February 21, 2024 • 64 mins
Humans are phenomenally inventive creatures -- problem is, some of their inventions may end up disrupting the status quo. In fact, history is riddled with mysterious deaths of inventors and scientists -- along with countless allegations of conspiracy. How many of these strange stories could be true? Tune in for the second installment of this ongoing series: Mysterious Inventors.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noela.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
We're joined with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand
most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Want you to know.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
We are returning to an ongoing series about mysterious inventors
and scientists. You can check out Part one of Mysterious Inventors,
released on December twentieth, twenty twenty three, as the Humans
reckon the Calendar. Do you guys remember that one?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Yeah, And it also echoes back to an earlier episode
we did.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Who's Killing all These Scientists, which.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Is about assassinations of like open secret assassinations of scientists
who are experts in nuclear weaponry.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
Like definestrations, right, people getting tossed out of windows.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Some of that, yeah, right. But ultimately that one, Kasha
came out in twenty fourteen, you guys. That was when
in twenty twelve there were some big stories coming out
about Iranian scientists being murdered like straight up car bombs,
explosives attached to a motorcycle, all.
Speaker 6 (01:39):
Kinds of craziness.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Yeah, And in each of those cases, of course, there's
no real like international justice regime that is trying to
advocate for a prosecution, And there are a lot of
dangerous third story windows depending upon which part the world
you move in.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
Whoops on a banana peel. Yeah, but it's also like
hard to get motive quickly or intent, you know, I
mean unless you're absolutely like in on the conspiracy, Like
who do you report this to? And how do you
go about reporting it? And like what clues are you
(02:21):
looking for?
Speaker 6 (02:22):
It's tough.
Speaker 5 (02:23):
I mean, maybe I'm just being maybe that's just a
lazy way of thinking of it, but it does seem
like it would be difficult to figure this stuff out,
you know, with any kind of immediacy.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
That's good for the nuclear scientists, we know they were
the victims of targeted killings entirely because of their work
leading current non nuclear nations to nuclear weaponry. But in
the point you raise, which is mission critical for tonight's conversation,
(02:52):
we're seeing we're seeing a bit of human psychology as well.
Let's say somebody is working on something controversial, right, non
nuclear related, something bad happens to them. Are we to
say that they were the victims of a conspiracy or
were they the victims of the dark lottery that is
(03:12):
accidental death?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Right?
Speaker 4 (03:15):
We can't say everybody is killed because of their hobbies
or their career.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Well, there are also examples that we've come across over
the years where it is a prominent scientist, Let's say
a Russian scientist who was on the team that brought
Sputnik five into being the vaccination against the COVID nineteen
virus vaccination that was approved before the final trials were done, right,
(03:40):
and then he ends up dying and like let's say,
strangled in his own apartment with a belt, which is
this is an actual example. Somebody like that dies. Is
it because there was some kind of interpersonal conflict that
is what is alleged to have happened, or is it
(04:00):
something bigger in how the heck do you prove it?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Well?
Speaker 5 (04:03):
And I guess with cases like that where there's a suicide,
perhaps there are boiler plate kind of procedures that go
into clearing it, making it you know, Okay, it was
their foul play, it was there evidence that somebody was
here and participated in making this happen, or was this
somebody that took their own life. So, but beyond that,
it's hard to you know, it's hard to push for
(04:27):
like more taking a closer look unless there's like a
very clear pattern.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And so tonight we're exploring stories about scientists allegedly or
in some cases provably removed to not to not because
they were bad people, but in a larger effort to
remove their expertise from the grand chess board of Zabag
New Braznetski. We're zooming in on these scientists. Let's give
a bit of background. Here are the facts. You know,
(04:55):
if you listen to part one, we don't have to
spend too too much time on this invention. It's amazing.
It's such a superpower. The animals of the world have it,
not just humans. Otters make tools, corvids make tools. Cetaceans
as well, like animals get the idea of invention, and
it's really helpful for the human experiment because it an
(05:19):
invention addresses problems that human beings cannot solve with their
starting operating equipment. Like you know, you start with the
body and the mind. You can't automatically make fire unless
you figure out a couple of other things.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yeah, I think the big difference with humans is we
figured out, like you said, power fire right as the
first thing, and then combustion, and then electricity and once
once you have power tools. Right, if the beavers have
power tools, oh look out buddy, Sorry forests. But you
know that is where that is where I think humanity
(05:57):
becomes dangerous to itself in any of those other animals
that might figure out some tool making.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Yeah, has humanity broken the game of evolution? That's part
of the question.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
I mean.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Look, also, we're talking about discoveries and inventions. Discoveries and inventions,
they're closely related. The are kissing cousins, but they're not
quite the same. A discovery may simply be an observation.
The idea of an invention is the application of a discovery,
so it leverages what could be an abstract observation into technology,
(06:30):
like a great example of this comes from the Nolan film.
Oppenheimer spends a great deal of time on the difference
between discovery and invention, theory and application. Multiple points in
that film adaptation of Oppenheimer's life, we see the legendary
physicist Oppenheimer saying, I am a theorist. I not actually
(06:54):
making the thing. I just I understand the mechanics of
how it would work, and that's why he needed a team.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
Well, someone can discover a thing and not have the
skill set with which to apply it practically, right.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Well, yeah, exactly. The discovery that, oh there are atoms,
and this is how we think they probably work. And
as you said, been the technology or even the theory
is maybe someone could split that atom. Could it happen?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Right? Possible?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Then you then you invent the thing that could possibly
split the atom. Then you discover again it can be split.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
And then you parlay that into a world destroying weaponry,
you know, and then a blockbuster Hollywood film on the
backs of millions of deaths.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
And on the backs of barbies. Yeah, the world. My
theory is that movie would not have done as well
if there hadn't have been the Barbenheimer phenomenon. It's such
a it's such a long, thinky kind of movie.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
It's kind of wild that it did so much business
in the box office.
Speaker 6 (07:55):
I kind of fell in love when I saw it
for the first really dug it?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah, okay, I thought open. I'm write a lot of
poetry to it. Cool. I'm sorry.
Speaker 5 (08:03):
I obviously I was not able to make it when
we all, when you guys went and saw the movie,
and I still have not seen it.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
So I look forward to catching it at school. You should.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
You should watch it on an old school Nokia flip
phone with a mono sound, the way Nolan intended letterbox.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
So you know, just like in Hollywood brainstorming, a lot
of inventors have ideas that don't lead anywhere for any
number of reasons. A lot of times you're a scientist
and you say, oh, that's interesting, but the concept is
not immediately applicable nor successful because it needs other discoveries
or inventions to render it feasible. There's an amazing sketch
(08:45):
by the criminally underrated group Mitchell and Webb that talks
about this, and they have like an old school Middle
Ages Italian esque inventor and he comes up to the
money guy and he's got a carved wooden mouse and
it's got a little carved wooden ball inside of it,
and the money guy is saying, Okay, what is this
(09:05):
next great invention, and the whole bit is it's worth watching.
The whole bit is the dude saying, well, I don't
know exactly how this is gonna matter later, but at
some point someone else will invent an amazing thing and
you'll need this little carved mouse and you can you know.
And he's like, Okay, well what does this mouse do?
(09:27):
And he's like, well, you can click on it and
it doesn't have a bunch of wires leading out from it,
and the money guy's like, yeah, but it's the Middle Ages.
Most things don't have wires leading out of them. So
I think that's a beautiful way to show how weird
invention is, like the vention the flying machine.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
For clicking and dragon, come on, cavemn.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I think we all, I think we all got it.
That's a boy. Let's make sure we all understand. It's
a computer mouse. I had in my mind a tiny mouse,
like a creature mouse that had a ball inside of
it somehow, and I was like, what is this thing?
Speaker 5 (10:02):
Early early prototypes for the mouse perhaps looking more mouse like.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
M m yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
And also, I mean with Da Vinci's flying machines, we
got some amazing sketches his head was in the right place.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
He was onto something.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
But it wasn't until centuries later that the Right Brothers
made powered flight a reality. Also requisite shout out to
Charles Chappelle.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Uh, black Heart in the right place, Ben, that's what
I want to know. Unclear clear unclear anatomically probably quite possible.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Possibly, so you can you can also stumble across something
useful while you're researching a flawed or dead end idea,
right like, uh, think of the alchemist. They're looking for
the ability to transmute lead into gold using the Philosopher's Stone.
They're questing after immortality. They discovered neither of those things,
(11:00):
but they did invent pesticides along the way, So thanks
for the roundup, Alchemist of old. And they also sort
of stumbled into the discipline we call chemistry. And as
you know, if you listen Ridiculous history, a ton of
inventors died at the hands of their own inventions or
as a consequence of their discovery, like everyone from the
(11:21):
guy who made the creepy horse statue at Denver Airport
to Marie Curie and radiation poisoning.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
Well, yeah, and we know how hard it is sometimes
to get things approved for clinical trials or studies or
whatever human testing. So a lot of times, you know,
inventors who are on the verge of a breakthrough will
be like, Ah, we'll not have time for that. I'll
just test it on myself.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Oops, I died.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Right, right, And that's part of that's one of the
darker sides too. You know, we mentioned this often because
we cannot mention it enough. Suppression of technology might sound
wacka do, but it's very much a real thing. You
might stumble into an amazing idea, you might win the
lottery and purposely create an amazing idea. Your initial concept
(12:07):
might be on the money, but there if it challenges
the status quo of a system, just like Copernicus, right,
then you are going to be in trouble. Here in
the US, we have the Invention Secrecy Act of nineteen
fifty one, anti democratic, anti free market, very real and
top secret.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
That's interesting Ben that you liken it to things like Copernicus,
which often studies or discoveries, or you know individuals like
that that have theories that sort of flew in the
face of organized religion or like the governing status quo
in terms of them holding on to power.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I guess I think of the Invention Secrecy Act as.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
Being a little more like along the lines of, like
you've discovered a thing that you shouldn't know about that
like we it's ours already, you know what I mean,
And if you put this out in the world, it's
going to compromise national security.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Maybe it's just.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
A modern example, a modern version of that past, you know,
threatening the religious status quo.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I think that's very interesting.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, that's the comparison I'm hoping to draw here, because
the threat to the status quo, whether that is a
secular state power or an ecclesiastical theocratic power, it still
has the monopoly over violence. Like you, if you try
to find the you know, if you try to find
a year by year spreadsheet or markup of things that
(13:34):
fell to the Invention Secrecy Act, then you're gonna have
at best mixed success. We know that there is a
list of compensation. It's kind of like an imminent domain
of ideas where they can say, hey, your idea is
worth x amount of money, We're going to pay it
for this. You can never talk about it again if
(13:54):
you do any further research on it. You automatically work
for US democracy in the free market, take a backseat
every single moment to nation state concerns. I mean, you
can invent anything you wish in the US until the
powers that be deem you a threat. And you might
be saying, guys, it's twenty twenty four. Surely we've evolved
(14:18):
past burning scientists at the stake, right, We're past these
barbaric acts.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
Well, you just don't do it in public. Yeah, we
just don't do it in the town square. It's a
little more covert than that.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
And you'll see why we find this optimism a bit
chuckle worthy. After word from our sponsors.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
There are tons and tons of inventors and scientists whom,
depending upon who you ask, depending upon whom you ask,
ran a foul of great powers. Remember we talked about
Rudolph Diesel. What happened to that guy? Did he just
did he just fall overboard?
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
He disappeared on a ship during a night walk.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Well, people saw him go into his quarters and then
they were folded.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
There was a watch like left on his night stand
sort of.
Speaker 5 (15:13):
I believe it was just very much betty By type activities, right, Yeah,
But the big point is nobody saw him leave and
nobody found his body.
Speaker 6 (15:20):
If he was deceased and.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
He told people he would see them the next morning,
it's sketch, guys. I mean, we we we We've already talked.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
About it, but it's I would be hard pressed to
believe anything other than he was taken out.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
It's tough, right, Well, wait, really could what was the
connection he was potentially going to sell his technology or.
