Latest / Stuff You Should Know / How Project Blue Book Worked, Pt II
Transcript
- 0:01Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of My
- 0:03Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
- 0:12Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry
- 0:16Speaker 1: over there, and this is Park du Um. Project blue
- 0:20Speaker 1: Book that's right where we left off. Project blue Book
- 0:25Speaker 1: has officially been launched. They're doing a pretty good job
- 0:28Speaker 1: of investigating stuff at this point. The Salad Days Salad
- 0:32Speaker 1: Days of official investigation. You know, every time I hear
- 0:35Speaker 1: salad Days, I think of Monty Python sketch about it's
- 0:39Speaker 1: just called salad Days. Great, you should look at I'll
- 0:41Speaker 1: check it out. Is there is there blood? I need
- 0:44Speaker 1: blood in my Monty Py A lot of blood. Okay,
- 0:46Speaker 1: I'm in then, So let's talk about this was a
- 0:51Speaker 1: big if you want to talk to salad days of
- 0:53Speaker 1: UFO sightings. Speaking of salad days, this is one of
- 0:56Speaker 1: the big years. Uh. There were fifty hundred and one
- 1:02Speaker 1: UFO sightings in nineteen fifty two, which there were a
- 1:06Speaker 1: hundred and sixty nine. So there's a lot. Yeah, almost
- 1:10Speaker 1: an increase of ten times, that's right, pretty order of magnitude,
- 1:15Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, So that's a pretty big uptick. I
- 1:18Speaker 1: guess you could say, and it just so happens that
- 1:20Speaker 1: the Air Force had positioned itself already to investigate this
- 1:25Speaker 1: stuff with an open mind. Yeah, And there were some
- 1:28Speaker 1: big ones, like there was one where the Air Force
- 1:31Speaker 1: scrambled jets to intercept what they called brilliant objects over Washington. Uh,
- 1:37Speaker 1: they were on radar and seen visually in the sky.
- 1:40Speaker 1: And Major General John Sandford, he was the Director of Intelligence,
- 1:43Speaker 1: actually brief the FBI on this one and said, it
- 1:46Speaker 1: is not entirely impossible that the object sided may possibly
- 1:50Speaker 1: be ships from another planet such as Mars. You shouldn't
- 1:54Speaker 1: added that last, really really suck the wind out of
- 1:58Speaker 1: his credibility, Yeah, because he had to go in with
- 2:00Speaker 1: a pretty good sentence there, and he could have just
- 2:02Speaker 1: said from a somewhere else in the galaxy, right, He
- 2:06Speaker 1: might as well have said Uranus. He might as well
- 2:10Speaker 1: said martians. M So Sandford also, I got the impression
- 2:15Speaker 1: he went a little bit rogue here. He held a
- 2:18Speaker 1: press conference, from what I understand of his own accord, Yeah,
- 2:23Speaker 1: to reassure the general public that the Air Force was
- 2:25Speaker 1: on the case and that yes, it's true, we can't
- 2:28Speaker 1: really explain all this stuff but we're looking into it.
- 2:31Speaker 1: But he included the word however, which is very important
- 2:35Speaker 1: because what followed that was, however, a certain percentage had
- 2:39Speaker 1: been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It
- 2:44Speaker 1: is this group of observations that we now are attempting
- 2:48Speaker 1: to resolve. But there is no conceivable threat to the
- 2:52Speaker 1: United States. I don't know if I would have felt
- 2:55Speaker 1: better hearing that presser, I wouldn't have. Yeah, I would
- 2:58Speaker 1: have been like, I knew it. I knew at the
- 3:00Speaker 1: was about to end ye Martians. Who knows who's going
- 3:02Speaker 1: to replace Tom Cruise in top gun. There's this utter
- 3:05Speaker 1: chaos and disorder, that's right. Um. So there was an
- 3:09Speaker 1: article much the same way that the Saturday Evening Post
- 3:13Speaker 1: helped put it kind of a damper on the UFO craze.
- 3:15Speaker 1: The behest of the Air Force back in the forties.
- 3:18Speaker 1: The UFO fever that spiked in nineteen fifty two was
- 3:22Speaker 1: helped along by a Life magazine article, but not from
- 3:25Speaker 1: the Air Force behest. No, No, it was like the opposite.
- 3:29Speaker 1: It was called have we visitors from outer Space? It's
- 3:32Speaker 1: just such a nineteen fifties headline, you know. Yeah, And
- 3:36Speaker 1: they offered or they said they were offering scientific evidence
- 3:39Speaker 1: that there's a real case for in a planetary saucers.
- 3:42Speaker 1: And then I think about ten sightings that they kind
- 3:45Speaker 1: of just went over in great detail. Right, it was
- 3:47Speaker 1: a very long article. It was, um, it really made
- 3:51Speaker 1: the case that yes, there was probably extraterrestrials visiting US.
- 3:55Speaker 1: I bet that was a big issue of life. Sure,
- 3:57Speaker 1: but they sold a lot of those, Yeah, and they
- 3:59Speaker 1: I mean it landed really well and really hard among
- 4:02Speaker 1: the American public because they were in the grips of
- 4:04Speaker 1: UFO fever again. So while this is going on like it,
- 4:08Speaker 1: it had kind of died down a little bit as
- 4:10Speaker 1: crazy and in fact, the I think the Air Force
- 4:13Speaker 1: was kind of surprised when it flared up again because
- 4:17Speaker 1: it had a little bit died down from seven to
- 4:19Speaker 1: say nifty, and then all of a sudden fifty two.
- 4:23Speaker 1: I don't know where it comes back. It's like a
- 4:25Speaker 1: hemorrhoid you thought you'd taken care of exactly. That's an
- 4:28Speaker 1: exact analogy. It's perfect. So the c I A, um,
- 4:33Speaker 1: they had been kind of keeping tabs on this stuff.
- 4:37Speaker 1: I wondered about this when I was reading this, I
- 4:39Speaker 1: was like where are they this whole time? That's exactly
- 4:41Speaker 1: what they wanted you to wonder and then conclude they're
- 4:44Speaker 1: not doing anything exactly Could that be on the news? Right? Right?
- 4:47Speaker 1: So it turns out that the CIA was doing something
- 4:50Speaker 1: even though it wasn't on the news. Um. There was
- 4:52Speaker 1: a guy named H. H. Marshall Chadwell, where did all
- 4:57Speaker 1: these people come from? Yel or something's great there? Everyone
- 5:00Speaker 1: involved in this this UFO investigation came from Yale. BA
- 5:04Speaker 1: sound like blue bloods. So um. He was the assistant
- 5:07Speaker 1: director of Scientific Intelligence for the CIA, and he basically said, hey, um,
- 5:12Speaker 1: we don't know what these are. By the way, I
- 5:15Speaker 1: don't know if you've been paying attention to this stuff,
- 5:17Speaker 1: but we should probably investigate it. That's right. So he Um.
