WTUFO
What the UFO? We're learning about UFOs and processing in public.
We talk about what the phenomenon might be, explore historical sightings, track new developments, and generally feel our way through this wild, exciting subject.
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WTUFO
S1E9: UFO Deathbed Confessions
Over the years several people have made claims about UFOs near the end of their lives. We talk about some of the most famous cases, including several from people who worked at Roswell, and one, Phil Corso, who wrote a book about working on a secret reverse engineering program for the Pentagon.
These confessions range from simple to complex and from believable to unusual. We cover the confessions and then go a little deeper on Corso's book, The Day After Roswell.
If you're enjoying the show and you'd like to help us keep making it, please consider supporting us at patreon.com/WTUFO
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Hi, welcome to WTUFO. I'm Caleb, and this is John.
Speaker 2:What the UFO, hi Caleb, how you doing today.
Speaker 1:I'm okay. How about you?
Speaker 2:I'm good. I was up until like 2.30 in the morning reading Ross Coulthard's Reddit AMA, Come here everybody.
Speaker 1:Oh nice, let's definitely start with that Long range. We're going to do deathbed confessions-ish.
Speaker 2:We're going to do sort of a quick walk through a lot of them and then we're going to land on phil corso and dive into the day after roswell, which I just read and it's very fun. I'm very excited about this. Caleb did a ton of homework, he did a ton of homework for this for this week and I did like no homework. So, uh, I'm really read this extremely long ross colthart thread so that's got time to go, I guess I don't know what also you, you watch.
Speaker 1:We both watched the john oliver take and we could maybe have takes about that. Take um if you feel like doing that, but maybe let's start with colthart sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I don't have a ton of. I don't have a ton to say about it. I'm not even done reading it. It's very long. I think it's awesome that he took so much time to do this and gives like the answers questions that I did not expect to be answered about, like crazy, crazy stuff. Um, like, for instance, like what's the one word that you think we're not thinking about enough? And he says psionics. That's my coal fart. It's not very good. I think it's psionics, something like that.
Speaker 1:It's definitely psionics with a p, I remember because it used to be in dungeons and dragons, and there are no psionics anymore, that's bull.
Speaker 2:Well, okay, so the, I guess the one that all the one answer that I'll share. Maybe you then mention one that you liked the, uh, the freaking blue beings thing that somebody asks about. I had missed this. It's wild. Um, he, basically the person was asking ross about a clip where he had said that he had heard from a few people, from three different people, that they had recently been in touch with, uh, some blue beings, uh, and they felt that they felt compelled to reach out to ross colthard to tell him about this.
Speaker 2:He says three different people from three different parts of the world, yes, and that they received downloads of information and that one of them in particular was able to then understand complex physics equations just like instantly by looking at them, which Coulthard says he has seen them do. So that's crazy. And then the and then you know he's asked about that that video, that like clip of him on saying that, and what he says then is like yeah, since I made that video, I've heard from a bunch more people who also say they've talked to a blue person.
Speaker 2:oh my god, this blue being is trying to get in touch with Roscoe, that's so very fun and that's the thing that I'm going to send to my most woo friends in this, in this space, the people who want the, you know the, the straight moonshine UFO content, the blues. I honestly haven't heard of the blues like the Nordics, the grays, the repuloids.
Speaker 1:the blues is kind of new that's new to me, but the place I think I've seen it this week is on the our gateway tapes uh, landscape, um, which I dabble in because I'm into the monroe institute and I'm like playing with some of these flax. Um, uh, if anybody wants the flax, you hit us up. No, just kidding, pay for them, call, call the monroe institute and pay thousands of dollars for them instead, um, or at least hundreds man, just like quick sidebar, why not like?
Speaker 2:I keep hovering over this um. What's it called the binaural binaural process, like binaural sounds and I read huh the hemi sync.
Speaker 1:Like, hemi sync is the sort of brand name of the monroe version of it, but binaural beats is the like generic term, I think, for what that means.
Speaker 2:Basically just means like two different kinds of frequency in your ears, basically but with the idea being that it can be useful to like sync up the hemispheres of your brain to make you meditate or reach astral projection, kind of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's that's the Monroe promise of it. All right, so there are tons. There are playlists out there, like on Spotify and Apple music, where you find oral and I keep being like, oh, should I listen to this when I sleep. But then I think about the thing that you told me that I wish you hadn't told me, and one of the weirdo books that you read. Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1:I think about this also. I know what you're going to say Because it's psionic. You're going to say that this girl, in a psychic book I read, said that if you astrally project and you don't know what you're doing, you can like open up a hole in the fabric of reality around your place and invite bad spirits in or ill meaning you know beings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, I'm not trying to meet a Dracula behind this shit.
Speaker 1:I will say oh man, we're like already pretty deep in the blue being weeds here. But something I've heard repeatedly in various spiritual places now is that the part of the truth that they've had revealed to them in these cosmic journeys is that there's just like way, way, way more good than bad, that like there's evil in the universe, but it's like a tiny percentage, it's not like a giant yin yang, it's like 99.98% love, and then there's some evil, and that just kind of keeps the whole thing moving. It allows for free will and choice and blah, blah, blah. I'm not sure it's real either, but can we do cosmic journeys another time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Please. I just was up at 2.30 in the morning and needed to get to sleep, but I didn't want to listen to binaural meditation mixes because you, frankly, scared me.
Speaker 1:Well, who knows what they would do? I think probably a lot of them would have nothing to do with accidentally leaving your body. Also, some people think you accidentally leave your body just every night when you dream. So I don't know if that's real, but maybe All right.
