Speaker 1: Also media Jiminy Christmas, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: a podcast that's, for whatever reason, is about aliens. Right now, Look, folks,
Speaker 1: after three straight weeks of OPRAH, I needed something fun.
Speaker 1: Uh So we did a couple of book episodes on
Speaker 1: aliens and then I fell down a rabbit hole, and
Speaker 1: so this week we're bringing back one of our favorite guests,
Speaker 1: the Great Brandy Posey. Brandy, Welcome to the show. Do
Speaker 1: you believe in aliens?
Speaker 2: Well that's a good question, because like what is an alien?
Speaker 2: I guess is how do you want to define it?
Speaker 2: And also do you believe in multiple dimensions? Because these are.
Speaker 1: You know what? That's all right, I hoped for, Not
Speaker 1: so much the dimension stuff we're gonna be talking about.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talking about a real active bastardry that's
Speaker 1: kind of at the very beginning, not well not the beginning,
Speaker 1: kind of the middle point. But it's it's foundational to
Speaker 1: the UFO culture that gave us the X Files. Like
Speaker 1: we are talking about the stuff that became the X Files,
Speaker 1: which started as a disinformation campaign, and a lot of
Speaker 1: it can be tied specifically to an Air Force intelligence
Speaker 1: guy named Richard Dodie, who was basically brought in to
Speaker 1: mentally abuse and destroy a basically decent, possibly definitely too
Speaker 1: credulous guy who started finding evidence of, like recording evidence
Speaker 1: of like secret Air Force research, and so the Air
Speaker 1: Force was like, let's convince this guy it's all aliens,
Speaker 1: and they kind of destroyed his mind. So that's the
Speaker 1: story we're telling me about this.
Speaker 3: It's a excellent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a fascinating tale, both because it explains a
Speaker 1: lot of how we get to qan on, how we
Speaker 1: do get stuff like the X Files, a lot of
Speaker 1: kind of the core myths of UFO, conspiracy culture, all
Speaker 1: that stuff. But it's also just a great story about
Speaker 1: like US Intelligence services absolutely destroying a man in order
Speaker 1: to protect their ability to make engines of death, which
Speaker 1: is you know, that's that's some good stuff. We all
Speaker 1: love this shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the more examples the better, and there are many,
Speaker 2: but I don't know any with aliens yet, So very exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this will be a lot with aliens. And I'm
Speaker 1: you know, I'm I think where I come down on this.
Speaker 1: I don't believe I've never seen anything that's made me
Speaker 1: convinced that there's life outside of this planet, but I'm
Speaker 1: like open minded to it, like Foxholder, I'd like to
Speaker 1: believe I'm just open minded in the sense that I'm
Speaker 1: a skeptic, Like I don't think. I get kind of
Speaker 1: pissed when people look at folks who are kind of
Speaker 1: genuinely trying to interrogate the information out there and are like, well,
Speaker 1: that's just crazy to think about, because it's not and
Speaker 1: it's not crazy to think that the government would lie
Speaker 1: about stuff like that. But that said, everything I've ever seen,
Speaker 1: including like the stuff that came out at twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one, that pill shaped craft, you know, that's
Speaker 1: kind of like the most recent big UFO disclosure. And
Speaker 1: if you watch that audio, because it's all from like
Speaker 1: I think F eighteen pilots, you can hear the pilots
Speaker 1: are genuinely like, what the fuck is this thing? I
Speaker 1: have no idea what it is, right, and I do
Speaker 1: I understand why people default too, well, that must mean
Speaker 1: it's aliens. But like, there's a long history of all
Speaker 1: sorts of countries the United States and countries that are
Speaker 1: geopolitical enemies of the United States testing all sorts of
Speaker 1: weird craft that like people don't like are capable of
Speaker 1: doing things people did not know was possible at the time.
Speaker 1: And that is like the origin of most of our
Speaker 1: UFO myths is stuff that's completely explicable that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: let some pilot in on, right, because it's too sure
Speaker 1: for him.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, because like you can imagine, like also, the first
Speaker 2: time somebody saw an automobile, did they think that was
Speaker 2: an alien? It's just you know, human, where as we're
Speaker 2: building technology in different ways, yeah.
Speaker 1: Or as we'll talk about because this is a lot
Speaker 1: of the story we're talking about the day the first
Speaker 1: time people saw drones, right, especially at night. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got this this thing that's got a bunch of
Speaker 1: lights on it that moves in a way that planes
Speaker 1: certainly don't move like drones. Right, you see that shit
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty in the dead of night above an
Speaker 1: air Force base. It's not necessarily like you're not a
Speaker 1: crazy person to being like, well, I wonder if that's
Speaker 1: something like fucking not of this earth? Right, And the
Speaker 1: Air Force, Like, the basic story we're telling today is
Speaker 1: the Air Force being like, oh yeah, that's much better
Speaker 1: than them believing we're working on ways to murder people
Speaker 1: through robots. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's the story we're
Speaker 1: gonna tell this week, and that's the end of the
Speaker 1: cold open ah, and we're back. We're starting the episodes. Brandy,
Speaker 1: it's been a bit since you've been on the show.
Speaker 1: You are a very busy person, and I wanted to
Speaker 1: before we get into the episode. Is there anything you
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of plug up top?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Definitely. So my podcast, Lady to Lady has been
Speaker 2: around for thirteen years at this point. We were every
Speaker 2: Wednesday for thirteen years. We're an independent show where me
Speaker 2: and my two co hosts have a fourth guest one
Speaker 2: every week who's usually another female identifying person, and it's
Speaker 2: just for women riffing in like a positive way, which
Speaker 2: is something that entertainment doesn't want to show you very often.
Speaker 2: So they've been around forever. I also have an independent
Speaker 2: comedy record label that I started last year called burn
Speaker 2: This Record, so you can find us on Instagram at
Speaker 2: a burn This Records dot com. And basically that is
Speaker 2: like a completely day project trying to lift off voices
Speaker 2: from around the country that other labels aren't dealing with,
Speaker 2: and I'm also doing it in a much less predatory
Speaker 2: way than most comedy labels work. I've always self released
Speaker 2: all of my own things, and I'm just like expanding
Speaker 2: that information to try to like include more people and
Speaker 2: kind of keep.
Speaker 1: Yeah as a rule in the end history, the only
Speaker 1: thing more evil than like the NSSAY and military intelligence
Speaker 1: is comedy labels.
Speaker 2: Yes, very, I mean honestly, you're not wrong.
Speaker 3: Oh no, that was only a partial joke.
Speaker 2: We could do. Yeah, I have a couple of bastards
Speaker 2: for you for later, if you ever want to need
Speaker 2: a couple of pitches.
Speaker 1: It is funny how like horror, horror cinema and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Nearly all like nice people involved in making it comedy
Speaker 1: real mixed bag, A lot of monsters in comedy.
Speaker 2: Nice people you, Oh yeah, I mean the best, the
Speaker 2: best of people and the worst of people I've met
Speaker 2: in comedy. And I think comedy is an important thing
Speaker 2: in our culture because I think it's important to remember
Speaker 2: that just because someone makes you laugh and is charming,
Speaker 2: it does not mean they were a good person at all.
Speaker 2: It is a trick. It's a trick that we're able
Speaker 2: to do. Actually, one of the most important things to
Speaker 2: accept about the world is like, just because somebody's you know,
Speaker 2: we we don't need to get into this right now,
Speaker 2: but I agree with you entirely.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah to fucking aliens. Now alliens, fucking aliens,
Speaker 1: but back to fucking aliens.
Speaker 2: I don't know where this story is going. We'll see
Speaker 2: maybe maybe.
Speaker 1: I mean it actually always nearly always doesn't like lead
Speaker 1: any if you follow like any UFO conspiracy threat, it
Speaker 1: does eventually like lead to people are breeding with the aliens.
Speaker 3: I mean that was a big part.
