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Speaker 1: Now Here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Nori with you.

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Speaker 2: Mark Hartzman is one of America's leading connoisseurs of the

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Speaker 2: strange and bizarre, and has written books about sideshow performers,

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Speaker 2: Oliver Cromwell's Head, Weird Things on eBay, and Unorthodox Messages

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Speaker 2: from the Man Upstairs. Artsman's work has also appeared in

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Speaker 2: Mental Floss, Bizarre and other publications, and he has been

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Speaker 2: a featured speaker at various events including Explorer Mars, Humans

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Speaker 2: to Mars Summit in Washington, d C. The Cody Island

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Speaker 2: Congress of Curious People, New York's Comic Con, the Exeter

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Speaker 2: UFO Festival, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Some of his

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Speaker 2: books include The Big Book of Mars, The Bomb Ahead

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Speaker 2: of Oliver Cromwell, a memoir Chasing Ghosts, and We Are

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Speaker 2: Not Alone. Mark, Welcome back to the program. Have you

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Speaker 2: been good?

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Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on, George.

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Speaker 2: How how did you get involved in the strange the bizarre.

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Speaker 3: I've always loved the strange and bizarre since I was

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Speaker 3: a kid. I really got into it. You mentioned sideshow

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Speaker 3: in my book American Side Show, and that's kind of

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Speaker 3: where my love really began for I think all things strange,

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Speaker 3: most notably with the world's tallest man ever, Robert Widlow,

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Speaker 3: who I was fascinated with when I was a kid.

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Speaker 3: He was eight foot eleven and a half inches tall,

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Speaker 3: which was just kind of mind blowing that the human

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Speaker 3: could be that tall. It's just the most giants of

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Speaker 3: giants that we've ever known. So I was fascinated by him,

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Speaker 3: and I saw the movie The Elephant Man, probably at

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Speaker 3: too young of an age, and that really stuck with me.

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Speaker 3: It's a pretty amazing movie, The Life of Joseph Merrick,

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Speaker 3: so that that also kind of, I think, really pulled

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Speaker 3: me into the things, all things strange and bizarre.

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Speaker 2: Back in nineteen seventy four, I was a television producer

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Speaker 2: in Detroit. They used to call me Captain Bizarre because

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Speaker 2: I would pick many of the same stories you like

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Speaker 2: and put them in my newscast. I mean, because remember

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Speaker 2: those things.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, How can you not.

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Speaker 2: Exactly tell us a little bit about the head of

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Speaker 2: Oliver Cromwell.

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Speaker 3: Well this, as you mentioned, I wrote a book called

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Speaker 3: The Embalm Head of Oliver Cromwell of Memoir. So Cromwell

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Speaker 3: was the Lord Protector of England, Ireland and Scotland in

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Speaker 3: the mid sixteen hundreds. So he's the guy who led

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Speaker 3: the charge to have Charles the First beheaded. So that

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Speaker 3: put an end to the monarchy in sixteen forty nine,

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Speaker 3: and Cromwell took over, and then he died in sixteen

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Speaker 3: fifty eight and he was embalmed and then buried in

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Speaker 3: Westminster Abbey, and then his son took over, but then

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Speaker 3: he abdicated the Lord Protector Lord Protectorate, and Charles the

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Speaker 3: Second resumed the monarchy. That's why we have a monarchy

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Speaker 3: against today, and that's why we have Charles the Third now.

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Speaker 3: But he was pretty angry about his dad being beheaded,

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Speaker 3: so he exumed the body of Oliver Cromwell and he

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Speaker 3: hanged it posthumously, and then he beheaded that embald head

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Speaker 3: and he put it the top Withyminster Hall on a

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Speaker 3: spike to deter anyone else from trying to commit regicide.

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Speaker 3: And it stayed there for twenty five years, and then

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Speaker 3: eventually a storm came and broke that steak in half,

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Speaker 3: and it fell to the ground and someone picked it

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Speaker 3: up and took it home, and the head then traveled around,

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Speaker 3: passing through different hands for another two hundred and seventy

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Speaker 3: five years until it was finally reburied in nineteen sixty.