Speaker 2:What are we talking about? The stock market, john Oliver.
Speaker 1:John Oliver, just briefly, because you touched on this point when we were discussing Colthard a little bit which is like the staggering fact of an NHI presence is just like so immense that it's really weird that people aren't thinking about it and aren't curious about it and talking about it more. And I just wanted to mention kind of one of my only like problems with what was otherwise like a pretty solid presentation from John Oliver is just that it blows off the alien exit in a way that's like not super helpful. I think it is super helpful that he got a bunch of especially liberal people on board. He gave them a permission structure to stay, things at parties like hey, actually you know we should look into UFOs Great, that's awesome. And that's really the whole project that he was embarking on. I think that he was embarking on, I think.
Speaker 1:But he does say like and, by the way, you know, they might not be aliens, but that's not the hard part to think about, I think. And I think like I wanted the next half of the sentence to be like but they might be, and if they are, we have a lot to think about and it could be really interesting and that's fine, like it doesn't have to go much deeper than that, but I think it's like really important when people engage with this topic that they engage with that idea, because if they're not willing to do that, then they're just going to get stuck in the human tech or you know, weather, phenomena, space and it's not gonna. It's not gonna move them sufficiently to engage as much as they should and also it just like feels like a weird, like side hatch to take. Like what do you mean? You're really interested in what these things are, but you don't think they're aliens like you're saying. You think they're probably russian and chinese tech. Then like no, the military's not going to tell you it'll never even be your business.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean I don't know. It's kind of the format of John Oliver's show to like talk about an issue and then just kind of like wrap it up at the end and be like, yeah, I'm going to the next one and provide some sort of like false closure and then like never come back to it, I think mostly. So I don't know, I thought it was okay. I thought it was okay and also dated and like leaning on like Roswell, like why are we digging in on that instead of like digging in on the tic-tac? And yeah, ultimately I found it kind of frustrating and I sent it to one uh, skeptic friend and skeptic's the wrong word, he's just a friend who like won't get interested in this, but by really ought to be interested in it, um, and I don't think it probably moved the needle at all for him yeah, so that's frustrating to me that is a
Speaker 1:little annoying fun to hear somebody dunk on the condon report, though, and that was great yeah yeah, and I really appreciate connecting the wires of like uh, profound skepticism about the military industrial complex with openness to scientific inquiry, like that's. Those two things should really come together and that's like that. That's a good angle in. I think we've talked about this but for, like, the political left, which is kind of having a harder time, I think, getting interested in ufos because they don't want to, uh give any credence to the idea of a deep state maybe, especially right now. Um, so it's like important to have john oliver, who, frankly, is a figure of the left, um, invite people from that culture yeah, it's just also on some level.
Speaker 2:It's just frustrating to have a conclusion be like and we really should be looking at this because like no shit, and that's been the conclusion for like 80 years, and it's like kind of a cop-out, not that like john John Oliver gets to like create a congressional panel or something. Also nothing about that, right, and the whole thing. I think we barely talked about Congress. I don't even think he talked about the Schumer Amendment.
Speaker 1:Skipped Grush. Yeah, skip the Schumer, amendment, skip NHI.
Speaker 2:That's kind of malpractice in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean for most other issues he would like land with. Where are we now legislatively To make?
Speaker 2:room for like Bloomberg or for sorry for like the Blue Book and the Condor and stuff and Roswell, but not talk about the Tic Tac in more detail than he did and not talk about the Schumer Amendment, which is a really staggering, weird piece of legislation that just seems like somewhere between malpractice and being a scaredy cat and not wanting to appear crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's right. Still, notch it as a general small W. I think a win. Yeah, I think that's right. Still, notch it as a general small W. I think a win. Yeah, I think a win For the conversation. I do think so. Make it bigger. So should we pivot into dissonance? Psyonix, what are you mumbling?
Speaker 2:I said discourse yes, let's pivot please. Let's hear your book report. Where are we starting?
Speaker 1:Okay, so first Deathbed Confessions. In general, I thought there would be more. That's like takeaway number one when I started looking into this. It's basically like the Roswell boys and like a couple of friends, but not a ton of people yet, which maybe is just because, like, not a ton of people from the era where this lockdown started happening have died. Probably would have liked one from like Roscoe Hill and Cotter, first director of the CIA. That would have been good. I assume he's dead For sure. Okay, so what I thought I'd do is like do a quick little rundown of some people who have said things later in life and then build up toward the Roswell boys and land on Phil Corso and go deep on that one. Does that sound good?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that sounds great. Just remember to stop and breathe and drink water every now and then, and I'll try to think of clever questions to ask you, breathe and?
Speaker 1:drink water every now and then and I'll try to think of clever questions to ask you, okay. So first of all there are two astronauts. They didn't make deathbed confessions but they made confessions during their life or like had instincts in this direction. One is gordon cooper, the other is edgar mitchell. Gordon cooper said he saw uh basically like a formation of ufos when he was flying uh warplanes in Germany and this kind of screwed with his. It may have kind of screwed with his astronaut career.
Speaker 1:Edgar Mitchell believed the Roswell stories and like said he had inside information about that but never claimed to see a UFO himself, even in space. But he also went on to found the noetic institute, uh, and got very interested in psionics for the rest of his life, um. So I don't even really know why these guys are in this conversation. This I you can blame chat gpt for bringing them here, but uh, they they said things later in life and they were uh controversial, um. Then there's this slightly more um serious dude. His name is Paul Hellyer. He was the Canadian minister of national defense in the 1960s, um, and so he's like a relatively serious person to believe the Roswell stories. But basically that's what he did believe the Roswell stories. He uh read this book that we're going to talk about in a little bit the day after Roswell, and he called an airport it's actually his son called an air force general that he knew, and that air force general told Hellier and his son yes, this book is real, yes, roswell was aliens, basically, and there's even more crazy shit that I could tell you, basically. And there's even more crazy shit that I could tell you, uh. And so hellier felt it was important to tell everybody else that he had received this information and that he believed that it was true. So later in his life he kind of went on a campaign of making these announcements and talking about it openly, um, and I believe he lived into his 90s.
