Speaker 1: Hi Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
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Speaker 1: it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
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Speaker 1: For more information, check out the show notes.
Speaker 2: Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3: Hey, Hey Animation.
Speaker 4: Do you mind if I toss this mic on you?
Speaker 3: Could you just stay your name?
Speaker 5: I'm Travis Walton. Today is January twenty ninth.
Speaker 3: How long has it been?
Speaker 6: Now?
Speaker 5: Forty five years? Forty five years and three months. But
Speaker 5: some things don't change, you know, Some things about it
Speaker 5: haven't gotten any easier at all. I wish that this
Speaker 5: had never happened. It's not been a good thing for
Speaker 5: my life, for my family in some ways, they don't
Speaker 5: even see the real me, you know.
Speaker 1: This morning I woke up, had breakfast and some coffee, showered,
Speaker 1: then went to my office. I had a few zoom calls,
Speaker 1: a quick lunch, did some scrolling on TikTok and Instagram,
Speaker 1: sent a few emails and some more emails the.
Speaker 7: First yawn of the day.
Speaker 1: Left my office, went to my local neighborhood bar. I
Speaker 1: love a good Jim Martini, a phone call, another email,
Speaker 1: another email, time to eat dinner and go to sleep.
Speaker 2: Okay, I think you get it.
Speaker 1: We all have a version of this, a routine, a pattern,
Speaker 1: our habits, whatever it is.
Speaker 2: We all have shit.
Speaker 1: To do, more than enough to worry about, jobs, relationships, politics, religion, COVID, whatever,
Speaker 1: the next version of COVID is an endless amount of
Speaker 1: things to keep our minds busy. Life can feel like
Speaker 1: a hamster wheel doing the things we know until we
Speaker 1: get too tired and fall asleep.
Speaker 2: That sounded depressing.
Speaker 1: My point is it's almost by default that we as
Speaker 1: humans remain focused on what's right in front of us,
Speaker 1: and for the most part we have to. But if
Speaker 1: you ever just stop, stop and step outside and just
Speaker 1: look at the sky, sometimes all the things in our
Speaker 1: daily lives suddenly feel incredibly small, and maybe that's a
Speaker 1: good thing.
Speaker 8: The Earth is a very small stage in a vast
Speaker 8: cosmic arena. Our planet is a lonely speck in the
Speaker 8: great enveloping cosmic dark, the pale blue dot.
Speaker 1: This is the voice of the late Carl Sagan, renowned
Speaker 1: astronomer and an astrophysicist, famously describe the Earth as a
Speaker 1: pale blue dot. He put our tiny existence into perspective,
Speaker 1: artfully explaining not only our responsibility to each other, but
Speaker 1: also to our planet.
Speaker 7: Consider again that dot.
Speaker 5: That's here, that's home, that's us.
Speaker 8: Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
Speaker 8: Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is
Speaker 8: where we make our stand. To me, it underscores our
Speaker 8: responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to
Speaker 8: preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only on.
Speaker 5: We've ever known.
Speaker 1: My name is Payne Lindsay, and for the last five
Speaker 1: years or so, I've spent my career making true crime
Speaker 1: podcasts and investigating cold cases. Ever since I was a kid,
Speaker 1: gazing up at the stars with something I love to do,
Speaker 1: wondering what else could be out there, or if there
Speaker 1: was anything at all. Well, scientifically speaking, the likelihood of
Speaker 1: intelligent life existing somewhere else in the universe at this
Speaker 1: point is almost certain. Space is literally so big that
Speaker 1: it makes our numeric system look stupid trying to explain it. Example,
Speaker 1: we live in the Milky Way, Venus, Earth, Mars, you
Speaker 1: know the rest. There are over one hundred billion more
Speaker 1: planets in the same galaxy and beyond the Milky Way.
Speaker 1: It's believed that there are likely ten trillion more galaxies.
Speaker 2: So doing the math.
Speaker 1: That brings us to a whopping one septilian number of
Speaker 1: planets in the universe. That's a one with twenty four
Speaker 1: zeros after it. What are the odds? We're just so
Speaker 1: damn lucky one inceptilian, I guess. But even if science
Speaker 1: supports the idea of extraterrestrial life, we here on Earth
Speaker 1: have an incredibly hard time grappling with it. Hoaxes, pseudoscience,
Speaker 1: attention seeking people. It's all clearly muddy the waters. And
Speaker 1: I get it.
Speaker 2: Little green men are fun.
Speaker 1: They look cool on a T shirt or a mug
Speaker 1: from a gift shop, But what's the real deal here?
Speaker 1: Very quietly, over the last two years, the conversation surrounding
Speaker 1: UFOs has started to slowly shift. Navy pilots have come forward.
Speaker 2: With evidence, my god.
Speaker 1: Aircraft maneuvering in ways that defy our current understanding of
Speaker 1: the laws of physics.
Speaker 2: Congress is meeting about it, NASA has joined the SARCH.
Speaker 1: If there's ever been a time to look at the
Speaker 1: subject a little more seriously, it's probably right now.