- 5:21Speaker 1: He got a panel impaneled, there's really no other way
- 5:24Speaker 1: to put it. I like that word. Um in ninety
- 5:28Speaker 1: two and it was led by a physicist, a very famous,
- 5:32Speaker 1: likable physicist named Howard Percy Robertson. He was likable physicists, sure,
- 5:37Speaker 1: he was very very well liked in his class at Yale.
- 5:42Speaker 1: He would be H. Percy Robertson at Yale though, Oh
- 5:45Speaker 1: I guess so he really would he loosened the club
- 5:49Speaker 1: tie by going by Howard Percy. Yeah, so he was
- 5:53Speaker 1: from cal Tech and he looked into this thing and
- 5:57Speaker 1: they had this panel and they met for for days
- 6:00Speaker 1: twelve hours a few hours a day. That seems a
- 6:03Speaker 1: little skimpy to me, but whatever, same here, I've only
- 6:05Speaker 1: got three hours a day to do. They just basically
- 6:08Speaker 1: went around the room taking turns reading that Life magazine
- 6:11Speaker 1: article out loud, I guess so, and then discussing what
- 6:14Speaker 1: they thought about it. So Repelled is still here. He's
- 6:17Speaker 1: the head of Blue Book at the time. Still Heinik
- 6:20Speaker 1: was there. He's still around. Yeah, he's never he's never left, right, No,
- 6:24Speaker 1: he's part of this this ongoing project that's right investigation. Uh.
- 6:28Speaker 1: And then other people that were involved that you know
- 6:31Speaker 1: should have been in the room and were in the room,
- 6:32Speaker 1: and they were all presenting what they thought were the
- 6:35Speaker 1: most interesting cases to what would be eventually known as
- 6:39Speaker 1: the Robertson Panel. Right, the Robertson Panel said thank you
- 6:42Speaker 1: very much, all of you will will be in touch.
- 6:44Speaker 1: Don't call us, We'll call you. And they issued a
- 6:47Speaker 1: final report and it said that of all UFO cases
- 6:51Speaker 1: could be explained by meteorological, meteorological, astronomical, celestial, known scientific stuff.
- 6:59Speaker 1: Sure technology, that that's believable. Okay, the other ten percent, though,
- 7:05Speaker 1: if we spend enough time and energy investigating it, we
- 7:09Speaker 1: could also explain those. Yeah, that's where the b S
- 7:12Speaker 1: comes in. Their conclusion was that given enough time and effort,
- 7:16Speaker 1: of all UFO sightings could be explained underknown scientific or
- 7:22Speaker 1: technological explanation. And no one said, so are you saying
- 7:26Speaker 1: that ten percent of these are so confounding that you
- 7:30Speaker 1: can't explain them? And they went, yeah, but we could,
- 7:33Speaker 1: we just don't have enough time. Exactly. It's a really
- 7:36Speaker 1: passive aggressive way of saying there is no such thing
- 7:39Speaker 1: as alien. Yeah, pretty much so that but that is
- 7:42Speaker 1: ultimately what they said. Yeah, but here's the thing though,
- 7:45Speaker 1: they did see that this was the fact that people
- 7:48Speaker 1: were sighting these UFOs, and it was all over the papers. Um,
- 7:51Speaker 1: the craze was a bad thing and and dangerous, even
- 7:55Speaker 1: because the Cold War is heating up like we were
- 7:58Speaker 1: talking about. Um, the Soviets have been known to secretly
- 8:02Speaker 1: exploit the American psyche. Um, that never happens anymore. Of course,
- 8:09Speaker 1: they don't do anything like that. Well, it's like you said,
- 8:11Speaker 1: this was the Cold War, that's right. They were known
- 8:14Speaker 1: to do this kind of thing, and they thought, this
- 8:16Speaker 1: is a perfect opportunity for the Soviets to come in
- 8:20Speaker 1: fake reports about UFOs, get everyone distracted, worked up into
- 8:25Speaker 1: a frenzy, um and they start asking them questions about
- 8:28Speaker 1: pulsating and and they said, and not only that, but
- 8:34Speaker 1: the Soviets, Uh, I read their papers or I have
- 8:37Speaker 1: them read to me, and uh, they don't have any
- 8:40Speaker 1: reportings of UFO sidings. So they're clearly if there are any,
- 8:43Speaker 1: they're keeping a lid on it. And this is our
- 8:45Speaker 1: problem that they can exploit. We can't do the same
- 8:48Speaker 1: back to them, right, So all the Soviets had to
- 8:50Speaker 1: do would be come in and be like UFOs UFOs
- 8:52Speaker 1: basically like shouting, you know, fire and a crowded theater,
- 8:56Speaker 1: which is the legal of course, as everyone knows. That's right. Um, so, uh,
- 9:01Speaker 1: this is a this is a problem. This is like
- 9:03Speaker 1: with the way the CIA thought, you know, this is
- 9:06Speaker 1: something that they need to do something about. So they
- 9:09Speaker 1: decided to um basically undo that that Cold War hysteria
- 9:14Speaker 1: and panic. Yeah, but they were in a pickle though,
- 9:17Speaker 1: because they like they're supposed to be tamping down this
- 9:22Speaker 1: thing that they don't if that they I feel like
- 9:26Speaker 1: they shouldn't even be investigating to begin with. Right, they're
- 9:29Speaker 1: denying that something even exists, but continuing to investigate it. Right.
- 9:34Speaker 1: So what I was saying is they decided to say, Okay,
- 9:36Speaker 1: we need to get rid of this Cold War hysteria,
- 9:39Speaker 1: we need to kind of take the air out of
- 9:41Speaker 1: this weird phenomenon in American culture. And they decided to
- 9:46Speaker 1: do that by exploiting America with a public relations campaign
- 9:50Speaker 1: very as you say, bern Asian. Uh. And they said, hey,
- 9:54Speaker 1: call up Walt Disney. Yeah, and they really did. They thought,
- 9:58Speaker 1: you know, um, we're gonna get this out in the media.
- 10:00Speaker 1: We're gonna have um, we're gonna create this propaganda that's
- 10:05Speaker 1: gonna sweep the nation on TV and in movies and
- 10:08Speaker 1: in newspapers debunking all this stuff, showing like, hey, this
- 10:12Speaker 1: is how you explain this stuff, right, saying like here's
- 10:15Speaker 1: this report and here's the scientific explanation for it, and
- 10:18Speaker 1: that they consider that would be very powerful. And I
- 10:21Speaker 1: think they're right. Yeah, just basically priming America's pump to
- 10:24Speaker 1: where if you're having a water cooler conversation and bring
- 10:27Speaker 1: something up about a UFO. There are five people there
- 10:30Speaker 1: to say, didn't you see that thing like that? It's
- 10:33Speaker 1: weather balloons. People love doing that and if you can
- 10:36Speaker 1: arm people with that, they will do it every time.
- 10:39Speaker 1: And that that actually is a pretty good plan for
- 10:42Speaker 1: tamping down. It's a great plan. They also decided, maybe
- 10:46Speaker 1: one of the less great parts of the plan, to
- 10:48Speaker 1: surveil and keep tabs on UFO groups for anti American
- 10:55Speaker 1: stuff because this was during the McCarthy era. Of course. Yeah,
- 10:58Speaker 1: so everybody was doing anti America and stuff if they
- 11:00Speaker 1: weren't painting their white picket fence. Yeah, and I was.
