Understanding Audio
The Understanding organization at it’s peak had over 80 units spread mostly around the States with a few far flung units in places like Vancouver, Canada and Sweden. Each Unit was self organized by anyone wanting to start one, and members then met once or twice a month to listen to speakers on topics from UFOs to ESP to channelling to dowsing.
One unit in particular in California, Inglewood Unit 15 of Understanding, organized by Lee and Barbara Yates in 1957 left behind recordings made of all the Unit’s lectures going back to their inception – a magnificent legacy. It gives you an inside look into what went on inside an Understanding Unit, including mundane things like the door prize.
Below are recordings going from the 1950s to late 1970s including recordings from the Giant Rock Convention held by George Van Tassel. After Barbara Yates died in 2011, the original magnetic reel-to-reel tapes were donated to the Mufon Orange County chapter in 2012 who had them transposed to mp3 recordings. In 2021, Gary Spakes got in contact with DFDC and agreed that if DFDC helped defray part of the MP3 transcription costs, the recordings could be published on DFDC.
Of the original 280 recordings, after removing duplicates, corrupted ones with nothing but hours of hissing, Yates personal family recordings, the remaining 156 recordings or roughly 500 hundred hours of audio, have been trimmed, noise removed, reduced in size for online delivery, MP3 tags added and presented here for free on this, December 20th, 2022, the 30th anniversary of Fry’s death in 1992.
Two notes:
- If you are jumping forward in the audio recordings with the online player and get a clicking sound, just give it ten seconds and the audio will return. There is either a bug in the online MP3 player or the loading is slow, but when jumping ahead, there will be “ticking” until it loads. It seems to happen when the page has just been loaded.
- If some of the audio players are reporting 0:00 length files, just reload the page. The audio files range in length from as short as ten minutes long to over three hours long.
Enjoy:
- 1956 & 1957
- 1958
- 1959
- 1960 to 1964
- 1966 to 1967
- 1968
- 1969
- 1970
- 1971
- 1972
- 1973
- 1974
- 1975 to 1976
- Undated – Part One – Inglewood Understanding Unit 15 recordings
- Undated – Part Two – Inglewood Understanding Unit 15 recordings
- Undated – Part Three – Various including radio interviews and conference talks
Below are some recordings of Daniel Fry that are noteworthy:
Here are some talks that were on the old Audio page :
Description: Long John Nebel, in the 1950s, hosted a late night syndicated radio show about all things paranormal, much like Coast to Coast AM. Check out Long John Nebel’s wikipedia entry for more information:
There are two interviews below and they have been edited for noise and content to only showcase where Fry talks.
The first five minute clip was taken from an unsourced, undated youtube video. The original youtube clip only contained the first part of Fry talking about the landing. I edited the clip to also remove all the other contactees who talked.
The second fourteen minute clip is various sections of a single show where Fry talks during a June 1956 interview. The original was sourced from the Internet Archive and Fry covers topics like what really constitutes proof, etc.
Here is another Long John show taped off the air from August 1st, 1958 and originally from YouTube. I have modified the audio by removing noise and cutting most of the audio not related to Fry.