Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff. You should know a production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Choke Brian over there,
Speaker 1: and there's Jerry over there. She s all dressed up
Speaker 1: in a silver jump suit as usual, a jump suit.
Speaker 1: I said, I pulled it out. Should we edit that
Speaker 1: out and retake it? No? I think we should leave it? Uh,
Speaker 1: Jerry behind the scenes stuff everyone. Jerry sometimes has to
Speaker 1: get what's called room tone, which means she has to
Speaker 1: roll tape digitally and we have to be completely silent
Speaker 1: for a few moments. We get the tone of the
Speaker 1: room for I don't know, purposes of magic. And every
Speaker 1: time she's done that, we always have the urge to
Speaker 1: giggle or fart or be six year old. So she
Speaker 1: looks at us sternly the whole time during that five
Speaker 1: or six seconds of room. Man, it's so funny. I
Speaker 1: don't know what that instat does. And that's just like
Speaker 1: we can't sit here for five seconds and not speak
Speaker 1: without cracking a joke. We've got a bit of the
Speaker 1: class clown in us, I think is what it is.
Speaker 1: I sure did still do. Oh yeah, Were you a
Speaker 1: class clown? Really? Yeah? But on the downland, Like I
Speaker 1: wouldn't fire out something for the whole class to hear
Speaker 1: unless I knew it was like comedy gold. But I
Speaker 1: would work my circle around me, you know. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: a regional act. I was fairly disruptive, okay, but it
Speaker 1: was always fun. So teachers liked me. But they were
Speaker 1: just like, just shut up though? Sometimes? Were your parents
Speaker 1: were educators so you knew where the line was? Right?
Speaker 1: Were you going over the line because you could get
Speaker 1: away with it? No? I mean they weren't teachers. I
Speaker 1: mean that's actually that's not true. My dad was the principle.
Speaker 1: But I didn't start real cutting up till high school.
Speaker 1: I got you. Why are we talking about this? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I'll tell you why, chuck, because it reminds
Speaker 1: me of Henny Youngman. It just so happened to be
Speaker 1: around the peak of his career on June four seven.
Speaker 1: Did you fact check that? Okay, because then we're going
Speaker 1: to get a letter. Henny Youngman's career peak was in
Speaker 1: you morons, you do get paid during a government shutdown? Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And are we going to correct that now or should
Speaker 1: we do it a listener mail, No, we might as
Speaker 1: well correct it now. Yeah, so I got it wrong
Speaker 1: big time, and we heard from apparently everybody. Nine thousand
Speaker 1: of our million listeners are government employees who worked through
Speaker 1: the last shutdown, because all of them email in and said, hey,
Speaker 1: by the way, whether you worked or not, if you
Speaker 1: were furloughed, you were. You got back paid this time.
Speaker 1: But you we were right. It does take an act
Speaker 1: of Congress. That doesn't happen automatically. What does this take
Speaker 1: an Act of Congress? Yes, it does. So we got
Speaker 1: that one wrong. I got that one wrong. Chuck went
Speaker 1: along with it for the went along for the usual. Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: that sounds good. Josh, whatever you say, I want to
Speaker 1: get your back you know, I appreciate that. So anyway, um,
Speaker 1: back on j seven, it was a very important day
Speaker 1: because you can use this day to basically pinpoint the
Speaker 1: moment that America's just ongoing fascination with UFOs and by extension,
Speaker 1: aliens began. It did not exist basically before that time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that is? Because I think a
Speaker 1: a skeptic and we're gonna talk a lot in this
Speaker 1: episode about skeptics and believers. For lack of a better word,
Speaker 1: Skeptics would say, like, while all of a sudden, that
Speaker 1: UFOs just start appearing, right, And I think there are
Speaker 1: some answers to that. Oh yeah, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe they just found it or maybe they just decided
Speaker 1: to start poking around our airspace. Well, that presumes that
Speaker 1: there is actual like UFOs and extra, yeah they do.
Speaker 1: You have another explanation for if there isn't a they, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe just um newspaper I mean, were there no like
Speaker 1: even newspaper reports pre I know all of it began
Speaker 1: on June ninety all right, Well then my answer is
Speaker 1: the aliens started their business then on that day, Okay,
Speaker 1: and I mean there would have to be a basically
Speaker 1: a day zero if that ever really did start somewhere? Yeah,
Speaker 1: why not seven? Who knows? They may have been zipping
Speaker 1: around with the dinosaurs maybe, but the dinosaurs didn't put
Speaker 1: that on the news. Nope, did they see that. Well,
Speaker 1: they didn't preserve any of their own news reels. At
Speaker 1: the very least that's true for me. The explanation is
Speaker 1: mass hysteria, dogs and cats living together, that kind of stuff. Alright,
Speaker 1: So on June there was a man named Kenneth Arnold.
Speaker 1: He was a pilot to private pilot, not a private
Speaker 1: in the army who was a pilot, private sector pilot.
Speaker 1: I think that really got across with the private pilot. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he had a good reputation. He wasn't some uh
Speaker 1: he was known around town as a respectable business guy.