- 11:03Speaker 1: You know, I mentioned Disney and we both laugh, But
- 11:05Speaker 1: that was not a joke. They actually did think about
- 11:08Speaker 1: um and who knows, maybe they got in touch with
- 11:10Speaker 1: Disney about making some propaganda pieces to help them out
- 11:14Speaker 1: because they had done that before. Chip and Dale originally
- 11:17Speaker 1: started out as UFOO investigators. But it's just kind of
- 11:20Speaker 1: one thing led to another. Uh. They worked on propaganda
- 11:24Speaker 1: pieces before that was one called Donald gets drafted, uh
- 11:28Speaker 1: Donald Duck propaganda film UM And they said it never
- 11:31Speaker 1: came to fruition, but it would not surprise me if
- 11:33Speaker 1: they didn't poke around a little bit, right, like in
- 11:36Speaker 1: Earnest Donald gets drafted. Did Yeah that was a one
- 11:40Speaker 1: that got released. Oh you mean like the UFO one. Yeah, Like,
- 11:43Speaker 1: it wouldn't surprise me if they really did have an
- 11:45Speaker 1: official meeting and Disney just said no, like we're not
- 11:48Speaker 1: going to get involved. They're like, but we have this
- 11:50Speaker 1: idea about psychic children. But I guess it's kind of
- 11:55Speaker 1: pro psychic. Really, I wonder what the messages an Escape
- 11:58Speaker 1: from which Mountain. I haven't seen it in so long.
- 12:00Speaker 1: I'm sure there's some very clear message that as an adult,
- 12:03Speaker 1: you'd be like, this is what I was taught. Yeah,
- 12:05Speaker 1: I mean I saw both of those. Didn't the rock
- 12:08Speaker 1: recreate that remake it? I think so? But I did
- 12:12Speaker 1: not recreate. Makes it sound like he just did it
- 12:14Speaker 1: in his head in his living room or something here.
- 12:17Speaker 1: He recreated that after dinner one night. I really think
- 12:20Speaker 1: he was in that a remake. No, I think you're right.
- 12:22Speaker 1: I never I never bothered. Oh I didn't. I like
- 12:25Speaker 1: that guy though. Oh The Rocky is great. I mean
- 12:27Speaker 1: I don't go see his movies much, but he seems
- 12:29Speaker 1: like a good dude, right, he does seem like a
- 12:31Speaker 1: good dude. You have a sense for these kind of things.
- 12:36Speaker 1: There was one TV show, There was a CBS show
- 12:38Speaker 1: called UFOs colon Friend, Foe or Fantasy? And is this
- 12:45Speaker 1: the one that Cronkite Okay, I didn't know if that
- 12:49Speaker 1: was a separate one. Did I write this that poorly?
- 12:52Speaker 1: It's part of the same sentence? No, I know, I
- 12:54Speaker 1: just I couldn't tell if it was me it was
- 12:57Speaker 1: my because it says isn't the same sentence narrated by
- 13:00Speaker 1: Walter Cronkite? Yes, okay, No, you are heated, grace, thank
- 13:05Speaker 1: you for rest. This is the nineteen sixty six uh.
- 13:09Speaker 1: And this was um largely over the Michigan sightings. Yeah,
- 13:13Speaker 1: we'll talk about those in a little bit. Yeah, just
- 13:15Speaker 1: stick a pin in that. But it was big enough
- 13:17Speaker 1: that they brought concrete or cron Kite out concrete, you
- 13:21Speaker 1: know how I'm talking about, Sure Walter concrete. That's he's
- 13:25Speaker 1: a legend. You turn them upside down and shake him
- 13:27Speaker 1: and we'll come out of the cup. So but in
- 13:30Speaker 1: that in that documentary is very much a pro skeptic
- 13:33Speaker 1: anti UFO documentary where it's they followed this um the
- 13:38Speaker 1: Robertson Panel recommendations of saying, here's this amazing report of
- 13:43Speaker 1: the sighting. Here's how it's explained. Here's another study. Here's
- 13:46Speaker 1: how it's explained. Don't you see now that UFOs are
- 13:49Speaker 1: actually really just kind of something. They're they're not alien.
- 13:53Speaker 1: It's fantasy. They called it friend forward fantasy. They should
- 13:55Speaker 1: have just called it UFOs fantasy, right, because that was
- 13:58Speaker 1: the upshot of it all. So UM, that Robertson panel report,
- 14:02Speaker 1: there's something else that was really interesting about it. UM
- 14:06Speaker 1: had a very surprising knock on effect years later. So
- 14:11Speaker 1: this the panel was was impaneled in ninety two, i
- 14:15Speaker 1: think the year of that, that UFO fever outbreak, and
- 14:19Speaker 1: it's um it's proceedings and its recommendations stayed classified until
- 14:23Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, and after a blue book was gone. Yeah,
- 14:28Speaker 1: years after it was gone. So I'm sure they figured like, oh,
- 14:30Speaker 1: it's fine, whatever, just release it. But here's the thing.
- 14:33Speaker 1: Up to that point, up to nineteen seventy five, as
- 14:36Speaker 1: far as anyone in the American public was concerned, the
- 14:40Speaker 1: CIA had just remained quiet on the whole thing. It
- 14:42Speaker 1: was all you. US Air Force CEA had nothing to
- 14:45Speaker 1: do with it, And so all of a sudden, this
- 14:47Speaker 1: Robertson panel comes out, and it's not only their own report,
- 14:51Speaker 1: but they also mentioned an earlier CIA panel that had
- 14:55Speaker 1: basically the same conclusions um that showed that very much
- 14:59Speaker 1: the I was involved in this and that they covered
- 15:03Speaker 1: it up and two people in nine it gave the
- 15:07Speaker 1: the alien conspiracy theory a real shot in the arm
- 15:10Speaker 1: because it showed no, the CIA was definitely investigating this
- 15:14Speaker 1: and they covered it up. So how can we trust
- 15:16Speaker 1: anything that anybody says about this? Yeah, covering, covering it
- 15:20Speaker 1: up to begin with just made the cover up. It
- 15:24Speaker 1: was a cover up. It made a it made something
- 15:27Speaker 1: that wasn't a cover up a cover up. Yeah, exactly,
- 15:29Speaker 1: by covering and fueled all sorts of conspiracy theories. That's
- 15:33Speaker 1: how it works. That's just how it works. The US government,
- 15:36Speaker 1: probably any government, will never ever learn, but that is
- 15:40Speaker 1: just how it works. That's right. There was another report
- 15:43Speaker 1: declassified in nine, uh, where the CIA set around the
- 15:48Speaker 1: mid nineteen fifties, they started observing planes that could flat
- 15:53Speaker 1: high altitudes, they started creating them. Yeah, well it said observing,
- 15:58Speaker 1: So I guess they were just observing what they create.
