Across the UK, across continental North America, at around the world on the internet, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is the 500 edition of the unexplained.

Yes, I am smiling because when I sat exactly here in my father's old leather chair, saying those words in 2006, I never thought that there would be 500 shows.

So many shows that you could start playing them today and still be playing them three weeks from now.

That's an astonishing thing. You know, the whole thing got into my blood. One of these days I will have to take a holiday and just get away from everything for a while, but I'm so caught up in it all.

I'm constantly learning and thank you very much for everything that you've done for me, for being my friend, for being my supporter through these years, and for telling your friends about the show over this time.

My life has changed as your life will have changed over these years. I've lost both of my parents in this time, and that's a hard one to bear, but it's something that all of us will have to reach and accommodate in our life somehow.

So that's one way that my life has changed. And today, here I am sitting here talking with you in lockdown.

A word that I thought applied to prisons, you know, a few years ago, that was all I knew about lockdowns. They're locking down the inmates.

Now in this world, we're all inmates and we're all locked down. We can only hope for better times. But look, I want to get quickly to this special guest on this edition, Jacques Vallet, but I just want to say thank you.

Thank you for being part of this, and thank you for being my friend through the years.

Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, who I first met when he was 17 years of age, and he used to come and fix technical problems at Radio City in Liverpool, and I just thought this guy's a genius.

I would love to be able to work with him, and Adam has given me his time and his effort for all of these years. So thank you, Adam.

Thank you to Hayley for booking the guests more recently, and you know, making that easy for me, I'm not a good booker of guests. I'm greater coming up with ideas, I think.

I'm not bad at coming up with ideas, but I'm not very good at the physical thing of all of that administrative stuff of getting people sorted.

So Hayley does a wonderful job on that, and thank you Hayley.

It's been a bit of a ride to quote Art Bell, and who would have thought that my inspiration and hero Art Bell, I would actually get to know towards the end of his life.

Okay, I didn't get that chance to work with him, that nearly happened, but I did get to know him, and it was nice to have him listening to my work as I'd listened to his work, and he thought there was some value in it, which is a wonderful thing, and I will take that forward in my life.

Okay, I think that's about everything the usual stuff about, if you want to get in touch with me, of course. Go to my website, the unexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can send me an email from there if you'd like to make a donation to the show.

And thank you if you have recently. Go to the website, the unexplained.tv, click the link for donations, and you can do that there.

And if you've done that over the years, that we've been taking donations here, which I think is about six or seven years now.

Thank you very, very much indeed, who knows what the future may hold in life, and on this show. I guess that's part of the excitement.

Let's get to the United States now. Jacques Vallet, a Frenchman, born September 24, 1939, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, prominent uphologist, and astronomer, currently in San Francisco, in a very close to Silicon Valley, but also with a base in France, his native country.

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