Speaker 1: And he was flying near Washington Mount Rainier and he
Speaker 1: was looking for down plane. I guess he was a
Speaker 1: search and rescue guy. Hey, I think he was just
Speaker 1: helping out maybe a similar pre civil air patrol. It
Speaker 1: was or right around the time that it started, Okay,
Speaker 1: but even still, I think he was just being like
Speaker 1: a good samaritan. He had his own plane and was
Speaker 1: helping like and he saw and this is a quote,
Speaker 1: uh nine saucer like things flying like geese in a
Speaker 1: diagonal chain like line, and estimated the speed of these
Speaker 1: uh saucer geese to be twelve hundred miles per right,
Speaker 1: which really is pretty funny. Well, at the time he
Speaker 1: must have been going probably about fifty miles per hour
Speaker 1: in his old little prop plane. UM. So part that
Speaker 1: was really saying something you wouldn't hardly be able to
Speaker 1: see it, I would think, so he he lodges this
Speaker 1: report and um, within just a few hours, this is what.
Speaker 1: I don't know how this happened, but within a few hours,
Speaker 1: the Associated Prescott wind of this. Yeah. The AP is
Speaker 1: a wire service, which means like they do the reporting
Speaker 1: and they send it out to newspapers for syndication, and
Speaker 1: newspapers just print what the AP wrote all over the country.
Speaker 1: So the AP picking it up made it national news
Speaker 1: almost the same day, basically that this man had seen something.
Speaker 1: And in this AP report, the writer coined the term
Speaker 1: flying saucers. Yeah, because Kenneth Arnold had called them saucer
Speaker 1: like things that we're flying, and he went, let me
Speaker 1: just rearrange this in a way that's a little more
Speaker 1: gravy flying what flying? What he saw a saucer geese
Speaker 1: like goscer geese. Flying saucers worked, And it was a
Speaker 1: big deal, and all of a sudden, everyone starts seeing, Um,
Speaker 1: we didn't call him UFOs yet. Just keep your pants on,
Speaker 1: we'll get there flying saucers, flying saucers or flying discs. Right.
Speaker 1: There was even in the San Francisco Chronicle headline that
Speaker 1: said flying saucer seen in most states. Now, so that
Speaker 1: headline was printed on July seven. Kenneth Arnold saw his
Speaker 1: sighting on June, a couple of weeks at tops and
Speaker 1: within that time, like so many reports happen that basically
Speaker 1: every state had I had a report of a flying saucer.
Speaker 1: Now pretty amazing. It was like a floodgate opened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which if you're in the United States Air Force at
Speaker 1: the time, is problematic because they were in charge of
Speaker 1: security for for anything not on the ground in the
Speaker 1: United States. Yeah, the air space. Yeah, I guess I
Speaker 1: could count the sea and that's the Navy. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I was trying to say it in a more clever way,
Speaker 1: but I think they're there, Yeah, you're airspace, and like,
Speaker 1: what are we gonna do here? Uh? Is this a
Speaker 1: threat to America? Like do we need to start legitimately
Speaker 1: investigating this stuff? Right after Pearl Harbor, the Cold War
Speaker 1: is starting to heat up a little bit and people
Speaker 1: are freaked out and we need to see what's going
Speaker 1: on at least. Yeah, people were a little jittery, yeah
Speaker 1: over that in that decade in particular, So the Air
Speaker 1: Force does decide that it needs to do something, um,
Speaker 1: especially at the behest of a guy named Lieutenant General
Speaker 1: Nathan Twining, who was the commander of Air Material Command,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a memo titled Flying Discs, and he
Speaker 1: basically said, we need to figure out what is the
Speaker 1: deal with all this because these reports that are coming
Speaker 1: in are describing things that shouldn't be possible. So let's
Speaker 1: look into this. And he had enough clout that a project,
Speaker 1: an Air Force project was created named Projects Sign. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is the first of what will be several projects
Speaker 1: which culminated in you know, I think the final one
Speaker 1: was just shut down like six or seven years ago,
Speaker 1: like officially well twelve. I don't know if it's technically
Speaker 1: related to SIGN, but it followed in the mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: just projects investigating UFOs by the US government. Yes, like
Speaker 1: officially designated investigations. Yeah, that the one you're referring to
Speaker 1: was supposedly shut down in two twelve, but some claim
Speaker 1: it was never really shut down, as it's usually the case.
Speaker 1: So this project Signed technically was originally called Projects Saucer.
Speaker 1: Not bad, It's okay. I like projects Signed cooler or more?
Speaker 1: It sounds cooler. Um, yeah, don't you think it sounds
Speaker 1: very mysterious? Well, yeah, I'll give you that. What is
Speaker 1: it related to it's not as good as the next one,
Speaker 1: but we'll look at that. Okay. So Projects Signed is
Speaker 1: associated with right Patterson Air Force Base. It's assigned to it.