- 16:00Speaker 1: Come on. You can't take everything I say, literally. Uh,
- 16:04Speaker 1: and we're talking about remember earlier I kind of teased
- 16:06Speaker 1: about the fact that the Soviets might have these spy
- 16:09Speaker 1: planes because we had spy planes, the U two spy
- 16:12Speaker 1: plane very much top secret at the time. Yeah, it's
- 16:15Speaker 1: it's like the old adage when you point in the
- 16:18Speaker 1: sky at the Rusha's spy plane, you've got three fingers
- 16:22Speaker 1: pointing back at your spy plane. Right. Uh. It was
- 16:26Speaker 1: very much top secret, like I said, and it was.
- 16:28Speaker 1: It could go up to sixty thousand feet, which is
- 16:32Speaker 1: three to five times higher than any commercial plane could
- 16:35Speaker 1: fly at the time. And they were commercial pilots are
- 16:37Speaker 1: seeing these things and reporting on them. Well, yeah, because
- 16:40Speaker 1: they were silver at first, they weren't painted the cooler
- 16:43Speaker 1: black color until later on. I guess with the touring
- 16:47Speaker 1: models that they started to pump out there and they
- 16:50Speaker 1: you know, were very reflective, so at sunrise and at sunset,
- 16:53Speaker 1: these things would cast these weird lights and uh, you know,
- 16:57Speaker 1: commercial pilots, because they didn't know this was a thing,
- 17:00Speaker 1: would say, hey, there's something going on a way up
- 17:01Speaker 1: above me, or people would see them from the ground. Yeah,
- 17:04Speaker 1: flying really fast, really high, and looking like fire. Yeah,
- 17:09Speaker 1: because this started I think testerones in the mid nineteen fifties,
- 17:13Speaker 1: so that coincides with a lot of these sightings. Yeah.
- 17:16Speaker 1: So this this c I a memo for that was
- 17:18Speaker 1: declassified in basically said, by our estimate of that seven
- 17:23Speaker 1: one unidentified UM report of the reports that were remain unidentified,
- 17:32Speaker 1: Project bluebooks files, UM are you two and SR seventy
- 17:36Speaker 1: one test flights can probably account for about half of those, right,
- 17:40Speaker 1: which whittles that number down dramatically. Should we take another break?
- 17:45Speaker 1: All right, We'll take a break and come back and
- 17:47Speaker 1: talk about the return of Heineck right after this, Chuck,
- 18:16Speaker 1: this is going so well. Thanks, I'm really impressed. Good
- 18:21Speaker 1: so Heinich, He said he returned, but really he never
- 18:25Speaker 1: went anywhere. He's still plodding along doing his thing. He
- 18:29Speaker 1: started out at Project sign. By this time it's blue book.
- 18:32Speaker 1: It's like us with this place. How many times has
- 18:35Speaker 1: it changed hands? A million? We're still here. We're like
- 18:39Speaker 1: the Heinecks here of how stuff works. So um with
- 18:43Speaker 1: with the years, however, Heinek himself seems to have changed,
- 18:48Speaker 1: and he changed probably earlier than he made it public
- 18:51Speaker 1: that he had changed. But he later said, you know what, everybody,
- 18:56Speaker 1: I actually think that these UFOs are a thing at
- 18:59Speaker 1: the very least some stuff we can't explain, and we
- 19:01Speaker 1: should be investigating them way more scientifically than we are.
- 19:05Speaker 1: And that really flew in the face of the public
- 19:08Speaker 1: face that he had, which by the by the time
- 19:11Speaker 1: he he came out and said that had become something
- 19:13Speaker 1: of a laughing stock at the behest of the Air Force. Yeah,
- 19:16Speaker 1: like what the change was is Repelled left in nineteen
- 19:20Speaker 1: fifty three and he was the dude that kind of
- 19:22Speaker 1: had it running like a legit investigatory body. He left,
- 19:27Speaker 1: and then Heineck says it basically just became a pr
- 19:29Speaker 1: device um and the stats prove it out. It was
- 19:34Speaker 1: the unexplained case rate of up to that we talked
- 19:38Speaker 1: about after Repelled left that went down to one, which
- 19:42Speaker 1: is just an insult. Even if you're a skeptic, that's
- 19:46Speaker 1: an insult, right, because again they would use anything that
- 19:49Speaker 1: they could think of, including planets that weren't even visible
- 19:52Speaker 1: in the sky at the time. There was very famously
- 19:55Speaker 1: one UM where I think there was a sighting in Oklahoma,
- 20:02Speaker 1: I believe, Yeah, yeah, there was a the Oklahoma State
- 20:08Speaker 1: Police Tinker Air Force Base and a meteorologist in Oklahoma
- 20:12Speaker 1: who was using weather radar at the time, all independently
- 20:16Speaker 1: tracked four objects, one of them on radar, and Heinek
- 20:21Speaker 1: in the Air Force of who were doing UM Project
- 20:25Speaker 1: blue Book representing Project Blue Books, said it was Jupiter. Yeah,
- 20:30Speaker 1: which is not a good explanation for four objects that
- 20:33Speaker 1: are both visually cited and show up on radar, because
- 20:37Speaker 1: Jupiter doesn't show up on radar, and it certainly doesn't
- 20:39Speaker 1: show up as four fast moving objects. Yes, and Jupiter
- 20:43Speaker 1: wasn't even visible in the night sky on that date, right,
- 20:45Speaker 1: So this definitely kind of like is a really good
- 20:47Speaker 1: example of what what Heinech was having to come out
- 20:50Speaker 1: and say to the public, you know, towards the end
- 20:53Speaker 1: of his UM his Camel's backbreaking. Yeah. And here's the
- 20:58Speaker 1: thing is, he was still slightly skept I mean, I
- 21:02Speaker 1: don't know about slightly skeptical. He was still a skeptic,
- 21:04Speaker 1: I guess. But his whole beef was uh. And he says,
- 21:08Speaker 1: this is a direct quote, he said, everything was negative
- 21:12Speaker 1: and unyielding in their attitude. Everything had to have an explanation.