Speaker 1: Of the first five seasons of The X Files, right,
Speaker 1: But yeah, the I started this episode by talking about
Speaker 1: that Air Force footage. It's actually, honestly, I forget if
Speaker 1: they were a force or Navy pilots, but it was
Speaker 1: released twenty twenty, twenty twenty one of that like pill shaped,
Speaker 1: weird thing in the sky that you know, those pilots are, like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is this shit? As I wrote this
Speaker 1: the near the end of January twenty twenty five, the
Speaker 1: most recent kind of big UFO news was that a
Speaker 1: few days before we recorded this episode, Republican representative Tim
Speaker 1: Burchett claimed that he spoke to an admiral who he
Speaker 1: did not name, who told him that he had seen
Speaker 1: that there was evidence that the Navy had evidence of
Speaker 1: an unidea fed naval vehicle quote moving at hundreds of
Speaker 1: miles an hour underwater that was as large as a
Speaker 1: football field, Which sounds like he's trying to prepare us
Speaker 1: for the idea that SeaQuest is real. And I hope
Speaker 1: that means that Roy Scheider has secretly been alive this.
Speaker 2: Whole time because Jonathan brandis Let's.
Speaker 1: Say, Jonathan brandis, yes, yes, get them all back, bring
Speaker 1: them all back. I'm so glad you got my SeaQuest joke, Brandy, No,
Speaker 1: what ever does Prior to this, in November of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, the Pentagon had published a report revealing hundreds
Speaker 1: of previously undocumented UFO sidings. Now again UFO, and they
Speaker 1: use unidentified aerial phenomena I think is the actual official
Speaker 1: term they use. But like, this does not mean there
Speaker 1: are hundreds of cases of the Pentagon said, yeah, we've
Speaker 1: seen hundreds of alien signings. It means we've seen hundreds
Speaker 1: of things in the sky at various points that like
Speaker 1: we don't actually know fully what they are, right because
Speaker 1: a lot of people being flying a lot of weird
Speaker 1: shit in the sky, right, we just had a mile
Speaker 1: public hysteria When unidentified drones were spotted flying over cities
Speaker 1: in the Northeast. People panicked. There was like reports that, oh,
Speaker 1: it's Iran has a drone carrier parked off the coast,
Speaker 1: And like, guys, if you've been like looking at how
Speaker 1: fucking Iranian power projection has been working in the areas
Speaker 1: right next to them, they're not flying drones over DC
Speaker 1: from a fucking hidden carrier. Panic was stoked by initial
Speaker 1: claims by government officials that there was no record the FBI.
Speaker 1: Someone came out was like, we don't have any record
Speaker 1: of schedule drone flights, and people I know freaked out
Speaker 1: because you're like, well, the FBI says they don't know
Speaker 1: what it is. And again I need you, as I
Speaker 1: always ask, think back to nine to eleven, right, where
Speaker 1: all of these different federal agencies had pieces of that
Speaker 1: and none of them talked to each other. The fact
Speaker 1: that the FBI didn't know about this shit is not weird.
Speaker 1: Eight government agencies are dogshit at talking to each other.
Speaker 1: And in fact, it took several weeks, but in late January,
Speaker 1: after the transition, the White House made a statement that
Speaker 1: the drone flights had in fact been approved. This was
Speaker 1: just everyone kind of fucking up, and the confusion was
Speaker 1: likely stoked by a confluence of factors. Drone development is
Speaker 1: advancing rapidly. Different federal agencies are bad at talking to
Speaker 1: each other. Some of the drones being tested were likely
Speaker 1: so classified that individuals involved preferred a public panic over
Speaker 1: UFOs or Iranian drone carriers to actual info about their
Speaker 1: projects being revealed. And all of these reasons are essentially
Speaker 1: the same reasons that led to the birth of UFO
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories in the first place, Starting with the supposed
Speaker 1: crash landing at Roswell, New Mexico in nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 1: The OG, Yeah, the OG, and it's I think there's
Speaker 1: this attitude that, like, we have Roswell. There's this crash
Speaker 1: in forty seven. The government initially says, and this is
Speaker 1: what's really unique about Roswell. The first government reports are
Speaker 1: some sort of fucking saucer crashed, right, yeah, the only
Speaker 1: time that's really happened. And then they came out and said,
Speaker 1: now it's a weather balloon. But there's this attitude that like,
Speaker 1: and from that moment, Roswell was like the center UFO culture.
Speaker 1: It really wasn't. It actually kind of fell off for
Speaker 1: like more than a decade before people started like kind
Speaker 1: of recentering Roswell in American UFO mythos. And part of
Speaker 1: why so, first, when we're talking about like what actually
Speaker 1: happened at Roswell, probably the best non alien theory is
Speaker 1: that earlier in nineteen forty and I think this is
Speaker 1: pretty credible. Earlier in nineteen forty seven, the US government
Speaker 1: had launched something called Project Mogul, and the idea was
Speaker 1: to set up a series of balloon listening stations to
Speaker 1: receive and record evidence of Soviet nuclear trials. Researchers from
Speaker 1: the US Army Air Force's Secret Are and D Division
Speaker 1: tested a cluster of fourteen of these balloons, one of
Speaker 1: which went down near Roswell in July. Just a few
Speaker 1: weeks earlier, in June, a Republican politician and pilot named
Speaker 1: Kenneth Arnold had sparked the first great UFO panic in
Speaker 1: US history by reporting to have seen nine silver discs
Speaker 1: flying near Mount Rainier, Washington. When the rancher who owned
Speaker 1: the land and oswell that one of these balloons crashed
Speaker 1: onto a guy named Mac Brazil went to the nearby
Speaker 1: airfield and like went to the Air Force. Well, the
Speaker 1: Army Air Corps was like, hey, I found like some
Speaker 1: weird shit on my property. They sent out investigators. Now,
Speaker 1: due to the secrecy behind Project Mogul, the investigators they
Speaker 1: sent didn't know about that project. So some of these guys,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the guy who's kind of first unseen
Speaker 1: will claim years later and will be consistent for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life after that point and believing in
Speaker 1: saying like I saw an like an craft, I can't explain.
Speaker 1: I believe it was an alien craft, right, or the
Speaker 1: remains of an alien craft. Now, again, there was technology
Speaker 1: in these air balloons that was not widely available or
Speaker 1: that people and that people were not widely knowledgeable about.
Speaker 1: And the guys who responded to this crash didn't fucking
Speaker 1: know about the program because it was heavily classified. So
Speaker 1: you know, you can come out of this either saying like, well,
Speaker 1: I think that they did find some aliens, or I
Speaker 1: think probably if we're doing the Akham's razor thing, it's
Speaker 1: not super weird to assume like, yeah, the government, every
Speaker 1: every part of our incredibly paranoid defense industry was lying
Speaker 1: to every other part and hiding all sorts of shit,
Speaker 1: and these guys just didn't know what the fuck they saw.
Speaker 2: Well, I think often like we want aliens to be
Speaker 2: true instead of that like it feels Yeah, it's much
Speaker 2: more comforting. I mean yeah, I think people are even
Speaker 2: with everything, all the little videos and everything been coming
Speaker 2: out in the last few years and keep people keep
Speaker 2: being like yeah, sure, okay, great, would love it. Can
Speaker 2: they can they take over?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure an alien is here. That means somebody is actually
Speaker 2: maybe in charge. That isn't us. It'd be great.
Speaker 3: It's the I used to.
Speaker 1: I definitely had that period where I was more in
Speaker 1: the like dark hunter in the forest sort of thing,
Speaker 1: like oh, maybe we don't want aliens, you know, to no, no, no,
Speaker 1: at this point, if there's aliens, fuck, they can't be
Speaker 1: worse than us.
Speaker 3: They literally can't.
Speaker 1: Like we're so bad at running our country at our planet, like.
Speaker 3: Just them on, let them in.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 3: They want to eat us.
Speaker 1: Fine, I'm all we're already all being eaten. We're already
Speaker 1: being consumed by the guys who owned fucking banks and
Speaker 1: social media companies. We might as well be eaten by
Speaker 1: aliens who have cool shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe plastic has been an alien the entire time.
Speaker 2: It why not take over Ever's brain?
Speaker 1: Oh God, I would I would feel such a sense
Speaker 1: of peace if the mushroom men at the center of
Speaker 1: Mount Shasta were proved to be real. Truly, but alas so,
Speaker 1: initial local reporting on the Roswell crash was pretty good.