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Speaker 3: So the head traveled for three hundred years, which just

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Speaker 3: I find to be an amazing story that some balm

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Speaker 3: hedge just being passed around and shown the people, and

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Speaker 3: people are studying it and questioning whether or not it's authentic.

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Speaker 3: And so I wrote that whole story, covering the three

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Speaker 3: hundred years of it, of its post life travels, and

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Speaker 3: all told from the perspective of Cromwell's head.

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Speaker 2: Did it decay at all?

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Speaker 3: I mean it did, yeah, but it's still retained some features.

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Speaker 3: There's a by the time, you know, you had photography

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Speaker 3: coming around towards sort of the latter part of about three

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Speaker 3: hundred years. There are some amazing photos from the nineteen

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Speaker 3: thirties of a couple of scientists who are studying it.

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Speaker 3: And you still see the whiskers, you can still see

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Speaker 3: some of those swarts, you know, the warts and all

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Speaker 3: with Oliver Cromwell. So it retained a few features. But yeah,

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Speaker 3: I mean it was it didn't look great, but you know,

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Speaker 3: you could still see that was the head of a

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Speaker 3: former world leader today. So it's buried at Sydney Sussex

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Speaker 3: College and Cambridge and the Anti Chapel there, but it's

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Speaker 3: not known exactly where. So there's a plaque within the

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Speaker 3: Anti Chapel that says that the head is buried within

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Speaker 3: that space, but no one knows the exact positioning.

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Speaker 2: Now, tell me about your work about the flat Earth.

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Speaker 3: So this is just something recent I wrote about. So

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Speaker 3: I do a website called weird Historian dot com, and

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Speaker 3: that's a place for me to put all these kind

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Speaker 3: of fun, weird stories. And what I love to do

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Speaker 3: is just research some weird, weird topics and see what

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Speaker 3: I dig up. And a lot of times that's going

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Speaker 3: through different newspaper archives and see what pops up when

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Speaker 3: I put in some strange keywords. So I looked up

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Speaker 3: flat earth to see what people were saying about this,

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Speaker 3: you know, from years in the past. So I found

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Speaker 3: this story from nineteen twenty one of a religious leader

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Speaker 3: who was running a school in Illinois, and his name

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Speaker 3: was Wilburt Glenn Beliva, and he was preaching at least

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Speaker 3: for ten years in this school system that the earth

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Speaker 3: was flat. And this was the thousands of grade schoolers

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Speaker 3: and high schoolers, and he was just convinced that this

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Speaker 3: was the way, and he thought it was completely flat.

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Speaker 3: I mean, this is, you know, like like all the

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Speaker 3: flat Earthers, I think pretty much ascribed to the same beliefs.

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Speaker 3: It was, you know, flat, the north poles in the center,

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Speaker 3: there's no South pole, and then there's just a wall

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Speaker 3: of ice that kind of prevents sailors from falling off

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Speaker 3: at the rim of the Earth, that they go too far,

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Speaker 3: kind of like the Antarctic going all around the Earth.

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Speaker 3: And to me, it sounds like the Game of Thrones

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Speaker 3: wall of ice, you know, the night Watch. But this

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Speaker 3: was what the students were taught, and they were told

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Speaker 3: that the flat Earth remained stationary in space, was just

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Speaker 3: sitting there, and the Sun is revolving around us in

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Speaker 3: sort of a spiral fashion, and that the Sun is

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Speaker 3: opposed to being about ninety three million miles away as

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Speaker 3: we know now, he said, the Sun was more like

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Speaker 3: just a few miles away, not that far at all,

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Speaker 3: And in terms of its size, it was much smaller,

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Speaker 3: considerably smaller than we know it to be. So again,

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Speaker 3: just taking perspective from a different perspective. On perspective, I

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Speaker 3: guess you could say.

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Speaker 2: Where do you find these stories? Mark?

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Speaker 3: So I love going through newspaper archives, you know, and

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Speaker 3: you just type in typing keywords and you never know

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Speaker 3: what pops up. I mean, that's actually what what led

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Speaker 3: me to write my Mars book, The Big Book of Mars,

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Speaker 3: was stumbling across the story about the Martian Woman. Again,

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Speaker 3: you don't know what you're going to find when you

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Speaker 3: pop these things in, and then you kind of find

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Speaker 3: yourself going down these rabbit holes like what is this about,

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Speaker 3: and digging into it deeper and deeper.