Speaker 1:So he did that for some time and along the way he got like a fair amount of attention from some uh, he described them as like intelligence officials, believed from the united states, who attempted to um a slip him disinformation, which he said he he sussed out that they would try to like leak him things that would make him sound crazy because they weren't true, um, and they figured he was like credulous enough to buy it and share it and then they could bust him, uh, and they tried to get from him the name of this air force general, uh, and they implied to him strongly that they wanted to crack down on this person and like kick him around a bit, um, so he didn't like that at all and he likes talking about it. He also has some interesting like maybe borderline kooky or or like borderline revolutionary theories about economics. He doesn't like the um fed having you know soul money printing abilities in the united states, and he has some very full-throated takes on, uh, on econ. So we'll share an interview with him in our show notes and you can check this guy out, uh, all right, so then there are two more that come with videos, which is fun because we can link to them, and I'm curious if, if you have any information about this or like takes about these videos, because I feel like we probably both watched them when they dropped.
Speaker 1:One is Boyd Bushman, uh, and the other is agent Cooper, spelled, spelled Cooper K E W P E R, um, the, the. These guys look remarkably similar. They're sort of like frumpy old, balding white dudes, um, and we're like like weirdly shapen. And, uh, they're sort of like frumpy old, balding white dudes, um, and we're like like weirdly shapen and uh, they're sort of they're on the way out, like this is these do qualify as as pretty deathbed, especially uh, agent Cooper, uh, whose full name is Oscar Wayne Wolf with two X and uh names Cooper or wool or uh quotes agent Cooper and uh names cuper or wool or uh quote agent cuper stein this is like cia name, um, and his full name is oscar wayne wolf with two f's.
Speaker 1:And our boys, uh, our boys, richard dolan and jellyfish corvell, are in this video because they set it up and film it in like a motel in Florida or something. It looks weird and and he just tells them stories about being involved in the crash retrieval and reverse engineering. Richard Dolan is sitting on a bed in this interview, just great. Richard Tolan is sitting on a bed in this interview, just great. I think Jeremy Corbell's working the camera Leans in for a handshake at the very top, amazing. And Boyd Bushman is the guy who brought Polaroids and holds them all up.
Speaker 2:And is like this is the alien and this is the machines of the the alien. Which one of these guys do you want to tell me about first?
Speaker 1:um, I don't I don't really have much to say about either of these guys. The only thing I have about bushman is that, uh, people have claimed that the alien picture he shows has been debunked as a toy, but the only evidence that I have found to provide a receipt for that debunking claim is that there's like a very brief youtube video by like a totally anonymous poster, um, that looks like it's footage of this body in a toy case, but like no one's provided an sku number for the toy, or like an ad for the toy, or like a link to the toy in real life. So it's possible that that's like counterintel.
Speaker 2:I've been down that particular rabbit hole and watched that video and yeah, it's an unconvincing debunking. I think they're not bringing the receipts there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is weird because it would seem sort of easy. Yeah, which is weird because it would seem sort of easy to one take from the day after Roswell about disclosure, which is that sometimes part of the plan might be to let some of the crazier stuff through the cracks, with the intention that it both soften the ground and and maybe seem unbelievable simultaneously. So I did want to. Yeah, I'm sorry, we'll loop. We'll loop back around to that, but I wanted to ask did you watch these videos and do you have takes or reactions? I haven't seen them though I don't.
Speaker 2:I think I watched the Bushman one a while ago, but no Okay cool.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll put them in the place and if you guys watch them and you want to talk with us about them, we want to hear what you think about them and we'll watch them and maybe you and I will have a conversation about them another time. Sound good, sound good, okay. So then, rounding the corner to the last leg of the journey, getting back to sort of like ground zero UFO. There actually are a bunch of confessions from the Roswell boys, and there are four of them. I'm going to talk about three of them. I'm going to sideline Kaufman, frank Kaufman because I just don't know anything about him, and some people claimed that many of his documents were fabricated. So there's a lot of discourse about Kaufman, but he seems like maybe one of the less reliable figures. We don't know for sure. He claims that he was working there and saw, you know, extraterrestrial looking stuff. So then we have three people who were working in the Roswell world and I'm not a Roswell expert so I don't know a ton about this, but I'm going to say their names and we'll go a little bit into it.
Speaker 1:Walter Hout was the information officer at Roswell in 47. He was pretty young I think he's in his 20s at the time, handled the debris and who gets caught in that shitty staged photo with the like phony weather balloon shit, um, looking pretty pissed, uh, like kind of the next day, I think, or two days later. And then philip j corso, who was not at roswell but who was involved later in processing some of the, in processing some of the crash materials, according to him. So, starting with Walter Hout, walter Hout both has like the thinnest thing to say and like the most serious way to say it, because all he really says is this stuff looked extraterrestrial to me, but the way he says that is, he gets an affidavit signed with, I believe, a notary republic and, uh, a notary public, notary public, uh. And he works out with his daughter all the details of what he's gonna say. It's notary public, right, okay, uh, anyway, he formally issues this statement and then it's sealed to be released upon his death, which is a pretty serious thing to do, and I respect his care and his narrow crafted message.