Speaker 1: The project is run out of right Field at the time,
Speaker 1: outside of Dayton. And if you're a u fologist, you
Speaker 1: would say, well, of course it's right Patterson. That's where
Speaker 1: they reverse engineer all the alien technology. So of course
Speaker 1: that's where they would investigate it. And they actually do
Speaker 1: reverse engineer technology at right Patterson Air Force Base. Then
Speaker 1: they have since like World War One when a down
Speaker 1: German biplane was captured and they took it to Dayton
Speaker 1: and said, figure out how this works. That's a really
Speaker 1: interesting job. And project sure, I think reverse engineering stuff
Speaker 1: because it's basically copying. I mean I get why they
Speaker 1: call it reverse engineering because you're starting at the end
Speaker 1: and going backwards. But just to be handed like here
Speaker 1: is an enemy, um whatever, it could be a weaponto
Speaker 1: yeah whatever, and say, just figure out how it works
Speaker 1: so we can build one if we want to, or
Speaker 1: if it's not worth our time, then at least we
Speaker 1: know how it works exactly, or we can come up
Speaker 1: with measures to counteract it, or yeah, how can we
Speaker 1: destroy this or copy this? What kind of potatoes are
Speaker 1: they using in there? Those new potatoes, they'll put a
Speaker 1: hole right through you new potato caboose? Oh yeah, that man?
Speaker 1: Was that a real band? Or when you made up?
Speaker 1: I can't remember it was real. It's like a little
Speaker 1: hipie shake Ban's right. So, uh, the long and short
Speaker 1: of it is anytime right. Patterson has mentioned that's when
Speaker 1: the you know, who's the one guy that everyone the
Speaker 1: meme always posts Aliens man? The other guy from Ancient Aliens?
Speaker 1: Is that what it was from which I knew his name?
Speaker 1: Do you remember? That's one of the first things that
Speaker 1: Aaron Cooper did of us? Oh really was us? Is
Speaker 1: the Ancient Aliens guy? One of the first stuff you
Speaker 1: should know? Meme copies after Van Nostran's era ended. After
Speaker 1: Van Nostran's Reign of Terror, Cooper picked up the thread,
Speaker 1: so it might say bean Nostrans continues today his reign
Speaker 1: of terror. Yeah, just not photoshop based. So um yeah,
Speaker 1: if it's right, Patterson, then people are gonna think there's
Speaker 1: something going on there. And like you said, there was
Speaker 1: a lot going on there, including very secret projects that
Speaker 1: are still going on there. I supposedly that's where they
Speaker 1: took the Roswell UH flying saucer, which also happened in
Speaker 1: n A lot of people connect those dots, but it
Speaker 1: apparently Roswell and the crash and aliens didn't really become
Speaker 1: part of like cultural consciousness until the eighties. UM. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So and so Project Signs going on, and in a
Speaker 1: year after or the following year after Kenneth Arnold first
Speaker 1: had a sighting UM, they released a document called the
Speaker 1: Estimate of the Situation. And this is these are Air
Speaker 1: Force personnel working on Project Signs, okay, and they get
Speaker 1: together and they say, you know what, UM, we don't
Speaker 1: think that based on some of these these UM, these
Speaker 1: sightings and in particular what we consider very credible witnesses
Speaker 1: describing very incredible things, that that they have any kind
Speaker 1: of origin in US or even USSR technology, and there's
Speaker 1: a possibility that these are extraterrestrial in origin. And that
Speaker 1: was the basis of this estimate of the situation that
Speaker 1: they handed off to UH Air Force, the Air Force Brass,
Speaker 1: and the Air Force Brass said, are you out of
Speaker 1: your mind? So in the end, the report basically said
Speaker 1: we can neither confirm nor deny the very famous line
Speaker 1: that everyone uses these days, which basically means there's something
Speaker 1: going on. Yes, but remember we we found the place
Speaker 1: where that first was cool the Glomar Explorer, right, and
Speaker 1: that wasn't until the sixties. So I think this is
Speaker 1: somebody using an anachronism here. Yeah, I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: think it necessarily said that in the report, but that
Speaker 1: was the upshot. Basically they just said it with different
Speaker 1: words back then. So, um, here's the deal. Though, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people that worked on this thing
Speaker 1: that uh would have probably confirmed. It was kind of
Speaker 1: split between people like, maybe there's something going on here
Speaker 1: and people that just didn't think so and probably didn't
Speaker 1: want to deal with it. Yeah. I didn't have a
Speaker 1: sense of just how evenly split it was, but there
Speaker 1: were definitely people working on the projects who said they're
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial in origin and other people who said, no, there's
Speaker 1: we just don't understand it. The Air Force brass like
Speaker 1: I said, said, are you guys crazy? You actually made
Speaker 1: this document and got their hands on all the copies,
Speaker 1: destroyed them all And as a matter of fact, the
Speaker 1: Air Force has always denied that the estimate of the
Speaker 1: situation ever existed, and that any understanding that it did
Speaker 1: exist came from people who did work on Project sign
Speaker 1: who said, no, this, this did exist, and this is
Speaker 1: what it said, and this is the reaction it got. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard not to like because we're both
Speaker 1: fairly skeptical, but it's hard not to go down that
Speaker 1: conspiracy trail a little bit. Yeah, when you hear stuff
Speaker 1: like that report never existed and people that worked on
Speaker 1: it like, no, it totally existed, and here's what it said,