- 21:15Speaker 1: And I began to resent that even though I basically
- 21:18Speaker 1: felt the same way. I thought they weren't going about
- 21:20Speaker 1: it in the right way. So that was the deal
- 21:23Speaker 1: is the Air Force was just sort of an obligatory
- 21:26Speaker 1: stamp of not true. It was this, and he was like, well,
- 21:30Speaker 1: I don't necessarily think it's a alien saucer either, but like,
- 21:34Speaker 1: can we investigate it and get like a real explanation
- 21:36Speaker 1: at least? Yeah, that was definitely his thing. And then
- 21:39Speaker 1: the other thing was that one through line that has
- 21:42Speaker 1: kept skeptics interested in this is credible observers reporting incredible,
- 21:48Speaker 1: unexplainable things. That's right. So those two things, the Air
- 21:50Speaker 1: Force jurking him in the way that they were carrying
- 21:52Speaker 1: out the investigation, and these credible observers actually caused him
- 21:57Speaker 1: to undergo a conversion. There's a debate, oh, for whether
- 22:00Speaker 1: it was a slow conversion or a quick conversion. Some
- 22:02Speaker 1: people suspect that he was actually a lifelong believer and
- 22:05Speaker 1: that he just kind of kept it under wraps. But
- 22:08Speaker 1: even after you underwent this conversion, which has been estimated
- 22:11Speaker 1: to have happened around nineteen sixty, he kept it. He
- 22:15Speaker 1: kept quiet, as a matter of fact, for years, and
- 22:18Speaker 1: he didn't want to stake his personal reputation, his professional career,
- 22:22Speaker 1: all that stuff on just coming out and being like, hey, everybody,
- 22:26Speaker 1: the Air Force is lying to you, especially considering that
- 22:29Speaker 1: the general public by this time had had completely bought
- 22:33Speaker 1: into the idea that the Air Force was just blatantly
- 22:36Speaker 1: and clumsily trying to cover up knowledge of UFOs and
- 22:40Speaker 1: their reality. Yeah, he said he was kind of waiting
- 22:42Speaker 1: for the big one, right, like something so irrefutable that
- 22:46Speaker 1: he could actually really go public with it. All right, Well,
- 22:49Speaker 1: let's talk about the swamp gas in Michigan. This is
- 22:52Speaker 1: in March nineteen sixty six, very famous case. Uh, there
- 22:56Speaker 1: was a sighting over several days or hundreds of people
- 22:59Speaker 1: that reported glowing objects hovering and flying around an arbor Michigan,
- 23:05Speaker 1: and then a bunch of towns along the countryside between
- 23:08Speaker 1: Toledo and Detroit. Same thing. Eight seven students at Hillsdale
- 23:13Speaker 1: College in Michigan, and they all said the same stuff
- 23:16Speaker 1: as that we've seen these objects with red, white and
- 23:19Speaker 1: blue lights. Um one family instead of UFO landed on
- 23:23Speaker 1: their farm. I don't know about that one, sure, but
- 23:25Speaker 1: you never know. Yeah, the college students might stretch credibility
- 23:28Speaker 1: a little bit, but it was a big national story.
- 23:33Speaker 1: Heinek went there and it was basically a frenzy, so
- 23:36Speaker 1: much so that he had trouble getting interviews with the
- 23:40Speaker 1: witnesses as the official like representative, because the press was
- 23:44Speaker 1: all over it. Right, Yeah, the press were eating up
- 23:46Speaker 1: all of their time. He couldn't he couldn't interview them,
- 23:49Speaker 1: but he finally did, and he held a press conference,
- 23:52Speaker 1: and um at the press conference, he said, it's possible
- 23:57Speaker 1: some some of the sightings may have mistaken swamp gas
- 24:00Speaker 1: for UFOs. And in this guy's defense, he had he
- 24:04Speaker 1: said some. He didn't say all. He wasn't dismissive about it.
- 24:09Speaker 1: It was just something he said, but the press took
- 24:12Speaker 1: it and and it converted it into all. Basically, the
- 24:16Speaker 1: headlines read Heineck dismissed his sightings as swamp gas and
- 24:20Speaker 1: that that was that. Like he had basically said, it
- 24:22Speaker 1: was all swamp gas. Everybody knew that scores and dozens
- 24:26Speaker 1: and possibly hundreds of people across Ohio and Michigan hadn't
- 24:30Speaker 1: all seen swamp gas, and that was a preposterous explanation,
- 24:35Speaker 1: especially if you laid it on the whole thing. Yeah,
- 24:38Speaker 1: Johnny Carson even had an astronomer on to basically refute
- 24:43Speaker 1: the swamp gas theory. There. Yeah, there's a headline air
- 24:46Speaker 1: Force insults public with swamp gas theory. That wasn't like
- 24:50Speaker 1: a legitimate newspaper. So it was a ridiculous thing that
- 24:55Speaker 1: got It was a dumb thing to say, but I
- 24:57Speaker 1: think he said it not not realizing that it was
- 25:01Speaker 1: going to become the explanation and it was going to
- 25:04Speaker 1: make him a further laughing stock. It just so happened
- 25:07Speaker 1: that that swamp gas thing was the last straw that
- 25:10Speaker 1: that broke Heine's back. Yeah, it broke his back. And
- 25:14Speaker 1: there was a senator out of Michigan named Gerald Ford,
- 25:18Speaker 1: and he said, I want to I demand a congressional hearing.
- 25:21Speaker 1: And they said who are you? He said, I'm Senator
- 25:23Speaker 1: Gerald Ford. I'm gonna be president one day. Yeah, you'll see.
- 25:25Speaker 1: I'll fix you good when i'm president. They said, how
- 25:27Speaker 1: are you gonna be president? Your senator? He said, well,
- 25:29Speaker 1: it's complicated, you'll see, right. Uh So he demands this
- 25:33Speaker 1: hearing and they, uh they held a hearing the following month,
- 25:39Speaker 1: and this is when Heinek really got a chance to
- 25:42Speaker 1: to kind of publicly out himself as a convert and
- 25:46Speaker 1: said my recommendation, Senator Ford, watch your step is UFO
- 25:52Speaker 1: sighting should be investigated by scientists and not the military.
- 25:56Speaker 1: And this was music to the ears of the military
- 25:58Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. Yeah, they said, he said
- 26:01Speaker 1: it finally. Yeah, great, They said, yes, you're absolutely right,
- 26:04Speaker 1: we should have somebody scientifically investigate this. And the Air Force,
- 26:09Speaker 1: for its part, saw an out of being in this
- 26:13Speaker 1: UFO investigating business that it didn't want to be in
- 26:16Speaker 1: the first place, that that in some way Heinek had
- 26:20Speaker 1: just opened the door for them. So they said, yeah,
- 26:22Speaker 1: we agree with Heinek. You guys should totally get some
- 26:25Speaker 1: sort of scientific study going. And I don't know if
- 26:29Speaker 1: it was Congress that hired them or if the Air
- 26:32Speaker 1: Force did, but either way, a committee led by a
- 26:35Speaker 1: physicist named Edward Condon, University of Colorado, UM Buffalo. They yeah,
- 26:41Speaker 1: they took up the I they took up the task
- 26:45Speaker 1: of figuring out whether um UFOs actually were a thing
- 26:49Speaker 1: or not in deserve scientific study. Right. So this is
- 26:53Speaker 1: a three year study in the end, and the objective
- 26:56Speaker 1: was to really take it seriously as an academic and
- 27:00Speaker 1: they did that, right. No, they didn't it was really
- 27:03Speaker 1: just a smoke screen um to get the Air Force
- 27:07Speaker 1: out of this business once and for all, because Condon basically,
- 27:11Speaker 1: and there was a bit of a drumbeat in the
- 27:12Speaker 1: public of like your wastinger taxpayer money. There were some
- 27:16Speaker 1: people that shot this was super worthwhile, but most people
- 27:19Speaker 1: saw it as like, why is the Air Force wasting
- 27:21Speaker 1: their time with this stuff? I would guess that would
- 27:22Speaker 1: have been William F. Buckley's position probably, so so, Yeah,
- 27:26Speaker 1: there were some people, especially people in the Air Force tour,
- 27:29Speaker 1: like this is this is a dumb thing to do,
- 27:31Speaker 1: where this is a dumb waste of time. So Condon said, Okay,
- 27:35Speaker 1: I am possibly the only person on the planet who's
- 27:39Speaker 1: in a position to get the Air Force out of
- 27:42Speaker 1: UFO investigations. I'll do a little wink wink, nudge nudge,
- 27:45Speaker 1: ask a few people if it pulsated or throbbed, and
- 27:48Speaker 1: then we'll just release a report that says no. And
- 27:52Speaker 1: that's exactly what they did. In January of nineteen sixty nine,
- 27:55Speaker 1: they released the Condom Report, which was respectably four and
- 27:59Speaker 1: thirty nine pages long. Yeah, but this quote from Condon
- 28:03Speaker 1: though in sixty seven, uh, it is my inclination right
- 28:06Speaker 1: now to recommend that the government get out of this business.