Speaker 5 (15:40):
It was like a bad deal to there was some
kind of weirdness, right, But wasn't there some kind of
weirdness about the deal where it was like, really, was
it really lucrative for him or was it kind of
like him not getting Delta good hand? It was it
was something like in one extreme or the other, Like
it was either a really good deal for him, a
(16:00):
really bad deal for.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
Him, and he had money problems. He had Zack Duffel bags, yeah,
cash and stuff with his wife. I mean in each
of he's a great example because in each of these
following cases, we're going to see accusations of conspiracy. We're
going to see a lot of skeptics who say, hey,
their invention didn't work. It was pseudoscience. And then sometimes
we're going to see a conspiracy blooming just because of
(16:23):
what a person was doing before they die, like their career,
their hobbies, their interests, whatever view you might take, fellow
conspiracy realist, We're going to see a lot of questions
that remain unanswered. Maybe we start with a doctor Rodney
Marx shout out to what happens when someone dies in Antarctica,
(16:44):
which I think has been on our minds recently.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Oh yeah, well, especially when someone dies and the death
isn't even thought to be a homicide potentially right for
a long time.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Yeah, let's let's learn a little bit more about doctor Marx.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Huh. Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
Doctor Rodney Marks was an Australian astrophysicist who was employed
by the Smithsonian Society, and he was a part of
a research project in Antarctica for the National Science Foundation.
At the time of his demise on May the twelfth
of the year two thousand. He was stationed at one
(17:21):
of these research facilities. Guys, Sorry, I'm just getting mad
true detective vibes such a it's not Antarctica, it's Alaska,
but very much revolving around mysterious deaths at research stations
in the frozen tundra. The station in question here was
called Ammundsen Scott Station in the South Pole, and upon
(17:43):
his expiration, his cadaver was flown off.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Of the continent immediately over to New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Well, let's go ahead and say he didn't have like
gunshot wounds, right. It wasn't like one of those things where, oh,
this is a homicide, we need to get this guy out,
or this person is not doing well, we need to
save him and get him out of here. He is
dead and he is sent somewhere, right, And.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
It wasn't cyanid to the good people of Thailand. Yeah,
he had this set up there. He had because his
condition deteriorated incredibly quickly, precipitously. Was he was fine one day,
as fine as one can be living in that harsh,
contained environment, and then the day before he dies May eleventh,
(18:38):
he is incredibly unwell. He's vomiting blood, like starts mourning.
Speaker 6 (18:44):
Fine.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
By the afternoon he's vomiting blood, and he dies. Investigators
were not able to or still not able to fully
figure out what happened because the body, to your point, no,
was moved so quickly. They did conclude an autopsy that
he died of what's called acute methanol poisoning. No one
(19:06):
who was around and was a very small group of
people here, just like the board game Clue, no one
has come forward to explain exactly how he ran into
a cute methanol poisoning. Investigators did rule out suicide. They said,
we don't have any indications that this guy purposely consumed
this lethal amount of methanol. But then the investigators also
(19:30):
said they got stone walled at.
Speaker 5 (19:32):
Every turn, So the alternative being that they were slowly
fed the stuff for no or that it was just
a hazard of the occupational hazard.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
I think there was a significant amount of it that
got into something he ingested at some point, so which
then you know, if you're an investigator, you're trying to
figure out, well, how did that methanol get in his system?
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Right, That's what Ben was saying.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And the people who are around him at the time
didn't seem to have much to say about what could
have happened or what the how it got into his body.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
And methanol is related to alcohol, but it's it's not
the alcohol you drink. It's kind of like Prohibition, when
a poisons government purpose, right, when the US government actively
poisoned people during prohibition. So the question is, yeah, did
he get poisoned on purpose? Is this a homicide? And
if so, why, And if you're an investigator asking that question,
(20:30):
you have to wonder why the National Science Foundation is
not helping you at all.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
That is a little odd.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
Also, the immediacy of flying the cadaver off to New
Zealand of all places, it's a little weird.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
And there's a piece in the New Zealand Herald that gosh,
it was from two thousand and nine. It talks about
the well at least it alleges, according to some internal
documentation from the groups that were running the station out there,
that there was heavy drug use on the station by personnel,
heavy drinking by the personnel at the station. And it
(21:06):
does I don't know again it it's weird because it
leaves open the door to potential accidental poisoning.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Right like he because he was a binge drinker, had
he accidentally consumed methanol right, possibly while already inebriated. And
that's from there's a there's a another there. There was
another update to that from Jared Booker, we're talking about
the same article where where where. They also point out
(21:37):
he was one of fifty people on the site. There
were there were a lot of people there, but they're
all clearly identified.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
They're all clearly if you.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Were an investigator, you should be able to find and
question them. And even the even the assigned coroner out
of New Zealand had a problem with this. He said,
I don't think New Zealand police and authorities are being
given the information they need.
Speaker 5 (22:06):
So no, yeah, I'm sorry, no shade on New Zealand.
But why New Zealand? He is Australian. Was it just proximity?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
This is just this was an outfit reporting on it.
It's David, It's by David Fisher.
Speaker 5 (22:20):
By the way, ask why they flew the body of
New Zealand. Yeah, apparently, I guess, like what for them
to do an investigate?
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Like who? Who? On whose authority? I guess is my question?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Right?
Speaker 4 (22:32):
Proximity would would be the answer, their proximity and available
investigative okay facilities. Yeah, but we we also don't know
what he was working on, which is the next question.
Speaker 6 (22:44):
No, we don't.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Just part of the weird stuff here and again that's
just why it's weird to me when you think about
it as either a covered up homicide or an accidental
homicide or accidental death right within a close knit organization
like that. It was stated, but at least according to
this article, it was stated that this should be investigated
(23:07):
as a homicide immediately upon the body being found and
then moved to New Zealand. They said the investigator said, hey,
this should be looked at as a homicide, the medical examiner,
but that it was not treated that way, and the
organization that was running the facility, basically whether they whether
(23:29):
they had anything to do with it or not, people
were able to go into his room and actually move
things around, get rid of evidence if they had wanted to,
and everything was tainted, there was no way to prove
what actually happened to him at that point.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
Potentially, Yeah and A police were still wondering whether there
had been US agencies carrying out a full investigation and
whether they in New Zealand would be able to have
access to that investigation. At this point, it seems like
the answer is not really And if we were to
(24:05):
say this was a case of conspiracy, then we ourselves
would need much more information. We would need to know
what exactly Marx was working on. The closest we can
tell you is that he was running the Antarctic Submillimeter
Telescope and Remote Observatory or wait for it, ASTRO with
(24:28):
a forward slash between the T and the R, which
I think is just a very cool name. I'm trying
to keep it positive. Yeah, he's working for Harvard Smithsonian.
But we know the cause of death, but we don't
know the circumstances leading to it. The crime scene or
if crime it is is absolutely fubar. This is going
(24:51):
to remain a mystery unless one of those forty nine
people comes forward with legitimate information.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
So what do you guys think? Is it?
Speaker 4 (25:01):
Is it possible that he ran a foul of somewhat?
Speaker 3 (25:09):
It's just hard to say.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
If, like imagine, you're in that isolated place, you've got
some kind some kind of personal conflict with somebody else,
and it's only it's getting worse and worse because you're
so isolated yet stuck together. Methanol poisoning would be a
way to do it if you knew that the people
or the person was around you that drank a lot,
(25:34):
or you.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Could put it in, right, you could put it in
a familiar container or something. We would just need to
know more about how the how acute methanol poisoning works,
and what the timeframe is. It's also possible that they
this person drank from the wrong container. It's also possible
(25:57):
they were dosed in a way that didn't involve recreational
alcohol consumption whatsoever. It's just tough. But we see again
this thing we're talking about earlier, which is the fact
that this guy is a scientific luminary, and the fact
that his death is and probably will remain so mysterious
(26:17):
naturally breeds speculation.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
It's a big problem. There were forty nine other people
at the station, right, Yeah, so like that's a lot
of suspects. That's what what is who's that the detective
who's doing all the movies lately, Like, let's doing all
the investigation? Oh man, why can't I think of this?
The one about the glass onion?
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Oh not pero, No, it's like a I can't remember Daniel.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
Yeah, he's excellent.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
God, what a cool character. He's so funny.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Just imagine that movie, except there are forty nine suspects,
right right?
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Oh, and we are getting a message from mission control,
Ben wi Blanc. Thank you, Thank you, Paul. Let's move
on to doctor Don Craig Wiley. He had all the
makings of a future Nobel Prize winner until his body
(27:18):
was recovered from the Mississippi River on December twentieth, two
thousand and one. Tennessee and Arkansas police forces in collaboration
rule this death a homicide. He is a biophysics expert,
and he had been missing for more than a month
before his body was discovered.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, this is a weird case. It's a really weird case.
I think the biggest Well, I guess let's talk about
it because it's a bridge, right that he must have
gone over, right, But there's this bridge, allegedly or not allegedly,
according to the investigation, was pretty protected from somebody going
(28:02):
over that bridge unless they really wanted to.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Yeah, it has a two meter fence that's like six
and a half feet on either side.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Which is not easy to get over unless you want to.
If you're somebody throwing a body or something, probably not
gonna happen. It's gonna be a lot more difficult. It's
just a weird place, especially after being missing for.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
So long, Yeah, and they found his car on that bridge.
He had a rental car that they found on the bridge. Also,
abandoned vehicles are going to play a big role in
a future episode we're doing. But the FBI does become
involved in this case, and controversially they're the ones who
say he had an accidental death. Somehow he stopped this
(28:49):
rental car on this bridge, looked at the fence and
said challenge accepted, and somehow fell over to his death.
This another interesting thing here to this pattern we're establishing, folks.
His death comes in the wake of the anthrax scare
(29:10):
in the United States, and according to his peers, he's
one of the few people who would have been able
to accurately trace where the anthrax had originated to find
the providence of the anthrax, which remains part of a
heated debate and conspiracy theories today in twenty twenty four, So.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Your mind reels, right, oh wow, did someone did someone
kidnap him and take him away? How did he get
a hold of a rental car? It was fifteen days,
But your brain you want to go into investigative mode.
At least I do, I know, I do. Who would
have motivation? To take him away from that. Do you
(29:49):
think he would have motivation to want to escape himself,
right to disappear for a while because of whatever pressures
he's getting. There's so many different avenues that you could
go down with him.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
Yeah, I mean it would have been convenient if we're
playing the fin game. It would have been convenient to
certain people if he were no longer a factor. But
then we would also be assigning a lot of agency
and ability to people who who would be able to
track someone down if they're off the grid via probably
(30:24):
like credit slips, rental car stuff, whatever kind of technology.
It just seems like it's asking a lot of that conspiracy,
but it also is asking a lot. It's asking an
almost equal amount. To accept the FBI's official explanation, a
guy stops his car, climbs over a fence, and drops
(30:47):
to his.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Death right by a hydro electric plant.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Apparently, no no indications of suicidal ideation, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Ah, feels like a dumping, like a body dumping to me,
but a difficult one somehow for some reason.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Oh it's spoiler, folks. We're not giving the ad.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
We don't have the answers for no of these we
want to hear from you at the end of the show.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
We have no idea you but one last thing nobl
reads really quickly. I think there is potential for someone
to have gotten to him before he disappeared. Right, So,
like weve been we were talking about like having to
track him down with rental car stuff and in credit slips.
I think there's potential that somebody got to him and
(31:28):
then the disappearance occurred because he was with somebody, but
then they's.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
Been held and then transported perhaps uh perhaps put to
the question, right.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
Yeah, I was going to ask if if you guys
thought there was any indication of like some mysterious third party,
you know, like and I hear when I think of
like dumping bodies, I'm like, well, you gotta have help.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
To do that.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
So little has been released.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Yeah, even now, Yeah, it's it's it's tough. It is
a good question, you know, because to to approach an
answer here, conspiratorial or mundane, we would need to know
at least a little bit of what happened in that
half month, in those fifteen days, right, is it possible
(32:14):
like when someone gets abducted, for example, if they're being interrogated.