Speaker 1: here's what it was called. And you know, they just
Speaker 1: basically incenterate the thing. You had a copy, I saw
Speaker 1: you made the little flower doodles on it. It's hard
Speaker 1: enough to go down that road, it really is. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of part of the problem with all this
Speaker 1: is because there's this um you know, this huge, massive
Speaker 1: public um viewing of all of this stuff, reports, suggestions,
Speaker 1: it becomes a thing, and at the same time, as
Speaker 1: we'll see, the government is simultaneously investigating it and then
Speaker 1: denying it, and it created kind of a weird headlock
Speaker 1: on on the nation's psyche. Yeah, so there was one
Speaker 1: um sighting in Project Signs book and report that doesn't
Speaker 1: exist that most everyone was like pretty impressed by. And
Speaker 1: that was the uh chills or chillis Childs why did
Speaker 1: witted witted? I'm going with childs witted the child's witted
Speaker 1: UFO encounter. And that was an Alabama in July of
Speaker 1: And this is the beginning of what you will see
Speaker 1: as a recurring thing where it's not you know, the
Speaker 1: drunk farmer in the field or the college students students partying,
Speaker 1: you know in a cul de sac. It's like military
Speaker 1: pilots or airline pilots, like people that are trained to
Speaker 1: understand aviation and know what doesn't look right. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this one was to Eastern Airlines pilots. Uh. They were
Speaker 1: flying a d C three and they said they nearly
Speaker 1: collided with um. And here's the quote a strange torpedo
Speaker 1: shape plying object that looked like quote one of those
Speaker 1: fantastic flash Gordon rocket ships in the funny papers. It
Speaker 1: didn't really help the legitimacy, but the fact that these
Speaker 1: guys described it, that they were so bread at the time,
Speaker 1: that they were both trained commercial pilots, it really did
Speaker 1: impress a lot of people working on sign and it
Speaker 1: did kind of give them this confidence that there may
Speaker 1: be something going on that we don't understand here and
Speaker 1: we need to investigate this. Right But for the Air
Speaker 1: Forces part General hoyit Vandenburg said no physical evidence, no
Speaker 1: case exactly, and and he's the one who allegedly ordered
Speaker 1: all of the copies of the estimate destroyed, and he
Speaker 1: also basically ordered from on high, look, all of this
Speaker 1: can be explained something them how, some way, using our
Speaker 1: current understanding of science, go make that happen. It's what
Speaker 1: came to be known as the conventional explanation paradigm, which
Speaker 1: I put this together long enough ago now that I
Speaker 1: can't remember if that's an actual thing or if I
Speaker 1: coin that. Oh the EP. Yes, it sounds official to me.
Speaker 1: It does when you say it that way. But I
Speaker 1: also have a very dry style, so it's entirely possible
Speaker 1: I came up with that. But that is there are
Speaker 1: three things, basically three causes of why somebody might think
Speaker 1: they have seen a alien ship under the c EP
Speaker 1: under the EP mass hysteria and hallucination, which is what
Speaker 1: you think, dogs and cats, hoax, which is that's super
Speaker 1: easy to believe that someone Plenty of those have happened.
Speaker 1: You remember crop circles. Uh. And then misinterpretation of known objects,
Speaker 1: which is a very big bucket that you can toss
Speaker 1: things into if you're the military. Yeah, because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of weather phenomenon or celestial phenomenon and you can
Speaker 1: just make stuff up and say they were looking at
Speaker 1: this rubber bands? What it was rubber bands? How are
Speaker 1: you going to prove otherwise? You'll note, though, in all
Speaker 1: three of those explanations, there are none of them say
Speaker 1: extraterrestrials or even secret unknown technology, right, because that's not
Speaker 1: conventional or an explanation. While it is an explanation, but
Speaker 1: it's not conventional, but it doesn't fit the paradigm. It
Speaker 1: does not Uh. And then they actually worked with the
Speaker 1: Saturday Evening post Um which everybody was reading at the time,
Speaker 1: and they did a two part article which debunked flying saucers.
Speaker 1: And this was sort of the beginning of um kind
Speaker 1: of like a not kind of like very much a
Speaker 1: pr campaign to debunk flying saucers. Should you take a break?
Speaker 1: I think we should chuck. We've reached the break part.
Speaker 1: All right, We'll move on to Project Grudge right after this. Okay,
Speaker 1: So here's the thing though, the Air Force, even if
Speaker 1: they really genuinely were like, no, man, there's no such
Speaker 1: thing as aliens. Whatever this is, it's just it's just
Speaker 1: Americans being freaked out about the Cold War. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: just call it that. This is the Air Force brass talking.
Speaker 1: I'm doing my best impression of them. Um. They still
Speaker 1: needed to investigate him, because the Air Force is charged
Speaker 1: with protecting US airspace and there are reports coming in
Speaker 1: on a daily basis from all over the country of
Speaker 1: unidentified objects flying saucers flying through American airspace. So they
Speaker 1: still needed to investigate this. But the Air Force decided
Speaker 1: they could investigate it on their own terms, and so
Speaker 1: Projects sign was dissolved and replaced by what this is
Speaker 1: your favorite name for Project Grudge, which is named so
Speaker 1: exactly why, you think, because they didn't want to be
Speaker 1: messing with this stuff, they should have called it Project
Speaker 1: Uh are you freaking kidding me? Are you joking right now?