Speaker 9: UFOs on radar harassing a US Navy warship off the
Speaker 9: California coast.
Speaker 10: This Navy video showing the pilot's reaction to the strange
Speaker 10: aerial encounter. What pilots described as aircraft that flew in
Speaker 10: a manner that defied physics.
Speaker 7: It's rotating, by god, the whole I have a look
Speaker 7: on the NFA.
Speaker 11: The UAPs or unexplained aerial phenomena, that's what the military
Speaker 11: calls them, physical evidence of off world vehicles not made
Speaker 11: on this.
Speaker 12: Earth, no wings, rotors or detectable exhausts, Unable to track
Speaker 12: where they came from or where they disappeared.
Speaker 7: Tool on it.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I hope that's a plane.
Speaker 13: Oh gee, please be applying, How please we can hire you?
Speaker 5: Ready for this cha?
Speaker 1: And sure there's no wide eyed alien saying take me
Speaker 1: to your leader here, But there is a record number
Speaker 1: of strange sightings in the sky throughout the entire world
Speaker 1: that no country on Earth has been able to rationally explain.
Speaker 1: Yet this question are we alone? Has been an everlasting
Speaker 1: drive throughout human history. If we could just shake it
Speaker 1: all down, cut through all the nonsense, if we could
Speaker 1: dissect all the real evidence we have today with an
Speaker 1: open mind and a healthy amount of skepticism what might
Speaker 1: we actually find, because I think learning the truth about
Speaker 1: anything is supremely important. Part of evolving is simply opening
Speaker 1: your mind to possibility.
Speaker 2: But the ultimate challenge.
Speaker 1: In this way of thinking still remains, we all have
Speaker 1: shit to do, and even if we found all the
Speaker 1: answers going to change my life today or the responsibilities
Speaker 1: I have tomorrow. But maybe it's a big enough question
Speaker 1: worth leaving the monotony of my daily routine and just
Speaker 1: attempt to answer. I'm stepping off the hamster wheel because
Speaker 1: I know it'll be right there waiting for me if
Speaker 1: I ever decide to come back.
Speaker 2: All you have to do is listen. Welcome to high strange.
Speaker 14: Do you believe in UFOs? Applying the correct definition to
Speaker 14: the word UFO, that question doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 5: What they're really saying.
Speaker 14: When they ask do you believe in UFOs? Is do
Speaker 14: you believe that we're being visited by extraterrestrials? They're not
Speaker 14: saying do you believe that there are objects in the sky.
Speaker 14: We can't explain two very different things. If you said
Speaker 14: to somebody I study UFOs, they laugh. I try to
Speaker 14: even avoid the word UFO. I study data about objects
Speaker 14: in the sky that we can't explain.
Speaker 2: This is Leslie Kane.
Speaker 1: She studied UFOs for over two decades now, written multiple
Speaker 1: articles for The New York Times and made their best
Speaker 1: seller list as an author.
Speaker 14: I did not get into UFOs by any kind of
Speaker 14: intentional design. What happened was I was working at a
Speaker 14: public radio station in Berkeley, California, in the nineties. This
Speaker 14: colleague from France sent me this report about UFOs that
Speaker 14: changed everything for me.
Speaker 1: The report that made it to her desk was titled
Speaker 1: UFOs and Defense, a scientific study into whether there were
Speaker 1: any dangers or national security threats related to UFOs?
Speaker 14: Are there any dangers? Are they a national security issue
Speaker 14: because these things are up in the skies? It was
Speaker 14: a ninety page study written by admirals, generals, a chief
Speaker 14: of police, police scientists, authoritative people who weren't going to
Speaker 14: be making up stories. They interviewed all these pilots, and
Speaker 14: they looked at data from around the world, and they
Speaker 14: drew the conclusion that the best hypothesis to explain the
Speaker 14: cases they studied, the most valid, logical, rational explanation for
Speaker 14: this is that these are visitors from somewhere else. I
Speaker 14: couldn't believe it that generals and admirals and police officers would.
Speaker 1: Say that these were all qualified experts from extremely varied backgrounds. Scientists, pilots,
Speaker 1: technical directors, police chiefs, admirals, air force generals, the kinds
Speaker 1: of people you'd probably listen to as a journalist.
Speaker 14: To me, it was like, oh my god, this is huge,
Speaker 14: the biggest story there is completely blew my mind. Even
Speaker 14: if there's this small chance that we are being visited
Speaker 14: by something from another world, isn't that like a massive story.
Speaker 14: It was to me. I tried to pitch a story
Speaker 14: to a lot of editors, pitch the story to them,
Speaker 14: and I learned nobody wants to hear about this topic.
Speaker 14: The papers were afraid of taking the risk that they
Speaker 14: would be laughed at. UFOs were completely stigmatized, considered to
Speaker 14: be a joke.
Speaker 15: Basically, the stigmatization around UFOs has been an enormous obstacle.
Speaker 1: This is Brian Bender, senior correspondent for Politico who covers
Speaker 1: national security.
Speaker 15: No one wants to be the UFO guy.