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Speaker 2: Ironically, one of your books, it's called We Are Not Alone,

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Speaker 2: which is a similar title to the late New York

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Speaker 2: Times science writer Walter Sullivan, who wrote a book back

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Speaker 2: in the sixties, same kind of title.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the same title. Actually I picked up after

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Speaker 3: the book came out. I picked up a paperback of

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Speaker 3: that book. But yeah, I mean, I love the UFO phenomena.

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Speaker 3: It's another one I've been fascinated by since I was

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Speaker 3: a kid, and I love digging into that whole story.

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Speaker 3: It was just just ruled UFO the A couple days ago,

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Speaker 3: Dueen twenty fourth when Kenneth Arnold saw the first nine

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Speaker 3: discs over Mount Rainier in Washington and they became termed

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Speaker 3: flying saucers. That's when that term was coined. So the

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Speaker 3: book really covers off on the history of UFOs and

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Speaker 3: were human experience, mostly beginning with the forties. It does

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Speaker 3: dip back into some thoughts about ancient history, but mostly

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Speaker 3: starting with like that era of the forties with the

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Speaker 3: Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers, the food fighters of the earlier

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Speaker 3: forties in World War Two, and then gets into just

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Speaker 3: different eras you know, the nineteen fifties you had the

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Speaker 3: contact Ese, this group of people that believed that they

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Speaker 3: were in contact with different people from space, mainly mostly Nusians,

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Speaker 3: but people from other plants in the Solar system as well.

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Speaker 3: I'm kind of preaching a message of peace and concern

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Speaker 3: about the atomication we had entered into. And then you

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Speaker 3: get into more abductions in the sixties and seventies and

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Speaker 3: continuing into the eighties of course and even today, and

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Speaker 3: then so covers up all these different stories, but also

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Speaker 3: takes a scientific perspective on the idea of extraterrestrial life

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Speaker 3: and pursuits to discover extraterrestrial life, and then gets into

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Speaker 3: more of the recent findings, particularly in the last you know,

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Speaker 3: twenty twenty five years or so, all the news that's

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Speaker 3: been out lately with the tic tac UFOs and these

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Speaker 3: different science from Navy pilots. So it covers a really

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Speaker 3: broad range of the UFO experience.

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Speaker 2: In about a week and a half, we're coming up

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Speaker 2: on seventy seven years since the Roswell episode.

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Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, yeah, just other same story.

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Speaker 2: Now tell us about the strange case of the man

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Speaker 2: who tried to contact Martians with the radio.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: So this was the one I just kind of alluded

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Speaker 3: to before, which is one of my favorite stories, and

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Speaker 3: it is a story that really got me into writing

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Speaker 3: all about Mars. So this was nineteen twenty six and

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Speaker 3: he was a London lawyer who claimed that he was

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Speaker 3: in telepathic communication with a Martian woman named Umaruu I.

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Speaker 1: Love the name.

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Speaker 3: And they were having these telepathic conversations and he's learning

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Speaker 3: about life on Mars. How they're much taller than we are.

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Speaker 3: They have a you know, one third gravity, so they're

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Speaker 3: growing taller, seven eight nine feet tall. Umaru had big ears,

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Speaker 3: Paul Hair. They had airships that they could fly in.

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Speaker 3: They were peaceful, they drank tea, they smoked pipe, they

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Speaker 3: had electrified fruit, you know, all these wonderful things that

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Speaker 3: were going on on Mars. He's subscribing to people, and

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Speaker 3: so in nineteen twenty six, Mars was in opposition to Earth,

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Speaker 3: which means it was its closest point in its orbit

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Speaker 3: about thirty five million miles. So he decided to try

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Speaker 3: to send a telegram to the Martians. He worked us

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Speaker 3: out with Umar Raru that their Martian scientists would be

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Speaker 3: ready to receive the message from Earth. And so he

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Speaker 3: worked with the Rugby Radio Tower in London, which was

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Speaker 3: the world's tallest, most powerful radio tower in the world