Speaker 1: I gotta do what do you hear yourself? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a sort of That was the attitude in
Speaker 1: the Air Force at the time. You didn't want to
Speaker 1: get assigned. There might have been like one person that
Speaker 1: was super into it. I think they were a handful,
Speaker 1: but generally you didn't go into the Air Force to
Speaker 1: do this, and you were probably irked if you were
Speaker 1: assigned this duty. Yeah. I got the impression that this
Speaker 1: was something like being stationed in Greenland or Siberia or
Speaker 1: Alaska or something like that. Probably not Siberia. That Greenland's nice. No,
Speaker 1: it's not. Alaska's lovely, okay, depending on all right, uninhabited Canada, Oh, okay,
Speaker 1: can it is great? Anyway, I got the impresson this
Speaker 1: is like a backwater assignment where if you ticked off
Speaker 1: your your commanding officer, that's they would put you on
Speaker 1: Project Oh you should have said South Georgia. Okay, yes,
Speaker 1: the worst place in the world. So uh yeah. You
Speaker 1: call this the Dark Ages of Air Force UFO investigation
Speaker 1: because Project Grudge was um the basic tenant there was.
Speaker 1: We're here to debunk these claims, not so much investigate,
Speaker 1: but just a debunk. Right, Not only do these have
Speaker 1: some sort of conventional explanation, even when they seem like
Speaker 1: we don't they don't, We're still going to give them
Speaker 1: a conventional explanation because that's it. Because these are not
Speaker 1: extraterrestrials and we're sick of this s word. Yes, that's
Speaker 1: what the Air Force said, that's right. Uh. And one
Speaker 1: of the people they hired as a civilian scientist consultant
Speaker 1: was a man named very important figure in this whole story,
Speaker 1: j Allen Heinek from the Ohio State University. You did that, huh?
Speaker 1: And he is a prominent astronomer. Does that make you
Speaker 1: mad a little bit? I'm not sure why either, but
Speaker 1: it does. Uh. He was a prominent astronomer and he
Speaker 1: was recruited specifically to be chief of debunker And that's
Speaker 1: how we saw his role for sure too, especially initially,
Speaker 1: so he was a UFO skeptic UM to him, he
Speaker 1: really kind of fell in line with that mentality that
Speaker 1: everything could be explained as a hoax or a misunderstanding
Speaker 1: or a misidentification. UM. But he was also a scientist
Speaker 1: in his you know core. Yeah, he was a very
Speaker 1: well respected astronomer, and he believed that this should still
Speaker 1: be investigated, especially cases where somebody who was like a
Speaker 1: trained pilot or an astronomer or a meteorologist or somebody
Speaker 1: had seen something um and and reported it and that
Speaker 1: it seemed incredible. Those incredible sightings by incredible people that
Speaker 1: was kind of the confounding thread that wound through these
Speaker 1: decades of investigation of UFOs. Yeah, and the other thing
Speaker 1: too that you gotta remember about Heineck was he was
Speaker 1: very much the face of this debunking and uh, it's
Speaker 1: a role that he would grow to loathe over the years,
Speaker 1: to say the least, because we'll get to some of
Speaker 1: the more ridiculous explanations. He was the one that had
Speaker 1: to pare it the stuff out. Yeah, you know, they'd
Speaker 1: shove him out there, would be like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden realized there were cameras
Speaker 1: in his face and he'd say, yo, everyone. That's what
Speaker 1: he was famous for, was that his intro linue. That's
Speaker 1: how it started every press conference. So one of his
Speaker 1: first efforts here and this was um and maybe his
Speaker 1: most famous this was the case of Captain Thomas Mantel.
Speaker 1: He was an Air Force pilot who died when his
Speaker 1: P fifty one Mustang went down while he was chasing
Speaker 1: a UFO. That sounds like an Air Force pilot and
Speaker 1: a pet Mustang. That's what you would do. Let me
Speaker 1: go after that thing. Sure, I want to, I want
Speaker 1: to see what it's like, that's what Maverick would do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess. So are you excited about that movie? I know? No, No,
Speaker 1: did you see the trailer? No, I'm gonna show it
Speaker 1: to you. It has Tom Cruise d aged in it.
Speaker 1: They should have just gone with that, So you are
Speaker 1: you excited about it? Listen? Man? I like top Gun.
Speaker 1: I was not some like. I didn't think I was
Speaker 1: some big nut for top Gun. But when I saw
Speaker 1: that trailer, it gave me a little bit of the
Speaker 1: fields for sure. Yeah, man, I was like, why am
Speaker 1: I so excited about this? Wow? Okay, well maybe I'll
Speaker 1: give it. I guess on the child of the eighties.
Speaker 1: But when I saw him on that that Ninja motorcycle
Speaker 1: or whatever, riding around with his helmet on that music,
Speaker 1: who is top Gun? Now? Well? I think the deal
Speaker 1: is now he comes back, and now there's a brash
Speaker 1: young kid. Right, Who's the bresh young kid? Is a
Speaker 1: Christian Navarro? I don't think so. I predicted it would be,
Speaker 1: and I don't think I'm right. Well, he would have
Speaker 1: been better than whoever they got, is what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: because he's a friend of the show and the other
Speaker 1: guy is probably not of course, although if it turns
Speaker 1: out he is, then it would be an even match.