Speaker 2: I too do not want to be the UFO guy.
Speaker 1: And trust me, I mean it when I say that
Speaker 1: I feel like the conspiracy rabbit hole surrounding this topic
Speaker 1: is a dark, slippery slope. It starts with just wanting
Speaker 1: to know what this thing is. Then the next thing
Speaker 1: you know, you're analyzing Egyptian pyramids searching for clues from aliens.
Speaker 7: It's not a career builder.
Speaker 15: It's not a career builder, it's you know, it's a
Speaker 15: tenfoil hot wearing Do I want to be considered that person?
Speaker 15: As a journalist in Washington covering national security for the
Speaker 15: first twenty years of my career, UFOs never came up
Speaker 15: at all. I mean, he just wasn't a topic that
Speaker 15: people talked about. It didn't mean that there weren't people
Speaker 15: out in the world talking about it, It just was
Speaker 15: never a topic that as a reporter covering the Pentagon
Speaker 15: you ever really came across. If I come to my
Speaker 15: editors and say I want to write about UFOs, you
Speaker 15: know they're going to.
Speaker 7: Roll their eyes and I'm not going to be taken
Speaker 7: very seriously.
Speaker 15: Summer of twenty seventeen, I got a call from a
Speaker 15: source of mind. He said, hey, you know, I think
Speaker 15: I might have a good story if you're interested. There's
Speaker 15: this guy. He's in the Pentagon. He's a career intelligence
Speaker 15: officer and he's been working on UFOs. First of all,
Speaker 15: I was like the UFOs, the Pentagon studying UFOs.
Speaker 7: Like in modern day. So it was intriguing to me.
Speaker 15: But at the same time, I was like, you know,
Speaker 15: I don't know that that's a politico story. There's this guy,
Speaker 15: he's about to leave the government and he's leaving quite frustrated,
Speaker 15: but he's ready to go public with this.
Speaker 7: So I met him. I also did some betting of him.
Speaker 7: Is he who he says he is? And what is
Speaker 7: his background and who?
Speaker 15: Was very clear to me in the beginning that he
Speaker 15: was very credible, and started digging a little further, peeling
Speaker 15: back the onion layer. And it turned out the program
Speaker 15: that he was working on in the Pentagon, that was
Speaker 15: researching UFO sightings was actually initiated by Senator Harry Reid
Speaker 15: from Nevada got some of his fellow senators to put
Speaker 15: twenty two million dollars into the budget, a senior politician
Speaker 15: who wants the Pentagon to study UFOs, and made it happen.
Speaker 15: I mean, I'm a Pentagon reporter and I cover Washington,
Speaker 15: and we have a Senator who's got twenty two million
Speaker 15: bucks out of the taxpayers send it to this office
Speaker 15: over at the Pentagon, and now they're looking into the UFOs.
Speaker 15: And now the guy who's been doing it says, I've
Speaker 15: learned all these really interesting things and nobody seems to care.
Speaker 15: That immediately rang a bell in my head that it's
Speaker 15: not just a UFO story, it's also a political story.
Speaker 1: If the government was using taxpayer dollars to fund a
Speaker 1: secret UFO research program, who was just the hook he
Speaker 1: needed to publish a story. Simultaneously, unbeknownst to each other,
Speaker 1: Leslie Kane was chipping away at the same story.
Speaker 14: Because of the years of reporting I'd done on this,
Speaker 14: I got to know some of the sort of key
Speaker 14: inside players. One of them invited me in October of
Speaker 14: twenty seventeen to a meeting with a man named Luis Elizondo.
Speaker 1: Lou Elisondo that anonymous source from the Pentagon who claimed
Speaker 1: to have run the UFO research program was a man
Speaker 1: named Lou Elizondo, and he didn't just have an interesting
Speaker 1: story to tell, he had evidence to support it.
Speaker 15: Lou Alexondo was preparing to come out of the government
Speaker 15: in trying to pitch this story to mainstream media.
Speaker 14: I went to this meeting with Luis Alessando and three
Speaker 14: of there are people I knew. At that meeting, I
Speaker 14: was shown these incredible documents, and then I was also
Speaker 14: shown these three videos.
Speaker 2: Oh going, I can for whin the wind for hunting,
Speaker 2: pointing out for the west.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think.
Speaker 7: It's rotating, so I rot the thing.
Speaker 13: Oh my god, there's a whole fleet. I have a
Speaker 13: look on the FA.
Speaker 14: Actual videos in the possession of the Navy of UFOs.
Speaker 14: My mind was blown. All the journalism I'd done nothing
Speaker 14: came close to this. The implications of this were huge.
Speaker 14: The government was taken this seriously. The government had invested
Speaker 14: resources into studying UFOs, which meant they're real. I brought
Speaker 14: it to the editors at the New York Times, showed
Speaker 14: them everything. There is something real that's unexplained.
Speaker 15: They were going to the New York Times. I think
Speaker 15: they talked to the Washington Post. I went to my
Speaker 15: editors and when can we run it? There was some
Speaker 15: eye rolling a little bit in the newsroom.