Speaker 1: It described accurately what was found on Max Farm. To
Speaker 1: further alay suspicions, the Army allowed several journalists to tour
Speaker 1: the nearby base at Alamagordo, where they were fed a
Speaker 1: series of lies about the weather balloon. Namely, they were
Speaker 1: told it was for meteorological purposes, not for spying on
Speaker 1: Russian nuclear tests, because we really didn't want people to
Speaker 1: know how well the Russians were doing at some of
Speaker 1: that stuff, right, But otherwise they were generally accurately informed
Speaker 1: about the crash and that it for a while. Interest
Speaker 1: in UFOs flat lined not long after Roswell thanks to
Speaker 1: Kenneth Arnold, now the whole Pacific Northwest had caught UFO
Speaker 1: fever after he made public statements about seeing that group
Speaker 1: of UFOs around Rainier and on July first, people in
Speaker 1: and around Twin Falls, Idaho started seeing glowing discs or
Speaker 1: balls in the sky. So many people saw them in
Speaker 1: such quick succession that something real had to be going on.
Speaker 1: This is one of those things where it's like, wow,
Speaker 1: a shitload of people are seeing something like this is
Speaker 1: not just a hysteria. And it was not just a hysteria.
Speaker 1: One of the discs was recovered and was found to
Speaker 1: be a thirty inch metal disc with a plexiglass bubble
Speaker 1: and some scratch assembled electronic parts, vacuum tubes and shit.
Speaker 1: The whole thing turned out to have been a prank
Speaker 1: by some kids with a basic understanding of engineering.
Speaker 3: They built a fake UFO. Respect respect. It's cool.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I'm always supportive of doing that.
Speaker 1: Why not fuck with people at this point?
Speaker 4: Ye?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, that's actually.
Speaker 1: What got us here. And maybe that's not a good idea.
Speaker 1: Don't listen to me, folks, don't listen to me. We
Speaker 1: maybe do if it's funny. So public interest in UFOs
Speaker 1: kind of fell off after this. This is sort of
Speaker 1: what makes people like because there's this initial surge in
Speaker 1: interest and belief, and like roswell might have immediately been
Speaker 1: kind of a big thing, but then there's this very
Speaker 1: famous hoax that happens within days of roswell, and suddenly
Speaker 1: people are like, oh, you know what, maybe only crazy
Speaker 1: people in cranks believe in UFOs, right, And that's kind
Speaker 1: of what happens after this, right, there's UFO culture continues
Speaker 1: to evolve, but it's not a thing that the average
Speaker 1: American feels good. If they take it seriously, you don't
Speaker 1: want to talk about it, right, because then you'll get
Speaker 1: kind of like written off as a kook, you know.
Speaker 2: Well, and it ruins of their lives. I think everyone
Speaker 2: that's ever come forward like publicly about you know, a
Speaker 2: potential alien encounter, they're not better for it after they've
Speaker 2: told everybody about that.
Speaker 1: No, and as again as we'll talk about a lot
Speaker 1: of those people, you know, are, we're definitely being fed
Speaker 1: liesed by the government because government was like, well, shit,
Speaker 1: we can distract attention from like the shit that we're
Speaker 1: doing if we just like fuck with these people. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty, aguy named Frank Scully publishes a book
Speaker 1: titled Behind the Flying Saucers, based on an article he'd
Speaker 1: written for a variety. The core of this book, in
Speaker 1: the core of that article was based on a speech
Speaker 1: by an oil millionaire and alien obsessive named Silas Newton,
Speaker 1: or at least that's how Silas Newton wanted people to
Speaker 1: see him as like a guy who'd gotten rich in
Speaker 1: oil and was also into aliens. Silas Newton was a
Speaker 1: con man.
Speaker 2: As most silas As are. Not to smirch the Silases
Speaker 2: of the world. Silai, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I've never met again Silas.
Speaker 2: Look another a name frankly thankfully lost to the ages
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: Don't name your kids Silas. And if you're a Silas,
Speaker 1: change your name right. Yeah, you know that's the official
Speaker 1: stance of this podcast. Sorry, Silas is no.
Speaker 2: I agree, official stance of lady to lady as well.
Speaker 2: I speak for my podcast podcasts are against Silas.
Speaker 1: We're going to get like ale, a whole group together
Speaker 1: here that we're gonna be like the NATO of trying
Speaker 1: to stop people from being named Silas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: Author Adam go rightly describes what Newton is saying about
Speaker 1: aliens in this lecture this way. Newton claimed that a
Speaker 1: flying saucer piloted by other worldly midgets had crashed crashed
Speaker 1: in Aztec. New Mexico in nineteen forty eight. The source
Speaker 1: of Newton's saucer revelations was a mysterious doctor g who
Speaker 1: had purportedly examined the remains of these interplanetary travelers and
Speaker 1: viewed pieces of the saucer debris.
Speaker 3: So, you know, not the.
Speaker 1: Most woke way to describe any of this, but yeah,
Speaker 1: in the fifties, what.
Speaker 3: Do you expect.
Speaker 2: That's interesting too, because like there's those Peruvian quote unquote
Speaker 2: alien mummies that came out a year or two ago that.
Speaker 1: I'll just talk about those for a minute too, yeahah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's that's a I don't know that we seem
Speaker 1: to be generally believe that aliens are short rather than tall.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unless you which is got the Nordics of course.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Scully writes this book based on the kind of
Speaker 1: shit that Silas is saying, and as soon as the
Speaker 1: book comes out, it is revealed to all be based
Speaker 1: on a host. Newton had been working with a friend
Speaker 1: who spread lies about aliens because he was just sort
Speaker 1: of a general con man. He was probably not a millionaire,
Speaker 1: and he certainly did not have a legitimate oil business.
Speaker 1: He actually made his money by selling fake leases to
Speaker 1: supposedly oil rich land alongside magnetic oil detecting machine. So
Speaker 1: he will he will sell you a lease that isn't
Speaker 1: real to land and bring along a machine that you
Speaker 1: can lease that will show you that there's oil on
Speaker 1: that land, and none of it's real. Just a con man,
Speaker 1: a beautiful con man, one of these. Well America is great.
Speaker 2: But that's pretty good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So he's a scoundrel with an eye for any
Speaker 1: con that might bring profit, and he was caught quickly.
Speaker 1: But his work caught the eye of a group of
Speaker 1: the greatest scoundrels and common in US history, the Central
Speaker 1: Intelligence Agency or some government agency. We actually don't know
Speaker 1: that it was the CIA. I don't know that any
Speaker 1: of this is true as we're going to get to
Speaker 1: all of the sources on stuff, like there's definitely definitely
Speaker 1: a lot that is verifiable here. But every source who
Speaker 1: comes forward from inside the government, all of the former
Speaker 1: intel officers who talk about this stuff, they're all also
Speaker 1: kind of not kind of they're all also extremely fucking shady,
Speaker 1: and they lie about a ton of shit. So in
Speaker 1: his book Saucer, Spooks and Kooks, Adam go Wrightley notes
Speaker 1: that a former CIA officer, Carl Flock, claimed to have
Speaker 1: uncovered records that Silas Newton was visited by shadowy government
Speaker 1: agents who asked him to keep telling tall tales about
Speaker 1: flying saucers. Flock mused, did the US government or someone
Speaker 1: associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of
Speaker 1: crashed flying saucers so a real capture saucer or saucers
Speaker 1: could be more easily kept under wraps. Was this actually
Speaker 1: nothing to do with real saucers, but instead some sort
Speaker 1: of psychological warfare operation? And I believe I think there's
Speaker 1: a very good chance that Silas was encouraged to keep
Speaker 1: doing this, because we have good documentation that different intel agencies,
Speaker 1: including the NSA, encouraged people to tell.
Speaker 3: Flying saucer stories.
Speaker 1: Right, the CIA as well did this. I don't think
Speaker 1: Silas Newton was being Again, I don't think this is
Speaker 1: like psych warfare or necessarily covering up a real alien thing.
Speaker 1: The evidence suggests that they're covering up weapons development, right. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: like a startling number of foundational UFO culture dudes, Carl
Speaker 1: was also into right wing politics. After working at IBM
Speaker 1: and the CIA, he was hired by the American Enterprise
Speaker 1: Institute to work as a senior editor. He contributed to
Speaker 1: The Libertarian Review and Reason magazine, as well as writing
Speaker 1: short stories about aliens. During the Reagan administration, he was
Speaker 1: made Deputy assists Secretary of Defense for Operational Test and Evaluation.
