00:00:02:01 – 00:00:32:21
Dan LeFebvre
Hello and welcome to Based on a True Story, the podcast that compares your favorite Hollywood movies and TV shows with history. With spooky season upon us. Today we’re pulling another classic episode from the vault. Actually, more than that, we’re going to do three episodes all about the same TV series History Channel’s Project Blue Book. In case the title alone doesn’t tell you what it’s about, Project Blue Book was the codename for the United States Air Force’s systematic study of UFOs.

00:00:32:23 – 00:00:56:27
Dan LeFebvre
Perhaps the best way to summarize it is from this fact sheet from the Air Force themselves, and I want to link to the whole thing in the show notes. If you want to read it all. But it starts like this. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated unidentified flying objects under Project Blue Book. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated December 17th, 1969.

00:00:57:00 – 00:01:28:06
Dan LeFebvre
Of a total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remained unidentified. Now, if you’re watching the video version of this, you might notice some of my little corrections to that document, because technically, Project Blue Book itself didn’t start in 1947. The truth is a little more complex than that, as we’ll hear throughout this episode. But as you might imagine, the TV show that shares the name of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book covers some of those reports created by David O’Leary.

00:01:28:07 – 00:01:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
Project blue Book ran for two seasons of ten episodes each. The first season was in 2019 and the second in 2020. So that means we have a lot to cover today. And to kick this off, we’ll get to hear from the host of one of my all time favorite UFO related podcasts, Rob Christofferson. He’ll help us separate fact from fiction in each episode of the entire series, both seasons.

00:01:51:04 – 00:02:10:08
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s two episodes, one for each season. And then for the third episode, we’ll get to go behind the TV show itself as we hear from the creator, David O’Leary and the showrunner, Sean Blonsky. Before we kick this off with Rob Christofferson, though, let’s set up our game Two Truths and a lie for the first season of Project Blue Book.

00:02:10:10 – 00:02:28:10
Dan LeFebvre
Now, if you’re new to the show, since based on a true story is all about separating fact from fiction in the movies and TV, you’ll get to practice your skills at separating fact from fiction. In this podcast episode, with the game of two Truths and lie. So I’m about to give you three things that we’ll talk about during the first season of Project Blue Book.

00:02:28:13 – 00:03:01:03
Dan LeFebvre
Two of those things are true, and one of them is just an all out lie. Are you ready? Okay. Here, there. Number one, Project Blue Book was the first time the government investigated UFOs. Number two, former Nazi Wernher von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney to promote the U.S. space program after World War two. Number three, the term Foo Fighters was used by World War Two pilots who saw unexplained phenomena.

00:03:01:06 – 00:03:20:25
Dan LeFebvre
Got them. Okay, now, as you’re listening to our story today, see if you can figure out which one of those. It’s a lie. And I’ve got the answer in the envelope right here. And we’ll open that at the end of season one of Project Bluebook to see how well you did. Oh, and speaking of the video version here, just so you know, these episodes are from the vault.

00:03:20:25 – 00:03:47:18
Dan LeFebvre
They were recorded in 2020 and 2021, respectively. And that was before I did video episodes. So these are remastered audio only episodes. But with that, now it’s time to playback my chat with Rob Christopherson from 2020 about the historical accuracy of Project Bluebook Season one.

00:03:47:21 – 00:04:24:15
Dan LeFebvre
I’d like to start by setting the stage for Doctor J. Allen Hynek and his work on Project Bluebook. Now, according to the TV show Doctor, Hynek was an astrophysics teacher at Ohio State before he he’s recruited by the US Air Force to investigate flying saucers, what they called Project Bluebook. Now, there’s one little bit of dialog in the show where they give a very vague reason as to why they picked Doctor Hynek, and it’s when General James Harding tells Captain Michael Quinn that Hynek, quote, did some things for us in the war, end quote.

00:04:24:18 – 00:04:45:24
Dan LeFebvre
So not a lot of details there about that. But they do give some details about why they started Project Blue Book itself. Now, the reason that the show gives for that was because there are Hollywood movies about aliens coming out, and the public know something’s going on, but no one knows exactly what, including the government. According to the show.

00:04:45:25 – 00:05:08:00
Dan LeFebvre
So they want to find out, but they also want to cover it up. We get the sense from the show that the military picked Hynek because of his scientific background, because he’s not in the military, they’re hoping that they can give a little bit of some scientific proof to the public for flying saucers. That’s outside of the military.

00:05:08:03 – 00:05:30:12
Dan LeFebvre
Now, in the show, Doctor Hynek agrees to join Project Bluebook on three conditions. One is that he stays on staff at Ohio State. Two is he gets a paycheck from the government, some extra money for his family. And the three is that he gets recognition for whatever he finds. So that is, according to this TV show, a kind of setting all of this up.

00:05:30:14 – 00:05:36:19
Dan LeFebvre
How well do you think the show did depicting the way that Doctor Hynek got involved in Project Bluebook?

00:05:36:21 – 00:06:08:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So Doctor Hynek, joining Project Bluebook was kind of a matter of convenience for most. So, when Project Bluebook comes into being in late 1951, this is essentially the government’s third attempt to study the UFO phenomenon. And doctor J.L. and Harnick was part of the government’s first UFO study, which is called Project Sign, signed commenced in January of 1948 and was shuttered later that year.

00:06:08:21 – 00:06:40:11
Rob Kristoffersen
He joined the project in the spring of 48, for a few different reasons. He was at the time the director of the observatory at Ohio State University. All of the government’s UFO projects were run out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was about 60 miles away from him. And Hynek already had a high security clearance from his work on the proximity fuze during World War two, which is what they kind of allude to him doing things for us during the war.

00:06:40:14 – 00:07:06:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And when you factor in all of these things, Hynek was kind of the guy they needed an astronomer to rule out any kind of astronomical explanation that there could be for the sightings. And, he was a perfect guy to do it. So, as our good friend Sam stated on the Not Alone podcast, right place, right time, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

00:07:06:08 – 00:07:10:27
Dan LeFebvre
I love that. So,

00:07:10:29 – 00:07:46:27
Rob Kristoffersen
When Hynek took the job, he believed that this would be a quick one. He was pretty sure that what the UFO phenomenon was at the time was just Cold War nerves, world War two, latent nerves, you know, stuff left over. So, one of the most important cases that Hynek worked on, and that will come full circle for his involvement in Project Blue Book is a case involving a pilot by the name of Thomas F Mantell, who died while in pursuit of a UFO in January of 1948.

00:07:47:00 – 00:08:25:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Mantell and a few other pilots were taxiing planes from Marietta, Georgia, to Stanford Field in Kentucky. And while they were doing that, Godman Air Force Base, which was located near Fort Knox, had received a few unidentified blips on their radar and asked Mantell and his crew of a few other pilots to go investigate it. Well, Mantell pursued the object, but, unfortunately, he didn’t have oxygen on board, so when his plane climbed too high, he suffered from epoxy, which basically caused him to crash his plane.

00:08:26:02 – 00:08:50:15
Rob Kristoffersen
And Hynek was the one that kind of made his determination on this case. And he claimed that he was chasing the planet Venus. So really just kind of debunking mentality. And that was at the start of Project Sine. That was the mentality that, and Hynek had. So.

00:08:50:18 – 00:09:17:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Project sine was basically shuttered largely because of a document called The Estimate of the situation, which basically said that these crafts were extraterrestrial in origin. No surviving copy of this document exists, though, like, the generals that this report went to basically said, you have to destroy every single one of these, documents. There’s no way that we’re going to the president or anybody with this kind of information.

00:09:17:06 – 00:09:54:02
Rob Kristoffersen
So no surviving copy has ever been found, but there have been people who have attested to it, including Doctor Hynek himself. So signed was shuttered and was reactivated as Project Grudge. Now, grudge was strictly a debunking campaign. They downplayed reports and at times just threw them out. Didn’t even bother to investigate them. Grudge officially lasted for about a year, but they kind of kept somebody on staff so that if somebody did want to report UFO sightings to there, there would be somebody there.

00:09:54:02 – 00:10:25:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And that guy’s name was Lieutenant Jerry Cummings. And in 1951, there was a sighting at Fort Monroe, Monmouth, new Jersey, and Air Force personnel witnessed a disc shaped object. And a report was, filed, but was ultimately dismissed by Cummings under the directive that he had been working with. And this report made its name to a general by the name of CP Campbell, who requested to see the report and didn’t really like the looks of it.

00:10:25:15 – 00:10:55:04
Rob Kristoffersen
He didn’t feel like people were being honest with him, and Cummings basically told him how the project had been handled up to this point, that it was there just to debunk reports. And, at that point, Cummings got or sorry, Campbell got pretty angry and, he ordered that, Project Grudge be reactivated in full force. Unfortunately, Cummings was on his way out, back to a civilian life.

00:10:55:04 – 00:11:08:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So he got a gentleman by the name of Captain Edward Rupert, who was the first Project Bluebook head to, spearhead this project. So.

00:11:08:12 – 00:11:32:16
Rob Kristoffersen
Captain Rupert was essentially the backup pilot, for the crew of the Enola Gay. So if any, of the pilots that were involved in that flight couldn’t, somehow make it, for whatever reason, he was the guy that was going to fly that plane, and he had worked with Doctor Hynek before on Project Sign, and he quickly got in there.

00:11:32:16 – 00:11:52:15
Rob Kristoffersen
He whipped this project into shape, and it soon it would be relabeled Project Blue Book. But one of the things that he did was he went back into the old reports just to see what was there, to see how things were ruled. And Rupert was the kind of guy who was going to give you his objective opinion.

00:11:52:15 – 00:12:14:20
Rob Kristoffersen
He wanted this to be as objective study as possible. So if you leaned one way, either one way to one side or the other, you were kicked off the team. So, one case report that he looked at was the Thomas F Mantell case, and he saw that Hynek was the one that made the determination on that one.

00:12:14:22 – 00:12:47:00
Rob Kristoffersen
So he basically called him up and said, I need you to come back in here. We need to reexamine this case. They determined that what Mantell was chasing was a Project Mogul balloon. This was a newly declassified project. As of 1951, that essentially set up weather balloons to, with audio equipment attached to them. And they were basically there to detect Soviet atomic bomb tests.

00:12:47:03 – 00:12:56:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And that’s basically how Hynek made his way onto Project Bluebook. He stayed, after that, through the entirety of the project.

00:12:57:01 – 00:13:14:26
Dan LeFebvre
So just to make sure I’m understanding there was a captain, because in the show, there’s Captain Quinn, and we also meet a couple generals. General Harding and General Valentine are the character names. Were they also were they based on those, those generals and the captain that you were referring to, or they just completely fictional?

00:13:14:29 – 00:13:55:22
Rob Kristoffersen
They’re inspired. They’re not, totally those people. For instance, Captain Quinn is kind of based on to Project Blue book heads, Edward Powell, like I mentioned. And, another one by the name of Colonel Robert Friend, who was a Tuskegee Airman, and he served, I think, for about a year. But he was he had had that Edward Pelt mentality, which was he they were skeptical, but they wouldn’t let their, skeptical beliefs really shatter any kind of, reports or anything like that or, you know, lead them down a road.

00:13:55:22 – 00:14:24:12
Rob Kristoffersen
They didn’t think they should be going. In general, Valentine, I do believe, is based on General Nathan Twining, who was the general that actually created Project Sign, and he was kind of a figure in the background during the government UFO research project. So he was always kind of there in the background, always kind of got Intel and he’s, you know, made some interesting statements on UFOs and such.

00:14:24:14 – 00:14:36:05
Rob Kristoffersen
The there’s some funny interviews with him. There’s one in which he alludes to UFOs kind of thwarting U.S. forces in Vietnam and stuff like that. It’s, there’s a lot of fun stuff out there.

00:14:36:08 – 00:14:49:19
Dan LeFebvre
Well, yeah. Okay. I was just curious because obviously Doctor Hynek being real. I was just curious who on the military side of it would have been real. But it sounds like they’re more just composite characters, which is very common that we get for movies and TV shows.

00:14:49:22 – 00:14:59:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, for the most part, the only, real to life characters on the show are Doctor Allen Hynek and his wife, Mimi. Mimi Hynek.

00:14:59:21 – 00:15:25:25
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned the pilot there, and that leads right into the next question that I have, because in episode one, it kicks off with something that they call the Fuller Incident. Now, I’m going to assume that’s not necessarily the the same incident that you were referring to, because this in the show at least happens in Fargo, North Dakota, and it’s named after Lieutenant Henry Fuller, who is the pilot who gets into this dogfight with a flying saucer.

00:15:25:27 – 00:15:48:18
Dan LeFebvre
And according to the show, that was essentially the reason why they started Project Blue Book. But then after the investigation of the incident, Doctor Hynek concludes that the object the lieutenant was chasing was nothing more than a weather balloon. And you mentioned something similar to that. So was the fuller incident that we see in the show. That event that you were referring to, is that something else?

00:15:48:20 – 00:16:20:04
Rob Kristoffersen
No, that’s a little bit different. It has some of the hallmarks of the Thomas F Mantell case, but the Fuller incident is based directly on an incident called the Gorman dogfight. And, this involved a man by the name of George F Gorman, who was an Air National Guard pilot out of Fargo, North Dakota. And on October 1st, 1948, his squadron was returning from a flight at night, and Gorman decided he wanted to stay up in the air for a little bit, longer for some night flying practice.

00:16:20:04 – 00:16:42:06
Rob Kristoffersen
And after circling around a football stadium, this was around 9 p.m. that night. He was approaching Hector Airport and was notified by the tower that there was a Piper Cub plane below him. And, he was forced to circle the airport for a short period of time. And on one pass, he saw what he believed to be the tail light of another craft.

00:16:42:06 – 00:17:10:26
Rob Kristoffersen
Pass the cape, the Piper Cub plane on his right. It was white and color, blinking in intervals and approximately 6 to 8in in diameter. So this object was not registering on radar in any way. But, he went into an investigate it. And when Gorman made his approach, the light stopped blinking and basically just took off. And Gorman engage with the object.

00:17:10:26 – 00:17:40:28
Rob Kristoffersen
He pursued it. He found himself out, maneuvered basically at every turn, but was able to get behind it at one point. But when he did, the object basically turned around and flew straight in his direction. It passed right over his canopy and turned around to do it again. But before it seemingly was supposed to make impact, the light abruptly turned upward and shot straight up into the air.

00:17:41:01 – 00:18:04:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Now, Gorman attempted to pursue the object, but it was such a steep climb that his plane stalled out at 14,000ft. He was able to restart it, though, and landed. So, it’s not like it is. It’s depicted in the show. It’s the. He doesn’t crash the plane or anything, but, what makes this sighting so powerful is that there were numerous eyewitnesses to it.

00:18:04:29 – 00:18:28:05
Rob Kristoffersen
The two men manning the tower that night, Lloyd de Jensen and H. Johnson attested to the object’s fast speed, maneuverability, and the Piper Cub plane. The pilot of it, doctor A.E. cannon, also saw the light and testified to basically the same thing. And here’s a here’s a fun quote from, Mr. Gorman, quote.

00:18:28:05 – 00:19:08:18
Rob Kristoffersen
I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvering. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia, because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate, and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve. End quote. So this case was one of the Landmark Project’s nine cases, the other being The Test, the death of Thomas F Mantell, and another account known as the Child’s Weighted Account, which involved two civilian pilots that witness basically a long cigar shaped object fly alongside their plane at night.

00:19:08:21 – 00:19:18:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So that’s really what, that incident and, what that, episode was based on.

00:19:18:03 – 00:19:22:08
Dan LeFebvre
Sounds like movements that you would expect from a weather balloon. Right.

00:19:22:10 – 00:19:32:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Kind of. It kind of reminded me of, like, if you think about it, like, maybe like an alien playing with a laser pointer, you know, it’s it’s got those hallmarks there, I like that.

00:19:32:19 – 00:19:33:21
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

00:19:33:23 – 00:19:36:03
Dan LeFebvre
There you go. And we’re just the cats following along, right.

00:19:36:05 – 00:19:37:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Absolutely.

00:19:37:15 – 00:19:57:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, something that happened after this in the show was when Doctor Hynek used the term UFO for the first time. And, it was I thought this was funny because when he used it, the Captain Green character, you kind of looks at him as like a what? And then he goes on to explain, well, I’m kind of trying to coin this term to explain what we’re investigating.

00:19:57:16 – 00:20:02:13
Dan LeFebvre
Was he the one that actually coined the term UFO? And was it after that incident?

00:20:02:15 – 00:20:28:26
Rob Kristoffersen
No. Actually, the person that coined the term is it’s one of the people that coined is based on, Edward Rupert. He actually coined the term and early 52, he was looking for a different term because, flying saucer had such, negative, connotation associated with it. So he wanted a fresh term to go in with an unidentified flying object, is what he came up with.

00:20:28:28 – 00:20:36:25
Dan LeFebvre
I guess. Makes sense, too, because it’s not. You mentioned earlier a cigar shaped craft. They’re not always saucer shaped.

00:20:36:27 – 00:20:37:29
Rob Kristoffersen
No.

00:20:38:02 – 00:21:05:05
Dan LeFebvre
Now, in episode two of the show, Doctor Hynek and Captain Queen go to investigate a case in West Virginia where a mother and her children see something strange. And this is the case, according to the show called The Flatwoods Monster, because it’s not a flying saucer. This time or a UFO use that term, but it’s also involving a creature of some sort.

00:21:05:07 – 00:21:25:11
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe an alien creature. Well, that’s what Doctor Hynek and Captain Queen are there to find out. Ultimately, Doctor Hynek once again gives a rational explanation for the strange things that were seen. He stands up in front of the town and gives this speech. Captain Quinn and Doctor Hynek explained that the spaceship they saw was just a meteor.

00:21:25:14 – 00:21:47:00
Dan LeFebvre
The creature that they saw was a great horned owl. And Doctor Hynek goes on to give a scientific explanation about hot air and cold air, causing light to refract in different directions. It’s why stars twinkle and mirages are formed in the desert, according to his explanation. And it’s also how you can see an owl in a burning forest and think it’s a monster.

00:21:47:03 – 00:22:00:28
Dan LeFebvre
So that’s how the the movie or I’m sorry in the movie, the TV show sets up the flatwoods monster case. Was that a real investigation and how well did the show do explaining those events that happened?

00:22:01:00 – 00:22:30:04
Rob Kristoffersen
The flatwoods monster case was a real case that, took place in September of 1952. And it really is almost something out of a horror movie, especially when you look online at the images that were created once the eyewitnesses described what they were seeing. So, a group of kids, Eddie and Fred Mae and Tommy Heyer, witnessed this fireball in the sky in September of 1952.

00:22:30:07 – 00:22:55:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And they saw it go down in the forest. So they gathered a small group that included, the Mae’s mother and Gene Lemmon, who was a 17 year old National Guard member. And Lemmon led the charge into the into the forest. And they had first see what they believe was just two lights. But the more that they stare at them, the more that they realized that they look more like eyes.

00:22:56:02 – 00:23:23:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And then they see this large metallic looking creature that had, they described it like a spade behind its head, but it was completely red and apparently everyone in this group, which consisted of seven the seven people witnessed this creature. The town was kind of on edge a little bit, but not as bad as they depict it in the show.

00:23:24:01 – 00:23:54:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But, Project Blue Book really didn’t play much of a part in this case. This was really more investigated by civilian, UFO groups and, independent investigators. One of the most prominent was a an investigator named Gray Barker, who, did and investigated a number of cases, including the, famed Mothman flap in, West Virginia in 1966 and 1967.

00:23:54:11 – 00:24:32:06
Rob Kristoffersen
But basically all Project Blue Book did was looked at the, sighting of the object in the sky and just basically determined that it was a meteor. But they didn’t seem to acknowledge the creature at all in their, in their files. So, yeah, they didn’t really play much of a part, but, I did enjoy the depiction, of the way that they did things the skeptics have pointed to, an owl in a tree as being the culprit of this, but, I don’t necessarily pi that.

00:24:32:09 – 00:24:35:19
Dan LeFebvre
But it’s but it’s just, you know, the hot air and the cold air and.

00:24:35:21 – 00:24:36:02
Sean Jablonski
Well, the.

00:24:36:02 – 00:24:48:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Cool thing is the, when he’s talking about how stars twinkle, he was the astronomer that discovered how stars twinkle. So. Oh, it’s kind of fitting for him, you know?

00:24:48:29 – 00:24:58:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, well, that’s cool. I didn’t realize that. That they. I’m sure they they pulled that in as a as a little, little nugget there too, for somebody to find that cool.

00:24:58:03 – 00:25:25:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Or the, the cool thing about this show is that his children, Paul and I think another one of his children actually consult for the show. So it’s a lot more it’s it has its, you know, dramatic elements, but it’s, pretty accurate, as best as they have been able to contribute, there are some mannerisms that Aidan Gillen will do that, apparently are the same ones that Doctor Hynek would do.

00:25:25:22 – 00:25:54:04
Rob Kristoffersen
And, and, they’ve actually used like, personal items that, Jalen Hynek and maybe Hynek had for their characters in the show. So, you know, it’s a cool it’s a cool nod. And, the show is very respectful of his legacy. So I, I appreciate it for that because he is this really monumental figure in UFO research.

00:25:54:07 – 00:26:20:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, let’s, continue on because there’s more episodes that we need to cover. After the flatwoods monster case, we see that Doctor Hynek is he’s taking his role very seriously, and he’s he’s really trying his best to come up with some scientific rationale behind both the faller incident and the flatwoods monster. But then the next case is the Lubbock Lights.

00:26:20:04 – 00:26:40:11
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s when things start to change as far as the show is concerned. And this is episode number three in the series. It’s the first time that both Captain Quinn and Doctor Hynek experienced something themselves. They’re out in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, and Captain Quinn is inside the car and Doctor Hynek is outside of the car.

00:26:40:11 – 00:27:13:16
Dan LeFebvre
When the car just starts going crazy, lights are flashing, the radios tuning frequencies, the entire car is shaking, and then a massive V-shaped crack with blue lights fly over, and they both see it now in the show. General Harding and General Valentine in the military give Quinn and Hynek the explanation that what they saw was a top secret experimental craft that has a V shape wing, and they show some photos that look like they could be real from that time period.

00:27:13:18 – 00:27:38:12
Dan LeFebvre
But despite this explanation, Doctor Hynek doesn’t believe that this is true. Doesn’t really believe what the military is telling him. And so he’s starting to get the sense that perhaps he’s not getting the full story. At the very end of episode three, we see him writing in his notebook. He writes possible government cover up. So was the series correct?

00:27:38:12 – 00:27:49:27
Dan LeFebvre
And showing that Doctor Hynek started to have experiences of his own that he couldn’t explain around the time of the Lubbock Lights? And did he start to suspect that he wasn’t being fed the full story from the Air Force?

00:27:49:29 – 00:28:15:20
Rob Kristoffersen
Hynek, as far as I know, never witnessed a UFO while investigating any cases during Project Blue Book. There’s a really great biography of him called The Close Encounters Man by Mark O’Connell, and in it he talks about a sighting that he may have had while looking, through a telescope. He claimed he saw, like a strange object, fly over the face of the moon or something like that.

00:28:15:20 – 00:28:56:17
Rob Kristoffersen
But, he never had an overt UFO experience during his time. In regards to what the Air Force was letting him in on, Hynek was the one of the people that was on the inside. So it they never really kept anything from him. If anything, he knew things that he couldn’t really talk about. And, in 1953, there was a CIA led panel called the Robertson Panel, which basically came in, and the reason why they came in, we’ll, it’ll be coming up later in, in the line of questioning.

00:28:56:17 – 00:29:32:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And then it pertains to an episode like the last episode in the season. But they came in, they assessed the work of, Project Bluebook, and they basically determined that, like Project Grudge, they had to now downplay reports in order to keep the public calm. So, in order to prevent mass hysteria, they were going to have to misidentify things and, essentially Project Blue Book from 1953 onwards became Project Grudge all over again.

00:29:32:21 – 00:30:17:15
Rob Kristoffersen
But Hynek was there. He was he was doing the best that he could. He couldn’t really come forward and say what he wanted and not. Or he would be losing access to the Project Blue Book Files, which at the time were the best place to get UFO files from. There weren’t civilian organizations as of yet. They would pop up not long after, but, essentially in 53, that was a turning point for Hynek, where he had started to change from this total skeptic there to debunk reports to, okay, now I’m being told that I can’t do my job properly.

00:30:17:20 – 00:30:41:23
Rob Kristoffersen
I don’t like this, so I don’t really trust the CIA at this point. And, he would essentially go through this metamorphosis over time where he would become a believer in the phenomenon. So the way that they kind of depict it in the show, his turn doesn’t happen that quickly, but, it does it does happen over time.

00:30:41:25 – 00:30:57:08
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah. It sounds like they, again, we see this a lot in movies and TV shows where they simplified it. It sounds like they just gave him an experience. Instead of trying to explain the CIA panel and all of these other, aspects, perhaps.

00:30:57:10 – 00:31:26:11
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. Absolutely. And, the Lubbock Lights photographs are real photographs. I do believe the ones they show in the actual episode are the real Lubbock Light photographs. And, that case took place in early 51. That was during the transitionary period from when Rupert was coming in. But, that was a case that stumped a lot of people.

00:31:26:13 – 00:31:50:18
Rob Kristoffersen
There were scientists that studied it, and, the the individual that actually took the photographs. He was a student, I do believe, at one of the universities. They took these photographs over a couple different nights, but they essentially show a group of lights in an arrow type shape, in passing over the skies of Lubbock, Texas.

00:31:50:18 – 00:31:55:19
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s, it’s really fascinating case. Then, go look up those photos online.

00:31:55:19 – 00:31:56:20
Sean Jablonski
They’re fun.

00:31:56:22 – 00:32:14:26
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And in, in the show, don’t they kind of pass it off as possibly a flock of birds or something like that, reflecting off lights. Was that a, an excuse or a, natural reason that was kind of thrown around there as one of the possibilities.

00:32:14:29 – 00:32:42:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, that was an actual reason that, investigators pinned, and they did end up doing a test and taking photographs. And what happened was you could see one speck of light from one bird. There wasn’t enough, reflection to actually pick it up. So it’s not clear exactly what the Lubbock lights were. They actually traveled quite fast.

00:32:42:25 – 00:32:51:11
Rob Kristoffersen
They determined, when they flew over them, that they were traveling at somewhere near 1800 miles an hour or so. Pretty sure birds can’t do that.

00:32:51:18 – 00:32:55:04
Sean Jablonski
Not many birds that they come across. Okay.

00:32:55:06 – 00:32:58:21
Dan LeFebvre
I hope not. At least that would be, the fast flying birds.

00:32:58:24 – 00:32:59:08
Rob Kristoffersen
That is a.

00:32:59:08 – 00:33:02:14
Sean Jablonski
Flat like work.

00:33:02:16 – 00:33:33:02
Dan LeFebvre
Well, the the next episode, episode number four, brings in Operation Paperclip. And this is when we’re introduced to Verner von Braun. He is a former Nazi who built the V-2 rocket and post-World War II two. He’s heading up America’s space program. So Doctor Quinn and or. I’m sorry, doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn get a firsthand look at von Braun’s work, as they think that maybe one of the UFOs that they’re investigating is just one of his rockets, and it’s a top secret rocket.

00:33:33:04 – 00:34:00:17
Dan LeFebvre
So during this on the show, von Braun pulls Doctor Hynek aside and offers him a job to work with him. But Doctor Hynek doesn’t trust the former Nazi. I wonder why. But then, regardless, von Braun tells Doctor Hynek that he can’t explain the sightings. He knows about anybody. He can’t explain them. And then at the end of the episode, we see von Braun overseeing a test with an American pilot being forced into a giant flying saucer.

00:34:00:19 – 00:34:23:12
Dan LeFebvre
And as the saucer starts to take off, there’s some massive rings rotating around it. Obviously, you know, we have some effects going on there and then, you know, poof, it just disappears. And then von Braun simply says it worked like he’s not. The IT show is implying that he’s working on a lot more than just rockets. Can you give us an overview of Operation Paperclip?

00:34:23:12 – 00:34:31:26
Dan LeFebvre
And did Project Bluebook cross with paperclip and take Doctor Hynek to meet up with, Verner von Braun?

00:34:31:28 – 00:34:33:12
Sean Jablonski
So.

00:34:33:15 – 00:35:02:21
Rob Kristoffersen
For Operation Paperclip? Basically, as World War Two was winding down, American, British and Russian forces were racing to scour Germany for military resources, technological advances and anything that they could get their hands on that the Germans may have created, the Germans at the time were known for, really high technological advances, especially in, in rocketry.

00:35:02:23 – 00:35:30:17
Rob Kristoffersen
And, the allies actually discovered a list called the Ozen Berg List that contain the names of every single scientist, that had worked for the Third Reich. Funny enough, they found it in a toilet. So let’s take that for what you will. Okay. The allies, essentially tracked down 1600 scientists and brought them to America. The OSS, the sponge, expunge their records.

00:35:30:19 – 00:36:04:29
Rob Kristoffersen
So they were basically given a slate clean slate to work for the government. And the most infamous individual was, Wernher von Braun. And he is basically the father of modern rocketry. He designed the V-2 rocket, and he was instrumental for us, in the space race. He pretty much got us to the moon. So, I got to say, Dan, I didn’t really expect to find anything because I didn’t think that Hynek had done anything with V-2 rockets or had met Wernher von Braun.

00:36:04:29 – 00:36:21:15
Rob Kristoffersen
But, you brought out the best to me, Dan. So I got to thank you for that. Now, I discovered this blog post on, I think it was Ohio Moo Funds website. And let me tell you, this website looks like it’s from the 90s. I love it.

00:36:21:18 – 00:36:23:13
Sean Jablonski
Hey, nice.

00:36:23:15 – 00:36:55:16
Rob Kristoffersen
And it was written by John Hynek secretary, a woman named Jenny Zeeman, and apparently Hynek worked on V-2 rockets while at White Sands Missile Range after the war. Now, he had imagined he had allegedly met Wernher von Braun at that time. But nothing. Nobody has ever come forward with this information like it’s not even in his biography. And even Heinrich’s closest friends do not know anything about this.

00:36:55:18 – 00:37:07:18
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, apparently he may have worked on, V-2 rockets at one point. So, Yeah, that that’s new information to me, man. So good job.

00:37:07:21 – 00:37:18:07
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. No, I mean, there are two high profile characters. I mean, I’m I’m not intimately familiar with Von Braun, but he’s kind of the the face.

00:37:18:07 – 00:37:19:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Of.

00:37:19:22 – 00:37:42:03
Dan LeFebvre
The US after the war, getting a lot of of Nazi scientists to to work on American technology. And for me, he was always kind of the face of that. So when I saw them together on the show, I knew that was something I had to ask, like, did they actually meet each other? Or is this just a show, having two names that people might recognize and using it as an excuse to put those two together?

00:37:42:06 – 00:37:47:15
Rob Kristoffersen
Right. Yeah. And, apparently they did cross cross paths at one point.

00:37:47:18 – 00:38:05:29
Dan LeFebvre
Well, speaking of crossing paths with names, I’m going to ask you another one here, because in the show there’s one point where Doctor Hynek tells Captain Quinn, as you know, he doesn’t trust Von Braun. And he’s like, you know, how do you make a Nazi look legitimate? You have Walt Disney give him his own special and Beemer right into your living room.

00:38:06:01 – 00:38:13:13
Dan LeFebvre
And we see this happen on the show. Did Von Braun and Walt Disney actually team up for a TV special?

00:38:13:15 – 00:38:37:24
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, yeah, a number of times. The first time was on an episode, what they called Disneyland back at that time. Today, you would know it as the wonderful world of Disney and he appeared on screen to talk about plans for the American government to go to the moon. So, he would also appear in a number of Disney specials after that.

00:38:37:24 – 00:38:51:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So Wernher von Braun was the face, early on of the for the space race. So, yeah, he definitely did team up with, Walt Disney a time or two.

00:38:51:03 – 00:39:17:05
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. That’s that’s fascinating. Wow. Okay, so moving on to the next episode. This is episode number five, and it’s entitled Foo Fighters. And in this episode, we see that Lieutenant Fuller from the very first episode, he’s back. And this time he’s in a group of people who have experienced something similar to him. You know, lights in the sky, maybe not the exact same thing as him, but they’re all similar experiences.

00:39:17:07 – 00:39:46:02
Dan LeFebvre
And Captain Quinn explains the title of the show. He explains that during World War Two, pilots would see lights that they couldn’t explain, and they called them Foo Fighters. That’s why they named the episode that. But in the episode, Lieutenant Fuller and his group of experiencers show Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn the lights themselves. They bring out this contraption that they’ve built, and they seem to be able to call the lights, to them.

00:39:46:05 – 00:40:12:11
Dan LeFebvre
But Doctor Hynek is quick to dismiss these as just car truck headlights bouncing off the fog in the distance. They’re not really calling them to them. And then at the end of the episode, Doctor Hynek runs across Fuller at a secret hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that’s now abandoned. And Doctor Hynek shows Fuller something and almost immediately, Fuller douses himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire.

00:40:12:13 – 00:40:37:24
Dan LeFebvre
Now, after this, the show cuts to General Harding and General Valentine. This is very stereotypical, secret government. They’re just kind of sitting around this table in, you know, very dark room and just kind of what you would expect for a secret military government, I guess. But, but they talk about how somebody or something must have flipped Fuller’s off switch, whatever that means.

00:40:37:25 – 00:41:01:03
Dan LeFebvre
It doesn’t really explain a lot right there. It just says, oh, it must have flipped him off, which sounds like something else, but that’s. But, in the show, they said, flip the off switch. Now, when I was watching this episode, it was one of the first episodes that I was thinking, am maybe this really wasn’t based on something real.

00:41:01:06 – 00:41:24:27
Dan LeFebvre
After all, the episode itself was claiming that Foo Fighters were was a term used in World War Two, and this is, after all, after World War Two. And so I just assumed that maybe this was the show stretching things, and I got the implication just watching the show, that Doctor Hynek probably never actually investigated Foo Fighters because those were during World War Two.

00:41:24:27 – 00:41:32:03
Dan LeFebvre
And this is supposed to be happening after World War two. Or am I wrong there? Did he actually investigate Foo Fighters like we see in the show?

00:41:32:05 – 00:42:04:25
Rob Kristoffersen
He did not investigate Foo Fighters. He was really busy working on the proximity fuze by that time. But, Foo Fighters were a real phenomenon during the war. And it was experienced by both Allied pilots and axis pilots, and they both believed that this was, technology from both sides being thrown at planes. But, that’s kind of confusing because like, clearly it’s not none of them, you know, claimed responsibility for it.

00:42:04:27 – 00:42:33:17
Rob Kristoffersen
And, if we’re talking about, like, the Germans, the Germans would totally take responsibility for that back in the day. There’s no way that they wouldn’t. But yeah, the Hynek never investigated the Foo Fighters. There wasn’t really a lot of, resources to investigate the Foo Fighters at the time. They there was a brief investigation done by American forces, but they couldn’t come to any definitive conclusion.

00:42:33:17 – 00:42:49:11
Rob Kristoffersen
But, yeah. Doctor Hynek, he was working on that proximity fuze, which I do believe time magazine ranked it as the third best innovation to come from the Second World War.

00:42:49:14 – 00:42:51:04
Dan LeFebvre
What is the proximity fuze?

00:42:51:07 – 00:43:14:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Basically, it’s a fuze that sends out radio waves. And when the radio waves bounce off something and come back and that signal gets shorter and shorter, the bomb basically explodes and realistically, you see that same technology in, like, noise cancellation headphones. Now.

00:43:14:11 – 00:43:16:00
Dan LeFebvre
We have Doctor Hynek to thank for that.

00:43:16:02 – 00:43:17:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah.

00:43:17:21 – 00:43:42:25
Dan LeFebvre
So I’m curious though, because in the in the show, when we see Lieutenant Fuller, his off switch flipped or whatever happens there and he it’s a very tragic death. It you know, he sets himself on fire. But if his experience was based on, a pilot named Gorman, I believe you said, was that what essentially what happened to Gorman?

00:43:42:27 – 00:43:57:28
Rob Kristoffersen
No. There’s not a lot known about Gorman, but he seemingly lived a normal life after the Gorman dogfight. He served in the, forces for a little bit longer, and then, went off and did his own thing.

00:43:58:00 – 00:44:26:24
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, well, the next investigation in the show covers green fireballs. They’re sighted over a nuclear testing ground. And Project Bluebook is called in to verify that these are, in fact, meteors, a perfectly natural explanation. But something happens during the investigation, and Doctor Hynek sees the fireballs in the sky himself. And they are very clearly not meteors. Now, with another super secretive character on screen.

00:44:26:27 – 00:44:47:00
Dan LeFebvre
Man, that is simply cast. I had to look them up afterwards, he just to see if he had an actual name. But they just call him the Fixer. He shows up and, Doctor Hynek theorizes out loud that perhaps the green fireballs are some sort of craft monitoring our nuclear testing sites, because that’s where they were seen.

00:44:47:03 – 00:44:53:23
Dan LeFebvre
Can you give us an overview of the the real event that this episode had based on and what Doctor Heinrich’s reaction was to it?

00:44:53:25 – 00:45:23:04
Rob Kristoffersen
Sure. In November of 1948, reports started to trickle in, out in the west of of the phenomenon known as green fireballs. They were at first quickly dismissed as green military flares, but on the night of December 5th, 1948, two separate plane crews, one military and one civilian, in New Mexico, each attested to seeing a green fireball while in the air.

00:45:23:06 – 00:45:41:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Each of them described the object resembling a green meteor, but ruled out meteors when the object basically abruptly turned, turned up, and then leveled off, which I’ve never heard of a meteor doing. But, you know, the those fancy meteors, they just do what they want these days.

00:45:42:00 – 00:45:44:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you’ve never heard of birds that fly that fast either, so.

00:45:44:10 – 00:45:46:10
Sean Jablonski
No meaning.

00:45:46:13 – 00:46:17:04
Rob Kristoffersen
So, three days after that sighting on the eighth to Air Force Office of Special Investigations, pilots witnessed similar phenomena while they were in the air. And they described it as resembling a military flare. But it was too big and it was a lot brighter. And then four days after that, a man by the name of Doctor Lincoln LaPaz, he was an astronomer with the University of New Mexico, had his own sighting of the green fireballs.

00:46:17:04 – 00:46:40:29
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot of people were seeing them in and around military bases in New Mexico, mostly. And, he basically was able to triangulate their position over Los Alamos National Laboratory. And in a letter to the Air Force, he stated that they could not be a meteor because it was traveling too slow at the time, and it didn’t have a tail coming off of it.

00:46:41:02 – 00:47:14:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So those sightings would continue from, yeah, November of 1948 until April of 1949, and most of them were centered in New Mexico. Now, Doctor LaPaz was tasked by the government to study the phenomenon. So it wasn’t carried out by this would have been, Project Grudge at this point. Went from project sign to Project Grudge. But the military was growing concerned that this was, foreign weapon, which could, you know, would make sense for them.

00:47:14:21 – 00:47:39:28
Rob Kristoffersen
It seems weapon like. So, a lot of their top secret projects were also conducted in New Mexico. So it makes sense that they would be, interested in it. And there were also similar objects sited over nuclear storage areas in Fort Hood, Texas. So, Doctor LaPaz determined that whatever these objects were, they were not natural.

00:47:39:29 – 00:48:16:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Most, or. Yeah, they were not natural. Most of the sightings were centered. Yeah, really in Los Alamos National Laboratory and many of the staff there, he interviewed and many of them claimed to see these green fireballs. Now, the sightings would become more sporadic after April of 49, but, they still continued on to the point where, in December of 1950, the government decided to set up an instrument observation station at Holloman Air Force Base, and it was only manned by two officers.

00:48:16:00 – 00:48:22:23
Rob Kristoffersen
But they, classified this project as Project Twinkle.

00:48:22:25 – 00:48:57:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So, LaPaz, you know, had other ideas. He felt like this deserved a more rigorous study. And ultimately, when the government was done in 1950, they would downplay the sightings in their final report. But the sightings still continued on after that for a little while. Every witness that saw them claimed that it could not have been a natural phenomenon, which is, you know, rare because you’re talking about trained observers, scientists and the such.

00:48:57:11 – 00:49:20:17
Rob Kristoffersen
Another fun fact about Doctor LaPaz. He had an earlier UFO sighting in 1947. And it was in Roswell, New Mexico. So he may have witnessed the actual Roswell craft crash, maybe, I don’t know, but, it’s just an interesting little tidbit there, but, Hynek, we’re not really sure of what Hynek thought about these.

00:49:20:17 – 00:49:37:27
Rob Kristoffersen
We’ve never gotten any comments from him about it. And the investigation wasn’t carried out by Project Sign or Grudge. It was something that the government was trying to keep under wraps. So, yeah, not really sure what happened and what Hynek thought there.

00:49:38:00 – 00:50:03:26
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if there were many other, cases like that that were outside of Project Sign or garage or Bluebook? I guess I’m assuming that those projects were the kind of the official official government investigation. And it sounds like this one was kind of, and off the books. Not really. I mean official, but not really official, if that makes sense.

00:50:03:26 – 00:50:10:22
Dan LeFebvre
You know, in that way, to kind of not throw it in with all the others where there are a lot of other cases like that that we know of.

00:50:10:24 – 00:50:42:11
Rob Kristoffersen
Not really. There isn’t a lot of declassified information that I’ve ever come across that really points to additional, government studies. Though Hynek later in his career, after really Project Bluebook was shuttered, he would make these comments that he was like the public face of like the UFO investigations, but he always made it seem like there was something else going on behind the scenes that the public didn’t know.

00:50:42:11 – 00:50:46:21
Rob Kristoffersen
So there’s a possibility that there are projects that we don’t even know about.

00:50:46:24 – 00:50:47:15
Dan LeFebvre
Of course.

00:50:47:17 – 00:50:49:14
Sean Jablonski
Yeah. Okay.

00:50:49:16 – 00:51:11:29
Dan LeFebvre
Well, moving on to the next episode. We’re up to episode number seven, and we come across the first hoax in this series. And according to the show, it’s with a Boy Scout troop leader who claims to see a UFO and even claims to shoot at it and hit the alien that comes out of the craft. And for some time, the Scoutmaster disappears.

00:51:12:03 – 00:51:35:03
Dan LeFebvre
But then he staggers back into town, just as Doctor Hynek is explaining that the lights that they saw were caused by swamp gas. And before long, though, Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn are able to figure out that the town’s sheriff sent a telegram to Hollywood about having proof about the flying saucer story. And that happened before the scoutmaster came back into town with that proof.

00:51:35:03 – 00:51:49:00
Dan LeFebvre
So it would seem that the sheriff and the Scoutmaster were in on this, trying to make a bunch of money on, what clearly was a hoax, trying to sell the movie rights. Did this hoax really happen the way that we see in the show?

00:51:49:03 – 00:52:17:24
Rob Kristoffersen
Man, this is one of my all time favorite cases. This is a really fun one. This is the case of a Florida scoutmaster by the name of Sunny divergence uncorked on August 19th, 1952. Divergence was, driving a group of Boy Scouts home, when he saw a bright light flash over. It’s a trail called Military Trail near West Palm Beach, Florida.

00:52:17:27 – 00:52:42:19
Rob Kristoffersen
He thought it could have been a stranded motorist or a plane that had gone down. So he pulled over onto the shoulder and basically went in to investigate. He told the three boys that, he was driving home to remain in the car, and he basically took a machete and a, flashlight with him, and he instructed the boys to run to the farmhouse that was nearby.

00:52:42:19 – 00:53:09:21
Rob Kristoffersen
If he didn’t come back in 15 minutes or so from the car, the boys claimed that they could see like a ring of lights, descending into a grove of trees. And they could also see, the flashlight as well. And when they saw that his flashlight had gone out, the boys ran to the farmhouse, and soon an officer arrived on scene and they were, about to commence a search.

00:53:09:24 – 00:53:38:23
Rob Kristoffersen
And it had been an hour or so, but divergence emerged from the, palmettos and was frantically waving his machete in the air and just, like, raving like a mad man. But, according to his testimony, he had been searching for about four minutes when he started to smell this nauseating odor. He also said that you felt like he was being watched, and he next claimed to feel this really intense heat that was coming down from above him.

00:53:38:23 – 00:54:03:12
Rob Kristoffersen
And when he looked up, he could not see the stars above him. There was this object that was just hovering over him, and it was, he described it as a dull black object in the shape of a saucer approximately 30ft in diameter. Divergence moved back from the object. And when he did, he claimed to hear this metallic scraping sound.

00:54:03:14 – 00:54:31:07
Rob Kristoffersen
And when he looked up again, there was this hatch that was opened on the side of the object. He noticed a red light coming from the inside it, and it soon developed into a mist that engulfed his body. And, the divergence lost consciousness not long after that, and he woke up a short time later and he was propped up against a tree, but he couldn’t really remember propping himself up against a tree.

00:54:31:09 – 00:54:57:17
Rob Kristoffersen
And his eyes were apparently so burned that he couldn’t see out of them. But, divergence underwent questioning with the local police, and they had noticed that the hairs on his arms were actually singed. So, they also went back to the area of where it where it occurred, and they discovered burnt patches of grass on the ground.

00:54:57:19 – 00:55:27:02
Rob Kristoffersen
Now, when Project Bluebook was notified, Edward Ruppel went to investigate and he took samples and then had them tested. They found that the soil had only been burnt at the top. So whatever had happened to them, it wasn’t some kind of natural rot from underneath that or anything like that. But Rupert would come to call this entire case a hoax, and in fact, he would call divergence the best hoax or that he had ever seen.

00:55:27:04 – 00:55:47:22
Rob Kristoffersen
He was painted as media hungry and also an opportunist willing to sell his story. But the problem was, is that they were never able to explain how he did it. They were never able to explain the burnt patches of grass, or like they couldn’t explain anything that this guy did. They just did hoax.

00:55:47:24 – 00:55:57:29
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow. Okay, so even after the investigation, they’re just like, we’re not going to even bother to try to figure out exactly what happened here. Just assume that he’s he’s hosting it.

00:55:58:01 – 00:56:24:06
Rob Kristoffersen
It those kind of cases. And they were very rare at the time like case cases, something very extreme. It’s on the level of like, a flatwoods monster kind of incident. And the government didn’t really want to get involved with cases like that. And you would see, from time to time that, if they were reported, they would downplay them almost immediately.

00:56:24:06 – 00:56:30:12
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, the government really didn’t want to talk about weird cases like that.

00:56:30:15 – 00:56:52:25
Dan LeFebvre
I’m curious, though, because one of the things that we see in the show, I mentioned very briefly, but, is when Doctor Hynek is when he’s explaining lights, he uses that says it was, caused by swamp gas. And that’s I have to ask about that because it’s something that I’m familiar with from, that movie Men in Black, of course, because they use that an explanation of, you know, swamp gas.

00:56:52:25 – 00:57:05:19
Dan LeFebvre
You know, that’s pretty much the explanation for UFOs. And so I think it’s something that’s kind of caught on in popular culture as a common explanation for UFOs. Was that really an explanation that started with Project Bluebook?

00:57:05:21 – 00:57:32:15
Rob Kristoffersen
It mostly started with Hynek. One of the most infamous investigations that he did occurred in Michigan in 1966, in the Dexter Hillsdale area, for approximately a week, sightings had been taking place in that area. It began on, March 14th, of 66. The police and Washtenaw County first witness strange lights in the sky over, Lima Township.

00:57:32:17 – 00:57:56:10
Rob Kristoffersen
And they chased these lights for a period of time. But, they were outmaneuvered every single time they tried. And throughout the week, people in Washtenaw County reported seeing similar objects in the sky. Some went on to report them as resembling like a spinning top. But the culmination of these sightings occurred two nights, later that week, on March 20th.

00:57:56:12 – 00:58:20:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Frank Manor of Dexter Township reportedly saw a strange object in the swamp behind his home. He described it resembling a pyramid with a porthole on it, from which this bluish green light was emitting. And then the next night, at nearby Hillsdale College, over 80 female students witnessed a strange light rising and falling in a swamp near their dorm.

00:58:20:09 – 00:58:49:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Hynek was sent to investigate that case and was basically forced to conduct a rushed investigation. He didn’t have a lot of time and, was forced to give a press conference. One of the witnesses in that case had mentioned that at first, because they ended up witnessing what the girls did at the college dorm room in Hillsdale believed it to be at first swamp gas, which is a real phenomenon.

00:58:49:28 – 00:59:45:07
Rob Kristoffersen
Basically, what happens in a swamp is when vegetation is dying, it will release methane into the air. And sometimes, you’ll basically see like a, short flash of light that it creates. So Hynek basically was forced to say that what happened in Dexter Hillsdale was swamp gas, and he was ridiculed heavily for it. And in fact, it was his determination on that case that really shuttered Project Bluebook toward the end, because what happened was, I believe he was governor at the time, Gerald Ford, he was not happy with the determination that Hynek came to and basically ordered for a panel and an independent panel of people to investigate UFO sightings.

00:59:45:07 – 01:00:17:04
Rob Kristoffersen
And this led to the Condon Committee, a, group of scientists out of the University of Colorado that studied UFOs for a couple of years and ultimately determined that, UFOs were not a threat to national security. In fact, they couldn’t determine what they were at all. And, that was the end of Project Blue Book. So the swamp gas thing is essentially Doctor Hynek probably most fumbling move during his time at Project Blue Book.

01:00:17:06 – 01:00:48:07
Dan LeFebvre
Going back to the TV show, the Nixon investigation that we see when I was when I was watching this, it really started to turn the entire series a little more sinister in my mind. It gave the idea that the military is trying to cover up some psychological tests that they’re doing on their own soldiers. We see a group of Army soldiers who got a UFO attack on the platoon on film, and we’re watching this.

01:00:48:09 – 01:01:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
Doctor Hynek is watching this, and the and the military is watching this. And that’s kind of the what kicks off the investigation. But then in the end, we find out that the soldiers were shell shocked from experiences in World War Two. And at the end of the episode, there’s a scene where the two generals, Harding and Valentine, are upset that the Secretary of Defense has been testing chemical weapons on their own.

01:01:11:20 – 01:01:15:15
Dan LeFebvre
Soldiers. How much of that actually happened?

01:01:15:18 – 01:01:52:09
Rob Kristoffersen
This incident is based on testimony from a private first class named Francis P wall during the Korean War. This is like one of the most harrowing tales that, you will ever hear. And there’s some really messed up stories from, soldiers during a war about UFOs and such. And, while was stationed near shore, one which, is was roughly 60 miles from Seoul, and his regiment was prepared to bombard a nearby village with artillery.

01:01:52:09 – 01:02:22:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And right before the attack was set to take place, this UFO appeared in the sky right above the village, and, they just started firing off. Artillery burst after artillery burst and, there were shells that exploded right next to this object, but it didn’t seem to take a hit. And, at the time, the object was emitting an orange light and it just was hovering over the village.

01:02:22:24 – 01:02:51:24
Rob Kristoffersen
That’s when wall basically asked his commander for permission to fire at this thing. And when permission was granted, everybody opened fire. The object changed to a blue green color. And it started to make these eerie arcs in the sky. And then it started to shoot beams at these people. They all reported feeling a burning and tingling sensation as the beams of light were shown at them, and were all forced into underground bunkers at the time.

01:02:51:24 – 01:03:24:28
Rob Kristoffersen
They had to take refuge from what this whatever this thing was, most of the men were trucked out by ambulance. They were actually too weak to walk. And doctors, once they got back to a hospital, noted how all of their white blood cell counts were really high. So, they never explained what happened to these men. Some have pointed to, like, a Soviet weapons test, but even that’s kind of out of the realm of possibility, even for me.

01:03:25:00 – 01:03:46:06
Rob Kristoffersen
As far as we know, it wasn’t a government chemical weapons test, but I wouldn’t put it past the government to have done that at any point in history. Like the the government has done some shady stuff in the past. If you want a, a good example of that, there’s a, book that came out, last year.

01:03:46:06 – 01:04:17:11
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s called Poisoner in Chief, and it’s all about a, one scientist’s work during, a project called MK ultra. He was basically tasked with, seeing what if they could use LSD? To basically as a form of mind control. It was a very is a very dark project for the government. So, I really wouldn’t put it past it at any point for the government to have done tests like that.

01:04:17:18 – 01:04:28:04
Rob Kristoffersen
There was the Tuskegee experiment, which I really don’t want to get into, because it was some pretty sick stuff. But yeah, I, I really wouldn’t put it past the government to have done tests like that at some point.

01:04:28:06 – 01:04:29:12
Sean Jablonski
Wow, wow.

01:04:29:14 – 01:04:52:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, let’s get back to the show then, instead of getting even darker. But, yeah. So in episode nine, Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn come across their first abduction case. And this is the case of someone named Thomas Mann, who claims that he was abducted by aliens. And there’s a few key things from that episode of the show that I want to get your insight on.

01:04:52:09 – 01:05:25:20
Dan LeFebvre
First is during this episode is when we see Doctor Hynek hypnotize Thomas to help him remember more about the abduction experience. Now, through hypnosis, Thomas is able to remember things that he couldn’t remember otherwise. When I saw this, it hit me that this is similar to what we talked about when we covered the movie communion. When you were a guest on the show to talk about what these strippers experience, there, and I, I wasn’t sure if Doctor Hynek kind of started that idea.

01:05:25:20 – 01:05:46:17
Dan LeFebvre
We get the when I was watching, Project Blue Book, I got the idea that nobody was really familiar with using hypnosis in that way. When he’s using this on on Thomas Mann. So was Doctor Hynek using hypnosis in his investigations? And was he one of the first to do that for abductees?

01:05:46:19 – 01:06:12:22
Rob Kristoffersen
So this episode is loosely based on the Betty and Barney Hill incident, which is, an incident that we recently covered on, a two part episode. And, essentially this New Hampshire couple reported having a close encounter with a strange object within the White Mountains. At one point, Barney had this dramatic sighting in a field, of this object through a pair of binoculars.

01:06:12:25 – 01:06:47:27
Rob Kristoffersen
He claimed to have telepathic communication with the occupants of this UFO. And they also claimed to have, suffered from missing time during this encounter, too. There was, period of time that they just couldn’t account for. They started to conduct their own investigation almost immediately after coming home. And, they read books voraciously, talked to experts, you know, from scientists to UFO investigators, until they ultimately decided that they wanted to explore their experiences through hypnosis.

01:06:48:00 – 01:07:12:24
Rob Kristoffersen
And they ultimately found this individual named Doctor Benjamin Simon. He was a Boston based hypnotherapist and through their work with him, uncovered an abduction narrative that involved the hills being taken on board a UFO, subjected to medical tests, and then returned to their car. Now, Doctor Benjamin Simon, was, pretty heavy hitter when it came to hypnosis.

01:07:12:24 – 01:07:41:01
Rob Kristoffersen
He set up a hospital, and I believe it was Long Island to treat soldiers coming home. From the war, from World War two with, with, all sorts of, mental problems, basically treating soldiers with PTSD before PTSD was known as anything. And he would use hypnosis to do that. Doctor Simon was the first to hypnotize an abduction witness.

01:07:41:06 – 01:08:07:09
Rob Kristoffersen
Hynek didn’t really do that. He did advocate for it in a couple of cases, but, he was, not a trained hypnotist in any way. The, probably the most infamous person to start doing this within the UFO community was a gentleman by the name of Doctor Leo Sprinkle. And, he used hypnosis on a number of, witnesses.

01:08:07:11 – 01:08:33:04
Rob Kristoffersen
And then later on in the 80s, man by the name of Doctor or not? Doctor, just, Bud Hopkins, he was a, New York based artist. He kind of put abduction cases on the map in the 80s by conducting hypnosis sessions and, working with, experiencers. So, yeah, Doctor Hynek never practiced, hypnosis in.

01:08:33:04 – 01:08:33:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Anyway.

01:08:34:01 – 01:08:54:15
Dan LeFebvre
Something else I want to ask you about with that, episode was when we see Doctor Hynek talk about this, a scale that he’s been working on. How’s it, close encounter. The first kind of close encounter. The second kind. Well, that’s what happened to Thomas. Their abduction, and then close Encounters of the Third Kind being even beyond that.

01:08:54:18 – 01:09:03:23
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s a term that I think we’re familiar with it from nothing else. The movie, was was that a scale that Doctor Hynek invented?

01:09:03:26 – 01:09:28:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. Doctor Hynek did invent, that scale. It’s what we call the, Hynek scale these days. There were actually six classifications. The first was a nocturnal light, which is basically your mundane sighting of a UFO at night. And then there is what he called the daylight disc, which is a sighting of an object during the day from more than 1000ft away.

01:09:28:10 – 01:09:56:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Then there is a radar visual sighting, which, is primarily, you know, witnessed by civilians and military pilots. It’s basically when a pilot sees something and it’s confirmed by radar data. And then, we get to the heavy hitters, close encounter, the first kind of the sighting of an object from approximately 1000ft away or less, close encounters of the second kind is a sighting, where an object leaves a physical trace of some kind.

01:09:56:13 – 01:10:24:27
Rob Kristoffersen
So in the Florida scoutmaster case, there was the burnt grass. And even in the Betty and Barney Hill case, there was, really strange readings that they got from their car on the back trunk. They noticed these semicircle, these circles, about a half dollar size that they don’t know where they where it came from. And, they ended up testing the trunk with a compass, and they found that it was magnetized.

01:10:24:27 – 01:10:56:22
Rob Kristoffersen
So that was a physical trace case. And then a close encounter of the third kind is when an object is an object is seen in an occupant of that object to scene. So some kind of humanoid being is seen at the same time. And the interesting thing about, the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind is that, when Steven Spielberg was working on that and he wanted to use that title, he actually had to go through J.L. and Hynek because that was his copyrighted title.

01:10:56:22 – 01:11:04:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So JL and Hynek ended up consulting on, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he even has a cameo at the end.

01:11:04:12 – 01:11:11:20
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, nice. Nice. I’ll have to watch that again and and look for him. I don’t remember, because I don’t know that I would be able to pick him out without finding a photo, but.

01:11:11:22 – 01:11:18:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Here’s, here’s the, hint that I’ll give you look for the man with the healthy Van Dike. You will notice him.

01:11:18:02 – 01:11:20:23
Sean Jablonski
Okay.

01:11:20:25 – 01:11:21:28
Sean Jablonski
Nice.