Then the idea is you always want them to feel
like they can escape the situation at some point, right
if they pay obedience and they comply, then maybe they'll
get away with a few broken fingers or whatever. And
(32:36):
we're not saying that happened here. We are saying that
it is a very mysterious death. And you cannot blame
friends and family for refusing to accept the FBI's explanation
like that. You know, you you would need an accomplice
or a perpetrator for a body to be thrown from
a bridge, And if someone just decides to jump off
(32:58):
of a bridge, you would to make that story stick,
you would need to have some indications of their mental
state up to that moment, and in both cases, we
simply don't have that information.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
No, it's a weird one.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
Oh yeah, it is, indeed, And I think we got
a couple other weird ones on our hands as well.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Okay, here's one to that point. Here's one that I'm
a little skeptical about. Eugene Malov m A. L.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
L ove.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
At the time of his death in May of two
thousand and four, he was a leading scientist in a
being diplomatic here a controversial concept the field of free
energy he had been. I think his death though, was
probably unrelated to whatever his research was. I think it's
(33:54):
I'm like, not one hundred percent, but it looks like
it was just other bad actors being bad people.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah. Again, it's a problem where if you are involved
in something that sounds super cool and potentially dangerous, like
free energy, right, could you actually build something that would
rival the big energy companies? And would they want you
dead because of that? Even if you're doing all that stuff,
no matter how successful your inventions are and your pursuits are,
(34:23):
you can still have problems with other individuals that enter
your life that have nothing to do with your research
that could cause your demise. I think this might be
an example of that.
Speaker 4 (34:34):
I'm tempted to agree, Yeah, because, like, imagine when you
hear what happened to folks, Imagine if this guy had
just been really into fly fishing. Imagine if instead of
researching free energy, he was researching better ways to build
fishing lores.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Okay, okay, you know so, and then hear this.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
And then hear this, all right, so let your minds diverge.
We're going multiverse.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
Malav's been renting out his former childhood home to a family.
The name of the family is the Schaefer family and
later the son of the Shaffers. Chad along with one
of his friends, Mozelle Brown, and along with Chad's girlfriend
Candace Foster, they get charged with this scientist murder in
(35:23):
May of two thousand and four.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Apparently what happened.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
What occurred was that these two guys Brown, Brown and Schaeffer,
Chad Shaffer, Mazel Brown, they beat doctor Malav to death.
And they didn't do it because of problems with free energy.
They did it because he was evicting Chad Shaffer's parents
from that rented home because they hadn't paid their rent
(35:50):
in a couple of months. And you can see testimony
with Candace Foster. You can see where these folks got booked.
The investigation looked pretty solid. It's still it took even then,
no allegations and conspiracy. It took police years to make
the connections and the arrest.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Which seems insane. Welve was there cleaning the home that
night at like eleven PM at night, cleaning the home
after the eviction, and police didn't think to imagine that
those who had been evicted could have been a part
of it.
Speaker 6 (36:28):
It does.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
It makes me wonder if even detectives can get taken
down the wrong path when you introduce something like, oh,
this guy was working on free energy. Oh man, right,
I don't know. I just how do you not make
that connection almost immediately because they they would, These are
people who would who would have the perception that they
(36:50):
are victims of this guy, right, despite whatever their actions.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
Were, Which makes you think too, you know how easily
the course of an investigation may be altered because you're
looking for anomalous, unusual things things of note, research into
free energy is one of those things, more so than
fly fishing. But you have to consider all of these aspects.
(37:17):
So for those of us played along at home, we
have we have two cases where we can't say for
sure what happened. We have one case where it does
seem like a tragedy, an egregious an egregious act of homicide,
but not related to scientific pursuit. Do we want to
(37:40):
take a break for a word from our sponsor? I
have the feeling we got a couple more to get
to here, it seems right.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
And we have returned.
Speaker 4 (37:56):
Here is another death without an answer what happened to
the physicist and nuclear research scientist. We had to do
at least one named John Mullen.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Just one John, or one one one nuclear research scientist
named John Mullen, named John Mullen out out of the
very many. Right, Oh yeah, this case is whoo this
one again. If you're just I go so speculative on
these and I play the if then game, ben, I
think to my own detriment here. But let's let's just
(38:31):
do the facts of this one. Doctor John Mullen died
of arsenic poisoning, and according to authorities, it's believed that
that poison somehow found its way into a drink that
he consumed, and they couldmit they made that connection. And
initially who did they think maybe was the culprit?
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah, his girlfriend at the time is romantic partner Tamara Rallo.
This was also in two thousand and four, and they
thought they thought that she would be the top person
of interest. She was actually going to be arrested on
suspicion of homicide.
Speaker 6 (39:11):
But then what happened, m then she ends up dead.
Speaker 5 (39:17):
And then at the time, investigators on the case didn't
really give up much information to the media as to
whether or not she'd committed suicide or there had been
some foul play suspected. There has, at the time of
this episode that we're recording right now, been no conclusive
answers to these questions.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
So your primary suspect ends up dead, there's no trial.
Isn't that convenient? I'm just saying.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
Also considering two weeks after the murder of Mullet, and
they do conclude, by the way, investigators conclude that he
was drinking. He was a mineral water guy, so he
drank some mineral water and it had been laced with
a fatal dose of arsenic. Two weeks after the murder,
his girlfriend Rollo, who's fifty two at the time, she
(40:10):
leaves a message with one of Mullen's children, one of
his two sons, and in the message, this is per
Mullen's son. In the message, she says, quote, don't be
surprised if you find my body floating in your dad's
swimming pool.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
See did he did? Did doctor Mullen know something? And
he even divulged to tomorrow that he knew something, as
you know, connected to his contract with Boeing. But but
just the fact that he did have a contract with Boeing.
He's working on stuff that could be potentially highly secretive
and dangerous, like genuinely secret, secretive and dangerous compared to
(40:52):
you know, the free energy or something like that.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I just thought that was interesting because it is convenient.
Do you have someone the main suspect die before there's
any trial or discovery or anything like that.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Yeah, the best way to keep a tomb secret is
to kill the people who dig their grave, you know,
I mean shout out to tengus Khan. But also, you know,
if we were exercising skepticism, we can do a couple
of counterpoints. One, Boeing has a lot of contract workers,
right and uh, And two is Boeing's Does Boeing have
(41:30):
the operational capability to execute a homicide?
Speaker 2 (41:35):
They just put a hole in a fuselage right right right?
Speaker 4 (41:40):
So like the more conspiratorial thing would be he had
some he had some disturbing whistleblower knowledge of some sort,
whether that's croket funding, whether that is poor engineering oversight,
et cetera. And that he was silenced and that his
girlfriend was silenced as a result. But again no proof,
(42:00):
no proof, and police did interview her before death, and
they said she was talkative, she wasn't defensive, but I don't,
I don't know, you know. Later, Rollo's daughter found a
book under her mother's mattress that talks about how to
kill people with poison. Most folks are most folks are
(42:22):
kind of sloppy on this stuff. Your phone searches aren't secure,
and honestly, a VPN is not going to help you.
Speaker 5 (42:29):
Just to be clear, you guys, I've had a sick
family for the last couple of weeks, so I've had
a lot of opportunities to hang out at Walgreens and
I couldn't help but notice a giant display of I
guess it's like defrosting kind of fluid.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
It's that blue fluid that.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
Comes in the giant jugs and there's massive warnings on
the back about what happens if you ingest it. But
my sick conspiracy brain immediately jumped to man, what a
way to get to someone who's a big fan of
Blue Power Aid?
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Am?
Speaker 1 (42:57):
I right?
Speaker 3 (42:59):
Dogs love it too because it's as sweet. It's sweet apparently,
And that's the problem.
Speaker 5 (43:02):
Right, You could put it in power Aid, just not
one hundred percent, and if someone drinks that stuff five
times a day, they'd probably never notice it. If they
didn't notice it had been tampered with. But yeah, sorry,
that's just These are the kind that's been always says
we're fun at parties.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
I'll tell you guys. Okay, So I I go through
way too many cans. I'm a bad citizen of the art.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
You recycle though you're not that bad.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
That true, but but I'm still I think in the
in the end, I'm probably not a good I'm not
good to myself because of the stuff that's on the
insides of those cans and all the everything we've done,
all the stuff we talked, all the good ones, and
sometimes they don't get recycled, depending on where I am
and if I can gain access to a recycling bin
(43:46):
or not. Right, I am so paranoid about the click
and the pop you get if I open up a
can and that's supposed to be carbonated and it doesn't
have just the exact sound that I'm looking for, I
dump that baby out.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
Pop right?
Speaker 6 (44:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (44:08):
Right, you really do that? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (44:09):
You do know?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
And it's not because I actually think anyone's trying to
poison me or I think about the manufacturing process, and
I think about like a flaw that could have happened
in one They got so.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Many steps along the way where things could go wrong.
Speaker 6 (44:23):
I'm just like, I'm not gonna take the risk.
Speaker 5 (44:25):
Well, guys, remember back in the day where it was
so much easier to tamper with even like medicine, and
there were all these scares of like people like poisoning
aspirin and stuff, and that was literally what led to
like child safety caps and.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Stuff like that. I mean, we're better than we used
to be, but it is still kind of scary.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
Yeah, both the good and bad actions of the world
are easier than you think, folks, And that's something that
should stick with all of us. And speaking of questions
that remain, We've got got a couple more examples for you.
As we said, this is a continuing series because there
are a lot out there. Do you guys remember the
(45:04):
story of Aaron Salter Junior.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
This one, I.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Don't know slightly rings a bell, but no, I don't
think so either, know.
Speaker 4 (45:12):
So, Aaron Salter Junior, like so many people in the
United States, falls victim to a mass shooting and a
frankly terrifying thing about the US then, as of now,
is that the mass shooting's happen so often here right,
far more often than in many other countries. Aaron Salter
(45:34):
Junior is not an inventor by trade. He was a
career police officer in Buffalo and in his retirement he
took a security guard job at a place called tops
Friendly Markets. He also picked up a hobby, which is
one of his late primary drives. At this point, he's
working on an invention of fuel cars with water electrolysis.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
So he's making a water powered car.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
In fuel cell yeah yeah, And he's in a lot
of interviews where he's talking about the invention. You can
see compilation clips of him on YouTube quite easily. He
dies when he's fifty five years old and he's trying
to defend people at the tops Friendly Market. There's an
eighteen year old mass shooter. Salter ends up being one
(46:25):
of ten people who are shot to death by this guy.
This guy is a white mass shooter and according to investigators,
his attack was racially motivated. He was aiming to kill
black people. So there we see a tragedy that is unfortunately,
heartbreakingly all too common in the US. But then we
(46:47):
also see that one of those ten victims is a
guy who's actively working on a hydrogen fuel cell a
water powered car. So people start putting the dots together.
Speaker 6 (47:00):
It's ben.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
It says here that police say Salter actually had a
weapon himself and fired back at the gunman.
Speaker 4 (47:08):
Yes, he died attempting to defend people. Yeah, wow, this
was This was quite recently too. This mass shooting occurred
on May fourteenth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Kind of wild because this guy wasn't like some sort
of funded, you know, researcher. He was just kind of
working on this stuff like as a hobby almost right.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, he was independent, he was self starting. This feels
like a coincidence to me.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
I don't know if it feels relating, because especially to
your point of the motive of the shooter in the
first place.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
Right, Yeah, and we don't want to give the shooter
too much air time. But no, that was his motive.
You're absolutely right. The guy's name was Peyton s. Jendron
or Gendron geen Dron. Got sentenced last year, actually almost
exactly a year ago today. Got sentenced to eleven consecutive
(48:03):
life sentences, which consecutive means one after the other, so
he can't serve him concurrently, he's not getting now, got it?
