, the elderly man, who
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is somewhat forgetful and unable to walk, is sitting outside alone.
He asks a family member to bring him something from
the house, but when they return, the old man and
the chair he was sitting on are gone. The family
look high and low for their elder without success. After
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a few days, a neighbor and friend of the family
returns home to Liaijo from a trip to ching Dao,
another town located about one hundred miles away. On his arrival,
he hurries straight to the missing man's son at his
home and asks him if he's still looking for his father.
When the Sun, still desperate with worry, replies that he is,
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his neighbor tells him with delight that his is safe
and well and staying in ching Taut. Though disbelieving it
at first, the Sun immediately dispatches some servants to ching
Dau to look for him. Sure enough, the old man
is soon located in the distant town and promptly returned
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safely to his home. When the Sun asks him how
on earth he got to ching Dau, the old man
explains that he was quietly minding his own business when
suddenly two mysterious figures appeared out of nowhere. Without saying
so much as a word, the men picked him up
in his chair, then flew him up to the sky
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and all the way to the town. It is, of course,
a fantastic fable with no possible foundation in truth. Or
is it you're listening to unexplained, and I'm Richard mc
lean smith. It was some time around ten PM when
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twenty one year old farmer Huang yang Cho collapsed into
his bed after a long day toiling in the fields.
That night of July twenty seventh, nineteen seventy seven in
Dongbei Cao, a remote rural village in the Herbei Province
of northern China, was a hot one. Although most of
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rural China at the time was gripped by extreme poverty
and the continuing effects of the Cultural Revolution, by all accounts,
Huang was doing quite well for himself. He'd also recently
become engaged and was excited for the wedding due to
take place at the end of the autumn harvest. Some
of his neighbors even told him that he was living
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a dream of millet, a Chinese proverb meaning his life
was like a fanciful dream, but the saying also had
an alto alternative meaning, sometimes interpreted as your hopes will
ultimately come to nothing. That night, in the thick, humid
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air of peak monsoon season, as the chirp of crickets
pulsated all around, the exhausted Huang drifted off to sleep.
The following morning, Huang failed to turn up at the
rice farm where he worked. Since he was an ordinarily
reliable and punctual employee, a colleague contacted his family and
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asked if they could check in on him. A short
time later, a relative of Huang's arrived at the young
farmer's home and knocked on its door. No Huang's bike,
his only mode of transport, was still leaning against the
side of the house. There was no response from inside.
Feeling a little perturbed by the silence, the relative let
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themselves into the property, where inside they found Huang's clothes
for the work day ahead neatly laid out in his room,
but no sign of Huang. In a panic, its family
and neighbors immediately began to search around the village and
surrounding fields, which were at least thirty miles away from
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the nearest railway station, But after days of fruitless searching
for the missing farmer, Huang was still nowhere to be seen.
It was some ten days later, on August sixth, when
a telegram was received by the village committee. It had
been sent from Shanghai, a city located six hundred miles
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away to the south. It said incredibly that Huang was
being held there in a detention center, and that he
needed a member of family to confirm his identity so
they could allow him to return home. But that wasn't
the strangest thing. The telegram had apparently been delayed on
its way to the village, having originally been sent to
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the wrong address. But more than that, it appeared to
have been written at nine a m. On July twenty eighth,
less than twelve hours after Huang had gone to bed.
When Huang finally arrived back home two weeks after he
had gone missing, he was naturally subjected to intense questioning
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by his family and neighbors. The story he had to
tell was utterly out of this world, as Huang is
said to have recounted it. Having gone to bed on
the evening of July twenty seventh, Huang had enjoyed a
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solid night of sleep when sometime around six a m.
Seemingly on the verge of waking, he drifted in and
doubt of what he first assumed was a lucid dream.
All around him, he heard the cocoffhon any of busy
traffic replete with honking horns, and the trundling of trucks.
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Then slowly images came to him of a busy street scene,
as if he were standing right in the middle of it.
Looking around, he saw shops, restaurants, and street science that
all proclaimed he was in the metropolis of Nanching. Then
Huang had the sudden, horrifying realization that he wasn't in
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a dream at all. He was really there. Somehow, it
appeared he'd managed to travel four hundred and eighty five
miles in the dead of night with no luggage, no money,
and no memory of the journey. At least that's what
he's said to have told the two strange men who
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apparently approached him moments later. The men, who Huang is
said to have thought were traffic police, had little sympathy
for the amused young man and demanded to see his
Nuanjing residency permit. When he failed to produce it, Huang
was promptly arrested and escorted to the local railway station.