Speaker 1: And this is a lot of a lot of these guys,
Speaker 1: like so many. It's again, when people are kind of
Speaker 1: casually into it, they'll be like, well, now it's pilots
Speaker 1: saying that there's aliens, and now it's a member of
Speaker 1: the government. And it's like from the beginning, the two
Speaker 1: people making the most reports that there were aliens were
Speaker 1: Republican politicians and pilots, because pilots see a lot of
Speaker 1: weird shit, and Republicans believe anything you tell them.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, I know, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Flock is an interesting figure in UFO culture because
Speaker 1: he was both a believer, or at least a quasi believer,
Speaker 1: and a skeptic, publishing a book that ultimately debunked Roswell
Speaker 1: and first made public the connection between that event and
Speaker 1: Project Mogul. As guys in this world go, he's more
Speaker 1: credible than most, but that comes with a big asterisk, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So for a while, flying saucers are decidedly fringe, although
Speaker 1: some of the most consistent true believers are former military
Speaker 1: officers who often had intelligence clearances. In the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: some of the most active UFO research groups by civilians
Speaker 1: were made by and for former military intelligence guys. And
Speaker 1: this may have had something to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that the CIA and THEDIA the Defense Intelligence Agency, had
Speaker 1: experimented by this early point in putting out misinformation on
Speaker 1: UFOs to test subordinates, right, And the logic here is that, Okay,
Speaker 1: you want to know this guy is kind of like
Speaker 1: he's a security guard at a facility where we're really
Speaker 1: doing some shit, and maybe he's someone we're thinking about
Speaker 1: promoting to be in a more sensitive thing. Tell him
Speaker 1: that there's aliens. Tell him that we have a flying saucer.
Speaker 1: If that gets out in the media, you know, this
Speaker 1: guy can't be trusted, right, And if he doesn't say shit,
Speaker 1: then maybe you tell him the truth. Maybe you don't,
Speaker 1: but like, either way, you know you can trust him
Speaker 1: because if he's not going to tell the media that
Speaker 1: like there's fucking aliens, maybe he's actually like somebody that
Speaker 1: we can trust. With with real secrets.
Speaker 2: You know, I love that the government runs like scientology.
Speaker 3: It's absolutely runs like science, all cults all the way down.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's American culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is that of xenu. It's whatever we're calling this one.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Flying saucers become sexy again in the late nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: when a researcher named Leonard Stringfield makes a public presentation
Speaker 1: at the nineteen seventy eight Mutual UFO Network Symposium. Moof
Speaker 1: On I think is what people call it.
Speaker 2: I've been to a mof on meeting.
Speaker 3: Oh, I would love to go.
Speaker 1: To a moof on meeting.
Speaker 3: That sounds like a hoot.
Speaker 2: It was he a blast.
Speaker 1: He claims that a retired Air Force colonel had told
Speaker 1: him that an alien craft had in fact been recovered
Speaker 1: at Roswell and this guy was one of the first
Speaker 1: military responders at Roswell Roswell and died convinced that what
Speaker 1: he saw was an alien spacecraft. The narrative starts to
Speaker 1: pick up steam from here, and an nssay MIMO revealed
Speaker 1: as part of a Foyer request suggests the CIA had
Speaker 1: something to do with it. Here's go Wrightley's book again.
Speaker 1: The memo dated August twenty ninth, nineteen seventy eight, was
Speaker 1: written by an unidentified NSA AS signee who commented on
Speaker 1: what he suspected to be a number of fraudulent CIA
Speaker 1: memos presented at the symposium. It was later revealed that
Speaker 1: the assignee in question was a former NSA employee and
Speaker 1: mof On board. Remember Tom Delouis and a lot of
Speaker 1: guys at moufon have like like are reached out to
Speaker 1: buy people in intelligence agencies and fed info. So it's
Speaker 1: very hard to say what, like, were these CIA memos
Speaker 1: just something some people made up? Were they memos the
Speaker 1: CIA faked? Or were they memos the NSA faked pretending
Speaker 1: it was the CIA? Right, all of these things are
Speaker 1: kind of possible because all of this shit happened to
Speaker 1: some extent.
Speaker 2: And that they want to believe. Then you're just like, please,
Speaker 2: I won't question it. Just give it to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just give me the good stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Speaking of the good stuff, that's the sponsors of our
Speaker 1: podcasts and we're back. So if you take nothing else
Speaker 1: from these episodes, it should be that military officers and
Speaker 1: intelligence agency employees backing up UFO conspiracies or any other
Speaker 1: kind of conspiracies. Doesn't mean those conspiracies are likelier to
Speaker 1: be true because all of these people are professional liars, right.
Speaker 1: Not only are they professional liars, but there's nothing that
Speaker 1: means somebody who reached a moderately high level in the
Speaker 1: CIA or the Special Forces or the DA is not
Speaker 1: just as crazy as that guy you met at a
Speaker 1: bar who claimed the Martian stole his best deference, right like,
Speaker 1: Michael Flynn is out of his goddamn mind. Was legitimately
Speaker 1: a guy with a lot of like who had had
Speaker 1: a very high position in the military. Established he had
Speaker 1: a lot to do with intel and specific areas, right like,
Speaker 1: and he's you know, and a dick and a fascist. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: to your average American with slightly nerdy inclinations, a lot
Speaker 1: of this UFO stuff is kind of like background noise.
Speaker 1: Kids love it, you know. There's like an entertainment a
Speaker 1: lot of movies and stuff based around this stuff in
Speaker 1: the fifties and sixties, and so it's not necessarily like
Speaker 1: taken super seriously by a ton of people. And it
Speaker 1: probably started as kind of like a lark for a
Speaker 1: guy that we're going to be talking a lot about
Speaker 1: in these episodes, who was I think, I don't know
Speaker 1: if hero is the right term, but I'm very sympathetic
Speaker 1: to him. A fellow named Paul Benowitz, and Paul Benowitz
Speaker 1: is the victim of Richard Dody and of the US
Speaker 1: intelligence establishment during this period. He is an engineer with
Speaker 1: a master's degree in physics who started his own small business,
Speaker 1: Thunder Scientific, in nineteen sixty nine. People will say that
Speaker 1: Paul was a genius with electronics. He is very good
Speaker 1: at what he does. He'd moved to New Mexico to
Speaker 1: be closer to the bleeding edge of the experimental aerospace industry,
Speaker 1: and he dug a niche for himself there, providing different
Speaker 1: measurement instruments for NASA and the Air Force. He hit
Speaker 1: the market at a spectacular time when all of these
Speaker 1: industries were exploding, and his intention was initially to get
Speaker 1: a peece HD. And he has to like shelf that
Speaker 1: because his company is so successful and it's growing so fast.
Speaker 1: Thunder Scientific established a lab right outside of Kirtland Air
Speaker 1: Force Base and had regular dealings with scientists and officers
Speaker 1: from the newly established Air Force and the book Project Beta.
Speaker 1: Greg Bishop Wrights, the demands of his business now left
Speaker 1: little time for friends and socializing, but this did not
Speaker 1: bother him. Thunder Scientific and his family were all that
Speaker 1: he needed. What little time he had left was devoted
Speaker 1: to plowing through a small collection of wild West novels,
Speaker 1: his only guilty pleasure. So pretty nice, harmless guy. He's
Speaker 1: making like altimeters and shit, like for devices for measuring
Speaker 1: like you know, moisture in the air on planes and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, kind of like nerdy stuff, right.
Speaker 2: No, totally, this is definitely the CIA is going to
Speaker 2: ruin this mountain's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, intelligence, but the CIA, like there's a number of
Speaker 1: people involved in fucking with Paul. For guy, Paul has hobbies.
Speaker 1: He's a pilot and he's like an aerobatic pilot, so
Speaker 1: he likes to do like plane stunts and shit.
Speaker 3: He's very good.
Speaker 1: And starting in the nineteen seventies he begins paying and
Speaker 1: increasing attention to the UFO movement. He joins the Aerial
Speaker 1: Phenomenon Research Association or APRO, which is a civilian UFO
Speaker 1: research org based out of Tucson, And so that's like
Speaker 1: somewhere I think sometime in like the mid seventies is
Speaker 1: when he joins apro and so he's pretty plugged into
Speaker 1: all this stuff. A year after Leonard Stringfield writes, you know,
Speaker 1: he co writes that book that reignites interest in Roswell
Speaker 1: and flying saucers. In April of nineteen seventy nine, Paul
Speaker 1: attends a big conference on cattle mutilation, which had just
Speaker 1: started to become a thing that people were talking about.