Speaker 1:And we have we will also link to this this affidavit in full. The basic big punchline is I am convinced that what I personally observed was some type of craft and its crew from outer space. He was convinced of that. But he also gives some more details about like seeing the bodies, seeing the craft which he describes as like-shaped and like 12 to 15 feet, uh, with no windows, uh did appear metallic, um, no wings, no tail section or landing gear. And again, this is all like a very formal, very limited affidavit and I respect him for that, because it's not sprawling, it's not crazy, and he never said it in life. So I think you got to give him some credibility for never selling this story, not going on a book tour, just really, he got nothing from this well wait.
Speaker 2:Isn't this the guy, though, whose daughter runs a roswell museum in roswell, or is that somebody else?
Speaker 1:Oh, that seems believable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what's his name?
Speaker 1:again. Sorry, hout, hey, jamie, jamie find Hout's daughter's museum. Jamie, oh, there, it is Just kidding, I don't. I don't know, but that sounds believable, and and his daughter did help him with this affidavit.
Speaker 2:So I think that that's. I'm pretty sure that that's detailed in in plain sight the Coulthard book, but I yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:OK, I would believe that, and it's it's also pretty thin, so we'll move to Jesse Marcel, lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force. Jesse Marcel, lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force.
Speaker 2:The thinness sorry the thinness of that is kind of cool and interesting and kind of like lends credibility to it. I think. Yeah, I agree, the circumspect statement delivered in a in like the most kind of I don't know legally hefty way that you could do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree, he's not telling a story about meeting an alien and having psychic thoughts implanted. He didn't write a book. Yeah, his daughter might have this thing. It's worth noting that, by the way, there are, I believe, two affidavits. He made a narrow one in, I think, 2007 or something, and then, like, he elaborated on it shortly before his death in uh 2013. So there's a a 20, there's a 2002, oh, and a 1993. There's a very brief one from 1993, um, and then there's this elaborated one in uh 2002. He passed away shortly after.
Speaker 1:So then there's Jesse Marcel, who's the guy in the picture, the very famous picture, and the things to tell about Marcel, without having done a super deep dive, are that he does spend a bunch of time later in his life saying this was aliens, basically, and at the time, on the night, he does this really cool thing where he stops by his home after picking up some of the crash stuff and he shows it to his wife and then, I believe, like 11 year old son, and they play with the stuff and marcel says basically, like I think this is from a flying saucer and like we're probably never going to get to see it again. So like, let's check it out, isn't this cool? And they described it as like an interesting combination of stuff, like ranging from aluminum to some things that were like wood beams to like a purplish strip of writing. Like, on the insides of these beams there, uh, symbols written in like a purplish color. Um, and his son described them as like not quite hieroglyphics, but like abstract symbols of some kind.
Speaker 1:And like, curiously, coincidentally, later, when we get the reveal, the, the like what sounds to me like a better cover-up, uh, like months or years later, the air force comes out with a story that's like oh, actually there were this, there were super secret weather balloons that, like, even these guys didn't know about. Yeah, that's 1994, that's 94. Okay, do you know about this story? Do you remember what it's called? Oh, um man.
Speaker 2:No, I don't, I was just listening to it. I think it's called oh man. No, I don't, I was just listening to it. I think it's the third or fourth explanation that the Air Force gives.
Speaker 1:Project Mogul maybe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it Mogul. Super high altitude.
Speaker 1:Right, right, which is like if it is disinformation, it's like quite high quality disinformation because it's like pretty believable. I've heard people say that like maybe the timeline doesn't add up. It did set off like a suspicious bell for me that somebody described the Project Mogul balloons as like oh, they included purple tape with symbols on it and I was just like that's, that's so specific. That's really like what kind of symbols? Why can you say more about that? Yeah, it just feels like it was designed to explain this particular story.
Speaker 2:I mean it's plausible, except when you take into account, like the descriptions of the debris field by the ranch hand who found the place, or like the initial report from the air force general saying that they recovered a flying a disc, and when you take into account these all these people who after the fact said that something else had happened, including the guy in the picture with the weather balloon, like it just doesn't add kind don't know kind of off topic for us to like go down the roswell path here. But like I think it's kind of where we are.
Speaker 1:I think you know lied about.
Speaker 2:They're gonna just lie about it forever to us.
Speaker 1:That sounds likely. Um, did you know that? That ranch hand like disappeared for a week after and uh, yeah, he like left of his ranch, um, and then came back and I think had a new car. Uh, citation needed on that. I wish I had the receipts, but uh, but it sounds strong. It sounds a lot like somebody like yoinked him up and like took him to a facility and was like you can't tell anybody about this ever. Uh, and then like made a deal with him and brought him back.
Speaker 1:I also heard, in diving into this a little bit, that there were some stories about like really scary air force dudes coming to the homes of people who saw stuff or who were related to the crew and just like scaring the shit out of them. Like there was one woman who like recounted the story of being a little girl and seeing this dude in like a big helmet, like yell at her and her mother and say if you ever talk about this, you will disappear in the desert, and she's like crying about this as a as a full-grown woman, like at 65, and that all just seems like a little extreme for high altitude weather balloons, even if they were military. So I think that probably is a good transition to the big dude philip corso, philip james corso it's just a ridiculous picture on his wikipedia page. Uh, he's leaning back kind of maybe don't start there. If you're about to get into phil corso, don't start with the wikipedia picture. Um, so I learned a bunch of interesting maybe things from phil corso's book.