Speaker 14: There are real physical objects in the sky that demonstrate
Speaker 14: extraordinary technology beyond the capability of what we have.
Speaker 15: What is that How do they do that? How are
Speaker 15: they flying that way? No sense from any.
Speaker 7: Of the radar.
Speaker 15: If there's an engine, it's not giving off any heat
Speaker 15: going from the service of the ocean to seventy thousand
Speaker 15: feet in a couple seconds, which would make any aircraft
Speaker 15: we know blow up.
Speaker 7: We really want this.
Speaker 15: Story out, but we're not even sure the mainstream media
Speaker 15: will bite.
Speaker 7: We had decided we were going to go with it.
Speaker 15: We ran the first story the same day that the
Speaker 15: New York Times did.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, both Politico and The New York Times
Speaker 1: ran stories about UFOs witnessed by military pilots, aircraft captured
Speaker 1: on radar and video maneuvering in ways that farce topass
Speaker 1: our current technology. When the story's published, the Pentagon responded
Speaker 1: confirming they were real.
Speaker 10: Now, after a series of unusual encounters by Navy jets,
Speaker 10: like this one in twenty seventeen showing an F eighteen
Speaker 10: super Hornet encountering an unidentified object, the Navy has decided
Speaker 10: it needs to codify how its sailors and pilots record
Speaker 10: such unexplained events in case these flying objects are in
Speaker 10: fact some kind of advanced aircraft.
Speaker 9: The US Navy and.
Speaker 10: Pentagon are trying to destigmatize reporting what they call unexplained
Speaker 10: aerial phenomena.
Speaker 1: For the first time in American history, there was physical
Speaker 1: video evidence of an unidentified flying object captured by the
Speaker 1: military that the government itself acknowledged to be real, not
Speaker 1: just real, but that they don't know what they are.
Speaker 1: Alongside these Navy videos, Brian and Lesley's stories unearthed the
Speaker 1: top secret Pentagon program that have been studying these things
Speaker 1: for years, depending on office.
Speaker 15: That was created in two thousand and seven was called
Speaker 15: the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program.
Speaker 7: The acronym was a tip very innocuous sounding name.
Speaker 15: Obviously, there's no UFOs in that name at all, and
Speaker 15: I think that was on purpose.
Speaker 7: It was sort of hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 9: Recent report by The New York Times unveiled the existence
Speaker 9: of a real life X Files Department.
Speaker 10: Secret UFO program has just been revealed millions of dollars
Speaker 10: to look into UFO sidings.
Speaker 8: It's a five year secret government program to investigate mysterious
Speaker 8: flying objects.
Speaker 15: It was set up to basically look at UFOs as.
Speaker 7: We think of them, so you know them whatever you will.
Speaker 15: Flying saucers in interviewing pilots or other military personnel that
Speaker 15: were reporting these sightings.
Speaker 7: Thirty four studies they commissioned.
Speaker 15: They hired smart people at different universities, scientists to.
Speaker 7: Do basically theoretical studies.
Speaker 15: So, in other words, if the craft is doing this,
Speaker 15: it's exhibiting these properties, how might that work?
Speaker 7: What kind of propulsion system might you need to be
Speaker 7: able to do that?
Speaker 15: Interviewing some of the witnesses, participants, chronicling what happened and
Speaker 15: when it happened. That was the primary role of the
Speaker 15: ATIP office. ATIPS spent a lot of time on a
Speaker 15: particular case involving the USS Nimts aircraft Carrier.
Speaker 9: The USS Nimets aircraft Carrier and its support ships carrying
Speaker 9: the most sophisticated sensor systems in the world, had several
Speaker 9: interactions with AAVs that is anomalous aerial vehicles.
Speaker 15: So imagine it's like a normal day if there is
Speaker 15: such a thing for the USS Nimics aircraft carrier sailing
Speaker 15: off the southern California coast. F eighteens fighter planes take
Speaker 15: off from the deck doing drills, doing their normal practice runs,
Speaker 15: flown by some experienced pilots who were not just right
Speaker 15: out of flight scold lieutenant commanders had been in for
Speaker 15: a decade or more.
Speaker 7: They're reporting that they're seeing with their.
Speaker 15: Own eyes, also picking up on the faighteens camera, these
Speaker 15: tic TAC shaped vehicles, many of them flying at enormously
Speaker 15: high speeds, speeds that they can't even really begin to
Speaker 15: keep up with them if they wanted to.
Speaker 9: It was so advanced it rendered US capabilities ineffective. It
Speaker 9: showed velocities far greater than anything known to exist.
Speaker 15: Numerous vehicles basically stalked the aircraft carrier days, and by
Speaker 15: stock I mean pilots are flying off the aircraft carrier
Speaker 15: doing their drills, and these tictacs are just flying circles
Speaker 15: around them.
Speaker 9: They could turn itself invisible both to radar and the
Speaker 9: human eye, undetectable and unchallenged.