Speaker 1: And this is when I say, a conference on cattle mutilation.
Speaker 1: This is less kooky than a lot of these events
Speaker 1: are going to sound, because in part there's some actual
Speaker 1: shit being done to cow. So there's some very there's
Speaker 1: some serious people there who actually, like, I want to
Speaker 1: know what the fuck is going on?
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The event itself is hosted by Republican Senator Harrison Schmidt,
Speaker 1: a former astronaut who'd walked on the moon. Among the
Speaker 1: attendees were numerous FBI agents, politicians, local law enforcement officers,
Speaker 1: scientists from Los Alamos, tribal officials, and of course new
Speaker 1: age psychics wearing robes alongside dishevelled ufologists.
Speaker 3: Of course for the yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Of course, I mean they have they have to be there.
Speaker 2: I mean, right, and what a party in the parking lot.
Speaker 2: Somebody's got to be throwing the after parties.
Speaker 1: So you have there and acid I think is still
Speaker 1: legal at this point. Maybe they'd banded by man. The
Speaker 1: good koke is out there, people have quailudes. I bet
Speaker 1: the parties were wild.
Speaker 2: Absolutely comic. Con Eat your heart. I wonder what the
Speaker 2: swag is for the free swag for the cattle Mutilation Convention?
Speaker 2: They what's in the go go away bag?
Speaker 1: Yeah, lymph nodes so a reporter for the New Mexico
Speaker 1: and into to describe the conference as a farce featuring
Speaker 1: the strangest collection of weirdos ever assembled in New Mexico,
Speaker 1: and I will tell you right now that is no
Speaker 1: longer an accurate statement. I've spent too much time in
Speaker 1: New Mexico to believe that a lot of.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, med Bar is the bar is an alien
Speaker 2: one of my favorite states. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1: So said, weirdos were united by their interest in a
Speaker 1: real phenomenon. This is not fake. The fact that cattle
Speaker 1: are being found dead and surgically mutilated is not fake.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that is happening right. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of theories as to why. There's one that is
Speaker 1: almost certainly the actual truth here that we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about. But this is a real thing that is happening,
Speaker 1: and people are rightfully like, what the fuck is going on?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: This starts when a decent number of cattle are found
Speaker 1: dead and surgically mutilated in the Dulcet area, like in
Speaker 1: a near Dulce, New Mexico, which itself is near the
Speaker 1: Hikarilla Reservation. One of the first investigators is a state
Speaker 1: trooper named Gabe Valdez, who's a very like a kind
Speaker 1: of a titan in the ufology figure field, and again
Speaker 1: one of the guys who's more credible, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of within this community, which is not to say does
Speaker 1: not believe some stuff that can't be proven, but just
Speaker 1: is one of the guys who is attempting to actually
Speaker 1: go about some of this like scientifically. And Gabe as
Speaker 1: he's looking because people, you know, he's getting calls from
Speaker 1: like ranchers like I've got these cows, like fucking cut up, man,
Speaker 1: this is fucking weird, he finds tripod prints near several
Speaker 1: of the corpses, and he initially theorizes that there's an
Speaker 1: a that this is evidence that an alien craft had
Speaker 1: landed nearby, which it is not, but Waldas keeps digging
Speaker 1: and he eventually uncovers evidence that that makes it very
Speaker 1: clear this.
Speaker 3: Is human beings did this, right, And the.
Speaker 1: Specific evidence is that several cows were found to have
Speaker 1: been drugged with atropine and a gas mask had been
Speaker 1: found at one site.
Speaker 2: Right, god, damn, what's what's the matter with people? This
Speaker 2: is a student film gone wrong?
Speaker 3: Brandy.
Speaker 1: This is so much more fucked up than you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is so so fucking crazy. What the reason why
Speaker 1: this is happening? The likely reason again, this isn't. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you exactly. This is definitely what happened. But
Speaker 1: the theory of Valdez and his son come up with,
Speaker 1: I think is very credible. So Valdez starts to suspect
Speaker 1: that the government is secretly killing and studying the corpse
Speaker 1: of cattle. He found that most of the deceased animals
Speaker 1: had their tongues and lymph nodes, specifically, their lymph nodes removed,
Speaker 1: which is the organ you would take if you wanted
Speaker 1: to do tests for cancers.
Speaker 2: Right, okay, yeah, so there is good reason.
Speaker 1: Now to suspect that these mutilations were tied not to aliens,
Speaker 1: but to a secret government project called Project gas Buggy,
Speaker 1: which had been launched in nineteen sixty seven as part
Speaker 1: of the Plowshare program.
Speaker 3: You have you heard of the plowshare program?
Speaker 2: No, I don't know about the Plowshare program. It hasn't
Speaker 2: come up in my searches.
Speaker 4: Oh Man.
Speaker 1: Is one of my favorite things the government ever did.
Speaker 1: And by that I mean like one of the funniest things.
Speaker 1: This is like fucked up and horrible, but it's extremely funny.
Speaker 1: And it's also kind of soothing because if the government
Speaker 1: did this what I'm about to explain to you and
Speaker 1: didn't get us all killed, I think we've got a
Speaker 1: pretty good shot of surviving the next few years. Great
Speaker 1: love that I try to be hopeful here. So Project
Speaker 1: Plowshare was named after Isaiah two to four in the Bible.
Speaker 1: They will beat their swords into plowshares, right, And that
Speaker 1: means like, we're going to take these weapons and turn
Speaker 1: them into a tool that we.
Speaker 3: Used to get food. Right.
Speaker 1: The project was established as a way for Dwight Eisenhower
Speaker 1: to feel less bad about presiding over the birth of
Speaker 1: a planet killing Arsenal. In nineteen fifty three, he gave
Speaker 1: his famous Adams for peace speech at the UN and
Speaker 1: promise that the United States would quote devote its entire
Speaker 1: heart and mind to find the way by which the
Speaker 1: miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death,
Speaker 1: but consecrated to his life. And sort of the the
Speaker 1: less kind of shiny, you know, beautiful thing going on
Speaker 1: here is that, like we were making so many goddamn nukes,
Speaker 1: but like by this point, by like the sixties seventy,
Speaker 1: we have the sixties especially, like we've got enough nukes
Speaker 1: to kill everything, right, and the Russians has the same
Speaker 1: number basically, you know, yeah, and other people are starting
Speaker 1: to get them, and like some of the folks making
Speaker 1: the doing this feel kind of bad and are like,
Speaker 1: I kind of want my life to be a little
Speaker 1: bit more than just building a death machine for the
Speaker 1: entire species. Maybe there's a way to use all of
Speaker 1: these nightmare weapons to do good shit, right, Yeah, what
Speaker 1: wishful thinking?
Speaker 2: That's adorable. Yeah, I'm not responsible for this world becoming
Speaker 2: a barren waste land someday. Absolutely not. No.
Speaker 1: No, So the idea here is, let's figure out if
Speaker 1: there's a way to use nuclear explosions to speed and
Speaker 1: assist government civil works projects, right, different construction projects, and
Speaker 1: specifically one of the big initial things. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty six, there's this thing called the Suez Crisis, right
Speaker 1: the Suez Canal. You remember when that big boat got
Speaker 1: stuck and at like, yeah, it was very funny, but
Speaker 1: also shit got like really expensive for a while because
Speaker 1: a lot of trade goes through the Suez Canal in Egypt,
Speaker 1: it's very important. Well, in nineteen fifty six, the Suez
Speaker 1: Canal Company, which had been owned by Britain and France,
Speaker 1: gets nationalized by the Egyptian president and there's like a
Speaker 1: crisis over like whether or not Europeans are going to
Speaker 1: be able to use the Suez Canal. And like this,
Speaker 1: by the way, is still a major factor in geopolitics.