- 28:08Speaker 1: My attitude right now is there's nothing to it. But
- 28:11Speaker 1: I'm not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year,
- 28:13Speaker 1: So that that really it really undermines that really frankly
- 28:18Speaker 1: whittles it down to about fifty just with that one quote.
- 28:22Speaker 1: You know, so, Um, the kind of report basically says, hey, everybody, Um,
- 28:27Speaker 1: our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the
- 28:29Speaker 1: study of UFOs in the past twenty one years that
- 28:32Speaker 1: has added to scientific knowledge. Careful consideration of the record
- 28:36Speaker 1: as it is available to us leads us to conclude
- 28:38Speaker 1: that further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified
- 28:43Speaker 1: in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby. And
- 28:47Speaker 1: the weird thing is, Chuck is I agree with him wholeheartedly. Yeah,
- 28:51Speaker 1: we didn't learn anything except about ourselves from investigating UFOs
- 28:57Speaker 1: all these years that we know about. Okay, I'll give
- 29:00Speaker 1: you that, except for toasters, and um, did that come
- 29:04Speaker 1: from the UFO tech. That's something what some people say, Yeah, yeah,
- 29:08Speaker 1: there's like if you're a UFO believer, Um, one of
- 29:12Speaker 1: the big things people point to is this boom in
- 29:14Speaker 1: technology that came after World War Two. We're on about
- 29:18Speaker 1: the time the ros Ball crash happened, and they point
- 29:20Speaker 1: to right Patterson and say, well, we learned a lot
- 29:22Speaker 1: from this, and we started making microwaves and tang and
- 29:26Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff ended up on the moon. Um,
- 29:28Speaker 1: those aliens were touched in their bread, and right, we
- 29:30Speaker 1: gotta get in on this. I like the real version
- 29:33Speaker 1: of it where that guy had a chocolate bar, Percy,
- 29:35Speaker 1: I can't remember his last name. He had a chocolate
- 29:38Speaker 1: bar in his in his pocket and melted when he
- 29:40Speaker 1: got too close to a microwave. He's like, let's start
- 29:43Speaker 1: making popcorn with this thing. Man, I forgot about that
- 29:45Speaker 1: guy Percy something. We're gonna call him Percy Sledge. Okay,
- 29:49Speaker 1: I was just about to say that. I was so uh.
- 29:53Speaker 1: I'll tell you what. Let's take a break here and
- 29:55Speaker 1: we'll tell you about what happened with Project blue Book
- 29:57Speaker 1: right after this. Alright, Project blue Book closed was killing
- 30:28Speaker 1: December seventeenth nine. It was officially closed the Airport sonatifact
- 30:34Speaker 1: sheet and said, no UFO has ever been a threat
- 30:38Speaker 1: to our national security. UM, they don't recognize any technological developments. Um,
- 30:43Speaker 1: there are no extraterrestrial vehicles. UM. And if you're a ufologist,
- 30:48Speaker 1: is that what it's called, you followed upologists? Then um,
- 30:53Speaker 1: you think it's just all one big lie. Still, yeah,
- 30:56Speaker 1: there's there's another documented sighting. Here's the thing with all
- 31:00Speaker 1: these documented sightings, it's like, yes, people did say this. Yeah,
- 31:06Speaker 1: So it's it's really tough to kind of like as
- 31:09Speaker 1: coming from like the stuff you should know way to
- 31:11Speaker 1: be like, well to contradict this official report. Here's this other,
- 31:16Speaker 1: you know, thing that we should be skeptical of. But
- 31:18Speaker 1: there is there was something that happened at UM a
- 31:22Speaker 1: Malmstrom Air Force based in Montana in ninety seven where
- 31:27Speaker 1: allegedly ten of our nuclear warheads were suddenly taken offline
- 31:35Speaker 1: while this unidentified object was hovering overhead, and that the
- 31:40Speaker 1: people who were tasked with UM watching the warheads all
- 31:44Speaker 1: reported on this and it was documented supposedly, and that
- 31:49Speaker 1: the Air Forces fact sheet thus that this was never
- 31:52Speaker 1: a threat to our national security was a flat lie. Yeah.
- 31:56Speaker 1: So in the end, they Project Bluebook and all of
- 31:58Speaker 1: the other projects came before it investigated over twelve thousand sightings,
- 32:04Speaker 1: UM seven hundred and one remained unidentified. If you go
- 32:08Speaker 1: by that number if you listen to the military, like
- 32:11Speaker 1: you said, half of those were you two's or blackbirds,
- 32:15Speaker 1: which is like what three fifty or so? But even
- 32:17Speaker 1: still okay, So there's three d and fifty that's a lot, okay,
- 32:20Speaker 1: But other people say, no, it's even more than that,
- 32:23Speaker 1: right exactly because these were official investigations and you didn't
- 32:28Speaker 1: even investigate the one that I saw, buddy. A lot
- 32:30Speaker 1: of that stuff goes on. That's one. Um. Yeah, and
- 32:33Speaker 1: that's actually evidenced in the number of sightings that increased
- 32:36Speaker 1: after Project Blue Books. So um, in nineteen sixty five,
- 32:42Speaker 1: I believe there was eight hundred and eighty six reported
- 32:44Speaker 1: sightings as part of Project Blue Book. In two thousand
- 32:48Speaker 1: and fourteen, there were eighty six hundred nineteen. In two
- 32:53Speaker 1: thou eighteen there were thirty two d and thirty six.
- 32:55Speaker 1: That was a slow year. So a lot of people
- 32:57Speaker 1: say the Air Force wasn't actually investigating all these Yeah,
- 33:01Speaker 1: and granted this is you should know, this comes from
- 33:03Speaker 1: private UH groups and citizens who have developed these groups
- 33:08Speaker 1: for reporting, like the National UFO Reporting Center, because it's
- 33:12Speaker 1: not codified now by the military, so citizens have done this.
- 33:18Speaker 1: So take it. Take that number with a grain of salt.