Speaker 1:Uh, the day after roswell in 1997, and the only only reason I'll start with a maybe is that it is the opposite of Hout's extremely narrow, very clear claim. It's like a broad, sprawling, massive story about this guy's life, his career in government and everything he was involved with, some of which sounds like fantastical. Like there's a moment later in the book where he sort of takes credit for the bay of pigs crisis and like getting kennedy to respond to missiles because he says he like saw this intelligence and like leaked it to a reporter in boston to put pressure on on Kennedy when he was visiting Massachusetts, because Corso felt he had concluded that Kennedy must be aware of this intelligence but not acting on it. And so there are some hints in this book of self-aggrandizement.
Speaker 1:It's wide and sprawling, but it does come very late in his life, it's like the year before he dies and on a personal like gut check level it's, it's very, very detailed and the like level of granular information in it really to me does pass the smell test. A lot of it feels true, and there's a bunch of stuff that I I think is like worth considering as information, even if it's just sort of like contextual vibes about the time in a place that was post-world War II America and the military's response to Roswell. Do you have any questions or breathers?
Speaker 2:No, not yet. Please keep going.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, we'll just let me cook, then We'll let Phil Corso cook. Okay, so very brief resume.
Speaker 1:Okay, so very brief resume. He's, he serves in army intelligence in Europe in World War II. He joins the army in 42. He serves in army intelligence in Europe and he becomes the chief of the US counterintelligence corps in Rome, which is like a crazy post at the time. Which is like a crazy post at the time, obviously. Uh, among other things, he like has an audience with the pope. Um, he I believe this is him, I might be getting my wires crossed, but I think he like interfaces with the local mafia to like keep shit functional. Um, he's, he secures safe passage for like 10,000 Jews out of Europe. Um, this is like in the immediate aftermath of World War II. And then, from this this position, he goes on to be the uh, a member of the staff of eisenhower's national security council for four years, from 53 to 57. So he does work at the white house, um, and then in the 60s he becomes the chief of the pentagon's foreign technology desk in the army research and development, working under Lieutenant Jenner, general Arthur Trudeau, okay.
Speaker 1:And that's yeah, and that's where he gets this box of materials, ostensibly from the Roswell crash, and one of the first things that jumps out about the way he gets this box is it does not come with receipts. There is no like documentation that accompanies this box, and he's struck by this. And, uh, I was struck hearing it. Uh, because it sounds like a big part of the problem. And when we talk about, like our contemporary attempts to like verify the existence of this program, you and I have discussed the the like clean hands approach inside these offices that like prevents not just a bullshit operation like arrow, but like a very serious operation like the new york times, from getting any of these documents, because you can't get a document that just doesn't exist. Uh, so that, I thought, was really interesting.
Speaker 2:That's a theme. That's a theme that comes up when you're learning about this stuff, like I'm pretty sure the twining memo has a similar sort of provenance, where they're like we just found it in this folder and it actually sort of uses a different typeface than we used at the time and nobody knows where it came from. And then also just last night in the Colthart Reddit, through that, I learned about this other document that was a memo. It's the damn, I don't remember her name right now or his name right now, mead, I'm going to pull it up. Damn, I don't remember her name right now or his name right now, mead, I'm going to pull it up.
Speaker 2:But yeah, mead Lane, this Mead Lane memo that is sent the same day as the Roswell story breaks and it has a filing number on it that apparently doesn't actually correspond to any sort of filing system. So I don't know any sort of filing system. So I don't know. This is just like it feels, like maybe smoke of a disinformation camp or miss, you know, this information cover, I don't know, like some whatever these structures are that are opaque to us, that are, and like methods for compartmentalizing information or like conducting a, like you know, longitudinal kind of confusion campaign. I feel like this is part of that and actually it had me thinking last night about the cia that that old. Have you ever looked at that cia manual from the cold war about how to like gum up administrative works and just like be?
Speaker 1:a big asshole as a bureaucrat.
Speaker 2:It's like if we have a guy inside the you know the kremlin or something is like the guidebook for sucking at your job so much that it becomes like a national security liability for the country you're in um, and it's a lot of stuff like that of like be unclear in your emails, like or I mean, we're talking about emails. I guess your memos and like use typos even, or just like call for extra meetings and review sessions when they aren't necessary and then drag your feet or don't show up or things like that. So I don't know. Those kinds of like PSYOP tactics are real and documented.
Speaker 1:That is fascinating and it leads me to two places. One is a quote from this book about like an old story about keeping secrets, which is a group of men protecting their deepest secrets took their secrets and hid them in a shack whose location was secret. But the location was discovered. So they built a second shack and stored those secrets that they still kept. And then the second shack was discovered, so they realized they'd have to give up some secrets to protect the rest and they again moved to build a third shack. And for this process repeated itself over and over until anyone wanting to find out what the secrets were would have to start at the first shack and work from shack to shack until they could go no further because they didn't know the next location. And he says for 50 years. This was the process by which the secrets of Roswell were protected by various serial incarnations of an ad hoc confederation of top secret working groups throughout different branches of the government. And it is still going on today. And the time today, I believe, believe, is 1997.