Speaker 1: Like particularly liberals in the US like to act like
Speaker 1: France and whatnot is like so much less fucked up
Speaker 1: of a country. But look look at the kind of
Speaker 1: weapons France sells the Egyptians. No matter who's in charge,
Speaker 1: no matter what they do to their people, no matter
Speaker 1: how violent an asshole they are, France is always willing
Speaker 1: to sell the Egyptians any kind of fucked up weapons
Speaker 1: they want. Because there's this canal and it's kind of
Speaker 1: a big deal, right, So yeah, fifty six the Seuez
Speaker 1: Canal gets shut down, and people are like people in
Speaker 1: our gay people in you know, our allied governments are like, fuck,
Speaker 1: we got to figure out something. And what's the most
Speaker 1: logical thing to do if you need to replace the
Speaker 1: Suez Canal?
Speaker 2: Brandy, Oh, make it bigger, blow it up.
Speaker 1: No no, no, no no no, that's crazy talk. No,
Speaker 1: the most logical thing to do is to detonate five
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty thermonuclear weapons in a line across the
Speaker 1: Holy Land through the Negev Desert to the Mediterranean Sea.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 2: I know about this. I just read about this.
Speaker 1: Holy Land five hundred nukes.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's so fun. That's this is also a recent
Speaker 2: theory that's come up in the last oh say, a
Speaker 2: year and a half or so we've been hearing about. Okay, interesting, great,
Speaker 2: Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: I it's fascinating to think of how different everything going
Speaker 1: on there would be if, like, an addition to all
Speaker 1: of the awful stuff happening, everyone had fucking radiation poisoning
Speaker 1: because we set off five hundred and twenty nuclear explosions.
Speaker 2: Jesus, that's probably wouldn't have gone.
Speaker 3: Well, I would have.
Speaker 2: Loved probably been in the initial pitch of this, just
Speaker 2: somebody's like, all right, hear me out, I know this
Speaker 2: mom can destroy anything? What if?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get through okay, all right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? What do you think a picture of a shovel?
Speaker 1: We all hate digging, right, what do we love nukes?
Speaker 2: We just want to see what it looks like to
Speaker 2: do that. It wouldn't gonna be the Earth and half
Speaker 2: or anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I can't think of any downsides to setting
Speaker 1: off five hundred and twenty nukes in the Holy Land.
Speaker 1: Seems like a good call.
Speaker 2: What Jesus is really what he died on the cross for?
Speaker 4: Was this?
Speaker 3: Like he actually he would have loved nukes?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's it's from the Book of Silas, which
Speaker 2: is a horrible book that was we have never you know, published.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why we hate Silass. So the idea of
Speaker 1: repurposing that this doesn't catch on people, Thank thank god?
Speaker 3: Enough are you? Are you out of your fucking mind?
Speaker 4: Do that?
Speaker 1: So we don't do this. But the idea of repurposing
Speaker 1: nukes for civil use lingered on and In nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: Project Plowshare is established, and I want to quote from
Speaker 1: a write up from the Science History Institute, Plowshare scientists
Speaker 1: looked at the natural world as if it were a
Speaker 1: piece of clay waiting to be sculpted by nuclear tools.
Speaker 1: As the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller remarked,
Speaker 1: if your mountain is not in the right place, drop
Speaker 1: us a card. And I do love that, like atomic
Speaker 1: era mad scientist.
Speaker 2: Shit, yeah, yeah, yeah, slag the flagger is real.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is kind of that's kind of cool. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen sixty, Popular Mechanics devoted an article to
Speaker 1: the idea with Edward Teller. Sophie will pull up the
Speaker 1: thing on the screen here, but like it's the cover
Speaker 1: of Popular Mechanics March nineteen sixty. There's a picture of
Speaker 1: Teller sitting at a desk with a bunch of papers.
Speaker 1: We're going to work miracles. The atom's power is ready
Speaker 1: to unlock a treasure chest of Arctic oil, dig open
Speaker 1: an Alaskan harbor, open the spigot for Colorado's shale. And
Speaker 1: this article is by Edward Teller. I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a little bit of that opening When you look at
Speaker 1: a map of Alaska, you will observe that Point Hope
Speaker 1: at the northwest corner, projecting out into the out Arctic Ocean.
Speaker 1: Above Point Hope, the shore is exposed to the polar
Speaker 1: ice pack, which even in the summer, is never far
Speaker 1: Offshore ships can travel north of this point only one
Speaker 1: month and twelve but below Point Hope the shore swings
Speaker 1: to the southeast and the sea is free of ice
Speaker 1: for three months of the year. Nearby our coal deposits
Speaker 1: and somewhat farther oil that might attract commerce except for
Speaker 1: one vital lack. There is no harbor, no good anchorage
Speaker 1: for sea going ships. So they theorize a number of things,
Speaker 1: but one of them is to literally melt big chunks
Speaker 1: of the ice caps with nukes so that we can
Speaker 1: get it like coal and oil more effectively.
Speaker 2: I like that they just did the slow version of
Speaker 2: it by just never move away from oil.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, we uh it turns out we got
Speaker 1: there anyway, guys.
Speaker 3: Good news.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I guess better than nuking it. Probably.
Speaker 1: So Teller's got a problem, which is, we know at
Speaker 1: this point radiation bad and thankfully, like hydrogen bombs, less radiation,
Speaker 1: but like not no radiation, And so there's a there's
Speaker 1: a very good question here, which is like, hey, if
Speaker 1: we detonate like a nuke underground, won't it like could it?
Speaker 1: Could that be bad? Could it like cause real problems?
Speaker 1: And so Teller has to direct the first underground test
Speaker 1: of a thermonuclear weapon to gather data for busy bodies
Speaker 1: who kept asking questions like.
Speaker 2: That so annoying.
Speaker 1: So the initial data seems to be good. They detonate
Speaker 1: a one point seven kiloton nuke in Nevada, and I'm
Speaker 1: using nuke interchangeably here for all atomic weapons. Obviously, a
Speaker 1: hydrogen bomb is a very different thing from like the
Speaker 1: kind of bombs we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But
Speaker 1: these are they are mostly using like hydrogen bomb, Like
Speaker 1: that is the idea for plowshare after a point, because
Speaker 1: it's just like a better tool. And the initial data
Speaker 1: seems to suggest that, like, oh, actually, like this might
Speaker 1: be pretty safe, right, that's the initial data. This ignites
Speaker 1: a spree of dangerously insane plans, like Project Gnome, which
Speaker 1: suggested nuking a massive underground salt deposit in Alaska in
Speaker 1: order to create heat and steam to run a turbine
Speaker 1: providing power for a nearby city, and Sophie's gonna pull
Speaker 1: up like a diagram explaining this where it's just like generator, turbine,
Speaker 1: condenser and then molten salt from nuclear explosion.
Speaker 2: It's for sure gonna work.
Speaker 3: Definitely, it totally will be safe.
Speaker 1: It's not crazy at all, Like obviously molten salt from
Speaker 1: a nuclear explosion. There's no possible downside to do it creating.
Speaker 2: That, so no, never.
Speaker 1: The good news is that local indigenous leaders find out
Speaker 1: that like Tellers, like what if we just knew huge
Speaker 1: chunks of like Inuit territory and shit to see if
Speaker 1: that does something. And they're like this seems bad. And
Speaker 1: they're particularly concerned because Teller had just carried out an
Speaker 1: H bomb test a couple of years earlier in the
Speaker 1: Marshall Islands that had gone bad and caused the highest
Speaker 1: recorded levels of nuclear fallout and history. They had destroyed
Speaker 1: several item islands, and like that people lived on, like
Speaker 1: it's a real problem. We've done episodes if it could
Speaker 1: happen here on the Marshalls and how much the US
Speaker 1: focks them over. But Teller's a big part of that,
Speaker 1: so you know, he doesn't get to newke Alaska to
Speaker 1: the extent that he wants to Neewke Alaska. And again
Speaker 1: and again his high hopes are dashed by the fact
Speaker 1: that everything he suggests and does is completely out of
Speaker 1: its mind. By nineteen sixty seven, Plowshare had moved on
Speaker 1: to a new idea. Deposits of natural gas could be
Speaker 1: extracted if nukes were used to break up dense rock
Speaker 1: formations that kept them trapped. This is the origins, like
Speaker 1: some of the origins of hydraulic fracking, right, initially they
Speaker 1: want to do hydraulic fracking with nukes. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: great stuff, guys. Yeah, let's bucket this planet nuke at all.