01:11:22:00 – 01:11:43:04
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Well, at the very end of episode nine, in the TV show Doctor Hynek gives, he’s he’s given a head up by that mysterious fixer guy that something’s going to happen in Washington, DC. So he flies there just in time to see a show of lights over DC. Now, in the show, this happens in the middle of the day.

01:11:43:06 – 01:12:05:24
Dan LeFebvre
And then later, Defense Secretary Fairchild, he was the one who was, doing the chemical testing on the soldiers, that we saw in an earlier episode. He’s killed as his car burst into flame just before he’s about to reveal the truth to the world. And then meanwhile, we see that lights come back and the military scrambles some Sf90 force to respond.

01:12:05:26 – 01:12:31:22
Dan LeFebvre
They have trouble keeping up with the objects as they’re flying around Washington, DC. And at the very end of the episode, which is the end of the season, Doctor Hynek tells Captain Quinn that he’s come to the realization that the only way they’ll be able to find the truth is to keep the jobs that give them access to information in more cases, but to convince the government that they don’t believe because that’s clearly what the higher UPS wants.

01:12:31:22 – 01:12:50:27
Dan LeFebvre
They’re given this cover up. So we get the sense that Doctor Hynek is pretty much just going to play the game and keep trying to find the truth. So how well did the TV show explain the lights over Washington, DC and what happened to Doctor Hynek and Project Bluebook after this?

01:12:51:00 – 01:13:19:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So 1952 was a big year for UFO sightings in the United States. Three incidents covered in the first season of the show happened in 1952 the flatwoods monster case, the Florida Scoutmaster case, and the most significant of them, which was a pair of incidents that came to be known as the Washington merry go round, as, Edward Pelt would call it.

01:13:19:12 – 01:13:48:03
Rob Kristoffersen
In July of that year. And over the course of two weekends, objects were seen by numerous eyewitnesses over and kind of outside Washington, DC. The first major incident took place on July 21st, just outside the city. Pilots and radar personnel, reported objects nearby. A pilot by the name of Casey Spearman of Flight 807 described the object resembling a falling star without a tail on it.

01:13:48:05 – 01:14:13:26
Rob Kristoffersen
And then on the 28th, objects were sighted again over Washington, D.C. this time, the Air Force scrambled jets to chase them down, but the objects outmaneuvered them very easily, and Rupert was summoned at the time by president Harry Truman for an explanation, but hadn’t been able to conduct an investigation at that point, and he didn’t have answers for them.

01:14:13:26 – 01:14:42:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So, ultimately, they rushed to call a press conference and quickly quelled all the excitement. The government blamed it on, weather. Yep. That’s right. Weather. But it’s basically because of this incident that the Robertson panel, which I mentioned previously, led by the CIA, was convened and then ultimately decided that UFO reports had to be downplayed.

01:14:42:21 – 01:15:11:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Edward Bruce Pelt would leave a Project Blue Book by the end of 1953 because of it. And, he ended up retiring. He wrote the first, really landmark book about his time, on Project Sign and Project Blue Book. It was called The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. He actually died very young, at the age of, I believe, 37 of a heart attack.

01:15:11:00 – 01:15:39:17
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, it’s, I think they did a good job of playing up the hysteria aspect. That’s the government was generally operating under the nature of cover ups when it comes to this phenomenon. And when it comes to the UFO history, it’s this question of, you know, you’re tackling this question of whether they downplayed reports to keep the public calm or because the government was hiding something that they had.

01:15:39:19 – 01:16:01:08
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s never really ever been cleared up. But I’ve always leaned towards the government was just trying to keep the public calm. I don’t think the government really has any, definitive information about this stuff, but you never know. It could be wrong. The government could come out and say, you know, we got aliens hanging out at area 51.

01:16:01:08 – 01:16:02:24
Rob Kristoffersen
I don’t know, you never know.

01:16:02:26 – 01:16:04:18
Sean Jablonski
You never know. Yeah. Yeah.

01:16:04:20 – 01:16:30:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, in that episode, which is episode ten, when we see in the show his name is Secretary Fairchild, the defense secretary, when he dies of very suspicious circumstances. That led me to think that maybe there was it was based on somebody that might have died in similar circumstances that they showed that. So, so plainly, there was that based on something that actually happened.

01:16:30:07 – 01:16:59:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Secretary Fairchild is based on the first Secretary of Defense, James V Forrestal. Forrestal died in 1949, well before the Washington merry go round. But he died under very mysterious circumstances. He was receiving treatment at the Bethesda military Hospital in Maryland for a mental breakdown, and his body was found having fallen from a great height from his hospital room.

01:16:59:03 – 01:17:42:02
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s unclear if he committed suicide or if he was actually just thrown from the window, but his death has been lumped into, conspiracies involving a group that most likely didn’t investigate UFOs, but was an actual group within the government. And, they were called majestic 12. Most point to majestic 12 as a group that essentially were studying the effects of radiation after bomb tests, but many have lumped them into this government conspiracy where, they were essentially trying to keep, the proof of extraterrestrial life from the public.

01:17:42:02 – 01:17:56:12
Rob Kristoffersen
And many believe that Forrestal was killed, because he wanted to come forward until the public about, extraterrestrial life being real and having visited us. So.

01:17:56:14 – 01:17:58:03
Sean Jablonski
Kind of darker.

01:17:58:03 – 01:18:03:11
Rob Kristoffersen
A little darker in the, in the real sense of, what happened to Forrestal here?

01:18:03:13 – 01:18:24:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, one thing that we didn’t get to cover that I just want to ask you about real quick, is a storyline that goes throughout the entire show, and that’s the character of Susie Miller. And, in the show, while Doctor Hynek is off on his investigations, it cuts back to home life with with Mimi, his wife, a lot.

01:18:24:15 – 01:18:44:25
Dan LeFebvre
And we get this sense that the character of Susie is a Russian spy of some sort. We hear some, her speaking in Russian over the radio to someone with her quote unquote husband, which we know is not really her husband. We get the feeling that it’s not really her husband, but that’s what she introduces him as.

01:18:44:28 – 01:18:59:16
Dan LeFebvre
And we get the overall idea that they’re probably Russian spies trying to infiltrate Project Blue Book through Doctor Heinrich’s wife. Was there any truth to that side of the whole show?

01:18:59:19 – 01:19:39:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Not really. There was no real, indications that the Russians were trying to infiltrate Project Blue Book. But interestingly enough, Andy Jacobson, who wrote a book about area 51, has this theory that the Roswell crash was a Russian craft designed to basically cause mass hysteria. And what she points to is that, her source claims that, Joseph Stalin really got a kick out of, the Orson Welles War of the worlds broadcast.

01:19:39:14 – 01:20:14:16
Rob Kristoffersen
And so he, he has said, her theory is that he essentially wanted to cause mass hysteria in that kind of way. Of course it didn’t pan out that way. Roswell was the case that was shuttered for over 30 years. So before anybody really started to know, that anything had crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. So, yeah, not not really there there was no real, attempt by the Russians to infiltrate this program.

01:20:14:19 – 01:20:18:18
Dan LeFebvre
Interesting. I never heard that, that possible theory about Stalin there.

01:20:18:20 – 01:20:20:00
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s a wild one, man. It’s a.

01:20:20:00 – 01:20:21:26
Sean Jablonski
Wild one.

01:20:21:28 – 01:20:32:14
Dan LeFebvre
Nice. Well, is there anything from the show that, as you were watching this, first season that you just wish that they had put in their.

01:20:32:16 – 01:20:37:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Listen, Hynek needs a van. Dike. Somebody get a van dike on Aidan Gillen.

01:20:37:06 – 01:20:38:04
Dan LeFebvre
We need it. There you go.

01:20:38:08 – 01:20:41:13
Sean Jablonski
Okay. Awesome.

01:20:41:15 – 01:20:57:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about Project Bluebook. I know we didn’t cover season two that much on this episode as we’re recording this, the season is still ongoing, but you’ll have to come back on once that season is over and chat about whatever the events are that we see there.

01:20:57:05 – 01:21:00:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, absolutely man, I’d love to.

01:21:00:02 – 01:21:20:11
Dan LeFebvre
In the meantime, if you’re listening to this, Rob has an awesome podcast that covers a lot of UFO related events in history. Go open up the app that you’re listening to this on and subscribe to Rob’s podcast called Our Strange Skies. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of your podcast and some of the great stories that you cover over there?

01:21:20:13 – 01:21:41:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Sure. So, for a long time I had the impetus to cover, singular UFO stories, and I had seen that nobody really did it. And a lot of podcasters just kept coming to me for, like, content. They just were like, hey, what’s a good UFO case to cover? And I’m like, I’d usually give them something, but I’m like, why don’t I just make a.

01:21:41:18 – 01:21:42:16
Sean Jablonski
Podcast of my own?

01:21:42:16 – 01:22:18:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So I, I created the Strange Skies podcast and we’ve been through a couple of transformations, but right now what we do is, we devote singular episodes or if, some require multi-part episodes to, UFO stories throughout history, from the United States, we’ve covered stories from Brazil and, a few other places, but, we just covered the Betty and Barney Hill incident, the Leilani Suborn incident, which is, another famous, New Mexico UFO sighting.

01:22:18:11 – 01:22:38:19
Rob Kristoffersen
We covered the first abduction case, which was occurred in 1957, in Brazil. And, there’s a lot of great episodes over there. So, yeah, if you want to know more about UFOs, come on over to the, our Strange Skies podcast. We got plenty for you.

01:22:38:21 – 01:22:42:00
Dan LeFebvre
Awesome. And you started a new show recently, too, right?

01:22:42:02 – 01:23:11:02
Rob Kristoffersen
Yes. It’s called the Coda, a music podcast. And every other week I’m joined by my buddy Brian Hastie of the Double Density podcast, and we discuss music news. And, we generally have a main feature or main topic where we discuss something from music. We’ve talked about our favorite opening tracks to an album. We’ve talked about our best albums of 2019, and we recently had a couple of guests on to talk about, a new album that they dropped.

01:23:11:02 – 01:23:17:11
Rob Kristoffersen
So, if you’re interested in music, talk, check out the The Coda, a music podcast.

01:23:17:13 – 01:23:19:22
Dan LeFebvre
Awesome. Thanks again so much for your time, Rob.

01:23:19:24 – 01:23:29:20
Rob Kristoffersen
Well, thank you.

01:23:29:22 – 01:23:47:06
Dan LeFebvre
We have a lot more to go. But I do want to point out that even though Rob was talking about his podcast are Strange Guys that’s not actively in production. Remember that chat with Rob was in 2020? You might still be able to find it online now if you want to go through the archives. If it is available, I’ll be sure to add a link to it in the show notes so you can check there.

01:23:47:08 – 01:24:13:20
Dan LeFebvre
Before we move on to season two of Project Blue Book, let’s find out the answer to our Two Truths and a lie game for season one. And as a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one lie again. Number one, Project Blue Book was the first time the government investigated UFOs. Number two, former Nazi Verner von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney to promote the U.S. space program after World War two.

01:24:13:23 – 01:24:26:23
Dan LeFebvre
Number three, the term Foo Fighters was used by World War II two pilots who saw unexplained phenomena. Did you figure out which one is a lie? I’ve got the answer in the envelope, so let’s open that up.

01:24:26:25 – 01:24:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
And the lie is number one. While Project Blue Book is typically the most popular investigation, the US government had into UFOs, as we learned from Robert, was actually a follow up to Project Sign and Project Grudge. So even though there were a lot of the same people involved in these different government projects, Project Blue Book was not the first time the US government investigated UFOs or what people these days called UAP.

01:24:52:29 – 01:25:21:25
Dan LeFebvre
Unidentified aerial phenomena instead of unidentified flying objects. Okay, now let’s set up another game of Tetris in line for season two of Project Blue Book. Are you ready? Okay, here they are. Number one. In the 1950s, the U.S government illegally experimented with LSD on unwitting U.S. citizens. Number two, the phrase little green men comes from a close encounter in Kentucky.

01:25:21:27 – 01:25:48:02
Dan LeFebvre
Number three, Project Blue Book was commissioned by JFK. All right, I’ll be back after the season two discussion with Rob to see if you got it right. And now here is the remastered version of my 2020 chat with Rob Kristofferson about season two of Project Blue Book.

01:25:48:04 – 01:26:17:15
Dan LeFebvre
All right, well, then, let’s dive into the second season and the first episode of the second season. We’re introduced to the Roswell incident. If there’s one name that just about everyone knows it’s connected to UFOs, it’s Roswell. But that doesn’t mean everyone knows the details of what happened there. According to the show on July 5th, 1947, there was a major storm around Roswell, New Mexico, and then the next morning, a rancher by the name of Mike Connors found a field covered in strange metal.

01:26:17:18 – 01:26:44:19
Dan LeFebvre
By the end of the day, his neighbors were collecting pieces of the debris, and he wasn’t really convinced that it was manmade. So he contacted authorities. They swooped in, but someone leak the story out, it hit the wire. And then it started to run worldwide. Newspapers in Europe even ran with this story. The show doesn’t really say how the authorities shut the story down, but it does say that once Harding got involved two days later, Connors bought himself a brand new car and the town stopped talking.

01:26:44:23 – 01:27:08:11
Dan LeFebvre
So I’m going to assume that they were paid off. The wreckage was flown to Texas, where Harding held a press conference explaining the saucer was nothing more than a weather balloon. Now, I know we could have an entire episode, entire podcast just dedicated to the Roswell incident, but in a nutshell, how? What did the show do depicting the events of the Roswell incident?

01:27:08:13 – 01:27:37:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Well, with this particular episode, the bare bones are there. You know, some details have been changed, but, the storm in question, that starts the episode occurred on the night of July 2nd, 1947. And the man in question, they call him Mike Connors in the show. Well, his real name was Mac Brazel. And on that night, Brazel claimed to hear a strange sound that didn’t quite sound like, thunder and lightning.

01:27:37:14 – 01:27:59:13
Rob Kristoffersen
So, he was the foreman of a sheep ranch owned by a man named JB foster. And the next morning, when he woke up to get started, he discovered a debris field outside. It was about, three quarters of a mile long by about, I think, like 20ft wide or so. So this was a really remote area.

01:27:59:13 – 01:28:20:11
Rob Kristoffersen
The closest town to the Foster Ranch is, a town called Corona, which is about 30 miles away. But, he showed the debris to his closest neighbors, which were Floyd, and were at a proctor who owned the ranch themselves. And, they tried to cut it, and they tried to burn it, but they were not successful in doing so.

01:28:20:13 – 01:28:55:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So, the doctors urged Mac Brazel to report the debris to the authorities. And Brazel ultimately did four days later. It’s not exactly clear why he waited as long as he did. It could have been a combination of the July 4th holiday and the hesitation on Brazil’s part to do anything with it. But, on Monday, July 7th, he brought the debris to the Chaves County Sheriff Department, who in turn notified the Roswell Army Airfield, which is, known today as the Walker Air Force Base.

01:28:55:12 – 01:29:18:10
Rob Kristoffersen
The base dispatch two officers, Major Jesse Marcel Senior and Captain Sheridan Cavett, to actually retrieve the material. They Brazel escorted them to the ranch, and, they actually ended up spending the night there before they headed back into town. They gathered up as much as they could, and they also tried to cut it. They tried to burn it.

01:29:18:12 – 01:29:49:09
Rob Kristoffersen
They also tried to hit it with a sledge hammer, and they found that they couldn’t make a dent with it. So it wasn’t until long after they brought it back that the military swarmed the place. And before Jesse Marcel junior there. Jesse Marcel senior. Sorry, actually brought it. To the, airfield. He brought it home. Where, his son, Jesse Marcel Jr and a few of his other family members claimed to have actually seen the wreckage.

01:29:49:12 – 01:30:18:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Some of them, some of the pieces, Jesse Marcel Jr claimed had, these, like, weird hieroglyphic writings on them that were in, like, this purple kind of script. But he said that it was more closely resembling metal. It’s kind of one of those things that gets debated a lot. But, the, military just swarmed the place and, they actually sent out a lot of this wreckage.

01:30:18:00 – 01:30:44:05
Rob Kristoffersen
It was ultimately going to be flown to, Wright Field, which, later became, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which is where Project Blue Book was, stationed out of. But, in the meantime, while they were collecting all this stuff, the military decided to send out a press release. And, and the man that made that decision, was a man named Colonel William Blanchard.

01:30:44:07 – 01:31:07:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And he informed the base’s information officer, Lieutenant Walter Hot, to, send a press release into town. And like, he, hot physically brought these press releases to, like, the Roswell Daily Record and a few other places in town, which, seemed kind of odd for the times, considering that they could just send it, you know, via wire.

01:31:07:24 – 01:31:35:04
Rob Kristoffersen
But that’s, like one of the weird parts about this case, one of the tiny, weird things, but, they you that, ends up making the paper, the date, like, later that day saying, you know, Roswell Army Airfield recovers flying saucer. So, yeah, while this was all happening, Major Jesse Marcel, junior, he made a stop at Carswell Field in Denton, Texas.

01:31:35:04 – 01:32:04:20
Rob Kristoffersen
As he was accompanying this wreckage to right field and a gentleman by the name of, Roger Ramey, who was general. He, had Jesse Marcel senior pose with pictures of what, they were claiming was a down weather balloon. And ultimately, the next day, they would, retract their initial headline saying that they recovered a flying saucer and saying, no, it was all just a weather balloon.

01:32:04:23 – 01:32:27:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Now, Jesse Marcel Senior attested to the to the effect that it wasn’t the same stuff. He was saying that, they kind of made up this, mock weather balloon, had them pose with it, but it was not the actual wreckage that made its way to right field. And he went to his grave saying the same thing.

01:32:27:13 – 01:33:15:16
Rob Kristoffersen
Same with, Jesse Marcel senior. What’s interesting about this case is after it was retracted in 47 people, in the UFO community, by and large, forgot about this case for about 30 years. Wasn’t until 1978, when, independent researcher named Stanton Friedman was actually told, while he was conducting an in radio interview that he should talk to Jesse Marcel senior and from there, Roswell has become this big household name when it comes to UFOs and, you know, not trusting the government because the government has changed their mind as to what was recovered on multiple occasions.

01:33:15:16 – 01:33:19:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And, yeah, it’s just this big cultural touchstone now.

01:33:19:16 – 01:33:37:04
Dan LeFebvre
Wow, wow. So the I mean, I’ve seen the, the picture of him kind of, I’m assuming Marcel at on the front page of the paper he’s got holding something in his hand that would then be what they kind of staged as the weather balloon, not the necessarily the material that was actually recovered.

01:33:37:06 – 01:34:04:23
Rob Kristoffersen
Right? Yeah. That’s, that’s what Jesse Marcel both Jesse Marcel claimed is that it was not the same stuff. It was, swapped out. You know, they were trying to keep this thing, you know, on the down low, covered up. And that’s really why Roswell is as big a thing as it is. Because given that the, Air Force has changed their mind as to what it was on multiple occasions, now, nobody really trusts their explanation.

01:34:04:23 – 01:34:39:28
Rob Kristoffersen
So you have a ton of explanations out there. Now, there’s, a book called, area 51. It was written by a woman named Andy Jacobson. And she proposed at one point through one of her sources that what the Roswell wreckage was was a Russian craft that, had been sent over into American territory to cause hysteria because apparently Joseph Stalin was a big fan of, George Orwell’s or, sorry, not George Orwell.

01:34:40:00 – 01:34:40:29
Dan LeFebvre
Orson Welles, the,

01:34:41:03 – 01:35:01:09
Rob Kristoffersen
Orson Welles, for the War of the worlds broadcasts. Apparently, he was a huge fan, according to her source, and that this was a mock thing, dreamed up by the Russian government. That’s probably like the low end of believability on this. But, there are a lot of interesting theories when it comes to Roswell, I think.

01:35:01:09 – 01:35:23:21
Dan LeFebvre
I don’t remember if it was in episode one, but I do remember the the show actually mentioning that very, very briefly. I think that the two generals are talking to each other, and one of them talks about how, the things that Doctor Mengele did to those children and, you know, and the saucer was Soviet propaganda or whatever.

01:35:23:21 – 01:35:46:18
Dan LeFebvre
Like they just kind of imply that that’s what it was was it was Soviet. And then, of course, Doctor Mengele, the, the Nazi, doctor doing something to the bodies to kind of make them look like aliens or whatever it was. I just remember that very, very briefly in, in the TV show. So it sounds like maybe that that’s where that comes from.

01:35:46:20 – 01:35:59:18
Rob Kristoffersen
There are, you know, other theories like that out there. There’s, there’s some that get really, really dark, but, yeah, yeah, it seems like everybody has a theory on Roswell these days.

01:35:59:21 – 01:36:38:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, heading back to the show in episode number two, it’s the part two of the Roswell incident. And during this episode, we find out about a resident in town named Duncan Booker. And he crashes a massive UFO into the center of town to try to draw attention to what he says is the real story. General Harding agrees to go on TV with Booker to tell the world that this was nothing more than a hoax, but once they go live, Booker’s friend at the TV station starts playing footage of an alien autopsy, and then Doctor Hynek comes to the rescue and he realizes that, oh, you look the studio lighting in the footage is the

01:36:38:14 – 01:36:59:15
Dan LeFebvre
same. This is this footage is a hoax. But then Booker insists that, yeah, they recreated the footage, but it was actually from something that they actually saw. And I thought I remembered something about some alien autopsy footage that showed up quite some time ago, but I don’t remember if it was supposed to be from Roswell or related to that or not.

01:36:59:18 – 01:37:04:23
Dan LeFebvre
Is that real footage, and was it tied to the Roswell incident like the show implies?

01:37:04:25 – 01:37:45:28
Rob Kristoffersen
So the, alien autopsy video was huge. It was a real video that, came out in the, mid 90s. During that time, that’s where UFOs were kind of hitting their cultural balloon. This was when Roswell had really blown up in popular culture, and it was actually all thanks to Unsolved Mysteries. Unsolved mysteries was the first show to really give that case its do so by by this time, aliens and and UFOs are big and they’re appearing on a lot more television shows.

01:37:45:28 – 01:38:20:23
Rob Kristoffersen
And, one of the networks that really ran with it was Fox in the, in the 90s. And, they ran a program in 1995 called Alien Autopsy Fact or Fiction, and it was hosted by, Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek The Next Generation fame. And, a man by the name of race until he came forward saying that he found footage of an alien autopsy and he had at the time been looking through a retired military cameraman’s footage searching for, actually, footage of Elvis for, like, some documentary.

01:38:20:23 – 01:38:57:23
Rob Kristoffersen
And, he claims that he stumbled upon this autopsy of an alien being that he says was one of the bodies at Roswell. So the Fox airs this special, and it is huge. So much so that they re-air it a couple months later and, it kind of just dies down for about a decade. When in 2006 recently claimed that the footage was a recreation of footage that he had seen in 1992, it a degraded so bad that he couldn’t actually save it.

01:38:57:23 – 01:39:35:03
Rob Kristoffersen
So instead he he has this convoluted explanation that, in fact, he actually reshot the footage, recreated everything, in order to like, you know, bolster his claims. But, you know, it’s it definitely didn’t help his case. But, in 2018, a filmmaker named, Spiro Smulders revealed that he was actually the creator of the film, and he claimed that he created the alien sculpture using foam and stuffing the insides with, basically animal parts.

01:39:35:03 – 01:40:02:00
Rob Kristoffersen
So, this video footage kind of keeps, like, reappearing every now and then. There was a, leaked government document, about, I want to say maybe, late last year in which two guys, one of them was a, a high ranking military member. The other had been a consultant with the government saying that this footage was real.

01:40:02:00 – 01:40:06:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But, nobody at this point buys that. It’s actually really.

01:40:06:11 – 01:40:23:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it sounds like the show is is taking that concept, but there I mean, this is happening in the. Well, I remember Roswell being in 47, but then, you know, this happening after the fact in the 50s and stuff like that. With the as far as the TV show timeline, it kind of bounces back and forth. But none of that.

01:40:23:03 – 01:40:33:13
Dan LeFebvre
It sounds like if it surfaced in the 90s, it sounds like they’re taking something from decades later and kind of throwing that in there just to add to the narrative.

01:40:33:16 – 01:41:02:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, pretty much, you know, there’s always been like UFO hoaxes. They’ve always been prevalent. The first UFO hoax goes back to 1947, in these kids, and I forget exactly what town they lived in. I think it was called Woodworth, and they ended up at, this is when, Kenneth Arnold had his famous sighting. It was shortly after that, and sometime in July.

01:41:02:15 – 01:41:21:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And these kids mocked up this UFO, and they put it on this one lady’s lawn. And the reason that they put it on that one lady’s lawn is because she was known as the town gossip. And she knew and they knew that, word would get around really quickly. And to the point where the, National Guard actually ended up coming to town and these kids got in trouble.

01:41:21:19 – 01:41:30:10
Rob Kristoffersen
So, I mean, there’s always been hoaxers and there’s always been people trying to make a buck. And, I mean, recently probably made a killing selling video tapes.

01:41:30:14 – 01:41:50:13
Dan LeFebvre
So I wanted to ask you about something that the show has. And when they’re investigating on the show, Hynek and Quinn, they come across a soldier who was at Roswell, and soldiers name is Stuart Terry. He tells them that there wasn’t just one crash site, but there was a second one. And at that second site, Terry talks about how he shot something.

01:41:50:15 – 01:42:08:02
Dan LeFebvre
Later, he recovered the remains buried in his land. And then Hynek and Quinn go to where it was buried, and they find some skeletal remains. But then I think there was a mention as well, where someone mentions how the authorities asked for five child sized coffins. So maybe there was more than just the one being that we see, shown on the actual TV show.

01:42:08:02 – 01:42:16:29
Dan LeFebvre
But what about this concept of two crash sites at Roswell where there were there actually two crash sites with multiple being supposedly found?

01:42:17:02 – 01:42:46:16
Rob Kristoffersen
There have been a few different narratives concerning, you know, the crash saucers at Roswell, one being that the craft in question was hit by lightning over the Foster Ranch, and it created this debris field, and that the actual saucer crashed 150 miles away in a place called the Plains of Saint Augustine in the late 70s, early 80s. As Stanton Friedman was researching this case, he learned of a story through a second hand and third hand sources.

01:42:46:16 – 01:43:18:27
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot of people came forward saying that this guy named Barney Barnett discovered the crash saucer and alien bodies at this place called the Planes of Saint Augustine. And Friedman was never actually able to talk to him directly. He had died, about a decade before he started researching it. But a lot of people came forward, I want to say like maybe 5 or 6 people came forward and said, oh, yeah, Barney Barnett, he told me the story about how he saw these, alien beings in this crash saucer all the way in this at the site.

01:43:18:27 – 01:43:42:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And there was also, allegedly an archeology class that had walked up upon it at the same time that he did. Now, there’s also speculation that what had happened was that there were two saucers that crashed, and one ended up at the planes of Saint Augustine, and the other allegedly crashed 2 to 3 miles away from the Foster Ranch.

01:43:42:27 – 01:44:18:18
Rob Kristoffersen
But nobody’s ever really been able to like and, you know, pin it down to one. And again, that’s what makes Roswell this like narrative that has been built on, over and over again upon time. The child sized coffin portion of this comes from a man named Glenn Dennis. He was a part time assistant at the local funeral home, the Ballard Funeral Home, and he claims to have received a call from the Army Air Force, inquiring about the availability of child sized coffins.

01:44:18:18 – 01:44:42:23
Rob Kristoffersen
He claims to have delivered 3 or 4 of them to the base, and, he also claimed to have ran into a nurse on the base who had witnessed the alien bodies, and even drew a sketch of them on a napkin, of which, Dennis actually recreated. I don’t think like there are photos if you Google Glenn Dennis, you know, alien sketch, you’ll see.

01:44:42:23 – 01:45:03:08
Rob Kristoffersen
You’ll come upon like this. There’s like, four small images on what looks like, you know, a piece of, like, white stationery. I think he ended up recreating it, but his testimony has been called into question, simply by the fact that they’ve never been able to confirm who this nurse was. At the Roswell Army airfield.

01:45:03:08 – 01:45:17:14
Rob Kristoffersen
So, Yeah, these, these are, this just attests to the reason why, Roswell is this, like, ambiguous mound of, testimony at this point, while.

01:45:17:14 – 01:45:38:17
Dan LeFebvre
Moving right along. We’re in episode number three now, and Project Blue Book has a case at area 51. It involves two soldiers, Willingham and Miller. And they were doing a routine patrol when Miller was abducted by a UFO. When Hynek and Quinn get to the site of where it happened, you can see the sand there was turned to glass.

01:45:38:20 – 01:45:52:24
Dan LeFebvre
Other than Roswell, of course, everyone knows about area 51 and how it relates to UFOs and top secret cover ups and things like that. But was Doctor Hynek ever there to investigate an abduction like we see in the show?

01:45:52:26 – 01:46:19:00
Rob Kristoffersen
Abductions were something that Project Blue Book tried to distance themselves from. And we really didn’t get, our first abduction account until 1961, when Betty and Barney Hill had their experience, you know, which we briefly talked about in episode 153. It was the inspiration for one of those episodes, and they tried to, explain away certain portions of their sighting.

01:46:19:02 – 01:46:42:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So, for instance, the only parts that they investigated were the sighting and the actual craft in the sky, which they claimed was, I believe, like an advertising search later, an advertising like plane or something like that flying at like midnight or whatever, which was a really ridiculous explanation. It’s a great time to realize.

01:46:42:22 – 01:46:45:03
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

01:46:45:06 – 01:46:52:06
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s a great, great time. Let’s advertise to that. That single folk, you know, the single couple that are just driving on the highway, they.

01:46:52:06 – 01:46:54:01
Dan LeFebvre
Call that targeted advertising. That’s that.

01:46:54:01 – 01:46:57:03
Sean Jablonski
One. Yeah.

01:46:57:06 – 01:47:51:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Absolutely, absolutely. But, the only abduction investigated through, like, the guise of Project Bluebook was the abduction of a police officer named Herbert Schirmer in 1967. And it wasn’t exactly investigated by Project Blue Book, personnel, but by an independent body that had been brought in to study the phenomenon called the Condon Committee. And, this arose this committee arose in 1966 after a series of sightings in Michigan to which, Doctor Hynek, probably made the biggest, what many would consider career suicide at that point by, labeling a UFO sighting as the, product of swamp gas, which is where that that term came from.

01:47:51:17 – 01:48:03:05
Rob Kristoffersen
These, sightings occurred in, Dexter Hillsdale in the Dexter Hillsdale region of, Michigan. But this,

01:48:03:08 – 01:48:33:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Shurmur’s case is, is kind of fascinating because he’s a, he’s a police officer with the a, Ashland, Nebraska police Department. He was fluent in multiple language. He was a very intelligent man. And, in this on December 3rd, 1967, he was on a routine patrol. He was, on a rural road when he saw a light, which he assumed to be, a vehicle having trouble.

01:48:33:21 – 01:49:04:06
Rob Kristoffersen
And when he drove up on it, it was a UFO. And he stopped his car. And in the next moment, he appeared to be missing time. But, through the Condon Committee, he was subjected to hypnosis. It was later revealed that he had, been taken on board this UFO been shown around by some really interesting looking aliens, and he was ultimately returned.

01:49:04:06 – 01:49:31:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But, this case, like, caused such an uproar to the point where, Sherman was driving to Colorado, the University of Colorado, where this project was being handled. And during one trip, a group of people actually ended up destroying his car for, no real reason. I still don’t understand it. To this day. It was, it caused it seemed to cause some kind of uproar.

01:49:31:09 – 01:50:03:16
Rob Kristoffersen
But, Shermer ended up serving for a little while longer in Ashland, Nebraska. And then he ultimately moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he, died in 2017. But, there’s actually a really cool graphic novel created about his sighting. It’s called December 3rd, 1967, an alien counter by a guy named Mike. Jessica, and Shermer claimed that, yeah, he he eventually read it before he died.

01:50:03:16 – 01:50:32:13
Rob Kristoffersen
And he claimed that, he had come to see his see his sighting in kind of a religious sense. So, that’s really the only abduction case that Project Blue Book ever gave the light of day. Most of them really went unreported, until the 80s, when, you know, more and more people started to come forward. Before then, you had scattered incidents.

01:50:32:13 – 01:51:02:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Most of them would be, you know, relegated to the, UFO journals and such. But, abductions just weren’t something that Project Blue Book wanted to handle. And really, any incidents involving sightings of alien beings, they would downplay, they would, only investigate certain portions of it, especially when it came to like the UFO sightings itself.

01:51:02:19 – 01:51:09:28
Rob Kristoffersen
But when it comes to animate beings, Project Blue Book said, no, we’re out. We’re done with this.

01:51:10:00 – 01:51:31:24
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it sounds like they’re almost the TV show is almost doing something similar to what they did with the autopsy footage, where they’re finding an excuse to, in this case, bring in area 51, because everybody knows what area 51 is. So we need to have a reason for Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn to to be there to basically have area 51 on the show because it’s a show about UFOs.

01:51:31:24 – 01:51:33:24
Dan LeFebvre
And so you have to have area 51, right?

01:51:33:27 – 01:52:00:22
Rob Kristoffersen
Area 51 is just kind of the hot gossip around town. And it wasn’t until a, journalist named George Knapp, he started talking to a guy named Bob Lazar and Bob Lazar. He his credentials have never fully been proven, but that has not stopped him from speaking on the record many times, saying that, he had, worked briefly for the government.

01:52:00:28 – 01:52:15:18
Rob Kristoffersen
He had worked like, maybe less than two months, 2 to 3 weeks or so. Reverse engineering. This, UFO, which he, affectionately called the sport model, which, it’s always been kind of funny.

01:52:15:18 – 01:52:19:24
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, cool. They have, like, SUVs and the sport coupe versions and.

01:52:19:24 – 01:52:20:23
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

01:52:20:25 – 01:52:27:23
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, I would assume so. You know, like, there’s got to be a caravan somewhere in there. And area 51, I was. Yes.

01:52:27:25 – 01:52:51:01
Dan LeFebvre
Of course you travel in style. I wanted to ask you about something with area 51, because the show kind of gives the indication that, there’s more than just the base there. I think there’s, there’s a scene where we see Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn. There’s like this massive, complex, massive doors opening in the side of a mountain.

01:52:51:01 – 01:53:06:01
Dan LeFebvre
And Quinn says something to the effect of what we saw back there at the base with just the cover. This is the real area 51. Is there any evidence to suggest that the base that everyone knows is at Cream Lake is just a cover for some sort of massive hidden base nearby?

01:53:06:03 – 01:53:45:15
Rob Kristoffersen
Bob Lazar claimed that he didn’t exactly work at area 51. He worked at a portion of Groom Lake nearby that they called S-4, and S-4 was supposedly this huge underground complex went down for miles, and that’s where they were storing all of these, UFOs that had crashed and that the government was trying to reverse engineer. And they also housed apparently aliens that worked with the US government in the evening, like there are many places, many bases that, people claim aliens work with the government on technology and stuff like that.

01:53:45:22 – 01:54:15:06
Rob Kristoffersen
So, really that extends from Bob Lazar and his claim to work at, S-4. And the interesting thing is, is that George Knapp, in the introduction to, Bob Lazar’s autobiography, which came out late last year, he claims that he called up Nellis Air Force Base and said, is there a nest for, anywhere out there? And the guy’s like, yeah, there is.

01:54:15:06 – 01:54:21:17
Rob Kristoffersen
So it’s like, well, if if George Knapp can call up and ask if there’s an S-4 out there, why can’t anybody do it?

01:54:21:18 – 01:54:23:24
Sean Jablonski
Like, come on.

01:54:23:26 – 01:54:27:02
Dan LeFebvre
I was going to say, is that all it took somebody just picking up the phone and making a.

01:54:27:02 – 01:54:29:19
Sean Jablonski
Call. So it just.

01:54:29:19 – 01:54:41:10
Rob Kristoffersen
Seems to be. That seems to be it like, all you need is a phone and, you know, some in some, you know, liquid courage. And they’ll tell you that S-4 does.

01:54:41:10 – 01:54:43:02
Sean Jablonski
Exist.

01:54:43:05 – 01:55:08:03
Dan LeFebvre
If we head back into the TV show. Episode number four covers an event in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. According to the show, Jimmy J. Shoemaker is in the woods near his house when he sees a UFO fly over and at the house, his entire family sees creatures in the woods. We can see a shot where, his family’s all lined up with rifles, and they’re shooting through through the walls of the house at the creatures outside.

01:55:08:05 – 01:55:30:18
Dan LeFebvre
Shoemaker tells Hynek and Quinn when they get there, that aliens landed there and tried to kill them all. And then later, we find that Shoemaker happens to run a circus. He has monkeys, he has costumes for them, and a green glaze to make it look like alien handprints on the trees we saw. So Project Bluebook determined that this was all a hoax, even though again, we have the same sort of theme.

01:55:30:18 – 01:55:44:06
Dan LeFebvre
Shoemaker is claiming that he was just recreating the things that actually happened. It’s similar to what we saw with Duncan Booker in the Alien Autopsy a couple episodes earlier. So how well did the show do depicting this event in Hopkinsville?

01:55:44:08 – 01:56:10:03
Rob Kristoffersen
The Kelly Hopkinsville incident is one of the most fascinating UFO related incidents. Since the 50s. It’s, kind of one of those cultural touchstones to the point where it inspired a, a character, a Pokemon. So I mean, it’s, it’s one of those cases that, you know, it perks up a lot of people’s ears.

01:56:10:03 – 01:56:36:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So, you know, they got, there’s there’s the bare bones there. It occurred in the hamlet of Kelly in Kentucky on August 21st, 1955, and it occurred on the farmstead of the Sutton family at 7 p.m. that evening. A friend of the family, the the guy’s real name was Billy Ray Taylor, claimed to see a UFO with this colorful exhaust.

01:56:36:03 – 01:57:01:11
Rob Kristoffersen
It passed over him. It hovered near some trees nearby and it came down. And this was as he was going outside to collect some water. Now, these folks, they did not have electricity. They didn’t have running water. They had an outhouse. You know, this is rural life to the fullest. So Billy Ray, he comes inside and he tells everybody, oh, I saw this UFO.

01:57:01:14 – 01:57:27:21
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, it came down, it’s out back. And, nobody believed him. But an hour later, he and, his friend, the one lady was there to visit Lucky Sutton. He lived in the house. They went outside when, their dogs just started to bark uncontrollably. And at first they saw what they believed to be a strange glow coming from behind their property.

01:57:27:24 – 01:57:53:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And as it moved closer, they were able to make out small humanoid creatures about 3.5ft tall. They claimed that its head was, it was oversize, it was round in it, and it had really large ears, which was one of the more curious features of this creature, because you don’t often see ears reported on aliens. But, in this case, we do.

01:57:53:24 – 01:58:21:09
Rob Kristoffersen
And their arms were almost as long as its entire body. They they hung really low and, its hands had talons on them, of all things. So this thing is scary as hell. They had eyes that glowed, pale yellow color. And the, the two men immediately went inside, grabbed firearms, and pointed it toward the this creature that was coming toward them.

01:58:21:11 – 01:58:53:08
Rob Kristoffersen
And this creature had its hands raised as if it’s saying, don’t shoot at me. But they fired anyway. This creature did a flip. It fled under the cover of darkness and disappeared. Now, mind you, there are 11 people living on this farmstead at this time, and it’s really in a small three room shack. So you have eight adults and three children, and many of them saw creatures appearing at the window after this.

01:58:53:08 – 01:59:18:03
Rob Kristoffersen
So it was about maybe a half hour to 45 minutes later that one of these creatures appeared at the window. They fired again and again. This creature just flipped and fled into the trees. So it fully escalated. After Billy Ray Taylor stepped out the front door and had his hair pulled by one of the creatures who had climbed up on top of the roof.

01:59:18:05 – 01:59:43:22
Rob Kristoffersen
So the family, they all packed inside their house. They holed up for a few hours, listening to the footsteps on the roof, until they eventually fled to their cars and drove to the police station. Now, the officer that accompanied them back, he claimed that these are not the kind of people that would go to the police to solve their problems.

01:59:43:24 – 02:00:14:10
Rob Kristoffersen
So they were really, scared. They were shook up, and they accompanied them back to their house, but all they found were some spent shell casings. There were holes in the, screen windows. But after the police left, the creatures actually came back, and it was so dead. Approximately 2:30 a.m., the matriarch of the household, miss, Glennie Lankford, saw one of the creatures near her bedside window, and it put a hand on the window screen.

02:00:14:10 – 02:00:18:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And I would be scarred for life if I saw it.

02:00:18:08 – 02:00:20:12
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I’ve seen horror movies that start this way.

02:00:20:12 – 02:00:22:10
Sean Jablonski
This is.

02:00:22:13 – 02:00:46:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, exactly. This. This is a horror movie movie in the making. It’s happening in real time. So it was about 530 when these creatures backed off and they were never seen again. And, the family’s ordeal made national news headlines. And because of the way this case was portrayed in the news, there were a lot of details that were blown out of proportion.

02:00:46:08 – 02:01:14:04
Rob Kristoffersen
Like they, a lot of papers said that there were like, up to 11 of these aliens when, the family claimed that they only saw three of them. But, it’s from this case that, the term little green men is something that, entered the vernacular. And it’s something that kind of exists still today because, if you look at many of the popular images of, alien heads, they’re usually green.

02:01:14:04 – 02:01:39:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s, because of this case, according to documents, Project Blue Book never took an official interest in this case, though Hynek did later write about it in one of his books. But, this, this is definitely, I would say the, the real true to life case is a little more interesting than the way it, was displayed in Project Blue Book.

02:01:39:27 – 02:02:00:00
Rob Kristoffersen
I think the the problem that, they have with Project Blue Book is, there really isn’t a lot of mystery left over when you start to explain everything away. And, you know, I think that’s, one of the fatal missteps of the second season is they just start to explain things more and more.

02:02:00:02 – 02:02:13:18
Dan LeFebvre
One thing they did mention in this episode was, program in the CIA called MK ultra, and they’re supposedly doing some work with precognition. Is there anything about MKUltra, like, was that an actual program?

02:02:13:20 – 02:02:51:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, yeah. Project MKUltra was a real project. It was a CIA funded study pertaining to mind control through the use of LSD and other psychological measures. MKUltra is a whole other can of worms, and like, you could probably do, I could go on for ever talking about it, but, I want to direct people to a few different resources because it is one of the more, it’s one of the darkest, kind of portions to the work the CIA has ever done.

02:02:51:28 – 02:03:22:29
Rob Kristoffersen
But our friends at the Not Alone podcast did a three part series back in 2019 on, MKUltra and just the, the, extent that, that project went to. There is another great podcast that just, made a five part series, on, a Canadian physicians part in that program. It’s called, madness. And that’s from the, the podcast Endless Thread.

02:03:22:29 – 02:03:39:24
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s a really great series. And, one book I’ll recommend to that just came out last year because more and more people are starting to take an interest in this case. And it’s, a lot of it has to do with the death of a man named Frank Olson, which was the subject of a Netflix series called Wormwood.

02:03:39:27 – 02:03:57:13
Rob Kristoffersen
But, there’s a book that came out last year called Poisoner in Chief by, Stephen Kinzer, which is a really fascinating book. So, yeah, if you really want to see, like, the dark end of some of the, CIA’s research, go check out those things.

02:03:57:16 – 02:04:20:17
Dan LeFebvre
We’ll we’ll leave those for there. And, after the show, if we head back to the TV show and episode number five happens at a place called Maury Island. And according to the show, it happened on June 21st, 1947, two weeks before the Roswell incident. A man, a fisherman by the name of Ernest Reed, was out on Puget Sound checking his traps.

02:04:20:20 – 02:04:41:29
Dan LeFebvre
After about an hour, something appeared overhead. He described it as round. There’s, silver craft with holes in the middle and there were bigger than his boat. There were multiples of them. We see kind of a recreation of it and on the show, and they’re hovering less than 100ft over his boat. But there’s no noise. And then something seemed to go wrong.

02:04:41:29 – 02:05:01:18
Dan LeFebvre
We couldn’t tell if one of the ships was breaking apart or if it was trying to bomb him on purpose. But there’s pieces falling all over hitting his boat. And that’s when he called in a mayday, claiming that he was under attack from alien ships. But then, soon after the event, Reed recanted his story and said he was just trying to get some insurance money for fire damage on his boat.

02:05:01:20 – 02:05:18:13
Dan LeFebvre
And then the show says that this was the first time that, quote unquote, men in black hats were reported. When they showed up to silence the town. How much of that happened? And was this the first time that anyone saw the Men in Black?

02:05:18:16 – 02:05:49:28
Rob Kristoffersen
So this is, the the Maury Island incident is, one of the more controversial UFO cases. But as the story goes, that the gentleman’s name was, Harold Dahl. He was recovering logs in the Puget Sound on June 21st, 1947. That’s when he noticed, six donut shaped objects that were heading in his direction. And one of the objects appeared to struggle maintaining altitude.

02:05:50:01 – 02:06:15:11
Rob Kristoffersen
It dropped to about 1500 feet, and it floated directly over Dahl’s boat. And it started to drop what he claimed was slag like metal down into the sound. And some of it ended up hitting his boat. The debris ended up hitting his son Charles, breaking his arm, and some of the slag actually killed their dog too. Dahl claimed to take a photo of the craft, though.

02:06:15:11 – 02:06:55:06
Rob Kristoffersen
No, it’s never surfaced. Nobody’s ever seen this thing. So, you know, that’s, sketchy, sketchy as hell. But, he showed it to his supervisor, which was a man named Fred Christman. Christman didn’t believe him, though, and he went to investigate it for himself and claimed to have seen a UFO while he was out there investigating. So the next morning, a man wearing a black suit showed up at doll’s house and escorted him to a diner, and he proceeded to recount Dahl’s experience the day before as proof that he knew all about his experience.

02:06:55:08 – 02:07:24:06
Rob Kristoffersen
So Dahl was told by this man, don’t ever speak of it. Don’t ever tell anybody. Otherwise bad things are going to happen to you. So eventually, I mean, Dahl ended up telling his story to to a lot of people, but he eventually recanted his story. But it was investigated by two people. Kenneth Arnold, who I, you know, previously mentioned he was kind of the first, like, independent UFO investigator.

02:07:24:06 – 02:08:01:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And I think people looked to him just because he had a sighting and he was accompanied by a number, another man named captain EJ Smith, who had witnessed a UFO while piloting a passenger plane, sometime in July. They didn’t believe Dahl or Christman, though. The alleged debris that they had, they they had, I believe it was Kenneth Arnold had talked to a couple of, Army intelligence officers who ended up coming down.

02:08:01:14 – 02:08:32:04
Rob Kristoffersen
They were going to escort some of this, debris back to have it analyzed. And shortly after takeoff, their plane actually did go down in the Pacific Northwest. And, there’s been a lot of conspiracies that have come up, because of that. But, the reason this story and the Men in Black Angle itself was popularized was because of a book written by a man named Gray Barker called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.

02:08:32:06 – 02:08:59:07
Rob Kristoffersen
The book featured the Murray Island case and a handful of and a handful of others in which individuals had contact with shady men wearing black suits, telling UFO witnesses not to talk about what they saw. And I think the interesting thing here is that after Dul kind of talked about his experience, he, his work, which was on the Puget Sound, kind of started to dry up.

02:08:59:07 – 02:09:45:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And his son went missing for a period of two weeks and was discovered working in a diner in Montana. And he had no clue how he got it, how he got there. And we know that portion of the story is true because there was an FBI file, opened on it. So there are some elements of this story, which are true, but, I think they’re used to fuel, like the more sensational aspects of this case because, I do believe at one point, Harold Dahl’s wife also attempted to stab him, because of all of the, controversy revolving around the case, you kind of just wanted to cut it out,

02:09:45:22 – 02:10:13:17
Rob Kristoffersen
but, yeah, almost stabbed him. But, this is like, one of the more controversial cases in that not a lot has been proven. And if I recall correctly, Fred Crispin was one of it was actually one of the people subpoenaed by the, Warren Commission when they were investigating, the assassination of JFK. And he has had ties to, the military and I think maybe the CIA.

02:10:13:17 – 02:10:23:23
Rob Kristoffersen
But, don’t don’t quote me on that. Exactly. But, yeah, it’s, it’s a kind of a whole can of worms. The the Maria Island incident.

02:10:23:25 – 02:10:42:13
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of can of worms, I want to ask you about something else. About the the men in Black, because during this episode, we learn more about someone from season one. And in that season, he was simply known as The Fixer. In this episode in particular, we find out that his name is William and he used to be part of a remote viewing program for the CIA.

02:10:42:18 – 02:11:10:02
Dan LeFebvre
But then he left that program and joined a group simply known as the Men in Black. The idea that I got from this show was that the Men in Black isn’t a part of the CIA or the military, but they still seem to have powerful resources. And after I watched the, the show, this episode and kind of how they explained it, I still really, really wasn’t sure if William left the CIA to start The Men in Black on his own, or if he just joined the already existing group.

02:11:10:02 – 02:11:23:18
Dan LeFebvre
Somehow. I’m sure Men in Black can be, again, entire series by itself, but how well do you think the show did? Just explaining kind of the men in black themselves and who they’re supposed to be.

02:11:23:21 – 02:11:53:00
Rob Kristoffersen
There are a lot of different theories when it comes to The Men in Black. That’s definitely one that these are kind of government agents. Some believe that they are, independent agents that work of their own accord. Some believe that they are actually aliens as, when, during the, Mothman, series of sightings which you’ve covered with, our good friend Sam Fredrickson.

02:11:53:03 – 02:12:18:18
Rob Kristoffersen
They the people had encounters with men in black, and they would act as if they didn’t know what random mundane items were like. Pens. Like, there was one, case in which, the, maid reporter of the town, her name was Mary Hier. She was kind of the woman who led the charge on, reporting the Mothman sightings in the paper, printing the the reports.

02:12:18:18 – 02:12:44:01
Rob Kristoffersen
And she ended up having an encounter with, the strange man who, when he came into her office, he started asking strange questions like, what do you think John Keel would do if I. If, they told him to stop talking about the Mothman and stuff like that. And, at one point he reached for a pen and he was holding it as if he didn’t know what it was.

02:12:44:03 – 02:12:51:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And, Mary Higher said that, you know, he could have the pen, at which point he turned around and laughed and ran out.

02:12:52:02 – 02:12:54:15
Sean Jablonski
So like that. Yeah.

02:12:54:15 – 02:13:21:23
Rob Kristoffersen
There’s a lot of weird stuff around the Men in Black. There is even one theory that, guy named Paul Cornell who wrote this, this comic series called Saucer Country. And in it, his, take on the Men in Black was that, they were actually Air Force agents that would, as part of a hazing ritual, go and harass UFO witnesses that, their reports ended up in the news.

02:13:21:26 – 02:13:45:08
Rob Kristoffersen
So they’d show up on their door, you know, pretending to act like government agents and stuff like that. It’s, you know, there’s a lot of takes on, the, Men in Black and, they never cease to amaze me. Here’s another interesting account from this woman who claimed to be a remote viewer who said, at one point she was going to review remote view.

02:13:45:10 – 02:14:21:18
Rob Kristoffersen
The, Men in Black. So, like, remote viewing is kind of like, it’s sending your, like, body or out into the world to like, kind of like, see things from a distance, you know? So, this woman claimed that, these beings were, extradimensional beings from a different dimension. They, they kind of kept balance, you know, making sure that, evil, aliens didn’t interfere in human affairs.

02:14:21:20 – 02:14:24:00
Rob Kristoffersen
And they also had a ton of paperwork to do.

02:14:24:00 – 02:14:30:18
Dan LeFebvre
Well, it sounds like at least the at least the show is going off one of those theories, even though there’s a lot of them.

02:14:30:20 – 02:14:58:16
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, there’s so many there’s so many angles that they, had to, work with on this and, they could, you know, go a million different places. And, you know, I’d say I’d say Project Blue Book went to the more mundane route. Now, I had a I had a conversation with, with my buddy Rich Hatem, the guy who wrote, the screenplay for The Mothman Prophecies.

02:14:58:23 – 02:15:21:13
Rob Kristoffersen
And he said that, when they were first, pitching this idea for Project Blue Book, he actually went in, and he was trying to, pitch himself as a showrunner for Project Blue Book. He didn’t get it, obviously, but, you know, it would have been it would have been fitting, seeing as how, you know, he’s, he’s well versed in this stuff.

02:15:21:16 – 02:15:46:25
Dan LeFebvre
Speaking of the show, if we head back, we’re in episode six now, and this is where we learn about the Robertson pal, as well as someone named David Dabrowski. The storyline in the show suggests that there’s a battle between control over UFO investigations between the U.S. Air Force and the CIA. The CIA puts the Air Force on trial with the Robertson Panel, which looks into the validity of Project Blue Book’s work and the hearing.

02:15:46:25 – 02:16:15:18
Dan LeFebvre
It seems no one is interested in really diving into the reports from Blue Book. They pretty much just skim them and then close them as if they already have the answer that they want. And this is just a formality. But that’s when David Dabrowski comes to the story. He convinces Hynek and Queen to let him talk to the panel, where he says that he was directed to be there by beings from another planet, planet Ventus, which is two galaxies beyond ours, and he leaves the room.

02:16:15:18 – 02:16:29:22
Dan LeFebvre
And then Quinn says, we’re doing our part by stopping people like Dabrowski from inciting panic around the nation, from people who might actually believe that they’re telling the truth. How well did the show do depicting this? Did any of that happen?

02:16:29:24 – 02:17:02:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So, the Robertson panel was a real panel. It was led by the CIA. And that did, in fact change Project Blue Book’s mission from, like, an open minded investigation to skeptical debunking. But it didn’t really happen. It didn’t really go down like this. Robertson panel was led, by the head of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, and they saw the potential hysteria that these sightings could cause.

02:17:02:09 – 02:17:46:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Life magazine at the time was claiming that, the evidence of alien life was around the corner. They were, you know, pretty, they they believe that alien life was going to show up at any second. And, and in the last episode that I was on, there was a pair of, dramatic sightings, during two consecutive weeks over Washington, DC, that I talked about, that, really got the government a little worried, to the point where they, the CIA felt like they needed to step in and kind of gauge Project Blue Book and dictate its mission.

02:17:47:00 – 02:18:17:01
Rob Kristoffersen
The, number of UFO reports in 1952, right before the Robertson panel came in, went up dramatically. Most years after 1947, they would get like maybe 30 reports a year, 30 to 50. That year they got over 130. So they saw this as a huge concern. And they thought it could be used as, kind of like psychological warfare tactics.

02:18:17:03 – 02:18:45:09
Rob Kristoffersen
So they recommended educating the public on debunking sightings. And, and, you know, this isn’t to say that Dabrowski s character didn’t exist in the UFO, world. In the UFO culture, there were a number of people that were dubbed the contacts who claimed to have contact with Venusian aliens, who wanted mankind to basically get rid of its nuclear weapons to protect the environment.

02:18:45:11 – 02:19:01:24
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, it’s, didn’t really go down the way it did on the show, but it’s, it’s close. I mean, the Robertson panel’s there, but, I as far as I know, there were no contacts that were led in front of the Robertson panel to testify at any one point.

02:19:01:26 – 02:19:28:11
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, well, that was I want to ask you about that, because in the show, the Borowski character, he is claiming that aliens directed him to go help prove the validity of Project Bluebook. But if aliens wanted to prove the validity, couldn’t they just like, show up to the hearings themselves? I think there is even a line in an earlier episode where Captain Quinn says something like, why are all these sightings happening way out in the woods?

02:19:28:11 – 02:19:39:20
Dan LeFebvre
Couldn’t they just come to like, Times Square? Why? Why do they have to be so cloak and dagger about everything? Are there any examples of stories where the the logic like that just kind of doesn’t make sense?

02:19:39:22 – 02:20:10:01
Rob Kristoffersen
So many contacts, especially in the 1950s, had stories like this, and they would also use that kind of similar logic to, in fact, pretty much all of them did. When it comes to these stories, like they’re never truly about going to the government with, this information, it’s usually about like, proving the validity of their own sightings.

02:20:10:01 – 02:20:45:03
Rob Kristoffersen
But I pretty much every single one of them, the Georgia Dembski, who was one of the most well known, contacts of the 1950s, basically, you know, reported the same things. There was George Van Tassel or Lucci, even during the the the Mothman stuff. Woodrow Darren Burger was that type of individual. And, despite the fact that Woodrow wasn’t coming to the government to say, you know, to kind of with the nuclear stuff.

02:20:45:06 – 02:21:07:04
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot of them did, a lot of them did, and a lot of them faked evidence to bolster their claims. And a lot of them made money doing it. So, in the 50s, that seemed to be the contact kind of thing, you know, make money claiming that you had contact with the aliens, that they’re peaceful, but they just want us to cut it with the nuclear crap.

02:21:07:06 – 02:21:28:29
Dan LeFebvre
Back in the show where it episode number seven now, and it is the Curse of the skinwalker. This case takes place at a ranch in Utah owned by the Chapman family. One night, their son, Billy is sleepwalking outside when three orbs of light fly over. And then they fly into the ground, forming a creepy sort of shadow monster or something of some sort.

02:21:29:02 – 02:21:48:18
Dan LeFebvre
The family runs away, of course, because that’s creepy. And, Bluebook is called to investigate. Our heroes are looking at the case. Hynek and coin are told the story of the skinwalker. As legend goes, the Ute nation used to abduct Navajo and sell them on the New Mexico slave market. So the Navajo put a curse on them.

02:21:48:18 – 02:22:14:04
Dan LeFebvre
And the land. And that land happens to be where the Chapman’s ranch is now. Skinwalker is the name of the that the Navajo gave to a medicine man who’s chosen to take the form of an animal in order to inflict pain and suffering on others. The explanation that the show gives for all of this is that the scientists at an Air Force base some ten miles east of the Chapman Ranch, are drilling down in the caverns under their ranch.

02:22:14:06 – 02:22:39:15
Dan LeFebvre
They’re using a high powered water mixture into the fault line, and these release pockets of ethylene gas that can give people oral and visual hallucinations. So it’s quite a connection from the skinwalker to just being a hallucination. But was Bluebook involved in Skinwalkers and this idea that they’re just a hallucination like the show indicates?

02:22:39:18 – 02:23:15:08
Rob Kristoffersen
The basis for this episode is an actual ranch in the Ute Valley of Utah. And, it’s it’s called Skinwalker Ranch. It was owned by a couple named Terry and Glenn Sherman, and they claim to have experienced rather large wolves, strange UFOs, portals, poltergeist like phenomenon, and a variety of other phenomenon on their property. The skinwalker, has kind of become this concept appropriated by from like Native American culture.