Speaker 3 (48:11):
But I don't know.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
I mean, I'm kind of with you, with you guys
on this one, because there's there's a Facebook video from
the Facebook account called nineteen Keys, number one, number nine
keys that links Salter's death to his earlier claims of
this water powered car invention. And the concept here seems
to be that this mass murder might be some sort
(48:35):
of elaborate cover story or cover up meant to silence
yet another inventor who poses an existential threat to the
established energy and transit industries, and looking into it, I
don't see it. You know, we're not the end all
be all arbiters of the truth here, but it feels like, again,
(48:55):
because of what he was interested in in his life
in his retirement, that maybe there's a little bit of
red string from points that may not actually be connected.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
And he did he did die defending people. He was
a hero.
Speaker 6 (49:11):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
He was a former police lieutenant for the Buffalo Police
Department and he was the security guard at the place
where the shooting. Where where the shooting took place, Aaron
Salter Junior was was a security guard. Yeah, I didn't really.
Speaker 3 (49:28):
You're saying, yeah, at Top's Friendly Market.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
I didn't realize he was a security guard. But I
don't know why that left my brain as we were
talking about it and I was trying to connect dots here,
I missed that. So that was just his side gig,
or his maybe primary gig, and then doing the other
thing on the side in retirement. I don't see how you.
I don't see how you target the security guard in
a mass shooting like that on purpose, right, If you're
(49:54):
just going to take out the security guard, I don't
know why anyone would come up with a plan in
any darkened room, no matter how illuminati you are to
I don't think that's the plan.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Right.
Speaker 4 (50:06):
There are much more efficient ways to try to go
through that kind of assassination, right. You know, you could
target the car, you could target any other weak points.
And it does sound like this guy from what we
know about the mass shooting. The assailant was streaming on
(50:29):
Twitch dude, and he went into the parking lot and
opened fire, yelling racial slurs. And so the response here
is the response you would have if you were a
security guard. It doesn't sound like it just doesn't make
sense for that to be the kind of cover story
of cover story there is. It sounds like an absolute tragedy,
(50:50):
yet again familiar to American discourse, that has nothing to
do with the idea of water powered car.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Is that fair to say? I think so?
Speaker 6 (50:58):
That's how I feel.
Speaker 4 (50:59):
Ok, we have and you know if we are incorrect,
if there's information we're missing, please let us know for
any of these cases, because survivors, families, and friends still
want answers, and often the investigators want answers too. We
were thinking we could end with an update from a
person that we mentioned previously in Mysterious and Veterans Chapter one.
(51:23):
We didn't give the full look at it, but ning
Li Ninglee is anomalous in these cases. Ningle, Chinese American scientists,
shook popular media in the West back in the nineties
and early two thousands because of her seemingly credible work
(51:44):
with anti gravity.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
And if you are searching for doctor Lee, you aren't
going to find a ton written about well, actually no,
you will find a lot written about her on various
websites and blogs, but it's tough to come by anything
written about her that you might take as Oh, this
is a credible source, right that I could cite and
I would feel comfortable with that, except for one Popular
(52:07):
Mechanics like magazine article that you tracked down, Ben, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:12):
We had to go through some German sources. But also
you could see Lee being cited, interviewed, examined in popular
science magazines of the day like Discover and Popular Mechanics.
In the article talking about specifically there matt is Taming
Gravity by Jim Wilson, you can see Lee in the
(52:34):
center of a photograph at the top with two of
her colleagues, doctors Campbell and Smally. And what she's holding
there in the middle that looks sort of like a
bunt cake meets a record player. That is the that
is the superconductor disc she made or discovered or invented
(52:56):
that purportedly purportedly against gravity.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
It's really dope. When you read about her on those
other places it people think that doctor Kningley was on
the cusp of something huge when it comes to what
do they call it, gravitometric fields. I mean, it's really cool.
It's straight out of the science fiction novels that we love, Right,
(53:25):
somebody has a breakthrough in this science and now we
can actually build that UFO type craft that we've been
trying to make all these years. And the weird thing
is maybe we should should we go through actually what
she found, or should we just talk about her her
quote disappearance.
Speaker 3 (53:44):
Oh, let's sum it up real quickly.
Speaker 6 (53:45):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (53:45):
Yeah, So like nineteen nineties, two thousands, she is not
just appearing in popular science magazines. She's doing science. She
co authors a number of papers publishing these various journals
that are arguing the discovery of a practicable method of
(54:06):
fighting gravity. And what she says, or what the theory
is is that you can is.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
A deep water we'll keep it brief.
Speaker 4 (54:15):
You can rotate ions through a gravitometric field perpendicular, so
at an angle to their natural spin, and this will
nullify some of the effects of gravity. So to break
it down by analogy, we could say she figured out
that you can push ions in a different way that
(54:38):
will change the direction in which gravity pushes.
Speaker 1 (54:41):
So you're just kind of.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
Like leveraging the force differently possible. She thought so, and
a lot of her peers did, and then it seemed
like she was onto something. She was working at the
University of Alabama for a while. She left, she created
a limited liability corporation called ac Gravity, which is active today.
(55:05):
Found that like any good company, they're based in Delaware
for tax purposes.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
Of course, but the labs in Huntsville, Alabama, if you
ever wanted to check it out. So there was a grant, right,
there's there's quite a bit of money that was given
to this organization that she started to check and see
if there's any sand here could we do that? That
sounds great, amazing, talk about something that would go straight to,
(55:32):
you know, one of the big defense contractors if this
technology existed, if it's.
Speaker 3 (55:37):
Not already there Tonton Ton Ton.
Speaker 6 (55:40):
In nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
But the grant, how much was the grant for it.
Speaker 4 (55:45):
Was under five hundred thousand dollars, so big to individuals
at the time. But Chump changed, Uncle Sam, oh, we
got the actual number yet, it's four hundred forty eight thousand,
nine hundred and seventy dollars. I don't know why they
couldn't spring for the extra thirty bucks.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Hmmm. I think it was actually for four hundred thousand dollars.
But that forty eight nine seventy was like a salary
that somebody got for a year. I think that I
don't know.
Speaker 4 (56:14):
Awesome, it is a specific number. We know the grants
went from to get in two thousand and one, like
you're saying, and it ends in two thousand and two.
What did they do with all that money? We will
never no, no.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
Never know.
Speaker 2 (56:30):
Doctor Lee kind of disappeared. You can find several videos
of her speaking at various places for various functions, talking
about the potentials of her research and the science that
she and her team are doing, and then all of
a sudden, boop, she's gone. But there is something that
occurred that I was not aware of last time we
were recording this the first episode, Ben, and that's something
(56:53):
that happened to her in her personal life.
Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (56:57):
So in twenty fourteen, she is still like she's left
the University of Alabama but still definitely has connections and
the lab is in Huntsville. She is walking down the
street in the University of Alabama campus when she is
struck by a vehicle. Her spouse is nearby. Her spouse
sees the accident and so terrified that he suffers a
(57:20):
heart attack permanently damages him. He passes away just a
year later. As a result, doctor Lee does not die immediately.
She suffers what some have called a fate worse than death.
She has lasting significant brain damage, which quite likely led
to her contracting Alzheimer's.
Speaker 6 (57:40):
Yes, and there is.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
You can go online. You can find an obituary for
a doctor ning Lee, and it states that she was
born January fourteenth, nineteen forty three, and that she passed
away on July twenty seventh, twenty twenty one. Then I
wasn't able to verify if this is in fact a
(58:04):
real obituary for the actual doctor Ningley that we're talking about,
but it certainly does seem like that. At the top,
it describes her as a seventy nine years old and
quote one of the world's leading scientists in superconductivity and
anti gravity.
Speaker 3 (58:20):
Yeah, it's it is.
Speaker 4 (58:23):
Unfortunately this person's obituary as far as I can tell,
as well, she passed away. We don't know how far
this scientist anti gravity research actually went. We don't know
why the DoD threw five hundred grand at it. We
don't know what would have happened. We don't you know.
(58:45):
And also to be clear, we're saying we don't know
or not try to necessarily imply there was some huge
overarch and cover up, but we can say the information's
just not out there. I mean, also, people just get
hit by cars all the time.
Speaker 2 (59:02):
It's true, It's very true. One thing we would say is,
like the whole falling out of windows thing, an accidental
death is a likely choice for someone who is a
professional looking to hide that a hit is occurring. Just
(59:24):
putting that out there doesn't mean doctor Lee's death had
anything to do with that. It is just it is
a I would say, a likely way to go about
killing someone you want dead if you're an organization that's
a little more sophisticated if.
Speaker 4 (59:41):
You're Yeah, and there's also you know, there's the fact
that if this person had not encountered this tragedy, they
would have lived justified through the span of their natural life,
and the research that they did could have still been
kept secret. So yeah, there's also the possibility that the
(01:00:01):
DoD ponied up the money, which is chump change for them.
That's just a few pony bones for Uncle Sam, and
then I think that's for you. And then they looked
into it and they said, oh, this actually isn't either
applicable or it Isn't you know there's some error in
the methodology or something like what is this story of
(01:00:22):
the em drive? Remember that from a few years back
that garnered a similar level of interest, and we haven't
heard much about it since. Makes you think, I just
I feel like this just goes to show that it's
scratching the surface. It tells us a lot about human
psychology and the need to see patterns. But we also
(01:00:44):
still have a lot of unanswered questions. How much of
this is sheer accident, terrible luck? How much of it
might be the result of this stuff they don't want
you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
We would highly recommend you read the article in Popular
Mechanics that been found.
Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
Yes, oh, the article itself is in English. It's just
easier to find in German, which also makes you think,
does it not?
Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Sorry?
Speaker 4 (01:01:14):
Nine, indeed, maybe we call it a day here, because
the next part of this, the next part of this
exploration depends on you, constant listeners, fellow conspiracy realists. Let
us know if any of these cases are familiar to you.
Let us know if you have new information, Let us
know if there are whether there are other inventors or
(01:01:35):
scientists you want us to look into can't wait to
hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Correct to Mundo.
Speaker 5 (01:01:43):
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Where we have our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 5 (01:01:49):
We are also Conspiracy Stuff Show on YouTube where we
have weekly video delights rolling out for your viewing pleasure,
as well as on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and
TikTok Piers Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Yes, yes, yes, we also have a phone number. But guys,
I'm going to put one last quote in here from
that popular mechanics article because I missed it while we
were going through this. This is a quote from doctor
Ning Lee when asked about why she continues to turn
down money from investors.
Speaker 6 (01:02:18):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Investors want control over the technology. This is too important.
It should belong to all the American people.
Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Oh wow, No, yeah, she was murdered.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
I just mean that. I in my opinion, that sentiment
is dangerous because there are people who do want to
control it, who maybe even already control something like it
and don't want anyone else to have it. Just putting
it out there. Hey, we've got a phone number. It's
one eight to three three std WYTK. When you call in,
(01:02:54):
you've got three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your name and
message on the air. If you don't want to do that,
why not instead to send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
We can't emphasize the importance of the email, folks, we
read every single one we get. A shout out to Trent,
who introduces us to the importance of pronunciation, saying I
wanted to address the pronunciation of guy Anna and Siquibo
talking about our Venezuela Guiana episode or guy Anna episode.
(01:03:25):
You pronounced them like most people would and do, but
neither a Spanish words. Pronouncing them in a Spanish sounding
way only helps give credence to Venezuela's claims. Guyana is
pronounced like die anna, si Quibo is pronounced with the
qui like in quit. It's an Amerindian word, and although
(01:03:47):
it looks Spanish, it is not pronounced that way. Thank
you so much, Trent, you are absolutely correct about the pronunciation.
Please please please send us any and all messages you
feel your fellow conspiracy realist no conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Stuff they don't want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noela.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
We're joined with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand
most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Want you to know.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
We are returning to an ongoing series about mysterious inventors
and scientists. You can check out Part one of Mysterious Inventors,
released on December twentieth, twenty twenty three, as the Humans
reckon the Calendar. Do you guys remember that one?
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Yes?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Yeah, And it also echoes back to an earlier episode
we did.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Who's Killing all These Scientists, which.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Is about assassinations of like open secret assassinations of scientists
who are experts in nuclear weaponry.