Speaker 1: That's right. That's why we cast our a lot behind
Speaker 1: people who listen to they're the only respectable people, all right.
Speaker 1: At any rate, I will go see this. I will
Speaker 1: to my dying day not see the remake of Red Dawn,
Speaker 1: despite at least a friend of the show, if not
Speaker 1: a former friend of the show, UM producing that film.
Speaker 1: Oh luke, Yes, yeah, he says it stinks to I'm
Speaker 1: not sure you're allowed to say that. You might want
Speaker 1: to email him first, Okay, okay, so okay, Heineck the
Speaker 1: P fifty one goes down and Hi Hiinich says, you
Speaker 1: know what, he may have been pursuing and chasing Venus
Speaker 1: and they you know, that's a planet. Yeah so maybe
Speaker 1: uh and it was daytime and you can't see Venus
Speaker 1: in the daytime. He's like, yeah, I'm just gonna stick
Speaker 1: with Venus. I'm gonna stick with Venus. Goodbye. And there
Speaker 1: were That was just one explanation. There were other ones. Obviously.
Speaker 1: The weather bloom thing has always been a big one.
Speaker 1: UM conventional aircraft that you just you know, you saw
Speaker 1: it in the wrong light. Maybe, Yeah, So so you know,
Speaker 1: like you watched X files and everything. Sure, Okay, do
Speaker 1: you remember how like this kind of like agitated Molder
Speaker 1: would get and he'd start talking really fast. He would
Speaker 1: just be talking about all the ridiculous explanations that I've
Speaker 1: been given for UFOs. This is where they actually started, yeah,
Speaker 1: with j Allen Heineck giving these public explanations that over
Speaker 1: the years is we'll see really stretch credibility, reason, logic,
Speaker 1: common sense and became a just kind of a a
Speaker 1: pr problem for the Air Force. Yeah, because it might
Speaker 1: have been nothing or something explainable, but to just brush
Speaker 1: it under the rug as X or Y, like hey
Speaker 1: it's venus. It's like it that makes them do nothing
Speaker 1: but look bad, like they're not even taking it seriously,
Speaker 1: right right exactly. And I think in the Air Forces
Speaker 1: defense or from the position they were coming from, they
Speaker 1: didn't think the American public could handle and you know,
Speaker 1: oh sure just by saying like, oh, I don't know
Speaker 1: what it was. You know, it wasn't a UFO, everybody,
Speaker 1: it wasn't an alien, it wasn't the Russians, but we
Speaker 1: just we can't say what it was. They were not
Speaker 1: prepared to just go out there and do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again in their defense, I think America may have
Speaker 1: proven them right. They would have just been like, I
Speaker 1: knew it, it's aliens, and yeah, well they didn't want that.
Speaker 1: So they didn't want that kind of hysteria getting whipped up,
Speaker 1: which is why they explained everything, no matter how ridiculous
Speaker 1: it was. That's right. So, um, this happened, more and
Speaker 1: more and more, more sightings would come in. Air force
Speaker 1: would trot Heinek out there again with his hello, good
Speaker 1: bye and in between a bunch of bs. Basically, yeah,
Speaker 1: everything from balloons, planets, meteor's optical illusions, solar reflections, large
Speaker 1: hailstones is one that really got everybody. Um. But as
Speaker 1: as far as the air forces like going out there
Speaker 1: and just explaining everything in the actual project, people are
Speaker 1: saying like, there's some there's some out there that we
Speaker 1: just don't understand. There's something some core of this phenomenon. Yes,
Speaker 1: a lot of it is probably mass ysteria. Yes, a
Speaker 1: lot of his misidentification. But there are again credible witnesses
Speaker 1: who are giving these reports and we just can't quite
Speaker 1: explain these. Yeah, there was one in particular in September
Speaker 1: of ninety one that really kind of brought things to
Speaker 1: a head. This was in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and
Speaker 1: these were I mean, there were pilots, there were radar operators. Um,
Speaker 1: they observed fast moving, highly maneuverable disc shaped aircraft. And
Speaker 1: this is something you're gonna see again and again and again. Uh.