02:23:15:08 – 02:23:41:28
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s largely because of a book called hunt for the skinwalker, which was, chronicled the Sherman’s time on the ranch. It’s safe to say that Project Bluebook never investigated this case and never really would have, either. It wouldn’t be in their wheelhouse at all. They were really more concerned with investigating, like single sightings as opposed to like long term areas and stuff like that.

02:23:41:28 – 02:24:13:16
Rob Kristoffersen
But, yeah, in many ways, this episode seems like a plug for the new show that they had started that was airing after Project Blue Book. The season finale. It was called, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. It’s a Brandon Fugal show. It’s, it’s definitely a moment to cash in. That sighting didn’t come. Well, the property didn’t really come to the forefront until, the mid 90s.

02:24:13:16 – 02:24:28:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And really, it didn’t come to the public conscious until about 2006, ten years later. But, yeah, it definitely seemed like more of a money grab. And, Project Blue Book wouldn’t be, investigating a place like this.

02:24:28:19 – 02:24:29:21
Sean Jablonski
Yeah, yeah.

02:24:29:23 – 02:24:52:09
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we head back to the show, we’re on episode number eight, and it introduces another concept that is familiar with, UFOs. And that would be hangar 18. Hynek and Quinn are told about it by a mechanical engineer named John. He explains that hangar 18 looks more like a storage building than a hangar, but the real lab is six floors deep.

02:24:52:12 – 02:25:09:03
Dan LeFebvre
That’s where they reverse engineer Soviet technology. But this time, John says they have something that’s not Soviet. The suggestion they’re being that it’s extraterrestrial. What is hangar 18? And are there reports of reverse engineering UFOs there?

02:25:09:06 – 02:25:41:02
Rob Kristoffersen
The idea of hangar 18 is actually connected to the Roswell crash, and in particular to a few pilots who claim to have flown wreckage and alien bodies to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. One of them is a man named, Oliver Henderson, who, told his story to a number of, Roswell investigators, claimed that, he actually flew the, the child sized coffins, all the way to, Wright-Patterson.

02:25:41:04 – 02:26:08:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And there’s a World War two flying ace named Marion Black. Mack Magruder, who, also claimed to actually see living alien beings walking around in this, fictional hangar. There is really no hangar 18. It’s just kind of been this myth that has been propagated ever since, like the Roswell investigation. But, I mean, it did inspire a megadeth song, so I that’s that’s got to be worth something.

02:26:08:05 – 02:26:11:01
Dan LeFebvre
It’s gotta be worth something. Yeah.

02:26:11:03 – 02:26:11:12
Sean Jablonski
There you.

02:26:11:12 – 02:26:26:11
Dan LeFebvre
Go. What about the idea that Hynek was there? Because we see in the show that Hynek actually gets there. Is there anything to suggest that Hynek himself was at any place like that?

02:26:26:13 – 02:26:47:03
Rob Kristoffersen
No, no, there’s, Yeah. There’s nothing. It’s, Hynek was really close with his secretary, and he seemed to tell his secretary pretty much everything. There might have been some secrets that Hynek, you know, kept to himself, but, Yeah, I don’t think Hynek visited any kind of facility like that.

02:26:47:05 – 02:27:07:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, back in the show now we’re at episode number nine, and this case is a Soviet bomber carrying a nuclear bomb that gets cut into by a UFO over Canadian airspace. And Bluebook is called in because the Canadian Air Force doesn’t have a UFO program. So Hynek and Quinn make their way to a small logging community in a place called Hartley Bay.

02:27:07:23 – 02:27:25:26
Dan LeFebvre
Way out in the middle of nowhere, they find the plane along with the two pilots that survived. One is just called Alex, but the other pilots given a full name, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Alinsky. And that makes me think that maybe Alex is made up, but maybe Yuri is real. How much of this case really happened?

02:27:25:28 – 02:27:55:24
Rob Kristoffersen
So the the actual case that this episode is based on is, it’s a little, it’s honestly a little more terrifying than, than the one on, this, this particular episode. So, on the night of November 23rd, 1953, the U.S Air Defense Command near the US Canadian border detected a blip on radar over Ristic and over restricted airspace above Lake Superior.

02:27:55:26 – 02:28:26:26
Rob Kristoffersen
The Air Force scrambled an F 89 C Scorpion jet from Kinross Air Force Base, piloted by First Lieutenant Felix Moncler and Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson, and from the start, Robert Wilson had trouble tracking this thing once he got in the air and it kept changing course, like, really quick. But with the aid of, ground control, they were eventually able to kind of get a lock on this object, and they pursued it for over 30 minutes, getting closer and closer.

02:28:26:29 – 02:29:03:21
Rob Kristoffersen
Eventually, Michael and Wilson were guided down from 25,000ft to about 7000ft. They watched, the radar operators watched as the, you know, one radar blip chased the other, and a short while later they lost radio contact with Montclair and Wilson, and the witnesses there claimed to see on radar. These two objects merge into one and fly off. Now, Monreal and Wilson have never been seen again.

02:29:03:24 – 02:29:28:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Nobody knows what happened to them. Wreckage from their plane has never been found. They just disappeared. And, you know, there have been some like hoaxers coming forward. There was 1 in 2006. He claimed to be from a company called the Great Lakes Diving Company. They claim that, they walked up, they found something like, you know, a plane in Lake Superior.

02:29:28:27 – 02:29:48:03
Rob Kristoffersen
There was never it was ruled a hoax. But like Moncler and Wilson have never been seen since. And if you look at, McCullough’s, tombstone, his memorial, it’s, it’s explicitly states that he died while in pursuit of a UFO.

02:29:48:06 – 02:29:54:29
Dan LeFebvre
What about the idea? In this episode, we see Doctor Hynek actually neutralize an atomic bomb. Did he ever actually do anything like that?

02:29:55:01 – 02:29:57:10
Sean Jablonski
Probably not.

02:29:57:12 – 02:30:18:06
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, he was, he had worked with rocketry, but I don’t think he had worked with the atomic bomb specifically. And, you know, maybe in a situation, he’d be able to know how to disarm it. But I don’t know. What I love about this show is like, they they kind of treat JL and Hynek as if he’s like a jack of all trades.

02:30:18:09 – 02:30:22:18
Dan LeFebvre
He’s the hero of the show. So of course he’s going to save the day no matter what.

02:30:22:21 – 02:30:23:06
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

02:30:23:06 – 02:30:25:14
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, absolutely.

02:30:25:16 – 02:30:56:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well at the end of that episode, episode nine, Doctor Hynek and Captain Quinn get to meet Senator John F Kennedy when he stops by the Project Bluebook office. And the case from Kennedy takes place during Operation Main Breaks. This goes into episode number ten. There’s, massive multinational military exercise. It involves some 200 ships, 80,000 men. And if anything happens during a war exercise that size near Russian territory, it could spark World War three.

02:30:56:10 – 02:31:23:13
Dan LeFebvre
So Heineken, Quinn, investigate aboard USS Wisconsin in the North Atlantic near Norway. They find out that this UFO experience that this, sighting that’s happened, it’s not coming from the sky like all the others, but it’s actually coming from under water. But there’s something else about this. There’s a fishing trawler that was there. It left Shanghai some 11,000 miles away just two days ago, and the fuel tank is still almost full.

02:31:23:15 – 02:31:44:02
Dan LeFebvre
Needless to say, that’s impossible. And at the end of the episode, Quinn takes a mini sub underwater to where the flying crafts are coming from. But the admiral orders depth charges dropped anyway, and the last we see of him is a massive explosion outside his sub. We assume he’s dead, except Doctor Hynek believes maybe he’s not. Maybe he was transported somehow.

02:31:44:02 – 02:31:49:21
Dan LeFebvre
Like that boat from Shanghai. Did any of that happen?

02:31:49:24 – 02:32:18:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Operation Main Brace itself was a real operation. Like the sensational part, you know, definitely didn’t didn’t happen. But, Operation Main Brace at the time, was composed of dozens of NATO organizations that, had sent ships to participate. At the time, it was the largest peacetime military exercise since World War two. And it was meant to, simulate a mock attack on Europe.

02:32:18:09 – 02:32:57:12
Rob Kristoffersen
It was involved, 200 ships, a thousand planes and over 80,000 men. And during this exercise, UFOs were spotted. The first sighting came on September 13th, 1952. The crew of a Danish destroyer spotted a triangular shaped object with blue lights on it, moving through the night sky at high rates of speed. Seven days later, aboard the USS Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a reporter named Wallace Litwin claimed that several pilots and flight crew members saw a silver colored sphere in the sky.

02:32:57:14 – 02:33:23:11
Rob Kristoffersen
Following behind the fleet. There is an actual photo of this object as well, though. Many have tried to debunk it as a weather balloon. It doesn’t appear to be a weather balloon. And, the only, places that it could have been launched from have, denied launching weather balloons around this time. It was also moving way, way too fast to be a weather balloon.

02:33:23:13 – 02:34:03:08
Rob Kristoffersen
An object had been seen the day before of that sighting, on September 19th, as a British meteor jet was returning to an airfield after conducting exercises in the North Sea. And, the pilot of that flight claimed to see a strange silver circular craft following the meteor. They described its movements as that of a falling leaf from a tree, which, is a common, thing reported in a lot of UFO sightings, is that some of these objects appear to be like, doing this slow, the slow falling pattern at times.

02:34:03:10 – 02:34:24:19
Rob Kristoffersen
The objects stopped in mid-air, rotated, and then took off fast away from everybody else. But, yeah, maybe this was a real exercise. They saw some UFOs. I don’t know that Kennedy really played a part in it, but, it is, pretty fascinating. Set of sightings.

02:34:24:21 – 02:34:28:15
Dan LeFebvre
Was Kennedy associated with Project Blue Book at all?

02:34:28:17 – 02:34:54:21
Rob Kristoffersen
No, he was not. There have been, theories that people have suggested, claiming that Kennedy knew alien secrets that he had told them to Marilyn Monroe and that that’s why the both of them were assassinated. But there’s really no, truth behind those statements at all. It’s just, conspiracy theory.

02:34:54:24 – 02:35:16:18
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, I think the this show kind of alludes that it was, I think at the end of episode number eight, there was a brief line of dialog with Daniel Baker in the CIA talking to General Harding, saying, when it comes to the CIA, no one is untouchable, right? It kind of tie in my mind ties. Okay. It’s something with the JFK assassination as a CIA plot somehow tied to Blue Book.

02:35:16:20 – 02:35:51:05
Rob Kristoffersen
Right? Right. And that’s the thing. And that’s also like the ambiguity that the, assassination of John, John F Kennedy is kind of, lended itself to the Warren Commission, really didn’t do a good job explaining themselves and explaining, everything that happened. But, yeah, it’s just it seems like with some conspiracy theories, and the longer that they are around, the more they get added to and the more people come out of the woodwork saying, well, you know, this happened or that happened.

02:35:51:07 – 02:35:59:10
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. It’s always it’s always interesting to read them sometimes, but, yeah. So I don’t put a lot of stuck.

02:35:59:12 – 02:36:17:10
Dan LeFebvre
Well, that makes sense. I did want to ask about, I think was in episode three, there was a scene where we saw Heinecke and Queen in a Jeep and a big UFO flies over light, shine down. And then by the time the camera focuses on the Jeep again, Heinicke and Queen are gone, giving the impression that they were both abducted.

02:36:17:12 – 02:36:20:13
Dan LeFebvre
Was Doctor Hynek ever abducted himself?

02:36:20:15 – 02:36:54:18
Rob Kristoffersen
No. You. He was never abducted. He, He. When he came to, present his theories and stuff like that, he was very guarded. He was always very, skeptical. He was never rash to point to one thing. He had his theories and and he had his leanings. But when it came to a case by case basis, he, he would never he would never go there, per se and say, you know, that this is true or that is true.

02:36:54:18 – 02:37:11:19
Rob Kristoffersen
And, given that, Hynek even disputed the one UFO sighting that he claimed to have while looking through a telescope. So, yeah, he’s always been that skeptical kind of guy. But, as far as I could tell, and through all the research, he has never been abducted.

02:37:11:23 – 02:37:34:14
Dan LeFebvre
But we have talked about a lot of different concepts and things that they put into the show, things like area 51 and, and Skinwalker Ranch and these other elements. If you were in charge of this season of Project Bluebook, was there anything that you wish would have made it onto the show that they left out? I think there.

02:37:34:14 – 02:38:03:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Are a lot of other interesting sightings that they could have really gone to. And and like I say with, especially with the Skinwalker Ranch episode, you look at that and you see that it’s, you know, just, kind of a walking advertisement for another show that’s, that’s coming out. But, I’m glad that they included things like the the Kelly Hopkinsville incident.

02:38:03:28 – 02:38:07:18
Rob Kristoffersen
If I could,

02:38:07:21 – 02:38:52:05
Rob Kristoffersen
Trying to think, what would I have them include? I think the Herbert Shermer sighting is fascinating in the fact that we’re talking about a police officer that, claims to have been abducted by aliens. I think that would have been a more interesting case to present. In. That means there’s a case known as the, RV 47 case, and it’s kind of a the one case that many have put up as, like, the best scientific evidence for a UFO because it it literally involved a UFO following a, radar plane in the sky over, like, hundreds of miles.

02:38:52:06 – 02:39:11:25
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s, it’s a pretty fascinating case. Really, I think they did the best that they could with the season, but, Yeah, the. I can’t think of any other cases off the top of my head right now, but, those two are, I think would have made for interesting episodes.

02:39:11:28 – 02:39:18:18
Dan LeFebvre
Well, thank you so much for your time to come on to chat about Project Blue Book season two. I’ve learned a lot. It’s been it’s been a fun chat. Yeah.

02:39:18:18 – 02:39:29:26
Rob Kristoffersen
Thank you again for having me on this. Been so fun.

02:39:29:29 – 02:39:48:19
Dan LeFebvre
And that brings us to an end of the two seasons of the History Channel’s Project Blue Book. But stick around because we still have the chat with Project Blue Book’s creator, David O’Leary and showrunner Sean John Belinski to get another angle of the whole show that’s coming up right on the other side of our Two Truths and a lie game for season two.

02:39:48:23 – 02:40:16:08
Dan LeFebvre
And as a quick refresher, here are they two truths and a lie for season two of Project Blue Book number one. In the 1950s, the U.S. government illegally experimented with LSD, an unwitting U.S. citizens. Number two, the phrase little green men comes from a close encounter in Kentucky. Number three, Project Blue Book was commissioned by JFK. Did you figure out which one is a lie?

02:40:16:10 – 02:40:38:00
Dan LeFebvre
Again, I’ve got the answer in the envelope, so let’s open that up. And the lie this time is number three. As rat pointed out, President Kennedy was not associated with Project Blue Book at all. There has been some speculation that maybe he knew about alien secrets, but there really hasn’t been any proof of that. Okay, now I’ve got one more remastered episode for you today about Project Blue Book.

02:40:38:00 – 02:41:00:04
Dan LeFebvre
Coming up soon will be my chat from 2021 with the creator of Project Blue Book, David O’Leary, along with the showrunner, a Project Blue Book, Sean Job Lynskey. But first, let’s set up one final game of Two Truths and a lie for that episode. Number one, they wrote a season three, a Project Blue Book telling stories beyond the United States.

02:41:00:07 – 02:41:26:11
Dan LeFebvre
Number two, the Roswell Incident was made famous by Project Blue Book number three. David and Sean have both had unexplained experiences. Okay, now let’s hear from David O’Leary and Sandra Belinsky about creating Project Blue Book.

02:41:26:13 – 02:41:49:03
Dan LeFebvre
Or UFO mention either they just won’t believe what you say, or they’ll simply watch it to find a way to tell you that you’re wrong. I can only imagine how difficult that is when you layer that on to the normal difficulties of trying to pitch and create a show that’s based on UFOs. So my first question is simply why Project Blue Book?

02:41:49:09 – 02:41:59:13
Dan LeFebvre
Why did you decide to create a show around UFOs when you could create a show that doesn’t have nearly as much controversy surrounding it? David, as the creator, want to start with you?

02:41:59:15 – 02:42:23:25
David O’Leary
Yeah. Sure thing. And, hey, everybody’s there. And, Dan, thanks for having us. Thanks for having us on. Yeah. You know, I mean, listen, for me, and for Sean as well, I, I, we like UFOs have been sort of a life long obsession interest. I’ve always, always had a deep interest in the subject matter going all the way back to when I was a kid.

02:42:23:28 – 02:42:45:15
David O’Leary
I’m not sure why, but I just, like, was always. You know, fascinated with the unknown. And it always rang true to me. I would watch, you know, Unsolved Mysteries in the 1980s or scare the hell you know, scare the crap out of myself and read Whitley Strivers Communion when I was like 9 or 10 years old. And it just it always felt authentic and true.

02:42:45:15 – 02:43:08:24
David O’Leary
So like especially, you know, some of the more famous cases in terms of, in terms of bluebook, you know, I, I, you know, as I became an adult and moved out to LA and pursued a career in writing and all that kind of stuff, I wanted, you know, this was sort of right before I, you know, to enter 2017 and, like, UFOs kind of really hit the news again.

02:43:09:01 – 02:43:48:01
David O’Leary
And there wasn’t actually, frankly, a lot of UFO stuff on TV. X-Files had sort of come to its end and I become a bit of, of, of a UFO history buff. And Project Blue Book always just felt like such an interesting, ripe sort of world for TV in that it was period. You know, it had all these other interesting elements in the 1950s in terms of the Cold War and the rise of the atomic age and all that kind of stuff, and then just a plethora of like incredible pieces and then really just a focus on the characters who who sort of led that effort with doctor J and Hynek and, Captain

02:43:48:01 – 02:44:10:10
David O’Leary
Ed Peltz, sort of the first director of Project Bluebook boat who basically shifted sides and, and, and became these, you know, adamant believers that there was something worthy of rigorous scientific study here. So, I think it began with that idea of, of could retell, could we tell a story, you know, sort of historical drama through the lens of these characters?

02:44:10:13 – 02:44:34:22
David O’Leary
And, I was fortunate that, like, I guess there wasn’t a lot of UFO stuff at the time. And, I think Project Bluebook presented a certain, certain natural engine with sort of a, a kind of a different case every week with a really interesting sort of backdrop of getting to kind of tell it in this sort of noir 1950s, sort of shadowy sort of way.

02:44:34:22 – 02:44:46:21
David O’Leary
And, and we were just very, very fortunate that, you know, it took some time, but that eventually, it found a home, with eight studios and, and and history.

02:44:46:24 – 02:44:48:04
Dan LeFebvre
How about you? How did you.

02:44:48:09 – 02:45:16:28
David O’Leary
Kind of get involved in this? So I came a little later. You know, once David had, you know, sort of researched and written the script and had connected with, Robert Zemeckis, and I think they had had a series order by that point. And, you know, I’ve been in the television business for it’s like 25 years plus at this point, I think, and so I’ve, you know, every TV show needs to have a showrunner at some point.

02:45:16:28 – 02:45:38:11
David O’Leary
And David is talented as he is. Had not been in that position before. And so if you’re going to start any business, you’re generally going to want somebody who has that experience to sort of be in there and help help guide the process and understand what’s coming up in front of you and how to run a writer’s room and just, just all of the things you’re not going to know if you haven’t done it.

02:45:38:12 – 02:45:59:02
David O’Leary
So, I essentially interviewed for the job, which began with, meeting with David at a diner. And we realized very quickly that, like him, I, I’ve kind of been obsessed with UFOs my whole life. It’s been something that since I was a kid, I remember seeing one when I was ten years old that. Swear to God.

02:45:59:04 – 02:46:17:04
David O’Leary
And so it’s just something I’ve always been fascinated with. So we were trading stories to the point where we stayed so long. I got a parking ticket. And then, of course, you got to go. You got to go through the gantlet of meeting the studio and the producers and the network and all that stuff, and it just felt like such a very sort of natural, match.

02:46:17:06 – 02:46:47:15
David O’Leary
And then we just sort of move forward from there that, you know, we really connected on having the same passion, you know, in terms of that. But, so I’m just happy to have had the opportunity, to meet, you know, someone who shares that, and, you know, in terms of how I look at just even the phenomenon and want to tell those stories, I feel like, I mean, it’s very much in vogue right now for, for people to be talking about UFOs in a very serious way.

02:46:47:18 – 02:47:11:21
David O’Leary
And I think, like any new science and it is a bit of a science now because we’re just starting to discover it, because we have sort of the minds that are being applied to it and the science and the technology, and the, credibility of the people who’ve come forward. But for people to go back to your earlier point, for people who can, you know, when you talk about is there controversy around UFOs or why stir that up?

02:47:11:21 – 02:47:28:19
David O’Leary
Or when people say that, you know, my first question is like, well, what do you know about UFOs? I would ask, like, what do you know about the history of UFOs? Because a lot of people want to throw it off as something, you know, tinfoil hat wearing silly. Like, if they were here, they’d be landing on the front lawn of the white House and blah, blah, blah.

02:47:28:20 – 02:47:52:01
David O’Leary
But when you really understand the history, and the amount of cases and the amount of credible people that have come forward, physical evidence, you know, visual evidence, all of this, it is without a doubt something that exists. And I count myself as a true believer. And the second question I would ask somebody is, what do you believe about it?

02:47:52:08 – 02:48:11:16
David O’Leary
What do you have to believe to believe that it doesn’t exist? You know, and oftentimes people will sort of stumble and go, well, I just think that this would happen if there would be this, that the aliens would have said something by now. And then when you dig into that, you realize it’s just sort of a, a belief people have that sort of based on an like on a feeling.

02:48:11:19 – 02:48:28:23
David O’Leary
Right? Which is just like, oh, I don’t know. I just feel like it wouldn’t happen this way, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like when you sort of dig into that, it’s, I would imagine the way people would have felt before, I don’t know. We discovered bacteria when we didn’t have a microscope. You know, it’s demons inside your body.

02:48:28:24 – 02:48:45:29
David O’Leary
You know, that’s what it’s got to be. And then when the science caught up and we were able to see what was actually going on, there’s still a bridge that has to happen where people have to get on board and understand that the facts that are there and the people that are studying it are not crazy, and then all of this stuff gets borne out.

02:48:45:29 – 02:49:13:22
David O’Leary
So I feel like that’s a very important, pursuit right now, especially in a world where truth is such a, malleable concept. And so I love the idea that David and I, you know, again, I think found, a path and the passion towards wanting to get those ideas out there that it’s, it’s it’s be part of that notion of getting the truth out to an audience.

02:49:13:24 – 02:49:22:10
Dan LeFebvre
What was your interest kind of starting with that? You said you had an experience that at ten, it was that kind of when your interest in UFO started?

02:49:22:12 – 02:49:43:05
David O’Leary
100%, I, I was in, I was in New York City, which, where I grew up and saw lights in the sky moving, you know, silently information. There were these long sort of hexagonal type lights. And I remember very clearly, I can still see it very clearly. The moment where you look up and I’m like, am I seeing what I’m seeing?

02:49:43:07 – 02:49:58:28
David O’Leary
Could it be what I think it is? It has to be something like just this. You go through this whole range of emotions and, and of course, I was a kid, you know, but I still remember it very clearly to this day. So. Yeah, I mean, that’s where it had to start for sure.

02:49:59:01 – 02:50:01:27
Dan LeFebvre
David, have you ever had an experience?

02:50:01:29 – 02:50:25:21
David O’Leary
So I so I had something weird happened to me much later. And it was actually after I sold the, the show, but before the show got picked up to series and I actually, like, didn’t share it for a while, except with like, my wife and like basically I was walking home. It was I was walking home, I lived, I lived, then I lived, kind of near the grove for people living in Los Angeles.

02:50:25:24 – 02:50:40:28
David O’Leary
I was walking home through my neighborhood, and I was weirdly, I had a park a couple blocks away because of street parking, which was sort of a rare thing, and it was a quiet night. It was kind of late. And then the other strange thing was I was actually on the phone at the time, late with a friend of mine, which was also kind of just not use it.

02:50:40:28 – 02:51:04:11
David O’Leary
But I’m so glad I was that I wasn’t by myself, because I think I would have freaked out even more. And I saw what looked like a teardrop shaped sort of self luminescent, almost like a green kind of Chinese lantern emerge from out of the trees, like 25, 30ft above me. And I stopped and I did exactly what Sean does.

02:51:04:11 – 02:51:29:27
David O’Leary
And with so many UFO witnesses do and sort of be like, is that a drone? What is that? I’m not hearing anything like worrying, then I don’t know if this happened or not, but it felt like it started. It sort of stopped and it was kind of flickering and it sort of started to move towards me. And, I panicked and I, I’m on the phone with a friend of mine, and he sort of black, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

02:51:29:27 – 02:51:49:05
David O’Leary
I’m like, dude, I’m like. And I duck under it. And then it just sort of like continued on, kind of floating over the, sort of the, like the air I lived in in a sort of two storey house. So it’s just like, you know, like 30, 40ft in the air just over the houses and continued behind, behind, you know, some line of trees and stuff.

02:51:49:07 – 02:52:09:18
David O’Leary
Other than, like, talking to my wife about it, I didn’t share it for like a year. Because I, I don’t know, like, I, I, I like, didn’t want to be the guy with, like, a UFO show who, like, suddenly had this weird UFO variant, but, I eventually, did sort of talk about it because I also realized served to Sean’s point, too.

02:52:09:18 – 02:52:27:13
David O’Leary
And just like in terms of getting the truth out, like, I don’t know exactly what it was. And hey, maybe it was a drone and I was just like, I freaked myself out or something, but it was very oddly shaped, and it was very weird and sort of how it moved. It was sort of like a balloon, like a lit up balloon.

02:52:27:16 – 02:52:49:22
David O’Leary
But, you know, so that that was sort of the, that’s the only time I think I’ve seen something where I really couldn’t identify it, you know? And then I think so much about UFOs is sort of how it makes you feel. It definitely felt strange. Like it felt. It felt like something as opposed to just like, oh, that’s, you know, I just I couldn’t place what that would be.

02:52:49:24 – 02:53:06:23
David O’Leary
Especially because it was like, in the branches of trees and sort of like, you know, and then later on, like, actually when we were doing the show, like we found out there are like, you know, these cases of green fireballs, we even did an episode on them. And that’s a little bit of what it I didn’t actually know that at the time.

02:53:06:23 – 02:53:13:29
David O’Leary
And that’s sort of like what it came out like to me. So I don’t know. I don’t know what that was. Yeah.

02:53:14:00 – 02:53:17:06
Dan LeFebvre
You don’t usually don’t try to fly a drone through the trees.

02:53:17:10 – 02:53:27:27
David O’Leary
Yeah. Right. Yeah. It was very weird. It almost looks like it came out of the tree. Like it was very like I saw it in the branches and kind of emerged from, like. It was very sad. Wow.

02:53:28:01 – 02:53:44:23
Dan LeFebvre
That’s weird. Well, go back to the show. You’ve both worked on shows that are not based on true events as well as, of course, Project Bluebook, which is what are some of the differences in the ways that you approach a show when it’s based on true events compared to a completely fictional story? Sean, me let’s start with you this time.

02:53:45:00 – 02:54:03:29
David O’Leary
Sure. I, I’m going to steal a quote, and I don’t know who to credit it to, but, I you know what I think it was? Mark Twain is like, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And I think you find that out right away. Now, I’ve had the the the. I tend to love historical pieces.

02:54:03:29 – 02:54:27:03
David O’Leary
I’ve done a few development wise, you know, over the years, Tesla and Edison, the Bonaparte’s. There’s been a couple other in there, and it’s been a bit of a learning curve trying to apply storytelling to what actually happened. And, whether it is the network exec saying, I don’t care, we need better television. And what exactly happened in that moment?

02:54:27:05 – 02:54:31:28
David O’Leary
Or just an instinct from a storytelling point of view? You know, look.

02:54:32:01 – 02:54:33:18
Sean Jablonski
It.

02:54:33:20 – 02:54:56:11
David O’Leary
Taking history and making a story of it. You can do a documentary right there. That’s why they exist. Because and a lot of times there’s great history that you couldn’t write this stuff. But when you’re trying to make a television show and you need to sort of hit your brakes and you need to engage an audience and you want to give your characters an emotional arc, you kind of have to.

02:54:56:11 – 02:55:16:24
David O’Leary
And it sounds like simple, but it’s actually kind of hard. You have to sort of really give yourself permission to, expand on it. Because otherwise you’re sort of I, I remember feeling almost, you know, I definitely had a lot of deference to the history and the people, and you never want to mess with that.

02:55:16:24 – 02:55:38:09
David O’Leary
But at the same time, you have to again, do your job and and sell it to an audience. So, I feel like I’m rambling a little bit, but I just think you have to have the courage to kind of get out there and really tell the story that you’re wanting to tell and have respect for the people in the material.

02:55:38:12 – 02:55:57:28
David O’Leary
But be a little fearless in how you do it. Otherwise, you know, you’re never going to you never going to cross the boundary and just say, nobody’s ever going to say what? What a really wonderfully factually accurate television show. Do you know what I mean? And get you get yourself ratings and an audience. And I even know, like, something like the Queen.

02:55:57:28 – 02:56:21:23
David O’Leary
I mean, how much can they have been in those rooms where those people were talking and understand what was said? And, lastly, I had a really good mentor. I grew up under basically Tom Fontana, who was sort of my mentor into the business, and he said, if you’re going to do something historical, look for those, look at the history, and then find the moments in between that might not necessarily even be written about.

02:56:21:26 – 02:56:45:00
David O’Leary
Get in there and use your writing ability to figure out what could have happened, what could have connected those dots, how could have, though? How could those characters have moved from point A to point B? That’s not being written about, you know? And thankfully, audiences are very forgiving these days. And I, I have to say like, Quentin Tarantino was a big inspiration in a weird way.

02:56:45:00 – 02:57:03:05
David O’Leary
When I saw Inglorious Bastards, I went, wait, you can’t kill Hitler in a theater? That never happened. And yet at the same time, I remember as an audience thinking, this is the most exhilarating thing I’ve seen because it felt like he was having the courage to go. I want to tell the story that’s going to get people excited.

02:57:03:05 – 02:57:27:05
David O’Leary
And I think if you set the table for your audience that way and say, look, this is inspired by true events, we are not telling that, you know, accurately. We’re inspired. You know, we’re inspired by it and doing it. I think you’re okay. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we, we we quickly realized is exactly what Sean said, that we needed to put entertainment and emotion first.

02:57:27:12 – 02:57:46:02
David O’Leary
You know what I mean? Like, people are going to tune. Otherwise you’re you’re just going to watch a documentary on Project Blue Book. If you just want to know the facts, you know it’s all there. You can read. There’s wonderful books we have. We’ve read them. What? You know who we need to tell a story that about about people, about human beings going through these events.

02:57:46:05 – 02:58:04:22
David O’Leary
You know, we kind of quickly realize the heart and this, you know, the heart and soul of the show was Hynek and Quinn. That relationship, along with all of our other, you know, sort of six primary leads, the generals, you know, Susie and Mimi, all that stuff. Mimi and Hynek. So, but you know what?

02:58:04:22 – 02:58:33:09
David O’Leary
You what we found a way to do, I think rather hopefully rather well, was take those kernels of truth and, you know, and and put them into and then and then weed them into a narrative yarn that was hopefully enjoyable, entertaining, emotionally evocative, while while having but but also encouraging people to be like, hey, like that. Like every week was a case that really happened, within within an episode, we we’d have little Easter eggs of things that were really going on at the time.

02:58:33:09 – 02:58:59:08
David O’Leary
We’d explore other things that were sort of in the social fabric of the 1950s, bomb shelters and, and, you know, paranoia. And, and you know, this. Yeah. You know, like, people tapping your phones and all that stuff. Russia’s interest, interest in UFOs, all that stuff. So, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. One other quick thing to we also had Paul Hynek, who was, you know, Jalen Hynek son, as a consulting, producer on the show.

02:58:59:08 – 02:59:18:21
David O’Leary
And, you know, that felt like any time we were, you know, doing something that made us a little squeamish or whatever he was, he would always say, which is wonderful. He’d say, I think my dad would love this, you know? And so that really gave us a lot of, you know, permission. It felt like to kind of run with it and get a blessing.

02:59:18:24 – 02:59:19:05
David O’Leary
Yeah.

02:59:19:12 – 02:59:22:21
Dan LeFebvre
Just for that, that topic. Are you talking about UFO? Was it, you know.

02:59:22:24 – 02:59:23:09
Sean Jablonski

02:59:23:12 – 02:59:31:17
Dan LeFebvre
Unexplained. Right. And then government cover ups where obviously we don’t know a lot of stuff that’s going on there. Did you find.

02:59:31:19 – 02:59:32:03
David O’Leary
Bluebook.

02:59:32:03 – 02:59:40:13
Dan LeFebvre
To be more challenging to fill in some of those gaps, then completely fictional? Because there is just a lot of it that we don’t know.

02:59:40:15 – 03:00:01:28
David O’Leary
Did SAR de. I’ll jump in. Yeah. The thing we talked about very early on was that it’s we’re riding a line between we can never say they exist or the show goes away because the whole idea is they’re searching for the truth. Right. So that was always a hard line to kind of kind of deal with. And something we were very aware of every episode.

03:00:02:01 – 03:00:25:11
David O’Leary
And one of the challenges too, is like, you realize it’s not a, it’s not a cop show where you show up and there’s a body, our guys show up and somebody’s saying, no, no, no, I saw it in the sky. You know what it’s like. So how do you how do you tell those stories? In, in, in give it all of that sort of energy and interest and, and, you know, a revelation, every act kind of thing.

03:00:25:11 – 03:00:48:20
David O’Leary
So that’s right. And, and the thing we realized was that we had to thrust our leads and our audience into the case, you know, we had to thrust them into these events to some degree. So things would happen to Clinic and Quinn as they would investigate a case that would often not start with, you know, a civilian witness or a military witness or multiple witnesses seeing something they couldn’t explain.

03:00:48:20 – 03:01:10:11
David O’Leary
It wouldn’t the case wouldn’t be over. It would lead down a rabbit hole of of more revelations. But as Sean said, it’s exactly right. We would always want to walk that line like we’d always have, like a plausible other, answer, no matter how deep. And we went. I mean, there’s an episode early on where we go to, you know, Operation Paperclip.

03:01:10:11 – 03:01:44:12
David O’Leary
We go into, like, the sin base and there looks that it’s like they’re staring at what looks like an alien. An alien in a tank, you know, but there’s an alternate explanation there that’s given as well, so that there was always this sense of like, you know, am I am I seeing you know, which you know, which truth are you going to are you going to believe, you know, because I think one of our goals, too, was obviously we wanted to attract audience members who were interested in this subject matter, but we also wanted to, you know, we were also very cognizant that, like, half the population, you know, you know, doesn’t

03:01:44:12 – 03:02:06:25
David O’Leary
think there is much to UFOs. And we wanted to make sure that we we presented an interesting sort of like dilemma where both sides could be like, oh, maybe, maybe it was maybe, maybe the, you know, the Lubbock lights were plovers, you know, or like, or maybe it was temperature over inversions. In episode 2 in 110, you know, at the in the season one finale or things of that nature.

03:02:06:25 – 03:02:19:18
David O’Leary
So, so that there was always this balance because like, yeah, as soon as you just say it’s, it’s real definitively it’s the mystery is gone. The truth is, you know, that the quest is, is is Oak.

03:02:19:21 – 03:02:20:27
Dan LeFebvre
Park part of.

03:02:21:00 – 03:02:21:21
David O’Leary
Blue Book like.

03:02:21:27 – 03:02:35:18
Dan LeFebvre
From from history was to come up with some of those stories, some of, some of the plausible explanations for that. Was it can you give an example, maybe of a plot point in there where you, you did depart from the history that they.

03:02:35:21 – 03:02:36:04
Sean Jablonski
That.

03:02:36:07 – 03:02:41:06
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe the example that Blue Book gave and had to kind of come up with your own?

03:02:41:09 – 03:03:15:18
David O’Leary
Oh, God. I mean, listen, you know, I mean, well, there were certain threads that we, you know, as far as we know, the high necks were never infiltrated by a Russian. A Russian email a Russian spy, as Claude would say, I don’t know. I don’t think that ever happened. But, you know, you know, so certainly we were adding certain narrative drama, but but like, what is well documented was that Russia was very interested in, in not only their own UFO programs at that time, but in what America knew about UFOs at that time because they were like, is this top secret, you know, technology, things of that nature, that, you know, that

03:03:15:18 – 03:03:45:13
David O’Leary
we have yet to release and we, we always were excited by the idea that, like, oh, the Hynek family could be a soft target into sort of an intelligence gathering mission from Russia about that. And then things obviously complicated from there because even our, even our sort of Russian spy character is sort of become sort of morally torn about like which side she should be fighting for and all those, all those wonderful things, I think from a case standpoint, though, I think we always tried to reverse engineer what became the official explanation.

03:03:45:13 – 03:04:12:27
David O’Leary
You know, like the plovers, like temperature inversions with the stuff over DC. Even, you know, Hopkinsville where, you know, as crazy as it scene with the there was like a monkey that was dressed up in the space outfit that that’s all based on fact. Actually, they’re one of the got one of the guys in the family worked at a circus, and there was, like, monkey trained monkeys there, like, because in a way that’s almost too absurd to make up.

03:04:12:29 – 03:04:46:12
David O’Leary
I would be embarrassed to like bits that in a room. So I think we always started with something, you know, that, you know, we’d kind of reverse engineer it. And again, to go back to your very first question and try to sort of honor what was the initial, you know, truth of the actual story. Yeah. One of the joys of the, of the show for me was like, when we would air, I would like live tweet the show, and I would beforehand kind of put together the list of all the things, all the cool little, like, you know, truth nuggets that we had, we had sort of pulled from here and there and

03:04:46:12 – 03:05:06:28
David O’Leary
maybe turn them in a bit of a blender to tell a cohesive, compelling drama. But so that but really to invite audience audiences to go like, research this, like, hey, this really was a real thing, or like you wanted this case based off this event, so that there was always these sort of like footings that audiences could had and like, oh, okay, great.

03:05:06:28 – 03:05:26:11
David O’Leary
And then they can go off, they can go off and see the case. And then even at the end of every episode, if you watched it on history, there was like a 2 or 3 minute documentary piece about the case that inspired this week’s episode of Bluebook, and that was sort of conceived from the very beginning. Once we landed at history, to draw a line in the sand so that we could clearly be like, listen, we’re not trying to deceive.

03:05:26:18 – 03:05:46:03
David O’Leary
We want to like, tell a cool story, compelling, compelling narrative. But here’s here and then here’s the route of of where this comes from. Now go off and like, you know, do your own research and come to your own your own conclusions. So it was nice to have that other sort of piece that would help plant it in historical context.

03:05:46:06 – 03:05:48:18
Dan LeFebvre
I like what you said, John, about the, the monkeys.

03:05:48:18 – 03:05:50:20
Sean Jablonski
Being that I mean.

03:05:50:22 – 03:06:03:02
Dan LeFebvre
There and that’s one of the things I love about the, the show that I do, being able to dig into some of that, because knowing that that’s based on fact, like that’s, that’s something that somebody could easily look at and be like, oh, what?

03:06:03:07 – 03:06:05:21
David O’Leary
I mean, that’s that’s kind of happened, but well, yeah.

03:06:05:21 – 03:06:07:23
Dan LeFebvre
Actually some of the crazy stuff does.

03:06:07:23 – 03:06:09:03
Sean Jablonski
Happen.

03:06:09:05 – 03:06:34:25
David O’Leary
Yeah. It’s it’s a yeah. And it’s, it’s you know, I think Chernobyl is probably what like the gold standard in terms of trying to sort of tell like an accurate story based on a historical event. And, you know, we again, had to sort of decide early on that we, you know, there’s there is, there’s got to be a slightly different version of the show and, and also just we knew too, that, you know, and David had put it in there.

03:06:34:25 – 03:06:39:09
David O’Leary
There’s so much family. And so going on to that, we could also sort of lean on that.

03:06:39:11 – 03:06:54:28
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned a couple of them earlier, some of the, stories that you got to cover, like the Lubbock Lights and Operation Paperclip, area 51 even got, high involvement in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What was your favorite episode in the series?

03:06:55:00 – 03:07:17:14
David O’Leary
Oh, gosh. I mean, I would say, I would say I’m torn between three. I think both Sean and I share deep, deep love of the Close Encounters upset, which in many ways, in some ways feels almost like the culmination of the show. Like you could almost like, like end it there because like, we end we, you know, we end obviously in a very different way.

03:07:17:16 – 03:07:36:13
David O’Leary
But and I was thinking about that actually this morning. Why that that episode registers so much, I think, for all of us. I mean, some of it was just, you know, the magic of it all coming together, intercutting between two different time periods. But I think one of the things for us, too, is it was one of the one of the clearest departures in tone for us.

03:07:36:13 – 03:08:03:09
David O’Leary
We were a rather conspiratorial, dark, noir tone, which is like, I love that tone, like most of the things I write are like sci fi mysteries, supernatural mysteries, like, I, I can’t get enough of that. But this episode, the case is ultimately has this wonderful sort of positive spin, you know what I mean? Like, it’s so much captures a sense of wonder instead of a sense of of fear.

03:08:03:11 – 03:08:20:22
David O’Leary
It sort of it stands out because that’s the other side of this thing. Like, we don’t want to forget that it’s not just about conspiracies and being deceived and and public denial and disinformation, misinformation, all that stuff. But it is about the wonder of what’s out there. And I think that that episode in some ways encapsulated that, that wonder.

03:08:20:24 – 03:08:41:19
David O’Leary
And then and then the other two episodes, I’m really, I really love I love our like, big finale episode. So like, like one town into town for me also stand out as just like cinematic, like movies. You know what I mean? Like, I think I think Sean and I are both really proud of how those episodes turned out as well.

03:08:41:21 – 03:08:59:05
David O’Leary
But I don’t know. I mean, like, I could go on like, we did two quote unquote bottle episodes. I think Sean wrote them both, which are also some of my favorites. That was abduction in season one. And, I forget where we oh, what lies beneath in in season two, in season two, sort of the revelation of who Susie really is and all that kind of stuff.

03:08:59:07 – 03:09:19:00
David O’Leary
And that’s like, that’s we put all our characters just in a room, essentially, and had to tell it, tell an amazing story there. So, I don’t know, it’s hard. I yeah, I love all of them. I definitely the bottle episodes are fun because it’s so character based and, you know, the challenge of we’re a show that has to go out and look at UFOs.

03:09:19:00 – 03:09:47:22
David O’Leary
How do you actually how do you keep people in the house in order to tell the same show? So yeah, those bottle episodes are great close encounters. Yeah, I mean that and and do exactly what David said. The finale’s just there’s so much fun and and and happened you know, that’s the other thing everyone yet like the the Close Encounters based on George Adamski, who was a guy who was just like that character, who we sort of had in the show, which was so much fun.

03:09:47:22 – 03:10:11:02
David O’Leary
And then, you know, Paul Hynek makes a little cameo as a camera operator in the Close Encounters scene, which was so nice as a way, you know, to sort of in homage to his father. And he was saying just even being on that set was meant so much to him. And and yeah, as David put it perfectly with it, it took a break from the usual town and showed the wonder of it, which was wonderful.

03:10:11:04 – 03:10:31:18
David O’Leary
Paul Heinrich’s cameo in an episode about his father serving as a like. There are so many meta parallels because Paul was a consultant for us on the show, and then we did an episode about his father being a consultant for Steven Spielberg, who’s like, Zemeckis’s close friend. It was just like that for me. I’m just like, oh, wow.

03:10:31:18 – 03:10:42:06
David O’Leary
Like, that’s just like some incredible, incredible miracle that that that we were, like, somehow able to, like, pay that, pay that all off and then do it, do its injustice.

03:10:42:09 – 03:10:45:01
Dan LeFebvre
And I’ll just fits perfectly together. Just.

03:10:45:03 – 03:10:45:13
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

03:10:45:14 – 03:10:46:15
Dan LeFebvre
Almost right itself there. Yeah.

03:10:46:15 – 03:10:47:28
Sean Jablonski
Wow. Okay.

03:10:48:00 – 03:11:10:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if there is one UFO related incident and pretty much everyone is heard of, it is the Roswell incident, and that’s the case. You started season two with with, two episodes covering it. Did you feel it? Because that is so popular. Roswell is so popular that it was more difficult to cover than some of the others on the show, like you had to be more accurate to the story.

03:11:10:03 – 03:11:16:09
David O’Leary
And in a way, it was it was hard to do because Bluebook didn’t investigate Roswell.

03:11:16:11 – 03:11:16:26
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

03:11:16:28 – 03:11:57:12
David O’Leary
That was our biggest challenge at first. You know, was having to go back and you go, well, how can we tell Roswell when it happened, you know, five years before the book was even born? And so we kind of had to have a Roswell 2.0, but you had to take all the facts from the original, and sort of make it feel current, you know, and so that probably more ironically, more than any other episode had the most kind of, I guess, would you say fiction to it because they never investigated it going back and sort of interviewing those witnesses well, after the fact and then sort of making it feel current.

03:11:57:15 – 03:12:18:15
David O’Leary
You know, it was it was intimidating. But, you know, because we’re such research fans and loved the story so much, we knew right away it was a two parter just because there’s so much information in there and, you know, you’ve added with it’s opening season two, you want to be, you know, a big sort of, you know, a way to sort of come back in which, you know, interesting story.

03:12:18:15 – 03:12:39:04
David O’Leary
We, you know, wasn’t our initial impulse to put Roswell as a season opener and that, you know, gradually true, you know, breaking of story and then input from the network, we got to, a place where it was like, nope, we’re doing Roswell to open season two, which was ultimately the smartest choice. Yeah, as a way to sort of bring the show back.

03:12:39:07 – 03:12:55:07
David O’Leary
Yeah. That’s right. At one point and for a while, actually, we would we really wanted to do more island as, as as our, as our opener. I remember that which we eventually, you know, but it all sort of works out like it sort of reveals itself as you break it. Like we found a much better way to do it.

03:12:55:07 – 03:13:19:14
David O’Leary
You know, ultimately down the line, you know, I think that episode was like, I it’s six or something like that. I think 2 or 5. Yeah. Or 205. Yeah. And, but yeah, I think for us, I cracking the case on Roswell just became about, well, you know, we, we done a bunch of research on Roswell and it just became, well, okay, if a town was really, you know, silenced.

03:13:19:16 – 03:13:42:02
David O’Leary
Yeah. And traumatized in this way, what would be the symptoms of that six years later? And once we saw a real. Well, what if somebody was trying to get the truth out of Roswell and staged, like, you know, like this crazy event in the desert where this where, where a saucer allegedly went down and sort of, you know, held the held the US government kind of hostage, like, I’m going to unleash the truth.

03:13:42:04 – 03:14:06:01
David O’Leary
It created a way for like, our guys to go back in there and then, and then the other thing we sort of had the revelation of it was like, oh, what a great character. A journey we can take with no on his character. And as a general returning to a scene of a crime, something that he’s never fully been able to square, and also delineating, you know, for those who watched the episode between Valentine and.

03:14:06:07 – 03:14:07:29
Rob Kristoffersen

03:14:08:02 – 03:14:32:03
David O’Leary
Oh, I’m like, yeah, thank you. Hardy. In terms of like, who knows what and who might really be in control because for season one we play, you know, we we need to sort of be, you know, the face of it a little bit more. But but then we sort of flipped the script a little bit like, oh, perhaps Valentine, who’s more the veteran, more of the senior is actually sort of hiding some things from, from, from Harding as well.

03:14:32:03 – 03:14:43:14
David O’Leary
So is, you know, it just it gradually reveals itself to us as we find, as we found a way to do it, you know, of like, oh, here’s a way to do it that really is interesting.

03:14:43:16 – 03:14:49:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. It was really interesting that, I because I think a lot of people, when they think of the government cover up, it’s like.

03:14:49:25 – 03:14:51:07
David O’Leary
The government and they’re.

03:14:51:07 – 03:14:52:10
Sean Jablonski
All in it.

03:14:52:16 – 03:14:58:21
Dan LeFebvre
In it together. And as I was watching it, yeah, I definitely got the sense that even these two generals, they don’t even.

03:14:58:25 – 03:15:02:06
Sean Jablonski
They don’t know everything that the other one knows.

03:15:02:09 – 03:15:08:07
Dan LeFebvre
And so you start to get that sense in there as well. Just really, really, really well done to put that together.

03:15:08:10 – 03:15:32:29
David O’Leary
And so what’s not you know, the general that wound up going into Roswell from outside was Twining, who Harding is based on and was credited a lot with, you know, some of those strong arm tactics that were used in and the idea of when Brazel gets brought onto the base, you know, the idea of somebody who had been in charge of terrorizing an entire town.

03:15:32:29 – 03:15:58:07
David O’Leary
And there’s, again, I’d encourage anybody who has even an inkling of curiosity to go to look at it. There are plenty of firsthand accounts of people who were there. And then you know, are you going to choose to believe somebody saying, I was there? My life was threatened by a military official, and I was told if I spoke, I would be killed and go, okay, there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of those witnesses who came forward and said the exact same thing.

03:15:58:07 – 03:16:22:15
David O’Leary
So you have to ask yourself, am I going to choose to believe they’re all crazy? You know, they’re all making this up for the sake of, you know, a story? You know, it’s fascinating. And also with, you know, Valentine, who was based on Hoyt Vandenberg, you know, ultimately, he went on to be part of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was like an ultra super secret, you know, in charge of our nuclear program.

03:16:22:15 – 03:16:39:13
David O’Leary
And I think he was that did he become head of CIA or was brought into the CIA or something? So it again, it felt like we were fortunate enough to find this truth in the history and really try to bring it out in the in the storytelling. Yeah.

03:16:39:19 – 03:16:57:16
Dan LeFebvre
There is a petition going now to bring the show back for a third season. I’ll make sure to add a link to it in the show notes. If anybody wants to sign it. But let’s say that petition is successful and you’re able to make a third season of Project Blue Book. Have you thought about some other stories that you might like to cover that you didn’t get to in the first two?

03:16:57:18 – 03:17:00:04
Sean Jablonski
David, go.

03:17:00:07 – 03:17:28:17
David O’Leary
Okay, only a little bit right here. Well, some of the fans been murdered, but other listeners may not. We actually had a third season writers room that, ended where we basically broke, all of season three. So for us, it’s been particularly hard, I think, to, you know, and then and then basically Covid hit and I mean, literally like the last day of our writers room was like the day like kind of the world world shut down like it was lockdown.

03:17:28:19 – 03:17:50:20
David O’Leary
In 20th March or 2020, mid-March of 2020. So, yes, I mean, we have, you know, listen, we, we, we would love nothing more than to then to continue that journey. So especially because for us it we for in a weird way, the show lives in our heads. Like a season at the end of season, like we kind of knew where we were going.

03:17:50:23 – 03:18:19:00
David O’Leary
We we mapped out a whole past, and that makes it hard to because I know how, excited we, Sean and I are about that season. I mean, that season, that season is like some of our favorite stuff. And like, we the guys to do it like, so. And I mean, we can tease it a little bit too, because it’s, you know, it felt that, it felt like such a natural progression again.

03:18:19:00 – 03:18:48:02
David O’Leary
Also history on our side. There was the great UFO wave of 1953 54 in Europe. Yeah. And so we decided to go, you know, as you know, to sort of make it bigger and, you know, it a lot of it takes place over in Europe. Because that’s where, that’s that’s where the sightings were. It was it went from like, you know, a handful of sightings in Europe to thousands a day.

03:18:48:02 – 03:19:07:24
David O’Leary
All of a sudden it was like off the charts. And when you dig into the history of Europe and the history of some of those cases, again, it for us it felt like this is what the show is. It is about the phenomenon. And it’s not just an American phenomenon, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And so we we got to explore some seminal cases.

03:19:07:24 – 03:19:31:02
David O’Leary
And, it really I mean, like anything, it felt like we were hitting our stride and we we broke every single episode. So. Yeah, but there’s some wonderful. Yeah, England, France, Italy, Italy, Russia. Roswell. Yeah. Like it was just like we. Yeah, we it was, it was, you know, heartbreaking. Yeah. It was heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking. I don’t really.

03:19:31:02 – 03:19:31:25
Sean Jablonski
Heartbreaking.

03:19:31:27 – 03:19:55:19
Dan LeFebvre
Well I hope hopefully we’ll get to see some of that in the future. But, I wanted to ask you about, Doctor Heinrichs perspective on UFOs, because in the real Project Blue Book, he kind of started pretty skeptical. And then his position changed as he was investigating these. So as you were researching and writing and putting together this, did your opinions change at all?

03:19:55:19 – 03:20:01:22
Dan LeFebvre
I know you were both big into UFOs beforehand, but did it change at all as you were creating the show?

03:20:01:24 – 03:20:41:03
David O’Leary
What changed for me was doing research on Hynek and realizing how smart he was in terms of hypothesizing the multitude of answers that might exist. Right? Even in like, his book, you know, I think, like, you know, the UFO experience or, you know, his numerous books, he, he would hypothesize, you know, like, especially with some of these cases that delve into, like, you know, Close Encounters of the Third kind or, you know, seeing, seeing actual occupants or entities or whatever you want to call them, you know, I mean, he he Hynek entertained every theory under the sun from the day, you know, interdimensional in some way, like the planet is also theirs.

03:20:41:03 – 03:21:21:09
David O’Leary
Somehow today, our interplanetary spacecraft do. They are us in the future today are like I. I remember like you spoke a little bit about sort of the robotic nature of that of the how these creatures are described. Like, are we dealing with artificial extraterrestrial artificial intelligence, right. Like, on and on. And I think that that, that, I mean, I, you know, you know, just I always love that the notion that, like, maybe, you know, the answers could be as complicated, complicated as the questions we could be dealing with a multitude of, sort of phenomena happening simultaneously.

03:21:21:09 – 03:21:43:17
David O’Leary
We’re just not we’re just not sure, you know, what what sort of the answers are. But, that was the shift for me. Was like, you know, don’t hang your hat on. Really? Any one theory, because it could be. It could be something else. It could appear one way, but actually, I actually did something else. I always love that, you know, I would say of anything to that.

03:21:43:19 – 03:22:04:29
David O’Leary
To that end, there’s like it only expanded. I mean, I was already having had knowledge of it sort of, you know, believed in the phenomenon. And, you know, I, I couldn’t profess to have the answers, but had certainly done the research. But if anything, it just expanded it expanded the scope of what was possible, like, especially with interdimensional beings.

03:22:04:29 – 03:22:33:25
David O’Leary
AI from alien civilizations. Are they even here? You know, old that stuff. The biggest thing for me that I found doing this was the, sort of how the sightings ticked up right after an around the time of our, you know, us basically getting nuclear capabilities. There are so many incidents of UFOs in and around nuclear missile sites turning the missiles on and off.

03:22:33:27 – 03:22:57:20
David O’Leary
And, you know, in and around Los Alamos at once. We got the bomb. This. That’s when everything shut up. That’s really when that’s what really when Roswell happened. And that is one of the most fascinating stories to me, because to me, it’s the clearest evidence yet. And this is coming from high ranking military officials who’ve testified in front of Congress about this.

03:22:57:20 – 03:23:21:20
David O’Leary
Again, this this stuff is all available to go. You can watch it, you know, and decide for yourself. Yeah, yeah, decide for yourself if like the, you know, the high ranking colonel who said I was in the missile bunker when the this, you know, object came and basically cut the power then turned it back on said our missiles to launch and we couldn’t do anything, then took it away.

03:23:21:22 – 03:23:48:14
David O’Leary
Yeah. And you can decide if this guy just decided to make it up and ruined his entire career. But to me, that’s the clearest evidence. It’s one thing for a civilian to see something dark across the sky and go, I saw something I can’t explain. It’s another thing for military personnel who are overseeing our nuclear weapons to have these objects come in and around and and basically control them, because to me, that’s communication, right?

03:23:48:14 – 03:24:06:18
David O’Leary
I know what that is like. It’s it’s them saying, we can do this to you. And now it’s up to us to go. Are they benevolent? Are they they or are they saying they can destroy us or they trying to start a war? Like what is happening? It’s not just like, oh, I saw something. I don’t understand it.

03:24:06:18 – 03:24:30:02
David O’Leary
They’re communicating in a way and have the ability to affect our world. That phenomenon blew my mind. And if you go down that rabbit hole and look at all the instances not just in America, but in Russia at the same time, it’s it’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. And it goes all the way back, all the way back to the beginning of this, of this phenomena.

03:24:30:05 – 03:24:53:04
David O’Leary
I mean, Ed repels in his book, talks about it, how they would expect to see UFO sightings over like, like, atomic detonations in the South Pacific on top secret military, sort of weapons testing programs in the 40s and then late 40s and the 50. So it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s a fascinating, sort of aspects of this.

03:24:53:12 – 03:25:02:16
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. That’s a really interesting point to bring up, because if you put it kind of in a historical context, World War Two had just happened. So there was a lot of.

03:25:02:19 – 03:25:03:18
Sean Jablonski
Explosions.

03:25:03:21 – 03:25:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
Going on, you know, and that didn’t.

03:25:06:09 – 03:25:08:07
David O’Leary
Bring anything out.

03:25:08:10 – 03:25:14:23
Dan LeFebvre
But it but the nuclear side of it does it just interesting that World War Two didn’t seem to really.

03:25:14:25 – 03:25:40:18
David O’Leary
You had the Foo Fighters in World War Two really that, that, that that, that was a very a sort of a big thing back then. All the pilots describing what these objects were. And we touched on that, I think a little bit in the first season. And historically, it’s not like UFOs began right then they you Columbus talked about UFOs, you know, so but there was a clear, like explosion of sightings, you know.

03:25:40:21 – 03:26:05:14
David O’Leary
Well, maybe pun intended. Right around the time we got the bomb, that is when the wave just took off. And it’s also where the military, you know, had really, you know, gotten involved. And again, you know, the really it began with, you know, why am I forgetting his name? The sort of, you know, first thing, flying saucers in Oregon.

03:26:05:16 – 03:26:06:16
Sean Jablonski
Yeah.

03:26:06:18 – 03:26:28:06
David O’Leary
And the army. Arnold. Yeah. In 1947, which happened literally three weeks before Roswell. And one of the things in Roswell that that, is interesting. They did nuclear tests in and around there, but that was also the Roswell was the home of the final ninth Bomb Squadron, which was the squadron that dropped the Enola Gay was in Roswell.