Speaker 1:He's writing this wild, very cool, yeah. So zooming out, this guy's top line big picture is that he uh, gets some of these materials and then they concoct a plan to like sort of cover their tracks by introducing them into, uh, the technology bloodstream of uh corporate america. And so he like sort of hatches or helps lead some of the re-engineering, uh reverse engineering efforts, uh, and he talks about like a bunch of specific technologies that he claims came from this, including like lasers and night vision and kevlar, um, but but there's like a a general tone thing that I thought was really interesting about the way that, uh he got handed this box, which also rang with what you were talking about with the counterintelligence, which is that post-world war ii, everybody was fucking terrified of everybody else and, like the world was like very much on a war footing, and it wasn't just because World War II had just ended, it was also because, going into World War II, they had just finished what they thought would be the last war ever and then, like World War II just happened, like just shook the world again. So there was very much this attitude of like okay, well, what's next? Like when's world war three Right, and like all eyes immediately went to Stalin and Russia, um, and everybody in the United States government was freaking out about that and um, and the way Corso describes it is that the military was like highly segmented and that the like branches didn't trust each other and departments within branches didn't trust each other and nobody trusted the CIA and nobody trusted the CIA partially because he said another really interesting thing that spies in some cases tended to trust each other more than their political bosses, and that included like crossing national lines.
Speaker 1:So he said he didn't describe any specific instances of this, but he said there were times that like american and russian spies, just because of the nature of their like profession and their devotion to the profession, like just had more confidence that they could predict the behavior, had more confidence that they could predict the behavior of each other than they could predict the behavior of their political bosses.
Speaker 1:So they almost in a weird way like trusted spies from the kgb more than they trusted like the white house is of course those implications sometimes, um, and that you know like that meanwhile the kgb is like just trying to get along and not get destroyed by the Kremlin. So like they were willing to sort of play along sometimes and like as a result you get information swaps and leaks and of course those sort of big picture is that because Russia and America were both aware of the extraterrestrial threat. Of the extraterrestrial threat, they did a lot of stuff that looked like it was uh cold war focused uh, but really it was like developmental uh in in regard to like skilling us up to face et, basically non-human intelligences. So a bunch of the space initiatives that happened under Reagan, he says, were sort of secretly aimed at developing defense mechanisms for America to actually confront non-human intelligence and shoot down some of their craft, which apparently, according to corso, we eventually successfully did colthart talked in the uh ama last night about the rumors that we've shot down craft with um emps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he said it's something that he's heard and hopes is not true hopes.
Speaker 1:It isn't true yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Just seems like a bad idea to be shooting them. I think is his take well, that's interesting.
Speaker 1:it's corso's take is is like these guys don't give a shit about us and uh, we need to defend ourselves. And uh, at least his vibe was like they're cutting up our cattle, like they just don't care and and they're at the best indifferent to human affairs and at the worst trying to mess with us. So he also had this. He brought this point of view that, along with us not trusting our own branches of government, that we didn't trust the Soviets and we were extremely nervous that the Soviets might get ahead in the ET race and that they might like make a deal with the aliens and like come out on top dominating the earth. So we've been like the way Corso tells it, we were like doing a very tricky dance to try and like counter the Soviet rise but really try to counter the alien rise.
Speaker 1:And also I just wanted to say I think it makes sense that the extreme concern about the secrecy of this material would in some ways relate to like pedestrian, terrestrial concerns about our opponents getting access to this information. And I think that probably still stands as logic underpinning the secrecy of the crash retrieval program. If it's public, then it's a massive target for spies. It's already a target for spies, but it's like way harder to defend it if it definitely exists. And if you're like inviting teams from Stanford and MIT and to come see your material, then like bam, some of those people are going to be spies and we're like very worried about this technology getting into the wrong hands, Cause we're still figuring it out ourselves.
Speaker 2:Citation needed. Okay, good, tell me more about Corso. What break me off another?
Speaker 1:bar here. Okay, cool, all right. So there's Corso has a body experience. He's protecting a like a base one night where the stuff is stashed and he, like, opens a crate and describes a spooky looking body. That scares the hell out of him. And this is like not the beginning of his relationship with the crash materials, cause he's not read in or allowed to have access to it at that time. It's just like the beginning of the journey for him is seeing this thing. If you want, I could describe this thing, would, would you do you think that's value add?
Speaker 1:yeah, tell me about the spooky body okay, okay, so he opens up this thing, whatever they'd created this way. It was a coffin, but not like any coffin I'd seen before. The contents, enclosed in a thick glass container, was submerged in a thick, light blue, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. The object was floating, actually suspended, and not sitting on the bottom with a fluid overtop, and it was soft and shiny as the underbelly of a fish, and at first I thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere. But this was no child. It was a four-foot human-shaped figure with arms, bizarre four-fingered hands I didn't see a thumb thin legs and feet and an oversized, incandescent light bulb-shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin. I knew I must have cringed at first, but then I had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But I couldn't tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature's flesh. Its eyeballs must have been rolled way back in its head, because I couldn't see any pupils or iris or anything that resembled a human eye. But the eye sockets themselves were oversized and almond-shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose, which didn't really protrude from the skull, it was more like the tiny nose of a baby that never grew as the child grew and it was mostly nostril.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he goes on a little bit. He says the features are all arranged frontally small circle on the lower part of the head, okay, protruding, no protruding ears. Cheeks had no definition, no eyebrows, no facial hair, tiny flat slit for a mouth. And later he would discuss a more thorough rundown from the medical team at that big hospital that everybody goes to in DC who told him the bones were super thin and that the lungs were much, much higher, had like a much higher capacity than humans relative to the overall body, and this kind of stuff led him to believe that these guys were like maybe, maybe clones or maybe drones designed for long-term space travel. They could hold more atmosphere in their lungs, basically for longer, and also the bones had like because of their thinness and I think maybe flexibility might have been better able to withstand like jarring changes of motion and very high speeds, um, total side bunny hole here.