- 33:21Speaker 1: But at the same time, it's not necessarily that these
- 33:24Speaker 1: groups are drumming up sightings. There may even be more
- 33:28Speaker 1: because at the time, in the forties, fifties, and sixties,
- 33:32Speaker 1: the American public generally knew if you saw something, you
- 33:34Speaker 1: would contact your local Air Force base. I wonder how
- 33:38Speaker 1: many people know who to contact if they think they
- 33:40Speaker 1: see something, have no idea. I don't either. I would
- 33:43Speaker 1: just drive up to Dobbins and like knock on the
- 33:45Speaker 1: front gate. They'd be like, come inside, forever um. One
- 33:49Speaker 1: of the other things. One of the other reasons that
- 33:51Speaker 1: people say now the unidentified number is actually way higher
- 33:55Speaker 1: than seven hundred is because if you take those cases
- 33:59Speaker 1: where you say it was Jupiter, it was a weather balloon,
- 34:02Speaker 1: it was some stupid thing we just came up with.
- 34:04Speaker 1: Those cases go from identified to actually unidentified, and so
- 34:08Speaker 1: that number increases even further. Project Blue Book Will Never
- 34:12Speaker 1: Die Friend, No, well not and something else won't ever
- 34:15Speaker 1: die is Heinik is the person who who developed the
- 34:20Speaker 1: very famous Close Encounters rating scale. Uh. If you've seen
- 34:25Speaker 1: the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, highly recommended.
- 34:28Speaker 1: First of all, great Great Steven Spielberg film with the
- 34:32Speaker 1: great great Richard Dreyfuss, Terry gar for God's sakes, but
- 34:37Speaker 1: using that man, she's so good. I miss her. So
- 34:42Speaker 1: the first kind is and you get one point. It's
- 34:46Speaker 1: a rating scale for the believability of a sighting. Yeah,
- 34:50Speaker 1: I just love the point thing, right, I got two points.
- 34:53Speaker 1: So you get one point if you uh see a
- 34:56Speaker 1: UFO within five feet not bad. Set kind is two points.
- 35:01Speaker 1: Of course, that is a physical effect um happens, which
- 35:05Speaker 1: is like in Close Encounters when he's on the railroad tracks,
- 35:10Speaker 1: his headlights start going bersark and his truck shakes, and
- 35:13Speaker 1: the crossing gate on the on the railroad track goes
- 35:16Speaker 1: up and down. That would be I wonder if there'd
- 35:18Speaker 1: be two points for each of those things. Are two
- 35:20Speaker 1: points for the experience? I don't know, because I mean
- 35:23Speaker 1: you're just running those numbers, two for each point. It
- 35:26Speaker 1: blinked again, It blinked again, right. And then finally the
- 35:29Speaker 1: third kind, the old three point line, that is when
- 35:33Speaker 1: you see an alien or interact with an alien, and
- 35:36Speaker 1: obviously in the film, that is when Richard Dreyfuss at
- 35:39Speaker 1: the end walks up into that spaceship and takes the
- 35:42Speaker 1: hand the aliens and probably like the most unbelivable. It's
- 35:47Speaker 1: a pretty old movie. And then it's called the Third Kind. Sure,
- 35:50Speaker 1: so the most unbelievable part of this whole thing is
- 35:55Speaker 1: that Heinik went from the guy who was saying it
- 35:58Speaker 1: was a weather balloon, it was this train pilot saw
- 36:01Speaker 1: Jupiter even though Jupiter wasn't even the sky right then
- 36:04Speaker 1: to the guy who literally wrote the book that founded uphology,
- 36:09Speaker 1: it was the UFO experience calling a scientific inquiry. Yeah,
- 36:13Speaker 1: he just completely basically switched sides and said, there's a
- 36:17Speaker 1: lot of stuff that we can't explain. Here's all these
- 36:20Speaker 1: you know, all this experience that I have investigating these things.
- 36:23Speaker 1: Let's go forward and figure this out. I don't want
- 36:26Speaker 1: to be a cynic, but I wonder what salary he
- 36:30Speaker 1: had as a private citizen for years and years doing
- 36:34Speaker 1: this being the face of this. Do you think he
- 36:38Speaker 1: was like, that's pretty good money. Maybe, And then when
- 36:41Speaker 1: the time was up, he said, you know what writes
- 36:45Speaker 1: some books? Maybe, um As from what I can tell,
- 36:48Speaker 1: he's a respected person in the field and in a
- 36:51Speaker 1: lot of fields. Actually I didn't get anything because whenever,
- 36:54Speaker 1: you know, when we research something, if somebody's like that
- 36:57Speaker 1: somebody's out there sniping them. I don't remember this really
- 37:01Speaker 1: coming up. The only thing I saw that was that
- 37:04Speaker 1: was somebody throwing shade. Was the idea that he had
- 37:07Speaker 1: been a believer all along, right, and then it was
- 37:10Speaker 1: actually faking as a skeptic. But he was a pretty
- 37:14Speaker 1: pretty believable fake skeptic. That's right. And here's the deal
- 37:18Speaker 1: though things did not stop. UM. That was a classified
- 37:21Speaker 1: memo that's not classified any longer from October nine, just
- 37:26Speaker 1: before blue Book was terminated, that basically revealed that like, hey,
- 37:31Speaker 1: we're gonna still investigate stuff. It's not part of blue
- 37:34Speaker 1: Book anymore, but here's how we're gonna do it and
- 37:36Speaker 1: what we're gonna do, like, here's the process, and that astounding. Yeah,
- 37:39Speaker 1: I mean not really, but I mean there was a
- 37:41Speaker 1: memo that was sent out after blue Book, right before
- 37:44Speaker 1: blue Book was shut down, saying, don't worry, we're still
- 37:46Speaker 1: going to have procedure for reporting this stuff and investigating it.
- 37:50Speaker 1: It's just not going to be public, right, and uh,
- 37:54Speaker 1: Harry Reid sent a majority leader at the time, UM,
- 37:57Speaker 1: he had his program. It was all over the news,
- 38:00Speaker 1: UM where what was it called the Advanced Aerospace Threat
- 38:03Speaker 1: Identification Program because I guess Harry Reid thought there's something
- 38:08Speaker 1: out there and we need to look. It was a
- 38:11Speaker 1: pet project of his. That's right. You know, both Carter
- 38:14Speaker 1: and Reagan claimed to have seen UFOs. I think I
- 38:18Speaker 1: did know that a new Carter. Of course Carter. I
- 38:21Speaker 1: didn't know about Reagan. I don't think really. Oh yeah,
- 38:25Speaker 1: we talked about that. I think we did, uh live
- 38:29Speaker 1: at at Comic Con, didn't we do Ufoh this was better?
- 38:34Speaker 1: I agree? I think I agree. This feels more like real. Yeah. Well,
- 38:39Speaker 1: if there's anything unreal, it's being at actually south By
- 38:43Speaker 1: Southwest that wasn't Yes, okay, no comment. But this stuff
- 38:50Speaker 1: still goes on. Even though that project from Harry Reid
- 38:52Speaker 1: was shut down supposedly or shut down in twelve people
- 38:56Speaker 1: involved say, no, we're still doing it. We're still doing
- 38:58Speaker 1: that stuff. And here's the thing. When that came out,
- 39:01Speaker 1: this is two thousand seventeen. The guy who ran that
- 39:03Speaker 1: that program um came out and told everybody about it.