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The officers handed him a ticket to Shanghai and ordered
him to travel there immediately, where he would be taken
to a repatriation camp until they could confirm his identity.
Huang boarded the train and Julie set off for Shanghai,
located two hundred miles away to the east. When the
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train finally pulled into Shanghai station, Huang was staggered to
see the same two police officers patiently waiting for him
on the platform, despite the fact that he was almost
certain they hadn't boarded the train with him. The officers
then escorted the bemused young man to the Ninth Repatriation
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Camp a short walk away. There he was taken in
by a People's Liberation Army soldier named Blu qing Tang, who,
as it turned out, had relatives in dong Bai Ko,
where Huang lived. Qing Tang felt sorry for the young
farmer and immediately dispatched the telegram that would eventually make
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its way to Huang's family and secure his release. By September,
everything in Huang's life seemed to have settled back to normal.
On the eighth of that month, the village committee held
a meeting about how to increase their productivity. Huang was
assigned a job to deliver manure to the fields first
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thing the next day, and advised to go to bed
early by some of the village elders, and so the
young man duly obliged. The following morning, he was nowhere
to be found. It said that when Huang went missing
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for the second time, a co worker was sent to
look for him. Once again, Huang was not in his house.
He appeared to have left a message behind. Scrawled across
his bedroom wall was the name of a distant province
in China, Shangdong, the names of two people unknown to
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every one in the village, Kao Deng Min and Kao
yan Chin, and the single word relax. Three days later,
on September eleventh, Huang miraculously reappeared with an even more
bizarre tale to tell. Early in the morning of the ninth,
he said he felt a cold breeze tugging at his
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sleep wear and heard a loud clock strike two. Somewhere
in the distance. He realized he was once again back
in Shanghai, at the railway station that he'd apparently been
sent to on his first mysterious trip. But this type,
the normally busy station, was eerily quiet, and the air
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was thick and heavy, while ominous dark clouds swirled above.
Moments later, a loud crack of thunder erupted, followed by
a torrent of rain, drenching the hapless Shang. He wept
with frustration and despair until he remembered Lou Qing Tang,
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the soldier who'd taken him in at the repatriation camp
during his previous misadventure. Then he heard a voice saying, hello,
you must be Huang yang Cho. Huang was astounded to
see what he was certain were the same two men
who'd picked him up last time and taken him to
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the detention center, only this time they were wearing military uniforms.
The men claimed to have orders to pick him up
and deliver him to lu Qing Tang. Yuang claimed. He
then followed the troopers to Lose Artillery Division, located on
the outskirts of what is now the Pu Dong District
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of Shanghai. Despite the compound being heavily armed, Huang and
the two men were waved straight in by the seemingly
unconcerned guards at the front gate. Since Liu qing Tang
was at a meeting on their arrival, his son lu
Hai Sheng was summoned to meet the visitor instead. Lu
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Junior is said to have been confused by the two
men accompanying Huang. It was mostly the clothes they were wearing.
Their uniforms seemed odd, as if they'd been borrowed, and
their footwear was all wrong, But when Huang turned around
to introduce them, the men had completely vanished. When the
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guards were later questioned as to why Huang had been
granted access to the facility, none of them recalled Eva,
and seeing him enter once again, telegrams were exchanged, this
time between the camp commandant and the head of Huang's village,
asking again to verify Huan's identity. Huang was then threatened
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with arrest if he ever came back again, and was
promptly sent home. When Huang returned home for the second time,
he claimed to have no idea who'd left the writing
on his bedroom wall, but that was the least of
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his worries. Where at first many in the village had
been intrigued by the story, now they felt a great unease.
Rumors spread that Huang had been possessed by evil spirits,
and his fiancee broke up with him, just like the
Chinese proverb about the millet. It seemed Huang's hopes and
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dreams were beginning to crumble. A week later, on September twentieth,
a disconsolate Huang was heading home from another day of
work when he later said, he was suddenly overtaken by
dizziness and passed out. When he woke up, he apparently
found himself in an unfamiliar hotel room, sat in front
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of him with those same two men whom he'd apparently
previously encountered on his strange journeys. They said they were
two brothers named Kao Deng Min and Ko yang Jin,
the names that were found written on Huang's bedroom wall.