Speaker 1:But I I bumped into another idea listening to another crazy person that I didn't include on this list, whose take was that he met some aliens that said they were from 68 light years away and it took them 45 years to get here. And it should have, by our best estimations at the time, taken them 60,000 years, but it only took them 45 years. But I thought that was yeah interesting as an idea that, like, maybe they can in fact go faster than light, but maybe it's not so much faster than light that it's like a portal gun to anywhere in the universe whenever instantaneous travel maybe it's just like a lot better, uh, than our max imaginings right now. It's kind of an intriguing idea yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:It is uh, um, bring us, bring us back home, though I regret letting you talk about the person in the blue coffin. You sound completely crazy and I don't know this guy.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah no, that's fair, I did.
Speaker 1:I want to um say another pedestrian-ish thing that corso claims early in the book is that there are uh radar events at roswell and white sands that like pre-crisage, the um, the, the crash, and that there's like a big lightning storm this night.
Speaker 1:Uh, but there's uh, they're like very unusual fast, uh, fast moving radar, uh signatures and um, and it's so weird that the, the team, the operators, like break down the radar equipment to like check to see what's wrong with it, and then they reassemble it and they can't find anything wrong with it. Um, and it's, it's doing the like rapidly zipping from one side of the screen to the other and like changing directions, um, in super fast ways, which, yeah, sounds a lot like some of the other stuff that we've heard. So it kind of sounds like maybe there were a bunch of craft flying around out there and then it sounds like there was a big, crazy lightning storm. So it's possible they were fighting or it's possible somebody got hit by lightning, it's possible somebody crashed something like that. Um, but that was news to me. I had not heard anybody make that claim before and uh and I don't think it's been verified or certified or agreed on anywhere else.
Speaker 1:Um, but there are a few other fun things to talk about here and like specifically there's. There's a story maybe this is we can let this be like grand finale um, he, he, he does get into, uh, the twining memo. Um, he's like twining is a fairly significant part of this story. Um, he, he worked for eisenhower, but I don't think he worked for truman, so he, he doesn't get to like see these conversations with truman, but, uh, he gets to hear about them and he gets to interact with Quining and Helen Cotter, who are both in the loop on explaining to Truman what's going on, and these are a little bit long but I think they're really interesting. So the the basic assertion is that this group comes up with a way to do the cover-up and the disclosure in a sort of way that's intertwined. They're talking about how crazy this is and truman asks them are we ever going to tell people? Basically, and everybody kind of goes quiet because they just don't know. They don't know what to do. Um, and they, they ask him to talk to twining. Um, helen cotter says, like you should talk to twining because he's like kind of in the weeds on this and he knows the details. Um and twining says, uh, that we can basically combine the cover-up with the disclosure, which is, I thought, a really interesting idea. So I'm going to just read two paragraphs here. The group that we can basically combine the cover-up with the disclosure, which is, I thought, a really interesting idea. So I'm going to just read two paragraphs here.
Speaker 1:The group agreed that these were the requirements of the endeavor they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a government within the government, sustaining itself from presidential administration to presidential administration, regardless of whatever political party took power, and ruthlessly guarding their secrets while evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they received. But at the same time they would allow disclosure of some of the most far-fetched information, whether true or not, because it would help create a climate of public attitude that would be able to accept the existence of extraterrestrial life without a general sense of panic, of extraterrestrial life without a general sense of panic. It will be, general Quining said, a case where the cover-up is the disclosure and the disclosure is the cover-up. Deny everything, but let the public sentiment take its course, let skepticism do our work for us until the truth becomes common acceptance Kind of a fascinating idea and sort of like a high level answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really wild. That's that's actually. That's one of the crazier ideas I've I've ever encountered in this space at least, as at least around disclosure. That's really cool. It makes me want to read the book. I kind of hope that that's what's going on.
Speaker 1:It definitely feels like that's what's going on sometimes and so that's what I meant, uh, when I brought that up earlier about the like guys showing polaroids before they die. Like if there is an organization that's like deciding whether to block or not block people from doing stuff, like that they might take a look at like kind of a kooky looking former Lockheed Martin employee and say, like this is fine, and also like like it's a cake and eat it too situation, because, a, people will think they're crazy and, b, this information gets out into the public consciousness and that's that's a win-win and we're at like what 57 percent of people believe.
Speaker 2:Americans believe in ufos. Like that seems like about. Like that seems like a softening of that seems like soft ground yeah, do you think?
Speaker 1:uh, everybody seems like really scared at this time in 47 of of seeing uh, the orson welles thing happen. I think there. Think there's a quote in this book about like are you crazy, we can't tell people Like you want more of the worlds to happen in real life, like again, like it was Orson Welles like screwed it for everyone because his radio play was so scary that like people died and that convinced. When we actually met aliens the government was like well, we obviously can't tell people because look what happened when a radio play came out.
Speaker 2:I think that's actually not true and is like really overblown and is kind of a just big American myth, something seeded by print journalism in the weeks after the event to try to uh push the idea that you can't listen, you can't trust radio news. You gotta get your news from the paper here. Look at the dangers, the perils of radio waves that's fascinating, yeah, just like they dunk on twitter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, uh, so this they they describe like kind of concocting this plan and um putting it into action and uh, I don't know. There there are he sort of like speculates on this conversation. He he hears about a conversation with truman where they decide to do this and truman is like very worried about the political ramifications if people find out about this um for him, which is like a reasonable concern. Yeah, I think he. He also describes in this book, like the, the process of the v2 coming out and like the president at the time I don't remember if it's eisenhower or truman that the v2 gets like revealed under and he's he's like been warned by russia that he's got to stop running v2 flights. Um, is it v2? I don't even know what I'm talking about the secret bombers, um, or the the secrets, the spidey right yeah, so I guess I'm talking about b2s right v2 rockets, uh, b2 anyway, he describes it.