Speaker 5 (01:16):
Like definestrations, right, people getting tossed out of windows.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Some of that, yeah, right. But ultimately that one, Kasha
came out in twenty fourteen, you guys. That was when
in twenty twelve there were some big stories coming out
about Iranian scientists being murdered like straight up car bombs,
explosives attached to a motorcycle, all.
Speaker 6 (01:39):
Kinds of craziness.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Yeah, And in each of those cases, of course, there's
no real like international justice regime that is trying to
advocate for a prosecution, And there are a lot of
dangerous third story windows depending upon which part the world
you move in.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
Whoops on a banana peel. Yeah, but it's also like
hard to get motive quickly or intent, you know, I
mean unless you're absolutely like in on the conspiracy, Like
who do you report this to? And how do you
go about reporting it? And like what clues are you
(02:21):
looking for?
Speaker 6 (02:22):
It's tough.
Speaker 5 (02:23):
I mean, maybe I'm just being maybe that's just a
lazy way of thinking of it, but it does seem
like it would be difficult to figure this stuff out,
you know, with any kind of immediacy.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
That's good for the nuclear scientists, we know they were
the victims of targeted killings entirely because of their work
leading current non nuclear nations to nuclear weaponry. But in
the point you raise, which is mission critical for tonight's conversation,
(02:52):
we're seeing we're seeing a bit of human psychology as well.
Let's say somebody is working on something controversial, right, non
nuclear related, something bad happens to them. Are we to
say that they were the victims of a conspiracy or
were they the victims of the dark lottery that is
(03:12):
accidental death?
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Right?
Speaker 4 (03:15):
We can't say everybody is killed because of their hobbies
or their career.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Well, there are also examples that we've come across over
the years where it is a prominent scientist, Let's say
a Russian scientist who was on the team that brought
Sputnik five into being the vaccination against the COVID nineteen
virus vaccination that was approved before the final trials were done, right,
(03:40):
and then he ends up dying and like let's say,
strangled in his own apartment with a belt, which is
this is an actual example. Somebody like that dies. Is
it because there was some kind of interpersonal conflict that
is what is alleged to have happened, or is it
(04:00):
something bigger in how the heck do you prove it?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Well?
Speaker 5 (04:03):
And I guess with cases like that where there's a suicide,
perhaps there are boiler plate kind of procedures that go
into clearing it, making it you know, Okay, it was
their foul play, it was there evidence that somebody was
here and participated in making this happen, or was this
somebody that took their own life. So, but beyond that,
it's hard to you know, it's hard to push for
(04:27):
like more taking a closer look unless there's like a
very clear pattern.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
And so tonight we're exploring stories about scientists allegedly or
in some cases provably removed to not to not because
they were bad people, but in a larger effort to
remove their expertise from the grand chess board of Zabag
New Braznetski. We're zooming in on these scientists. Let's give
a bit of background. Here are the facts. You know,
(04:55):
if you listen to part one, we don't have to
spend too too much time on this invention. It's amazing.
It's such a superpower. The animals of the world have it,
not just humans. Otters make tools, corvids make tools. Cetaceans
as well, like animals get the idea of invention, and
it's really helpful for the human experiment because it an
(05:19):
invention addresses problems that human beings cannot solve with their
starting operating equipment. Like you know, you start with the
body and the mind. You can't automatically make fire unless
you figure out a couple of other things.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yeah, I think the big difference with humans is we
figured out, like you said, power fire right as the
first thing, and then combustion, and then electricity and once
once you have power tools. Right, if the beavers have
power tools, oh look out buddy, Sorry forests. But you
know that is where that is where I think humanity
(05:57):
becomes dangerous to itself in any of those other animals
that might figure out some tool making.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Yeah, has humanity broken the game of evolution? That's part
of the question.
Speaker 3 (06:07):
I mean.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Look, also, we're talking about discoveries and inventions. Discoveries and inventions,
they're closely related. The are kissing cousins, but they're not
quite the same. A discovery may simply be an observation.
The idea of an invention is the application of a discovery,
so it leverages what could be an abstract observation into technology,
(06:30):
like a great example of this comes from the Nolan film.
Oppenheimer spends a great deal of time on the difference
between discovery and invention, theory and application. Multiple points in
that film adaptation of Oppenheimer's life, we see the legendary
physicist Oppenheimer saying, I am a theorist. I not actually
(06:54):
making the thing. I just I understand the mechanics of
how it would work, and that's why he needed a team.
Speaker 5 (07:02):
Well, someone can discover a thing and not have the
skill set with which to apply it practically, right.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Well, yeah, exactly. The discovery that, oh there are atoms,
and this is how we think they probably work. And
as you said, been the technology or even the theory
is maybe someone could split that atom. Could it happen?
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Right? Possible?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Then you then you invent the thing that could possibly
split the atom. Then you discover again it can be split.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
And then you parlay that into a world destroying weaponry,
you know, and then a blockbuster Hollywood film on the
backs of millions of deaths.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
And on the backs of barbies. Yeah, the world. My
theory is that movie would not have done as well
if there hadn't have been the Barbenheimer phenomenon. It's such
a it's such a long, thinky kind of movie.
Speaker 5 (07:51):
It's kind of wild that it did so much business
in the box office.
Speaker 6 (07:55):
I kind of fell in love when I saw it
for the first really dug it?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah, okay, I thought open. I'm write a lot of
poetry to it. Cool. I'm sorry.
Speaker 5 (08:03):
I obviously I was not able to make it when
we all, when you guys went and saw the movie,
and I still have not seen it.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
So I look forward to catching it at school. You should.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
You should watch it on an old school Nokia flip
phone with a mono sound, the way Nolan intended letterbox.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
Right.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
So you know, just like in Hollywood brainstorming, a lot
of inventors have ideas that don't lead anywhere for any
number of reasons. A lot of times you're a scientist
and you say, oh, that's interesting, but the concept is
not immediately applicable nor successful because it needs other discoveries
or inventions to render it feasible. There's an amazing sketch
(08:45):
by the criminally underrated group Mitchell and Webb that talks
about this, and they have like an old school Middle
Ages Italian esque inventor and he comes up to the
money guy and he's got a carved wooden mouse and
it's got a little carved wooden ball inside of it,
and the money guy is saying, Okay, what is this
(09:05):
next great invention, and the whole bit is it's worth watching.
The whole bit is the dude saying, well, I don't
know exactly how this is gonna matter later, but at
some point someone else will invent an amazing thing and
you'll need this little carved mouse and you can you know.
And he's like, Okay, well what does this mouse do?
(09:27):
And he's like, well, you can click on it and
it doesn't have a bunch of wires leading out from it,
and the money guy's like, yeah, but it's the Middle Ages.
Most things don't have wires leading out of them. So
I think that's a beautiful way to show how weird
invention is, like the vention the flying machine.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
For clicking and dragon, come on, cavemn.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I think we all, I think we all got it.
That's a boy. Let's make sure we all understand. It's
a computer mouse. I had in my mind a tiny mouse,
like a creature mouse that had a ball inside of
it somehow, and I was like, what is this thing?
Speaker 5 (10:02):
Early early prototypes for the mouse perhaps looking more mouse like.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
M m yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
And also, I mean with Da Vinci's flying machines, we
got some amazing sketches his head was in the right place.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
He was onto something.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
But it wasn't until centuries later that the Right Brothers
made powered flight a reality. Also requisite shout out to
Charles Chappelle.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Uh, black Heart in the right place, Ben, that's what
I want to know. Unclear clear unclear anatomically probably quite possible.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Possibly, so you can you can also stumble across something
useful while you're researching a flawed or dead end idea,
right like, uh, think of the alchemist. They're looking for
the ability to transmute lead into gold using the Philosopher's Stone.
They're questing after immortality. They discovered neither of those things,
(11:00):
but they did invent pesticides along the way, So thanks
for the roundup, Alchemist of old. And they also sort
of stumbled into the discipline we call chemistry. And as
you know, if you listen Ridiculous history, a ton of
inventors died at the hands of their own inventions or
as a consequence of their discovery, like everyone from the
(11:21):
guy who made the creepy horse statue at Denver Airport
to Marie Curie and radiation poisoning.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
Well, yeah, and we know how hard it is sometimes
to get things approved for clinical trials or studies or
whatever human testing. So a lot of times, you know,
inventors who are on the verge of a breakthrough will
be like, Ah, we'll not have time for that. I'll
just test it on myself.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Oops, I died.
Speaker 4 (11:45):
Right, right, And that's part of that's one of the
darker sides too. You know, we mentioned this often because
we cannot mention it enough. Suppression of technology might sound
wacka do, but it's very much a real thing. You
might stumble into an amazing idea, you might win the
lottery and purposely create an amazing idea. Your initial concept
(12:07):
might be on the money, but there if it challenges
the status quo of a system, just like Copernicus, right,
then you are going to be in trouble. Here in
the US, we have the Invention Secrecy Act of nineteen
fifty one, anti democratic, anti free market, very real and
top secret.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
That's interesting Ben that you liken it to things like Copernicus,
which often studies or discoveries, or you know individuals like
that that have theories that sort of flew in the
face of organized religion or like the governing status quo
in terms of them holding on to power.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I guess I think of the Invention Secrecy Act as.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
Being a little more like along the lines of, like
you've discovered a thing that you shouldn't know about that
like we it's ours already, you know what I mean,
And if you put this out in the world, it's
going to compromise national security.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Maybe it's just.
Speaker 5 (13:00):
A modern example, a modern version of that past, you know,
threatening the religious status quo.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I think that's very interesting.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, that's the comparison I'm hoping to draw here, because
the threat to the status quo, whether that is a
secular state power or an ecclesiastical theocratic power, it still
has the monopoly over violence. Like you, if you try
to find the you know, if you try to find
a year by year spreadsheet or markup of things that
(13:34):
fell to the Invention Secrecy Act, then you're gonna have
at best mixed success. We know that there is a
list of compensation. It's kind of like an imminent domain
of ideas where they can say, hey, your idea is
worth x amount of money, We're going to pay it
for this. You can never talk about it again if
(13:54):
you do any further research on it. You automatically work
for US democracy in the free market, take a backseat
every single moment to nation state concerns. I mean, you
can invent anything you wish in the US until the
powers that be deem you a threat. And you might
be saying, guys, it's twenty twenty four. Surely we've evolved
(14:18):
past burning scientists at the stake, right, We're past these
barbaric acts.
Speaker 5 (14:23):
Well, you just don't do it in public. Yeah, we
just don't do it in the town square. It's a
little more covert than that.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
And you'll see why we find this optimism a bit
chuckle worthy. After word from our sponsors.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
There are tons and tons of inventors and scientists whom,
depending upon who you ask, depending upon whom you ask,
ran a foul of great powers. Remember we talked about
Rudolph Diesel. What happened to that guy? Did he just
did he just fall overboard?
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
He disappeared on a ship during a night walk.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Well, people saw him go into his quarters and then
they were folded.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
There was a watch like left on his night stand
sort of.
Speaker 5 (15:13):
I believe it was just very much betty By type activities, right, Yeah,
But the big point is nobody saw him leave and
nobody found his body.
Speaker 6 (15:20):
If he was deceased and.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
He told people he would see them the next morning,
it's sketch, guys. I mean, we we we We've already talked.
Speaker 5 (15:27):
About it, but it's I would be hard pressed to
believe anything other than he was taken out.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
It's tough, right, Well, wait, really could what was the
connection he was potentially going to sell his technology or.