The brothers were twenty six and twenty five and apparently
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hailed from Shangdong Province. According to Huan, the men only
then admitted that they were responsible for all his strange disappearances,
and now they'd brought him to lan Cho in Gansu Province,
over seven hundred miles from his home. The men took
Huang for dinner, then together they spent the night in
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the hotel. The following morning, the two brothers as said
to have led Huang outside and told him to brace himself. Then,
just like that, the brothers lifted Huang straight into the air,
with each taking it in turns to carry him on
their backs, as like Neo from the matrix, They flew
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through the sky, according to Juan, in just one hour,
flying low above the land. The men arrived at the
capital Beijing. There he was taken to Chung'en Grand Theater,
where they watched an opera. Next, they traveled to Chianniman Square,
landing in front of a tank before checking into a
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nearby hotel for the night. The following day, they flew
to Tianjin and snuck into a movie theater and watched
a film, then traveled to the city of Harpin. Huang
described how they strolled through a shopping mall before taking
off again at dusk toward the city of chang Chun,
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followed by shen Yang, Fujo and Nan Ching six hundred
miles to the north, all on the same day. According
to Huang, each trip between cities lasted only an hour.
Not only were the men able to fly, but according
to Huang, the brothers also had the ability to speak
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local dialects wherever they went, and always had enough money
to pay for meals and accommodation. Other than that, the
two men apparently ate and slept like normal human beings.
And insisted that Huang not take any photographs or keep
any souvenirs from their travels. Finally, on the twenty eighth
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of September nineteen seventy seven, Huang said that the mysterious
cow brothers finally returned him to his back yard, where
they left him under a jujub tree. He never saw
them or made any lengthy journeys at inexplicable speeds. Again, naturally,
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Huang's accounts of his strange travels were hard for his
family and friends to take seriously, but as his story spread,
the authorities felt they had little choice but to investigate. First,
the local police and propaganda bureaus are said to have
interrogated him, followed by a local division of the armed forces.
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The thinking among these various agencies was that Huang yang
Cho was deliberately sabotaging the village's reputation. He was pronounced
a class enemy, and yet, as the story goes, during
repeated questioning, Huang's behavior appeared perfectly normal, and other than
insisting that his fantastical flying travels were true, he showed
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no signs of mental illness or cognitive disorder. In the end,
it said that the authorities simply gave up and let
him return to his normal life, and for over twenty
five years his story subsided into relative obscurity, except that
it is among members of the ufology community. Some of
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them believe Huang's story to be a clear case of
a close encounter of the fifth kind. The close encounter
terminology refers to a system drawn up by the astronomer
and UFO researcher J. Allen Heinich published in his nineteen
seventy two book The UFO Experience, a Scientific Inquiry. In it,
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he proposed a quasi scientific classification he believed were the
six levels of extra terrestrial encounter. One, the most common type,
involves a distant sighting at night, or, as he put it,
seeing nocturnal lights. Level two is a distant observation of
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a disc or oval shape in the sky during the daytime,
known as a daylight disc. The third level of sighting,
or radar visual, is a visual report of a UFO
combined with radar confirmation of an object. Level four, also
known as a close encounter of the first kite, is
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a visual sighting of an unidentified flying object appearing to
be less than five hundred feet away and with some
clearly visible surface details, while level five, also known as
a close encounter of the second kite, is a UFO
sighting in which a physical effect is alleged, such as
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interference in the functioning of a vehicle or electronic device,
or inducing fear zeological effects such as paralysis or heat
in the witness. A close encounter of the third kind,
or level six, after which the nineteen seventy seven Steven
Spielberg movie was named, involves a UFO encounter in which
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a moving entity is said to be present. For j
Allen Heineck, that is where it ended. Others have proposed
two more stages, an encounter of the fourth kind being
a supposed UFO event in which a human is abducted
by a UFO or its occupants, or at the very
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least where the witness experiences a transformation of their sense
of reality, and finally, a close encounter of the fifth kind,
where an alien abductee receives some manner of physical effect
from their supposed close encounter, be that an injury or healing, or,
as in Huang Yang Chose apparent case, being directly flown
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through the sky. In two thousand and four, Huang's story
was investigated by China Central Television under the auspices of
their science and education channels Approaching Science program. They decided
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to look for evidence to support Huang's stories. Various apparent
witnesses were interviewed, including lu Qing Tang, the soldier at
the repatriation camp in Shanghai, as well as the head
of Huang's village committee and its co workers. So to
fill in the gaps, they asked Huang to go to
two different medical facilities in Beijing to conduct a series
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of tests. At the first institution, he was given a
polygraph test while he was questioned about his story. Huang
failed the test. However, doctors were reluctant to conclude that
he was definitely lying. After all, not only was he
having to contend with the mental pressure of being in
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such an environment for the first time, but also twenty
seven years had passed since the alleged events took place.