Speaker 15: And at one point the faighteen pilots are supposed to
Speaker 15: rendezvous some sixty miles away, is part of their daily exercise,
Speaker 15: and they find out that the tic TACs they just saw,
Speaker 15: they're already there. The tic TACs went from where they
Speaker 15: were sixty miles in a couple seconds to the predetermined
Speaker 15: rendezvous point. So the question was well, how do they
Speaker 15: even know that's where we're going. Not only the pilots
Speaker 15: themselves reporting it, but a Navy cruiser with a massive
Speaker 15: radar on it also picking up these shaped vehicles on
Speaker 15: its radar from multiple vantage points over multiple days. They're
Speaker 15: seeing the things that they can't explain. This became a
Speaker 15: big deal within the Navy, got reported up the chain,
Speaker 15: and nobody really could explain it.
Speaker 7: That became one.
Speaker 15: Of the main cases that the aid TIP program went
Speaker 15: back and tried to unpack and tried.
Speaker 7: To explain is there any way we could understand how
Speaker 7: those things could be doing that?
Speaker 15: And maybe if we did, we could maybe get a
Speaker 15: little further down the road of explaining where they're coming
Speaker 15: from and who owns them.
Speaker 7: Is somebody in them?
Speaker 15: If that's a bad guy who had that technology, we're
Speaker 15: in big trouble.
Speaker 7: They're twaying with us.
Speaker 1: The first hand accounts from military personnel aboard the USS
Speaker 1: nenets were compelling, and if all their claims were true,
Speaker 1: then the implications were massive. But there was still one
Speaker 1: huge problem.
Speaker 15: Nobody cares, nobody's listening. There's this sort of human nature.
Speaker 15: If we can't really come up with good answers It's like,
Speaker 15: I don't want to go there. There's no easy answers.
Speaker 15: I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 1: They were captivating news stories, but that's it. The only
Speaker 1: question that really mattered was still unanswered. What the hell
Speaker 1: are these things?
Speaker 14: Not everybody is on fire about wanting to know more
Speaker 14: about UFOs? Are we alone in the universe? What does
Speaker 14: this mean? Why are they here? It's something that most
Speaker 14: people don't have the time and energy to think about.
Speaker 14: It's absolutely understandable to me. People are making living, raising
Speaker 14: their kids. They don't have the luxury of the time
Speaker 14: to contemplate these kinds of things. This is a paradigm
Speaker 14: shifting thing.
Speaker 7: That gets to the point of the stigma changing.
Speaker 15: Just for the last couple of years, there is more
Speaker 15: willingness to come forward. But that's not because the Pentagon
Speaker 15: decided that one day be more transparent. It's because members
Speaker 15: of Congress who control the budget are demanding it.
Speaker 7: They're saying, enough is enough.
Speaker 15: Tell us what you know, and if you don't know anything,
Speaker 15: go out there and start studying it.
Speaker 7: There's so much scar.
Speaker 15: Tissue, so much conspiracy theory, so much bs, so difficult
Speaker 15: that stigma. We're so conditioned to think of the flying
Speaker 15: saucer in terms of like the Hollywood image aliens that
Speaker 15: came from some faraway place and oh, maybe they were
Speaker 15: here before we were. And it's a very sort of
Speaker 15: almost linear way to look at it.
Speaker 14: A lot of people when they think of UFOs, they
Speaker 14: think of raw the whole notion of aliens as opposed
Speaker 14: to just there being a phenomenon that we can't explain
Speaker 14: that really comes from Roswell. Initially, people associate UFOs with
Speaker 14: Roswell Wildwell.
Speaker 16: New Mexico headline in July eighth, nineteen forty seven, the
Speaker 16: Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has
Speaker 16: been found and is now in the production of the Army.
Speaker 16: Late this afternoon, a bulletin from New Mexico's ejected that
Speaker 16: the widely publicized mestally of the flying pulters may soon
Speaker 16: be called.
Speaker 1: When it comes to UFO mythology in American history, there's
Speaker 1: arguably one case that stands out, riddled with speculation and
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories, now known infamously as the Roswell Incident.
Speaker 2: It goes like this.
Speaker 1: On July eighth, nineteen forty seven, something crashed in the
Speaker 1: desert of Roswell, New Mexico. It soon became a national
Speaker 1: news story. What exactly crush there has been the topic
Speaker 1: of intense debate now for over half a century.
Speaker 17: I'm here to discuss so called flying Saucers' interest in
Speaker 17: this problem has been due to our feeling of an
Speaker 17: obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability,
Speaker 17: anything in the air that may have the possibility of
Speaker 17: threat or menace to the United States.
Speaker 14: Rozel has had such a grip on the culture, permeated
Speaker 14: the culture in a way that has probably helped the
Speaker 14: taboo stay alive. I think it's so fascinating to people
Speaker 14: because it involved a crash and beings.
Speaker 6: July nineteen forty seven, Roswell's Army air Base the press
Speaker 6: release announcing that the remains of a flying saucer had
Speaker 6: been found.
Speaker 1: On the day of the crash, the Roswell Army Airfield
Speaker 1: issued a pre release stating they had recovered a quote
Speaker 1: flying disc The.