03:26:28:08 – 03:26:46:06
David O’Leary
That’s what dropped the bomb on, you know, Hiroshima and all those all in and around their the White Sands missile base, the Allen Knoll, I can’t remember the other one, but all those nuclear testing things were around there, and the the amount and saucer sightings were just off the charts.

03:26:46:08 – 03:26:52:09
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. That’s fascinating. I, I guess I never had put it together that the Enola Gay was there in Roswell.

03:26:52:11 – 03:27:13:24
David O’Leary
When people think of Roswell, they always think of it as a kind of a sleepy desert town, kind of random, small thing. It’s got it had huge Roswell Army Air Force airfield had huge, huge sort of, military significance at that time. It was very important. And in that whole area, that was it was a massive testing ground for for top secret weaponry and stuff like that.

03:27:13:24 – 03:27:22:12
David O’Leary
So it’s not a I don’t think it’s at all, you know, for shrines to transport in any way a coincidence that this was a hub of sort of UFO activity at the time?

03:27:22:15 – 03:27:30:25
Dan LeFebvre
Well, I know I asked you about your your favorite episode. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but do you do you have a favorite story from the set as you are creating the show?

03:27:30:27 – 03:27:46:28
David O’Leary
I have to, and I’ll tell I’m really briefly. One is in abduction, which Shawn wrote, but he unfortunately was, for whatever reason, not able to be on set for. But I got, I got to be up for like nine and ten or maybe he, he was up for a little bit, but I don’t think he was up there for this part.

03:27:47:01 – 03:28:07:27
David O’Leary
When the character is recalling his sort of abduction experience, because it was what’s called a bottle episode, we had to do it. We couldn’t rely fully on VFX as we were trying to keep the but the budget down. That’s what a bottle episode is. And our director, Alex Graves, had this brilliant idea of like, he’s supposed to be levitating in a ship, right?

03:28:07:27 – 03:28:31:01
David O’Leary
And like, sort of finds himself in this alien environment. So they really strung up, the actor’s name, I think, is Malcolm. Good, good, win or good will forgive me if I. It’s. Yeah. And they strong him up and they shined all these shimmery lights on on him in the background on a screen and they, they blasted the entire sort of soundstage with, with, with smoke.

03:28:31:04 – 03:28:50:03
David O’Leary
And it was this magical alien kind of like experience come to life. But you could not see in front of you. The camera guys are like, you know, all the crew was so quiet and it was it just it looked incredible. You’re like it felt like you’re watching a VFX shot happen in front of your eyes. You know, it was like a portal open to another dimension.

03:28:50:07 – 03:29:16:12
David O’Leary
If you are looking at what we were actually filming. So that was incredible. And then I, you know, I mean, obviously all the like, fun kind of anecdotal moments with the cast are amazing too. But the other thing was in 110 we blew up a car and that was that was up just like we we all sat around and like literally had popcorn and like blew it up on our wound up in a, in a sort of an outside in an amphitheater, kind of an environment against a green screen.

03:29:16:15 – 03:29:42:21
David O’Leary
And, that was that. It blew up a nice 1950s car to boot. And that was just a fun, a fun, a fun day to see all that happened to. I have a zillion photographs that I’ll just say briefly. I think it was literally day one of episode 101. We showed up on set and it was the, you know, it was, the farm that what played for the farm house in the, in the first episode.

03:29:42:21 – 03:30:08:12
David O’Leary
And it was early morning cold Canada, and there was this fog that had just blanketed the entire area. And with this sun piercing through, it was some of the most dramatic looking landscape I’d ever seen. And it was the arrival of our characters through this fog. You know, up to this farmhouse, I it’s like, I don’t think we could have gotten we couldn’t have wished for anything better.

03:30:08:12 – 03:30:24:13
David O’Leary
And it was day one. So it’s just basically everybody’s connecting, everybody’s, you know, come in with their A-game. And so excited to be there. And it felt like, you know, felt like the gods were smiling on us saying this is the right way to begin. So we talked a.

03:30:24:13 – 03:30:35:16
Dan LeFebvre
Little bit about, potential season three. But in the first two seasons, was there anything that you wanted to add in there but you couldn’t for one reason or another?

03:30:35:19 – 03:31:12:10
David O’Leary
Oh, gosh. Well, we had like whole episode ideas that for one reason or another, we had we had to scrap, you know, I mean, there was all all kinds of like, you know, periods where I mean, there were sort of like UFO cold spots popping up in there in the early 1950s. And like, we thought about doing an episode that sort of explored that idea about sort of like how people how people might sort of use this arrival of this sort of new phenomena into the public consciousness, towards their own sort of self-serving ends and how people could get kind of roped into that to that kind of thing with, you know, gosh,

03:31:12:10 – 03:31:43:05
David O’Leary
I mean, there was all, you know, there’s always things there’s even within episodes, there’s scenes we had to kind of course, or little moments like for what timing purposes? We’re like, we just can’t. We can’t. We got to pick and choose. I’d say to David, you know, you’re his very first, his early draft of the script, you know, and it was always described as, you know, X-Files meets madmen because he had a really wonderful touch with the soap that was in there and is in it again, it was as much about personal life.

03:31:43:05 – 03:32:01:06
David O’Leary
And Joel, who was the kid, there was even a storyline with him. And, you know, it’s through the natural process of any TV show creation, development, you know, where the rubber meets the road. You got to start leaving, pushing things aside in favor of, you know, the engine of the series, which is our two guys in the cases.

03:32:01:06 – 03:32:17:21
David O’Leary
And I think we tried hard to make sure that we, you know, with like Susie and, and, Mimi and all of that to kind of create, you know, another world that we could go into that reflected the Cold War era times. But, I mean, for me, you know, I, I, I loved as much the character stuff as anything.

03:32:17:21 – 03:32:37:02
David O’Leary
And I thought there was certainly more stories to tell with, you know, me, me and Susie, and to have a female perspective as well as a home perspective, and to see what’s really going on, you know, during the Cold War, back home, you know, we tried a little of that with the bomb shelter early on in season one, you know, which was a real thing.

03:32:37:05 – 03:33:03:02
David O’Leary
You know, they would put ads in the newspapers for that stuff and how the kids would feel at school and bomb shelter. Yeah. Buy your own bomb shelter. Reminded me of we. Yeah, we had it. We came up with this whole storyline with Joel as, like, this 1950s boy kind of stand by me as sort of storyline with, like, he had a crush on his, like, neighbor, either on the radio or and then like, but then they and you get to sort of explore the fear of Russia and the Cold War through the lens of children.

03:33:03:04 – 03:33:23:24
David O’Leary
The irony being, of course, that they’re like while they’re like sitting while Joel’s at his neighbor’s, there really is a Russian spy next door having dinner at his house like all this, like wonderful stuff that like a just, you know, you got to pick and choose or a UFO show. So it was like, you got gotta, you know, but it would have been nice to, you know, to do some of those things as well, you know.

03:33:23:25 – 03:33:27:26
Sean Jablonski
Yeah, I forgot about all that.

03:33:27:28 – 03:33:37:25
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you guys so much for coming on to chat about Project Bluebook. I know until there’s a season three, hopefully there’ll be a season three, but until then, can you share a little bit about what you guys are working on?

03:33:37:27 – 03:34:04:27
David O’Leary
Sure. Well, I mean, you know, again, it’s it’s a you know, the world is such a passion for us. David and I are working on something right now that we’re we’re, you know, don’t want to say too much because we’re, in the early stages of, let’s say, negotiations. But, it’s back in the UFO worlds, and, we look forward to bringing, you know, those stories back to television, hopefully in the, in the coming, in the coming year, I should say.

03:34:04:27 – 03:34:23:10
David O’Leary
So, you know, if Blue book. What? Our appetite. We’re excited to serve it. Another meal coming up soon. Yeah. We just wanted to also give, you know, in regards to the safe Blue Book campaign, you know, a huge shout out to Carson who has led that effort. I know we created a website called Save Blue Book Comm, which is amazing.

03:34:23:17 – 03:34:46:08
David O’Leary
And just a wonderful way that he’s collected so many, you know, artifacts from the show and imagery from the show and, and all of our fans who, you know, remind us that the show mattered to them because that that is the most important thing. And that’s why we that’s why we did it. So we’re forever grateful we we never give up hope.

03:34:46:10 – 03:34:56:19
David O’Leary
You just never know. You just never know what’s going to happen. So we have a season three ready when, When? When? As soon as someone’s ready to take it on, so, you know. Thank you to all the fans.

03:34:56:21 – 03:34:59:21
Dan LeFebvre
And thanks again so much for your time, guys.

03:34:59:23 – 03:35:20:10
David O’Leary
Yeah. Thanks. You’re wonderful. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks, everybody.

03:35:20:12 – 03:35:41:24
Dan LeFebvre
This episode of based On a True Story was produced by me, Dan Lafayette. What did you think of this huge mega episode about the History Channel’s Project Blue Book? Let me know if you’d like to see more of these style longer episodes in the future. We’ve got one more answer for teachers and allies to uncover. And as a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one life from my chat with David and Sean.

03:35:41:27 – 03:36:08:28
Dan LeFebvre
Number one, they wrote a season three of Project Blue Book, telling stories beyond the United States. Number two, the Roswell Incident was made famous by Project Blue Book number three. David and Sean have both had unexplained experiences. Did you figure out which one is a lie? Here’s the answer in the envelope. So let’s open that up. And the lie this time is number two.

03:36:09:03 – 03:36:30:01
Dan LeFebvre
Even though the History Channel’s Project Blue Book starts off season two with the Roswell incident in The True Story, the US government’s Project Blue Book did not investigate the Roswell incident like we see in the TV series, and that’s mostly because of the timeline. The Roswell incident occurred in 1947, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that Project Blue Book itself became a thing.

03:36:30:01 – 03:36:58:27
Dan LeFebvre
Remember, there was Project Sign and Project Grudge, and then really, it wasn’t until the 1970s, I believe it was 1978, that Roswell started to get popular after an interview with ufologist Stanton Friedman, and he interviewed a then retired U.S. Air Force officer named Jesse Marcel. Marcel was one of the soldiers who helped take the debris from the ranch in Roswell, and then he stated that the official explanation that it was a weather balloon was a cover story, and he actually believed it was extraterrestrial.

03:36:58:29 – 03:37:21:02
Dan LeFebvre
From there, the stories and theories started to swirl. So throughout the three episodes today, we played three separate games of two tours in A lie and the lies were one, three, and two respectively. How’d you do? Did you get all three correct? Head on over to based on a True Story podcast.com/discord and let me know how you did.

03:37:21:04 – 03:37:40:09
Dan LeFebvre
As always, you’ll find that link in the show notes with all of the other links for this episode, as well as on the show. Is home on the web over at. Based on a True Story podcast.com/376. Until next time, thanks so much for spending your time with Rob and David and Sean and me today, and I’ll chat with you again really soon.

September 10th, 490 BCE. Marathon, Greece.

We’re kicking off this week with the movie 300: Rise of an Empire, and as soon as the opening credits are over, Lena Headey’s character, the wife of the Spartan King Leonidas from the first 300 movie.

Lena Headey’s character is Queen Gorgo, and to start Rise of an Empire, she’s addressing many of the Spartan soldiers who fought with her late husband. These soldiers are all carrying spears, shields, and, of course, the impressive physique of bare-chested six packs that we saw the Spartans have in the first 300 movie.

Sixteen Spartan soldiers surround Queen Gorgo as she addresses them, but there are more like 36 or 37 spears visible, suggesting even more soldiers behind those we can see as they hear their queen speak.

She tells them her husband, Leonidas, their king, and the brave 300 are dead.

As she continues to speak, she moves among the men showing even more soldiers beyond the numbers I just mentioned, but it’s nearly impossible to count them as the camera shifts angles. As the camera changes, though, we can see sails above Queen Gorgo’s head. We can hear the creaking of a wooden ship, which tells us they’re all on a ship.

She tells them it was King Darius who came to take our land ten years ago when youth still burned in our eyes. Ten years ago, this war began as all wars do: With a grievance.

Then, the movie takes us back to ten years earlier.

Mud is being kicked up by feet running in slow motion. The particles of mud and dirt flung high into the air just hanging as time moves at a snail’s pace. As we see more bare-chested men wearing helmets, blue robes on two men leading the charge to the right side of the screen, all with the round shields and weapons: Swords and spears.

Queen Gorgo’s voiceover continues, saying King Darius was annoyed by the notion of Greek freedom and has come to Greece to bring them under submission.

As thunder claps and lighting strikes, the camera changes yet again. Now we can see a vast mountainous landscape, on a dark and stormy night. In the foreground, numerous ships can be seen, some still in the waters, and other right along the shores. All of them have their sails put up, suggesting the ships are disembarking onto the beach beyond.

And on the beach beyond, tiny black dots can be seen. It’s nighttime so impossible to see all of them individually, but each dot is a soldier from one of the ships, giving the overall scene an enormous size. The beach they’re all on leads to a pathway between right mountains, right in the center of the movie’s frame, and in the distance are even more black dots: Greek soldiers charging at Darius’ men as soon as they arrive on the Greek shores.

Queen Gorgo’s voiceover confirms this as she says Darius made landfall at the field of Marathon with an invading force which outnumbered the Greek defenders 3-to-1.

Rain continues to pour down in slow motion as the camera zooms in on the same Greek soldiers we saw in slow motion earlier, this time they’re coming over the muddy horizon and charging directly toward the camera. A bolt of lighting and the loud thunderclap in the stormy sky behind the advancing soldiers suggests even the sky is angry.

She says at dawn the hopeless Athenians do the unthinkable: They attack.

We see King Darius turn around, looking in the direction of the Greek soldiers coming over the horizon. Other soldiers are taking off belongings from the ship. Sure, they’re all soldiers, too, but none of them are ready to fight.

And Queen Gorgo’s voiceover also confirms this, as she says the outnumbered Greeks attacked the weary Persians as soon as they landed after their month-long trip at sea gave them shaky legs. We see some of the Persian soldiers grab spears and swords in haste and start to face the approaching enemy.

Then, the camera cuts to the architect of this mad strategy: A little-known Athenian soldier named Themistokles. The camera focuses in on a single soldier as Gorgo says he gives the Persians a taste of Athenian shock combat.

Sullivan Stapleton is the actor who plays Themistokles in the movie.

The very stylized movie was still going in slow motion this whole time, but now as the Greek and Persian armies clash time speeds back up to normal pace as the sound of swords clanging, and the sound of two fighting armies can be heard against the thunder and rain.

It looks like a bloodbath.

The Persians are caught off guard, and the Greeks run right through most of them. Slicing his way through the Persians is Themistokles, who we can tell now was one of the soldiers wearing a blue robe. That conveniently makes him a lot easier to pick out among the two forces fighting each other in the rain and mud.

Shifting between real-time speed and slow motion, Themistokles fights his way to the shores and the Persian ships. Wasting no time, he runs right up one of the ship’s ramps, slashing and killing everyone on board.

The camera cuts to show King Darius in one of the ships just off shore. He’s watching the chaos unfold in front of him, clearly enraged at what he’s seeing. Back to Themistokles, and he jumps back onto the beach, leaving the ship he was on. There must be no one left to kill on that one.

He races along the beach, killing more and more Persians. An arrow slices at his arm. More arrows hit his shield. Throwing his sword to kill one of the archers, Themistokles charges at the other. Another arrow, this time he turns his head to let it glance off his helmet as he tackles and kills the archer.

Queen Gorgo’s voiceover has returned, saying all of this was for a crazy Greek experiment called democracy. A free Greece.

Slamming the archer to the ground, Themistokles seems to have reached the end of the beach, but he takes off his helmet to look out at the Persian ships still in the waters. On one of those ships is King Darius, still watching the slaughter in front of him. For a moment, Themistokles and King Darius stare directly at each other from across the water between them.

Finally, Darius turns away as if to say the Persians are about to leave—at least for now.

Queen Gorgo’s voiceover says through the chaos, a moment appeared. And Themistokles took advantage of that moment. We see him pick up the bow from the archer he just killed. Then, pulling back an arrow, he lets off one shot.

Back on the Persian ship, Darius has his back turned now and doesn’t notice the arrow coming toward him. But someone else on the ship does. Another man on the other side of the ship runs in slow motion as he screams, “Nooooooo!”

Queen Gorgo says this is the moment that will ring throughout the centuries and make Themistokles a legend.

The camera follows the arrow he shot as it flies across the water, aimed directly at King Darius. From the other side of the boat, the running man reaches Darius just in time the arrow hits him in the chest, knocking him backward into the other man’s arms. He glares at Themistokles with a burning hatred that tells you there will be vengeance.

Then, Queen Gorgo tells us who this other man is: Darius’ son, Xerxes.

She goes on to say that for all the praise that would be heaped upon Themistokles, he knew he made a mistake. Xerxes’ eyes had the stink of destiny about them. He knew he should’ve killed that boy.

But, instead, after delivering the fatal arrow to King Darius, we see Themistokles simply turn and walk away.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie 300: Rise of an Empire

As immersive as the fictional portrayal is, as we begin separating fact from fiction, let me start with a blanket statement that I’m sure you already know but it’s still worth saying: 300: Rise of an Empire is the sequel to 300, which itself was based on a comic book of the same name.

That’s why it shifts between slow motion and real-time speed, and gives unrealistic streams of blood flying around the scene as soldiers swing their swords.

Even once we separate ourselves from that side of things, another major caveat we have to keep in mind is that we’re talking about something that happened 2,514 years ago. Do we know if Themistokles and King Darius had a stare down across the water like we see in the movie? That’s not the kind of thing that gets documented so of course we don’t know for sure. But, I bet if you had to guess how realistic that sort of moment is, I bet you would come to the same conclusion that I would and guess that’s not very realistic at all, haha!

With those major caveats aside, there really was a major battle at Marathon between the Greeks and Persians that happened 2,514 years ago this week.

Lena Headey’s character, Queen Gorgo, really was King Leonidas I’s wife. He was, of course, famous for the Battle of Thermopylae that was told in the movie 300—which we looked at on episode 5 of Based on a True Story.

Another element of truth the movie shows correctly is the timeframe between the events. We hear Queen Gorgo talk about Leonidas and the 300 being dead, and also how it was ten years ago that Darius brought the fight to our shores at Marathon.

The legend of the 300 at Thermopylae happened in 480 BCE, while the Battle of Marathon was ten years earlier in 490 BCE.

But here’s where the movie takes some creative license, because even though the timeline means Queen Gorgo was alive during both battles, we don’t really know how involved she was with the army to travel with them on ships and telling the story of Marathon to soldiers like we see her doing in the beginning of the movie.

It’s certainly plausible. Especially because we do know she held a position of importance in Greek society at the time, not only because of her husband being king, but also because she was in her own right an intelligent woman. For example, a lot of what we know about her comes from an ancient Greek historian named Herodotus, and even though he didn’t write about women often, one story he told was how Gorgo helped decipher a hidden message warning the Greeks of a Persian invasion. That makes her one of the first female cryptanalysts in recorded history.

Back to the movie’s version of the Battle of Marathon, though, one of the things Gorgo mentions in her voiceover is that the Persians outnumbered the Greeks 3-to-1.

And that’s about right. Historical estimates put the Greeks at about 11,000 soldiers while the Persians had somewhere between 20,000 to 30,000 soldiers carried by 600 or so ships called triremes. So, of course, the movie uses the higher number to make the contrasts between forces seem even greater.

So, it is true that the Greeks here heavily outnumbered.

Did they attack as soon as the Persians landed in Greece to help overcome the mismatch in numbers?

No, they didn’t. That part of the movie is not true.

And now it’s time for the part of the true story that maybe you’ve heard before from a very different legend. After all, you’ve heard of the long distance run of 26.2 miles, or 42 kilometers, being called a marathon. As the legend goes, that’s the distance the Greek messenger Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens to inform them of the victory at Marathon. So, obviously that would’ve happened after the battle if he informed them of the Greek victory.

While that is the legend, according to Herodotus, that run actually happened before the battle…and he didn’t run from Marathon to Athens, but he ran the 150 miles, or 240 kilometers, from Athens to Sparta to ask for their help for the impending Persian invasion. Actually, that’s how we know it happened this week in history, because the historical records tell us the Spartans couldn’t march until after their holy day.

Oh, and as a fun little bit of trivia, as of this recording the world record holder for a marathon is Kelvin Kiptum from the 2023 Chicago Marathon where he had an average speed of about 13 mph, or 21 km/h. Of course, that’s a 26.2 mile marathon. It’s said that Pheidippides did his 150-mile run from Athens to Sparta in two days. That’s an average pace of 4.7 mph, or 7.5 km/h. A runner named Yiannis Kouros holds the ultramarathon record of 150 miles in 22 hours, 52 minutes, and 55 seconds in 1984. That’s an average pace of 6.6 mph, or about 10.6 km/h.

Meanwhile, I’d probably pass out from exhaustion way back by the starting line so I’m glad they sent Pheidippides instead of me haha!

Back to the Battle of Marathon, though, the reasons for the Greek’s ultimate victory is still something historians debate, but as with most things in history there’s not likely to be just one thing; there were a number of factors that went into the final Greek victory at Marathon.

But let’s start breaking it down by looking at something the movie doesn’t show: Their armor.

While the actors in the movie are obviously in such great shape they can use their six packs as armor, it’s probably not a surprise that the real Greek army actually wore more armor than we see in the movie.

At least, sort of.

Here’s where the true story really gets more complex than the fictional one from the movie, because the Greek army consisted of a lot of citizen-soldiers called hoplites. After all, ancient Greece wasn’t really unified into the country of Greece that we think of today. It was made up of city-states that banded together when they needed to fight off shared enemies like the Persians. That’s why you’ll find references to the Athenians, the Spartans, and so on…they’re all Greek, but they’re also independent city-states.

On top of that, because Greek hoplites were essentially civilians called into military service when needed they often weren’t trained well and they usually wore whatever armor they could afford.

“Usually” is the key word there, because the Greek general in charge of the force that went out to face the Persians at Marathon had all his men equipped as hoplites for what many say was the first time in Greek history.

Oh, that general’s name was Miltiades and he isn’t in the movie at all.

Even though the armor the Greek hoplites wore was quite different than the lack-of-armor we see in the movie, the Greek’s armor was a lot lighter than the Persian’s armor. That was a major tactical advantage, because that let the Greeks move a lot faster than the Persians.

So, even though the Greeks didn’t charge the Persians as soon as they landed on shore, they did charge at the Persians. That wasn’t a common fighting tactic back then, so it was unexpected by the Persians. But, of course, simply charging your enemy isn’t going to overcome 3-to-1 odds on its own like the movie shows.

Speaking of what the movie shows, in her voiceover, Lena Headey’s version of Queen Gorgo says the architect behind the Greek’s decision to run out to meet the Persians before they could establish a foothold is a soldier named Themistokles.

While Themistokles really was someone who fought at Marathon, the commander of the Greek armies was the general I mentioned before: Miltiades.

Other Greek generals weren’t sure if they should attack the Persians or wait for them to attack them at Athens. After all, then they’d have the benefit of defensive positions in the city to help them fight against overwhelming odds.

As fate would have it, the Greeks found out the Persian cavalry happened to be away from the Persian camp. He took advantage of that situation, and ordered the attack on the Persian infantry.

That made the odds a little more in the Greek’s favor with the 11,000 Greeks attacking about 15,000 Persian infantry. On top of that, since the Greeks were the ones attacking they had more control over where the battle would be fought and they chose to attack on a mountainous and marshy terrain. So, the movie is correct to show mountains and mud…that helped ensure the Persian cavalry wouldn’t hear about the attack and return to route the Greeks while they were fighting the Persian infantry.

Of course, the Greeks were still outnumbered by the Persian infantry alone. That brings us to yet another reason for the real reason the Greeks won at Marathon: Phalanxes.

Basically, with long spears and large, bronze shields, the Greeks packed together so tightly that the Persians couldn’t penetrate with their shorter swords. General Miltiades also employed a tactic that proved to help the Greek victory, too. As the battle raged on, the center of the Greek forces collapsed to allow Persians to advance. Then, the wings of the Greek forces would collapse into the center so all of a sudden the Persians would find themselves surrounded.

While we don’t know for sure exactly how long the battle lasted, most historians believe it only took a few hours for the Persians to be routed and flee back to their ships. In that time, estimates place about 6,500 Persians killed while fewer than 200 Greeks lost their lives in the battle.

What of King Darius himself?

The movie got that wrong, too.

Darius I did not die at the Battle of Marathon. In fact, most historians say he wasn’t even there. Two generals named Datis and Artaphernes led the Persian forces. So, the movie’s plot line of Darius’ son Xerxes wanting revenge for his father’s death isn’t what happened.

In the true story, Darius I dead four years after the battle from natural causes. That’s when his son Xerxes took the throne. He did continue fighting the Greeks leading to a second Persian invasion of Greece that culminated in the Battle of Thermopylae the legend of the 300. But that wasn’t revenge for his father’s death. That was continuing the expansion of the Persian Empire that many consider to be the first global empire in history.

Something else we hear Queen Gorgo’s voiceover talk about in the movie is the idea of a Greek experiment called democracy.

That’s actually true, the ancient Greeks are often credited with what was at the time a new system of governance that was radically different than the monarchies, oligarchies, and tyrannies of the time. More specifically, it was the Athenians who laid down the foundations around 508 BCE.

So, when we take a step back from the Battle of Marathon itself and look at the bigger picture, you can see why so many point to Marathon as being a single day in history that changed the course of history.

Many of the founding figures of Western philosophy such as Socrates to Plato, Aristotle, came from Greece in the years, decades, and centuries afterward. If the Persians had wiped out the Greeks at Marathon, it’s not hard to imagine us living in a very different world today.

If you want to see how the Battle of Marathon is portrayed on screen, hop into the show notes to find where 300: Rise of an Empire is streaming now!

September 11, 2001. Herndon, Virginia.

Just saying that date, I’m sure you can guess what our next event is…although the location might throw you off. The reason for that location is because seven minutes into the 2006 movie called United 93, there’s some text on the screen to tell us we’re at the National Air Traffic Control Center in Herndon, Virginia. The camera follows a man into a room filled with screens and people—it looks a lot like what you’d expect an air traffic control center to look like.

As the man walks into the room, there are some claps and we can hear someone saying, “Congratulations on the promotion, Ben!”

That’s how we know the man is Ben Sliney. Others continue to clap or offer a congratulatory handshake as he makes his way further into the room. He smiles, thanking them, says “good morning” and jokes that he’s glad everyone is awake.

Standing in front of a bank of monitors, Ben talks to some of the other guys about the current situation. One of them says there’s a small system in the southwest, nothing much too big. Another system moved off to the east, so we have clear skies. Ben replies to the weather report saying that’s good, it’ll be a good day on the east coast.

The other guy points to something on the monitor. They can all see what it is, but from the angle the camera is facing Ben Sliney, we can’t see the monitor. But we don’t really have to, because the guy explains that the President is going to be moving to Andrews, so we’ll have restrictions in place around that. Pretty much standard ops. Ben doesn’t take his eyes off the monitor as he nods his approval.

Then, he smiles, and thanks them for their reports. They go back to work while Ben moves onto another area of the room. He looks at the monitors. Everything seems to be pointing to just another day.

The true story behind that scene in the movie United 93

We’ll stop our movie here because, as you might imagine, the entire movie is centered around the same day—and also because I’ve already done a deep dive into this movie over on episode #113, so if you want to learn more about the whole movie that’ll be linked in the show notes.

For today, though, the movie is true that September 11^th, 2001, started off as just another normal day at the National Air Traffic Control Center. But, as I’m sure you already know, it was not just another day.

The movie was also correct to suggest the President traveling to Andrews, referring to Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington, D.C., where then-President George W. Bush was flying in from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

And the movie was also correct to show a reason for Ben Sliney to be congratulated when he entered the room that day. September 11, 2001, just happened to be Ben Sliney’s very first day as the FAA’s National Operations Manager.

While the scene I just described takes place in Virginia that’s just because that’s where the control center is based. Officially known as the Air Traffic Control System Command Center for the Federal Aviation Administration, but since the government loves its acronyms that’s the FAA’s ATCSCC.

What we didn’t talk about in this segment were the four planes hijacked that morning. American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

The fourth plane was a little different, though, because it didn’t hit the hijacker’s intended target.

After it was hijacked, United Airlines Flight 93 was headed toward Washington D.C. with an intended target of crashing into the U.S. Capitol building. But the passengers on United 93 revolted against the hijackers, and the plane crashed in a field near Stonycreek Township in Pennsylvania.

During the course of his first day as National Operations Manager for the FAA on September 11^th, 2001, Ben Sliney made the decision to land every plane in the air over the United States. That was the first time in U.S. history that’s ever happened.

Oh, and in the movie, Ben Sliney is played by…well, Ben Sliney. That’s right, the real person played himself in the movie.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to the true story, if you want to learn even more, queue up BOATS episode #113 linked in the show notes for as soon as you’re done watching the movie this week.

September 14, 1814. Baltimore, Maryland.

For our third event this week, we’ll pull a dramatization segment from a Smithsonian documentary.

The sky is gray and dreary. It almost looks like fog or some mist. In the foreground, a massive American flag riddled with holes is flapping in the wind.

The camera cuts to three men now. One of them is wearing a uniform, but he’s more in the background. The focus is on one of the two men not in military uniform—in particular, one of the men seems to be pacing around nervously as he’s looking off in the foggy, gray distance.

With a slightly different camera angle now, we can see the three men are standing on the deck of a ship. The pacing man is running his hand through his hair now, as he continues to look off frame.

The camera backs up to further away now, and we can see there are four ships. The closest one fires its cannons, followed by another blast from one of the ships further in the distance. Now the camera cuts back to the American flag flapping in the hazy sky.

The true story behind that scene in the movie A Star-Spangled Story

That short sequence comes from a documentary called A Star-Spangled Story: Battle for America, and event it’s showing is when Francis Scott Key got his inspiration for a poem called, “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” after seeing the flag on Saturday this week.

You probably know his poem by another name: “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Francis Scott Key is the guy who I mentioned pacing and running his hands through his hair in the movie. In the true story, Key was a lawyer who went to the British along with another man named Colonel John Stuart Skinner to ask for the release of Key’s friend who had been captured by the British in late August.

Key and Skinner took a ship out to the British fleet that was near the city of Baltimore, Maryland. While they successfully negotiated for the release of Key’s friend, a man named Dr. William Beanes, the timing wasn’t great because the British were just about to launch an attack on Baltimore.

So, Key, Skinner, and Beanes were forced to watch as the British unleashed a 25-hour long bombardment on the American soldiers at Fort McHenry. At dawn on September 14^th, Key saw the huge American flag flying over Fort McHenry and started writing the poem. He didn’t write it all that day, though.

He jotted down a few lines, then completed it a few days later after the three men, Key, Skinner, and Beanes, were released from the British fleet. Most people are only familiar with the first verse of the poem that would go on to become “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Francis Scott Key wrote four verses:

O! say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,

O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there —

O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,

Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,

What is that which the breeze o’er the towering steep,

As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,

In full glory reflected now shines on the stream —

‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

That the havock of war and the battle’s confusion

A home and a country should leave us no more?

Their blood has wash’d out their foul foot-steps’ pollution,

No refuge could save the hireling and slave,

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave;

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

O! thus be it ever when freemen shall stand

Between their lov’d home, and the war’s desolation,

Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land

Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto — “In God is our trust!”

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

Key’s poem, “The Defence of Fort M’Henry,” was published almost immediately along a notation that it goes to the tune of a popular British song written by John Stafford Smith called “Anacreon in Heaven.”

That was the official song of a club of amateur musicians in London called the Anacreontic Society.

Together, the words from “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” along with the tune of “Anacreon in Heaven” combined to become “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which was an immediate hit in America. It wasn’t for over a hundred years, in 1931, that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was officially adopted as the national anthem of the United States.

So, now you know the phrase “by dawn’s early light” in “The Star-Spangled Banner” is talking about this week in history: The dawn of September 14^th, 1814.

If you want to learn more about the true story, check out the documentary from the Smithsonian called A Star-Spangled Story: Battle for America. We started our segment at about ten minutes in, but as you can tell from the title the whole thing is about the story of the song, so this is a good week to watch it all!

Historical birthdays from the movies

It’s time for the birthday segment, about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On September 12^th, Henry Hudson was born somewhere in England. Maybe in London, and maybe in the year 1525, but as you can probably guess a lot about his early years aren’t known for sure. He was an explorer who is best remembered through some of the discoveries he made: The Hudson River in New York, or Hudson Bay in Canada. While there haven’t been a lot of movies about him, probably because we know so little about his early years or even his disappearance in 1611, there was a movie in 1964 called The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson if you want to watch something about him.

On September 13^th, 1660, Daniel Defoe was born in London, England. He was a writer who is perhaps best known for the 1719 novel called Robinson Crusoe. He was played by Ian Hart in the 1997 movie about the novel, also called Robinson Crusoe.

On September 15^th, 1254, another explorer was born in Venice: Marco Polo. Although perhaps you best know him as the namesake of the swimming game version of tag, the real Marco Polo made his mark on history by traveling along the Silk Road in Asia in the 1200s and returned to Europe and publicized the great wealth and size of the Eastern empires such as China, the Mongol Empire, Persia, India, Japan, and many more. Until Marco Polo’s book about his travels around 1300, most of Europe didn’t know much about the Asian countries. Netflix had a series about him simply called Marco Polo that ran for two seasons where Marco Polo is played by Lorenzo Richelmy.

‘Based on a True Story’ movie that released this week

Today is the 19^th anniversary of the release of the supernatural horror film directed by Scott Derrickson that claims to be ‘based on a true story’ called The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

Set in the modern era of when the movie was released in the 2000s, the storyline revolves around the trial of Father Richard Moore. He’s played by Tom Wilkinson in the movie, and in the movie, Father Moore is a priest charged with negligent homicide following the death of a 19-year-old college student named Emily Rose.

As you might’ve guessed by the title of the movie, Emily died during an exorcism performed by Father Moore. According to the movie, she’s a devout Catholic college student who begins experiencing terrifying symptoms that she believes are signs of demonic possession. Her symptoms include severe seizures, hallucinations, and physical contortions. Despite medical intervention and a diagnosis of epilepsy, her condition deteriorates, leading her and her family to seek help from the church. Father Moore believes them and agrees to perform an exorcism.

In the movie, the exorcism itself is where we really get into the supernatural horror elements. Emily starts speaking in different languages, has unbelievable strength, and her body moves in unnatural ways. Despite Father Moore’s best efforts, the exorcism does not work, and Emily passes away in the process.

That leads us to the courtroom, where we see the trial of Father Moore after Emily’s death. On one side, you have the prosecution, which is led by Campbell Scott’s version of Ethan Thomas, insists Emily had a medical condition and Father Moore’s exorcism denied her the treatment she needed. For the defense, Laura Linney’s version of Erin Bruner, argues that Emily actually was possessed by a demon. She argues that it was the demon that killed Emily, not Father Moore.

The movie is an interesting clash of religious faith, science, and the law—you know, the kind of things everyone agrees about all the time.

And in the movie, even the jury can’t seem to agree. Their verdict is to declare Father Moore guilty, but also to ask Mary Beth Hart’s version of Judge Brewster to give Father Moore time served. Judge Brewster agrees, and Father Moore is allowed to go free despite the guilty verdict.

The true story behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Shifting to the fact-checking, let’s start with the most obvious of inaccuracies in the movie: The title.

Instead of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a more historically accurate title for the movie would be “The Exorcisms of Anneliese Michel.”

That’s because the real person the movie is based on is a 23-year-old German student teacher named Anneliese Michel, and in the true story, Anneliese had 67 exorcisms before she died on July 1^st, 1976.

Which brings up another inaccuracy in the movie: The timeline.

The true story happened in the 1970s, while the movie makes it more contemporary to when it was released in the 2000s.

So, with all of that said, it’s probably not too much of a surprise for me to say this movie is stretching the term “based on a true story” to its limits. But, to play devil’s advocate to what I just said, that doesn’t mean the concept of the movie is completely fictional.

What I mean by that is if you look at the people, places, timeline, and the location of the movie, sure it’s made up. However, the basic gist of a woman having an exorcism that led to her death and the Catholic Priest involved being put on trial for her death…that is true.

Born in 1952, and raised in a devout Roman Catholic family, Anneliese Michel was a deeply religious woman. Her childhood wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but all that changed in 1968 when, at the age of 16, Anneliese started having some severe convulsions.

Naturally, she went to a doctor first and before long she was diagnosed with epilepsy and depression. Once she was diagnosed, she started receiving treatments with little to no effect. Of course, even that isn’t all that uncommon…people can get misdiagnosed or have medical treatments that don’t help with whatever ails them.

For the deeply religious Anneliese, whatever ailed her started giving her some uncommon symptoms, though. She heard voices, and perhaps most terrifying of all, saw hallucinations that included demonic faces. Of course, when it comes to symptoms like that, it’s not like you can show other people the hallucinations you’re having, so that’s where those around Anneliese started to splinter into two different beliefs about what was happening to her.

On one side, you had the doctors and medical staff trying to help Anneliese through scientific methods while on the other side you had Anneliese and the Michel family. As the medical treatments failed to help, and Anneliese only grew worse, they started to believe more and more that this was beyond anything medical.

Or, in other words, I suppose you could say they lost faith in medicine and returned to their religious faith. So, they went to the Catholic Church to ask for help. At first, they were rejected. After all, the Catholic Church also tends to default to a medical explanation before jumping to a spiritual one.

And, as I alluded to before, Anneliese had been diagnosed by medical professionals with temporal lobe epilepsy, which has been known to cause many of the symptoms Anneliese had like the seizures and hallucinations.

Earlier, I mentioned Tom Wilkinson’s character in the movie, Father Moore. He’s not a real person for all the aforementioned reasons of time, place, people changes, etc. but Father Moore’s character in the movie is based on two Catholic priests named Father Ernst Alt and Father Wilhelm Renz.

Father Alt was the local priest for the Michel family, so he likely spent the most amount of time with Anneliese, and as such he was crucial in helping convince the Catholic Church to change their mind. Eventually, in September of 1975, Bishop Josef Stangl approved the exorcism under the condition that Father Alt and Father Renz adhere to strict secrecy about the whole matter.

On an average of a couple times a week from September of 1975 until June of 1976, Father Alt and Father Renz performed exorcisms on Anneliese. That’s why there were so many exorcisms performed on her. It wasn’t a one-and-done thing. And the movie is correct to suggest some of the things like speaking in multiple languages, abnormal bouts of strength, and strange contortions of her body.

While there’s no footage of the real exorcism of Anneliese publicly available that I could find to compare with what we see in the movie, I think it’s safe to say the movie does what movies love to do and exaggerate things a lot.

We know Catholic priests used the 1614 Rituale Romanum, because that’s basically the Catholic Church’s instruction manual for priests performing exorcisms. As the name implies, that’s from 1614, so I don’t think the exorcisms they actually performed were anything like what we see in the movie…although, again, I’ll have to play devil’s advocate to myself, because the Catholic Church updated that 84-page document for the first time in 1998.

So, from 1614 until 1998, the rite of exorcism remained the same. And since the movie takes a true story from the 1970s into the 2000s, I suppose they’d be using the updated version. And while my Latin is rusty to the point of non-existence, all my research suggests there wasn’t a lot changed. Just some minor things like updating descriptions of what Satan looks like since now the Church teaches Satan is a spirit without a body.

Unfortunately, even the exorcisms couldn’t help Anneliese.

In her final months, she stopped eating. She stopped drinking. In addition to everything else she was going through, Anneliese started to suffer from severe malnutrition. Then, on June 30^th, 1976, Father Renz performed yet another exorcism…one that would be her last.

Anneliese Michel died on July 1^st, 1976.

The movie is also correct to show a trial after her death. Father Alt and Father Renz were charged with negligent homicide just like we see Father Moore charged with in the movie. In a 1978 article from The Windsor Star newspaper, Father Alt said he never thought Anneliese was “dangerously ill.”  In the same article, Father Renz said he didn’t call a doctor because, “the exorcism ritual expressly states that clergymen should not burden themselves with medical matters.”

I’ll add a link to the article in the show notes if you want to read it, because it also talks about how the Michel family sued the five doctors who helped treat Anneliese because they drew up a report of her case—something the Michel family said was a violation of doctor-patient confidentiality.

In the end, the verdict in the true story was the same for the two priests as it is in the movie for Father Moore: Guilty. The sentencing was not the same as the movie, though, because in the true story the priests were sentenced to six months in prison, with three years of probation.

And now you know a little more about the true story behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose!

Dan LeFebvre  04:16

Before we dig into some of the details of the movie if you were to take a step back and give 1999 Is the mummy an overall letter grade for its historical accuracy? What would it get?

Aidan Dodson  04:27

Oh, I think it would be called probably a D- or an E. Okay, the points where it actually has something to do with the real Ancient Egypt are few and far between.

Dan LeFebvre  04:43

Ancient Egypt did exist and that’s it. Pretty much. Yeah.

Aidan Dodson  04:46

But interestingly that even the country that it’s set in does not look like Egypt. Oh, really? i Okay. They take it further with the latest ones, the franchise, but basically most of what we see there It is not recognizably Egypt of any period. I suppose. There are a few things which sort of people might think might be Egypt, but no, it’s some. It’s a straight as I went when it first came out, I went and we asked her I said, basically, it’s in a land which they’re calling Egypt, but it’s fundamentally more like Middle Earth or some other fictional fictional venue. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  05:27

okay. It’s it’s got the sands. And so I guess for the American movie viewing audience, it’s okay, that’s, that’s Egypt.

Aidan Dodson  05:34

Yeah, exactly. Yes, I suppose so. Yeah. But of course, we’ve heard if you know, Egypt, there’s a lot of which isn’t seven. So it’s a caricature of what somebody who’s never been to Egypt thinks it might be like, I think that’s the best way of describing it. Very

Dan LeFebvre  05:48

good. Very good. What the movie starts by kind of setting up some of the people involved in this story. We hear about Pharaoh Seti the first his wife, an oxygen a moon, that high priest emo tap, and afford to believe the movies version of history. Emo tap an affair with an oxygen moon. And when they were discovered, the two of them killed SETI Are those real people did the affair that we see in the movie really happen? The

Aidan Dodson  06:12

only person who’s really setting the first he was a genuine king of Egypt. Yeah, his mommy is in the Cairo Museum. He’s the father of Rameses. The second so he’s he’s a wet he’s an important figure in Egyptian history. The thing is, he never had a wife called ankarana. Moon, he never had an official called him Hotep. And as far as we can tell, he died in his bed of natural causes. We’d actually do know, he died relatively young. But there but there’s sort of no signs of any foul play or anything on the mummy.

Dan LeFebvre  06:46

Okay, okay. So they did change things quite a bit what the concept, obviously being his wife, you wouldn’t want to have have an affair there. But they really seem to make it a big deal that you know, Emma type is the high priest and having an affair with the pharaohs wife is, you know, they have her outfit basically painted on that you’re not allowed to touch or they have that kind of thing on there. Yeah,

Aidan Dodson  07:09

this has got me three things. The first is the choice of the name for the queen. In fact, it’s a garbled version of the wife of Tom comunes. Actually his wife, and is is lifted directly from your original 1932 movie, where the heroine is called that. And likewise, him Hotep is lifted directly from the 1932 bar Boris Karloff film as well. So there’s a lot of this film, because at the time it was, originally it was presented as going to be a remake of the 1932 classic or possibly the Hammer Horror version, the 1950s. But it wasn’t that all they did was picked a few things. For example, the names of the hero and heroine are anti hero and heroine.

Dan LeFebvre  07:56

Okay, yeah, so they’re pulling from multiple sources sounds like men and turning it into the Middle Earth slash Ancient Egypt, fictional area to create this kind

Aidan Dodson  08:05

of thing that the original idea was possibly to do a remake. And then they decided though, let’s change this. But let’s change this bit until the till the relationship with the original version is, isn’t there at all.

Dan LeFebvre  08:20

Make sense? Make sense? I want to ask about something in the movie that we see kind of the talking about emo Tapi transfers into the mummy through what the movie calls the hum die. You know, the movie explains this as being the worst of all ancient Egyptian curses reserved only for the most evil of blasphemers. And the key to this curse is basically keeping the mummy sealed in his sarcophagus. Because if he’s released, then he becomes this super power walking disease. Bring it back the 10 plagues of Egypt, strength of ages, the power of the Sands and the glory of instant disability. Did the ancient Egyptians have any sort of curse like the home die that we see in the movie? Not

Aidan Dodson  09:01

in the slightest, no, the only curses we have are basically against embezzling funerary endowments. There’s not even anything about if you if you rob my tomb, you’re going to be it’s it’s very much almost a transactional kind of thing. And certainly the idea of of that kind of thing as being the worst possible punishment that we know they had capital punishment. And we know that for some things that you tomb robbing, you could be impaled. Otherwise, punishments tended to be I see with I’d say probably worse, straightforward executions, but often having your nose and ears cut off and sent to work in the mines, that sort of thing is there is the really, it’s really nasty kind of stuff. And when you’ve got somebody who’s guilty of a state crime, it seems if you’re high enough place you’re allowed to commit suicide. because we do have we do have the records of the trials of people who are responsible for assassinating a later Pharaoh. And basically, the the, it seems fairly clear that these are some of the more senior ones were allowed to sort of go off and kill themselves. But otherwise, which is that their fate overtook them is the as the other one is the word used. So, but there is no evidence for any kind of sort of particularly sort of nasty or special kinds of punishments like that. Okay, okay. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  10:32

that was that was something that the first time I watched this movie back, I think I saw it in the theaters when it first came out. But how was it immediately I was like, wait a minute, why wouldn’t some Pharaoh be like, I’m going to purposely have this curse, and yet, it’s going to suck to be killed that way. But then I’m going to become into this invincible super power, right, like to get that power in the other side.

Aidan Dodson  10:55

And also, the other point is that surely by saving him up like that, is preserving his body. And that was the way that you that was what people wanted, it seems that if you were particularly bad, you were burned, which is the way of destroying your afterlife. So actually, the whole idea of preserving some of your special way as a curse is completely the wrong way round the points but if somebody was particularly bad for things, you destroy them, every trace of them on Earth, because part again, part of the idea is that your while your body survives, your soul survives everything else. And obviously more important and interesting that if your name survives, the whole point about sort of somebody who’s done something really really dreadful, is to not only destroy their body, but destroy every any mention that ever existed. So doing this to him home tip is completely opposite to what you would expect. There are some you’ve picked up things like particularly horrendous.

Dan LeFebvre  11:56

Okay, that makes perfect sense. Because I’ve I know, I’ve, I can’t think of any names off the top of my head, I’m sure you have a lot more. But I know I’ve seen things about you know, the ancient Egyptians carving off names and things like that to try to erase them from history. Exactly.

Aidan Dodson  12:12

And that’s that’s the whole point. And there’s the bottom line is providing these John names survives on Earth, you’ll never be dead. So they say, you know, write a book and live forever. But if he would say the opposite way round is a take, take the name away, destroy the body, and then you will be as though you’re never You never were.

Dan LeFebvre  12:33

Okay, I want to there’s something. This is just kind of talking about the curse there. In the movie. We see the curse affects the people who open the motifs canopic jars most because he needs those to regenerate. There’s a group of American treasure hunters who fall prey to the mummy so he can start that regeneration process. But the impression that I got from the movie was they were pulling from the curse of the pharaohs, which is something that I’ve heard about. But is there anything from history to suggest the curse of the pharaohs is actually a real thing like moving implies.

Aidan Dodson  13:03

The slightest now it was made up by a journalist in 1922. Basically, when they were when they were excavating the toilets on Cameroon. They were basically journalists hanging around all the time. And one of the journalist was actually an ex Egyptologist, who I think was rather embittered by the fact that because he was he’d once been an Egyptologist he might be allowed in and get some special scoop. But basically, they turned I said, No, you’re now one of one of them. You can and I get the feeling, although it’s we haven’t got it in words of one syllable. But he’s the span various stories with his fellow journalists, because he got the pedigree of being a form rich Egyptologist. And he made basically, as far as we make it, he made it up. The whole the whole thing. And what’s really ironic is the guy who we think is responsible making it up when he died of cancer 10 years later, they alleged he died at the pharaohs curse, when actually he was the person who made it up in the first place. So they say the only sort of curses which exist, are what we might call ones against embezzlement, because when you built your two, there was a need to have offerings, regularly placed in it. And what you’d often do is then endow some agricultural land to provide food to be to go to your town. And the concern was that this might be embezzled and the end the resources diverted somewhere else. So that’s really where when we see curses, they’re really against that kind of thing, rather than the sort of classic if you if you rob my to my old do something nasty to you. I think that’s sort of almost implicit that that’s that’s the case. That and we know that sometimes that mummies are often burned by robbers, and we think that may be to lie the robbers to try and stop the dead person taking revenge. But that’s not Because that’s a curse that just simply, if you do something to the dead, that’ll come get you.

Dan LeFebvre  15:06

You may have already kind of alluded to this, but in the movie storyline, it takes place mostly in a city called Hymenoptera. And the movie explains Hymenoptera as being known as the city of the dead because it was the ancient burial site for the sons of pharaohs. Is Hymenoptera an actual place? Nope.

Aidan Dodson  15:23

And in fact, what Hymenoptera is actually a mispronunciation of probably, and Monterrey, the chief god, the Hmong culture certainly doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t look like any set in Egyptian cemetery I’ve ever come across. Basically, within the set up in the was you’d have the ordinary town, and then there’d be normally to the west of it, because that’s where the dead live, there will be a cemetery, which would be depending on the period would just look like this in the area of desert with a few or it may be a cliff with some tombs cut into it or whatever. But none of that what the what they show us Hammond portrait looks a bit like a cross between the Temple of cognac and somebody’s sort of sad fantasy, it’s, that’s again, that sort of thing. But say, I think it’s I think I think they’ve saved the clearly that name, the only way they can get it for I think it’s just an Asus is distorting and raw. And there’s other thing which which always got me moment I saw it, my wife always hates it, if I watch anything like this, because I’m always snapping at it. There’s the bit where they’re hurrying off from Cairo to heaven, portra. And they go by steam. What’s wrong with the overnight express train? By the time this is set, which is presumably 1920s ish, there a there’s an overnight there’s an express train, which will get you from Cairo to lux, which I assume is what they call the app, Hammond portra in like 10 hours, so why go? Why get why go get a paddle steam, which takes days? Again, this question about some bearing very little resemblance to Egypt, you know, and there’s also that sort of slave market thing early on. There might have got that in about 1500. But you had anything like that in Egypt, you know, for sort of centuries. So again, it’s it’s not Egypt at all. It’s a fantasy land, which they’re calling Egypt, and they’ve sort of brought in a few bits and bits and pieces, which people didn’t get, ooh, that’s Egypt, but it’s as natural as natural place where all this stuff is happening. It’s bears no resemblance whatsoever.

Dan LeFebvre  17:41

Well, I have to ask kind of the flip side of the city of the dead is the city of the living, which in the movie is where emotet lives, Thebes is thieves of real

Aidan Dodson  17:49

place. Thieves certainly is a real place. It’s the group name for what we now call look. So and that was the religious capital of Egypt from about 1500 BCE, through to about 1100 BC. So during that during the very high pot, and certainly during the time that SETI was, you know we have we have temples of Seti the first there, we’ve got best reason was because tumors and everything else. So the idea of there being that is no is fine. And that is the what we’ve got to know on the east bank at modern Luxor, and the city of the dead that necropolis is on the west bank. So that’s sorted that East West division is certainly there. And so as I said earlier on, I think most in most parts of Egypt, there was there would be the area of the living, and then there’ll be the cemetery. So ideally, off to the west, if the topography allows that sometimes it’s off to the east, and they do some more weird and wonderful things to try and sort out the orientation, but basically, that there is that basic division there.

Dan LeFebvre  18:51

Okay, and that, I mean, that doesn’t seem like it’s anything unique to Ancient Egyptians. I mean, even today, you know, we have cemeteries and you see cities in, I live in America, you see cities in America, where the cemetery is kind of off, off to the side, you know, as the city grew, but how would Yeah, exactly,

Aidan Dodson  19:09

I think, I think so. I’ve traveled quite a lot in the States. I do it out just outside San Francisco, you’ve got this whole city of the dead of Colmar and everything else going off off to the south. So yeah, that idea is less I think the issue is, it’s normally should be to the west, whereas we don’t quite do that. But it’s helped, of course, by the fact that you’ve got a North South River so it’s a West Bank and East Bank and that sort of, and generally speaking, providing the topography allows it you will be buried on the West it just some cut some case places where the foot where the cultivated floodplain goes off so far, if you wanted to go and sort of visit granddad’s grave, you’d have a day’s journey. So they mucking around a little bit but that’s the but yeah, so I think they’ve they’ve taken clearly what is looks or Thebes as their model and sort of then dropped into it this Hammond portra concept.

Dan LeFebvre  20:03

There’s another element to Hymenoptera being the place of the resting place of the wealth of Egypt. There’s a scene in the movie that is this huge big room filled with all sorts of gold and statues and just huge piles of gold just there. It looks exactly like what you would expect a treasure room to look like themed with ancient Egypt with all these statues. Do we know if the Egyptians had any huge treasure rooms? Like we see in the movie? Not

Aidan Dodson  20:30

like that. I think this if they did they that any treasure which they had, they certainly had quadrate right? They certainly had it would have just been in small store rooms with under lock and key you wouldn’t put it in pilot into all that kind of thing. I think what you’ve got then is this idea of the legendary wealth of Egypt. The fact the fact that you could take it with you and your tomb so royal tombs were fairly well packed with, with with gold and stuff, look at the stuff that they found it took time for moons to come. That’s a good, good example of that. But not was certainly nothing, nothing like that kind of thing. And that’s that’s just simply just sort of an excuse further set builders to have to have fun, I suppose. Because you say I think it’s almost a trope from all kinds of these kinds of these sorts of whether it’s Indiana Jones or whatever, there’s always this, this torch lit Great Hall with whatever the stuff is in the middle of it. And we have no no examples of anything, anything like that at all.

Dan LeFebvre  21:33

Okay, you mentioned the torchlight. Now, there was something I wanted to ask about because in the movie, we see Rachel vices character Evelyn, she calls when she calls an ancient Egyptian trick where they reposition mirrors above the ground to then cast light underground. And that made me wonder how did the ancient Egyptians see underground? Did they just use fire that then would burn up their oxygen? or was there some sort of ancient trick like we see in the movie? Well,

Aidan Dodson  21:57

it’s actually the thread which she’s using is actually the trick they use nowadays to light up to okay by using mirrors if you there’s a couple of if you go if you if you visit some of the tombs in Egypt today, most of them have now got LED lighting and everything but there’s a few where they where they still haven’t got so therefore they’ll use some mirrors just to bounce some sounds something they’re basically what they used was little floating wick oil lamps, but with very very pure olive oil. And and apparently if you put salt in it, it doesn’t smoke. So that’s that’s clearly West what they used for that for it. The idea of flaming torches without again, they they look, they look fun in on Hollywood, we’ve never actually used such a thing because it will just mess up the paintwork. Oh,

Dan LeFebvre  22:46

yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, I was thinking that you know in more enclosed spaces like you would lose oxygen even faster if you had this huge torch and then the light would go out and then you would go out

Aidan Dodson  22:56

like what you want because people who are actually down there are going to be the artists they weren’t actually going to see properly so definitely want the thick a nice pure light which you can get from sort of olive oil with a little oil lamps you know this sort of flickering torches unless you want to if you’re trying to get you’re trying to get your colors right and and so on. So they don’t again that again, the flaming torches are as I think a standard. If you go back into Hollywood history, as always what you do if you’re going underground, some of you have flaming torches. You don’t go with nice, loyal or anything like that. There

Dan LeFebvre  23:33

are a group of people in the movie that we see called the Magi and they are according to the movie Pharaoh’s bodyguards. They were there when said he was killed. They’re the ones to perform the curse on emotive as punishment for killing somebody. And then for 1000s of years, they’re tasked with making sure that the mummy doesn’t escape. How well do you think the movie does showing Pharaohs bodyguards? The Magi? Well, first

Aidan Dodson  23:56

of all, they don’t exist to start with the magic magic. The magic and map made made magic magic. Magi sorry, are basically the Egyptian police force to name for policemen, effectively. So nothing nothing special. They just they’re sort of parrot they’re dissuaded from paramilitary police. The idea of then any kind of continuity like that it’s just it just can’t this can’t possibly this doesn’t work in the sense of looking at the history of Egypt from that point that point onwards. There with with with the multiple sets of disjuncture with the Persians with the Assyrians evading the Persians evading the Greeks invading the Germans invading the Arabs invading, etc, etc. The chance of any kind of survival of this covers kind of sort of little band of brothers kind of thing. It’s throughout generations. It’s just, it’s just absolutely silly. But of course they of course, don’t. They’ve taken that actually from the 90s 32 Mummy film, when you’ve said we’ve got wherever the mummy is that purse is the is actually the person who was sort of as frisky as it was lived as lived on through as lived on through time. So, yeah, it’s again, one of those things where it’s, it’s just it’s a fun bit of the story, but it just doesn’t bear any any resemblance. But then he’s getting some, there’s something that you find in quite a few film, this idea of this sort of this order of monks or whatever it is who’ve sort of carried out who’ve gone through history. And they’re the ones so it’s still it’s passed on from father to son kind of thing.

Dan LeFebvre  25:38

Yeah, that was definitely the feeling that I got from them was that yes, this was passed on through generations. And they were doing this and apparently didn’t do a very good job because they didn’t protect the Pharaoh and they also didn’t protect the mummy and they failed on multiple points.

Aidan Dodson  25:57

I do wonder whether some weathers whether the idea is in part, let’s say it’s not original for this particular mummy fail, is of course, you have got hereditary families in Palestine, who are the guardians of the sacred places. So the idea of a family who they want to control the keys to the churches, the Holy Sepulchre and stuff like that. So I think that’s sort of where the concept might have come. But that’s sort of only over the last and that’s less lasted 500 years or so. So it’s not sort of not to be sniffed at but that is in the context of a sort of a culture which continues to recognize this art the idea of the of these kinds of Guardians, but if you try and take it over 3000 years, it becomes just silly.

Dan LeFebvre  26:45

We talked about the the city of the dead but there’s another concept in the movie called The Book of the Dead and that’s why it’s the mummy mo tap is trying to get bring back his his the love of his life, I was gonna say his wife, but there was actually the pharaohs way. And actually, I’m going to try to bring back the love of his life. And so reading from the book is what wakes me up to begin with later on. It’s actually the the book of almond raw that is going to be the one to kill the mummy are the Book of the Dead and The Book of almond raw, are they based on real things?