Speaker 5 (15:40):
It was like a bad deal to there was some
kind of weirdness, right, But wasn't there some kind of
weirdness about the deal where it was like, really, was
it really lucrative for him or was it kind of
like him not getting Delta good hand? It was it
was something like in one extreme or the other, Like
it was either a really good deal for him, a
(16:00):
really bad deal for.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
Him, and he had money problems. He had Zack Duffel bags, yeah,
cash and stuff with his wife. I mean in each
of he's a great example because in each of these
following cases, we're going to see accusations of conspiracy. We're
going to see a lot of skeptics who say, hey,
their invention didn't work. It was pseudoscience. And then sometimes
we're going to see a conspiracy blooming just because of
(16:23):
what a person was doing before they die, like their career,
their hobbies, their interests, whatever view you might take, fellow
conspiracy realist, We're going to see a lot of questions
that remain unanswered. Maybe we start with a doctor Rodney
Marx shout out to what happens when someone dies in Antarctica,
(16:44):
which I think has been on our minds recently.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Oh yeah, well, especially when someone dies and the death
isn't even thought to be a homicide potentially right for
a long time.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Yeah, let's let's learn a little bit more about doctor Marx.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
Huh. Absolutely.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
Doctor Rodney Marks was an Australian astrophysicist who was employed
by the Smithsonian Society, and he was a part of
a research project in Antarctica for the National Science Foundation.
At the time of his demise on May the twelfth
of the year two thousand. He was stationed at one
(17:21):
of these research facilities. Guys, Sorry, I'm just getting mad
true detective vibes such a it's not Antarctica, it's Alaska,
but very much revolving around mysterious deaths at research stations
in the frozen tundra. The station in question here was
called Ammundsen Scott Station in the South Pole, and upon
(17:43):
his expiration, his cadaver was flown off.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Of the continent immediately over to New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Well, let's go ahead and say he didn't have like
gunshot wounds, right. It wasn't like one of those things where, oh,
this is a homicide, we need to get this guy out,
or this person is not doing well, we need to
save him and get him out of here. He is
dead and he is sent somewhere, right, And.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
It wasn't cyanid to the good people of Thailand. Yeah,
he had this set up there. He had because his
condition deteriorated incredibly quickly, precipitously. Was he was fine one day,
as fine as one can be living in that harsh,
contained environment, and then the day before he dies May eleventh,
(18:38):
he is incredibly unwell. He's vomiting blood, like starts mourning.
Speaker 6 (18:44):
Fine.
Speaker 4 (18:45):
By the afternoon he's vomiting blood, and he dies. Investigators
were not able to or still not able to fully
figure out what happened because the body, to your point, no,
was moved so quickly. They did conclude an autopsy that
he died of what's called acute methanol poisoning. No one
(19:06):
who was around and was a very small group of
people here, just like the board game Clue, no one
has come forward to explain exactly how he ran into
a cute methanol poisoning. Investigators did rule out suicide. They said,
we don't have any indications that this guy purposely consumed
this lethal amount of methanol. But then the investigators also
(19:30):
said they got stone walled at.
Speaker 5 (19:32):
Every turn, So the alternative being that they were slowly
fed the stuff for no or that it was just
a hazard of the occupational hazard.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
I think there was a significant amount of it that
got into something he ingested at some point, so which
then you know, if you're an investigator, you're trying to
figure out, well, how did that methanol get in his system?
Speaker 6 (19:56):
Right, That's what Ben was saying.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
And the people who are around him at the time
didn't seem to have much to say about what could
have happened or what the how it got into his body.
Speaker 4 (20:08):
And methanol is related to alcohol, but it's it's not
the alcohol you drink. It's kind of like Prohibition, when
a poisons government purpose, right, when the US government actively
poisoned people during prohibition. So the question is, yeah, did
he get poisoned on purpose? Is this a homicide? And
if so, why, And if you're an investigator asking that question,
(20:30):
you have to wonder why the National Science Foundation is
not helping you at all.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
That is a little odd.
Speaker 5 (20:37):
Also, the immediacy of flying the cadaver off to New
Zealand of all places, it's a little weird.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
And there's a piece in the New Zealand Herald that gosh,
it was from two thousand and nine. It talks about
the well at least it alleges, according to some internal
documentation from the groups that were running the station out there,
that there was heavy drug use on the station by personnel,
heavy drinking by the personnel at the station. And it
(21:06):
does I don't know again it it's weird because it
leaves open the door to potential accidental poisoning.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Right like he because he was a binge drinker, had
he accidentally consumed methanol right, possibly while already inebriated. And
that's from there's a there's a another there. There was
another update to that from Jared Booker, we're talking about
the same article where where where. They also point out
(21:37):
he was one of fifty people on the site. There
were there were a lot of people there, but they're
all clearly identified.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
They're all clearly if you.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Were an investigator, you should be able to find and
question them. And even the even the assigned coroner out
of New Zealand had a problem with this. He said,
I don't think New Zealand police and authorities are being
given the information they need.
Speaker 5 (22:06):
So no, yeah, I'm sorry, no shade on New Zealand.
But why New Zealand? He is Australian. Was it just proximity?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
This is just this was an outfit reporting on it.
It's David, It's by David Fisher.
Speaker 5 (22:20):
By the way, ask why they flew the body of
New Zealand. Yeah, apparently, I guess, like what for them
to do an investigate?
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Like who? Who? On whose authority? I guess is my question?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Right?
Speaker 4 (22:32):
Proximity would would be the answer, their proximity and available
investigative okay facilities. Yeah, but we we also don't know
what he was working on, which is the next question.
Speaker 6 (22:44):
No, we don't.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Just part of the weird stuff here and again that's
just why it's weird to me when you think about
it as either a covered up homicide or an accidental
homicide or accidental death right within a close knit organization
like that. It was stated, but at least according to
this article, it was stated that this should be investigated
(23:07):
as a homicide immediately upon the body being found and
then moved to New Zealand. They said the investigator said, hey,
this should be looked at as a homicide, the medical examiner,
but that it was not treated that way, and the
organization that was running the facility, basically whether they whether
(23:29):
they had anything to do with it or not, people
were able to go into his room and actually move
things around, get rid of evidence if they had wanted to,
and everything was tainted, there was no way to prove
what actually happened to him at that point.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
Potentially, Yeah and A police were still wondering whether there
had been US agencies carrying out a full investigation and
whether they in New Zealand would be able to have
access to that investigation. At this point, it seems like
the answer is not really And if we were to
(24:05):
say this was a case of conspiracy, then we ourselves
would need much more information. We would need to know
what exactly Marx was working on. The closest we can
tell you is that he was running the Antarctic Submillimeter
Telescope and Remote Observatory or wait for it, ASTRO with
(24:28):
a forward slash between the T and the R, which
I think is just a very cool name. I'm trying
to keep it positive. Yeah, he's working for Harvard Smithsonian.
But we know the cause of death, but we don't
know the circumstances leading to it. The crime scene or
if crime it is is absolutely fubar. This is going
(24:51):
to remain a mystery unless one of those forty nine
people comes forward with legitimate information.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
So what do you guys think? Is it?
Speaker 4 (25:01):
Is it possible that he ran a foul of somewhat?
Speaker 3 (25:09):
It's just hard to say.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
If, like imagine, you're in that isolated place, you've got
some kind some kind of personal conflict with somebody else,
and it's only it's getting worse and worse because you're
so isolated yet stuck together. Methanol poisoning would be a
way to do it if you knew that the people
or the person was around you that drank a lot,
(25:34):
or you.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Could put it in, right, you could put it in
a familiar container or something. We would just need to
know more about how the how acute methanol poisoning works,
and what the timeframe is. It's also possible that they
this person drank from the wrong container. It's also possible
(25:57):
they were dosed in a way that didn't involve recreational
alcohol consumption whatsoever. It's just tough. But we see again
this thing we're talking about earlier, which is the fact
that this guy is a scientific luminary, and the fact
that his death is and probably will remain so mysterious
(26:17):
naturally breeds speculation.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
It's a big problem. There were forty nine other people
at the station, right, Yeah, so like that's a lot
of suspects. That's what what is who's that the detective
who's doing all the movies lately, Like, let's doing all
the investigation? Oh man, why can't I think of this?
The one about the glass onion?
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Oh not pero, No, it's like a I can't remember Daniel.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
Yeah, he's excellent.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
God, what a cool character. He's so funny.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Just imagine that movie, except there are forty nine suspects,
right right?
Speaker 4 (26:58):
Oh, and we are getting a message from mission control,
Ben wi Blanc. Thank you, Thank you, Paul. Let's move
on to doctor Don Craig Wiley. He had all the
makings of a future Nobel Prize winner until his body
(27:18):
was recovered from the Mississippi River on December twentieth, two
thousand and one. Tennessee and Arkansas police forces in collaboration
rule this death a homicide. He is a biophysics expert,
and he had been missing for more than a month
before his body was discovered.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, this is a weird case. It's a really weird case.
I think the biggest Well, I guess let's talk about
it because it's a bridge, right that he must have
gone over, right, But there's this bridge, allegedly or not allegedly,
according to the investigation, was pretty protected from somebody going
(28:02):
over that bridge unless they really wanted to.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Yeah, it has a two meter fence that's like six
and a half feet on either side.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Which is not easy to get over unless you want to.
If you're somebody throwing a body or something, probably not
gonna happen. It's gonna be a lot more difficult. It's
just a weird place, especially after being missing for.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
So long, Yeah, and they found his car on that bridge.
He had a rental car that they found on the bridge. Also,
abandoned vehicles are going to play a big role in
a future episode we're doing. But the FBI does become
involved in this case, and controversially they're the ones who
say he had an accidental death. Somehow he stopped this
(28:49):
rental car on this bridge, looked at the fence and
said challenge accepted, and somehow fell over to his death.
This another interesting thing here to this pattern we're establishing, folks.
His death comes in the wake of the anthrax scare
(29:10):
in the United States, and according to his peers, he's
one of the few people who would have been able
to accurately trace where the anthrax had originated to find
the providence of the anthrax, which remains part of a
heated debate and conspiracy theories today in twenty twenty four, So.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Your mind reels, right, oh wow, did someone did someone
kidnap him and take him away? How did he get
a hold of a rental car? It was fifteen days,
But your brain you want to go into investigative mode.
At least I do, I know, I do. Who would
have motivation? To take him away from that. Do you
(29:49):
think he would have motivation to want to escape himself,
right to disappear for a while because of whatever pressures
he's getting. There's so many different avenues that you could
go down with him.
Speaker 4 (30:02):
Yeah, I mean it would have been convenient if we're
playing the fin game. It would have been convenient to
certain people if he were no longer a factor. But
then we would also be assigning a lot of agency
and ability to people who who would be able to
track someone down if they're off the grid via probably
(30:24):
like credit slips, rental car stuff, whatever kind of technology.
It just seems like it's asking a lot of that conspiracy,
but it also is asking a lot. It's asking an
almost equal amount. To accept the FBI's official explanation, a
guy stops his car, climbs over a fence, and drops
(30:47):
to his.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Death right by a hydro electric plant.
Speaker 4 (30:49):
Apparently, no no indications of suicidal ideation, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Ah, feels like a dumping, like a body dumping to me,
but a difficult one somehow for some reason.
Speaker 3 (31:02):
Oh it's spoiler, folks. We're not giving the ad.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
We don't have the answers for no of these we
want to hear from you at the end of the show.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
We have no idea you but one last thing nobl
reads really quickly. I think there is potential for someone
to have gotten to him before he disappeared. Right, So,
like weve been we were talking about like having to
track him down with rental car stuff and in credit slips.
I think there's potential that somebody got to him and
(31:28):
then the disappearance occurred because he was with somebody, but
then they's.
Speaker 4 (31:33):
Been held and then transported perhaps uh perhaps put to
the question, right.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
Yeah, I was going to ask if if you guys
thought there was any indication of like some mysterious third party,
you know, like and I hear when I think of
like dumping bodies, I'm like, well, you gotta have help.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
To do that.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
So little has been released.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Yeah, even now, Yeah, it's it's it's tough. It is
a good question, you know, because to to approach an
answer here, conspiratorial or mundane, we would need to know
at least a little bit of what happened in that
half month, in those fifteen days, right, is it possible
(32:14):
like when someone gets abducted, for example, if they're being interrogated.