Speaker 2: No, No, it exists to be broken. It's the whole
Speaker 2: point of living.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these these guys, it's amazing because like you can
Speaker 1: get over the counter, like just incredibly potent barbituates at
Speaker 1: this point, and everybody is drunk and on barbituates the
Speaker 1: whole time this is going on. And when you understand that,
Speaker 1: it really does explain a lot of the decisions being made.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, these are not sober decisions at all. These
Speaker 2: are not These people.
Speaker 1: Are eating what is effectively xanax like candy bars. So
Speaker 1: Project gas Buggy follows, right, that's the idea. We're gonna
Speaker 1: frack with nukes. And they set off a bomb equivalent
Speaker 1: to twenty nine kilotons of TNT in northwest New Mexico
Speaker 1: near Dulce. From that article by the Science History Institute.
Speaker 1: The detonation on December tenth, nineteen sixty seven blasted open
Speaker 1: an underground chamber three hundred and thirty five feet high
Speaker 1: and almost a hundred and sixty five feet in diameter,
Speaker 1: and successfully fractured the rock, spurring a vast increase in
Speaker 1: gas production rates at the site. Unfortunately, the blast also
Speaker 1: contaminated the gas with radioactive tritium, making it unsellable to consumers.
Speaker 1: So it does work, it just makes poison radioactive natural gas.
Speaker 2: Love it where we peep that? When we make that,
Speaker 2: what do we do with that?
Speaker 1: I'm just curious what God willing now that our FK
Speaker 1: is going to be in there.
Speaker 3: You know, I think we can.
Speaker 1: I'm hopeful that we can just make that legal to
Speaker 1: use in homes and we can all have all the
Speaker 1: radioactive tritium gas in our living rooms that we need.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely, I choose from my kids what they get
Speaker 2: exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's good for them, you know, maybe maybe it
Speaker 1: counteracts the vaccines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, eat your radioactive gas, kid, come on.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Plowshare scientists wouldn't see real success in the fracking front
Speaker 1: until nineteen sixty nine, when a nuke set off under
Speaker 1: the Colorado River released one point five million dollars in
Speaker 1: natural gas that was usable for the mere cost of
Speaker 1: eleven million dollars. Also, the gas was still very poor quality. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Plowshare was shuttered, but the radioactive tritium gas under New
Speaker 1: Mexico near Dulce remained.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So, now we've got this big fucking hole underground filled
Speaker 1: with poison.
Speaker 3: That's fun.
Speaker 2: I just know that's out there. It's all a ticking
Speaker 2: time bomb.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So we've got this like death thing out in the
Speaker 1: middle of New Mexico and we don't really know what
Speaker 1: the fuck to do with it right now. What I'm
Speaker 1: going to say is not confirmed, but I consider it
Speaker 1: quite likely. Gabe Valdez eventually comes to the conclusion that
Speaker 1: the cattle mutilations around Dulci were carried out by government
Speaker 1: scientists studying the level of environmental contamination caused by the
Speaker 1: plowshare tests. If this is the case, it's something that
Speaker 1: is still somewhat under wraps, and military spooks would have
Speaker 1: put overtime work in to hide it back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. But it makes a lot of sense. They're
Speaker 1: clearly like studying animals around there to see like if
Speaker 1: they developing cancers, and they don't want people to know
Speaker 1: about it. I think this is actually a very very
Speaker 1: likely explanation for at least a good chunk of the
Speaker 1: cattle mutilations that are kind of found paid off, just
Speaker 1: like curious Alien bought or fucking not bought scientists or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, you did not disappoint. You did not disappoint.
Speaker 2: That makes total sense. I won't know which scientist was like,
Speaker 2: let make sure you get the asshole.
Speaker 3: To get into that asshole.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. Is that part of the experiments, sir?
Speaker 3: I mean, why not.
Speaker 2: It's for the there's the showmanship of what we're doing here.
Speaker 3: We gotta get weird with it people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this brings us back to Paul Benowitz because he
Speaker 1: meets Gabe Valdez at that cattle mutilation conference and he
Speaker 1: actually approaches Valdez and Valdez, who is like both an
Speaker 1: active state trooper who kind of becomes like in his
Speaker 1: area that whenever there's like weird alien ship, his colleagues
Speaker 1: are like, hey, Valdez, go look into this, like you're
Speaker 1: the you're the you're the crazy guy, right, go check
Speaker 1: this out.
Speaker 2: And I just wanted to plant drugs, right.
Speaker 1: I think Valdez really does want to be doing this
Speaker 1: because this kind of becomes his whole life. And he
Speaker 1: he's like as soon as this random like engineer is like, hey,
Speaker 1: can I like write along with you to like look
Speaker 1: at weird alien stuff, Valdez is like, absolutely, Man, come on,
Speaker 1: let's let's go trace down some fucking lights. And that's
Speaker 1: exactly what they do. They do a lot of ride
Speaker 1: alongs together and they they've become fast friends. Bnowitz is
Speaker 1: a believer and Valdez is an open minded seeker. Right,
Speaker 1: you know that that's kind of the the minimum of
Speaker 1: what I'd say he is.
Speaker 2: What is their sexual tension like? And is this the
Speaker 2: exact thing that X files is based on?
Speaker 1: Oh they're fucking yeah, absolutely, this is what Mullian. No, No,
Speaker 1: they're not. I have no evidence, but it would be funny.
Speaker 1: This is like the fucking uh yeah, the moulderin Scully Origin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the sexual tension you could cut with a knife. Also,
Speaker 1: Valdez does in fact get pregnant with an alien baby.
Speaker 1: That's very much confirmed. His dad's an admiral. I think
Speaker 1: his Schully's dad was an animal. Maybe he was a captain.
Speaker 1: I know he called her Starbuck.
Speaker 3: I just watched that episode the other night.
Speaker 1: So speaking of Dana Scully boy, she looked good in
Speaker 1: a suit. Anyway, here's some ads. We're back. Everyone in
Speaker 1: that show looked good in this fucking skinner. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Like he was powering into that uniform.
Speaker 3: Looked amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No one talks about the fashion on the Xtra falls.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, those those real pencil ties. Fucking molder.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Beautiful stuff, beautiful stuff. So in the winter of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine Innowitz and his wife experienced well not a
Speaker 1: close encounter, but like an intermediate distance encounter at his
Speaker 1: Albuquerque home. So his house is like right up to
Speaker 1: the edge of the Kirtland Base, right, so he can
Speaker 1: see like the base itself, and there's this mountain that
Speaker 1: they had like hollowed out and filled with nukes, Like
Speaker 1: he's looking at all of that from his fucking porch, right,
Speaker 1: And he and his wife start to notice at night
Speaker 1: blinking lights that are floating and moving independently in the
Speaker 1: air over the base, and he is as a pilot,
Speaker 1: He's like, this does not look like any kind of
Speaker 1: aircraft I've ever seen, and in fact it is not
Speaker 1: now again, not aliens. This is like drone projects. And
Speaker 1: what becomes the stealth bomber is like, this is all
Speaker 1: the kind of shit they're testing out at Kirtland. He
Speaker 1: is seeing things, and he is seeing things that there
Speaker 1: is no he does not have any kind of good
Speaker 1: explanation for, right, because some of the things he's seeing
Speaker 1: are experimental craft that are capable of things that the
Speaker 1: broader populace did not know we could do with aerial
Speaker 1: craft at this point in time. Now, because he's rich
Speaker 1: and because he is a professional engineer, he has a
Speaker 1: lot of equipment. He's got telephoto lenses, he's got a
Speaker 1: Super eight camera, and he's got a lot of like
Speaker 1: different advanced antenna that are capable of taking data on
Speaker 1: the stuff that he's seeing, particularly the signals that these
Speaker 1: different craft are putting out right, because they're all putting
Speaker 1: out radio signals, they've got transponders and shit, right, you
Speaker 1: want that on there, especially with an experimental craft. You
Speaker 1: never know if one of those is going to like
Speaker 1: wind up crashing into the ground. You want to be
Speaker 1: able to grab it and shit. So he starts training
Speaker 1: this whole, not just his cameras, but all of these
Speaker 1: different in all these different electronic tools he has on
Speaker 1: the base while this is happening, and he's getting real
Speaker 1: data on something that is actually happening right now. The
Speaker 1: thing is, and this is there's an interesting documentary about
Speaker 1: this called Mirage Men, and it'll point out that Benowitz
Speaker 1: is a World War Two era veteran. He is a
Speaker 1: genuinely patriotic, helpful guy, and a lot of kind of
Speaker 1: early UFO dudes are like this. So there, his instinct
Speaker 1: is not the government is hiding something fucked up from me.