Aidan Dodson  27:16

The name Book of the Dead is based on something real, although actually the document was called by data Egyptians to prove Coming Forth by Day it was called the Book of the Dead by the local villagers in the 19th century when they started finding these scrolls. And they were found on the dead so therefore they’ve been called the Book of the Dead because of that the ancient Egyptian didn’t call them book they’re dead Of course, the book of Coming Forth my day, I want the book of Coming Forth by Day or aka The Book of the Dead was was a guide book to being dead effectively. It was a set of spells which helped you transform from being a dead person to being an eternal being.

Dan LeFebvre  27:57

So passing through death into into the afterlife, basically it sounds like yeah,

Aidan Dodson  28:02

and there’s not a thing there was things you had you had to get, you know, certain passwords to get through gateways, and all those sorts of things. And therefore if you can afford it anyway, you had a scroll anyway to your mummy which have had the Book of the Dead on it alternatives haven’t painted on the walls of your tomb. Or if you couldn’t afford the whole thing you could have who could have extracts from it so basically that’s there is there is this thing there is there is this thing, but it’s all about being dead it’s coming back and it is coming back to life but coming back to life in the next world is ensuring that you are able to then say pass through into the next world and continue on for eternity on the on the other side of your fam and Rod doesn’t exist at all there’s I think there’s also she mentioned at one point of a book of the living as well which again doesn’t exist I think you said as the the producers thinking there’s a thing called the Book of the Dead with actually it’s the book of Coming Forth by Day What are we must have a book of the book a book with a living to go with it and I think Rick and I seem to recall from the first I thought it actually goes I saw the film but she’s actually looking at what seems to be a cast apart the Rosetta Stone when she’s reading this as well so that the props are a little bit bizarre in places

Dan LeFebvre  29:23

yeah I think the I remember right the Book of the Dead is kind of it’s like a darker black and then the book of the living are Is this gold treasure and which is why a lot of the treasure hunters are looking for it is because it’s this Golden Book right and

Aidan Dodson  29:39

no it’s easy I guarantee you it’s one of those things where they’ve picked up this term Book of the Dead and then so and then run with it produced the rest of the rest the rest of the thing but

Dan LeFebvre  29:48

according to the movies version of events the magnification process for emo type in his priests happened while they’re still alive. The movie guy makes a point to mention this although Oh, the movie does mention that that’s kind of a special case for the curse to mummify them alive. But we do know that mummies are a real thing. But obviously, they’re not tied to the curses, like we see in the movie. So for those of us who aren’t familiar with the reason behind the mummies, can you share some more historical context that we don’t see in the movie at all around why Ancient Egyptians made mummies basically

Aidan Dodson  30:20

what the the way the Egyptians looked at things when you died, effectively, you split into a number of different elements, most of which were spiritual elements, but also the body was still part of you. And, and although the they don’t provide the full detail, the important implication is to enjoy a fully rounded next life, all your various bits still needed to be in existence. So therefore, the body needed to be preserved. So it could continue on playing its role. But exactly what that role is, it’s never made clear. I’m not sure even actually, the Egyptians fully understood what what it meant. It probably meant something, you know, in 5000 BC, but by the time you get to later periods, it just what you do. So basically, the idea is to take to preserve the body, at minimum, you wrap it in that in in some bandages, to hold it all together. And then if you can afford it, various chemical processes are carried out, which then desiccate the body. So effectively, unless it gets wet, or catches fire. It’s absolutely it’ll, it’ll survive forever. And that’s the idea the body should survive themselves. And it’s one of the reasons why the penalties for tomb robbery were death. Because if you were destroying somebody’s body, mummified body, you were then messing up their afterlife. And so therefore, it was effectively you know, it was effectively posthumous murder, if you were going to damage a mummy and say, we do know that in some cases, they set fire to the mummy, probably to try and stop the spirit taking any kind of revenge. So the mummy is a really quite important node if you like in the whole thing. But again, if Imhotep had done something particularly horrendous, the last thing you want to do is mummify him, because that’s the way we guarantee him a continuing existence. So therefore, you know, what you would do is execute him and then burn it. That’s what you would do in a real Ancient Egypt to somebody who was that horrendous, done something that horrendous?

Dan LeFebvre  32:39

It makes me wonder, because I think of some of some some beliefs of of afterlife now. And we think that the concept of ghosts and things like that where basically, those spirits can can go through objects, but then you’re talking about burning the mummies to keep them from coming back is, is there a belief that that mummies could come back and haunt or curse or whatever the term might be? The people in this world

Aidan Dodson  33:11

don’t the physical body itself, they certainly believe that spirits could come back and do stuff. And in fact, there’s one version of the of the of the Spirit called the bar, which actually was supposed to be able to come back and sort of sit outside the tomb and enjoy the sunset and things like that. And there were concerns that some that the malevolent spirits ghost could do harm. In this world. There’s one high priests wife, who, there is very interesting texts written, which went in her to suggesting that she hadn’t died, shall we say, on good terms with her husband? And there’s sort of a, we’d love to know what was going on there. But there’s click. And there are also some things where, while you do get a text called Letters to the dead, you could actually write a letter to you’re basically saying, Why are you why are you coming back? And then sort of disturbing, wait, why are you causing this problem in the household? And it’s sort of thought to be the dead was so the birds or the dead certainly could interfere in this world, but in a spiritual form, or the idea of actually having a mummy sort of getting up and wandering around is, is isn’t there at all, but certainly the idea of spirits, and particularly if you’ve died a bad death, or you’re unhappy, there’s a center there are there are Egyptian ghost stories. You know, there’s one where we’ve got a guy who’s visiting the cemetery, and he gets visited by a ghost who tells me him his life story. So we do certainly have that side of things.

Dan LeFebvre  34:49

Okay, okay. Yeah, I was I was really curious about that, because that’s something that you it’s not so different from a lot of beliefs now of like people coming back and interact acting with spirits and things like that, but also the concept of like you’re talking about putting, putting the Book of the Dead or you know, the map into this graphic so that they can read it, it kind of makes me think, okay, they can actually physically interact with this perhaps, or it’s just kind of a mixture of a lot of different things that I think are not uncommon today just call different things and kind of have often that.

Aidan Dodson  35:26

Like, is it there’s a common human desire not to see death as the end. The differences then then is what then happens beyond are the dead then gone to another place? Or are they still having some kind of interaction with you, because it will give each proper Egyptian to theirs, the burial shame is also a chapel, which goes with it. And then the chapel is what we call a false door, which is the interface between the two worlds, and where offerings will be placed in front of that to pass through to get to the other side, because one of the things Egyptians are always terrified of is going hungry in the next world. And in fact, a lot of the texts on coffins, and two walls are all about making sure there’s enough food, drink, and also clothing available. But also, then ideally, they like the real stuff, the fresh stuff as well. Hence, I was talking about these funeral endowments of fields to provide for food offerings. So that ideally, that would be brought on a regular basis. And that would pass through the false door. And also the spirit could would come to the false door to take on the food. And this one form of the Spirit, the bar could actually then come out and just visit and visit this world.

Dan LeFebvre  36:42

There’s a another kind of concept that we were talking about mummies I mentioned it briefly with the with the canopic jars.

Aidan Dodson  36:52

But one thing, they have five canopic jars in the movie, there are only ever four of them.

Dan LeFebvre  36:58

Okay, okay. But I want to ask about that, because you were talking about how, with ancient Egypt, kind of not really resembling Ancient Egypt. So it made me wonder with the modification process that we see in the movie with the canopic jars and, and even the location of the sarcophagus seems to make a difference in the movie, you know, in this case, we see emotet, because he did this bad thing. His sarcophagus is buried near the base of NuBus, which means that according to the movie, it was kind of funny to have these contrasts, it was either somebody of great importance, or he did something very, very bad. You know, those are the only two two reasons why he might be there. And of course, in the movie, it’s the latter. But is there anything from ancient Egypt like a time period where the moment occation process that we see in the movie resembles that at all?

Aidan Dodson  37:38

Not really, no, because it’s like to reward him or whatever he’s doing. His views have been riffing wrapped up, he’s not there’s not there. Because to ramify improperly to take all the all the all the organs out, you have to then stick it up, desiccate the body for a month, and all those sorts of things. So it doesn’t really, you know, the whole point is that you’re getting a very, very, very, very dead when you’ve had your brain taken out, you’ve had all your organs taken out. You there’s not really much you can do. And also the interesting point is that the although of the orchestra taken out most of the put in the Copic in the four canopic jars, the brain is either left in place or lost altogether. Because the brain you can’t remove it in a form you can then desiccate it and put it in a jar effectively. So about half of the mummies have had their mum their brains removed altogether. And the other half there’s a sort of shriveled husk of the brain in the in the head.

Dan LeFebvre  38:39

Okay, okay, there’s a kind of a key villain that I that we see in the movie they want to ask about when during the mummification process with the monotype, we see the scarabs and they’re thrown into the sarcophagus and they basically eat them alive. Just waves and then we see different points in the movie too. We see the scarabs eating humans like they cover up some of them and then matter of seconds, they leave and there’s just this deal husk of a person left. We’re scarabs used by ancient Egyptians, the way that we see in the movie, not in

Aidan Dodson  39:09

the size, poor defense or Scarab beat terribly um, slandered and libeled in that. Yeah, he’s just he’s just a just a little little little beetle who wanders around in the desert. The reason why the scarab is something faced Egyptians is because there’s two sides, which probably linked together. One is that the scarab beetle pushes around a ball of dung, which is his food. And they look upon that as though it’s the sun being pushed over the horizon in the morning. So when you look at that the Egyptian sun god, he goes through a number of different transformations. But his final one before the dawn is into a scarab beetle, that which point he then pushes the sun over the horizon. as though he was the ball of dung. So that’s the reason why the scarab is a really important thing. It’s the whole, it’s the it’s the vehicle for starting starting the day effectively. So that’s reason why it’s important thing that, but also, the word for scarab is HEPA in ancient Egyptian, and pepper also means to come into existence. And therefore, again, it’s, it’s the scarab is a symbol for take both rebirth because the idea of the sun coming up over the horizon is equated with the idea of rebirth because the sun is being reborn, the sources The sun has died at sunset is being reborn in the in the morning and also come into existence a HEPA HEPA through. So it’s a very, it’s a it’s a it’s important concept of coming into existence. That just so happens that because the way that Egyptian writing works is that pictures of things with the same consonants as a concept may be used for that concept because we don’t we can’t we don’t know the short vowels of a usage of ancient Egyptian. So possibly, it may have been hopper is the scarab beetle and HEPA is to come into existence, but they’ve got the same that same consonants, they can be used for the same thing. It’s the same reason why the sign for life is actually a sandal strap. Because Anke, which is sandals, strap and life. Also, if you haven’t got the short vowels, I’ve got the same consonant. So that’s how these things sort of work. And that’s reason why this scarab is an important thing because it is a form of the sun god and it’s the most creative for the sun god and in the Senate in the context of the dead. You want your ball of dung if you like to be pushed over the horizon by the scarab. So that’s reason why scarabs are such a big thing. They’ve ported Linux in offensive little desert creatures, who now

Dan LeFebvre  42:09

kind of the movie, I mean, they they sure seem pretty

Aidan Dodson  42:13

that there are flesh eating beetles, which actually doctors sometimes used now for cleaning up badly damaged wounds and things. So they picked up the fact that our beetles, which which will eat flesh, but not scarab beetles,

Dan LeFebvre  42:29

so when we see them the scarabs, is it more refer, it’s not really referring to the beetle itself, but the God in form of the Scarab it it sounds like in a lot of contexts, okay. It’s

Aidan Dodson  42:40

basically there’s a lot of it’s either the Sun God himself, or it is the embodiment of the idea of coming into existence. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  42:50

okay. But neither one is really like this is the beetle necessarily like talking about the beetle itself, you know, now

Aidan Dodson  42:56

it’s an original reason why they’ve picked on it is because they’ve seen the beetle pushing this, these balls ball of dirt around, which is where the sort of the idea probably comes from, but this idea is probably sort of 5000 6000 years ago, long before and again, that by the time, this is all set, which I’m assuming Cassetti is around about 1300 BC, which I assume is wherever that bit is that bit of it is set. It’s just probably what they do. And I suspect most people are but unless you were sort of a priest probably would have no idea why my scarab beetle is such a thing. It’s just, that’s what we do. That’s what we have.

Dan LeFebvre  43:38

Yeah, at that point, it’s just you believe it, because that’s what what you’ve been taught your whole life. Yeah, that’s exactly something that we see throughout all of the movie. There’s there’s trapdoors, and booby traps and secret chambers, especially in common Optra. And obviously, the sets are made up for the movie. But for those of us who haven’t really explored ruins of ancient Egypt in person, I have to ask, do any of the Egyptian ruins have the type of booby traps and secret chambers and trap doors that we see in the movie? So

Aidan Dodson  44:08

you’re not booby traps, we do get at certain periods of Egyptian history, some quite elaborate security in tunes whereby you have got corridors which which lead know where you’ve got trapped doors in the floor or ceiling and so on. So that sort of thing does exist. And there are occasion there’s a couple of occasions where they actually moved in a vaguely mechanical manner by using sand as a hydraulic fluid effectively. So the idea that idea that there are that the Egyptians could do that kind of stuff is true, but it’s only a very specific period of time. And it’s no and it’s always not to catch somebody out, in the sense of sort of trap them or whatever. It’s to close off corridors and things so they can’t be penetrated by robbers because that’s the key thing. It’s all to do with with Even robbers out. Otherwise, I think most things were just simply trusted to know to lock doors and guards when it came to sort of stuff outside. So he says you’ve just got a couple of periods none of which actually overlap with when, when that when they saw the arrangement bit of this is set where you have this kind of sort of quite elaborate attempt to try and mislead robbers and and seal off things.

Dan LeFebvre  45:27

Okay, okay. Yeah, I assume that a lot of that was very fictionalized for the movie, but I had to ask.

Aidan Dodson  45:33

Yeah, and I think also, a lot of it is then taken from previous movies, there’s land of the pharaohs is a classic one. Whereby you have this have all the sand sort of closing off a pyramid and things like that. So I think an awful lot of, of the mother of the mummy is derivative, they’ve taken a lot of stuff from other from previous movies, and sort of just juggling around a bit. And suddenly, suddenly, it’s possible not fully understood where the particular trope actually came from.

Dan LeFebvre  46:04

Yeah, well, you mentioned with the torches, you mentioned Indiana Jones before and I think yeah, that’s another thing. You know, there’s so many booby traps and things like that in that series as well, that came out before this 99 movie.

Aidan Dodson  46:15

I think I think land of the pharaohs is actually possibly sort of the starting point for a lot of that sort of things. Jack Hawkins film from the early late 1950s. I think it is with Joan Collins in her first sort of big, big, big starring role. And I think a lot of Allah’s a lot of that kind of special effects to do with Egypt seem to come maybe you can trace back to that particular movie.

Dan LeFebvre  46:40

Okay, okay. Well, you already talked about we talked about Hamanaka. But I want to ask kind of a concept around that, because the beginning of the movie, it’s basically discovered, and then at the end of the movie after defeating the mummy, at least until the sequel, but that’s a different movie for a different day. But we see how many after just kind of imploding on itself and it gets covered up by the sand. And so kind of throughout the, the storyline, or the timeline of the movie is when we realized that Hymenoptera exists, are there any real places that have been discovered and then lost again like that? Not

Aidan Dodson  47:16

at all? No. No, basically, there were basically things which have carried out under the sand, then we’ll excavate excavation and then still, they’re still visible. There’s, there’s, there’s nothing of that kind of scale. Because the whole point point is that, in this huge amount of time, between the Pharaonic times there are a lot of things could just simply were destroyed. And things which remain standing normally, because they were being reused as churches, mosques, people’s houses and stuff like that. So ya know, that what’s what’s what’s there has never, we haven’t lost anything like that at all. The contrast? Actually, archaeologists have redirected things rather than actually sort of things falling down again.

Dan LeFebvre  48:04

Okay. Yep. Makes it makes a lot of sense. I assume, once we discover something is the archaeologists make sure it doesn’t get lost

Aidan Dodson  48:10

again. Exactly. And also how, I’m not quite sure how they sort of kind of lost Hammond butcher. Because, you know, the by again, by the 1920s. When that we’ve that Egypt’s in pretty well surveys and sort of every, you know, even if the deepest parts of the Sahara Desert, so the chances of finding anything, which hasn’t been that kind of scale, which has been lost is a little bit difficult to but again, this is a sort of King Solomon’s Mines and all sorts of Rider Haggard kinds of things. So again, it’s, I think that we need to look, really, it’d be interesting to dive into the mummy, and just see how whether you can trace back each little elements of it to some specific 19th century adventure story or earlier, Hollywood piece of piece of work.

Dan LeFebvre  48:59

Yeah, I bet you there won’t be like one of those times that you see in the movies of the other the different lines connecting to different things, there’s probably a lot of different inspirations there from from the movie, for sure. I’ve talked to a lot of different historians who mentioned, you know, tourists coming to a place and they talk about things that they see in the movie. What’s one of the biggest myths from this or really any movie that people tend to believe about ancient Egypt? That isn’t true? I

Aidan Dodson  49:30

suppose it’s really that some kind of supernatural kind of thing. You get also new ages and so on, also coming into all this kind of stuff. You know, they they certainly had their religious faiths and so on. But most of it was all fairly sort of, well, well set out as far as the idea that anything is built in a sort of particularly esoteric way that we know Pretty well how it’s all how everything is done Egypt, although, you know it’s got spectacular monuments because the interesting history is simply as another country which when the interesting past you do get sort of people who through no cuts, try and sort of have seances in temples and so I’ve I’ve led tour groups before now and you know, not necessarily Mito, which was you’ve seen what some of the others are get up to try a lion sarcophagi guy and get good vibrations for whatever it wherever. So I think that’s the essence in some ways turns Egypt into some kind of sort of fantasy world, rather than emphasizing what actually we’ve got in Egypt is a is a 5000 year old civilization with lots of really, really cool stuff in its own terms.

Dan LeFebvre  50:55

Adding to the fantasy is not helping what is actually there.

Aidan Dodson  51:01

The only thing on the other hand, I suppose, is having seen it, some people who might not otherwise have gone to Egypt might pick up the phone, or go online and book a trip. And that’s, you know, and I think the key that the key sort of antidote to all this kind of stuff is actually to go to Egypt yourself and, and experience what it really is, like, see what the monuments really are like, what the land is really like. And those sorts of things. So, you know, whether it was or whether it’d be sort of films like this, or some of the bizarre, quite dark, legit the documentaries about Ancient Aliens or whatever. Ultimately, if it does actually get some people to look at the real stuff and actually sort of get on a plane to Cairo. Okay, well, at least there’s it might it might drag people through there are people I know, who’ve been dragged into even serious Egyptology by are the sort of wild assures. But then they’ve actually then looked into things properly and moved on like that. So either there’s an Egyptologist and so very much a lover of Egypt. You can’t there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Well, perhaps they can be. But generally speaking, you know it if people think it’s sort of this magic, magical land, and find it still magical in all different different kinds of way. And that’s also good. If you

Dan LeFebvre  52:23

are in charge of remaking the Mummy, what one of the biggest changes that you would make,

Aidan Dodson  52:28

I would probably go back to what I think probably have to be everything quite honestly, I wish me do is go and dig out the script for the original 1932 Mummy. Now there is lots of silly stuff in there. But it’s much more grounded in in theory, and and just isn’t good to study silly in so many places. And there’s there’s a genuine kind of menace to it. Same goes also for the 1959 when I think as well, where it is, it’s their proper horror films, rather than just sort of, because there’s nothing it’s all too many. I think the problem I found that the mummy and also most modern sort of what they would sort of call horror, I suppose it’s all too in your face. You know, the trick is, you know, it’s that there’s like the fate of the first killing in the 1932 Mummy fields. All you just see is a shadow and then that then a guy’s screen. And then so so I think there’s a lack of it also get this lack of atmosphere as well. So I think say that I think if you’re going to the they got it, they got it right in 1932. And they’ve been better off if they’d sent me down a remake with a bit better patch of some bit bit of modern technology and so on. Rather than trying and because it just so many things wrong with it. That you Yeah. Even though and even if you haven’t got a proper living mummy, you’ve got this thing which then transformed into a bald headed non mummified. So if I both have time, he’s not even a mummy at all. So I think there’s there’s a bit of a trade descriptions issue around it as well. So now, I get the feeling the whole problem was that they suddenly said, Hey, what’s next next, and we’re going to remake or remake the mummy? And then then just sort of took the title and a couple of the of the characters and then ignore the rest of it. So yeah, so I’m afraid I think it would have to be go back to the drawing boards. As you could probably, I think you’d probably want to have something you could do something with sort of Vengeful Spirit from Egypt, but it wouldn’t couldn’t be a Desarae mummy if you would have this helps to have somebody who is in debt, you know, because because if you look at the ancient Egyptian literature, there are bad beings out there in the beyond who can do nasty things to you So, but it doesn’t really it’s not gonna be quite produced sort of the action action movie, which clearly they were trying to do.

Dan LeFebvre  55:08

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, back to the drawing board. It sounds like that’s fair. I thank you so much for coming on to chat about the mummy, you’re talking about people learning more. And obviously, there’s a lot of fiction in the movie. But Ancient Egypt, obviously not entirely fiction. You’ve written extensively about it in your book series called lives and afterlife. So my last question is kind of a two parter. For listeners who want to learn more about the real history, can you share an overview of your series and then give a recommendation for where they start?

Aidan Dodson  55:39

Okay, this the series of books I’ve been writing for last all give you seven or eight years now in a series of biographies of individual pharaohs. And in fact, I started off by writing a biography of setting the first the Pharaoh who features in the mummy and the and then the idea of this our lives and afterlife series is to start off by looking at what we know about the history of the person during their own time, then take a first look at the afterlife and says look at their tombs, their money, their their funerary monuments and things like that. But also then to look at their modern afterlife in the sense of how were they rediscovered? Because there’s a because contrary to the sort of the continuity, which is implied in the mummy, there actually is a 2000 year gap between the last time we can actually engage with ancient Egypt, its own terms, I read it script and the rediscovery of how to read this stuff again. So So then we go into how do these people rediscovered? Because most of them had been completely forgotten for 2000 years? So how do we first start discovering these people exist, try and start finding out why, what they did, and so on, and so forth. So this is really what this what this series is all about. focusing mainly on either single fare or group of pharaohs. And the most recent one was on a group of Nubian Nubians, who were pharaohs. During the eight to seven centuries BC. Dubya is the area straddling the border between Egypt and Sudan. And it’s always it has been culturally different from both of those of those places. And it always been a place which was being attacked and exploited by the Egyptians. And then they turn the tables for 100 years, and then they become Pharaohs themselves. So that’s sort of the that’s sort of where, where that comes from. Some years ago, I actually had writer, an introductory book on Egyptian history called monarchs of the Nile, which is aimed very much at sort of anybody who wants to start getting an idea of the history of the subject of history, history of ancient Egypt, so probably something is worth that’s worthwhile looking into. And that’s going to bibliography of other kinds of things. Also, there’s quite a lot of societies out there who offer evening classes, evening lectures. And so since COVID, a lot of these were available on zoom on online. You know, the days when you actually had to go out on a wet February evening to go and get your fix of Egyptology down the local college, you can actually in your own homes and do that. So a lot of that. I mean, in America, there’s a group called the American Research Center in Egypt, who they’ve got local chapters who offer both in person and online stuff. In the UK, there’s thing called East exploration society. There’s a lot of other local societies around as well. So there’s lots of things you can get involved with your local museum, all those sort of ways into the real world of ancient Egypt, rather than the version put out by the mummy.

Dan LeFebvre  58:53

Yeah, well, hopefully that’ll be just be the gateway to actually learning more

Aidan Dodson  58:57

new people who’ve who’ve got in that way. So I’m not gonna I’m not gonna sort of poopoo it. It’s just that people need to understand that the Egypt which is in the mummy, shall we say, business resemblance to the real one of now or ever? Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  59:12

And that’s, I mean, honestly, that’s one of the reasons I started this show was because you know, I’ve curious about the the movies and in the real history behind them to dig into them and starting to, you know, share books like yours, like, here’s a great starting point to learn more about what actually happened. And you know, hopefully get people interested in that. So thank you again, so much for your time and coming on the show.

Aidan Dodson

Very happy to do it.

August 12th, 1943. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

For our first movie this week, we’re heading to a 1982 movie from Executive Producer John Carpenter that you’ve probably never seen called The Philadelphia Experiment. We’re starting at about 11 and a half minutes into the movie where we see Eric Christmas’ character, Dr. James Longstreet, centered in the frame. He’s wearing white shirt, maroon tie, an almost-matching maroon scarf, underneath a herringbone tweed overcoat, topped with a brown fedora.

He’s looking off camera at something in the distance for a moment before turning around and going back through the doorway of what looks like the military gray of a Navy ship. As he does, the wind picks up and throws the maroon scarf over his left shoulder.

The camera cuts to a different angle, and Dr. Longstreet’s silhouette is prominent in the foreground as he walks inside leaving us to see what he was looking at: Another Navy ship in the harbor of a metropolitan city that I’m assuming is Philadelphia.

Inside the ship now, the camera is focused on a red radar screen. As the line goes around the circular screen the sound of two blips can be heard just as we see them on the radar. In other words, there are two ships on radar…and I’m assuming one of them is the ship we’re on with this radar. That’s the ship we just saw Dr. Longstreet step inside, and then I’m assuming the other blip on the radar is the ship Dr. Longstreet was looking at across the harbor.

Oh, by the way, that line you see going around the radar in the movies all the time is called the radar sweep, or just the sweep. Don’t worry, I had to look it up, too.

Dr. Longstreet and his assistant enter the bridge we can see the military officers running the ship. Except, it looks like the U.S. Navy officers are calling Dr. Longstreet “sir,” so I get the sense he’s in charge of whatever they’re doing.

And whatever it is involves those two ships because one of them tells Dr. Longstreet that, “the ships are on station, sir.”

So, the two ships are placed in a specific location.

Just then, the camera cuts to show us the ship Dr. Longstreet was looking at before, and now there’s a small cutter ship in front of it. Was that there before? I didn’t notice it, but now I’m questioning if those are the two ships we see on the radar.

Back inside the ship, we’re in some kind of control room with a sailor manning a huge black piece of equipment with knobs, buttons, and dials on it. We can’t see what any of them are, though, other than a red sign that says, “High Voltage.” That sign matches another “High Voltage” sign directly across from our camera view. That box is connected to three smaller boxes labeled “Gen 1”, “Gen 2”, and “Gen 3.”

The sailor manning the controls is Jim Parker, who is played by Bobby Di Cicco in the movie.

Another sailor, Michael Paré’s character, David Herdeg, enters through the open doorway just behind Parker and one-by-one, flips on the three “Gen” boxes. As he does, he remarks to his colleague, “Here we go.”

The camera shifts to another room that’s bathed in red light. There’s some sort of huge device in the center. A black box similar to the one we just saw in the last room is in the center, but this one doesn’t say “High Voltage” on it. This box doesn’t say anything that’s legible in the movie, it’s just a black rectangle sitting in the middle of a room of pipes, just in front of some huge metal structure.

The movie doesn’t explain it here, but if I had to guess, I’d say this is the control box for whatever that huge structure is. As the camera pans up, we can see a sailor walking around the structure taking notes. Steam rises from it, too, in a way that reminds me of how the steam emits from a rocket on the launch pad before the main engines kick in.

Back on the bridge, another sailor informs him that the generators are activated. That must’ve been the three “Gen” boxes they just turned on. Putting on his round framed glasses, Dr. Longstreet gives the order, “Power to the main field.”

Knobs are turned on control boards. A knob is turned to “Set Level,” and another set to the value of 3%.

Back in the room with the sailor who turned on the “Gen” boxes, we can see more of the room now. The other sailor is still at the black box with the “High Voltage” sign, operating it by turning knobs and dials. In the foreground are eight huge panels of vintage light bulbs. You know the ones where you can see the yellow filament inside? It’s like that, but hundreds of them…

…in fact, I paused the movie to count them all so you don’t have to. 710 is the number I came up with, although I’ll admit that I might’ve miscounted because it’s really hard to see some of them in the back. So, if you got a different number, let me know!

All of the bulbs are pulsing. On, off. On, off. Almost like a throbbing of the light around the two sailors manning the equipment in the room, David Herdeg and Jim Parker.

Outside, everything is normal. We can see the massive Navy ship with the number “724” in the side in the foreground against a bright blue sky.

Then, on the right of the frame what looks like an antenna of some sort starts pulsing like the light bulbs did inside. Rays of lights start spraying out of the antenna toward the left of the screen. Inside the ship, now, everything is cloaked in an eerie red light. A couple of the sailors look at each other, each of the men is bursting with some sort of unnaturally bright, red, light.

From a distance, we can see the entire ship in the harbor as the rays of light from the antenna intensify. Maybe it’s coming from other parts of the ship, at this point there’s so much light I doubt it can be from one small antenna. The movie cuts to a few different shots of men watching the lights in wonder before going to one of the radar operators with the two blips.

We can hear them as the sweep goes around the radar.

Beep, beep. Beep, beep. Beep, beep.

The other of the two radar operators says he can’t believe it, the Eldridge is beginning to fade.

Beep, beep. Beep, beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

It’s gone. One of the officers looks at the radar in disbelief. Then, turning around, he looks right at Dr. Longstreet, “She’s radar invisible,” he says. I didn’t think it was possible. Congratulations, Doctor, it looks like you’ve taken the entire German fleet out of this war.

Back in the room, David Herdeg and Jim Parker are just standing there watching the pulsing light bulbs all around them. And back outside on the Eldridge, there’s still that eerie red glow pulsing around the entire ship—and the men on board.

A klaxon alarm goes off. Is something wrong?

Then, the camera cuts back to the shot of the harbor with the whole ship in view. Rays of light continue to emit from the ship until…it just disappears. On the bridge, one of the men says the cutter has radioed that the Eldridge has disappeared. Of course, she’s radar invisible!

No, sir, she’s gone. She’s really vanished.

The camera follows Dr. Longstreet as he rushes out of the door, he just came in a few moments earlier. Out in the harbor, as peaceful as ever is the small ship. The cutter.

Next to it?

Nothing.

The entire Navy ship has just disappeared.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Philadelphia Experiment

Let’s move onto our fact-checking segment, because there is a huge caveat to add to this movie.

There is a very good chance none of that happened.

I mean, making a Navy ship disappear? It’s the stuff of conspiracy theories, and that is exactly what we’re talking about today.

Another huge part of the movie’s version of the tale that differs from what many believe about the true story is the date. Movies often shift timelines, and this case is no different. You see, many people believe all this happened in October of 1943.

And that’s the version the movie tells, because even though I didn’t talk about this part today, at the beginning of the movie it says this is taking place in Philadelphia in October of 1943.

To add to the historical context that we don’t get in the movie, October 28^th is the date many associate with the experiment. Many, except for one key person in the story.

And that one key person is why we’re talking about this today instead of October. After today’s movie came out, one of the people who saw it was a man named Al Bielek.

According to Al’s version of the story, soon after seeing the movie, memories started returning of the time he was a part of The Philadelphia Experiment, and even leading other such top-secret government programs.

For example, some of those memories that returned included his time working at the Montauk Project on Long Island, New York. Where the story gets strange is that Al supposedly lived in California. So, every morning during the 1970s, he’d commute from his apartment in California, teleport to Long Island, New York, through the time tunnel the U.S. government perfected around that time, then he’d return to California at the end of the day.

For geographical context, that’s about 2,500 miles or almost 4,000 kilometers each way.

It sure would be nice if that teleportation was available in the mainstream for you and I, huh?

So, anyway, one of those memories that started coming back to Al Bielek after he saw the movie in January of 1988 was that his work at the top-secret Montauk Project ended with what we now know as the Philadelphia Experiment.

Are you ready to go down the rabbit hole on this segment?

And according to Al’s version of the story, he and another man named Duncan Cameron were on board USS Eldridge, that’s the ship in the movie, and they both jumped off the deck and then got mixed up in hyperspace with the Project Rainbow they were conducting exactly 20 years earlier on August 12^th, 1943.

So, while all the men on Eldridge were stuck in hyperspace somewhere between 1943 and 1983, Al and Duncan woke up at Camp Hero in Montauk, New York. That was in 1983, and while at Camp Hero, they met the famous physicist John von Neumann, implying he was working on the project as well. But, then, it was the Camp Hero staff that shut down those generators on the Eldridge in 1983, thereby collapsing the time tunnel and returning the Eldridge to the Philadelphia naval yard where the time traveling experiment started.

But, then, after the experiments ended all the records were destroyed, everyone involved was sworn to secrecy, or in some versions of the story some of the staff were even brainwashed or shot so they wouldn’t talk. And it only started to come back to light after Al’s memory started coming back after he saw the movie we talked about today.

Although I saw reports that claimed the ship was covered in a greenish-blue glow and not the reddish glow like we see in the movie. But, as the story goes, it really did simply disappear in front of everyone’s eyes in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in 1943.

Oh, and there are also reports of some people seeing Eldridge at the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia for a moment before it disappeared from there and reappeared in Philadelphia a few hours later.

So, what’s the true story?

Well, if you believe Al Bielek, all of this has been the true story.

But, since we are talking about a conspiracy theory here, I feel like maybe we should step outside of one person’s version of events.

USS Eldridge was a real ship, that’s not a made-up name for the movie or the conspiracy theory. She was a Cannon-class destroyer escort ship, 300 feet, or about 90 meters long. She was launched in July of 1943, commissioned August 27^th, 1943, and named after Lt. Commander John Eldridge, Jr., who was a U.S. Navy officer who posthumously received the Navy Cross for his role leading the initial invasion of the Solomon Islands on August 7^th and 8^th, in 1942.

Her role in the war was escorting soldiers and materials for the Allied operations in North Africa and Southern Europe, so she spent a lot of time in the Mediterranean. After the war, she wasn’t needed anymore, so she was placed out of commission in June of 1946, and sold to Greece in 1951. Greece renamed her to Leon, or Lion, and she served in their Navy until being decommissioned in 1992, and ultimately sold for scrap in 1999.

With all that said, if you noticed the timing there, there was about a month between her launch and being officially commissioned, and then going off to do her missions during the war. To be more specific, the U.S. Navy officially lists her launch date as July 25^th, 1943, and then about a month later on August 27^th, 1943, she was officially commissioned into the Navy with a ceremony.

Immediately, in early September, her first mission was to go to the Bahamas for shakedown operations. Or, in other words, a sea trial for a new ship and her crew to make sure they’re all good to go before joining the war. A training mission, basically.

So, the official history has Eldridge around the Bahamas around this time. Or, did something happen between July 25^th and August 27^th that we don’t know about?

What do you think really happened?

If you want to watch the movie’s version of events, I’ve got a link in the show notes for where you can watch the 1984 movie The Philadelphia Experiment. We started our segment today about 11 and a half minutes into it.

And if you want to go even further down the rabbit hole, they made a sequel in 1994 and a made-for-TV remake of the 1984 movie came out in 2012. I’ll go ahead and throw all those links in the show notes in case you feel like a conspiracy this week.

August 14th, 1040. Scotland.

For our next movie, we’ll join about 33 minutes into the 2015 movie adaptation of the Shakespeare play Macbeth. It’s a dimly lit room where we see Michael Fassbender’s version of Macbeth as he’s looking down and to the left. After a moment’s pause, he turns and sees someone at the door. They’re hard to see due to the dim candlelight in the room, but it seems to be a boy. His face is smeared in mud or grease of some sort, and he’s wearing all black, so he blends into the night behind him.

He’s holding something in his right hand, and that catches Macbeth’s attention. He asks if it’s a dagger. The boy doesn’t say anything, but as Macbeth approaches him, the camera cuts to a closeup of the boy’s hand as he stretches it out toward Macbeth, handing him the dagger. Interestingly, the dagger is facing Macbeth, so the boy’s hand is all bloody as he’s holding the blade.

Macbeth stares at the boy, calling him a vision. A dagger of the mind.

Slowly, the boy backs out of the open doorway into the night. Macbeth follows him, leaving the room and going outside.

Once outside, Macbeth continues to speak to the boy. The boy hasn’t said anything in return, but Macbeth still isn’t sure if he’s really seeing the boy or if he’s a vision. Closing his eyes, Macbeth tells himself there is no such thing.

And as he continues walking forward into the night, the boy is no longer there. Maybe he was a vision after all.

Macbeth walks across the darkness to the glow of candles coming from inside a nearby tent. As he gets closer, we can see there’s a large bed inside the tent with a man sleeping on it. Macbeth sneaks through the opening of the tent, kneeling by a body lying on the ground. The sound of a knife slicing as Macbeth makes sure they’re dead, whomever they are. Then, he moves forward into the tent.

As he continues forward, he says things like, “Whiles I threat, he lives. Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.”

Remember, this is Shakespeare.

Macbeth continues into the tent. He’s standing beside the bed now, looking down at the man sleeping. No one else is in the room. When the camera cuts to a closeup of the man in the bed, we can see his face a lot better now. It’s David Thewlis’ character, Duncan.

If the actor’s name doesn’t ring a bell, you might know him better as Lupin from the Harry Potter franchise.

His eyes are closed as he’s sleeping peacefully amid the flickering candlelight, completely unaware that Macbeth is standing over him. Then, his eyes open slowly, but he doesn’t move. He just looks up at Macbeth, who slowly puts his own hand over Duncan’s mouth. Then, we can see the silhouette of a long knife—the dagger from the boy. Positioning it over Duncan’s chest, Macbeth shoves down on the knife with one hand while his other hand muffles Duncan’s cries.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Macbeth

I almost feel bad saying this after our conspiracy theory-laden segment for The Philadelphia Experiment, but this scene from Macbeth also never happened.

While the movie is faithful to Shakespeare’s version of the story. In the play, Macbeth kills Duncan of Scotland by stabbing him while he’s sleeping, just like we see in the movie.

In the true story, though, King Duncan I was killed during battle.

But it was during a battle against the Macbeth, so at least Shakespeare got the idea of conflict between those two men right.

So, in the true story, Duncan was born somewhere around 1001 CE. Some sources even say he was born on August 15^th of that year, meaning this Thursday would’ve been his 1,023^rd birthday. Although I’ve also seen some sources saying he also died on the 15^th, and not the 14^th, which would mean there’s a chance he died on his 39^th birthday.

Duncan was the maternal grandson of Malcom II who, in turn, was King of Alba from 1005 to 1034. And it is true that back then, the Crown of Alba was passed back and forth between different lineages.

That concept was from generations before when the Scots and the Picts were united under a single king. At the time, they didn’t call it Scotland, but looking back on it through the lens of history that’s when many historians point to as the start of the Scotland we know of today.

Since most people didn’t make it to old age back then, the crown passed between different lineages to ensure someone strong enough to undertake the role would be in charge. Back and forth. That changed with Malcolm II, though, who tried to kill anyone else who might have a claim to the throne. As you can probably guess, the violent power grab was met with more violence.

But, even Malcolm II couldn’t escape old age. That brings us to Duncan, who ascended to the throne after Malcolm II died, on November 25^th, 1034, while he was in his 30s…Duncan was in his 30s, that is.

And that also brings us to Macbeth who, like Duncan, was also Malcolm II’s grandson. Macbeth challenged Duncan’s claim to the throne, so that is how the two cousins ended up at odds. Actually, there was a third cousin, too, Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, who teamed up with Macbeth against Duncan.

And so it was that the three cousins met on the field of battle near Elgin on August 15^th, 1040, and that’s where Duncan was killed. We don’t know if he was killed by Macbeth’s hand, or someone else’s, but that’s probably not too surprising from an event over a thousand years ago.

If you want to watch the movie’s version of events, in the show notes you’ll find a link to the 2015 adaptation of Macbeth, as well as some other resources to kickstart your own deep dive into the true story.

August 15th, 1945. Long Island, New York.

For our next segment, we’re going to the HBO miniseries The Pacific.

At the very beginning of the final episode, the scene fades up from black to reveal we’re inside a hospital. A line of beds are filled with men. We can hear a woman speaking, saying nothing of huge importance to the storyline but then the camera cuts closer to where we can see that she’s reading from a book, saying things like:

“…Then bethought them of the blessed boon of sleep; but Achilles still wept for thinking of his dear comrade…”

The series doesn’t mention this, but that’s Homer’s Iliad.

The camera pans over to a couple of the guys in the hospital beds. The man further away from the camera is heavily bandaged. His fingers, wrist, arm, head, eye, all have bandages…there’s also a metal contraption of some sort around his chest, neck, and although the camera angle makes it hard to see everything it looks like there might be something attached to his legs, too.

In the foreground of the camera’s shot is a man without any visible bandages. Neither of the men are paying attention to the woman reading to them, but the man in the foreground is reading the newspaper. It looks like he’s reading the comic strips.

Oh, there we go, she just noticed they’re not paying attention to her. She puts down the book and says, “Hey, you’re not listening to me.”

Putting a cigarette to his mouth as he puts down the paper, the man who was reading the comics says they were listening. He puts a cigarette in the other guy’s mouth—I’m guessing he can’t move his arms enough to smoke on his own. Each of the men take a drag on their cigarettes, the smoke swirling as they blow out.

He recites the last few things she read, proving he was paying attention. Then, he looks back at the newspaper and suggests he read a comic to the other guy all bandaged up.

In the background, we can hear a door open.

The camera cuts to a man walking into the room. He looks around. Then, addressing no one in particular, he blurts out the news. The Japanese have surrendered.

Everyone looks at him, including the two men who were preoccupied by the comics and being read to.

The man standing there smiles, laughs a bit. Then he continues, “The war’s over!” He says.

Murmurs start among everyone in the room. A woman’s voice in the back confirms the news as we can see a nurse excitedly saying it’s definite. It’s on the radio! The war is over!

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series The Pacific

Let’s start fact-checking how The Pacific shows that event now. And just to be clear, the event I’m talking about from this week in history is when Japan surrendered on August 15^th, 1945, bringing World War II to an end. Or, as it’s sometimes called, V-J Day. Victory over Japan Day.

It’s also known as V-P Day or Victory in the Pacific Day, since it’s the Pacific Theater of the war as opposed to the European Theater. When that came to an end with the fall of Nazi Germany, May 8^th, 1945, became known as V-E Day, Victory in Europe. We talked about back in episode #318 for the BOATS This Week episode covering May 8^th, 1945. So, I thought it’d be fitting to use how another HBO miniseries covers V-J Day.

Although, it’s worth pointing out that is not technically when Japan surrendered.

V-J Day or V-P Day, whichever you prefer, is commonly known as August 15^th, 1945. But that wasn’t the official surrender. That commemorates the announcement of surrender. Or, due to time zone differences, August 14^th in the United States is when it was broadcast. So, the series is correct to suggest that’d be when people found out about it, and even today some people refer to both August 14^th and the 15^th as V-J Day. However, the formal surrender happened a couple weeks later, on September 2^nd. That’s also why sometimes people refer to September 2^nd as V-J Day.

So, you’ll get some historical sticklers out there who point out its September 2^nd, and technically they’re not wrong, but in The Pacific they mention August 15^th, which is why we’re including it this week. Of course, just like Band of Brothers doesn’t show the actual surrender itself, neither does The Pacific. It’s showing what happened on the day for the characters the series is about.

So, to give a little more historical context that we don’t see in the series, on July 26^th, 1945, the Allies sent the Japanese government what’s known as the Potsdam Declaration. That’s named after Potsdam, Germany, the name of the city where a conference between the three leading Allies took place to draw up a plan for peace.

Maybe you’ve seen the photograph of Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, and Joseph Stalin sitting together…that happened at the Potsdam Conference. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll add a link to it in the show notes for this episode.

The Declaration, though, essentially defined the terms of surrender for the Japanese. It was quite literally an unconditional surrender, as the end of the document said:

“We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

The Japanese government’s reply was “mokusatsu.” Or, basically, to ignore it. The exact meaning of that word has been debated ever since. The United States government took it as being ignored, though.

The decision to drop the atomic bombs was made and, on August 6^th, Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. On August 8^th, the Soviet Union officially declared war on Japan and launched an offensive into Japanese-occupied Manchuria with over a million Soviet soldiers. Then, on August 9^th, Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki.

So, to summarize, what happened on August 15^th, was the Japanese government announced they would be accepting the Potsdam Declaration.

With the announcement, bombers on Tinian Island getting ready for a mission over Japan were called off. Or, at least, put on hold to make sure the Japanese announcement was something they were going to follow through with.

They did.

The formal document of surrender was signed on the deck of USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2^nd, 1945.

If you want to watch this week in history as it’s shown in HBO’s The Pacific, the text on screen saying it’s August 15^th, 1945, is how the 10^th and final episode of the series begins. And we covered the entire ten-part HBO miniseries in our own three-part miniseries so you can learn the true story in all its historical detail over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/thepacific

Historical birthdays from the movies

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On August 13th, 1860, Phoebe Ann Moses was born just east of North Star, Ohio. She was better known by her stage name, Annie Oakley, who earned fame as a sharpshooter in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. She’s been portrayed in a number of movies, including 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun, which is a movie based on the extremely popular musical of the same name by Irving Berlin.

On August 14th, 1851, John Henry Holliday was born in Griffin, Georgia. Most people know him by his nickname, Doc. Doc Holliday’s involvement in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona has seen him portrayed in a number of movies and TV shows. Probably one of the more popular of those is the 1993 film simply called Tombstone where Doc Holliday is played by Val Kilmer. We’ve covered that movie three times over the years, actually. One is a solo episode with just me, one is with the excellent podcaster Chris Wimmer from Legends of the Old West, and the other is with Tom Clavin who wrote the book “Tombstone” and all of them are linked in the show notes.

On August 15th, 1769, Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. I’m sure you already know who Napoleon was—the French military leader and emperor who conquered a lot of Europe. Have you seen the Ridley Scott biographical movie from last year? There’s so much to talk about with Napoleon, we’ve covered that movie twice with two different historians covering different elements of the movie, so you’ll find those links in the show notes as well.

On August 16th, 1888, Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Wales. Although he usually went by his initials, T.E. Lawrence. Or, as he’s more commonly known today, Lawrence of Arabia. He was a British officer who gained fame for his involvement in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He was played by Peter O’Toole in the 1962 classic film that’s named after him: Lawrence of Arabia.

‘Based on a True Story’ movie that released this week

Time now for our segment about ‘based on a true story’ movies released this week in history.

Actually, I have two of them for you this week, and they both released this week back in 1979.

Thursday is the 45^th anniversary of the widescale release in the United States of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic, Apocalypse Now.

The movie stars Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin Willard, and Robert Duvall as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore.

None of those were real people, which tells you a bit about the historical accuracy of the movie, but then again, the movie doesn’t really try to claim they are. It’s one of those movies that uses a real historical event and maybe inspired by some real people, but for the most part uses a fake storyline to tell the tale.

For example, like Saving Private Ryan where Private Ryan was not a real person—check out BOATS episode #159.

For Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando’s character of Colonel Kurtz is entirely fictional, although he’s not made up for the movie. He’s made up for the book the movie is based on. That would be Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Or, perhaps, “inspired by” is a better phrase, because Conrad’s book was published in 1899, and it has the character of Colonel Kurtz in that book. He was an ivory dealer in the book, but the mere fact that the book was published in 1899 means obviously the Vietnam War hadn’t happened yet. With that said, though, that doesn’t mean the filmmakers didn’t use contemporary soldiers as inspiration for the Vietnam era version of Kurtz.

The name that popped up most in my research was a CIA paramilitary operations officer named Anthony Poshepny, better known as Tony Poe.

As for Martin Sheen’s character in the movie, Captain Willard, he was most likely based on another character from Heart of Darkness named Charles Marlow. And Marlow was completely made up for the book, although some have suggested perhaps his name came from an Elizabethan playwright named Christopher Marlowe, with an “e” at the end.

Of the main characters in the movie, that leaves Robert Duvall’s character, Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, and I’m guessing by now you get the idea for how this goes. Just like Colonel Kurtz, Lt. Col. Kilgore was based on someone real, though. In this case, it’s John Stockton. No, not the NBA Hall of Fame, all-time assists and steals leader basketball player. Colonel John B. Stockton was in command of the 1^st squadron, 9^th Cavalry in the 1960s during the Vietnam War; and Robert Duvall used him as inspiration for his portrayal of Kilgore.

I’ll include a photo of Colonel Stockton in the show notes in case you want to see what he looks like.

And while you’re there, you’ll find a link to where Apocalypse Now is streaming if you want to watch it this week.

So, that’s one of the two movies this week. If you’re not feeling a war movie, just two days after Apocalypse Now hit theaters in 1979, Monty Python’s Life of Brian was released. That’d be on August 17^th, 1979, which makes Saturday the 45^th anniversary of that movie’s release.

I’m sure you already know what Life of Brian is…it tells the story of, well, Brian.

He’s just a normal guy. There’s really nothing special about him other than the fact that he was born just next door to Jesus, so everyone thinks he’s the Messiah. Then he joins a revolutionary group called the People’s Front of Judea to try and overthrow Roman rule, all the while masterfully tying together the story of historical Jesus into the tale—but in a comedic way because it’s Brian.

Tell you what, I could try to unravel the history and the religion from the movie and the comedy, but there’s someone much more knowledgeable than I am who can help with this because episode #205, I had a chat Dr. Adele Reinhartz about Life of Brian. Here’s a clip of my chat with her about what she thinks about how well the movie sets up the Brian character:

Dan LeFebvre  01:43

The movie opens with a spoof on the birth of baby Jesus, three wise men show up at two o’clock in the morning to worship the baby. They explain to Mandy, the baby’s mother, that they were led there by a star. She’s about to shoo them away when one of the wise men says we must see him. We have presence, gold, frankincense, myrrh, and Mandy’s replies like, oh, well, why didn’t you say so? He’s right over here. And then we find out the baby’s name is Brian. But what did you think of that opening sequence? In the movie? Looking at it from a historical perspective?

Adele Reinhartz  02:16

Well, first of all, it’s 100%. Hilarious. I agree. And it shows us the character of Mandy right away. And then of course, at the end of this season, they realize they see another another major, who lit up, and they realize they’ve been at the wrong place, and they take their gifts back. So that’s kind of funny. From a historical point of view, it’s it’s very difficult to assess this is based on the account in the Gospel of Matthew in the infancy narrative about the Magi coming to visit. And we don’t know the historicity of that, but the scene itself and in the movie, is really a take off on how that scene is presented in Christmas cards, in Christmas pageants and in other Jesus movies. So you’ve got the star making its way slowly across the sky. And then, you know, this atmosphere of reverence with the sacred music, and then you’ve got Mandy. So it really sets up that record the still is going to be about or at the film is going to do, which is essentially take some of the building blocks both of the Gospels, but also of Jesus movies, and Jesus and popular culture, and make fun of them.

Dan LeFebvre  03:40

Now, one of the overarching themes throughout the movie, of course, is the idea that Brian gets misidentified as Jesus was that a common thing misidentification back then?

Adele Reinhartz  03:50

I think that that’s really a part of the film’s comic premise. And it allows them to be free and how they portray Brian. The film is interesting the film was, they had a hard time getting it released commercially. And in the end, I think it was triggered through the intervention of George Harrison, it finally did get released. And the reason was that people were worried that it was blasphemous or that it portray Jesus in a negative light. If you actually see the film Jesus is in the brief moments when Jesus is there on the screen is completely reverential. The fun is with Brian, and I think that’s really why they did it not so much because misunder mis identification was a common theme. But because it allowed them a certain freedom to portray Brian without the constraints that filmmakers face when they try to portray Jesus.

You’ll find a link to my full chat with Adele about Life of Brian in the show notes, as well as where you can find it on streaming…in case you want to give it a watch before listening to the true story.

July 16th, 1969. Cape Kennedy, now Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

Today’s event is about an hour and 20 minutes into the movie.

The scene starts on a sunny day with a bright blue sky dotted with a few fluffy clouds. In the foreground, a series of national flags wave proudly in the breeze. You can easily pick out the iconic stars and stripes of the United States, the Union Jack of the United Kingdom, and the blue and white stripes of Greece, among many others.

Behind the flags, a diverse crowd has gathered, dressed in a mix of formal and casual summer attire. They’re positioned on bleachers, with some standing and others sitting, all facing an impressive structure in the distance. This towering construction, surrounded by a vast expanse of water and lush green landscapes makes for a spectacular view.

If we hit play on the movie now, we can hear some sort of an announcement being broadcast over the PA system. The camera cuts to three astronauts. That tells us what that impressive structure was in the distance; a rocket, and these are the astronauts inside.

From the next scene, the crowd stands behind a row of TV cameras all on the green grass. Remember this is 1969, so imagine what a row of huge, clunky broadcast cameras on tripods would look like and that’s it. Scattered around, a few of the camera people decided to get a better angle by climbing on top of their TV vans.

All the people and cameras are facing the right side of the movie’s frame so they can’t see behind them, against the blue sky amidst the clouds are two little white dots that are moving irregularly across the sky.

And then we get to see what the two little white dots are as the camera shifts to a closeup view of them landing. They’re basically what amounts to huge jetpacks. One is Josh Brolin’s version of Agent K, the other is Will Smith’s version of Agent J.

Joining them on the ground is another guy, Michael Stuhlbarg’s character in the movie, Griffin. The three men, which are all fictional characters of course, are standing in the middle of the road. As viewers, the camera is in the middle of the road, too, looking at what looks like a military installation. Signs on either side of the road say “DELTA GATE: RESTRICTED AREA” along with the NASA logo. Beyond the signs are a couple military jeeps, which are driving toward the camera to greet the three newcomers.

This is all made up for the movie, of course, so we can move along a little faster to get back to this week’s historical event.

But, in case you don’t remember what happens in the movie, Griffin, K, and J are arrested as trespassers by the MPs that come to greet them on the road. The three are taken to the man in charge, the Colonel, his actual identity gets revealed later in the movie it’s a big spoiler. They convince the Colonel of their mission, so he agrees to let them try and continue saving the future. The way they’re doing that according to the movie is to attach a shield to the nose of Apollo 11 rocket.

That brings us back to the movie at about an hour and 25 minutes, and we’re inside now. Watching an old TV. On the TV, in black and white because this is a TV from 1969 after all, is the Apollo 11 rocket on the launchpad. We can see a family of six all gathered around the TV watching it intently.

And before long, we’re whisked to the launchpad, too, as the movie’s camera swirls around the large rocket attached to red scaffolding. That’s where, in the movie, the commanding officer helps J and K get to the top to achieve their goal.

Amid those fictional scenes, we also see scenes of more people watching the launch on TV. Of course, they don’t see what the astronauts do when Josh Brolin’s version of Agent K hops from the scaffolding to the top of the rocket to attach the Arch Net shield that will save the world.

Thankfully, he manages to get off the rocket and leave the area just as Apollo 11 blasts off. The camera cuts back to the original shot we started our segment with crowds of people watching the rocket in the distance with flags of the nations, waving in the wind.

Now, we can see the rocket in the distance throwing huge plumes of fire and smoke into the air. K, J, and the Colonel watch from the ground as the rocket makes its way into the sky. Then, in space, we can see the blue marble-shaped Earth in the background with the rocket in the foreground. It looks like some pieces break off of it as it passes the camera, which stays focused on the Arch Net deploying as the rocket continues past the camera and into the space beyond.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Men in Black 3

Let’s start our fact-check on the true story by getting some of the obviously fictional things out of the way.

The Arch Net, time travel, the aliens, the concept of Men in Black—even if our inner conspiracy theorist can debate how realistic some of those things are, I think we can all agree that Men in Black 3’s interpretation of these things is completely fictional.

What really did happen, though, is the launch of Apollo 11.

Since the movie’s storyline is set around trying to avoid a fictional time traveling disaster, most of the real historical event isn’t really explained in the scene I described so if this could be a good movie to watch this week to catch the visuals of the Apollo 11 launch.

For example, remember when I mentioned the movie showing three astronauts inside the rocket? Well, even though it doesn’t say their names at that moment in the movie, if you look at the credits for the movie they did cast the astronauts correctly.

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin were the three astronauts aboard Apollo 11 on July 16^th, 1969. In the movie, they were played by Jared Johnston, Jonathan Drew, and Ken Arnold, respectively.

And if those names ring a bell, it’s probably because Apollo 11 was the mission that first landed humans on the moon. The movie doesn’t show that at all, of course, but that also happened this week in history on July 21^st when Neil Armstrong took his now famous, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

But, we’ll learn more about that next week.

With that said, the reason to mention it now is because the movie is correct to show such a massive audience around the world watching the event as it happened in real-time. A lot like what you’re doing right now with our own little Apollo 11 minisodes! Except for the whole real-time part, obviously, since it’s not 1969 and this isn’t a 195+ hour podcast haha, and in the true story the CBS coverage didn’t even run in real-time back in 1969.

The live television coverage started early this morning, July 16^th, at 6:00 AM Eastern and concluded when the Apollo 11 mission did eight days later on July 24^th. It’s nearly impossible to determine the exact number of viewers, but estimates are around the 600 million mark.

Of course, I have to throw out a huge historian’s caveat to this number.

Is that 300 million people watching the launch today, July 16^th, then another 300 million watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon a few days later? That’s just one of those little nitpicky things we’ll probably never know all the details, but it’s a historic moment of its own right, as they did what no one else had done on TV before.

I mean, not to take away from the history of Apollo 11…but the very first live trans-Atlantic broadcast happened via satellite in 1962, and it was just some pictures. Seven years later, they’re broadcasting live from the moon with roughly 16% of the world’s population watching.

But let’s go back to the launch itself, and another visual element the movie that it gets historically correct are the stands of people watching the launch with flags of the world’s nations against a bright, blue sky. In fact, there are photos of the real event, including one of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Spiro Agnew watching the launch. So, I’m guessing the filmmakers used those for reference.

The launch was planned for 9:32 AM Eastern time, making July 16^th what most refer to as the start of the Apollo 11 mission.

As a little side note, the mission ended when the astronauts returned on July 24^th—so we’ll circle back around next week to learn more about that side.

Here is NASA’s flight commentary from the Apollo 11 launch:

Note: Transcript automatically generated. Mistakes may happen.

00:01

T-Minus 15 seconds.