Then the idea is you always want them to feel
like they can escape the situation at some point, right
if they pay obedience and they comply, then maybe they'll
get away with a few broken fingers or whatever. And
(32:36):
we're not saying that happened here. We are saying that
it is a very mysterious death. And you cannot blame
friends and family for refusing to accept the FBI's explanation
like that. You know, you you would need an accomplice
or a perpetrator for a body to be thrown from
a bridge, And if someone just decides to jump off
(32:58):
of a bridge, you would to make that story stick,
you would need to have some indications of their mental
state up to that moment, and in both cases, we
simply don't have that information.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
No, it's a weird one.
Speaker 5 (33:14):
Oh yeah, it is, indeed, And I think we got
a couple other weird ones on our hands as well.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Okay, here's one to that point. Here's one that I'm
a little skeptical about. Eugene Malov m A. L.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
L ove.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
At the time of his death in May of two
thousand and four, he was a leading scientist in a
being diplomatic here a controversial concept the field of free
energy he had been. I think his death though, was
probably unrelated to whatever his research was. I think it's
(33:54):
I'm like, not one hundred percent, but it looks like
it was just other bad actors being bad people.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Yeah. Again, it's a problem where if you are involved
in something that sounds super cool and potentially dangerous, like
free energy, right, could you actually build something that would
rival the big energy companies? And would they want you
dead because of that? Even if you're doing all that stuff,
no matter how successful your inventions are and your pursuits are,
(34:23):
you can still have problems with other individuals that enter
your life that have nothing to do with your research
that could cause your demise. I think this might be
an example of that.
Speaker 4 (34:34):
I'm tempted to agree, Yeah, because, like, imagine when you
hear what happened to folks, Imagine if this guy had
just been really into fly fishing. Imagine if instead of
researching free energy, he was researching better ways to build
fishing lores.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Okay, okay, you know so, and then hear this.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
And then hear this, all right, so let your minds diverge.
We're going multiverse.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
Malav's been renting out his former childhood home to a family.
The name of the family is the Schaefer family and
later the son of the Shaffers. Chad along with one
of his friends, Mozelle Brown, and along with Chad's girlfriend
Candace Foster, they get charged with this scientist murder in
(35:23):
May of two thousand and four.
Speaker 3 (35:25):
Apparently what happened.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
What occurred was that these two guys Brown, Brown and Schaeffer,
Chad Shaffer, Mazel Brown, they beat doctor Malav to death.
And they didn't do it because of problems with free energy.
They did it because he was evicting Chad Shaffer's parents
from that rented home because they hadn't paid their rent
(35:50):
in a couple of months. And you can see testimony
with Candace Foster. You can see where these folks got booked.
The investigation looked pretty solid. It's still it took even then,
no allegations and conspiracy. It took police years to make
the connections and the arrest.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Which seems insane. Welve was there cleaning the home that
night at like eleven PM at night, cleaning the home
after the eviction, and police didn't think to imagine that
those who had been evicted could have been a part
of it.
Speaker 6 (36:28):
It does.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
It makes me wonder if even detectives can get taken
down the wrong path when you introduce something like, oh,
this guy was working on free energy. Oh man, right,
I don't know. I just how do you not make
that connection almost immediately because they they would, These are
people who would who would have the perception that they
(36:50):
are victims of this guy, right, despite whatever their actions.
Speaker 4 (36:54):
Were, Which makes you think too, you know how easily
the course of an investigation may be altered because you're
looking for anomalous, unusual things things of note, research into
free energy is one of those things, more so than
fly fishing. But you have to consider all of these aspects.
(37:17):
So for those of us played along at home, we
have we have two cases where we can't say for
sure what happened. We have one case where it does
seem like a tragedy, an egregious an egregious act of homicide,
but not related to scientific pursuit. Do we want to
(37:40):
take a break for a word from our sponsor? I
have the feeling we got a couple more to get
to here, it seems right.
Speaker 3 (37:54):
And we have returned.
Speaker 4 (37:56):
Here is another death without an answer what happened to
the physicist and nuclear research scientist. We had to do
at least one named John Mullen.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Just one John, or one one one nuclear research scientist
named John Mullen, named John Mullen out out of the
very many. Right, Oh yeah, this case is whoo this
one again. If you're just I go so speculative on
these and I play the if then game, ben, I
think to my own detriment here. But let's let's just
(38:31):
do the facts of this one. Doctor John Mullen died
of arsenic poisoning, and according to authorities, it's believed that
that poison somehow found its way into a drink that
he consumed, and they couldmit they made that connection. And
initially who did they think maybe was the culprit?
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah, his girlfriend at the time is romantic partner Tamara Rallo.
This was also in two thousand and four, and they
thought they thought that she would be the top person
of interest. She was actually going to be arrested on
suspicion of homicide.
Speaker 6 (39:11):
But then what happened, m then she ends up dead.
Speaker 5 (39:17):
And then at the time, investigators on the case didn't
really give up much information to the media as to
whether or not she'd committed suicide or there had been
some foul play suspected. There has, at the time of
this episode that we're recording right now, been no conclusive
answers to these questions.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
So your primary suspect ends up dead, there's no trial.
Isn't that convenient? I'm just saying.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:47):
Also considering two weeks after the murder of Mullet, and
they do conclude, by the way, investigators conclude that he
was drinking. He was a mineral water guy, so he
drank some mineral water and it had been laced with
a fatal dose of arsenic. Two weeks after the murder,
his girlfriend Rollo, who's fifty two at the time, she
(40:10):
leaves a message with one of Mullen's children, one of
his two sons, and in the message, this is per
Mullen's son. In the message, she says, quote, don't be
surprised if you find my body floating in your dad's
swimming pool.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
See did he did? Did doctor Mullen know something? And
he even divulged to tomorrow that he knew something, as
you know, connected to his contract with Boeing. But but
just the fact that he did have a contract with Boeing.
He's working on stuff that could be potentially highly secretive
and dangerous, like genuinely secret, secretive and dangerous compared to
(40:52):
you know, the free energy or something like that.
Speaker 3 (40:55):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I just thought that was interesting because it is convenient.
Do you have someone the main suspect die before there's
any trial or discovery or anything like that.
Speaker 4 (41:07):
Yeah, the best way to keep a tomb secret is
to kill the people who dig their grave, you know,
I mean shout out to tengus Khan. But also, you know,
if we were exercising skepticism, we can do a couple
of counterpoints. One, Boeing has a lot of contract workers,
right and uh, And two is Boeing's Does Boeing have
(41:30):
the operational capability to execute a homicide?
Speaker 2 (41:35):
They just put a hole in a fuselage right right right?
Speaker 4 (41:40):
So like the more conspiratorial thing would be he had
some he had some disturbing whistleblower knowledge of some sort,
whether that's croket funding, whether that is poor engineering oversight,
et cetera. And that he was silenced and that his
girlfriend was silenced as a result. But again no proof,
(42:00):
no proof, and police did interview her before death, and
they said she was talkative, she wasn't defensive, but I don't,
I don't know, you know. Later, Rollo's daughter found a
book under her mother's mattress that talks about how to
kill people with poison. Most folks are most folks are
(42:22):
kind of sloppy on this stuff. Your phone searches aren't secure,
and honestly, a VPN is not going to help you.
Speaker 5 (42:29):
Just to be clear, you guys, I've had a sick
family for the last couple of weeks, so I've had
a lot of opportunities to hang out at Walgreens and
I couldn't help but notice a giant display of I
guess it's like defrosting kind of fluid.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
It's that blue fluid that.
Speaker 5 (42:44):
Comes in the giant jugs and there's massive warnings on
the back about what happens if you ingest it. But
my sick conspiracy brain immediately jumped to man, what a
way to get to someone who's a big fan of
Blue Power Aid?
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Am?
Speaker 1 (42:57):
I right?
Speaker 3 (42:59):
Dogs love it too because it's as sweet. It's sweet apparently,
And that's the problem.
Speaker 5 (43:02):
Right, You could put it in power Aid, just not
one hundred percent, and if someone drinks that stuff five
times a day, they'd probably never notice it. If they
didn't notice it had been tampered with. But yeah, sorry,
that's just These are the kind that's been always says
we're fun at parties.
Speaker 2 (43:18):
I'll tell you guys. Okay, So I I go through
way too many cans. I'm a bad citizen of the art.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
You recycle though you're not that bad.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
That true, but but I'm still I think in the
in the end, I'm probably not a good I'm not
good to myself because of the stuff that's on the
insides of those cans and all the everything we've done,
all the stuff we talked, all the good ones, and
sometimes they don't get recycled, depending on where I am
and if I can gain access to a recycling bin
(43:46):
or not. Right, I am so paranoid about the click
and the pop you get if I open up a
can and that's supposed to be carbonated and it doesn't
have just the exact sound that I'm looking for, I
dump that baby out.
Speaker 3 (44:06):
Pop right?
Speaker 6 (44:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (44:08):
Right, you really do that? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (44:09):
You do know?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
And it's not because I actually think anyone's trying to
poison me or I think about the manufacturing process, and
I think about like a flaw that could have happened
in one They got so.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Many steps along the way where things could go wrong.
Speaker 6 (44:23):
I'm just like, I'm not gonna take the risk.
Speaker 5 (44:25):
Well, guys, remember back in the day where it was
so much easier to tamper with even like medicine, and
there were all these scares of like people like poisoning
aspirin and stuff, and that was literally what led to
like child safety caps and.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Stuff like that. I mean, we're better than we used
to be, but it is still kind of scary.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
Yeah, both the good and bad actions of the world
are easier than you think, folks, And that's something that
should stick with all of us. And speaking of questions
that remain, We've got got a couple more examples for you.
As we said, this is a continuing series because there
are a lot out there. Do you guys remember the
(45:04):
story of Aaron Salter Junior.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
This one, I.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
Don't know slightly rings a bell, but no, I don't
think so either, know.
Speaker 4 (45:12):
So, Aaron Salter Junior, like so many people in the
United States, falls victim to a mass shooting and a
frankly terrifying thing about the US then, as of now,
is that the mass shooting's happen so often here right,
far more often than in many other countries. Aaron Salter
(45:34):
Junior is not an inventor by trade. He was a
career police officer in Buffalo and in his retirement he
took a security guard job at a place called tops
Friendly Markets. He also picked up a hobby, which is
one of his late primary drives. At this point, he's
working on an invention of fuel cars with water electrolysis.
Speaker 3 (45:57):
So he's making a water powered car.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
In fuel cell yeah yeah, And he's in a lot
of interviews where he's talking about the invention. You can
see compilation clips of him on YouTube quite easily. He
dies when he's fifty five years old and he's trying
to defend people at the tops Friendly Market. There's an
eighteen year old mass shooter. Salter ends up being one
(46:25):
of ten people who are shot to death by this guy.
This guy is a white mass shooter and according to investigators,
his attack was racially motivated. He was aiming to kill
black people. So there we see a tragedy that is unfortunately,
heartbreakingly all too common in the US. But then we
(46:47):
also see that one of those ten victims is a
guy who's actively working on a hydrogen fuel cell a
water powered car. So people start putting the dots together.
Speaker 6 (47:00):
It's ben.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
It says here that police say Salter actually had a
weapon himself and fired back at the gunman.
Speaker 4 (47:08):
Yes, he died attempting to defend people. Yeah, wow, this
was This was quite recently too. This mass shooting occurred
on May fourteenth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Kind of wild because this guy wasn't like some sort
of funded, you know, researcher. He was just kind of
working on this stuff like as a hobby almost right.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Yeah, he was independent, he was self starting. This feels
like a coincidence to me.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
I don't know if it feels relating, because especially to
your point of the motive of the shooter in the
first place.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
Right, Yeah, and we don't want to give the shooter
too much air time. But no, that was his motive.
You're absolutely right. The guy's name was Peyton s. Jendron
or Gendron geen Dron. Got sentenced last year, actually almost
exactly a year ago today. Got sentenced to eleven consecutive
(48:03):
life sentences, which consecutive means one after the other, so
he can't serve him concurrently, he's not getting now, got it?