Speaker 1: His instinct is, I wonder if the government knows something
Speaker 1: clearly alien or otherworldly is happening above this base at
Speaker 1: this constitution, I need to tell them what I found.
Speaker 3: Right, he is not.
Speaker 1: Deeply patriotic, and this country is going to fuck him
Speaker 1: so hard.
Speaker 3: It does everyone who's deeply patriotic.
Speaker 2: Oh no, they're the bad guy. Don't do that. It's
Speaker 2: watching somebody walk upstairs in a horror movie.
Speaker 1: Well, and and Dodie, who's like going to be fucking
Speaker 1: with him for years over this is like you know
Speaker 1: World War Two era veterans. You just tell them, hey,
Speaker 1: we need you to help us with this, but you
Speaker 1: can't talk. You got to keep it quiet, as is
Speaker 1: national security. Of course, of course I trust the government. Sorry,
Speaker 1: like I'm a child of the New Deal. I fought
Speaker 1: for this country against the Nazis, you know, heroes. That's
Speaker 1: rightly right, and that that's where Paul's head is right
Speaker 1: in addition to literally believing in a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: Kookie a Ley, he is the government doesn't start that
Speaker 1: in him, right, he is down that road to an extent.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, So the reality of the.
Speaker 1: Situation is that he and his wife had documented evidence
Speaker 1: of some kind of experimental plane, drone or other electronic gizmo.
Speaker 1: There were a number of different things at the because
Speaker 1: part of like this whole Kirtland base is like one
Speaker 1: of the things that's kind of in this whole area
Speaker 1: is Sandia National Laboratories, which at the time is the
Speaker 1: number one weapons development facility in the United States at
Speaker 1: least probably on the planet as a result of that,
Speaker 1: and like one of the things they're working on is
Speaker 1: early laser guided missiles, you know, in addition to other
Speaker 1: different kinds of projects. One possibility for some of what
Speaker 1: Paul saw is there's this massive it's actually the largest
Speaker 1: freestanding wooden structure on Earth. Like even all of the
Speaker 1: bolts are would it's this massive tower that they were
Speaker 1: setting off like EMP blasts in order to test the
Speaker 1: resilience of planes to nuclear explosions. So because of that,
Speaker 1: you couldn't have any metal in the actual like thing itself.
Speaker 1: I don't understand the science, but that's just what people say,
Speaker 1: and that's apparently this was a thing that we did.
Speaker 1: Apparently it wasn't very effective because we weren't like the
Speaker 1: simulated blasts were not anywhere close to what a nuke
Speaker 1: would have done. But this is a thing that they
Speaker 1: were working on. There were lights on this thing. It
Speaker 1: looked weird and it gives off you're getting some weird
Speaker 1: fucking signals from this if you've got like different antennas
Speaker 1: and stuff. In addition to the other shit that they're
Speaker 1: fucking around with there. So I think somebody who was
Speaker 1: less inclined towards belief in, you know, aliens in the
Speaker 1: paranormal than Paul might have been like, yeah, there's probably
Speaker 1: some sort of weird cold war weapons system being developed
Speaker 1: there or whatever. Paul does not make that leap. He
Speaker 1: captures grainy footage of lights with his eight millimeter camera,
Speaker 1: and he uses his engineering knowledge design and construct a
Speaker 1: tracking antenna array on his roof. Adam go Wrightley notes
Speaker 1: quote Benowitz installed an arsenal of tracking antenna on his
Speaker 1: roof to record signals apparently emanating from these UFOs, which
Speaker 1: he claimed could DF direction find at distances of up
Speaker 1: to sixty miles. Alarmed that these craft posed a national
Speaker 1: security threat, Bennowhittz alerted Kirtland Base officials of his findings.
Speaker 1: Not long after Bennowitz's received what he believed were alien transmissions. Now,
Speaker 1: the reality of the situation, and again this is not
Speaker 1: entirely clear, but what's very likely happening is that, being
Speaker 1: a good engineer, Paul has built an array that is
Speaker 1: actually receiving encrypted transmissions. Because the Air Force is experimenting
Speaker 1: with classified broadcast technology to send out coding messages, and
Speaker 1: Paul is picking this shit up right, some of its
Speaker 1: great interference from the EMP set up, but he's actually
Speaker 1: almost certainly getting some actual encrypted stuff, right yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So he goes to the Air Force and he's like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I've been like listening and taking footage and there's like
Speaker 1: aliens and they're like, yeah, okay, another alien guy. And
Speaker 1: then he's like, and I pointed my incredibly advanced antenna
Speaker 1: array at your base of secret military bullshit, and look
Speaker 1: at these coded transmissions. And they're like, oh fuck, oh fu,
Speaker 1: fuck this guy. This guy might actually have something that
Speaker 1: could be a problem.
Speaker 3: We really don't want him doing this, but please don't.
Speaker 2: Don't oh shit, oh fuck.
Speaker 1: So the head of base security spends about a minute
Speaker 1: on the phone with Paul and decides he's probably a crank,
Speaker 1: but his status is the president of this legitimate lab
Speaker 1: and the fact that he's getting something and this this
Speaker 1: is potentially a risk to you know, this could expose
Speaker 1: some of the projects they're working on, right, and maybe
Speaker 1: Paul wouldn't even if Paul just publishes this stuff, being like, look,
Speaker 1: is evidence of aliens and it's actual encrypto transmissions. Well,
Speaker 1: Paul is going to publish that. Someone wouldn't be hard
Speaker 1: at all for some sort of like Russian agent to
Speaker 1: get that, and then maybe the Soviets crack this thing,
Speaker 1: and like, right, there's a number of ways this could
Speaker 1: be a problem, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they could decide to dig a ditch with a nuke.
Speaker 2: So right, well, in fact, they do. I didn't bring
Speaker 2: this up, but the Soviets have their own plowshare program
Speaker 2: that also causes massive, massively poisons the planet. Everybody's doing
Speaker 2: it in Soviet Russia. Do you cut out the bears? Assholes?
Speaker 2: Is that what's happening in their fields? Instead?
Speaker 1: You just poisoned the largest freshwater body on the or
Speaker 1: one of the largest freshwater bodies on the planet, and
Speaker 1: then we're done. Everything's fine. So yeah, And it's also
Speaker 1: maybe it's not the transmissions that freak him out. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's that he's getting documentation about some of the craft.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't know exactly what it is, but
Speaker 1: like the Air Force doesn't just say, okay, you know,
Speaker 1: tell this guy, we're making a.
Speaker 3: Note of it.
Speaker 1: They're like, we should keep talking to this dude. We
Speaker 1: need to get one of our guys an agent from
Speaker 1: the Air Force Office of Special Investigations to befriend Paul
Speaker 1: Binowitz and see what he knows. And so the head
Speaker 1: of base Security, Colonel Ernest Edwards, picks an Air Force
Speaker 1: Office of Special Investigations agent named Richard Doty to do
Speaker 1: just that, and we will be talking about Dody and
Speaker 1: what happens next to our friend Paul in part do you.
Speaker 2: Clivinger? That's it? Anything you want to plug? Brandy? Yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you, This was awesome. I'm excited to hear part
Speaker 2: two for the listener. You guys can find me on
Speaker 2: every social media app at this point at brand Azle,
Speaker 2: I got the Blue Sky, I got the threads, I
Speaker 2: got the ex still formally known as Twitter. I've got
Speaker 2: read Note, I'm on there now. Who cares whatever, TikTok.
Speaker 2: It's deleted from my phone, but my account exists Instagram, Facebook, wherever,
Speaker 2: Brand Dazzle. Brandyposy dot com is my website for a
Speaker 2: bunch of stuff. I have an album coming out in
Speaker 2: March that actually recorded in Portland yet last year and
Speaker 2: yeah burn this records on Instagram and Lady the Ladies
Speaker 2: my podcast. Yeah, thanks guys.
Speaker 1: Excellent all right, everybody, Well until next time, you know,
Speaker 1: go force your way into an Air Force bace and
Speaker 1: just start taking photos.
Speaker 2: You know, Naruto run right on in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right into Air Area fifty one. They love it
Speaker 1: when people do that. It's a lot of fun for them.
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