Guidance is internal

12

11

10

9

Ignition sequence start

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

All engine running

Liftoff

We have liftoff 32 minutes past the hour

Liftoff on Apollo 11.

Tower cleared.

00:30

Program Neil Armstrong reporting the roll and pitch program which puts Apollo 11 on a proper heading

00:46

Plus 30 seconds

00:50

for all complete and efficient programming

01:03

one Bravo is a aboard control mode

01:12

altitude two miles

01:20

you’re good at one minute downrange one mile altitude three four miles now velocity 2195 feet per second

01:51

we’re through the region of maximum dynamic pressure now

02:02

eight miles downrange 12 miles high velocity 4000 feet per second

02:09

standby for mode one Charlie Mark mode one Charlie

02:17

Cliff Charlesworth taking a staging status

02:20

here’s the new our goal for staging.

02:34

inboard engines

02:47

downrange 35 Miles 30 Miles high standing by for the outboard engine cut down now

03:02

and ignition

The last visual I wanted to point out from today’s movie is another one that’s pretty accurate: The rocket.

Just like the astronauts and the launch itself, the movie doesn’t focus on it, but visually we can see the filmmakers did a pretty good job replicating the Saturn V rocket that really did launch Apollo 11 into space. It’s a large white rocket with black panels and red “USA” writing at the bottom with the full “United States” stacked vertically along the rocket’s middle.

If you’re familiar with rocket launches, it’s probably not a surprise that the red scaffolding alongside the rocket was real, too. Well, I described it as scaffolding because it’s not really a building but a number of pipes and, well, it looks like scaffolding, haha!

And maybe that’s why a lot of people think it’s what holds the rocket up before it launches, but that’s not really true. It’s also not really scaffolding.

It’s called the Launch Umbilical Tower, or LUT, and at 380 feet tall, the LUT was designed with nine swing arms or gantries that allow people to service the 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket while it’s on the launch pad. That’s about 116 meters tall for the LUT and just under 111 meters for the Saturn V rocket height.

So while the movie’s storyline of having Agent K jump from one of the gantries to the command module to attach the Arch Net device isn’t very realistic—technically those gantries are swing arms for a reason—they’re both designed to allow people access to the rocket as well as being able to swing away for launch—which seems to be what it’s starting to do in the movie as K makes his jump.

July 16th, 1969. Cape Kennedy, now Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

Today’s event is about an hour and 20 minutes into the movie.

The scene starts on a sunny day with a bright blue sky dotted with a few fluffy clouds. In the foreground, a series of national flags wave proudly in the breeze. You can easily pick out the iconic stars and stripes of the United States, the Union Jack of the United Kingdom, and the blue and white stripes of Greece, among many others.

Behind the flags, a diverse crowd has gathered, dressed in a mix of formal and casual summer attire. They’re positioned on bleachers, with some standing and others sitting, all facing an impressive structure in the distance. This towering construction, surrounded by a vast expanse of water and lush green landscapes makes for a spectacular view.

If we hit play on the movie now, we can hear some sort of an announcement being broadcast over the PA system. The camera cuts to three astronauts. That tells us what that impressive structure was in the distance; a rocket, and these are the astronauts inside.

From the next scene, the crowd stands behind a row of TV cameras all on the green grass. Remember this is 1969, so imagine what a row of huge, clunky broadcast cameras on tripods would look like and that’s it. Scattered around, a few of the camera people decided to get a better angle by climbing on top of their TV vans.

All the people and cameras are facing the right side of the movie’s frame so they can’t see behind them, against the blue sky amidst the clouds are two little white dots that are moving irregularly across the sky.

And then we get to see what the two little white dots are as the camera shifts to a closeup view of them landing. They’re basically what amounts to huge jetpacks. One is Josh Brolin’s version of Agent K, the other is Will Smith’s version of Agent J.

Joining them on the ground is another guy, Michael Stuhlbarg’s character in the movie, Griffin. The three men, which are all fictional characters of course, are standing in the middle of the road. As viewers, the camera is in the middle of the road, too, looking at what looks like a military installation. Signs on either side of the road say “DELTA GATE: RESTRICTED AREA” along with the NASA logo. Beyond the signs are a couple military jeeps, which are driving toward the camera to greet the three newcomers.

This is all made up for the movie, of course, so we can move along a little faster to get back to this week’s historical event.

But, in case you don’t remember what happens in the movie, Griffin, K, and J are arrested as trespassers by the MPs that come to greet them on the road. The three are taken to the man in charge, the Colonel, his actual identity gets revealed later in the movie it’s a big spoiler. They convince the Colonel of their mission, so he agrees to let them try and continue saving the future. The way they’re doing that according to the movie is to attach a shield to the nose of Apollo 11 rocket.

That brings us back to the movie at about an hour and 25 minutes, and we’re inside now. Watching an old TV. On the TV, in black and white because this is a TV from 1969 after all, is the Apollo 11 rocket on the launchpad. We can see a family of six all gathered around the TV watching it intently.

And before long, we’re whisked to the launchpad, too, as the movie’s camera swirls around the large rocket attached to red scaffolding. That’s where, in the movie, the commanding officer helps J and K get to the top to achieve their goal.

Amid those fictional scenes, we also see scenes of more people watching the launch on TV. Of course, they don’t see what the astronauts do when Josh Brolin’s version of Agent K hops from the scaffolding to the top of the rocket to attach the Arch Net shield that will save the world.

Thankfully, he manages to get off the rocket and leave the area just as Apollo 11 blasts off. The camera cuts back to the original shot we started our segment with crowds of people watching the rocket in the distance with flags of the nations, waving in the wind.

Now, we can see the rocket in the distance throwing huge plumes of fire and smoke into the air. K, J, and the Colonel watch from the ground as the rocket makes its way into the sky. Then, in space, we can see the blue marble-shaped Earth in the background with the rocket in the foreground. It looks like some pieces break off of it as it passes the camera, which stays focused on the Arch Net deploying as the rocket continues past the camera and into the space beyond.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Men in Black 3

Let’s start our fact-check on the true story by getting some of the obviously fictional things out of the way.

The Arch Net, time travel, the aliens, the concept of Men in Black—even if our inner conspiracy theorist can debate how realistic some of those things are, I think we can all agree that Men in Black 3’s interpretation of these things is completely fictional.

What really did happen, though, is the launch of Apollo 11.

Since the movie’s storyline is set around trying to avoid a fictional time traveling disaster, most of the real historical event isn’t really explained in the scene I described so if this could be a good movie to watch this week to catch the visuals of the Apollo 11 launch.

For example, remember when I mentioned the movie showing three astronauts inside the rocket? Well, even though it doesn’t say their names at that moment in the movie, if you look at the credits for the movie they did cast the astronauts correctly.

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin were the three astronauts aboard Apollo 11 on July 16^th, 1969. In the movie, they were played by Jared Johnston, Jonathan Drew, and Ken Arnold, respectively.

And if those names ring a bell, it’s probably because Apollo 11 was the mission that first landed humans on the moon. The movie doesn’t show that at all, of course, but that also happened this week in history on July 21^st when Neil Armstrong took his now famous, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

But, we’ll learn more about that next week.

With that said, the reason to mention it now is because the movie is correct to show such a massive audience around the world watching the event as it happened in real-time. A lot like what you’re doing right now with our own little Apollo 11 minisodes! Except for the whole real-time part, obviously, since it’s not 1969 and this isn’t a 195+ hour podcast haha, and in the true story the CBS coverage didn’t even run in real-time back in 1969.

The live television coverage started early this morning, July 16^th, at 6:00 AM Eastern and concluded when the Apollo 11 mission did eight days later on July 24^th. It’s nearly impossible to determine the exact number of viewers, but estimates are around the 600 million mark.

Of course, I have to throw out a huge historian’s caveat to this number.

Is that 300 million people watching the launch today, July 16^th, then another 300 million watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon a few days later? That’s just one of those little nitpicky things we’ll probably never know all the details, but it’s a historic moment of its own right, as they did what no one else had done on TV before.

I mean, not to take away from the history of Apollo 11…but the very first live trans-Atlantic broadcast happened via satellite in 1962, and it was just some pictures. Seven years later, they’re broadcasting live from the moon with roughly 16% of the world’s population watching.

But let’s go back to the launch itself, and another visual element the movie that it gets historically correct are the stands of people watching the launch with flags of the world’s nations against a bright, blue sky. In fact, there are photos of the real event, including one of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and Vice President Spiro Agnew watching the launch. So, I’m guessing the filmmakers used those for reference.

The launch was planned for 9:32 AM Eastern time, making July 16^th what most refer to as the start of the Apollo 11 mission.

As a little side note, the mission ended when the astronauts returned on July 24^th—so we’ll circle back around next week to learn more about that side.

Here is NASA’s flight commentary from the Apollo 11 launch:

Note: Transcript automatically generated. Mistakes may happen.

00:01

T-Minus 15 seconds.

Guidance is internal

12

11

10

9

Ignition sequence start

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

All engine running

Liftoff

We have liftoff 32 minutes past the hour

Liftoff on Apollo 11.

Tower cleared.

00:30

Program Neil Armstrong reporting the roll and pitch program which puts Apollo 11 on a proper heading

00:46

Plus 30 seconds

00:50

for all complete and efficient programming

01:03

one Bravo is a aboard control mode

01:12

altitude two miles

01:20

you’re good at one minute downrange one mile altitude three four miles now velocity 2195 feet per second

01:51

we’re through the region of maximum dynamic pressure now

02:02

eight miles downrange 12 miles high velocity 4000 feet per second

02:09

standby for mode one Charlie Mark mode one Charlie

02:17

Cliff Charlesworth taking a staging status

02:20

here’s the new our goal for staging.

02:34

inboard engines

02:47

downrange 35 Miles 30 Miles high standing by for the outboard engine cut down now

03:02

and ignition

The last visual I wanted to point out from today’s movie is another one that’s pretty accurate: The rocket.

Just like the astronauts and the launch itself, the movie doesn’t focus on it, but visually we can see the filmmakers did a pretty good job replicating the Saturn V rocket that really did launch Apollo 11 into space. It’s a large white rocket with black panels and red “USA” writing at the bottom with the full “United States” stacked vertically along the rocket’s middle.

If you’re familiar with rocket launches, it’s probably not a surprise that the red scaffolding alongside the rocket was real, too. Well, I described it as scaffolding because it’s not really a building but a number of pipes and, well, it looks like scaffolding, haha!

And maybe that’s why a lot of people think it’s what holds the rocket up before it launches, but that’s not really true. It’s also not really scaffolding.

It’s called the Launch Umbilical Tower, or LUT, and at 380 feet tall, the LUT was designed with nine swing arms or gantries that allow people to service the 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket while it’s on the launch pad. That’s about 116 meters tall for the LUT and just under 111 meters for the Saturn V rocket height.

So while the movie’s storyline of having Agent K jump from one of the gantries to the command module to attach the Arch Net device isn’t very realistic—technically those gantries are swing arms for a reason—they’re both designed to allow people access to the rocket as well as being able to swing away for launch—which seems to be what it’s starting to do in the movie as K makes his jump.

July 15th, 1815. Rochefort, France.

Our first movie this week is 2023’s Napoleon, and the event from this week in history starts at about two hours and 22 minutes in.

Before we hit play, let me take a moment to describe today’s opening scene in the movie.

It’s daytime. Overcast. 

The scene in the movie is focused on a huge wooden ship, although there’s another in the background as well. Both ships are docked along a long, cobblestone area that’s taking up most of the camera’s frame in the foreground. Imagine two ships docked in the harbor of a city in the year 1815, and you’re about there…haha!

Right in the center of the frame, layered on top of the large ship is text from the movie that gives us the date and location…similar to what we just heard at the beginning of the segment, although the movie says we’re in Plymouth in July of 1815, instead of giving us the day of the 15^th. But, that means this isn’t actually France we’re seeing, and I’ll explain that once we start fact-checking this, because the movie give us something else I haven’t mentioned yet, and that’s the name of the ship: HMS Bellerophon.

With a British flag on her stern, Bellerophon is moored in the bay, with sails all put away leaving the stereotypical lines of ropes connected to the three masts on Bellerophon. On the cobblestone in front of the large ship are a handful of British soldiers in red uniforms scattered along the cobblestone area.

As we hit play on the movie, the only movement to be seen is on the left side of the frame when we see beautiful white horses can be seen pulling a white carriage up to a ramp on the ship. Behind the carriage are two more soldiers on brown horses, along with what looks like three men on the carriage and four more sailors looking on from in front of the white horses.

After the establishing shot, the movie cuts to inside the ship, now, as we see a man walking into the ship. He’s taller, so he has to duck to get through the doorway without hitting his head. He’s holding his military hat in his right arm, and he’s wearing a blue cloak with a British uniform underneath.

He enters the ship from the right side of the movie’s frame, greeted immediately by a sailor in the center who is saluting at attention. Then, on the left side, we can see a row of sailors at attention.

Although we can’t see him yet, we can hear Joaquin Phoenix’s version of Napoleon Bonaparte speaking in the background. After a moment, the camera cuts to where Napoleon is at—and he’s having breakfast aboard the ship. As he’s eating, he’s continuing to talk and explain what sounds like some sort of military strategy. Another brief moment, and the movie shows us who he’s talking to. Lined up watching Napoleon eat are nine young British sailors…some of them are very young, and quite honestly, I’d be surprised if they’re teenagers yet. They’re eagerly soaking up the knowledge that Napoleon is sharing with them.

Just then, we can hear the man who just boarded the ship enter the room. As he does, we can see a little easier now that this is Rupert Everett’s character, the Duke of Wellington.

As Wellington enters, the young sailors clear the room to allow him to talk to Napoleon without anyone else there. Now, it’s just the two men: In his French uniform, Napoleon sitting at the small, wooden table with his breakfast on it. Standing in his British uniform is Wellington, who pulls up a chair and sits down across from Napoleon.

For a bit of a visual aid, the room is lit from the wall of windows across the stern of the ship that, since we’re inside, we can see on the right side of the camera frame. The wooden walls of the ship’s interior are a light, teal color, with an off-white ceiling and black and white checkered tiles on the floor.

As Wellington sits, he helps himself to what looks like some tea from the table. The British government won’t let Napoleon stay in England, Wellington tells him. Instead, Wellington informs Napoleon that he’ll be going into exile on an island called Saint Helena. He’ll be under the watchful eye of Governor Hudson Lowe and his family.

Napoleon gets a glass of water as Wellington continues to give him more details about Helena—it’s an island, but there’s not much on it. It’s a thousand miles from the mainland of Africa, so it’s out of the way. You’ll have time to reflect, Wellington continues.

Joaquin Phoenix’s version of Napoleon just looks ahead with a blank stare as he processes the news.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Napoleon

Right away, I’ll be the first to admit that the scene I just described did not happen this week in history—because that scene didn’t happen at all…which is also why our opening date in the segment didn’t have to be entirely on point, but we’re talking about it anyway because that fictional scene I just described was very loosely based on something that did happen this week in history.

We just have to unravel some of the facts from fiction…which is pretty much the case for the entire 2023 Napoleon movie if you’ve listened to the deep dives we’ve done into that film.

But for this week’s event, let’s start with the most glaringly painful issue with that scene: The Duke of Wellington was not on HMS Bellerophon on July 15^th, 1815.

And if you think about it, the Duke of Wellington was in the British Army, not the Navy. And so, it’s probably not too much of a surprise that the real person who was on HMS Bellerophon with Napoleon that day was the captain of Bellerophon, a man named Frederick Lewis Maitland.

That tells why the scene is fictional, since it was someone else completely who was really there—Maitland instead of Wellington. But, then again, the real discussion wasn’t about Saint Helena, either.

And that’s the other major thing I wanted to bring up as being inaccurate with the movie’s scene is the topic of the discussion. It wasn’t about Napoleon being exiled to Saint Helena. He wasn’t informed of the exile until August, though, so not this week in history.

So, what really happened?

The true story also explains why I started the segment in Rochefort, France, while in the movie the text places Wellington and Napoleon on the ship in Plymouth—or Plymouth, England.

The reason for that is something the movie never talks about, they started in France but ended up in England.

So, let’s back up a few days to last week in history, July 10^th, 1815, because that’s when Napoleon’s entourage first arrived at Bellerophon. That’s what we see when the movie shows the carriage pulling up to the ship…although it wasn’t a carriage in the true story, it was another ship.

As the story goes, the British didn’t know about Napoleon’s plans to surrender. He was defeated at Waterloo on June 18^th, so a little under a month earlier. He’d been forced to abdicate the throne, though, so he wasn’t welcome back in France. So, that brings us to July 10^th, when a French ship with a flag of truce approached HMS Bellerophon while she was in the port of Rochefort.

That’s where Captain Maitland welcomed Napoleon aboard Bellerophon. If you want to learn more about that, Maitland actually wrote a book about it afterward called The Surrender of Napoleon, and since it’s hundreds of years old you can find it in the public domain. I’ll link to it in the show notes if you want to read it.

Initially, though, it wasn’t even Napoleon himself who approached Maitland. The first people aboard Bellerophon was a small delegation of two men sent with the announcement of Napoleon’s intention to surrender. One of those was the Comte de Las Cases, or Count of Cases, who wrote a book about the encounter later. That was a common thing, people writing books about their interaction with Napoleon, so of course it happened around the surrender, too.

Over the next few days, negotiations between the French and British continued until, on July 14^th, the Count of Cases came over to Bellerophon with General L’Allarand along with a letter from Napoleon himself indicating his desire to discuss surrender terms. That was in the morning, at about 7 o’clock, which is important to the story, because the Count of Cases returned to Bellerophon at about 12 hours later, at 7 o’clock in the evening with another letter—that one was from another French General, Count Bertrand, and told Maitland that Napoleon was prepared to surrender.

The logbook for HMS Bellerophon offers us the documentation of what happened the next day, July 15^th.

“At 7 a.m. the French frigate L’Epervier, having a flag of truce, anchored near us. At 11 a.m. the Emperor Napoleon came on board to claim the protection of the British flag.”

Of course, that’s the short entry you’d expect from a ship’s log, and not something from a movie—we don’t get the details from dialogue between two people like in the movie. But, as I mentioned before, it seems like everywhere Napoleon went, people wrote about their meeting with him, so as the story goes, Napoleon asked for transportation to North America. He was interested in living out the rest of his life in the United States. Maitland refused, in a move that many suggest might’ve been due to orders from his superiors.

The day after Napoleon surrendered, Maitland sailed Bellerophon with Napoleon on board from Rochefort, France, to Torbay, England. That was on July 16^th.

And that’s where he stayed, basically, until the British government could figure out what to do with him. But, news of Napoleon’s capture spread, so later in July the English moved Bellerophon to Plymouth to avoid the public eye.

The movie is correct to mention the name of Saint Helena. That’s a 47-square-mile-island—one of the most remote in the world, way out in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. Oh, and 47 square miles converts to about 122 square kilometers.

To give you an idea of how remote, Saint Helena actually just started getting some tourism in 2017 thanks to a new installation: An airport.

Well, technically, the airport construction finished in 2015 and it opened in June of 2016, but the first commercial flights began on October 14^th, 2017.

That’s right, the first flights to and from Saint Helena were just a few years ago…and this is an island that was discovered by the Portuguese in 1502. It only took 515 years later for commercial flights.

As crazy as that sounds, not having an airport for so long makes sense when you know that Saint Helena is over 1,200 miles away from the closest land mass. That’s about 2,000 kilometers, so for a long time the only way you could get there was by ship. Which, of course, is how Napoleon got there, and being that remote is exactly why Saint Helena was chosen for him. After all, the British didn’t want to risk the chance of his escape—remember, Napoleon had escaped exile once before on Elba.

We learned earlier that Napoleon didn’t learn about Saint Helena aboard Bellerophon in July, that really happened in August, which is also when he transferred him from Bellerophon to another ship HMS Northumberland.

Then, along with a smaller escort ship called HMS Myrmidon, the British took their prisoner to Saint Helena. They left Plymouth on August 8^th and arrived in Saint Helena on October 14^th.

That’s all part of a story outside this week in history, though, so if you want to continue this part of the story, first go check out the 2023 Napoleon movie if you haven’t seen it yet. The scene from this week in history starts at about two hours and 22 minutes into the movie.

Or if you don’t mind the spoilers, you can jump right into the true story because I’ve talked to two different historians about the Napoleon movie.

I’d recommend checking out my chat with Alexander Mikaberidze first, because my chat with him was more focused on straight up separating fact from fiction…then for my chat with Louis Sarkozy, I had already talked with Alexander, so I was able to go deeper into different topics.

…and you can find both episodes with Alexander and Louis in one place over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/napoleon

July 16th, 1969. Florida.

Our next movie is that classic film you think of first when you think of ‘based on a true story’ movies: Men in Black 3!

Haha! Okay, so, I kid—well, about the movie being the first one you think of as being a ‘based on a true story’ movie, but I’m not kidding about the fact that Men in Black 3 actually shows us something from history, and we’re actually going to wait on watching that movie together until tomorrow.

This’ll be something new for Based on a True Story, so let me explain.

Apollo 11 hit Range Zero on the countdown timer on July 16^th, 1969, at 13:32:00 GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time.

That means if you’re listening to this episode on the day it’s released: Tomorrow is the 55^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.

Actually, I know I just used GMT, but they took off from Florida in the United States, so just for consistency and also because sometimes my brain has a hard time calculating my local time zone from GMT, I’ll use Eastern Time throughout this story—local time for the launch, so that’s 9:32 AM Eastern Time, 6:32 AM Pacific—and I’ve got a link in the show notes to help you convert to your local time if you want. I’ll also include a link to the show notes for a great e-Book from NASA that has all the time, too, if it’s easier for you.

What that means, though, is the countdown timer was already started on this day, July 15^th, in preparation for the launch tomorrow.

NASA started that yesterday, July 14^th at 5:00 PM Eastern/3 Pacific.

Well, yesterday in 1969, not 2024—you know what I mean, haha!

On July 15^th, they did a planned hold of the GET, or Ground Elapsed Time that NASA used to track the mission, at 12:00 PM Eastern. They planned for an 11-hour hold, and as expected, the countdown resumed 11-hours later at T-9 hours.

As a side note, you know how you hear T minus 9, 8, 7, so on for the countdown? When that hits zero, that means the GET is at Range Zero, or exactly 00:00:00, then from there the timer counts every second of the Apollo mission to keep track of what happened when.

So, let’s pretend we’re in Florida 55-years ago as the excitement around the Apollo 11 mission’s launch is taking hold. Right now, we’re in the midst of the countdown hold. The CBS broadcast that would end up showcasing Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon hasn’t quite started yet; it’s scheduled for 6:00 AM Eastern in the morning for a planned 9:32 AM Eastern launch.

Will the Apollo 11 mission launch on time?

Or will it be delayed by the evil alien named Boris the Animal and his plan to prevent the ArcNet from being deployed, killing anyone who tries!?

Okay, I’m sure you already know the answer to that.

But, I hope you’ll join me tomorrow anyway in a little minisode just to cover the true story of the Apollo 11 launch as it was shown in the movie Men in Black 3.

That episode will publish at exactly 55 years after the Range Zero GET countdown hit 00:00:00.

Or, in other words, since Boris the Animal’s plans are not based in reality and Apollo 11 did launch on the scheduled time: Wednesday, July 16^th, 2024, at 9:32 AM Eastern, 6:32 Pacific.

What goes up must come down, at least it’s supposed to when it comes to Space, and we know from history the GET’s final count for the Apollo 11 mission was 195 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds.

Doing a little math on that: 195 hours into 24 hours per day is eight days with three hours leftover, so then the 18 minutes and 35 seconds. So, that means Apollo 11’s mission comes to a close eight days later, so next Wednesday, on July 24^th, we’ll complete this little minisode miniseries by how 2018’s First Man shows the Apollo 11 mission ending at 12:50 PM Eastern that day.

And we’ve got a couple other episodes between now and then, so maybe we’ll check-in from time to time, as well.

Okay, so that’s what we’re doing around Apollo 11’s launch starting tomorrow! But, that’s just one event from this week in history! Let’s queue up our next movie…it’ll be the animated movie Anastasia, so if you want to watch it along as I describe, queue up about four minutes into the movie, and we’ll hit play after the break!

July 17th, 1918. Yekaterinburg, Siberia.

Our next movie to watch this week is the animated cartoon from 1997 called Anastasia. About four minutes in, the movie places us in a dimly lit room with an eerie red glow. The architecture is reminiscent of an ancient castle or a wizard’s lair, with towering stone pillars intricately carved with arcane symbols and patterns.

At the heart of the scene stands a mesmerizing, fiery pillar of swirling red energy, that’s where the eerie red glow comes from in the room. This pillar seems to be the focal point of the chamber, radiating a sense of powerful, magical energy. The surrounding walls are lined with bookshelves, filled with ancient tomes and scrolls, hinting at a repository of forgotten knowledge and secrets.

To the left, a large globe sits atop a cluttered desk, alongside scattered books and parchment, suggesting ongoing studies or experiments. The right side of the image reveals a grand staircase leading to a lofted area, adding to the room’s sense of depth and mystery.

A lone figure, draped in a flowing red cloak, stands near the fiery pillar, their face obscured by shadows.

We hear some voiceover explaining what’s going on as more magical elements are swirling around angrily in the shot…almost like a tornado.

The voiceover says that Rasputin was consumed by his hatred of Nicholas and his family and sold his soul for the power to destroy them. Ah, that’s who the cloaked figure is near the pillar performing some sort of ritual. He’s getting sucked into the tornado, leaving only his skeletal bones behind. The cartoon skeleton is outlined in a glowing blue that contrasts against the red lighting.

Just then, a glass vial wrapped with what looks like a snake with a skull on top appears in the air. Inside the glass vial is some sort of a green magical element floating. The blue skeleton grabs it, and we can see it forming around the skeleton.

Then, we see the evil-looking Rasputin again, his face lit by the green magic. Under his breath, he mutters to the magical green element that it must, go and fulfill its dark purpose—to seal the fate of the czar and his family once and for all.

The green element oozes out of the glass vial as it leaves the room and to the streets outside. The voiceover says from that moment on, the spark of unhappiness across our country was fanned into a flame, and on the screen, we can see the little green magical elements doing something that seems to be spreading into people rioting, revolting, and tearing down statues.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Anastasia

What the movie is setting up here is how Rasputin betrays and kills Czar Nicholas and his family, allowing only Anastasia to survive.

That is not at all historically accurate to what really happened. What is true is that the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, was killed along with his family in Yekaterinburg on July 17th, 1918.

Since the movie’s version of this event is highly fictional, let’s get a quick summary of what really happened.

To understand this, we have to realize that in mid-1918, the Great War was still raging. What we now call World War I. Of course, we know now that it ended in November of 1918, but in July of 1918, they didn’t know that for sure. What they did know was that things were going badly for Russia in the war.

They were one of the first countries to join the war in 1914, and almost right away the Russian armies were not doing well. They were being defeated so badly that Nicholas II decided to take personal control of them. His advisers didn’t like this idea, but he did it anyway, and for the next few years he spent most of his time away from the government running the military during the war.

That’s important to the story because of the other character we see in the movie: Rasputin. He was a real person, although he wasn’t necessarily the evil mastermind behind the demise of the Czar and his family.

That said, Rasputin was…well…there are a lot of questions around the real Rasputin. We do know he was a self-proclaimed holy man. He was a mystic. So, obviously, the cartoon movie takes those things to the extreme by making him some sort of a magician when in reality he was probably more of a religious figure—a prophet of sorts.

We do know he was a friend of Nicholas II and the rest of the imperial family, and he helped with the imperial family’s only son, Alexei, who was sick a lot due to hemophilia. So, Rasputin acted as a sort of religious healer for little Alexei which meant he was around quite a bit.

Meanwhile, when Nicholas II went away to lead the Russian army in World War I, as the months and years dragged on, Empress Alexandra relied more and more on Rasputin’s advice.

A lot of people in Russia didn’t like Rasputin and saw him as nothing more than a fake, a fraud, a charlatan. As his influence over the empire grew, so, too, did the unhappiness within the Russian public about how the Empress was allowing him to influence her decisions.

On top of that, Nicholas II was not doing a good job leading the Russian army in the war. They were suffering huge loss of life and the cost of the war weighed heavily on the economy. High inflation and lots of poverty became the norm in Russia.

So, the riots and unrest we see happening in the movie really did happen, but it wasn’t because of some magical power by Rasputin, but instead it was because the Russian people were fed up with the way the Czar was leading the country. The riots that broke out in February of 1917 were so bad that Nicholas II had no choice but to abdicate the throne—he did that on March 15th, 1917. That formally ended the monarchy in Russia that had been established back in 1721.

So, to back up with a little historical context: World War I is still going on. Russia is in the war. Meanwhile, back at home, Russians are without the monarchy that has led the country for hundreds of years. There was a provisional government in place, but that was overthrown by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party in the fall of 1917.

Meanwhile, Nicholas II and his family had already left the palace after Nicholas II abdicated, and they were placed under house arrest.

At this point, essentially Russia was entangled in a civil war on top of World War I still going on, too. For the purposes of our story today, though, Lenin, had to figure out what to do with the former monarch and his family. Well…we wouldn’t be talking about it if we didn’t already know what they decided to do.

What’s tricky about this part of the story, though, is that there has been a lot of conflicting reports and sources about exactly what happened. As they say, history is written by the winners, and in this case, much of the history that survived is written by those who made sure the Romanov family did not survive.

The gist of the story, though, is that out of fear of approaching anti-Bolshevik forces nearing where the Czar and his family were being held, Nicholas II and his family were woken up in the early morning hours of July 17th, 1918 and led to the basement of a house. It was for their own safety against the oncoming forces. At least, that’s how the story goes for what they were told. Instead, though, the entire family was executed in the basement.

Or was it? Did their youngest daughter, Anastasia, survive? Some say she did.

Because of what I just mentioned, this version of history being written by the winners, the true story of exactly what happened in that basement has been studied, debated, and researched by historians ever since.

If you want to watch the story, this week is a great one to watch the 1997 animated cartoon simply called Anastasia. The sequence we started this segment with is right at the beginning, at about four minutes into the movie. And if you want to learn more about the true story, we dug deeper into what really happened back in episode #94 of Based on a True Story, where we learned what is most likely the true story of what really happened to Anastasia.

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history.

On July 18th, 1895, George Kelly Barnes was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Or, maybe not. To be honest, we don’t know exactly when he was born. Some sources say he was born on July 17, some say July 18, some say it was 1895, some say it was 1897, some say it was 1900. But, regardless, George Kelly Barnes was born sometime this week in history. He was perhaps best known by his nickname, “Machine Gun” Kelly. He was a prohibition-era gangster who robbed banks and became famous after kidnapping an Oklahoma oil man for ransom.

He was played by Charles Bronson in the 1958 biopic about his crimes simply called Machine-Gun Kelly.

Oh, and if you’re thinking of the musician who goes by the name Machine Gun Kelly, his real name is Colson Baker and according to my research it seems Baker got the nickname because his rapping style was shooting off fast, like a machine gun. So, perhaps the nickname for the musician is inspired by the gangster, but that’s where the relation ends.

On July 19th, 1860, Lizzie Andrew Borden was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. She’s best known for the axe murders of her father and stepmother, although she was officially acquitted of the crimes…Her story was told in the 2018 movie simply called Lizzie where Lizzie is played by Chloë Sevigny.

On July 20th, 356 BCE, Alexander III was born in Pella, Macedonia. Or, maybe it was the 21^st. Or maybe it wasn’t this week in history at all, and it was the 23^rd…as you might imagine, tracking birthdays back in 356 BCE wasn’t an exact science, but nevertheless, this was probably the birth week of the great the king of Macedonia known as Alexander the Great. He conquered much of the known world at the time, a story that was told in the 2004 film simply named Alexander with Colin Farrell playing the lead role. We covered that movie back in episode #157 of Based on a True Story.

Oh, and as a personal note, my mom’s birthday is also this week on July 19th, and I know she listens to the podcast so happy birthday, mom! I love you!

Onto our segment about ‘based on a true story’ movies released this week in history, can you believe this week marks the one-year anniversary of Barbieheimer?

That’s right, it was on July 21^st, 2023, that the Barbie movie and Oppenheimer both opened in theaters.

While Oppenheimer is obviously more of a historical movie than Barbie, if you saw Barbie then you’ll know that about an hour and 40 minutes into the movie, an older woman named Ruth reveals herself as the creator of Barbie.

In the movie, Ruth is played by Rhea Perlman, but the character of Ruth is for Ruth Handler, who really was the woman who created Barbie. But the real Ruth Handler passed away in 2002, so obviously she couldn’t be in the movie herself.

Originally, Ruth and her husband Elliot were interested in making furniture, which they did with a business partner named Harold Matson. During World War II, their furniture sales declined, and they tried making toy furniture instead. It worked! In fact, it worked so well, they shifted entirely and that’s how Mattel got into toy manufacturing.

Oh, and the name “Mattel” comes from mixing Harold Matson’s name—his nickname was “Matt” with Elliot Handler’s name. Matt-El. I guess they couldn’t get Ruth’s name in there.

Despite not having her name on the company, Ruth was very much involved in Mattel.

At the beginning of the movie, we hear Helen Mirren’s voiceover talking about girls playing with baby dolls and they could only play at being mother. On the screen we can see a bunch of little girls playing with baby dolls. Then comes Barbie, and in the movie we can see a huge version of Margot Robbie’s Barbie wearing a black-and-white striped bathing suit, towering over the little girls playing with the baby dolls.

Once we get past the fact that it’s a highly stylized interpretation of things, that’s actually not a bad version of how Ruth came up with the idea for the Barbie doll. It is true that in the 1950s, most little girls in the United States played with baby dolls as a way of preparing them to be mothers later in life. But, one day, Ruth saw her daughter and friends playing with rolls of paper they were pretending were them—and they were roleplaying being adults.

So, Ruth had an idea: What if we make a toy for girls to roleplay what it’s like to just be an adult woman? A mother, maybe, but there’s a lot more to what women can do than being a mother, so why not let little girls use their imaginations?

Where the movie stretches things a little bit with that introduction is that it gives the idea little girls only ever played with baby dolls—that there was no such thing as anything but a baby doll. Which simply isn’t true. In fact, when Ruth had first pitched the idea of the adult-looking doll for little girls, other executives at Mattel rejected the idea. Then, in 1956, when Ruth was on vacation in Europe with her family, she came across a doll called Bild Lilli. That was a German doll based on a comic strip character named Lilli. And the newspaper the comic appeared in? Bild. Hence the name of the doll, Bild Lilli.

You can find images of that doll online if you want to see what it looked like.

In the movie, Rhea Perlman’s version of Ruth tells Margot Robbie’s version of Barbie that she named Barbie after her daughter, Barbara.

And that’s true. Ruth Handler named the Barbie doll after her daughter, Barbara.

That brings us to another little tie-in to history from the movie because when Barbie first premiered to the world on March 9^th, 1959, she was wearing a black-and-white striped bathing suit. That’s the same bathing suit Margot Robbie’s version of Barbie is wearing in the movie when we see her for the first time in the introduction.

And just like the movie was a hit so, too, was the doll back in 1959. Barbies were flying off the shelf. I would highly recommend you look up a photo of the original 1959 Barbie doll and compare that to what the Bild Lilli dolls looked like? You can see just how much Ruth was inspired by the Bild Lilli dolls for Barbie.

In 1961, Ruth and Elliot introduced Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken.

While we see Ken in the Barbie movie, Ruth doesn’t talk to Ken so she doesn’t mention where his name came from…but, in truth, just like Barbie was named after Ruth’s daughter, Ken got his name from Ruth’s son, Kenneth.

Although it’s worth pointing out that Barbie and Ken only got their names. Everything else about Barbie and Ken, from how they look to their backstories, and so on, that’s not based on the real Barbara and Kenneth.

Oh, and as a fun little fact, Mattel actually bought out the rights to Bild Lilli in 1964 and instead sold Barbies in their place.

But, going back to an hour and 40 minutes into the Barbie movie, we have a few more historical elements to pull from dialogue in this scene.

The first is when Ruth tells Barbie, “Baby, I am Mattel. Until the IRS got to me but that’s another movie.”

But…actually, let’s skip this one because the movie circles back to it later, so we’ll do the same.

Another line of dialogue is a clever nod to the real Ruth Handler not being in the movie, because when the character of Ruth in the movie who, as I mentioned before, is played by Rhea Perlman…when she comes out and tells Barbie that, “I’m Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie.”

Everyone around gasps and Will Ferrell’s character mentions her ghost keeps an office on the 17^th floor. I thought that was a smart bit of dialogue to allude to the fact that the real Ruth Handler is gone.

Then, our last bit of dialogue to examine is what Ruth says next. She says, “You guys, you think the lady who invented Barbie looks like Barbie? Ha! I’m a five-foot-nothing grandma with a double mastectomy and tax evasion issues.”

And all of that is based on truth, because the real Ruth Handler was all of those things. Well, I guess, I found sources that said she was actually 5’ 2”, but she was a grandma—I couldn’t find if Barbara has children, but Kenneth did. The double mastectomy mention is also based on reality because Ruth Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1970, and then had a mastectomy. To add something the movie doesn’t mention, Ruth’s experience having the mastectomy led to her not being satisfied with the options for breast prosthesis available, so she invented her own.

But then that leads to the final mention in the movie’s dialogue: Tax evasion issues.

And this brings us back to a moment ago when I mentioned Ruth’s line, “Baby, I am Mattel. Until the IRS got to me but that’s another movie.”

I’m sure Ruth Handler’s life could be turned into a movie—although there’s not a biopic about her that I’m aware of.

But, the movie was correct to suggest that was the reason why Ruth left Mattel.

That happened in 1978, when they were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy, mail fraud, and giving the SEC false financial statements. After pleading no contest, Ruth received a fine of $57,000, sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service—and she resigned from Mattel.

Oh, and her husband, and other executives, too, it’s not like Ruth was the only one affected by this. But the movie focuses on her more, so that’s why I was doing the same.

After she left Mattel, she focused on her prosthesis company for women—called Nearly Me—which she ran until she sold it in the 1990s and retired. Ruth Handler passed away on April 27^th, 2002, from complications during a surgery for her colon cancer.

So, that’s one half of the Barbieheimer that released one year ago.

The other movie, of course, is Oppenheimer, about the life of Julius Robert Oppenheimer.

Surprisingly, I haven’t covered that movie, and it probably could stand to have its own episode—let me know if you want that to happen—but for today, let’s cover a few of the movie’s major plot points, starting with probably the biggest thing you’ll think of when you think of Oppenheimer: The development of the atomic bomb.

According to the movie, another famous name was involved in that: Albert Einstein. There’s a scene about 54 minutes into the movie where Oppenheimer goes to Princeton to visit with Einstein to get his thoughts on whether or not an atomic explosion would destroy the world.

The movie is correct to show Oppenheimer and Einstein meeting—in fact, they had more than just one conversation. For a time, Oppenheimer and Einstein had offices just down the hall from each other, so who knows how many times they talked?

Unfortunately, those kind of conversations aren’t the kind that get documented, so what they specifically talked about—we don’t know. So, while the movie is correct to show Oppenheimer speaking with Einstein, the specifics of what they’re saying is all made up for the movie.

Speaking of the movie, can we take a step back from this movie for a moment? Because, did you realize we’re doing our own little Barbieheimer combination this week, talking about both movies…and since Oppenheimer was directed by Christopher Nolan, have you seen that other blockbuster movie of his: Inception?

Well, this is a bit of Oppenheimerception because not only did the Oppenheimer movie release this week in history, but one of the major plot points in the movie also really happened this week in history.

And since we’re not doing a full event from the Apollo 11 launch today, let’s make up for that pulling an event from this week in 1945 in the Oppenheimer movie that released this week in 2023.

July 16^th, 1945. Southern New Mexico.

We’re in a barren landscape stretching out as far as the eye can see. The ground is dry and dusty, with sparse vegetation dotting the desolate expanse. The sky above is overcast, and at the center of this image is the only sign of civilization, a solitary structure—it looks like an industrial rig or tower of some sort. Surrounding the tower, a few vehicles are scattered, connected by dirt roads that crisscross the otherwise empty terrain. These vehicles hint at human activity, but their small number emphasizes the remoteness of the location.

The movie cuts closer now, to the base of the rig, where an Army truck is unloading something big—something we can assume is a component of the bomb. They take it into a tent at the base of the tower. We also see Cillian Murphy’s version of J. Robert Oppenheimer figuring out calculations; how far people had to be away from the bomb’s test. For example, Oppenheimer determines that without high winds the radiation clouds should settle within two to three miles, so in theory anyone further than that should be safe.

Then we see what I’m guessing is the nuclear core being carefully placed in the large device they took off the truck and into the tent at the base of the tower. It seems to be a case of some sort, protecting the smaller core inside. Once inside, they seal it up and raise it by wires to the top of the tower.

But they don’t drop it right away. The movie has a lot of lead-up to the test that helps build tension, and I won’t describe it all here because it’s about ten minutes of movie runtime so that could be well over four or five times that to unpack it for our purposes, but eventually, at about an hour and 55 minutes into the movie, we hear the countdown: 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Any noise in the movie disappears.

What used to be nighttime looks like day as spectators donning welder’s glasses watching from a long distance away. There’s still no noise, just an unnaturally bright light as the movie shows people gazing in wonder. Huge plumes of fire rise into the dark sky. The movie mentioned something about 5:30, but the bright, orange ball of flame is a stark contrast against the pitch-black sky, so I’m guessing it’s 5:30 in the morning.

Then, the sound comes back with a roar. The violence of the explosion rips through scenes of different people at different times as they hear it where they’re at. After the bright light fades away, not much time passes before sunrise, and everyone starts to cheer the successful test.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Oppenheimer

In the interest of being up front, the establishing scene that I described of them taking the device off the truck probably didn’t happen on July 16^th. That’s when the test happened, but even in the movie after they put the core in the casing there is some time that passes until the actual test.

That test is the event from this week in history, and if you’re not familiar with the Trinity Test, that was the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon, marking the dawn of the atomic age.

In the true story they nicknamed what the movie shows as a silver device the “Gadget’s” core. The bomb itself didn’t have a name, really, so they just called it the “gadget.” So, that sequence of putting it in the device and raising it up the tower was just a few days earlier than the test on the 16^th.

To be more specific, it was on July 12^th that the core was taken to the test area. On the 13^th, the non-nuclear components were taken to the test site and assembled with the gadget’s core. For a bit of geographical context, the test site was located in a region called Tularosa Basin, the Trinity Test Site is located on White Sands Missile Range, about 230 miles away from the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico where they built the device. That’s over 370 kilometers.

It’s now a National Park that’s usually closed to the public, but every so often they have open houses for the public. As of this recording, the next public open house is on October 19^th, 2024, so if you want to learn more about that check out the link in the show notes for the U.S. Army’s Trinity Test Site.

After a couple days of assembling the device, it armed and ready by the evening of the 15^th.

Oh, and something from the true story we don’t see in the movie, they had a pile of mattresses underneath the gadget as it hung over 100 feet from the tower. The idea was it’d break the fall if the cables snapped and the device fell to the ground…thankfully that didn’t happen, but I’m guessing the mattresses wouldn’t have saved the nuclear device had that happened.

Just like we see in the movie, at 5:29 AM on July 16^th, the Trinity Test was performed. And just like we see in the movie, it was a massive explosion of nuclear destruction.

But, the reason for going so far into the middle of nowhere was for safety. That’s what the movie is implying when it shows Oppenheimer trying to calculate the safe distances for people to observe.

And while that did happen, the calculations they came up with simply weren’t enough.

Some have estimated about 500,000 people lived within 150 miles of the nuclear detonation. Most weren’t informed of the test. They didn’t evacuate. But, they did see the bright flash. So they knew something was going on…but the U.S. government insisted the explosion they saw was an accident. Just some ammunition that blew up.

By the time the truth came out about what it was, it became so hard to prove deaths were a result of the test. Some have reported a spike in child deaths soon after it, though. And even though we’re talking about history, we’re not talking about ancient history…for example, a new group was started in 2005, with this purpose:

Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium

Seeking justice for the unknowing, unwilling and uncompensated, innocent victims of the July 16, 1945, Trinity test in South-Central New Mexico.

I pulled that quote from their website, and you can learn more about their work at trinitydownwinders.com. I’ll make sure to include in the show notes. And while you’re in there, if you want to watch Oppenheimer, Barbie, or any of the movies from this week in history, you’ll find where to watch them on streaming with the links in the show notes.

July 1st, 1916. Northern France.

The sky is an eerie yellow-orange color. Silhouetted against the eerie light in the foreground we can see two soldiers wearing British-style helmets. While they face the left side of the camera’s frame, another soldier walks on the right side of the frame in the trenches. Also, on the right side we can see posts with barbed wire strung between them.

The camera cuts to a soldier sitting in one of the trenches. Text on the screen tells us it’s 5:30 AM. The soldier is smoking a cigarette as he writes something down, presumably a letter. When the camera angle cuts closer, we can see his face a little better. This is Daniel Craig’s character, Sgt. Telford Winter. After examining the letter one last time, Winter folds it up and puts it into an envelope. Then, he picks up his rifle and puts on his helmet.

He walks down the trench a little way and says “good morning” to some other soldiers. It’s still very dark, so it’s hard to see how many soldiers are there, but I can count at least five or six at any one time on screen. It makes for what looks like cramped quarters in the trenches.

A few minutes further into the movie, it’s brighter outside now as the sun seems to have risen further. The battle is about to begin.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Trench

That is how the 1999 movie called The Trench shows an event that happened this week in history…and right up front it’s helpful to know this movie is trying to capture the essence of what it was like for the British soldiers leading up to the battle. So, it’s not going to be entirely accurate to everything that happened or even the soldiers who were there. For example, I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest Daniel Craig’s character, Sgt. Winter, was based on a specific soldier.

With that said, though, the movie is correct to show the Battle of the Somme starting this week in history on July 1^st, 1916. The name coming from the Somme River in Northern France.

By the end of July 1^st, the British Army alone suffered 57,000 casualties marking the bloodiest day in its history. The battle lasted for 140 days, from July 1^st to November 18^th, 1916, and in that time over three million soldiers fought.

The British suffered 420,000 casualties, the French around 200,000, and the Germans lost at least 450,000 men. So, with over a million men killed or wounded, the Battle of the Somme went down as one of the deadliest battles in human history.

Some people refer to the Battle of the Somme as the start of modern warfare because it was during this battle that the first tanks were used when the British sent them into action on September 15^th, 1916. It was also the first time a creeping barrage was used in battle. That’s when artillery continues to move forward to lay cover for infantry close behind it.

Well, I guess, technically that wasn’t the first time—the Bulgarians used a creeping barrage during the siege of Adrianople in March of 1913, but with the start of World War I in 1914, most of the rest of the world had already forgotten about that event and in a way it was re-invented at the Battle of the Somme.

If you want to watch the depiction on screen, check out the 1999 movie called The Trench. Most of the movie is set this week in history as it starts on June 29^th, 1916, but the beginning of July 1^st starts at an hour, eight minutes and 47 seconds into the film.

July 3rd, 1776. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A piece of paper reading July 2 is torn off to reveal the new date underneath. July 3.

We’re inside a large room with tall ceilings. And we’re not alone; there are a number of well-dressed men sitting at desks scattered throughout the room.

David Ford’s version of John Hancock bangs a gavel on his desk and stands up. He addresses the room, asking if there are any objections to the declaration as it stands now. William Daniels’ character, John Adams, stands up and says he has one. He points out that the correct word is “unalienable” and not “inalienable.”

Ken Howard’s version of Thomas Jefferson replies by saying that, no, “inalienable” is the correct word. Adams disagrees. The men in the room murmur. Calling the room to order by banging the gavel again, Hancock asks if Jefferson will yield to Mr. Adams’ request. Jefferson refuses.

After a moment, Adams withdraws his objection and sits back down.

Then, John Hancock puts a large piece of paper on the desk. The camera cuts to a closeup as we see him signing his name beneath all the writing. Someone comments how large his signature is and Hancock replies it’s so “Fat George” in London can read it without his glasses. Everyone laughs at this.

Hancock tells everyone to step up. “Don’t miss your chance to commit treason,” he says.

Just then, a messenger enters the room and hands a piece of paper off. Standing in front of everyone, it’s read aloud. The message is a report. It says the eve of battle is near. It also says the forces consist entirely of Haslet’s Delaware Militia and Smallwood’s Marylanders—5,000 troops to stand against 25,000 of the enemy.

The laughing from just a moment ago turns to a somber note as everyone realizes this is serious. The report continues to say the enemy is in plain sight beyond the river. We do not know how this will end, but there will be brave men lost before it does. The report is signed, “G. Washington.”

As the reading of the report is finished, William Duell’s version of Andrew McNair gets up from his chair. He steps up to the piece of paper that reads July 3. Tearing off the top piece, now it is July 4.

Hancock instructs McNair to ring the bell.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie 1776

That is how the movie called 1776 tells the story of an event that happened this week in history when the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4^th, 1776.

The true story? Well, it’s not really what we see in the movie. But that’s not too surprising because even though it’s not so obvious from the segment we’re talking about today, the movie 1776 is a musical interpretation of the events.

With that said, though, it is true that John Hancock was the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence. And his signature was the largest and horizontally centered on the Declaration—that’s why the saying of leaving one’s “John Hancock” is a term people use for signing a document today.

The other people in the movie are based on real people in history, too. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the custodian in Continental Congress, Andrew McNair, was known as the official ringer of the Liberty Bell.

Although the movie’s timeline is simplifying things quite a bit, too.

What really happened on July 4^th, 1776 was that after the final wording was approved on the Fourth, a handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence was sent to a nearby print shop owned by a man named John Dunlap. That night, Dunlap got to work on printing a couple hundred copies of it for distribution.

On July 6^th, the first newspaper printed a copy of the Declaration.

And while it is likely that Andrew McNair was the one to ring the Liberty Bell to announce independence, that didn’t happen until July 8^th. They had delayed it by four days to allow for printing the document for the first public readings of the document. That reading happened on July 8^th.

From there, the word started to spread like wildfire. On July 9^th, John Hancock sent a copy to George Washington who read it to his troops in New York City. Crowds of people started to tear down statues and anything representing British or royal authority.

As a quick side note, the movie’s joke about “Fat George” isn’t referencing George Washington—you probably already guessed that. It’s referring to King George III, who was the monarch on the British throne at the time.

While British officials sent copies back to Great Britain, it wasn’t until mid-August that the Declaration was printed in British newspapers.

If you want to see this week in history as it’s shown in the movie, check out the 1972 film called 1776. Andrew McNair tearing off the paper to mention it’s July 3^rd started at about two hours, 39 minutes into the movie while July 4^th starts a little later at two hours, 43 minutes and 38 seconds.

And as a little bit of extra trivia knowledge for you to share with your friends and family this July 4^th, it was actually 20 years later that Independence Day was celebrated for the first time: July 4^th, 1796.

And in a bizarre twist of fate, it was exactly 50 years after America’s birthday that two of the Founding Fathers mentioned in this segment died when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both passed away on July 4^th, 1826. They died within five hours of each other. Exactly five years after that, another Founding Father died when James Monroe passed away on July 4^th, 1831. Jefferson, Adams, and Monroe were not only Founding Fathers but they were the second, third, and fifth President of the United States, respectively.

July 4th, 1939. New York, New York.

Our next movie is in black and white. In the foreground, a man sits in front of a microphone doing something a lot like what I’m doing right now: Describing what he sees happening in front of him.

Except he’s not describing a movie like I am. On the other side of the table with his microphone we can see some netting, and beyond that a huge baseball stadium. He’s the radio announcer for the game.

He tells us that 62,000 people have jammed into Yankee Stadium this afternoon to pay tribute to the man who gave his all to the team for the past 16 years.

The camera cuts a little closer a marching band in uniform on the field, and it’s obvious there’s not an empty seat in the house. There are shots of fans enjoying the performance on the field as the radio announcer continues to talk about the man known as Larruping Lou and the Iron Man playing 2,130 consecutive games over those 16 years.

Now, he says, everyone is here to say farewell to Lou Gehrig—the pride of the Yankees.

In the tunnel, Gary Cooper’s version of Gehrig is wearing a Yankees uniform. By his side is his wife, Eleanor Gehrig. She’s played by Teresa Wright in the film. Slowly, they walk hand-in-hand, down the stairs. Lou stops part-way down and looks back at Teresa, who smiles at her husband.

Then, he lets go of her hand and continues down the dark tunnel to the light on the other side and out onto the field. The camera cuts back to Eleanor so we can’t see Lou stepping onto the field, but we can hear the crowd erupting into cheers. We can only assume they’re cheering at the sight of Lou on the field.

Instead of seeing him, though, we can see tears in Eleanor’s eyes for a moment before bursting into a full sob. She continues crying until the camera cuts back to the field.

Now we can see two rows of uniformed baseball players. On the right side of the frame are players in Yankee pinstripes. On the left side is a row of players with a “W” on their arm. All of them have their hats off, and they’re all looking at home plate in the center of the frame.

There, on the far side of where the camera is angled, we can see more people near home plate. Some are wearing business suits. There’s a podium with a banner of stars and stripes by the plate. And then there’s Lou Gehrig, wearing #4 on the back of his Yankees uniform.

Although it’s not visible in the movie, based on how this scene is framed it looks like the camera is on the pitcher’s mound with Gehrig and the other men by home plate and both teams lining the space from the mound to home.

The radio announcer continues to describe what’s going on as he says the Yankee’s manager Joe McCarthy hands Lou Gehrig a plaque. And then, just as he describes, on the screen in the movie we can see actor Harry Harvey’s version of Yankee manager Joe McCarthy hand Gary Cooper’s version of Lou Gehrig a plaque. Most of the writing is too small to read, but the headline at the top clearly says “Don’t Quit” in all caps.

McCarthy puts the plaque down, now, and turns to be handed a trophy. He then gives the trophy to Gehrig. It’s from his teammates on the Yankees, as a token of their appreciation for him. As Gehrig holds the trophy, the camera cuts back to the angle with the rows of players and we can see all of them start clapping for Gehrig. In the stands, everyone follows the players and they give Gehrig a standing ovation.

Then, a man in a suit identified by the radio announcer as New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia steps up to the podium with his back to the camera but facing toward the crowd behind home plate. We can’t hear what he’s saying, but he seems to say something briefly before turning to Gehrig and giving him a hearty handshake before making way for yet another man in a suit who steps up to the podium.

The radio announcer tells us this is the Postmaster General of the United States, Tim Farley. And again, he seems to say something to the crowd that we can’t hear. And again, only a few seconds later, he turns to shake Gehrig’s hand before leaving the podium for the next person.

Wearing a white suit, that person is identified by the announcer as none other than the Sultan of Swat: Babe Ruth. After saying something into the mic, he walks over to Gehrig to give him a handshake. This time the movie cuts up close to show Babe Ruth putting his arm around Lou Gehrig. After a moment, Ruth lets go of Gehrig and walks off.

Yankees Manager Joe McCarthy steps up to the podium now. Then, he gives Gehrig another handshake and walks with him to the podium. Finally, it’s Lou Gehrig’s turn to address the crowd.

As Gehrig steps up, the crowd goes crazy. They had sat back down, but now again everyone gives him another standing ovation. At the microphones, Gehrig takes in some deep breaths with his eyes cast down to the ground. Then he looks up as if to speak, but the crowd is still cheering, hooping, and hollering. He smiles a little bit as he looks around.

Then, he opens his mouth, and the crowd starts to quiet.

By the time Gary Cooper’s version of Lou Gehrig speaks, the crowd is hushed so they can hear what he has to say.

“I have been walking on ball fields for 16 years, and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. I have had the great honor to have played with these great veteran ballplayers on my left, Murderer’s Row, our championship team of 1927. I have had the further honor of living with and playing with these men on my right, the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of today. I have been given fame and undeserved praise by the boys up there behind the wire in the press box. I have worked under the two greatest managers of all time, Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy. I have a mother and father who fought to give me health and a solid background in my youth.”

The camera cuts to show an older man and woman, who we can assume are his mother and father. She puts a handkerchief to her face in a move that looks as if she’s dabbing away tears. Back on the field, Gehrig continues his speech. And now we can see what looks like tears starting to grow in his eyes, too.

“I have a wife, a companion for life…”

Again, the camera cuts away, this time to Eleanor who is still in the same place in the tunnel where Lou left her. She’s still crying, but a slight smile crosses her face when he talks about her.

“…who has shown me more courage than I ever knew. People all say that I have had a bad break. But today…today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

With that, Gehrig covers his mouth in thought for a brief moment before turning away from the microphones and the crowd goes wild. He walks past Babe Ruth, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of the Yankees. The crowd continues to cheer as he walks toward the third base dugout.

When he reaches the dugout, the movie cuts closer as he walks down the steps and back into the tunnel he came from a few minutes earlier. As Gehrig disappears out of the sunlight and into the shadows of the dark tunnel, in the background we can hear the umpire yelling, “Play ball!”

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie The Pride of the Yankees

That is how the 1942 movie called The Pride of the Yankees shows an event that happened this week in history: Lou Gehrig’s final public appearance at Yankee Stadium just a few years before the movie on July 4th, 1939.

If you’re a baseball fan, you know who he was…if you’re not a baseball fan, Lou Gehrig was one of the greatest players in Major League Baseball history.

Gehrig’s final appearance at Yankee Stadium, however, wasn’t to play a baseball game. It was to say goodbye.

Let’s get some more historical context that we don’t see in the movie’s segment I just described. To do that, we’ll go back about a year earlier to the Yankee’s 1938 season.

As that season progressed, Gehrig started noticing more and more that something was off. He couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, but his hands would ache, and he just couldn’t hit as well as he used to. So, he adjusted his swing, his stance, and the weight of his bat while his manager moved him in the batting order to try to get him out of his slumps throughout the season.

Of course, his slumps didn’t change that he was still Lou Gehrig. Even with signs of an issue, he worked hard to overcome it. In the 1938 season, Lou Gehrig hit .295 with 29 homers and 113 RBIs. So, he still had a great year.

But then, during the offseason, things didn’t get better. They got worse. Much worse. Gehrig’s balance was off. He wouldn’t be able to grasp things as well.

In the movie, we see Teresa Wright’s character, Eleanor Gehrig. And that really was Lou Gehrig’s wife’s name.

And in the true story, during the offseason as her husband was more clumsy than usual by dropping items or tripping over curbs, she started to be worried it might be something more. Maybe a brain tumor?

So, she and Lou went to the doctor. The diagnosis was a bad gallbladder, and he put Lou on a diet of fruits and veggies.