It was understandable that some elements of his recollection might
be hazy, so his statements were subjected to a second
evaluation at the psychiatric division of Beijing's Anding Hospital. Their
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deputy director, doctor Chen Bin concluded that Huang was either
telling bear faced lies or that he suffered from a
bizarre and severe case of somnambulism. In other words, he'd
somehow sleepwalked to the various cities. However, he couldn't offer
an explanation as to how the man could have apparently
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traveled such vast distances in the limited time available. Huang
yang Cho's brain health was also tested to see whether
he might have some form of epilepsy that might induce
such disassociative sleepwalking, but the tests showed Huang's brain to
be perfectly healthy. Further tests found no evidence to suggest
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he suffered from any other dysfunction in the brain, with
one physician adding only that he found Huang to be
a moderately paranoid person. The documentary producers also arranged to
film interviews with Huang while he underwent hypnosis. The producers
watched on expectantly as Huang was filmed being led into
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the hypnotist's office and invited to lie down on a
couch and try to relax his mind. Huang laid back
as the hypnotists soporific words washed over him, and before
long he appeared to have sunk into a deep trance.
The hypnotist began with a few simple questions about who
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he was and where he came from. Then he asked
Huang to recount once more the story of how he
came to be in Nanjing. The first time. Huang proceeded
to give a detailed account of his apparent mysterious journey.
Then the hypnotist asked him to describe the cow brothers.
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Huang duly obliged, describing their features, their height, and hair.
But as he did so, something became immediately apparent to
the documentary producers. Huang was merely describing his own appearance.
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Though there is little concrete evidence to back up Huang
yang chose claims, speculation in China and abroad remains rife
about what it all means. His life's story was even
adapted into the twenty twenty three film Tell Them I
Flew Away, directed by Chiu Pung Lie. As the blurb
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for the film on Mubi has it, the film explores
the essence of human nature and the pursuit and yearning
for a better life after the protagonist is abducted by aliens.
Could Huang really have been abducted as some have it?
Was he really just sleep walking, Or was he suffering
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from some kind of dissociative identity disorder somehow traveling across
China as alternately himself and then the cow brothers. Or
had a young farmer whose only dream was to travel
and see the world felt so trapped by circumstance and
the social morase of his community that the only way
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for him to achieve it was to somehow imagine it
into being. For what it's worth, the producers of the
documentary came to a rather vague conclusion that Huang yang
Cho had been sleepwalking, but gave no explanation for how
he'd seemingly managed to travel so far in such short
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spaces of time, a feat that would have been simply
impossible in waking life, let alone having to do it
while you were sleeping. The opera Huang claimed to have
seen when he was supposedly flown to Beijing was called
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Forced onto Mount Liang. During the making of the documentary,
a journalist traveled to the chang Un Grand Theatre in
Beijing to inquire if the opera had actually been playing
there in September nineteen seventy seven, at the time of
Huang's apparent visit. After speaking to the theatre manager, the
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journalist was disappointed to find that the theater had in
fact been closed at the time due to day damage
sustained during the nineteen seventy six Tongu Shang earthquake. It
didn't reopen until nineteen seventy nine. However, as the manager
went on to explain, shang Un Grand isn't the only
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theater in the area. There was also the te Shung
Theater near by. After getting directions, the journalist headed straight there.
A short time later, he was stood in the Tea
Chang Theater foyer as a member of staff thumbed through
a large record of the theatre's past productions. He lit
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a cigarette and watched hawkishly as the staff member turned
back the pages until finally they found the date they
were looking for and the name of the show that
had been playing at the time. Well, well, they said,
pointing to it, would you look at that? It was
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the opera Forced onto Mount Young. This episode was written
by Diane Hope and Richard McLain Smith. Diane is an
audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You
can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot
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com and on Instagram at in the sound field. Unexplained
is an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are
also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book
and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can
(28:42):
purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
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(29:03):
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