Speaker 6: US military quickly withdrew that statement, saying the crash spacecraft
Speaker 6: was in fact the remains.
Speaker 7: Of a weather bloom.
Speaker 1: The conflicting reports made by the government fuel public suspicion.
Speaker 1: But it's what happened in the years following that cemented
Speaker 1: the Roswell Incident in UFO lore, a local resident named
Speaker 1: Glenn Dennis came forward with a bizarre and much more
Speaker 1: unnerving narrative.
Speaker 7: In July of.
Speaker 6: Nineteen forty seven, he was a mortician and received a
Speaker 6: puzzling phone call from the Air Force. They wanted child
Speaker 6: science confidence delivered to the air base.
Speaker 18: How long would it take you to get more? And
Speaker 18: I said, how many do you need? He said, that's
Speaker 18: not important. How long would it take you to get more?
Speaker 1: Glenn Dennis claimed that the crashed object was some form
Speaker 1: of advanced aircraft and that three bodies were recovered from
Speaker 1: the scene, bodies unlike anything he'd seen before.
Speaker 18: They definitely weren't demans. Doctors were explaining this that they
Speaker 18: couldn't be from our planet. They had to be an alien.
Speaker 18: It had to be something, yes, but not in our planet.
Speaker 6: The eyewitness accounts of alien bodies and a cover up
Speaker 6: by the US government has given birth to the most
Speaker 6: powerful UFO story in American history, known simply as the
Speaker 6: Roswell Incident.
Speaker 14: Most of the cases we have on record are things
Speaker 14: in the sky, right, It's much easier to stigmatize the
Speaker 14: idea of a crash saucer in bodies than it is
Speaker 14: to stigmatize something that a pilot sees in the sky
Speaker 14: and picks up on radar. It's added to sort of
Speaker 14: conspiracy element, this sort of sci fi element to it,
Speaker 14: where UFOs are sort of synonymous with the idea of
Speaker 14: bodies and aliens. The impact that that's had sort of
Speaker 14: underlying everything, has not been helpful. There were so many witnesses,
Speaker 14: actual alien bodies, and it was taken away and it
Speaker 14: was covered up. They had various explanations for it.
Speaker 1: As the years went on, more and more witnesses came forward.
Speaker 1: I got my hands on some of the declassified sworn affidavits,
Speaker 1: one from a man named George Roberts, the manager of
Speaker 1: a local Roswell radio station at the time, states the
Speaker 1: following I made an attempt to go out to the
Speaker 1: crash site and see it for myself, but I was
Speaker 1: turned back by a military person who said it was
Speaker 1: a restricted area. The next morning, I got a call
Speaker 1: from someone in Washington, d C. The person said, we
Speaker 1: understand that you have some information, and we want to assure.
Speaker 2: You that if you release it, it's.
Speaker 1: Very possible your station's license will be in jeopardy, so
Speaker 1: we suggest you don't do it a little weird. Another
Speaker 1: affidavit from a woman named Sappho Henderson, refers to comments
Speaker 1: made by her husband, a high ranking Air Force pilot
Speaker 1: station in Roswell at the time. Her statement reads, in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, my husband picked up a newspaper at a
Speaker 1: grocery store. The article described a crash of a UFO
Speaker 1: side of Roswell, with the bodies of aliens discovered beside
Speaker 1: the craft. He pointed to the article and said, I
Speaker 1: want you to read this because it's a true story.
Speaker 1: I'm the pilot who flew the wreckage of the UFO. Again,
Speaker 1: weird stuff, but who knows.
Speaker 14: No matter how you look at this Roswell event, it's weird.
Speaker 14: I'm not going to say that I know, but it's
Speaker 14: completely conceivable to me that it was something as the
Speaker 14: terrestrial would crash there.
Speaker 15: I don't know what happened at Roswell, and I think
Speaker 15: anybody who says they do one hundred percent no doesn't
Speaker 15: know either or they're dead. I think something happened here.
Speaker 15: There was clearly a government reaction.
Speaker 14: There's no way in hell this thing that fell was
Speaker 14: made by humans.
Speaker 19: So the myschis on out in Roswell, that creepy Maxim
Speaker 19: and Major Marcel, what could you tell us road?
Speaker 15: But you know, there's a professor a Vi Lobe at
Speaker 15: Harvard who's now run something called the Galileo Project Institution
Speaker 15: at Harvard. It has real money now to study UFOs.
Speaker 15: But Avi Lob at Harvard says that we almost have
Speaker 15: to throw out everything else that came before. So difficult,
Speaker 15: especially all these years later, to separate what's fact what's fiction.
Speaker 15: Let's just start doing some real due diligence using all
Speaker 15: the technologies and capabilities we have in the government, out
Speaker 15: of the government wherever, and maybe we can at least
Speaker 15: get a little bit further down the road.
Speaker 7: When you talk about Roswell.
