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.