Speaker 1: They're they're always super fast and can do things that
Speaker 1: they've never seen aircraft do, like start and stop like
Speaker 1: on a dime, and turn and do these weird things
Speaker 1: that like are inexplicable for like really experienced pilots witnessing
Speaker 1: this stuff, or traveler even just an It's like this
Speaker 1: is there's not anything that at this time was supposed
Speaker 1: to be able to do that, right, And so Project Grudge,
Speaker 1: the personnel there had to investigate all the stuff and
Speaker 1: the chain of command basically was to report it to
Speaker 1: Major or Well. The man in charge was Major General
Speaker 1: Charles Cabell. He was ahead of Air Force Intelligence at
Speaker 1: the Pentagon. Yeah, and because this was these were military witnesses,
Speaker 1: it was a military incident, he wanted this directly to him,
Speaker 1: that's right. So there was one a Grudge investigator, Lieutenant
Speaker 1: Jerry Cummings, not Jerry sitting next to us. She's never
Speaker 1: been in the air for hush, as far as I
Speaker 1: know what she's been telling me otherwise for years. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: she's a big time impostor if she hasn't been in
Speaker 1: the Air Force. So he actually believed that they were
Speaker 1: quote intelligently controlled what they investigated. He thought, he's basically
Speaker 1: using code for aliens man, right, like the guy from
Speaker 1: Ancient Alien exactly. So here's the thing that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings,
Speaker 1: who who headed up this project for grudge, he was um,
Speaker 1: he was a little He was on the side of
Speaker 1: people who were like, no, this is being just swept
Speaker 1: under the rug. It's not being seriously investigated. And he
Speaker 1: actually griped about it to the head of Air Force Intelligence,
Speaker 1: Um Cable, that guy Cable, right, like Cabal Cable, Cabell, Cabell, Okay,
Speaker 1: and Cabell was like, what you guys aren't actually investigating
Speaker 1: this stuff. This is all just a pr campaign and
Speaker 1: uh he was told affirmative, sir, affirmative, and he went
Speaker 1: a little nuts. Oh that's what happened. Okay. It wasn't
Speaker 1: quite clear on what made it. I didn't write it
Speaker 1: very well. Okay, So he said, Okay, this is ridiculous
Speaker 1: that we're not actually investigating it. That's going to change.
Speaker 1: So he had enough cloud that he got Grudge dissolved. Oh,
Speaker 1: I thought he didn't like Grudge. He didn't like the
Speaker 1: way that Grudge was conducting this investigation, which is to say,
Speaker 1: not at all this makes more sense. And he instead said,
Speaker 1: we need to do something else. We need to revamp
Speaker 1: this whole project. We're gonna create We're gonna dissolve Grudge,
Speaker 1: create a new project. We're gonna call it Project blue
Speaker 1: Book because at the time, college exams were given in
Speaker 1: these standardized blue test books. And he said that we
Speaker 1: need to approach this with all the seriousness of a
Speaker 1: test in college. We're gonna call this Project blue Book.
Speaker 1: And um, we're going to get a new guy to
Speaker 1: head it up, a guy named Captain Edward J. Ruppelt,
Speaker 1: And he could not have found a better guy to
Speaker 1: to head Project blue Book. All right, let's take another break,
Speaker 1: and we should also announce this is a two parter.
Speaker 1: I don't think we said that at the onset. Well,
Speaker 1: that was gonna be the big cliffhanger, Oh, was it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was gonna be like the bicycle repair episode of
Speaker 1: different Strokes where no one collaps. Everybody just sits there
Speaker 1: in stunned silent. Well we can still do that, okay, alright, alright.
Speaker 1: So Project blue Book in the special two part episode.
Speaker 1: This is the second half of part one. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: you has confused me so bad. This was the new
Speaker 1: jam after Project Grudge. And you mentioned Edward Captain Edward J.
Speaker 1: Repel or is it repelled? I've been calling them ruppled.
Speaker 1: Oh really, yeah, your sounds a little more regal. So
Speaker 1: let's go with repelled. Okay. Oh man, do people get
Speaker 1: sick of this? I can't believe they don't, but they
Speaker 1: don't seem to. Our numbers are steady, if not still growing.
Speaker 1: I imagine that we lose point five percent of listeners
Speaker 1: of a pronunciation alone. Oh, probably more than that. We're
Speaker 1: lovable and almost any other way. So blue Book is happening,
Speaker 1: and under the command of Repelled. It is the Salad
Speaker 1: Days of official Military UFO investigation. I'm glad you use
Speaker 1: salad days. Have you ever seen the moning Python Salad Days?
Speaker 1: Sketch cheese? I don't know wherever they're playing like tennis
Speaker 1: in the late Victorian era, and like all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: it just turns into this bizarre blood bath. People like
Speaker 1: lose arms and sounds, head falls off. There's just blood everywhere.
Speaker 1: I just watch it again, Okay, okay, anytime I hear
Speaker 1: salad days, that's what I think. Money Python, They're so great.
Speaker 1: So the objective, the objective, cheez. The objectives of Blue
Speaker 1: Book were one, determine whether UFOs are a threat to
Speaker 1: US security, because that's the big deal. That's why the
Speaker 1: military's involved. It's not just like, you know, we just
Speaker 1: gotta like calm people's nerves. Like like we said earlier,
Speaker 1: they really had to do this because they can't if
Speaker 1: Independence Day happened. They can't be the ones who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: we we quit investigating this stuff because we thought it
Speaker 1: was just movies and science fiction. Yeah, yeah, that's there.
Speaker 1: They don't want to investigate this, but they have to
Speaker 1: a security concern just in case, and at the very least,
Speaker 1: the Air Force has to be showing the country that
Speaker 1: they're investigating, that they're on top of any security concerns
Speaker 1: like that. That's right. So that was the first objective.