Speaker 3 (48:11):
But I don't know.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
I mean, I'm kind of with you, with you guys
on this one, because there's there's a Facebook video from
the Facebook account called nineteen Keys, number one, number nine
keys that links Salter's death to his earlier claims of
this water powered car invention. And the concept here seems
to be that this mass murder might be some sort
(48:35):
of elaborate cover story or cover up meant to silence
yet another inventor who poses an existential threat to the
established energy and transit industries, and looking into it, I
don't see it. You know, we're not the end all
be all arbiters of the truth here, but it feels like, again,
(48:55):
because of what he was interested in in his life
in his retirement, that maybe there's a little bit of
red string from points that may not actually be connected.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
And he did he did die defending people. He was
a hero.
Speaker 6 (49:11):
I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
He was a former police lieutenant for the Buffalo Police
Department and he was the security guard at the place
where the shooting. Where where the shooting took place, Aaron
Salter Junior was was a security guard. Yeah, I didn't really.
Speaker 3 (49:28):
You're saying, yeah, at Top's Friendly Market.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
I didn't realize he was a security guard. But I
don't know why that left my brain as we were
talking about it and I was trying to connect dots here,
I missed that. So that was just his side gig,
or his maybe primary gig, and then doing the other
thing on the side in retirement. I don't see how you.
I don't see how you target the security guard in
a mass shooting like that on purpose, right, If you're
(49:54):
just going to take out the security guard, I don't
know why anyone would come up with a plan in
any darkened room, no matter how illuminati you are to
I don't think that's the plan.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Right.
Speaker 4 (50:06):
There are much more efficient ways to try to go
through that kind of assassination, right. You know, you could
target the car, you could target any other weak points.
And it does sound like this guy from what we
know about the mass shooting. The assailant was streaming on
(50:29):
Twitch dude, and he went into the parking lot and
opened fire, yelling racial slurs. And so the response here
is the response you would have if you were a
security guard. It doesn't sound like it just doesn't make
sense for that to be the kind of cover story
of cover story there is. It sounds like an absolute tragedy,
(50:50):
yet again familiar to American discourse, that has nothing to
do with the idea of water powered car.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Is that fair to say? I think so?
Speaker 6 (50:58):
That's how I feel.
Speaker 4 (50:59):
Ok, we have and you know if we are incorrect,
if there's information we're missing, please let us know for
any of these cases, because survivors, families, and friends still
want answers, and often the investigators want answers too. We
were thinking we could end with an update from a
person that we mentioned previously in Mysterious and Veterans Chapter one.
(51:23):
We didn't give the full look at it, but ning
Li Ninglee is anomalous in these cases. Ningle, Chinese American scientists,
shook popular media in the West back in the nineties
and early two thousands because of her seemingly credible work
(51:44):
with anti gravity.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
And if you are searching for doctor Lee, you aren't
going to find a ton written about well, actually no,
you will find a lot written about her on various
websites and blogs, but it's tough to come by anything
written about her that you might take as Oh, this
is a credible source, right that I could cite and
I would feel comfortable with that, except for one Popular
(52:07):
Mechanics like magazine article that you tracked down, Ben, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:12):
We had to go through some German sources. But also
you could see Lee being cited, interviewed, examined in popular
science magazines of the day like Discover and Popular Mechanics.
In the article talking about specifically there matt is Taming
Gravity by Jim Wilson, you can see Lee in the
(52:34):
center of a photograph at the top with two of
her colleagues, doctors Campbell and Smally. And what she's holding
there in the middle that looks sort of like a
bunt cake meets a record player. That is the that
is the superconductor disc she made or discovered or invented
(52:56):
that purportedly purportedly against gravity.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
It's really dope. When you read about her on those
other places it people think that doctor Kningley was on
the cusp of something huge when it comes to what
do they call it, gravitometric fields. I mean, it's really cool.
It's straight out of the science fiction novels that we love, Right,
(53:25):
somebody has a breakthrough in this science and now we
can actually build that UFO type craft that we've been
trying to make all these years. And the weird thing
is maybe we should should we go through actually what
she found, or should we just talk about her her
quote disappearance.
Speaker 3 (53:44):
Oh, let's sum it up real quickly.
Speaker 6 (53:45):
Okay.
Speaker 4 (53:45):
Yeah, So like nineteen nineties, two thousands, she is not
just appearing in popular science magazines. She's doing science. She
co authors a number of papers publishing these various journals
that are arguing the discovery of a practicable method of
(54:06):
fighting gravity. And what she says, or what the theory
is is that you can is.
Speaker 3 (54:14):
A deep water we'll keep it brief.
Speaker 4 (54:15):
You can rotate ions through a gravitometric field perpendicular, so
at an angle to their natural spin, and this will
nullify some of the effects of gravity. So to break
it down by analogy, we could say she figured out
that you can push ions in a different way that
(54:38):
will change the direction in which gravity pushes.
Speaker 1 (54:41):
So you're just kind of.
Speaker 4 (54:42):
Like leveraging the force differently possible. She thought so, and
a lot of her peers did, and then it seemed
like she was onto something. She was working at the
University of Alabama for a while. She left, she created
a limited liability corporation called ac Gravity, which is active today.
(55:05):
Found that like any good company, they're based in Delaware
for tax purposes.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
Of course, but the labs in Huntsville, Alabama, if you
ever wanted to check it out. So there was a grant, right,
there's there's quite a bit of money that was given
to this organization that she started to check and see
if there's any sand here could we do that? That
sounds great, amazing, talk about something that would go straight to,
(55:32):
you know, one of the big defense contractors if this
technology existed, if it's.
Speaker 3 (55:37):
Not already there Tonton Ton Ton.
Speaker 6 (55:40):
In nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
But the grant, how much was the grant for it.
Speaker 4 (55:45):
Was under five hundred thousand dollars, so big to individuals
at the time. But Chump changed, Uncle Sam, oh, we
got the actual number yet, it's four hundred forty eight thousand,
nine hundred and seventy dollars. I don't know why they
couldn't spring for the extra thirty bucks.
Speaker 2 (56:01):
Hmmm. I think it was actually for four hundred thousand dollars.
But that forty eight nine seventy was like a salary
that somebody got for a year. I think that I
don't know.
Speaker 4 (56:14):
Awesome, it is a specific number. We know the grants
went from to get in two thousand and one, like
you're saying, and it ends in two thousand and two.
What did they do with all that money? We will
never no, no.
Speaker 3 (56:29):
Never know.
Speaker 2 (56:30):
Doctor Lee kind of disappeared. You can find several videos
of her speaking at various places for various functions, talking
about the potentials of her research and the science that
she and her team are doing, and then all of
a sudden, boop, she's gone. But there is something that
occurred that I was not aware of last time we
were recording this the first episode, Ben, and that's something
(56:53):
that happened to her in her personal life.
Speaker 3 (56:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (56:57):
So in twenty fourteen, she is still like she's left
the University of Alabama but still definitely has connections and
the lab is in Huntsville. She is walking down the
street in the University of Alabama campus when she is
struck by a vehicle. Her spouse is nearby. Her spouse
sees the accident and so terrified that he suffers a
(57:20):
heart attack permanently damages him. He passes away just a
year later. As a result, doctor Lee does not die immediately.
She suffers what some have called a fate worse than death.
She has lasting significant brain damage, which quite likely led
to her contracting Alzheimer's.
Speaker 6 (57:40):
Yes, and there is.
Speaker 2 (57:43):
You can go online. You can find an obituary for
a doctor ning Lee, and it states that she was
born January fourteenth, nineteen forty three, and that she passed
away on July twenty seventh, twenty twenty one. Then I
wasn't able to verify if this is in fact a
(58:04):
real obituary for the actual doctor Ningley that we're talking about,
but it certainly does seem like that. At the top,
it describes her as a seventy nine years old and
quote one of the world's leading scientists in superconductivity and
anti gravity.
Speaker 3 (58:20):
Yeah, it's it is.
Speaker 4 (58:23):
Unfortunately this person's obituary as far as I can tell,
as well, she passed away. We don't know how far
this scientist anti gravity research actually went. We don't know
why the DoD threw five hundred grand at it. We
don't know what would have happened. We don't you know.
(58:45):
And also to be clear, we're saying we don't know
or not try to necessarily imply there was some huge
overarch and cover up, but we can say the information's
just not out there. I mean, also, people just get
hit by cars all the time.
Speaker 2 (59:02):
It's true, It's very true. One thing we would say is,
like the whole falling out of windows thing, an accidental
death is a likely choice for someone who is a
professional looking to hide that a hit is occurring. Just
(59:24):
putting that out there doesn't mean doctor Lee's death had
anything to do with that. It is just it is
a I would say, a likely way to go about
killing someone you want dead if you're an organization that's
a little more sophisticated if.
Speaker 4 (59:41):
You're Yeah, and there's also you know, there's the fact
that if this person had not encountered this tragedy, they
would have lived justified through the span of their natural life,
and the research that they did could have still been
kept secret. So yeah, there's also the possibility that the
(01:00:01):
DoD ponied up the money, which is chump change for them.
That's just a few pony bones for Uncle Sam, and
then I think that's for you. And then they looked
into it and they said, oh, this actually isn't either
applicable or it Isn't you know there's some error in
the methodology or something like what is this story of
(01:00:22):
the em drive? Remember that from a few years back
that garnered a similar level of interest, and we haven't
heard much about it since. Makes you think, I just
I feel like this just goes to show that it's
scratching the surface. It tells us a lot about human
psychology and the need to see patterns. But we also
(01:00:44):
still have a lot of unanswered questions. How much of
this is sheer accident, terrible luck? How much of it
might be the result of this stuff they don't want
you to know.
Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
We would highly recommend you read the article in Popular
Mechanics that been found.
Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
Yes, oh, the article itself is in English. It's just
easier to find in German, which also makes you think,
does it not?
Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Sorry?
Speaker 4 (01:01:14):
Nine, indeed, maybe we call it a day here, because
the next part of this, the next part of this
exploration depends on you, constant listeners, fellow conspiracy realists. Let
us know if any of these cases are familiar to you.
Let us know if you have new information, Let us
know if there are whether there are other inventors or
(01:01:35):
scientists you want us to look into can't wait to
hear from you. We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Correct to Mundo.
Speaker 5 (01:01:43):
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff, where
we exist on Facebook.
Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Where we have our Facebook group Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 5 (01:01:49):
We are also Conspiracy Stuff Show on YouTube where we
have weekly video delights rolling out for your viewing pleasure,
as well as on x FKA, Twitter, on Instagram and
TikTok Piers Stuff Show.
Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Yes, yes, yes, we also have a phone number. But guys,
I'm going to put one last quote in here from
that popular mechanics article because I missed it while we
were going through this. This is a quote from doctor
Ning Lee when asked about why she continues to turn
down money from investors.
Speaker 6 (01:02:18):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Investors want control over the technology. This is too important.
It should belong to all the American people.
Speaker 3 (01:02:26):
Oh wow, No, yeah, she was murdered.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
I just mean that. I in my opinion, that sentiment
is dangerous because there are people who do want to
control it, who maybe even already control something like it
and don't want anyone else to have it. Just putting
it out there. Hey, we've got a phone number. It's
one eight to three three std WYTK. When you call in,
(01:02:54):
you've got three minutes, give yourself a cool nickname and
let us know if we can use your name and
message on the air. If you don't want to do that,
why not instead to send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
We can't emphasize the importance of the email, folks, we
read every single one we get. A shout out to Trent,
who introduces us to the importance of pronunciation, saying I
wanted to address the pronunciation of guy Anna and Siquibo
talking about our Venezuela Guiana episode or guy Anna episode.
(01:03:25):
You pronounced them like most people would and do, but
neither a Spanish words. Pronouncing them in a Spanish sounding
way only helps give credence to Venezuela's claims. Guyana is
pronounced like die anna, si Quibo is pronounced with the
qui like in quit. It's an Amerindian word, and although
(01:03:47):
it looks Spanish, it is not pronounced that way. Thank
you so much, Trent, you are absolutely correct about the pronunciation.
Please please please send us any and all messages you
feel your fellow conspiracy realist no conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Stuff they don't want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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