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Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein may have been aliens from a parallel universe, according to a top paranormal expert.
Telly priest Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, who hosted 1990s Channel 4 show Fortean TV, also reckons extra-terrestrials have definitely visited planet Earth.
And he believes there is a Marvel-style “multiverse” that may have given us artist da Vinci – one of the greatest painters in history – and physicist Albert Einstein, who developed the theory of relativity.
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Lionel says: “I think very much life from other planets has been here. Let’s take great geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, or Plato or Socrates. Are they terrestrial beings?
“If we think of Einstein, the brain capacity there is absolutely colossal. Did he grow up and it was just the natural development of his brain or is he from somewhere else?
“Amazing people who have something like three or four times the normal human IQ and do these miraculous things – are they from elsewhere?”
He also believes doppelgangers, or doubles, of us could exist elsewhere in these multiple universes.
“If there are a great many planets in our universe and a great many more in every other universe, then we’re very likely to have intelligent aliens,” he says.
“If any of these universes is anything like our Earth there could be a slightly different version of everyone.
“And there’s a possibility that if these parallel universes come too close, the alternate versions could appear in our universe.”
Lionel has had a lifelong fascination with the paranormal – he has been president of the British UFO Research Association and is the president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena.
The 87-year-old has written several works on the subject and spent more than 50 years working on spooky cases.
They include the time he performed an exorcism – on a car.
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Cardiff-based Lionel says: “It was a Ford Capri, and the number plate was ARK 666Y – 666 is the mark of the Beast.
“The guy who owned it, Keith Tagliaferro, came to see me as he knew I was into paranormal stuff and he said: ‘There’s something terrifyingly wrong with this car.’
“He was an experienced driver of many years but said when he drives this he feels afraid, as if it’s trying to kill him, to involve him in a crash.
“I thought ‘if there’s something evil and unpleasant in here, I’ll take you on’. And I drove it round saying prayers of exorcism.
“I handed it back to him and said ‘I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with this'.”
Lionel’s paranormal documentary series Fortean TV, which was based on the weird phenomena magazine Fortean Times and ran between 1997 and 1998, has just been released on DVD.
He says: “I greatly enjoyed making it – the humour and the oddities and ‘is there a solution to this unsolved mystery?’
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“One of the strangest mysteries was this dog Oscar who appeared to be able to hypnotise the people who picked him up. I’d never come across the case of a canine hypnotist.”
Other strange cases investigated by the leather-clad biker vicar included a pet psychic who discovers a badly-behaving Irish wolfhound wanted his name changed from Sid to Egremont, the real-life human magnets in Taiwan and Hitler’s hair bizarrely growing on his Madame Tussauds waxwork.
Lionel also reveals how the strangest experience of his life was when his close friend Bill came to him from beyond the grave.
After Bill died, Lionel was working out the details of his funeral service when he suddenly appeared.
“He looked radiantly happy, all trace of the awful illness had gone and we were back together,” says Lionel.
“It convinced me there is another world and it’s a place of wonderful happiness and we shall all meet again.”
*Fortean TV: The Complete Series is on DVD now exclusively from networkonair.com.
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