Speaker 1: Number two was and this makes sense as well, um
Speaker 1: to determine if they possess they meaning the Aliens. I
Speaker 1: guess any unique scientific information or advanced technology we could use. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it didn't necessarily have to be Aliens. It could
Speaker 1: have been the Soviets too. I think that was probably
Speaker 1: the largest suspicion among people who said, no, this is real.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily that it's aliens. But maybe the Soviets are
Speaker 1: way way further ahead than than we think they are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like maybe they have some advanced by plane in US.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't want to spoil anything, but we
Speaker 1: had good reason to believe that might be going on, right,
Speaker 1: I know what you mean. I hope no one else
Speaker 1: does so. Uh, you can thank Mr Repelled or Captain
Speaker 1: Repelled by creating the term UFO. Yeah, he was like
Speaker 1: flying saucer, flying disc. Those are and and um disc
Speaker 1: geese who said, who even came up with that? Um?
Speaker 1: Those are totally Unscientifically, we need something that just kind
Speaker 1: of resets things and says this is a scientific investigation,
Speaker 1: and it worked. I mean, if you it's easy to
Speaker 1: thank UFO. Now sounds so like goofy and unscientific, but
Speaker 1: when you break down the words, it's it's the classification
Speaker 1: that really worked at the time. It's just kind of
Speaker 1: go on, it's gone on to feel like something else
Speaker 1: and meaning, oh yeah, it's definitely got a lot of
Speaker 1: cultural baggage around it now, but at the time, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was adia object exactly. And one of the other
Speaker 1: benefits of creating this new term was that they are
Speaker 1: also allowed to kind of redefine it, and they defined
Speaker 1: it really broadly as any aerial object which the observer
Speaker 1: is unable to identify, which is I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: really broad definition. And it also puts the onus for
Speaker 1: figuring out what that object was on the investigator. It's
Speaker 1: like basically saying, somebody saw something, they don't know what
Speaker 1: it is. Here's the description, go figure it out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And to his credit, he was like, let's get a
Speaker 1: database on a computer. And everyone said, what's a computer.
Speaker 1: He said, it's right here inside this warehouse, right, the
Speaker 1: warehouses the computer that's right, plug it in. Uh. And
Speaker 1: he he was gonna apply statistical methods to really try
Speaker 1: and figure something out. Drew up these questionnaires for people.
Speaker 1: Write a streamline questionnaire. Yeah, stuff like a draw picture
Speaker 1: that will show the shape of the object. Um, what
Speaker 1: was the condition of the sky. Did it suddenly speed up,
Speaker 1: a rush away? Did it change shape? Did it flicker?
Speaker 1: Did it throb? Did it pulse? Sate? Never moment? This
Speaker 1: is creepy And they shoved the question in air back
Speaker 1: across the table. But the UM and that the US
Speaker 1: Air Force Space basically designated a special officer to collect
Speaker 1: all these reports. Every base had one, every single base,
Speaker 1: and they all had to send those two right Patterson,
Speaker 1: right exactly. So UM they were taking this like really
Speaker 1: scientific approach that was saying like, we don't know what
Speaker 1: this is, but we're going to apply science to it,
Speaker 1: and we're going to get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: And as a result, they said, okay, because this definition
Speaker 1: for unidentified flying object is so wide, because it's up
Speaker 1: to us to investigate, we're gonna come up with three
Speaker 1: categories that these can possibly be placed into. There is
Speaker 1: identified where we figured it out. It was a meteor,
Speaker 1: it was a weather balloon. The person was drunk on
Speaker 1: corn whiskey, who knows. Um, there is insufficient data, were like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's just this thing that flew by.
Speaker 1: He'd say, okay, that's an insufficient data one. And then
Speaker 1: the last one the most famous one is unidentified, where
Speaker 1: no matter what UM they try during this investigation, they
Speaker 1: have enough data, they have a good enough description, but
Speaker 1: they can't correlate it with any known object phenomenon technology.
Speaker 1: And as a result, because of this open mindedness led
Speaker 1: by Captain Repelt, that there was a UM unidentified rate
Speaker 1: in Project Blue Books Investigation UM during his tenure. That's right, reports,
Speaker 1: we're misidentification of known things. Nine, we're insufficient information. I
Speaker 1: guess insufficient data and then known category uh one and
Speaker 1: a half percent were crackpots, were probable hoaxes, but basically miscellaneous.
Speaker 1: And then I think two. Yeah, I'm sorry, unknown, unknown
Speaker 1: or unidentified. And to this day, the official number of
Speaker 1: unidentified flying objects sightings that remained unidentified unexplained is seven
Speaker 1: and one. That's a magic number. Yeah, there are dudes
Speaker 1: out there with that tattooed on the back of their neck.
Speaker 1: Probably I want to believe. Is that the end of
Speaker 1: part one? I think, so Chuck is pretty good spot. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: as is tradition with two parters, We're not gonna do
Speaker 1: a listener mail, but we'll do a call out out
Speaker 1: for help with you guys, like we do every now
Speaker 1: and then so it really helps us out if you
Speaker 1: guys leave ratings and reviews on iTunes or the podcatcher
Speaker 1: of your choice and tell a friend a co worker
Speaker 1: that you listen to Stuff you Should Know and you
Speaker 1: get a lot out of it, and that stuff really
Speaker 1: is what made the show popular to begin with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we appreciate the continued support. Yeah, we try not
Speaker 1: to ask much. A couple of times a year. Maybe, yeah,
Speaker 1: please we have another review? Yes, okay, Well, if you
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Speaker 1: while you wait around for part two, you can go
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