Speaker 15: And you talk about all of these cases in history,
Speaker 15: I think what it doesn't account for is the magnitude
Speaker 15: of the lack of institutional knowledge within the government. There's
Speaker 15: enough mystery around it, enough things that don't add up
Speaker 15: to tell me that whatever the answer is number one,
Speaker 15: it's probably not one answer. There could be multiple answers,
Speaker 15: multiple truths. It's probably something that we're not even thinking about.
Speaker 15: Maybe we're kind of scratching at it a little bit.
Speaker 15: I've come to believe that whatever the government does still
Speaker 15: have in terms of juicy little secrets about UFOs, they're
Speaker 15: not keeping it secret out of knowledge. We're keeping it
Speaker 15: secret out of ignorance. They don't want to come forward
Speaker 15: and say, there's all these things we've seen and we
Speaker 15: have no friggin clue what they are. There are things
Speaker 15: out there, we've seen them, we've studied them, and we
Speaker 15: don't know they're.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid growing up, I can vividly
Speaker 1: remember seeing tabloid magazines about UFO encounters and alien abductions
Speaker 1: at the grocery store checkout line. They looked eerie, covered
Speaker 1: in weird, grainy photos of flying saucers and alien autopsies.
Speaker 1: My mom never let me get them rightfully, so they
Speaker 1: were too scary for an eight year old, and she
Speaker 1: probably knew they were all full of shit. This concept
Speaker 1: of alien abduction has been around for decades. Many people
Speaker 1: over the years have come forward with haunting tales of
Speaker 1: being taken aboard of spaceship against their will in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night. Just scan the Internet. There's plenty
Speaker 1: of them, most of which, in my opinion, have no merit.
Speaker 1: But since twenty seventeen, a wealth of government documents regarding
Speaker 1: UFOs have continued to be declassified. Some of them include
Speaker 1: things you'd only expect to find in science fiction.
Speaker 11: Thousands of previously classified documents regarding UFOs have now been
Speaker 11: released to the public.
Speaker 10: The shocking details from this fifteen hundred page report.
Speaker 11: Some of the stories include alien abductions, electrical paralysis, and
Speaker 11: even sexual encounters.
Speaker 9: From abductions that perceived time loss, the report says humans
Speaker 9: have been injured from exposure.
Speaker 1: I'm a person who has spent most of his podcasting
Speaker 1: career investigating unsolved murders and disappearances, dealing with facts, physical evidence.
Speaker 2: There's no room for fringe science.
Speaker 1: But while working on this show, I found one case
Speaker 1: in particular that's so strange Trying to rationally explain it
Speaker 1: feels next to impossible. In nineteen seventy five, seven men
Speaker 1: encountered something unexplainable in the mountains of Snowflake, Arizona. I've
Speaker 1: managed to get my hands on a ton of archival tape.
Speaker 13: There were seven men out there about three days ago.
Speaker 13: They were all coming back here after dark. Saw this bright,
Speaker 13: bright light to look to all seven of them like
Speaker 13: a saucer or some identified object. Before they actually stopped
Speaker 13: their truck, Travis jumped out of the car and ran
Speaker 13: up underneath of this thing. If you can imagine. They
Speaker 13: all witnessed a blue bluish light that projected from the
Speaker 13: bottom of this craft, whatever it was, and at that
Speaker 13: time it hit him. He cruppled and fell. They were terrified,
Speaker 13: and so they started their vehicle out. That drove the
Speaker 13: other way on that rim road for several miles until
Speaker 13: they regained their wits.
Speaker 5: Now, what was that man's name again? Who's missing?
Speaker 13: The man's name missing is Travis rot.
Speaker 10: The wa lp N.
Speaker 12: And a tend search for Travis Walton proceeded for three days,
Speaker 12: dogs and helicopters. They were unable to find him or
Speaker 12: any signs of where he was. After they told their
Speaker 12: astounding story to the police, they came under suspicion of murder.
Speaker 16: Travis was missing for five days as people searched the.
Speaker 2: Woods for him.
Speaker 13: There is no doubt Travis Walton believes he is telling
Speaker 13: the truth about what he experienced.
Speaker 1: On November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven men who are
Speaker 1: part of a logging crew deep in the mountains of
Speaker 1: Arizona claimed to have encountered a flying saucer. One man
Speaker 1: by the name of Travis Walton ran towards it to
Speaker 1: get a closer look and was struck by some sort
Speaker 1: of beam emitted from the craft, and then he was gone.
Speaker 1: He was literally a missing person for five days. For
Speaker 1: decades now, these men have stuck to their stories. The
Speaker 1: man who claims he was abducted, Travis Walton, is now
Speaker 1: in his late sixties, apparently still living in the small
Speaker 1: town of Snowflake, Arizona. After some searching, I finally found
Speaker 1: him on Facebook, told him about the podcast, and he
Speaker 1: eventually agreed to meet with me in person to tell
Speaker 1: his story. So we rented an airbnb in the mountains
Speaker 1: of Snowflake and hit the road. We landed in Phoenix
Speaker 1: and drove three hours into the mountains, set up our
Speaker 1: microphones and some film cameras to record the interview, and
Speaker 1: waited for him to arrive. But about an hour and
Speaker 1: a half after our scheduled interview time, I was getting
Speaker 1: a little worried and he hadn't responded to my last
Speaker 1: three texts, so I tried to call.