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Speaker 3: at that time, and they were connected with the Post Office,

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Speaker 3: so the Post Office charged him their long distance rates,

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Speaker 3: which I think was kind of funny, and I think

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Speaker 3: they were able to promote that idea to get pressed

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Speaker 3: about what they were doing. And he sent this message

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Speaker 3: to Mars and fully expected a response, and this was

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Speaker 3: covered by newspapers around the world like this was ended

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Speaker 3: up being a pretty big story, and of course he

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Speaker 3: didn't get any message back, and he tried it again

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Speaker 3: two years later because Mars was not positioned about every

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Speaker 3: two years or so. So he tried it again and

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Speaker 3: of course again received nothing in response. And he said

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Speaker 3: that umar Aru said that the Martian scientists were laughing

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Speaker 3: at us because we were unable to received their messages,

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Speaker 3: because we were not advanced enough to get the Martian

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Speaker 3: messages back. So it was our fault that we weren't

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Speaker 3: getting from the Martians.

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Speaker 2: Now, what's this bizarre story about Kennedy versus Nixon back

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Speaker 2: in sixty and a UFO spaceman.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So I mentioned in the book We Are

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Speaker 3: Not Alone that I covered a bunch of the contact ees.

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Speaker 3: So one of them that I found especially interesting was

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Speaker 3: a man named Gabriel Green and he ran for president

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Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty and of course we all know that

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Speaker 3: was the year Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon. But he was

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Speaker 3: on the he was running for a short time and

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Speaker 3: he was told basically by spacemen that he should run.

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Speaker 3: He had met he had seen lots of space ships.

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Speaker 3: He was actually based in the LA area, and he

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Speaker 3: was a saucer club and had met some of them

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Speaker 3: at one of the conventions, and of course he said

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Speaker 3: they looked just like earthlings. And they urged him to

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Speaker 3: run on the Space ticket. And he had had all these,

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Speaker 3: you know, wonderful promises. I mean the kinds of things

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Speaker 3: that you'd want any candidate to promise, right, So he

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Speaker 3: he promised unlimited education for everybody, better housing and highways,

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Speaker 3: better jobs, better wages. You know. He said that every

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Speaker 3: man would be a rich man tomorrow. And he had

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Speaker 3: this idea of a world up tomorrow today in utopia now.

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Speaker 3: And he had this I have it on my website.

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Speaker 3: It's also in the book We Are Not Alone. This

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Speaker 3: amazing ad that random newspaper American needs a Space age president,

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Speaker 3: and it goes through these wonderful promises he has that

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Speaker 3: the Space people will help him bring to life. As

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Speaker 3: of course, you know that that didn't really go anywhere.

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Speaker 3: He eventually fell off of a ticket and he backed out.

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Speaker 3: He didn't have enough support, but he did end up

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Speaker 3: he said the Space people urged him to back Kennedy,

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Speaker 3: which I think is you know, was nice because of

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Speaker 3: course Kennedy did get the space program going and obviously

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Speaker 3: got to the Moon. So you know, in the end,

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Speaker 3: you know, we got we got somewhere with space with

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Speaker 3: Gabriel Green support of Kennedy.

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Speaker 2: At least I'll always remember Kennedy's moon speech.

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Speaker 3: Oh, it's a wonderful speech.

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Speaker 2: Wonderful person.

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Speaker 3: We choose the moon.

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Speaker 2: Now what about the Great Airship Flap of the eighteen hundreds.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so this was another really interesting story. I originally

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Speaker 3: I wrote this for We Are Not Alone, and we

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Speaker 3: ended up cutting this just because we.

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Speaker 1: Had to edit.

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Speaker 3: I had way too much material. But I found this

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Speaker 3: to be really a fascinating lip the in the UFO phenomena.

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Speaker 3: So this was the Great Airship Flap of eighteen ninety

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Speaker 3: six and eighteen ninety seven, and it started in the

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Speaker 3: fall of eighteen ninety six with these different aircraft airship

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Speaker 3: sightings off the coast of California, and people were just

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Speaker 3: seeing these these weird airships going across the skies and

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Speaker 3: oftentimes you know, seeing people on them. They had different propellers.