Even before the 1939 season started, during spring training, things had degraded enough to be noticeable to some of Gehrig’s teammates. They could tell he wasn’t right. But, he’s still Lou Gehrig…so, of course, when the 1939 season officially started, he was in the lineup just like he was in every game.

But he started in a bad slump. A career .340 hitter, Gehrig started the 1939 season hitting only .143. Not only that, but Gehrig could tell things hadn’t gotten better.

So, Gehrig asked to be taken out of the lineup. He did that on May 2nd, 1939, meaning his last game on April 30th was officially the end of his consecutive game streak playing in 2,130 games over 14 years. We learned more about that on episode #316 of Based on a True Story for the week that happened.

After taking himself out of the lineup, for the rest of May he still suited up and traveled with the team even though he didn’t play. In June, he tried playing again in a minor league exhibition game. He didn’t last the whole game, though, so he and Eleanor went back to the doctors to get more answers. Within a few weeks, those doctors diagnosed him with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS…or, as it’s most commonly known today, “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”

Taking a step back for how fast a lot of this happened for the public, the 1939 season started in April as it did for the past 14 years with Gehrig continuing his consecutive games streak. On June 21st, 1939, the world found out Gehrig was officially retiring from baseball.

And then, on July 4th, 1939, the Yankees were playing a double-header against the Washington Senators. Between the two games, they held a special ceremony they simply called Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day. The movie was correct to show a few people addressing the sold-out crowd, including the mayor of New York City, Fiorello LaGuardia, as well as the Postmaster General, a man named James Farley.

The movie was also correct to show bands playing as they march around the field. It was also correct to show the framed sign given to Gehrig with the headline “Don’t Quit.” I’ll include a link in the show notes for some actual footage from the event where you can see those things.

Something we don’t really see in the movie, though, is that after others expressed their appreciation for Gehrig, the man himself almost didn’t speak to the crowd. The emcee for the event, reporter Sid Mercer, announced Gehrig, but he didn’t step up to the mics. Instead, he whispered something into Mercer’s ear who, in turn, told the crowd that Gehrig was too moved to speak but he asked Mercer to thank everyone.

Imagine being in a stadium packed with people–the movie mentions 62,000 people, but in the true story it was actually 61,808. I guess we can give it to the movie, though, haha! But all those people started chanting, “We want Gehrig!”

So, Gehrig stepped up to the mics and gave what many people consider to be one of the most famous speeches in sports history. Let me set this up real quick…because you’re going to hear Lou’s voice and my voice…because, unfortunately, a recording of the whole speech doesn’t exist.

But we do have part of it; the rest of it has been filled in by historians through newspaper reports from the day. And you’ll notice in the movie they actually do the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” at the end, but in the real speech you’ll notice that’s how he starts the speech…so, let’s start with Lou’s actual audio from July 4th, 1939:

Fans, for the past two weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break.

[pause]

Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.

When you look around, wouldn’t you consider it a privilege to associate yourself with such fine-looking men as are standing in uniform in this ballpark today?

Sure, I’m lucky.

Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky.

When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift—that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies—that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter—that’s something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body—it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed—that’s the finest I know.

So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. — Thank you.

In the movie, we see Babe Ruth at the ceremony. And that is very true. Not only was Babe Ruth at Lou Gehrig Appreciation day in 1939, but the real Babe Ruth played himself in the 1942 movie that re-enacted the event from this week in history.

If you want to watch that, hop into the show notes to find where you can watch The Pride of the Yankees. We started our segment from this week in history about two hours into the movie.

July 6th, 1917. Aqaba, Jordan.

A bell rings, alerting everyone to the attack.

The lookout ringing the bell is in a square-shaped defensive position lined with sandbags. On the sandy desert below, we can see rows of white tents. Tiny people in the distance are moving around the tents, mostly running in the opposite direction as the oncoming attackers.

From an angle behind the lookout, we can see the attackers charging in the distance. After he’s done ringing the bell, the lookout raises his rifle and shoots.

The camera cuts to a closer shot on the attackers. They’re all riding on either horses or camels, huge plumes of sand getting kicked up by what must be hundreds of horses charging the enemy ahead. One of the soldiers gets hit, presumably by the lookout’s shot. But it doesn’t slow anyone down as they gallop ahead.

All the men on horseback start ululating as they charge forward. Some of them are on camels, and the camera focuses on one of the men wearing all white as he urges his camel onward. The camera cuts to a further away shot and we can see the attackers on horses and camels rushing the encampment. They reach the white tents to be greeted by the sound of gunshots. Some of them fall, but others continue forward with the attack.

Defenders are cut down and before long, it seems obvious the attackers have the upper hand. The cinematic music swells as we see the attackers rushing passed the tents to the city behind it—pushing the defenders back toward the water just beyond the city.

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the movie Lawrence of Arabia

That depiction comes from the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia and it’s showing an event that happened this week in history on July 6^th, 1917, when Arab forces led by Sherif Nasir and Auda abu Tayi along with the British officer T.E. Lawrence defeated the Ottoman Empire at the important coastal city of Aqaba.

For a little more historical context, this whole conflict was part of the Middle Eastern theater of World War I, and the British were assisting the Arabs revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

This specific battle is referred to as the Battle of Aqaba, and in the movie, we see it being almost as if the attackers overrun the defenders. There seems to be hardly any slowing them down, and for the most part that’s true.

There were about 5,000 men in the Arab force that attacked about 1,100 defenders. The attack mostly came from the desert, although the British Navy assisted as well. Coming from the desert was a complete surprise to the Turks, though, because they assumed no one could make the 600-mile desert journey.

But, that’s exactly what they did.

And the result was a lopsided victory for the Arabs, with only two Arabs killed while the defending Turks suffered about 300 casualties.

As T.E. Lawrence wrote in his book:

The Arabs needed Akaba: firstly, to extend their front, which was their tactical principle; and, secondly, to link up with the British.

Or, in other words, because Aqaba was a port city, it allowed the British Royal Navy to help supply them from the water.

If you want to watch the event that happened this week in history, check out 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia and the day of the battle starts at about an hour and 47 minutes into the movie. And if you want to dig deeper into the true story, we covered that back on episode #49 of Based on a True Story.

STOPPED RECORDING HERE

July 7th, 1947. New Mexico.

A line of military vehicles are driving along a dirt road. It seems to be a mixture of larger transport trucks and some smaller Jeeps. The terrain around the dirt road is desolate with little more than rocks, sagebrush, and dirt.

One of the men in one of the Jeeps points ahead, “There it is!”

We can catch a glimpse of some smoke rising up from something ahead.

In the next shot, it’s a little easier to see what’s happening. There’s a depression in the terrain. Along the ridge, men in military uniforms walk up to look at the smoke billowing out from below. Not everyone is in military uniforms, though, a couple of the men are in plainclothes.

Now we can see what’s causing the fire. A huge pile of tires are burning. Orange flames and black smoke are flying into the sky.

One of the military men, who seems to be an officer, barks out orders to other soldiers to put the fire out. There’s a flag in the middle of the flames.

“Get that flag out of there!” the officer yells.

As the soldiers spring to action, one of the plainclothes men wearing a white hat notices one of the soldiers carrying a box. The soldier says it’s locked. It’s a little easier to identify the men now, and the man in a white hat is Aidan Gillen’s character, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He turns to the other plainclothes man, Michael Malarkey’s character, Captain Michael Quinn, and asks him when the original crash was reported in the press.

Quinn says it was July 8^th, 1947. Hynek uses that code to unlock the combination lock on the box. It works. Inside is a single piece of paper. Quinn reads it:

“In 1947, alien spacecraft crashed in this desert. Before you stands the man who covered it all up, General Harding. Tomorrow at 9 am I will show the world proof of what really happened in Roswell, New Mexico.”

The true story behind this week’s event depicted in the TV series Project Blue Book

Okay, so there’s a few things to separate here to get to the true story.

Let’s start with where this scene comes from, it’s from the first episode of season two in the History Channel’s TV series called Project Blue Book.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a real person who really was in charge of Project Blue Book—that’s what the U.S. Air Force called their official investigation into UFOs. The character of Captain Quinn, though, is a fictional character.

And I’ll admit up front this sequence is not showing something that happened in 1947. The reason for that is because the TV series is set much later, so this is a fictional scene to try and backtrack and talk about one of the world’s most popular conspiracy theories: The UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico.

Also, the date the TV show just mentioned is right, although you’ll notice that the series mentioned that’s when it was reported in the press…not when it actually happened.

That’s a bit of a loaded phrase, isn’t it? I mean, when it comes to the topic of a UFO crash…did it actually happen at all? Plenty of folks will disregard it simply because of the topic.

Well, if we could say without a shadow of a doubt then it wouldn’t really be a conspiracy theory, would it? But, regardless of whether or not you believe the Roswell crash was a real event, no one can deny that the story of what supposedly happened around July 7^th in Roswell has had an impact on countless people around the world.

As the story goes, a rancher named W.W. Brazel, who goes by the nickname “Mac”, found some debris scattered in a field. That happened in June of 1947. But his ranch didn’t have a phone or a radio, so he didn’t think much of it until he was driving to town on July 5^th. There, he heard stories of flying disks being seen. For example, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold had seen what the press quickly referred to as flying saucers on June 24^th, 1947. Just the day before “Mac” Brazel went into town, on July 4^th, United Airlines Flight #105 also talked about seeing some flying disks.

Countless other copycat sightings started popping up fast as word spread about the flying disks.

So, hearing some of these stories, Brazel was reminded of the debris he saw in the field. So, a couple of days later, on July 7^th, he took some of the debris into the sheriff’s office in Roswell. The sheriff called the Roswell Army Air Field nearby, and one of the officers, a man named Major Jesse Marcel, went out to the field with Brazel where he found the debris. Marcel didn’t take the debris right to the airfield. Instead, he simply took it home for the night and delivered it the next morning when he went to work.

The next day, on July 8^th, the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field released a statement that a “flying disk” had been recovered from a ranch near Roswell. It hit the papers and news reports soon after. The Roswell Daily Record newspaper ran a story on July 8^th, 1947 with the headline: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.”

RAAF standing for Roswell Army Air Field.

Now, I’ll play a clip from a radio broadcast on July 8^th, 1947 that talks about the flying disk at Roswell. But before I play it, just so you know there are some other new items mentioned as well. I thought about cutting that out, but I decided to leave it unedited so you can hear the report as it was broadcast.

So, here it is:

Note: This transcript is automatically generated.

On July 8, 1947, the Army Air Forces has announced that a flying disk has been found and is now in the possession of the Army. Army officers say the missile found sometime last week has been inspected at Roswell, New Mexico, and sent to right field, Ohio, for further inspection. Russia has demanded U.N. action to get all foreign military personnel out of Greece. Southern Cross collaborators have not yet reached agreement with John Lewis, but the rest of the soft coal industry has resumed production. The House of Representatives has passed the tax reduction bill by more than the two thirds, which would be required to override a veto. Headline of this new special report and set of views in a moment. The American Broadcasting Company had a period in session for that headline edition received a grant from all over the world forever. The day’s headlines were made headline figures and brings you accurate, timely reports on the news behind both headlines, plus informative and personal interviews with the men and women who made the headlines today. Today’s edition presents a roundup of the latest developments in the finding of a flying and eye witness report of the day’s significant actions at the UN Security Council. Ohio Congressman Thomas Duncan commenting on today’s House action on tax legislation. A special report on the status of so-called negotiations and the details of today’s All-Star Baseball game, reportedly because they ended up with history in the making. Stay tuned to headline Now is telegraphed late this afternoon, a bulletin from New Mexico suggested that the widely publicized mystery of the flying saucers may soon be solved. Army Air Force officers reported that one of the flames had been found and inspected sometime last week. Our correspondents in Los Angeles and Chicago have been in contact with Army officials endeavoring to obtain all possible late information. Joe Wilson reports to us now from Chicago that he may be getting to the bottom of all this talk about the so-called flying saucers. As a matter of fact, the 509th Atomic Bomb Group headquarters at Roswell, New Mexico. Reports that it has received one of the deaths which landed on a ranch outside Roswell. This landed at a ranch at Corona, New Mexico, and the rancher turned it over to the Air Force. Roger W w Rozelle was the man who discovered this office. William Blanford of the Roswell Air Base refuses to get details of what the plane this looked like in Fort Worth, Texas, where the object was first sent. Brigadier General Roger Ramey says that it is being shipped by air to the ADF Research Center at Wright Field, Ohio, moments ago. I talked to officials at Right Field and they declared that they expect the so-called flame supper to be delivered there, but that it hasn’t arrived as yet. In the meantime, General Ramey describes the object as being a flimsy construction, almost like a bus. So he says that it was so bad, but he was unable to determine whether it had a disc form, and it does not indicate its size. Rainey says that so far as can be determined, no one saw the object in the air, and he described it as being made of some sort of tin foil. Other Army officials say that further information indicates that the object had a diameter of about 20 to 25 feet and that nothing in the operation section indicated any capacity for speed and that there was no evidence of a power plant. This also appeared to flimsy the carrier man. Now back to photograph in New York. There was important activity within the U.N. Security Council today.

The next day, the Army said it wasn’t a flying disk at all. As the story goes, Major Marcel reported to the commanding officer at RAAF, Colonel William Blanchard. Colonel Blanchard, in turn, reported to General Roger Ramey at the Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas. General Ramey ordered them to fly the debris to him, so Major Marcel did that. As soon as Marcel arrived, he showed the debris to General Ramey who recognized it as pieces of a high-altitude weather balloon.

So, the story of the flying disk was retracted and, for the most part, forgotten. That changed in the 1970s when Major Marcel was interviewed by a man named Stanton Friedman. In that interview, Marcel said the story of the weather balloon was a cover-up and the debris he saw was extraterrestrial. In 1991, a retired USAF General named Thomas DuBose who was one of the men posing for press photographs of the debris in 1947 also said Marcel was correct in saying the weather balloon story was a cover-up.

And so, the story has been talked about ever since.

If you want to watch the way story is shown on screen, check out the History Channel’s TV series called Project Blue Book. Because of the timeline of the series, it doesn’t really show the event itself but the first two episodes of the second season are dedicated to it. And if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, so to speak, I’ve covered Project Blue Book multiple times from different angles, and you can find them all at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/projectbluebook.

Let’s move onto our next segment now, where we learn about historical figures from the movies that were born this week in history…and we had five events in this week’s supersize episode, so why not have five historical birthdays, too?

On July 1st, 1899, Henry Walton Jones, Jr. was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He’s best known by his nickname: Indiana Jones. Haha! Okay, so he’s obviously not a historical figure…but if you’re interested in historical movies, I’m sure you know who he is so I couldn’t help but include him. Do you have a favorite Indiana Jones movie? It’s Last Crusade for me, but I was surprisingly impressed with the latest movie that just came out last year—Dial of Destiny. Did you see that one yet? Hop into the Based on a True Story Discord and let’s chat about it!

Also on July 1st, but in 1921, Seretse Khama was born in Serowe, Botswana. He was a politician who served as the first president of Botswana and the story of his controversial marriage was told in the 2016 film A United Kingdom where Seretse was played by David Oyelowo. We covered that movie back on episode #238 of Based on a True Story.

On July 5th, 1810, Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut. He’s best known by his initials, P.T. Barnum, and as the man who founded the Barnum & Bailey Circus with James Anthony Bailey. Barnum was played by Hugh Jackman in the 2017 movie The Greatest Showman and we covered the true story behind that back on episode #123.

Oh, and as a fun little side note, even though Bailey from Barnum & Bailey never made it into The Greatest Showman movie, the real James Anthony Bailey was also born this week in history, on July 4th, 1847, in Detroit Michigan.

On July 6th, 1747, John Paul Jones was born in Scotland. Even though he wasn’t born in America, he emigrated to America and became probably the most well-known naval commander for the United States in the American Revolutionary War. John Paul Jones became famous throughout history for the quote, “I have not yet begun to fight!” when he was asked about surrendering. Although, there’s plenty of debate about whether or not he really said that exact line. But, he was played by Robert Stack in a 1959 biographical film simply called John Paul Jones. And yes, that Robert Stack—the same guy who hosted the popular TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

On July 7th, 1906, Leroy Robert Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama. He’s best known by his nickname, “Satchel.” Satchel Paige was a Hall of Fame baseball player whose career spanned 50 years. He debuted in Major League Baseball with the Cleveland Indians in 1948 at the age of 42. To this day, that is the oldest debut for any player in Major League Baseball. He played in the Majors until he was 59, another record that stands to this day. His story was told in the biopic from 1981 called Don’t Look Back: The Story of Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige with Louis Gossett Jr. playing the lead role of Satchel Paige.

Onto our segment about ‘based on a true story’ movies, since we’re doing a supersize episode this week, I’ve got a couple movies: One that was released in the past, and one that is being released this week!

Let’s start by going back to 15 years ago this week when Public Enemies was released on July 1^st, 2009.

Directed by Michael Mann, Public Enemies stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. The storyline revolves around Depp’s character, John Dillinger, who really was a notorious bank robber in the 1930s who many have compared to a Robin Hood-type character. On the other side, though, is Melvin Purvis, an FBI agent played by Christian Bale who is leading the hunt to track down Dillinger.

According to the movie, the FBI is relatively new, so a lot of the storyline around the hunt for Dillinger shows things we might consider normal today, but at the time were state-of-the-art techniques such as fingerprinting and tapping telephone lines.

The movie was right about that, although as you might expect there’s more to the true story.

Let’s start with Dillinger’s reputation as a bank robber in the 1930s.

To be more specific, the Dillinger’s crime spree was less than a year between September 1933 and July 1934. In that time, they killed 10 people, wounded seven others, organized three jail breaks, and robbed at least a dozen different banks in that time. Some have thought perhaps as many as 24 banks, but we know of 12 for sure. And it’s said that Dillinger got away with about $11 million that he hid…and maybe it’s still out there waiting for a treasure hunter to find it. Check out the TV show Expedition Unknown, season 9, episode 1 for more about the search for Dillinger’s treasure.

For today’s movie, though, Public Enemies was correct to have an FBI agent named Melvin Purvis in charge of taking down John Dillinger and his gang. Purvis had been a field agent at FBI offices in Birmingham, Oklahoma City, and Cincinnati, before being assigned to the Chicago office and tasked with leading the takedown of Dillinger.

Although the movie mostly shows Purvis taking the lead, another FBI agent named Samuel Cowley was also assigned to leading the takedown of Dillinger. In the movie, Cowley is played by Richard Short and has a smaller role than he did in the true story.

According to the FBI’s official documentation on the case, the way it worked was Agent Cowley was sent from Washington by J. Edgar Hoover himself to head up the investigation against Dillinger. He was sent to where Dillinger’s crimes were being committed, around the Chicago area. Agent Purvis was in charge of the Chicago office, so that’s how Cowley and Purvis started working together to take down Dillinger.

Oh, and while some have romanticized Dillinger as a form of Robin Hood-type character, in the true story that’s simply not the case. In the movie we’re talking about today, Dillinger never gave of the money he stole away…and that is true.

I’ll include a link in the show notes to a list of 10 myths about Dillinger on the FBI’s website, and #10 directly addresses the idea of Dillinger being a Robin Hood-type character.

Here’s what they had to say:

Dillinger certainly had charm and charisma, but he was no champion of the poor or harmless thief—he was a hardened and vicious criminal. Dillinger stormed police stations in search of weapons and bulletproof vests. He robbed banks and stole cars. He shot at police officers (and may have killed one) and regularly used innocent bystanders as human shields to escape the law. Worse yet, he stood by as his ruthless gang members shot and killed people, including law enforcement officials. And what of his ill-gotten gains? They were used to line his own pockets and those of his partners in crime, not those of impoverished Americans in the midst of the Great Depression.

Speaking of being a bank robber, if we go back to the movie, we see Dillinger along with a couple other gangsters named Tommy Carroll and “Baby Face” Nelson rob a bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. When they plan the robbery, they anticipate coming away with $800,000.

If we’re to believe the movie’s version of history, during the robbery, both Dillinger and Carroll are shot. Carroll is left behind and arrested while Dillinger manages to escape, but quickly finds out they only got about $46,000—not nearly what they were expected.

And that really did happen, although I found some conflicting sources on whether or not Dillinger’s gang expected to get away with $800,000.

But there’s a lot of details we don’t see in the movie, too, here’s what we do know about that particular bank robbery.

On the corner of Ninth and Main in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, sat the Security National Bank. At about 10:00 AM on the morning of Tuesday, March 6^th, 1934, a green Packard car pulled up to the bank. There were six men in the car.

When they got to the bank, four of the men got out and went inside. Two others stayed with the car. Inside the bank, one of the men issued an order saying, “This is a holdup; lie down.” The 30 or so people in the bank did as they were told, although someone managed to hit the alarm first. In 1934, Sioux Falls had about 26,000 residents, so it didn’t take long for word to spread of a bank robbery in progress.

As a crowd gathered outside, the two guys with the car periodically shot their Thompson machine guns into the air to keep the crowd away. Of course, it no doubt also drew attention for those who hadn’t yet heard about the robbery. One of those people happened to be an off-duty cop by the name of Keith Hale. When he came to investigate the sound of gunshots, one of the robbers inside saw him and opened fire through the front window, injuring Hale.

The robbers exited the bank, forcing everyone from inside the bank outside with them to help give them cover as they got into the car. Then, to protect themselves from the police shooting at them, the robbers forced five bank employees to ride along with them on the car’s running boards as they made their escape. They released the hostages before leaving town.

While this wasn’t the only bank robbery for the Dillinger gang, it was one that really drew the attention of law enforcement because Dillinger himself had escaped from jail just three days beforehand—on March 3rd—so it was a busy week for Dillinger that really pressed on law enforcement to bring him in.

Back in the movie’s timeline, the storyline comes to an end as Dillinger is shot by Purvis and other FBI agents in an ambush, they set up for him at a brothel. One of the agents named Charles Winstead manages to hear Dillinger’s last words. Winstead is played by Stephen Lang in the movie. He goes to visit Dillinger’s love interest in the movie, Marion Cotillard’s character, a woman named Billie Frechette. She’s in prison when Dillinger is shot, and she’s moved to tears when Winstead tells her Dillinger’s last words were: “Tell Billie for me, ‘Bye, bye, Blackbird.’”

Were those really John Dillinger’s final words? To be honest, we don’t know.

Officially, no, Dillinger had no last words as far as any official reports go. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of theories around what his final words might’ve been.

What is true, though, is the character of Billie Frechette being Dillinger’s girlfriend. She was arrested by the FBI in April of 1934 when she visited a friend in Chicago. She was charged with harboring a fugitive.

So, it is true that she was locked up near the end of the story.

The hunt for Dillinger continued, though, and it was a lot like the movie shows, an ambush at the end. In the movie, the woman who helps law enforcement is named Anna Sage. She’s played by Branka Katic in the movie. In the true story, Anna Sage’s real name was Ana Cumpanas—although she called herself Anna Sage, probably because it’s easier to pronounce for Americans like me.

The real Ana came from Romania and was in the process of being deported thanks in no small part to her job at the brothel. She met with Agents Cowley and Purvis, who promised to put in a good word for her with the government agency in charge of the deportation—the Department of Labor at that time.

So, she agreed to help. She told the agents one of her friends, a woman named Polly Hamilton, was going to see a movie with Dillinger the next evening. The next day, she confirmed the plans with agents and the ambush was a “go” for that evening: Sunday, July 22^nd, 1934.

At about 8:30 PM, Anna Sage, Polly Hamilton, and John Dillinger showed up at the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. After the movie, which was a Clark Gable film called “Manhattan Melodrama,” Dillinger and the two women emerged from the theater. Here is the official FBI explanation of what happened next:

At 10:30 p.m., Dillinger, with his two female companions on either side, walked out of the theater and turned to his left. As they walked past the doorway in which Purvis was standing, Purvis lit a cigar as a signal for the other men to close in.

Dillinger quickly realized what was happening and acted by instinct. He grabbed a pistol from his right trouser pocket as he ran toward the alley.

Five shots were fired from the guns of three FBI agents. Three of the shots hit Dillinger, and he fell face down on the pavement.

At 10:50 p.m. on July 22, 1934, John Dillinger was pronounced dead in a little room in the Alexian Brothers Hospital.

The agents who fired at Dillinger were Charles B. Winstead, Clarence O. Hurt, and Herman E. Hollis. Each man was commended by J. Edgar Hoover for fearlessness and courageous action. None of them ever said who actually killed Dillinger.

If you want to watch the movie released this week in history, you’ll find a link in the show notes for where to find 2009’s Public Enemies on streaming services.

Oh! And that reminds me, as a quick bit of trivia for you, the FBI labeled John Dillinger as “Public Enemy #1” in 1934, so a lot of people think that means Dillinger was #1 on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, but that’s not true…John Dillinger was never on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted because that list didn’t even exist until 1950. Although I guess if we’re being technical, the FBI itself didn’t exist in 1934…that name came about in 1935, so during the time of John Dillinger it was simply the Bureau of Investigation or BOI.

With that said, though, if the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted existed back in when Dillinger was alive, he probably would’ve been on it.

So, that’s Public Enemies.

Now, let’s fast forward to this week, because there’s another “based on a true story” movie coming out. It’s called Boneyard, and it’s directed by Asif Akbar, starring Mel Gibson and Curtis Jackson—better known as 50 Cent. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s not too surprising, it looks to be a low budget film and according to my research, it looks like it’ll be releasing in select theaters and straight to video on demand on July 2^nd.

But as it is a new movie, I haven’t seen it yet—and I’m guessing you haven’t seen it yet. So, let’s learn a little more about the true story so you can be the one who knows how much of the movie really happened if you see it this week.

The one-sentence synopsis of Boneyard they have listed on IMDb says it is, “Inspired by the true events of a serial killer that may still be out there today.”

The movie is a true crime story that starts when they discover the remains of 11 women and girls in the New Mexico desert. Enter Mel Gibson’s character, an FBI agent named Agent Petrovick, and 50 Cent’s character, the Chief of Police in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who team up to try and identify the killer. Before long, they start to realize it’s likely the work of a single person: A serial killer.

So, what’s the true story?

The movie is based on what’s become known as the West Mesa Murders. And the movie’s IMDb synopsis is correct to say the serial killer might still be out there—as of this recording, the West Mesa Murders are still unsolved.

West Mesa is the name of the mesa—that’s the raised landmass to the west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Well, that’s where the true story starts back on February 2^nd, 2009, when a woman named Christine Ross was taking her dog for a walk. On that walk, her dog found a bone. As you might imagine, she was surprised by that. She thought maybe it was a human bone, but maybe not…she wasn’t sure. So, she took a photo of it and sent it to her sister, an RN, who confirmed it was a human bone.

The police were called, and in the weeks that followed, they unearthed bones from 11 women and girls, one of whom was pregnant. Their ages ranged from 15 to 32 years old. They were able to determine the identity of the women and found most of them were sex workers or runaways.

Sadly, when they disappeared, they weren’t reported missing.

Piecing together information from interviewing hundreds of people who knew or at least knew of the victims, police were able to piece together a rough timeline between 2001 and 2005 as when the murders took place. The bodies were likely dumped in the West Mesa area because it was a remote area.

And it took years for them to be found, putting law enforcement way behind on unraveling the case. But that doesn’t mean there were no suspects. In fact, there were a number of suspects over the years. From pimps who knew some of the murdered women, to men with a history of violence against women, but there are probably two top suspects…and those two start with a guy named Lorenzo Montoya. He had a history of violence against sex workers, as well as his girlfriend. Some people also pointed out that he lived just a few miles from where the bodies were found; and his co-workers even said Montoya claimed to have killed women and buried them on the West Mesa.

Remember when I mentioned the police determined the timeline was between 2001 and 2005? Well, some have suggested perhaps they stopped because Lorenzo Montoya was killed in 2006. He didn’t die of natural causes, either. He had just finished strangling a sex worker to death when her boyfriend showed up and shot and killed Montoya.

Or maybe the guy who shot Montoya was her pimp. Or maybe he was both; the sources I found vary on his relation to her.

Would she have ended up on the West Mesa? We might not ever know.

The other top suspect came more recently, about ten years ago, in 2014, when another suspect named Joseph Blea came to the police’s attention…and before I go further, let me give a trigger warning for rape and sexual assault, skip ahead 30 seconds if you want to skip past that.

Blea was a rapist who targeted teenage girls in the 1980s and ‘90s, known for stealing their underwear. He wasn’t a suspect, though, until 2010 when a rape test kit was re-tested, DNA pointed to Blea, and although he lived with his wife and daughter, the police found underwear and jewelry not belonging to either of them in the house. The police thought perhaps they were trinkets from victims.

And then while Blea was in prison, it’s alleged that he admitted a connection to the West Mesa murder victims, saying he’d hired them for sex. Finally, police suspected Blea of killing another sex worker in 2015. When they had enough evidence against him, Blea was arrested and in June of 2015 he was sentenced in the ‘80s and ‘90s rape cases and sentenced to 36 years. Assuming Blea is still alive in 2051 when that sentence ends, he’ll be 94 years old.

Neither Blea nor Montoya were charged with anything related to the West Mesa Murders. As of this recording, officially, they’re still unsolved.

But, if you want to watch the movie version of this true crime investigation, hop in the show notes for a link to where you can find Boneyard!

And if you do give it a watch, chances are you’ll watch it before me, so let me know what you think of it and maybe give me your own historical letter grade for how well it told the true story!

00:02:26:24 – 00:02:57:24
Dan LeFebvre
We’ll get into some of the specifics of The X-Files and UFO’s here in a bit. But before we do that, just take a step back. Look at The X-Files overall. How do you think it’s impacted the general public’s knowledge about the UFO phenomena?

00:02:58:15 – 00:03:45:06
Rob Kristoffersen
I think what it’s done and what it’s done really well is take in the UFO paranoia that was really prevalent in the 1980s and kind of projected it into a wider audience. So when we roll into the eighties, when you take a look back at eighties ufology, it is it’s not looked at as a high watermark for UFO study in general because, you know, later in the decade it was revealed that there were elements of disinformation introduced into the community through a guy named Richard Doty, who was the primary kind of like the antagonist of eighties ufology.

00:03:45:07 – 00:04:11:26
Rob Kristoffersen
He was a member of the Air Force office of Special Investigations, and he said he had been given this kind of special assignment to there was a guy named Paul Benowitz who lived like right across the street from Kirtland Air Force Base. And he had he had had this interest in UFOs. He was big into cattle mutilations and that kind of stuff.

00:04:11:26 – 00:04:35:12
Rob Kristoffersen
And he started noticing these lights over Kirtland Air Force Base, and he believed that it was aliens and that there were alien battles happening on Kirtland Air Force Base. So Richard Doty is given this assignment that they’re not going to tell him. No, that’s not what’s going on. They’re going to kind of fuel the paranoia for him and make him seem like, yes, there is an alien battle going on here.

00:04:35:21 – 00:05:06:00
Rob Kristoffersen
But what they’re ultimate goal was, is to draw his attention away from Kirtland because they did have some secret technology that they were testing. So they shift his focus to Dale, say, base, it’s in New Mexico. It’s kind of taken on this this law of being a place where an underground alien base is because they literally dress that place up to make it seem like there’s an underground alien base out there.

00:05:06:10 – 00:05:31:07
Rob Kristoffersen
So Richard Doty kind of gets he gets on Paul Benowitz here and he kind of shifts things around. But what he also does is he hooks up with a guy of UFO researcher named Bill Moore, and they agree to kind of introduce a lot of disinformation into the UFO community in exchange, he was going to give Bill more actual real information.

00:05:31:29 – 00:06:00:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And in 1989 at the Soufan Symposium is in Las Vegas, he comes out and he gives this I think it was like an hour long thing this hour long presentation about how the role that he played in all of this and what Richard Doty did and all of that. And it kind of casts this shadow on the UFO topic for those that were studying in the community.

00:06:00:27 – 00:06:26:02
Rob Kristoffersen
Bill Moore, he never researched it ever again. He was kind of a laughingstock after that. So when we look at Eighties Ufology on top of that, the eighties is when Roswell comes into prominence, it starts to gather this big reputation. And then it culminates in 1989 when there is an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, a segment dedicated to Roswell.

00:06:26:02 – 00:07:00:09
Rob Kristoffersen
And it becomes so popular that a few months later, I think they aired it in like November of 89. A few months later, in January 1990, they re-air it and it has more viewers. So we have that. We have alien abductions becoming very more prominent, especially around 1987. You start to see them appear more in pop culture. So in reality, you know, X-Files is based on all of these things.

00:07:00:09 – 00:07:30:21
Rob Kristoffersen
And what it did really well is just kind of push that narrative out into a wider public to the point where like it did affect a lot of people that were really interested in the subject. And it kind of became the de facto face of what, UFO research and UFOs, you know, what the interest in the topic actually looked like to the point where, you know, people are talking like alien abductions became a mainstream thing.

00:07:30:28 – 00:07:56:13
Rob Kristoffersen
And before that, alien abductions had kind of been a thing from like the mid-sixties up until that time in the eighties when it just like really gets out there. So The X-Files did a great job of really amplifying the most paranoid aspects and kind of the worst aspects of the UFO topic.

00:07:57:27 – 00:08:07:19
Dan LeFebvre
So kind of picking, pulling different pieces from other other places and creating a narrative around that. Yes, if I understand what you’re saying.

00:08:07:20 – 00:08:08:10
Rob Kristoffersen
Absolutely.

00:08:08:10 – 00:08:10:14
Dan LeFebvre
Basically, it’s kind of what they did a good job of doing.

00:08:10:27 – 00:08:34:21
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there are there are two definite things that I that I didn’t mention, like Bob Laser. Bob Laser was, again, 1989. It seems to be this year, this culminating year of all this paranoid stuff. His story starts to come out. That’s when the Area 51 stuff starts to come to prominence. So it definitely amplified those paranoid aspects of it.

00:08:35:11 – 00:09:02:09
Dan LeFebvre
In the I want to as in the second episode of the first season, we introduced the character of Deep Throat in the X-Files, and we get the idea of there’s a cover up, even within the government itself. Mulder and Scully, they’re FBI agents, but they’re not getting access to everything themselves. And so at least when we’re watching the show, we kind of get the sense that we’re on their side, even though they’re still part of the government, they’re not getting the whole information.

00:09:02:09 – 00:09:21:03
Dan LeFebvre
So they have difficulty finding the truth in their investigations. It kind of makes me think of some of the government’s real investigations I know I’ve talked to you about before and in the past, your project side, project, Grudge Project, Blue Book. Do we know if those government investigations into UFOs had the same sort of challenges that we see?

00:09:21:03 – 00:09:27:02
Dan LeFebvre
Mulder and Scully encountering in the show, where they even have trouble finding the truth themselves, even though they are FBI agents?

00:09:28:06 – 00:10:17:12
Rob Kristoffersen
Back in the fifties, right at the start of Project Blue Book in 1952, it’s at the start. It’s slated to be this really objective study of UFOs, the UFO phenomenon, and the people that were running it up a Edward Rubel, who was the head of the project, Dr. Jail and Hynek, was brought in by Edward Rubel because he had worked on Project Sign and he had actually criticized him for some of the determinations that he came to when it when in certain cases where he was saying, oh, well, the determination was that this witness was seeing Venus and stuff like that.

00:10:17:12 – 00:10:53:29
Rob Kristoffersen
And so he brings men and it’s set to be this objective study. And then in July that year, two consecutive weekends, there are these two big sighting events in Washington, D.C. and they’re talking about, you know, objects appearing over the Capitol and being chased by jets. When, you know, jets are scrambled, they can’t keep up with them. And it’s like following that incident that Project Blue Book comes under scrutiny.

00:10:54:22 – 00:11:20:03
Rob Kristoffersen
Not only that, you know, in pop culture, you have Life magazine printing articles speculating about, you know, alien life and stuff like that. And in these incidents, just like had such a the government and specifically the CIA took a look at that, said, we’re going to come in, we’re going to do we’re going to we have a panel.

00:11:20:03 – 00:11:39:16
Rob Kristoffersen
We’re going to take a look at the UFO cases. And then essentially what they ultimately decide is that, well, your objective needs to change. And I always found that interesting. I was like, why is the CIA coming in to tell the Air Force what to do? Like, it doesn’t make sense, but that’s essentially what the Robertson panel was in 1953.

00:11:39:16 – 00:12:05:08
Rob Kristoffersen
There’s a panel of a few guys that came in. They looked at all I don’t know if they looked at every single case that they had amassed up until that point, but they looked at new cases that had come in. There was some even video footage that come through the project, Blue Book Desk, and they looked at that and said, Well, you’re going to have to change the scope of your project.

00:12:05:08 – 00:12:41:27
Rob Kristoffersen
You’re going to have to dismiss a lot of these cases because we’re in the middle of the Cold War. We don’t want a public that is untrusting or is, you know, paranoid of, you know, what’s going on out in the world. So the CIA comes in, says you’re going to have to change the nature of your project. So from 1952, up until I would say largely 1965, that’s when they just kind of downplay everything.

00:12:42:07 – 00:13:11:14
Rob Kristoffersen
And you don’t have a lot of major cases from that time period. The only major case that would come out is the case of Lonnie Zamora of the Socorro New Mexico Police officer who had seen a UFO, landed in an arroyo in New Mexico and had gotten close to the thing. He was a trustworthy witness, and that that’s kind of seemed to be a turning point.

00:13:11:14 – 00:13:53:18
Rob Kristoffersen
And then in 1965, a lot of people, including the press, kind of started to turn their back on the government and their determinations on things. What’s interesting about 1952 is that when you look at the total number of cases that Project Blue Book did or analyzed and investigated and stuff, there are only 701 cases that were labeled as unidentified in 1952 that that year had the most amount of unidentified cases ever, 303, which is an ungodly number.

00:13:53:27 – 00:14:15:29
Rob Kristoffersen
When you look at every other year. That Project Blue Book was in operation. There were 303 reports of unidentified objects that they could not come up with an explanation to. So it’s really not surprising when, you know, somebody steps in and says, you’re going to have to change this. This is a lot. There shouldn’t be that much happening in our skies.

00:14:15:29 – 00:14:54:00
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, there there has definitely been, you know, cases where that has happened. But yeah, like and I think what’s interesting there too is that the, I think the main impetus for why the CIA came in was that Edward Rubio was brought in front of President Eisenhower. And Eisenhower wanted to know what was going on, and he had no clue because he had just this was like maybe days, maybe a day or two after these sightings that occurred in 52.

00:14:54:00 – 00:15:20:08
Rob Kristoffersen
And he didn’t have time to investigate it. So, you know, he’s brought in front of the president. President wants to know what the heck is going on and he he didn’t have an answer for him. So it kind of became this, you know, thing where they wanted to lock things down. And yeah, so there is definitely and you also do see that kind of in a little bit.

00:15:20:08 – 00:15:32:09
Rob Kristoffersen
And you know, Paul Benowitz again and stuff, but like the government influencing civilians even in that case. So yeah, there are definitely cases in which that did happen.

00:15:33:09 – 00:15:57:20
Dan LeFebvre
Hmm. Something that was what, rewatching The X-Files. It’s something I kind of get the sense that a lot of people refer to the government as, you know, this this single organization that’s orchestrating some of these cover ups. It’s kind of, you know, the government versus the public, which was kind of which is interesting that, you know, I got the impression I was watching The X-Files, even though, as I just mentioned, you know, obviously, Mulder and Scully are they’re part of the government.

00:15:57:29 – 00:16:07:13
Dan LeFebvre
So it it the show does a really good job of of having this this contrast there. Do you think that’s still the case where it’s kind of the government versus the people for these cover ups?

00:16:07:26 – 00:16:43:19
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Even to this day, movements around disclosure are literally people yelling on the Internet at the government, telling them to release everything that they have, tell us everything that they know about, you know, UFOs, aliens, all this kind of stuff. And it’s kind of funny because, like, they probably don’t really have anything. Like, if they do, they’ve released it all to a certain extent, you know, and there are people that say, well, you know, not every single project, blue Book File has been released and and stuff like that.

00:16:43:19 – 00:16:58:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But yeah, this not a lot has changed since The X-Files has come out. It is literally people claiming that the government is just hiding everything. So disclosure now and people are still saying disclosure as if they.

00:16:58:11 – 00:17:03:07
Dan LeFebvre
Know that they’re not happy with the answer. They’re getting. So obviously there must be they must be hiding it. Yeah.

00:17:03:26 – 00:17:30:08
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, exactly. And and like now is interesting because there are like many of the branches in the military and stuff, they are like investigating UFOs. They’ve come out and said, we’ve got our own, you know, task forces that look into this stuff. So it’s only fuel to the fire. But yeah, it’s still disclosure all day long. Yeah.

00:17:30:08 – 00:17:49:15
Dan LeFebvre
Going back to The X-Files in a still in season one and episode ten, we get an indication for how the government might respond to a UFO crash in the show. It happens just outside towns in Wisconsin. It is a real town. And then Mulder finds out there’s this incident. Deep Throat tells him something about Operation Falcon. It’s gone into effect.

00:17:49:22 – 00:18:08:05
Dan LeFebvre
He says within 24 hours, the entire area is going to be sanitized. It’ll be like nothing ever happened. Later in the episode, Mulder and Scully talk to the widow of a local deputy who died at the scene, and she said she can’t afford to tell the truth because they told her if she says anything, then they’d withhold her deceased husband’s pension.

00:18:08:05 – 00:18:20:07
Dan LeFebvre
So they’re basically making her not say anything. Based on the reports that you’ve come across in your research, how realistic do you think The X-Files was and how it depicted a government response to a crashed UFO?

00:18:20:29 – 00:18:51:29
Rob Kristoffersen
There are a lot of interesting things that you read from people who say, I was on a team that went out and retrieved, you know, downed UFOs and stuff like that. There was a guy named Clifford Stone. And what was interesting about Clifford Stone is if you ever watched him talk, he would get very emotional about the the the retrievals that he went on and like because he would talk about like interacting with aliens and feeling their emotions and stuff like that.

00:18:52:07 – 00:19:40:09
Rob Kristoffersen
Very emotional, man. But there are there are a lot of similar these to certain crash retrieval cases, as they call them. Roswell comes to mind in a lot of cases because a lot of witnesses to Roswell that came forward in the eighties, nineties, up until now, they often talked about how the government would silence them and such. And you see a lot of that kind of stuff where people visit the areas today, they find them like really, you know, combed over and the like areas that are raked and stuff like that.

00:19:40:09 – 00:20:18:15
Rob Kristoffersen
One of the best examples of this is an incident called the Iceberg Incident that occurred in Rexburg, Pennsylvania, in 1965, in December. And what’s interesting about this case is that there were numerous eyewitnesses from Canada, Michigan, Ohio and a few other states in the area that saw this streaking object in the sky like before 5 p.m.. And what was interesting is that there was a group of people that saw this object make like a specific right hand turn.

00:20:18:28 – 00:20:49:11
Rob Kristoffersen
And in the town of Casper, this object comes out of the sky, crashes into the woods. People are believing it’s a meteor or something like that. But the local fire department, local police department, a lot of citizens respond to the area. They, you know, because it actually spread out on the radio really quickly that, oh, there was something that crashed in the woods and the fire and police department get there.

00:20:49:25 – 00:21:10:11
Rob Kristoffersen
They actually get into the woods and actually see what this object is. And they describe it as an ACORN shaped object. And one eyewitness, a guy named Jim Romanski, said that on the bottom of this object, there was this band. And on this band there was this like kind of weird writing that he related to Egyptian, Egyptian hieroglyphs.

00:21:10:25 – 00:21:40:10
Rob Kristoffersen
And before long, the military comes in, they cordon areas off. Everybody is not allowed within that area. They confiscate, I think, one reporter’s camera and such, and they hush everything up and like nobody really talks about this incident for probably 30 years or so, 20, 30 years. It was actually featured on Unsolved Mysteries in, I think the early nineties.

00:21:40:27 – 00:22:13:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But there are very there are a lot of similarities in the cases that you read of, you know, military coming in, make it in as quick a job as they can of it, just removing any trace from the area that anything could happen and silencing witnesses. So yeah, there there are quite a few cases like that. One of the most recent was actually in 2008 in California, and it was a place called Needles, California.

00:22:13:09 – 00:22:44:00
Rob Kristoffersen
And a bunch of people had witnessed a UFO crash into this riverbank. And there were a bunch of eyewitnesses, including a a guy in a boat that claimed that the government came in. They lifted this object off the riverbank, put it on like a flatbed truck, and transported it out of there. So, yeah, there’s there’s definitely a lot of similarities here with what you see in that particular episode of The X-Files.

00:22:45:01 – 00:23:13:00
Dan LeFebvre
You were talking earlier about disclosure, and as I was rewatching The X-Files for our chat, the final episode of Season one kind of left me with a question. In that episode, Mulder and Scully seem closer than ever to uncovering the evidence that they need to prove everything they’ve investigated so far. Again, it’s the season finale of the first season, and it’s a common theme that we see throughout the entire series, though it always seems like they get evidence, but none of it can really prove anything.

00:23:13:00 – 00:23:33:06
Dan LeFebvre
They’re always on the cusp of being able to reveal the truth for the whole world to see. But the truth is out there, right? They still can’t actually prove anything. It may. We want to ask about the that impact on the whole notion of disclosure, like you were talking about before, that being some sort of a magic pill that once for all is going to reveal the truth for everybody.

00:23:33:12 – 00:23:42:23
Dan LeFebvre
Do you think The X-Files played a part in this idea of government disclosure being the one size fits all answer to UFO phenomena?

00:23:43:15 – 00:24:12:20
Rob Kristoffersen
I think so, absolutely. Like before The X-Files and kind of you started to see in the UFO community this kind of shift between from, you know, yeah, there is a government cover up, but it just seems to be for the public’s benefit to, you know, just kind of cut down on the paranoia of everything and it starts to shift in the late seventies and into the eighties.

00:24:13:16 – 00:24:48:11
Rob Kristoffersen
In the eighties, there was a group of documents. This was all connected to Richard Doty and Bill Moore called the Majestic 12 documents. NIE’s were a series of memos that was that established a group within the government that was supposed to be responsible for kind of covering up UFO, those retrieving UFOs and stuff like that. And it’s kind of it’s pretty much been disproven at this point.

00:24:48:11 – 00:25:04:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Like there is no real evidence. Like if you go on the FBI’s website and you search for MJ 12, it has these great pictures of all of these memos and it has the words bogus written all over them. It’s great. It’s fantastic.

00:25:04:06 – 00:25:09:07
Dan LeFebvre
But but that’s exactly what you would expect, right? Of course, they’re never going to tell you, right?

00:25:09:15 – 00:25:39:27
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, exactly. Like these folks aren’t going to tell you anything. But yeah, it’s they a lot of people do see disclosure as this like magic pill that is going to solve this UFO mystery once and for all. And like, I really don’t understand, like, what people think that they have in the government. And again, it comes back to all of these stories that just kind of started to come to the forefront.

00:25:39:27 – 00:25:51:27
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, Bob Lazar saying that he worked on a UFO that had been reverse engineered from a crashed UFO. He even called it the sport model. You know, and a lot of the.

00:25:52:25 – 00:25:54:07
Dan LeFebvre
So the two door or the four door version.

00:25:54:28 – 00:26:15:23
Rob Kristoffersen
Apparently was the two door version. It was a little smaller, but, you know, that’s okay. But yeah, this like this like magic pill and like everybody has kind of built on to it. So like, what’s interesting is like you can look at a lot of the stuff that came out in the eighties. You could see how people have built upon it.

00:26:15:23 – 00:26:40:12
Rob Kristoffersen
So, you know, Roswell, there have been so many eyewitnesses that have come forward and say, oh, yeah, my parents, you know, were well aware of the event or, you know, my my dad, you know, did this or that and like it’s like this, like big, huge ball of clay. And it’s not you can’t really make out exactly what it is, but people keep adding to it.

00:26:40:12 – 00:27:11:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s like, unless you can produce the bodies, which is what people are hoping that the government has, you’re never going to get like anywhere when it comes to validity of these incidences. But like the UFO phenomenon in and of itself is built upon eyewitness testimony and kind of little bits of evidence that turn up and, you know, landing trace cases, whether that be, you know, like vegetation or, you know, other effects that it could have in the area.

00:27:11:05 – 00:27:39:25
Rob Kristoffersen
There isn’t a lot of evidence for UFOs out there because they they don’t often leave evidence. So in the end, you’re left with these anecdotal stories that people will kind of, you know, bring out. And like you can you could read all these stories in many UFO journals and stuff. You can read stories about encounters with strange humanoid aliens.

00:27:40:14 – 00:28:07:13
Rob Kristoffersen
There’s plenty of them out there. But yeah, just this the magic pill that that is disclosure. The X-Files did a great job of really hammering that point home. And and I think, like, when you look at these episodes, like when you look at like this image of Mulder out on Area 51, like on the base and there’s a UFO hovering over him.

00:28:07:13 – 00:28:34:12
Rob Kristoffersen
I think that’s what a lot of people’s views of this topic is that the government’s got it, they’ve got the goods, they’re not letting it out. We as taxpayers deserve to know and we’re going to complain about it until we get it. So be the X-Files played a huge part in that, like to the point where now how much has really changed in the 20 plus years since it’s been out?

00:28:34:12 – 00:28:43:15
Rob Kristoffersen
Like we’re we’re almost up to what, 30 years at this point, I think. What is it like 30 years next year? Something like that.

00:28:43:22 – 00:29:07:02
Dan LeFebvre
But I think that’s that’s that sounds right. Yeah, it has been. Wow. There’s another concept that that The X-Files puts forward and it’s in the in season two, the first episode, of course, the title of the episode is Little Green Men, right? In that episode, we find out there’s two craft that were sent into space in 1977 with messages from Earth for whoever might find it.

00:29:07:20 – 00:29:33:23
Dan LeFebvre
In 1990. The show depicts Voyager one passing the orbital plane of Neptune, leaving our solar system. And then later in the episode, Mulder goes to visit an observatory in Puerto Rico, where it appears that there was a response to Voyager, even though we don’t actually see a UFO in the episode, there’s lights. Mulder sees that he’s there while he’s there in Puerto Rico.

00:29:33:23 – 00:29:51:02
Dan LeFebvre
That kind of implies that there’s UFOs. I think The X-Files did a great job. I’m sure for budgetary reasons, you don’t actually see things. A lot of times you see the lights coming through the windows and, you know, causing this effect. And then Mulder sees the while now at least what we kind of think of the stereotypical shape of an alien.

00:29:51:27 – 00:30:17:04
Dan LeFebvre
Even though that episode came out in 1994, I think a lot of people today still poll the concept of UFOs and extraterrestrials being tied together and maybe even the shape of the alien here in this Little Green Men. As the title of the episode, do you think The X-Files contributed to people tying all of those things together, or was that something that was happening even before the show and they were pulling pieces together for that, for that concept?

00:30:17:18 – 00:30:52:18
Rob Kristoffersen
I think it definitely is one of those cases in which it amplified it because the the idea of the little green man comes from the gray alien. So the gray turns into the green. But the term little green men is interesting. It goes back to 1955 in the Kelly Hopkinsville case, in which the Sutton family basically holds off this, you know, these aliens in this like kind of siege on their home, they keep coming back to this window and they keep shooting at them.

00:30:52:18 – 00:31:12:05
Rob Kristoffersen
They keep retreating, but they keep coming back. It was a it was a really fascinating case to find. Yeah, it’s it’s absolutely terrifying. And like, there’s some there was one moment when one of the members of the family stepped out onto the front porch, and he claimed that one of those aliens kind of just like pulled him by his hair.

00:31:12:05 – 00:31:17:02
Rob Kristoffersen
That was like the most aggressive that they got with them. But in the press.

00:31:17:02 – 00:31:22:03
Dan LeFebvre
Sorry if I see if I see that happening, like I’m going to go to the front porch and say like, yeah.

00:31:22:28 – 00:31:24:29
Rob Kristoffersen
But yeah, I mean, it’s probably.

00:31:25:06 – 00:31:26:19
Dan LeFebvre
Just not me. That’s not what I would do.

00:31:26:24 – 00:32:12:01
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s not the smart response. No, it’s it’s not it’s not adequate. Like, just like don’t even engage with them because it’s like they just feel like door to door salesman at this point because they’re coming up to your door, you know, I don’t know what they want. Maybe, maybe they like their UFO broke down because that there was a preceding UFO event that one of the members of the household at the time had seen this like light streaking across the sky and it was like less than an hour later when this, like, this being comes out of like it approaches the house like they were first indicated to it because their dog was just, like

00:32:12:01 – 00:32:32:13
Rob Kristoffersen
barking like crazy in this weird being with you. It was short, maybe like no more than four feet tall hair. It was glowing. It was a luminescent being, had kind of big eyes and it had really big point eight years and it was approaching the house and I had its hands up looking like it was about to surrender to these people.

00:32:33:00 – 00:32:52:27
Rob Kristoffersen
And in response, they just started shooting at the thing to the point where like when they shot, they didn’t hit it. And it started to do kind of these like back flips and it started to float backwards. And it led to this, like, hours long ordeal to the point where I think they were like fending them off for a couple of hours.

00:32:52:27 – 00:33:17:26
Rob Kristoffersen
They got in their vehicle, they went to the police department, police came out with them. They looked at everything. They saw that there was a lot of bullet holes in like the windows and doors and stuff, but they didn’t find anything. So police leaves and these aliens come back and they just terrorize these people into the morning. So that’s where the term little green men comes from, because in the press, that’s what they call them.

00:33:17:26 – 00:33:49:06
Rob Kristoffersen
They it’s kind of similar to with Kenneth Arnold. They talk about because he had mentioned that the the objects that he saw in 1947 looked like saucers skipping across water, that, you know, there were flying saucers at that point. So, you know, that was that was what the press had dubbed them. But in late 1987, you start to see kind of like the concept of of what aliens could be start to be streamlined.

00:33:49:14 – 00:34:19:06
Rob Kristoffersen
Before that, you read reports of humanoid encounters and they’re all varied. They’re all very different. Sometimes people see human looking beings, other times they’re short, other times really tall. But they all look very different. And then you get to 1987, and that’s where the image of the gray comes in. And that image specifically comes from the cover of Whitley Strippers, but Communion.

00:34:19:15 – 00:35:01:02
Rob Kristoffersen
And that book is all about his lifelong abduction experiences. And it was a book that made a lot of big waves at the time because he was a well known author. And he’s coming forward and saying, Hey, I have this lifelong experience of being abducted by aliens. This actually happened to me. And the cover image on there is a painting of this alien by a guy named Ted Seth Jacobs, and it connected with a lot of people there were a lot of people that came forward after that saying, I had an interaction with this.

00:35:01:02 – 00:35:27:25
Rob Kristoffersen
And like, when you look at that cover image, it is it’s uncanny to look at. It’s it’s it’s that uncanny valley, man. It just like plays with you because for one, it’s a really well done painting. But two like the the eyes on that being that alien just stare back into your soul. And after that grays are kind of this big.

00:35:27:25 – 00:35:54:26
Rob Kristoffersen
The, the predominant aliens that people are interacting with, it gets streamlined into, oh, well, there’s certain of aliens that people interact with, grays they interact with, like reptilian looking beings. They interact with what they call like the Nordics, which are like these tall, blond, human looking beings. You know, there’s mantis beings that are pretty voyeuristic in certain accounts.

00:35:54:26 – 00:36:30:15
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s kind of funny, but that image ultimately gets transposed into UFO culture, which kind of gets pushed into the pop culture, and then the X-Files just kind of pushes it out there because one of the best, one of the most iconic episodes, Jose Chung’s from Outer Space. There is that scene toward the end of the episode in which Dana Scully is reading the book, the book of, you know, Jose Chung wrote about alien abductions.

00:36:30:15 – 00:37:04:14
Rob Kristoffersen
He took an interest in it. And on the cover of the book, it’s a spoof, spoof of communion because it’s essentially a gray aliens smoking a cigaret. So that image projected out to people, it definitely helped to become like that main popular image. That’s where the little green men really come from because, you know, the grays, they ultimately in pop culture, they’re portrayed as green now like you see green alien hits like all over the place.

00:37:04:14 – 00:37:11:03
Rob Kristoffersen
So X-Files definitely played a part in pushing that out into the public.

00:37:12:17 – 00:37:36:29
Dan LeFebvre
And it sounds like they’re pulling from different stories from the past in order to tell that story together. You’re talking about. I mean, what could we talked about a comedian before the show, actually, and so I’m familiar with that. The cover image that you were referring to. And I mean, if you see that or even a spoof of it in the show, I’m we have to go back and watch that episode again to look for that.

00:37:37:15 – 00:37:42:14
Dan LeFebvre
But I can only imagine that’s going to push that concept even further.

00:37:42:14 – 00:38:16:07
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s and and that’s the thing is like it’s widely regarded as like probably the best episode of The X-Files ever because and I think what it does is it kind of boils down to all of like UFO culture into one really well done episode. And it also contains an incident in which the there are there’s a government I think it’s like the Air Force or something like that that is going out and abducting people.

00:38:16:19 – 00:38:51:00
Rob Kristoffersen
These are what became known as military abductions. My labs. And in there in that episode, these abductors get abducted by aliens. So it’s you know, it’s just absolutely fantastic. But like, yeah, it ultimately distills what UFOs and UFO culture is down into one really great episode. And I mean, to see Alex Trebek as a man in black is is it an experience that is, you know, one of the best experiences of my life?

00:38:52:06 – 00:39:17:17
Dan LeFebvre
If we go back to the show in season four, episode number 17, there’s a story that centers around a commercial airliner that has an encounter with a UFO. Ultimately, the encounter with that airliner, Flight 549 in the show is a tragic one. It causes the plane to crash, kills everyone on board. Are there any real reports of UFOs interacting with commercial airliners like we see in that episode?

00:39:18:06 – 00:40:03:18
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, there is a lot of cases like that in the most famous probably Kenneth Arnold and they and they didn’t really interact, but like it was such a close encounter that, you know, it really it really rattled him at the time. But there is an incident in 48. It’s called the Charles Whitted case. And these two pilots, they’re flying their commercial airliner and they see kind of this they describe it as like a long missile like object, but it like basically flies right next to their plane and they just speeds away.

00:40:04:12 – 00:40:32:26
Rob Kristoffersen
And it made it got a lot of attention in the press to the to the point where, you know, the people were giving interviews. That was it was Eastern Airlines Flight 576. So, you know, they were flying from Houston to Atlanta. And the funny thing is, is like the first thing that they thought was that this was kind of a it was a military vehicle of some kind.