Speaker 5: Him give me a little test check.
Speaker 3: One two three, yeah, nine two eight two.
Speaker 1: Out of the blue, an old truck pulled into the driveway.
Speaker 1: I peeked through the blinds and it was him. I
Speaker 1: was about to open the door and greet him, but
Speaker 1: I paused and stopped myself. He was sitting in the
Speaker 1: driveway with his car off, just staring out the window.
Speaker 1: He seemed anxious or like he was contemplating something. Ten
Speaker 1: full minutes passed and he was still sitting there same position.
Speaker 1: Is he having second thoughts? Is he prepping his story?
Speaker 1: If this really happened to him, then it must have
Speaker 1: been traumatic.
Speaker 2: That was still very skeptical of all this.
Speaker 1: I sat on the couch, stewing in my own thoughts,
Speaker 1: and then, hey.
Speaker 5: How long has it been here? Forty five years? Twenty
Speaker 5: five years and three months. Some things don't change, you know.
Speaker 5: Some things about it haven't gotten any easier at all.
Speaker 5: I wish that this had never happened. It's not been
Speaker 5: a good thing for my life, for my family. In
Speaker 5: some ways, they don't even see the real me, you know.
Speaker 5: The area we were working on was a logging contract.
Speaker 5: Our job was to come in after the loggers and
Speaker 5: clean up the damage. Trees, thin out the overgrowth. It
Speaker 5: was really kind of a forest restoration project we were doing.
Speaker 5: We did some thinning, but then we were doing fuel
Speaker 5: break that day, pretty long day. When it was getting
Speaker 5: to our time to head home, worked thirty miles from home,
Speaker 5: so it's a bit of a drive. We loaded up
Speaker 5: all our equipment into the back of the truck.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 5: It's a double caped truck. There was room for all
Speaker 5: seven of the crew in one vehicle, four in the back,
Speaker 5: three in the front. We were headed home. Everybody's tired,
Speaker 5: so there was various conversations going on in the truck,
Speaker 5: two here or two there like that. As we were
Speaker 5: jouncing along this little logging trail, I could see a
Speaker 5: glow through the trees up the head. Closer we got,
Speaker 5: the more I was thinking that maybe this glow I
Speaker 5: was thinking was maybe some hunters camped there. I thought
Speaker 5: maybe the hunters were camped up there on the ridge.
Speaker 5: The whole clearing there had this release means glowed to it,
Speaker 5: sort of a feel. I don't know, maybe there was
Speaker 5: some kind of electrical charge in the air. So I'm
Speaker 5: it just had a really weird vibe to it. It
Speaker 5: made things you see at work all day looked really
Speaker 5: strange in this strange glow.
Speaker 1: Heard of it.
Speaker 5: We got to a point where we were past the
Speaker 5: thickest part of the growth and we could see the
Speaker 5: source of this light. Boom there it was. It was unmistakable.
Speaker 17: For the space.
Speaker 7: You white, that's your name of a habitat.
Speaker 16: And when.
Speaker 7: Didn't riched it?
Speaker 4: You know smoking gine need a wee player, didn't take
Speaker 4: a lean with a lean it you've been on the
Speaker 4: g there's a bean back.
Speaker 5: I've been going gene because of cool reck. Now she
Speaker 5: was over see the pending up.
Speaker 4: I'm talking your depend in a Ben Stupert show, Steve
Speaker 4: bud top Ton avert riding men. You well, you can
Speaker 4: kind of being down to saying the park peal we
Speaker 4: spend at dot com and nine help those boom Nata guys,
Speaker 4: we a Nati devil.
Speaker 1: High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for
Speaker 1: free every Thursday, But if you'd like to binge the
Speaker 1: whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now.
Speaker 1: Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange,
Speaker 1: and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Speaker 1: Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email
Speaker 1: us at tips at high strange dot com. High Strange
Speaker 1: is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence thirteen, created,
Speaker 1: hosted and edited by myself Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are
Speaker 1: myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner
Speaker 1: and myself. Original score by Makeup and Anity Set, sound design,
Speaker 1: mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney,
Speaker 1: Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman, and Sidney Evans.
Speaker 2: Our cover art is by Polygon.
Speaker 1: This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman
Speaker 1: featuring Gunna, written by Wesley tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler,
Speaker 1: Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster performed by metro
Speaker 1: Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from
Speaker 1: Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman in three hundred Entertainment
Speaker 1: for Gunna. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole
Speaker 1: team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media
Speaker 1: and Marketing, as well as Chris Corcoran and the team
Speaker 1: at Cadence thirteen. This episode features the song Roswell, performed
Speaker 1: by Raina del Sid and Tony Lndren. Check out the
Speaker 1: show's website at Highstrange dot com, and if you're enjoying
Speaker 1: the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing
Speaker 1: the podcast and share it with your friends.
Speaker 7: Thanks for listening.
Speaker 18: M