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Speaker 3: And again this was this was about three years before

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Speaker 3: the first Zuppelin appeared, you know, and several years before

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Speaker 3: obviously the Wright brothers had their first flight. That wasn't

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Speaker 3: until nineteen oh three. So really the only thing flying

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Speaker 3: was with hot air balloons at that time, and they

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Speaker 3: wore people kind of working on some rudimentary aircraft at

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Speaker 3: that time, but nothing that was like it was just

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Speaker 3: gonna be traveling the sky, you know, calmly, seemingly.

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Speaker 2: We didn't have the Hindenburg then, did we No?

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Speaker 3: I mean, so it's just a what was going on,

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Speaker 3: you know, And so this was being reported in newspapers

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Speaker 3: across California. I have a great illustration of one of

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Speaker 3: them from one of the headlines from eighteen ninety six

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Speaker 3: on my Weird Historian site. You'll see the spacecraft with

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Speaker 3: its weird propellers over over California. And so people were

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Speaker 3: reporting on this and having different theories about it, and

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Speaker 3: then it's just spread across the country into up to

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Speaker 3: around April or May of eighteen ninety seven. People were

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Speaker 3: just seeing these things all over the country, and no

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Speaker 3: one really had an explanation for where they came from

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Speaker 3: or who they were. And this was before we had

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Speaker 3: the language of like UFOs or flying saucers any of

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Speaker 3: that stuff. So people were just describing as these weird airships.

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Speaker 3: And there was one really particularly interesting case in Texas

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Speaker 3: and a werea Texas where one of them crashed.

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Speaker 2: Classic case too.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and this was one where they said it was

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Speaker 3: piloted by a Martian. So this was the other cases

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Speaker 3: they han't talked about aliens or anything like that, but

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Speaker 3: this one did. And it's interesting because again this is

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Speaker 3: about April of eighteen ninety seven, so at that time

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Speaker 3: there was a lot of talk about intelligent life on Mars.

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Speaker 3: I know, we just talked about that case in nineteen

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Speaker 3: twenty six, but this has been going on since the

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Speaker 3: about eighteen seventy seven when Giovanni Schiaparelli, and Italian astronomer,

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Speaker 3: thought that he saw line, he saw lines on Mars,

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Speaker 3: and they were misinterpreted as canals. He called them canale,

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Speaker 3: which is channeled. They got misinterpreted canals, and you have

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Speaker 3: people saying that, oh my god, there's these giant Martians

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Speaker 3: building canals all across Mars. They must be brilliant engineers.

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Speaker 3: So the idea of martians was becoming more and more

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Speaker 3: prevalence and written about in the newspapers and discussed by,

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Speaker 3: you know, legitimate scientists. So this idea that maybe a

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Speaker 3: Martian had piloted one of these airships and crash didn't

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Speaker 3: didn't seem that crazy. This was stuff that was being

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Speaker 3: talked about quite a bit at that time. Of course,

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Speaker 3: a lot of this was ended up being told later

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Speaker 3: by a historian who lived through this, like in nineteen

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Speaker 3: seventy she came out said all this stuff was just

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Speaker 3: written up by the local paper to kind of drum

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Speaker 3: up tourism and some you know, economic benefits for the

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Speaker 3: city because it was just a small town in Texas.

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Speaker 3: But a lot of people believe that the Martian is

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Speaker 3: still buried there today. So it's a pretty fascinating case.

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Speaker 3: What I love about that is it's exactly fifty years

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Speaker 3: before Roswell that you have this case of the UFO

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Speaker 3: crashing and the town then having this economic boom around

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Speaker 3: that whole story. And that's like a small microcosts before

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Speaker 3: rosweld is and became in nineteen forty seven.

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Speaker 2: There are you're right, there are reports at this means

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Speaker 2: this dead et is buried in Aurora, Texas somewhere.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, just in the grave guard And I know that

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Speaker 3: people from moufon the which at the time that's happened

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Speaker 3: were the Midwest UFO network. They were investigating it and

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Speaker 3: tried to get down there and wanted to exhume the body.

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Speaker 3: And I think they were not allowed to exhume the

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Speaker 3: body to see what the story was.

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Speaker 1: Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at

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