00:40:33:09 – 00:40:59:23
Rob Kristoffersen
But the they they were flying a DC, I think a DC three plane and it was just odd because it was wingless. But another odd feature is it looked like it had windows on it. So it wasn’t necessarily a missile. But the thing was it was Holland and it it had a lot of fire spewing out of the back allegedly, but there are a lot of cases.

00:40:59:23 – 00:41:29:03
Rob Kristoffersen
There’s another kind of infamous case from 1986 over Alaska in which a Japan Airlines flight interacted. They they ultimately see kind of this these like two small prelude objects that are kind of floating in midair in front of their plane. And that gives way to an object that they described as a mothership. They they described this object as like miles wide and just like absolutely huge.

00:41:29:03 – 00:42:09:24
Rob Kristoffersen
Like, when you look at sketches of this incident, like there’s a tiny plane and then there’s this huge UFO, but there are like quite a few incidences in which, you know, civilians, military pilots, they just kind of have these, you know, brief but memorable interactions with them. Yeah, they’re interesting, especially when you can hear like because you sometimes you’ll hear like kind of the recordings between the tower operators and the the pilots.

00:42:10:11 – 00:42:38:14
Rob Kristoffersen
We recently covered a case, a guy there was a guy who’s flying from Zihuatanejo, of all places, the place where Andy Dufresne ends up in The Shawshank Redemption at the end, he’s he’s flying to, I believe, Mexico City. And as he’s in the air, there are these three UFOs that appear alongside them, not to one on each side.

00:42:38:14 – 00:43:14:22
Rob Kristoffersen
And then there’s like one kind of in front of him. It ends up like kind of descending underneath his plane. And his first thought is to get out of the way. So he angles the nose of his plane down, ends up hitting one of these objects. At that point, he loses control of his plane. And he’s he’s trying desperately to regain, you know, the controls and such and these planes, these objects essentially escort him for a certain period of time before they eventually break off and fly towards a volcano.

00:43:14:22 – 00:43:37:24
Rob Kristoffersen
And he is so frightened by this incident that when he is eventually able to land, he actually has to end up he ends up like circling the airport like 11 times because his his landing gear, the doors to his landing gear were damaged. But he finally got him open. He lands the plane, he jumps out of the plane before the engine even shuts off.

00:43:38:01 – 00:44:09:24
Rob Kristoffersen
And he’s just absolutely freaked out. And eventually he ends up having these it ends up making the press in 1978. And he has these men in black experiences after that in which he is kind of harassed by a few group groups of people. Twice he in the first one, he was actually going to make a TV appearance. And this car kind of just like cuts of off the middle of the road.

00:44:09:27 – 00:44:29:12
Rob Kristoffersen
They approached him in his vehicle and they say, you’re not going to the studio, you’re not going to talk about this. So after that happens, you know, he goes home. Eventually, people catch up with them, he tells them what happened and they decide that, no, he’s going to we’ll have a private meeting in a hotel. So he goes and he meets with jail.

00:44:29:12 – 00:44:49:01
Rob Kristoffersen
And Hynek, of all people, he has a, I think, like a 11 hour meeting with him. It was very long, but they were going to make plans to meet again. And while he was going back up to their hotel room, he encounters another group of men in this lobby that says, you’re not going to talk about it, stop talking about it.

00:44:49:01 – 00:44:56:16
Rob Kristoffersen
So, yeah, there’s there’s a lot of interesting cases between, you know, interactions with pilots and UFOs.

00:44:57:21 – 00:45:25:26
Dan LeFebvre
Like you mentioned a few things in there that circle right into my next question. It’s in season five, episode 13, and in that episode we see a UFO in Kazakhstan, in the former Soviet Union, and with the popularity of Hollywood, a lot of movies and TV shows produced obviously in the United States, X-Files included. So it stands to reason that a lot of the UFO reports in the US get a lot more spotlight in pop culture than those outside of the U.S. But you mentioned something like that.

00:45:25:26 – 00:45:51:14
Dan LeFebvre
You know, the the some of the flights that you just mentioned were not in the U.S. do you think there are more reports in the U.S. or is it that incidents like Roswell or, you know, Kenneth Arnold you’re talking about because those get publicized more in things like movies and TV shows like The X-Files. Do you think that’s a reason why they’re, for lack of a better term, more popular than the events that we there are outside the U.S.?

00:45:52:09 – 00:46:20:02
Rob Kristoffersen
I think what’s interesting in I’ve had guests on and we’ve talked about cases that aren’t as well known that should be as well known a lot of the times that they’re not, you know, known far and wide because they weren’t printed in English and like, the thing is, is like UFOs. There were UFO incidences that predated Kenneth Arnold’s sighting in 47.

00:46:20:02 – 00:46:55:07
Rob Kristoffersen
So there was this phenomenon in 1946 in which countries like Norway, Finland, Sweden, some other European countries were seeing these things that they dubbed as ghost rockets. So they were these long objects that would fly really fast. Some people claimed to see them enter into bodies of water and stuff like that. And one of the earliest UFO reports that would it wouldn’t come out until about the 1970s, but there was a guy named used to.

00:46:55:07 – 00:47:46:09
Rob Kristoffersen
Carlson and he he lived in Sweden and he had this encounter in the woods with a landed object. And the he saw a human kind of human looking aliens around it. There was allegedly physical evidence left, including like these two kind of like containers which were used. I don’t remember exactly what they were used for, but I think with the way that the popularity of UFOs took off and because of the kind of massive footprint that American pop culture has worldwide, I think it had a definite influence on the cases that really kind of went to the forefront and became well known.

00:47:46:27 – 00:48:19:07
Rob Kristoffersen
So I don’t think it’s necessarily that there are more, you know, UFO cases in the United States. Maybe, maybe there are, maybe there aren’t. But when you read through reports, a lot of the times what you realize is that your UFO reports, the only time that you ever see that anybody ever sees a UFO in and is if it’s reported, essentially, that’s the only way that we know about it in the States.

00:48:19:07 – 00:48:54:29
Rob Kristoffersen
I would say that that may be changing because now the investigators that were researching and investigating these cases in the forties, 50, 60, 1780s, they’re no longer with us. And the main bodies that investigate these cases generally keep the information to themselves. Organizations like Move On, they’re not very with the information that they have. There’s new Falk, which is another outlet that you can report sightings to their cases aren’t really investigated, but they’re collected.

00:48:55:06 – 00:49:22:18
Rob Kristoffersen
But though, because those investigators aren’t out there, it just seems like there aren’t a lot of UFO cases out there. But I struggle with the idea that, you know, there are more UFOs in the United States than anything I there they have more of a they’ve had more of a, you know, public reputation in the United States than, I think in most places.

00:49:23:00 – 00:49:50:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Like if you don’t read through UFO magazines, UFO journals and read the cases that people are investigating, you wouldn’t know that they were happening. Like, I don’t think a lot of people realize how much of a hot spot Brazil is for UFO cases in Argentina. Those those countries had very strange and intense cases to the point where Brazil kind of has this reputation in which UFOs are kind of hostile.

00:49:51:02 – 00:50:14:05
Rob Kristoffersen
They’ll they’ve been reported as like, you know, harming civilians and stuff. I would say, like the UK has a very good body of of case work on par I would say with the states in many cases there were a lot of great investigators that are still doing things over there. But I think a lot of it is public perception.

00:50:14:21 – 00:50:49:05
Rob Kristoffersen
More than anything. There are always going to be those cases and probably the most well known cases are always going to be American cases. But yeah, I don’t think that UFOs are seen anymore here than they are anywhere else. But a lot of the times it just comes down to, you know, where can you report it to? And and are those people going to make that information prevalent because the UFO journals aren’t there anymore to publish these reports move kind of publishes them from time to time.

00:50:49:05 – 00:51:25:12
Rob Kristoffersen
You’ll see like a blog post of a case that they think is interesting. But yeah, it’s yeah, I just don’t think that. I just think that because of the reputation that the U.S. has, that’s why they it seems like there’s just a ton of cases here, but I definitely think they are everywhere. But it’s interesting. Think, too, when it comes to Russia and like the Soviet Union, they weren’t allowed to talk about their UFO cases.

00:51:25:12 – 00:51:55:07
Rob Kristoffersen
There was, you know, people who had UFO reports were not allowed to release them, share them until 1989. So once once that happened, you know, you start to see more like Russian UFO cases, but yeah, I think it’s a lot of it definitely has to do with the reputation that America has worldwide and especially American pop culture. You know.

00:51:55:07 – 00:52:22:17
Dan LeFebvre
There is a bit of dialog in that episode I was just mentioning in season five, episode 13, that I wanted to ask you about. It’s between Mulder and Dr. Ferber, where Mulder says the conspiracy is not to hide the existence of extraterrestrials, but to make people believe in it so completely that they question nothing. Do you think there’s any truth to that idea that the show puts forth?

00:52:22:17 – 00:52:59:20
Rob Kristoffersen
Or if you think about it, the scientific attitude to extraterrestrial life and like the popular consensuses is like, Oh, there’s definitely alien life in the universe. We just don’t think it has visited here. So I think we are at a point now where we are conditioned to believe that there is definitely extraterrestrial life out there, but I don’t think it’s to that point where it’s just this is an average mundane thing.

00:52:59:20 – 00:53:35:24
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, it’s it’s it’s no big deal. And it’s it’s such a thing that’s ingrained in you that that you don’t question it. But like there are also those people will, you know, just be like a passing comment or something like that. But yeah, I, I don’t think it’s like that. I don’t think it’s like conditioning like that because I don’t see, like the scientific community, like conditioning people to, you know, just, just make it seem like it’s an average everyday run of the mill kind of thing.

00:53:35:24 – 00:54:15:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting. Yeah. The way that they worded it in that because you know, it gets into the idea of like a psyop or something like that in which, you know, people claim that the government conditions the public to believe in things because one of the things that you see now is that people will look at a certain thing, whether that’s the the 2017 New York Times article with the, you know, the footage and stuff like that is like, oh, we’re being conditioned for disclosure.

00:54:15:09 – 00:54:47:06
Rob Kristoffersen
And it’s like, no, I don’t think so. I think it’s just, you know, people did some investigating. They found this project. You know, this project is done and over with. But they did find some interesting stuff. And it’s always those people, they call it quote unquote, drip, drip disclosure or soft disclosure and ultimately this conditioning. But I don’t think that’s a case that people are being conditioned to think about aliens or UFOs in a certain way.

00:54:47:28 – 00:55:09:19
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, and I don’t see that happening. It just seems like that seems like very expensive because like there are plenty of people that also say that some of the UFO sightings and even some of the most like since national UFO sightings were orchestrated by the government, it’s like, I don’t think the government has that much money, but, you know, maybe I’m wrong.

00:55:09:20 – 00:55:19:29
Rob Kristoffersen
Maybe they got those reverse engineered UFOs and I’m just, you know, I’m just living in my world where I block all that out.

00:55:19:29 – 00:55:33:13
Dan LeFebvre
Well, not that we’re talking about The X-Files, but not to go off in. Was it independence? Like, Oh, you don’t think it cost $20,000 for a hamburger or $10,000 for a toilet seat, do you. Right. That’s right. They get the money from.

00:55:34:01 – 00:55:37:12
Rob Kristoffersen
Yeah, exactly.

00:55:37:12 – 00:56:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
We were talking about Roswell just briefly before I mention that. And there’s something else that people are familiar with when it comes to UFO phenomena. It’s Area 51 and we see that in The X-Files in season six. Episode four, Mulder visits that top secret base Area 51 That episode was released in 1998, and I’m a lot has changed since then so what are the current theory is on area 51, is it still synonymous with UFOs as it used to be when The X-Files episode was released?

00:56:07:01 – 00:56:35:08
Rob Kristoffersen
A lot has come out to the point where, you know, the government has officially acknowledged that Area 51 is a thing, but Area 51 became, you know, really well known because of Barbara Starr, like we mentioned before. And, you know, it was dubbed Area 51 by the Atomic Energy Commission because it was part of the Nevada test and training range where they dropped nukes out there.

00:56:35:21 – 00:57:04:24
Rob Kristoffersen
They tested, you know, nuclear weapons and such. But it’s where they actually because they didn’t want anybody going out there, they actually gave this area of land near Groom Lake to Lockheed Martin, basically. And Lockheed Martin, you know, has been at the forefront of, you know, aviation specifically, you know, things like the S.R. 71, the B-2 bomber, etc..

00:57:06:07 – 00:57:31:09
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, it’s the last place anyone should be looking because nobody should be out there because, you know, radiation and stuff. But that’s pretty much where they they worked on, you know, like high tech planes and stuff like that. But any Jacobsen wrote a book about the base called Area 51, which, you know, she exposed what Lockheed Martin was doing.

00:57:31:18 – 00:58:15:05
Rob Kristoffersen
And there’s actually a couple of years ago, there was a great History Channel documentary made about it called The The Secret in the Sky The Untold Story of Skunkworks, which is absolutely fantastic. You know, I recommend any everybody check it out. I think it’s narrated by Dennis Quaid, but it is you know, it talks about all the technological advances that they made with skunkworks and like all the things that they had to design to, you know, make, you know, like the U-2 spy plane, which is still being used today, I believe, because the the camera on that thing is so amazing.

00:58:16:00 – 00:58:32:03
Rob Kristoffersen
The S.R. 71, which it’s it’s frightening to think that there’s a plane that leaks gasoline until you get to high altitude when everything gets squished together and air tight. So, yeah, that’s that’s pretty much what we know.

00:58:32:03 – 00:58:33:11
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a great design, doesn’t it?

00:58:33:18 – 00:58:56:10
Rob Kristoffersen
It does. And it’s you know, if you watch the documentary and you see the footage, you see this plane and it’s just like leaking all over the runway until it gets up into the air, the high altitude. And it’s just like, you know, everything comes together and eventually they have to meet up with like a refuel or in the air to get their, you know, their fuel.

00:58:56:10 – 00:59:09:05
Rob Kristoffersen
But it is an absolutely great documentary. And Gary, 51, is a great book. So if you’re interested in the subject, I highly recommend you go check either one of those out.

00:59:10:00 – 00:59:37:04
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you talk talking about those airplanes. And in that episode in that episode I was talking about with Area 51, there is a UFO that flies over Mulder and Scully and if you pause the episode as the UFO flies away, to me it looks a lot like a B-2 bomber. Yes. Do you think that there’s something to the idea that the UFO is not maybe not even just at Area 51, but it’s you know, it’s actually just military stealth technology.

00:59:37:09 – 01:00:00:01
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, again, with the the Paul Benowitz stuff, like when you look at lights in the sky and you don’t know what the heck it is, you’ve never seen anything like that before. It could be anything. And a lot of the times you see people will, you know, go to the idea, hey, this is aliens or something like that.

01:00:00:01 – 01:00:31:04
Rob Kristoffersen
But yeah, like I definitely think that a lot of mistake in technology, a lot of lights in the sky are a mistake in technology. I remember in that documentary they talked about how like there were reports in, I think like the 1950s or something like that where people were seeing basically like flying crosses in the sky and they basically said, yeah, that that was the U-2 spy plane.

01:00:31:12 – 01:00:41:28
Rob Kristoffersen
They were seeing it from really high up. But yeah, I definitely believe that there are some like secret military technology that is mistaken for UFOs.

01:00:43:01 – 01:00:56:25
Dan LeFebvre
After 13 years. The X-Files came back in 2016 with season ten and the first episode they the Roswell crash from 1947. Based on what we know of that incident, how old do you think The X-Files did recreating that?

01:00:58:14 – 01:01:27:09
Rob Kristoffersen
This is a very sensational version of what happened at Roswell. You know, like in reality, the government’s response to Roswell was very it actually took them 4 to 5 days to get out there. And it actually took, you know, Mac Brazel discovering all of this debris on the ranch he was working at to collect it. And even when it comes to, like, the iceberg crash there, their response was delayed a little bit.

01:01:27:09 – 01:02:14:09
Rob Kristoffersen
But you know, it’s it’s interesting to watch this very sensationalized version because, like, there were no reports of aliens on the Foster ranch or the supposed alien bodies were found in different spots. And like the thing is, is like the narrative with Roswell has changed so many times over the years. So it when it first began in when there was, you know, discussion about bodies, which largely relates to a guy named Barney Barnett who claimed that in an area called the plains of seeing Augustine, he had come across the crashed UFO in 1947.

01:02:15:09 – 01:02:39:15
Rob Kristoffersen
I think like somewhere around July or early July. And he saw alien bodies. He claimed that there was a group of archeology students that had also seen it that had come across the crash site. But when investigators went to track down, he was he had passed away. But the thing was, is he kept telling people about these aliens that he that he saw.

01:02:39:15 – 01:03:09:19
Rob Kristoffersen
So, like, all of these people had second hand stories of Barney Barnett saying, hey, I saw these alien bodies. But then the story morphed to the bodies being found like like maybe a mile or so away from the Foster ranch recovered by the government. There was even one time when it’s when they suggested that maybe it was two UFOs that actually crashed into each other, or maybe this UFO was hit by lightning.

01:03:09:19 – 01:03:51:15
Rob Kristoffersen
But, yeah, like it it wasn’t it wasn’t as sensational, like, as this. Like this. This was definitely weird. Like, they, they went and they kind of ran with it. But I to be honest, I was not a big fan of season ten because it was it kind of veered full blown into like, following the conspiracies as far as you could go, like like modern conspiracies, which, you know, when you’re talking about UFOs and it’s this kind of this like cheeky, funny thing, you know, in like the nineties and stuff.

01:03:51:15 – 01:04:05:05
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s like, yeah, I dig that. It’s kind of a thing. But like, but it’s the way that it’s portrayed in season ten. I’m not, not a huge fan of it, but yeah, I don’t, I do not like this depiction of Roswell in that episode.

01:04:05:21 – 01:04:15:15
Dan LeFebvre
Well, let’s say let’s say you were the showrunner for a reboot of The X-Files. What would be the first case that you would cover?

01:04:15:15 – 01:04:47:13
Rob Kristoffersen
Um, it’s, that’s kind of tough because, like, you know, they can pick and pull from whatever they want. They can influence anything that that they ever did. And like, you can see certain, like real life or like, like events that are alleged to have happened like in season six episode four, for instance, there’s shades of the Philadelphia experiment in there.

01:04:48:09 – 01:05:14:00
Rob Kristoffersen
You know, this alleged event in 1943 in which the government attempted to turn a a destroyer invisible, and allegedly it all went wrong and it caused people to kind of fuze to the ship. If there’s anything that I would love to see, The X-Files do is kind of like a comedic episode, a take on, like Jeff, The Talking Mongoose would be absolutely hilarious.

01:05:14:00 – 01:05:44:12
Rob Kristoffersen
I’d love to see an episode influenced on Jeff The Talking Mongoose, because it’s such a strange story in a strange, isolated place in the Isle of Man. It’s, you know, the story of a a quote unquote mongoose that, you know, lived in this family’s house talked to the family. There was like poltergeist like phenomenon that took place in their in their home and stuff.

01:05:44:12 – 01:05:54:16
Rob Kristoffersen
But it would be absolute comedy gold, just a talking mongoose if if X-Files ever came back, ever did anything, that that would be like the ultimate thing I’d want to see.

01:05:55:11 – 01:05:57:10
Dan LeFebvre
I would watch that. Yes, for sure.

01:05:57:16 – 01:05:57:28
Rob Kristoffersen
Right.

01:05:59:23 – 01:06:16:04
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you so much for coming on to chat about The X-Files. I’m a huge fan of your podcast and I love how you cover some obscure cases so well. So my last question is kind of a two parter. One, what’s one of your favorite stories that you’ve covered? And two, can you let listeners know where they can find your show?

01:06:17:03 – 01:06:44:25
Rob Kristoffersen
Oh, absolutely. You can find the show, Our Strange Skies, pretty much anywhere that you find podcasts. My one of my absolute favorite episodes I recently had on our good buddy Sam Fredrickson from the Not Alone podcast. And we talked about the story of this alien human hybrid that allegedly had moved into this college dorm room with this girl.

01:06:45:00 – 01:07:14:12
Rob Kristoffersen
And she was blind. So she wasn’t totally, you know, open. She didn’t know exactly what was going on, but she claimed to have had this alien human hybrid as a as a roommate. And like, the story gets really emotional. It points and Sam’s the perfect guest for that. So it’s our Rachel’s Eyes episode. So if you want a good introduction to what we do at the Our Strange Skies podcast, go check out that episode.

01:07:14:20 – 01:07:15:08
Rob Kristoffersen
It’s great.

01:07:15:29 – 01:07:20:20
Dan LeFebvre
Nice. I have make sure to include a link to that one in the show notes for this episode. Thank you again so much for your time, Rob.

01:07:20:20 – 01:07:29:02
Rob Kristoffersen
Thank you. Dan.

Dan LeFebvre  02:04

I’d like to start by asking about the idea of making a show about UFOs. There are some people who immediately switch off when they hear the term UFO mentioned, either they just won’t believe what you say. Or they’ll simply watch it to find a way to tell you that you’re wrong. I can only imagine how difficult that is when you layer that on to the normal difficulties of trying to pitch and create a show that’s based on UFOs. So my first question is simply, why Project bluebook? Why did you decide to create a show around UFOs when you could create a show that doesn’t have nearly as much controversy surrounding it. David as the creator, want to start with you.

David O’Leary  02:46

Yeah, sure thing. And everybody’s that and Dan, thanks for having us on. Um, yeah, you know, I mean, listen, for me. And for Sean as well. UFOs have been sort of a life long obsession interest. I’ve always always had a deep interest in this subject matter going all the way back to when I was a kid. I’m not sure why, but I just like was always, you know, fascinated with the unknown. And it always rang true to me, I would watch unsolved mysteries in the 1980s. Or scare the hell out of myself and read Whitley strivers, communion when I was like nine or 10 years old. And it just, it always felt authentic and true. So like, especially, you know, some of the more famous cases, in terms of blue book, as I became an adult, and moved out to LA and pursued a career in writing and all that kind of stuff. This was sort of right before, like, you know, end of 2017 and like, UFOs kind of really hit the news again. And there wasn’t actually frankly a lot of UFO stuff on TV, The X-Files and sort of come to its end. And I become a bit of a UFO history buff and Project Blue Book always just felt like such an interesting, right sort of world for TV. In that it was period, you know, it had all these other interesting elements in the 1950s in terms of the Cold War, and the rise of the atomic age and all that kind of stuff. And then just a plethora of like incredible cases. And then really just focus on the characters who who sort of led that effort with Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Catherine Ed repels sort of the first director of Project Blue Book both who basically shifted sides and became you know, adamant believers that there was something worthy of rigorous scientific study here. So I think it began with that idea of, can we tell a story, you know, sort of historical drama through the lens of these characters. And I was fortunate that like, I guess there wasn’t a lot of UFO stuff at the time. I think Project bluebook presented a certain natural engine with sort of a kind of a different case every week, with a really interesting backdrop of getting the kind of tell it in this sort of noir 1950s He’s sort of shadowy sort of way. And we were just very fortunate that, you know, it took some time, but that eventually I found a home with a nice studios and history.

Dan LeFebvre  05:11

How about you, Sean? How did you get involved in this?

Sean Jablonski  05:15

I came a little later, once David had, you know, sort of researched and written the script and had connected with Robert Zemeckis, and I think they had had a series order by that point, you know, I’ve been in the television business for, it’s like, 25 years plus at this point, I think. And so I’ve, you know, every TV show needs to have a showrunner at some point. And David is talented as he is, had not been in that position before. And so if you’re going to start any business, you’re generally going to want somebody who has that experience to sort of be in there and help guide the process and understand what’s coming up in front of you, and how to run writers room that just just all of the things, you’re not going to know if you haven’t done it. So I essentially interviewed for the job, which began with meeting with David at a diner, we realized very quickly that like him, I, I’ve kind of been obsessed with UFOs my whole life, it’s been something that since I was a kid, I remember seeing one when I was 10 years old, swear to God. And so it’s just something I’ve always been fascinated with. So we were trading stories to the point where we stayed so long, I got a parking ticket. And then of course, you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go through the gauntlet of meeting the studio and the producers and the network and all that stuff. And it just felt like such a very sort of natural match. And then we just sort of move forward from there that, you know, we really connected on having the same passion in terms of that book. So I’m just happy to have had the opportunity to meet someone who shares that, you know, in terms of how I look at just even the phenomenon and want to tell those stories, I feel like, I mean, it’s very much in vogue right now, for people to be talking about UFOs in a very serious way. And I think like any new science, and it is a bit of a science now because we’re just starting to discover it. Because we have sort of mines that are being applied to it and the science and the technology, and the credibility of the people who’ve come forward. But for people to go back to your earlier point for people who can you know, when you talk about, is there controversy around UFOs? Or why stir that up? Or when people say that, you know, my first question is like, Well, what do you know about UFO? I would ask, like, What do you know about the history of UFOs, because a lot of people want to throw it off is something tinfoil hat wearing silly. Like, if they were here, they’d be landing on the front lawn of the White House, a little bump. But when you really understand the history, and the amount of cases and the amount of credible people that have come forward physical evidence, you know, visual evidence, all of this, it is without a doubt something that exists. And I count myself as true believer. And the second question I would ask somebody is, what do you believe about it? What do you have to believe to believe that it doesn’t exist? You know, when oftentimes people will sort of stumble and go? Well, I just think that this would happen, if there would be this, the aliens would have said something by now. And then when you dig into that, you realize, it’s just sort of a belief people have that sort of based on like, on a feeling, right, which is just like, Oh, I don’t know, I just feel like it wouldn’t happen this way, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, when you sort of dig into that, it’s, I would imagine the way people would have felt before, I don’t know, we discovered bacteria, when we didn’t have a microscope, you know, it’s demons inside your body, you know, that’s what it’s got to be. And then when the science caught up, and we were able to see what was actually going on, there’s still a bridge that has to happen, what people have to get on board and understand that the facts that are there, and the people that are studying are not crazy. And then all of this stuff gets worn out. So I feel like that’s a very important pursuit right now, especially in a world where truth is such a valuable concept. And so I love the idea that David and I, again, I think found a path and passion towards wanting to get those ideas out there that it’s be part of that notion of getting the truth out to an audience.

Dan LeFebvre  09:24

You said you had an experience at 10 is that kind of when your interest in UFO started

David O’Leary  09:30

100% I was in I was in New York City, which is where I grew up and saw lights in the sky moving silently in formation there were these these long sort of hexagonal type lights. And I remember very clearly, I can still see it very clearly the moment where you look up and you’re like, Am I seeing what I’m seeing? Could it be what I think it is, it has to be something like just this. You go through this whole range of emotions and and of course I was a kid you know, But I still remember it very clearly to this day. So yeah, I mean, that’s where it had to start for sure. David, have you ever had an experience, so I had something weird happened to me much later. And it was actually after I sold the show, but before the show got picked up to series, and I actually like, didn’t share it for a while, except with like my wife. Basically, I was walking home it was when I was walking on I lived, I lived then I lived kind of near the grove for people living near Los Angeles, I was walking home through my neighborhood. Weirdly, I had a park a couple blocks away. And because of street parking, which was sort of a rare thing. And it was a quiet night, it was kind of late. And then the other strange thing was I was actually on the phone at the time, late with a friend of mine, which was also kind of just not used, but I’m so glad I was but I wasn’t by myself, because I think I would have freaked out even more. And I saw what looked like a teardrop shaped sort of self luminescence, almost like a green Chinese Lantern, or emerged from out of the trees, like 25-30 feet above me. And I stopped and I did exactly what Shawn does with so many UFO witnesses do and sort of be like, is that a drone? What is that I’m not hearing anything like worrying, then I don’t know if this happened or not. But it felt like it started it sort of stopped and was kind of flickering, and it sort of started to move towards me. And I panicked. And I ran on the phone with a friend of mine and he sort of laughing He doesn’t understand what’s going on with dude. And I duck under it. And then it just sort of like continued on kind of floating over the sort of the, like the air I lived in is sort of two storey houses. So it’s just like, you know what, 3040 feet in the air just over the houses and continued behind behind the same line of trees and stuff. Other than like, talking to my wife about it, I didn’t share it for like a year. I like didn’t want to be the guy with like a UFO show who like suddenly had this weird UFO experience. But I eventually did sort of talk about it. Because I also realized sort of to Shawn’s point too. And just like in terms of getting the truth out, like, I don’t know exactly what it was, and hey, maybe it was a drone. And I was just I freaked myself out or something. But it was very oddly shaped. And it was very weird and sort of how it moved. It was sort of like a balloon, like a little balloon. But so that was sort of the that’s the only time I think I’ve seen something where I really couldn’t identify it felt, you know, and then I think so much about you opposed to sort of how it makes me feel. It definitely felt strange. Like it felt it felt like something as opposed to just like, oh, that’s, you know, I just I couldn’t place what that would be. Especially because it was like in the branches of trees. And then later on like, actually, when we were doing the show, like we found out there are like, these cases of green fireballs, we even did an episode on them. I didn’t actually know that at the time. And that’s sort of like what it kind of felt like to me, so. I don’t know what that was.

Dan LeFebvre  13:07

Yeah, usually don’t try to fly a drone through the trees.

David O’Leary  13:11

Yeah, right. It was very weird. It almost looks like it came out of the tree. Like it was very like I thought it was in the branches and kind of emerged from like, it was very sad. Wow,

Dan LeFebvre  13:22

that’s weird. Well go back to the show. You’ve both worked on shows that are not based on true events, as well as of course, Project bluebook, which is what are some of the differences in the ways that you approach a show when it’s based on true events, compared to a completely fictional story shopping list with you this time.

David O’Leary  13:40

I’m going to steal a quote and I don’t know who to credit it to. But you know, what I think it was Mark Twain is like, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. And I think you find that out right away. Now I’ve had the I tend to love historical pieces. I’ve done a few development wise, you know, over the years teslin, Addison Bonaparte’s, there’s been a couple other in there. And it’s been a bit of a learning curve, trying to apply storytelling to what actually happened. And whether it is the network exact saying I don’t care, we need better television. And what exactly happened in that moment, or just an instinct from a storytelling point of view, taking history and making a story of it, you can do a documentary, right there. That’s why they exist because in a lot of times, there’s great history that you couldn’t write this stuff. But when you’re trying to make a television show, and you need to sort of hit your act breaks, and you need to engage an audience, and you want to give your characters an emotional arc. You kind of have to it sounds like it’s simple, but it’s actually kind of hard. You have to sort of really give yourself permission to expand on it. Because otherwise you’re sort of I remember feeling a definitely had a lot of deference to the history and the people and you never want to mess with that. But at the same time, you have to Again, do your job and sell it to an audience. I just think you have to have the courage to kind of get out there and really tell the story that you’re you’re wanting to tell and and have respect for the people in the material. But be a little fearless in how you do it. Otherwise, you know, you’re never going to you’re never going to cross the boundary and just saying, nobody’s ever going to say what a really wonderfully factually accurate television show. Do you know what I mean? And get you get yourself ratings and an audience and I even know like something like the queen? I mean, how much can they have been in those rooms, where those people were talking and understand what was said. And lastly, I had a really good mentor I grew up under basically Tom Fontana, who was sort of my mentor into the business. And he said, if you’re going to do something historical look for those. Look at the history and then find the moments in between that might not necessarily even be written about, get in there and use your writing ability to figure out what could have happened, what could have connected those dots. How could have though, how could those characters have moved from point A to point B, that’s not being written about. And thankfully, audiences are very forgiving these days. And I have to say, like, Quentin Tarantino was a big inspiration. in a weird way. When I saw Inglorious Basterds, I went, wait, you can’t kill Hitler in a theater that never happened. And yet at the same time, I remember as an audience thinking, this is the most exhilarating thing I’ve seen, because it felt like he was having the courage to go, I want to tell the story that’s going to get people excited. And I think if you set the table for your audience that way and say, Look, this is inspired by true events. We are not telling that, you know, accurately, we’re inspired. You know, we’re inspired by it and doing it. I think you’re okay. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we quickly realized exactly what Sean said that we needed to put entertainment and emotion first, you know what I mean? Like people are going to tune in otherwise, you’re just going to watch a documentary on Project bluebook. If you just want to know the facts, you know, it’s all there. You can read. There’s wonderful books we have, we’ve read them off. But we needed to tell a story that about people about human beings going through these events. You know, we kind of quickly realized the heart and the, you know, the heart and soul of the show was Hynek and Quinn, that relationship along with all of our other sort of six primary leads the generals, you know, Susie and Mimi, all that stuff. Meaning in hindsight, what we found a way to do I think, rather, hopefully, rather well was take those kernels of truth, and then weave them into a narrative yarn that was hopefully enjoyable, entertaining, emotionally evocative. But also encouraging people to be like, hey, like, that, like every week was a case that really happened to add within within an episode, we’d have little easter eggs of things that were really going on at the time, we’d explore other things that were sort of in the social fabric of the 1950s bomb shelters and, and, you know, paranoia and, and, you know, the CIA, you know, like people tapping your phones and all that stuff, Russia’s interest interest in UFOs, all that stuff. So yeah, we also had Paul Hynek, who was you know, J Allen Hynek son as a consulting producer on the show, and you know, that felt like any time we were, you know, doing something that made us a little squeamish, or whatever he was, oh, he would always say, which is wonderful. He’d say, I think my dad would love this. And so that really gave us a lot of permission. It felt like to kind of run with it and get a blessing.

Dan LeFebvre  18:36

Just for that, that topic. You’re talking about UFOs it, you know, unexplained right? And then government cover ups where obviously, we don’t know a lot of stuff that’s going on there. Did you find blue book to be more challenging to fill in some of those gaps, then completely fictional? Because there is just a lot of it that we don’t know,

David O’Leary  18:57

the thing we talked about very early on was that it’s we’re writing a line between, we can never say they exist, or the show goes away, because the whole idea is they’re searching for the truth. Right? So that was always a hard line to kind of kind of deal with and something we were very aware of every episode. And one of the challenges too, is like you realize it’s not a it’s not a cop show where you show up and there’s a body art guy show up? and somebody’s saying, No, no, no, I saw it in the sky. You know, it’s like, so how do you how do you tell those stories in given all of that sort of energy and interest and, you know, Revelation, every act kind of thing. That’s right. And the thing we realized was that we had to thrust our leads and our audience into the case, we had to thrust them into these events to some degree, so things would happen to Hynek and Quinn as they would investigate a case that would often start with the civilian witness or a military witness or multiple Witnesses seeing something they couldn’t explain it when the case wouldn’t be over, it would lead down a rabbit hole of more revelations. But as Sean said, it’s exactly right. We would always want to walk that line like, we’d always have like a plausible. Other answer. No matter how deep in we went. I mean, there’s an episode early on where we go to, you know, Operation Paperclip, we go into like this hidden base, and there it looks like. It’s like they’re staring at what looks like an alien, an alien in a tank. But there’s an alternate explanation there that’s given as well, so that there was always this sense of like, you know, which truth Are you going to believe? Because I think one of our goals too, is obviously we wanted to attract audience members who were interested in this subject matter. But we also want to, you know, we were also very cognizant that like, half the population, you know, doesn’t think there is much to UFOs. And we wanted to make sure that we, we presented an interesting sort of like dilemma where both sides could be like, oh, maybe, maybe the you know, the Lubbock lights were plovers, or like, or maybe it was temperature in river inversions in Episode Two, in 110, you know, the season one finale or things of that nature so, so that there was always this balance is like, yeah, as soon as you just say it’s, it’s real, definitively, it’s, the mystery is gone. The truth is, you know, that the quest is over.

Dan LeFebvre  21:22

Part of blue book, like from history was to come up with some of those stories, some of some of the plausible explanations for that. Can you give an example maybe of a plot point in there where you did depart from the history that they maybe the example that blue book gave and had to kind of come up with your own?

David O’Leary  21:42

Oh, gosh, I mean, we listen, you know, I mean, well, there were certain threads that we you know, as far as we know, the Hynix were never infiltrated by a Russian or a female Russian spy, as Paul Hynek would say, I don’t know, I don’t think that ever happened. You know, certainly we were adding certain narrative drama but but like, what is well documented was that Russia was very interested in not only their own UFO programs at that time, but what American knew about UFOs at that time, because they were like, is this top secret, you know, technology, things of that nature, you know, that we have yet to release. And we we always were excited by the idea that Oh, the Hynek family can be a soft target into sort of an intelligence gathering mission from Russia about that. And then things obviously complicated from there because even our even our sort of Russian spy character is sort of become sort of morally torn about which side she should be fighting for. And all those all those wonderful things. I think from a case standpoint, though, I think we always tried to reverse engineer what became the official explanation, like the plovers, like temperature inversions with the stuff over DC. Even Hopkinsville were as crazy as it seemed with the there was like a monkey that was dressed up in the space outfit that that’s all based on fact, actually, one of the guys in the family worked at a circus, and there was like monkey trained monkeys there like, because in a way, that’s almost too absurd to make up. I would be embarrassed to like fix that in the room. So I think we always started with something we’d kind of reverse engineered. And again, to go back to your very first question, try to sort of honor what was the initial, you know, truth of the actual story. And one of the joys of the of the show for me was like, when we would err, I was like, live tweet the show. And I would beforehand kind of put together the list of all the things all the cool little like truth nuggets that we had pulled from here and there and maybe turn them in a bit of a blender to tell a cohesive, compelling drama. But really to invite audiences to go like research this like, hey, this really was a real thing, or like you wanted this case is based off this event, so that there was always these sort of like footings that audiences can have been like, oh, okay, great. And then they can go off, they can go off and see the case. And then even at the end of every episode, if you watched it on history, there was like a two or three minute documentary piece about the case that inspired this week’s episode of bluebook. And that was sort of conceived from the very beginning, once we landed in history, to draw a line in the sand, so that we could clearly be like, Listen, we’re not trying to deceive, we want to, like tell a cool story, compelling narrative. But here’s the root of where this comes from. Now go off, you know, do your own research and come to your own your own conclusions. So it was nice to have that other sort of piece that would help planted in historical context. Yeah.

Dan LeFebvre  24:34

I like what you said, Shawn, about the monkeys. Yeah. And that’s one of the things I love about the show that I do, being able to dig into some of that, because knowing that that’s based on fact, like that’s, that’s something that that’s, yeah, somebody could easily look at and be like, oh, what, obviously, that couldn’t have happened, but Well, yeah, actually, some of the crazy stuff does happen.

David O’Leary  24:58

Yeah, you know, I think true. Goebbels probably what like the gold standard in terms of trying to sort of tell an accurate story based on a historical event. And, you know, we again had to sort of decide early on that there’s got to be a slightly different version of the show and and also just we knew to that you know, and David had put it in there. There’s so much family and soap going on too that we could also sort of lean on that.

Dan LeFebvre  25:23

You mentioned a couple of them earlier some of the stories that you got to cover like the Lubbock lights and Operation Paperclip, but area 51 even got Hynix involvement in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What was your favorite episode in the series?

David O’Leary  25:37

Oh gosh, I mean I would say I’m torn between three I think both Shawn and I share a deep deep love of the Close Encounters episode which in many ways in some ways feels almost like the culmination of the show like you can almost like like ended there because like we end we you know, we end obviously in a very different way. But he and I was thinking about that actually this morning of why that that episode read register so much. I think for all of us, I mean, some of it was just you know, the magic of it all coming together or intercutting between two different time periods. But I think one of the things for us too, is it’s one of the clearest departures in tone for us. We were a rather conspiratorial dark noir tone which is like I love that tone like most of the things I write are like sci fi mysteries supernatural mysteries, like I I can’t get enough of that but this episode, the case is ultimately has this wonderful sort of positive spin you know what I mean? Like it’s so much captures a sense of wonder instead of a sense of fear it sort of stands out because that’s the other side of this thing like we don’t want to forget that it’s not just about conspiracies and being deceived and public denial and disinformation misinformation all that stuff, but it is about the wonder of what’s out there and I think that that episode in some ways, encapsulated that that wonder and then the other two episodes I’m really I really love I love our like big finale episodes so like 110 into 10 for me also stand out as just like cinematic like movies. You know what I mean? Like I think Shawn and I are both really proud of how those episodes turned out as well. But I don’t know I mean like I could go on like we did two critical bottle episodes I think Shawn wrote them both which are also some of my favorites that was abduction in season one and I forget where we go what lies beneath in season two in season two sort of the revelation of who Suzy really is and all that kind of stuff and that’s like that’s we put all our characters just in a room essentially and had to tell tell an amazing story there so I don’t know yeah, they love all of them I definitely the bottle episodes are fun because it’s so character based and you know the challenge of worst show that has to go out and look at UFO is how do you actually how do you keep people in the house in order to tell the same show So yeah, those bottle episodes are great. Close Encounters. Yeah, I mean that and exactly what David said the finale is just there’s so much fun and and happened you know, that’s the other thing everyone you’d like the Close Encounters based on George Adamski, who was a guy who was just like that character, who we sort of had in the show, which was so much fun. And then, you know, Paul Hynek makes a little cameo as a camera operator in the Close Encounters scene, which was so nice as a way, you know, the sort of an homage to his father, and he was saying, just even being on that set was meant so much to him. And yeah, David put it perfectly with it. It took a break from the usual tone and showed the wonder of it, which was one of Paul Hynix cameo in an episode about his father serving as a click there are so many meta parallels because Paul was a consultant for us on the show and then we did an episode about his father being a consultant for Steven Spielberg who’s like the Mecca is closed it was just like for me I’m just like oh wow like that’s just like some incredible incredible miracle that that we were like somehow able to like pay that pay that off and then do it do it some justice

Dan LeFebvre  29:18

and I’ll just fits perfectly together if there is one UFO related incident and pretty much everyone is heard of it is the Roswell incident and that’s the case you started Season Two with with two episodes covering it did you feel that because that is so popular, Roswell is so popular that it was more difficult to cover than some of the others on the show. Like you had to be more accurate to the story and in a way

David O’Leary  29:43

it was hard to do because bluebook didn’t investigate Roswell. Yeah. That was our biggest challenge at first was having to go back and you go, Well, how can we tell Roswell when it happened? You know, five years before the was even born and so we kind of had to have a Roswell 2.0 but yeah take all the facts from the original and sort of make it feel prone you know and so that probably more ironically more than any other episode had the most kind of I guess would you say fiction to it because they never investigated it going back and sort of interviewing those witnesses well after the fact and then sort of making it feel crime you know it was it was intimidating but you know, because we’re such research beings and loved the story so much we knew right away it was a two parter just because there’s so much information in there and you know, you’ve added with it’s opening Season Two and you want to make a big sort of a way to sort of come back in which interesting story we get wasn’t our initial impulse to put Roswell as a season opener and that you know gradually through no breaking of story and then input from the network we got to a place where it was like nope, we’re doing Roswell to Open Season Two which was ultimately the smartest choice as a way to sort of bring the show back Yeah, that’s right at one point and for a while actually we really wanted to do Maury island as as as our as our opener I remember that you know, but it all sort of worked out like it sort of reveals itself as you break it like we found a much better way to do it you know, ultimately down the line. I think that episode was like episode six or something like that as of season two five thing 205 or 205 Yeah, but yeah I think for us I tracked in the case on Roswell just became about well you know, we we’ve done a bunch of research on Roswell and it just became well okay if a town was really silenced in traumatizing this way, what would be the symptoms of that six years later? And once we sort of realized or what if somebody was trying to get the truth out of Roswell and staged like you know like this crazy event in the desert where this were a saucer allegedly went down and sort of held the held the US government kind of hostage like I’m going to unleash the truth it created a way for like our guys to go back in there and then and then the other thing we sort of had the revelation of of it was like, Oh, what a great character journey we can take with Neil Donna’s character, and as a general returning to a scene of a crime something that he’s never fully been able to square and also delineating. You know, for those who watched the episode between Valentine and Harding that Thank you, Harding. In terms of like, who knows what and who might really be in control, because for for Season One, we play it we you know, we knew about them is sort of the the face of it a little bit more, but but then we sort of flipped the script a little bit like, oh, perhaps Valentine was more of a veteran more the seniors actually sort of hiding some things from partying as well, as, you know, it just it gradually reveals itself to us, as we find as we found a way to do it, you know, of like, oh, here’s a way to do it. That really is interesting.

Dan LeFebvre  33:00

Yeah, it was really interesting that, because I think a lot of people when they think of the government cover up, it’s like the government, and they’re all in it together. And as I was watching it, yeah, I definitely got the sense that even these two generals, they don’t even they don’t know, everything that the other one knows. And so you started to get that sense in there as well. Just really, really, really well done to put that together. The general

David O’Leary  33:24

that wound up going into Roswell from outside was twining who Harding is based on, and was credited a lot with, you know, some of those strong arm tactics that were used in the idea of when Brazell gets brought on to the base, the idea of somebody who had been in charge of terrorizing an entire town, and there’s, again, I’d encourage anybody who has even an inkling of curiosity to go to look at it, there are plenty of first hand accounts of people who were there. And then, you know, are you going to choose to believe somebody saying I was there, my life was threatened by a military official, and I was told if I spoke, I would be killed, and go, okay, there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of those witnesses who came forward and said the exact same thing. So you have to ask yourself, Am I going to choose to believe they’re all crazy, you know, they’re all making this up for the sake of, you know, a story. You know, it’s, it’s fascinating and also with, you know, Valentine, who was based on Hoyt Vandenberg, you know, ultimately he went on to be part of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was like an ultra super secret in charge of our nucular program. And I think he was, did he come head of CIA or was brought into the CIA or something. So it again, it felt like we were fortunate enough to find this truth in the history and really try to bring it out in in the storytelling.

Dan LeFebvre  34:48

There is a petition going now to bring the show back for a third season, I’ll make sure to add a link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to sign it. But let’s say that petition is successful and you’re able to make it third season of Project bluebook. Have you thought about some other stories that you might like to cover that you didn’t get to in the first two?

David O’Leary  35:07

Only a little bit, right? Some of the fans were just but other listeners may not we actually had a sort of third season writers room that I ended that where we basically broke on all of season 30. So for us, it’s been particularly hard, I think, to you know, and then and then basically COVID hit and I mean, literally, like the last day of our writers room was like the day world shutdown, like it was locked in 20, march of 2020, mid March 2020. So, you know, listen, we would love nothing more than to then to continue that journey. So especially because for us it in a weird way the show lives in our heads, like a season at the end of season, like we kind of knew where we were going, we mapped out a whole path. And that makes it hard to because I know how excited we are, Shawn and I are about that season. I mean, that season. That season is like some of our standard stuff. And like we were so jazzed to do it. And I mean, we can tease it a little bit too, because it’s, you know, it felt that it felt like such a natural progression. Again, also history on our side, there was the great UFO wave of 1953 54 in Europe. And so we decided to go, you know, as you know, sort of make it bigger. A lot of it takes place over in Europe, because that’s where that’s, that’s where the sightings were. It was it went from like a handful of sightings in Europe to 1000s a day, all of a sudden, it was like off the charts. And when you dig into the history of Europe, and the history of some of those cases, again, for us, it felt like this is what the show is it is about the phenomenon. And it’s not just an American phenomenon. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. And so we we got to explore some seminal cases. And it really did I mean, it’s like anything, it felt like we were hitting our stride. And we we broke every single episode. So yeah, there’s some wonderful, yeah, England, France, Italy, Italy, Russia, Russia. Like it was just like we Yeah, we it was it was, you know, we wouldn’t be heartbreaking. Yeah, it was heartbreaking. Really heartbreak are really heartbreaking.

Dan LeFebvre  37:31

Well, hopefully, hopefully, we’ll get to see some of that in the future. But I wanted to ask you about Dr. Hynix perspective on UFOs. Because in the real project, bluebook, he was kind of started pretty skeptical. And then his position changed as he was investigating these. So as you were researching and writing and putting together this. Did your opinions change at all? I know you were both big into UFOs beforehand. But did it change at all as you were creating the show?

David O’Leary  37:58

What changed for me was doing research on Hynek and realizing how smart he was in terms of hypothesizing the multitude of answers that might exist, right? Even in like his book, the UFO experience or, you know, his numerous books he he would hypothesize, you know, like, especially with some of these cases that delve into like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or through you know, seeing seeing actual occupants or entities or whatever you want to call them kind of entertained every theory under the sun from today are interdimensional in some way. Like the planet is also there’s somehow, too They are interplanetary spacecraft to they are asked in the future today are like, I remember like you spoke a little bit about sort of the robotic nature of that of the have had these creatures are described like, are we dealing with artificial extraterrestrial, artificial intelligence. Like, on and on, and I think that, that, that I mean, I, you know, just I always love that the notion that like, maybe the answers could be as complicated, complicated as the questions we could be dealing with a multitude of, sort of phenomena happening simultaneously. We’re just not, we’re just not sure you know, what, what sort of the answers are, but that that was the shift for me was like, Don’t hang your hat on really any one theory because it could be, it could be something else, it could appear one way but actually, I actually did something else. I always loved that, you know, I would say if anything to that, to that end is like it only expanded. I mean, I was already having had knowledge of it, sort of, you know, believed in the phenomenon and you know, I couldn’t profess to have the answers but had certainly done the research. But if anything, it just expanded. It expanded the scope of what was possible like, especially with interdimensional beings AI from alien civilizations, are they even here, you know, old that stuff. The biggest thing for me that I found doing this was how the sightings ticked up. Right after in around the time of our US basically getting new killer capabilities. There are so many incidents of UFOs in and around nuclear missile sites, turning the missiles on and off, in and around Los Alamos, once we got the bomb, this that’s when everything Shut up. That’s really when that’s really when Roswell happened. That is one of the most fascinating stories to me, because to me, it’s the clearest evidence yet and this is coming from high ranking military officials who testified in front of Congress about this again, this stuff is all available to go you can watch it, you know, and this is on my side for yourself. Yeah, yeah, decide for yourself if like the, you know, the high ranking Colonel Who said I was in the missile bunker when the this you know, object came and basically cut the power, then turned it back on, set our missiles to launch and we couldn’t do anything, then took it away. Again, you can decide if this guy just decided to make it up and ruin his entire career. But to me, that’s the clearest evidence. It’s one thing for a civilian to see something dark across the sky and go, I saw something I can’t explain. It’s another thing for military personnel who were overseeing our nuclear weapons, to have these objects come in and around and basically control them. Because to me, that’s communication. Right? I don’t, that is like, it’s it’s them saying, We can do this to you. And now it’s up to us to go, are they benevolent? Are they they? Are they saying they can destroy us? Are they trying to start a war, like, what is happening? It’s not just like, Oh, I saw something, I don’t understand it. They’re communicating in a way and have the ability to affect our world. That phenomenon blew my mind. And if you go down that rabbit hole and look at all the instances, not just in America, but in Russia at the same time, it’s it’s fascinating. It’s really fascinating. And it goes all the way back all the way back to the beginning of this of this phenomenon. I mean, Ed repelled in his book talks about how they would expect to see UFO sightings over like, like, atomic detonations in the South Pacific on sort of top secret military weapons testing programs in the 40s. And in the late 40s, in the 50s. So it’s, it’s it’s a fascinating sort of aspects of this. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  42:38

that’s a really interesting point to bring up. Because if you put it in a historical context, World War Two, it just happened. So there was a lot of explosions going on, you know, and that didn’t bring anything out. But it but the nuclear side of it, does what you

David O’Leary  42:56

had the Foo Fighters in World War Two, really, that was a very, sort of a big thing back then. All the pilots describing what these objects were, and we touched on that I think a little bit in the first season. And historically, it’s not like UFOs began, right, then they’ve Columbus talked about UFOs, you know, so, but there was a clear, like, explosion of sightings, you know, well, maybe unintended. right around the time we got the bomb, that is when the wave just took off. And that’s also where the military, you know, had really, you know, gotten involved. And again, you know, the really, it began with, you know, why am I forgetting his name? The sort of, you know, first thing flying saucers in Oregon? Oh, Timothy Arnold. Yes, in 1947, which happened literally three weeks before Roswell. And one of the things in Roswell that that is interesting, they did nuclear testing and around that, but that was also the Roswell was the home of the fybel ninth Bomb Squadron, which was the squadron that dropped the Enola Gay was in Roswell. That’s what dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. And all those all in and around there, the White Sands Missile base, the Alamo. I can’t remember the other one. But all those nucular testing things were around the end of the amount of saucer sightings were just off the charts.

Dan LeFebvre  44:25

Wow, that’s fascinating. I guess I never had put it together that the Enola Gay was there in Roswell.

David O’Leary  44:32

Yeah. When people think of Roswell they always think of it as a kind of a sleepy desert town kind of random small thing it’s got it had a huge Roswell army interface airfield had huge huge sort of military significance at that time it was very important and in that whole area that was was a massive testing ground for top secret weaponry and stuff like that. So I don’t think it’s at all you know, as the Sean’s to John’s point anyway, a coincidence that this was a hub of sort of UFO activity at the time

Dan LeFebvre  45:01

when I know I asked you about your your favorite episode it’s hard to pick a favorite but do you do you have a favorite story from the set as you were creating the show?

David O’Leary  45:11

I have to and I’ll tell them really briefly one is in abduction which Shawn wrote but he got unfortunately was for whatever reason not able to be on set for but I gotta I got to be on for like nine and 10 or maybe he was up for a little bit I don’t think he was up there for this part when the character is recalling his sort of abduction experience because it was what’s called a bottle episode we hadn’t do it we couldn’t rely fully on the effects that we were trying to keep the budget the budget down that’s what a bottle episode is. And our director Alex gray has had this brilliant idea of like he’s supposed to be levitating in a ship right and like sort of finds himself in this alien environment. So they really strong up the offers and I think is Malcolm Goodwin or goodwill forgive me if I it’s Yeah, and they strongly am off and they shined all these shimmery lights on on him in the background on a screen and then they blasted the entire sort of soundstage with with with smoke and it was this magical alien kind of like experience come to life like you could not see in front of you the camera guys are like you know all the crew was so quiet and it was just it looked incredible to your like it felt like you’re watching a VFX shot happened in front of your eyes you know it was like a portal open to another dimension if you were looking at what we were actually filming so that was incredible and then my you know i mean obviously all their like fun kind of anecdotal moments with the cast are amazing too but the other thing was in 110 we blew up a car and that was that was just like we all sat around and like literally had popcorn and like blew up blew up in a in a sort of a outside and an amphitheater kind of an environment against a green screen and that was that it blew up a nice in the 1950s Carter food and that was just a fun day to see all that happened to I have a zillion photographs I’ll just say briefly I think it was literally day one of Episode 101 we showed up on set and it was the the font that what played for the farmhouse in the in the first episode and it was early morning cold Canada and there was this fog that had just blanketed the entire area and with this sun piercing through it was some of the most dramatic looking landscape I’ve ever seen and it was the arrival of our characters through this fog you know up to this farmhouse I it’s like I don’t think we could have gotten we couldn’t have wished for anything better and it was day one so it’s just basically everybody’s connecting everybody’s come in with their A game and so excited to be there and it felt like the like the gods were smiling on us saying this is the right way to begin he talked a little

Dan LeFebvre  47:59

bit about potential season three book in the first two seasons Was there anything that you wanted to add in there but you couldn’t for one reason or another?

David O’Leary  48:10

Well we had a whole episode ideas that for one reason or another we had we had to scrap you know i mean there was all all kinds of like, you know curious weird I mean there were sort of like UFO cold spots popping up in there in the early 1950s and like we thought about doing an episode that sort of explored that idea that sort of like how people use this arrival of this sort of new phenomenon into the public consciousness towards their own sort of self serving ends and now people could get kind of roped into that to that kind of thing gosh I mean there was all you know there’s always things there’s even within episodes there scenes we had to cut of course or little moments that like for timing purposes we’re like ah, we just can’t we can’t we got to pick and choose I’d say to David you know your his very first his early draft of the script you know and it was always described as you know X Files meets Mad Men because there he had a really wonderful touch with the soap that was in there and is it again it was as much about personal life and Joel who was the kid There was even a storyline with him. And through the natural process of any TV show creation development, you know, where the rubber meets the road you got to start leaving pushing things aside in favor of, you know, the engine of the series, which is our two guys in the cases. And I think we tried hard to make sure that we like Susie and Mimi and all of that to kind of create another world we could go into that reflected the Cold War era times but I mean, for me, I loved as much the character stuff as anything and I thought there was certainly more stories to tell with you know, Mimi and Suzy and to have a female perspective as well as a home perspective and to see what’s really going on, you know, during the Cold War, back home, you know, we tried a little out with the bomb shelter early on, and Season One, you know, which was a real thing you know they would put ads in the newspapers for that stuff and how the kids would feel at school and you remind me of we haven’t we came up with this whole storyline with Joel as like this 1950s boy kind of stand by me as sort of storyline with like, he had a crush on his like, neighbor, this other girl and then like, but then you get to sort of explore the fear of Russia and the Cold War through the lens of children. The irony being Of course, that they’re like, while they’re like sitting while Joel’s at his neighbor’s there really is a Russian spy next door having dinner at his house, like all this wonderful stuff that like it just, you know, you got to pick and choose where a UFO shaft so it was like, you gotta, you know, but it would have been nice to, you know, to do some of those things as well, you know, yeah. Forgot about all that.

Dan LeFebvre  50:50

Thank you guys so much for coming on to chat about Project bluebook. I know until there’s a season three hopefully there’ll be a season three. But until then, can you share a little bit about what you guys are working on?

David O’Leary  50:59

Sure. Well, I mean, you know, again, it’s it’s a pat, you know, the world is such a passion for us. David and I are working on something right now that we’re you know, I don’t want to say too much because we’re in the early stages of let’s say negotiations, but it’s back in the UFO world. And we look forward to bring in those stories back to television, hopefully in the in the coming in the coming year, I should say. So, you know, it bluebook whet our appetite. We’re excited to serve another meal coming up soon. Yeah, we just wanted to also give you know, in regards to the save bluebook campaign, you know, a huge shout out to Carson who’s led that effort. I know he created a website called save Blue Book calm, which is amazing. And just a wonderful way to he’s collected so many, you know, artifacts from the show and imagery from the show and, and all of our fans who remind us that the show mattered to them because that that is the most important thing. And that’s why we that’s why we did it. So we’re forever grateful we never give up hope. You just never know you just never know what’s going to happen. So we have a season three ready Win, win win as soon as someone’s ready to take it on. So you know, thank you to all the fans.

Dan LeFebvre  52:16

Thanks again so much for your time, guys.

David O’Leary  52:18

Yeah, thanks. You’re wonderful. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks, everybody.