Speaker 2:The u2 spy plane is u2, that's that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:The cia pushes and pushes for more and more of these flights and the the president's like kind of trying to rein them in, but they insist and and request more and they end up getting somebody gets caught and like, uh, paraded around russia and like, has to, it's an american person who has to like admit, like yeah, I was spying on. Has to. It's an American person who has to like admit, like yeah, I was spying on your country. And it's like a massive blow to the president and and like you know, a very, a very embarrassing moment and it's like kind of an example of the CIA like pushing a little further than the executive branch maybe would have wanted to. To hear Corso tell it.
Speaker 1:We then like like developed some space tech that kind of made that irrelevant. Um, there's some stuff about tesla in here and like how j edgar hoover probably stole his uh files and how they worked on like concentrated energy rays and stuff. But the practical takeaway for corso is that we we did it. We like got ourselves to a place where we could actually compete with these n? Nbes or and nds I don't remember what he's what he calls ebe, ebes, yeah, yeah, which is what extra biological entity? What is?
Speaker 2:it. Yeah, they call it EB1. Ebe1 is the supposed name of a. Yeah, I don't know. You're saying that Corso says that we cracked some stuff.
Speaker 1:Um, oh wait, I I found another quote that I want to share from this truman conversation, or like quote ish semi-quote um, truman says winchell would crucify me if you found out what we were doing. And uh, he's reported to say at this meeting um, and throw a throwaway line. Nobody in the know liked president truman very much and he could appreciate it. Um, so admiral hill and cotter says it's just like the manhattan project. Mr president, it was.
Speaker 1:We couldn't tell anyone. This is war, same thing. Then they explained to him that after they convened the working group, they'll task out research of the tech while keeping it from the Soviet spy machine, which they're afraid is like operating within the government, because they're not very good at getting the Soviet spies out of their own government. And so Secretary Helen Cutter says we hide it from the government itself, create a whole new level of security classification just for this. The Central Intelligence Director said Any information we decide to release, even internally, we downgrade. So the people getting the information never have the security clearance that allows them all the way to the top. The only way to hide it from the Russians is to hide it from ourselves.
Speaker 2:Cool Plausible Makes a lot of sense. I like this a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very believable and also I'm interested in this idea. I don't quite understand this sentence. He says like even internally, we downgrade this information. I've heard elsewhere the claim that sometimes, to keep something extra super secret, you actually like unsecretify some level of it, like you declassify some aspect of it and you hide it in plain sight so that spies won't know to try and hack it, so that spies won't know to try and hack it. So maybe you would dumb down the information, gloss out some of the details and make it not a classified program. I don't understand what he's saying when he says any information we decide to release, even internally, we downgrade. So the people getting the information never have the security clearance that allows them all the way to the top have the security clearance that allows them all the way to the top. I don't understand that sentence exactly. But what about the information? Are you downgrading? Are you downgrading the classification level or are you downgrading the information? So I think I guess it's probably that second one. Any information we decide to release, even internally, we downgrade. So the people getting the information never have the security clearance that now I'll ask them all the way to the top. So they're like I don't sharing, only like subtle versions, only like fudgy versions of what they're doing when they do it via documents, and that's that sounds believable. Also, and I buy this idea about the sheds, just like setting up new sheds when old sheds get caught and moving to a new castle, and it does sound like that is probably still going on.
Speaker 1:He also had a take along these lines that all these different agencies doing stuff like this believe that they're working for some like shadowy higher up group, but that's not necessarily always true and sometimes there's just like nobody home and there's like no one in charge of these various crash materials. For example, like it's possible that he got a box of crash materials, but like also other people in the government got access to different parts of these, and like some tech uh that went into reverse engineering mode. Of course, I never saw. It's not like it all went through him and he did say he never got to see the craft. For example, they never, never let him see the plane.
Speaker 1:He did describe, however, the glass that they found in what they said were portals from the inside, that when you look through them, uh, it looked like it was light out, even though it was nighttime and, uh, his, his take was that that that material then became uh like the upstream tech that led us to night vision goggles wow, the cool piece of, uh maybe technology. And he described that as something people noticed at the crash site. They got there and it was night. They poked their heads in and could see through these holes in the side that it looked like bright day outside. They were like, oh, did the sun come up? No, what, Where's that light coming from?
Speaker 2:That's really cool. Okay Well, okay, Well. Great job. This book sounds crazy. I want to read it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. Oh, and a fun, fun thing for everybody the full text is available online. So that's great. Put that in a link, is it? Um? Is it long? Somebody stole it At like rapido 3.5 speed. It's three and a half hours.
Speaker 2:Okay, so for a normal human, yeah, it's kind of long.
Speaker 1:Probably like 12 hours, something like that, if you were listening, and then if you're going to look at this transcript, you can use some of the words that we used in this conversation to hop around and look for the specific segments, and we will put the link to the full text below outrageous.
Speaker 2:Okay, man, thanks for thanks for your deep dive this week. That was very fun thank you for listening.
Speaker 1:That was, uh, it was crazy. It's a, it's a whole lot of fun. This book, even if it is, uh, all made up, it's very poetic and it's interesting, and I think you still kind of like get a sense of the way the american military and intelligence communities have worked and specifically the way they worked post-world war ii. Yeah, interesting the day after roswell is what that's, what's what that's called? Um, thank you, thank you so much for spending the time and if you're out there listening and you thought this was fun, just like comment at us so we hear something other than the dark winds of the Never Void and we will totally engage with you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks bro, see you soon.