- 39:08Speaker 1: The New York Times reported on it, used all this
- 39:10Speaker 1: breathless stuff like really jumped to conclusions with the facts,
- 39:14Speaker 1: and then other people started reporting on that and exactly
- 39:18Speaker 1: the kind of reporting that was going on in the
- 39:20Speaker 1: forties and the fifties and the sixties and the seventies
- 39:23Speaker 1: about UFOs just continued again in two thousand seventeen. And
- 39:27Speaker 1: this is just probably how it's always going to be. Yeah.
- 39:30Speaker 1: And one of the big things was this two thousand
- 39:32Speaker 1: four sighting in San Diego from to I think Navy pilots.
- 39:38Speaker 1: And then they released the footage just a couple of
- 39:41Speaker 1: years ago in two thousand seventeen, as part of this
- 39:43Speaker 1: New York Times article. Yeah, they released the video footage
- 39:46Speaker 1: and you can go watch it on YouTube. I was
- 39:48Speaker 1: released in December of Uh. It is just I mean,
- 39:52Speaker 1: you can see this flying saucer, and you can hear
- 39:55Speaker 1: these pilots, these trained navy pilots. What the heck? Yeah,
- 39:59Speaker 1: they're like, look at it. Bro um. He actually said
- 40:02Speaker 1: bro uh did he? I must party calls him bro.
- 40:07Speaker 1: They described it as a forty ft long tic tac uh,
- 40:10Speaker 1: and then afterward, in subsequent interviews, one of them said
- 40:13Speaker 1: it it accelerated like nothing I've ever seen before. And
- 40:17Speaker 1: I have no idea what I saw that day, saw
- 40:20Speaker 1: the newest by plane from the future. Who knows, Well,
- 40:25Speaker 1: that's it for Project Bluebook. Everybody, I'm sure we um
- 40:29Speaker 1: less some stuff out. If we did, let us know,
- 40:32Speaker 1: especially if you're U followedists. We want to hear from you.
- 40:35Speaker 1: Um And since I said we want to hear from you,
- 40:37Speaker 1: that means, of course it's time for a listener mail.
- 40:41Speaker 1: This is just a little shout out about a couple
- 40:43Speaker 1: of references that that Brad and Sacramento likes. Thanks for
- 40:48Speaker 1: everything over the years, guys. I had to write in
- 40:50Speaker 1: too acknowledge Chuck's Striper reference in the Nuclear Semiotics episode.
- 40:55Speaker 1: It had me laughing. It took me back. I discovered
- 40:57Speaker 1: Striper in the late nineties, which is pretty late for
- 41:01Speaker 1: Striper really, and they were kind of a joke in
- 41:05Speaker 1: my circle of friends, most of them who had grown
- 41:06Speaker 1: up involved in the church. To Hell with the Devil
- 41:09Speaker 1: has been my favorite. Was it the name of their album?
- 41:12Speaker 1: I think so, or maybe it was just a song.
- 41:15Speaker 1: It's another an album called The Yellow and Black Attack.
- 41:18Speaker 1: I had these in my record collections. I don't anymore,
- 41:22Speaker 1: you lie, I wish I did. I'm surprised you haven't
- 41:27Speaker 1: gone back. Might it would be a fun party joke
- 41:31Speaker 1: to see how long it up on? I would love
- 41:34Speaker 1: to hear about Chuck's experience seeing them live. Well, I'll
- 41:37Speaker 1: go ahead and tell you I was into it when
- 41:41Speaker 1: I saw them live, like black and Yellow, spandex Sure. Yeah,
- 41:45Speaker 1: the drummer played. He was set up sideways. I remember
- 41:47Speaker 1: that was interesting, Like he was turned perpendicular to the
- 41:51Speaker 1: stage to the crowd. Yeah, like the drum set was
- 41:53Speaker 1: facing the side of the stage. Well, I guess because
- 41:56Speaker 1: he would sing and the microphone was to his left
- 41:59Speaker 1: facing the audience. But I don't It still doesn't make sense,
- 42:03Speaker 1: So I don't know why they did it. There's a
- 42:04Speaker 1: million ways you can put that microphone that's easier than
- 42:07Speaker 1: turning the whole drum kid, I totally that guy liked
- 42:10Speaker 1: his abs is what it was, and he wanted you
- 42:12Speaker 1: to like. I don't know if I'm not mistaken. The
- 42:15Speaker 1: drummer was the brother of the singer. Uh, Michael, Sweet,
- 42:20Speaker 1: I'm pulling this all out of behind in your so, Josh.
- 42:24Speaker 1: My favorite reference of yours was a while ago. I
- 42:27Speaker 1: don't remember all the details, but I had something to
- 42:29Speaker 1: do with a scene from Harry and the Henderson's when
- 42:32Speaker 1: Lithgow was trying to get Harry to go back into
- 42:34Speaker 1: the wild do you remember what you said? Yeah, I
- 42:36Speaker 1: was just describing how he like punches them in the face.
- 42:39Speaker 1: He says, yeah, but I don't remember what that was
- 42:42Speaker 1: in reference to it wasn't that long ago. I do.
- 42:45Speaker 1: I do remember that. Remember, you guys have a way
- 42:48Speaker 1: of making personal connection with your listeners, and I can
- 42:50Speaker 1: really appreciate that. Thanks for keeping things PG because I
- 42:54Speaker 1: love to listen with my kids and that is Brad
- 42:56Speaker 1: and Sacramento. Yeah. Man, it's kind of the point now
- 42:59Speaker 1: where I feel your cursing. I had to get used
- 43:01Speaker 1: to it on movie Crush cursing, and then it's now
- 43:05Speaker 1: it's his second nature. Has it become weird on stuff?
- 43:08Speaker 1: You should know to not curse an adult? I can.
- 43:11Speaker 1: There's a dividing line. Oh b camera, huh, yep. Nice.
- 43:15Speaker 1: I'm just a big dumb animal. No, no, no, It
- 43:18Speaker 1: takes a It takes a lot of verve and grit
- 43:23Speaker 1: and to be able to curse here and not curse there.
- 43:28Speaker 1: I've always been really good at it because of nieces
- 43:30Speaker 1: and nephews and just I was always hyper aware and
- 43:34Speaker 1: still am about being in public and like people being
- 43:37Speaker 1: around that I might offend. I don't. I don't want
- 43:39Speaker 1: to be that guy. Yeah. Well, if you want to
- 43:42Speaker 1: congratulate Chuck on this amazing sentiment of his, you should
- 43:46Speaker 1: follow us on social media. You can go to stuff
- 43:48Speaker 1: you Should Know dot com and check out all of
- 43:50Speaker 1: our social links there, or you can send your congratulations
- 43:53Speaker 1: directly to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff
- 44:00Speaker 1: you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How
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