April 28, 2023 • 59 mins
Virtually everyone's experienced a slip in memory -- in most cases, the slips are thankfully short-lived. But what happens when your own brain conspires against you... what happens when you permanently forget nearly every detail of your own identity? This was the case of a man who took the name Benjaman Kyle, who for years was one of the mysterious individuals known as the "living unidentified."
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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 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Paul Mission controlled decant. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Let's start today with a question. Guys,
have you ever walked into a room only to forget
(00:48):
why he came in there in the first place?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Consistently?
Speaker 4 (00:55):
And it's sort of like, you know, losing your keys
or something like that too. I think it's that he
comes from the same place of kind of you know,
scattershot brainedness.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
We learned something about this Ben, something with doorways, right.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Right, Yeah, you're on the money. We're on the same page.
This is a helpful psychological I don't know if it's
a hack because it's not going to be to the
advantage of the human mind. But when people walk through
entrances or exits, on some level, the neurotypical brain will
(01:32):
assume it's a new situation, like a new level of
a video game. Right, so you are no longer in
some way, You're no longer the person that was on
the other side of the entry. So if you want,
I guess the hack is, if you want to forget stuff,
just walk through a bunch of doorways.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, I'll tell you what works for me. I'm serious
because this really does happen to me quite frequently in
my new especially in my new house, because it's less
familiar to me. I think, so the new doorway really
is a reset. I walk back out the same door,
whichever one I went into, and I just kind of
stand there for a moment, collect my thoughts, and then
(02:13):
generally I can remember why I went into that other place.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
You can also do I don't know if there's a
real thing. This is just something I do. I call
it micro mnemonic approach. Like when you are before you
go to look for the thing, when you realize you
lost something, do a small motion that will create a small,
short lived sense memory, like cross your fingers and to
(02:39):
your point noel like cross your fingers and think keys,
or you know, put your arms a kimbo. A word
we never get to use and say to yourself keys
and then go look for them. And then if you're
in a room and you're wondering, why am I here?
What has life led me to cross your fingers again?
Or put your arms a kimbo, And then it'll hit you.
(03:01):
You'll be like, oh, I'm supposed to record a show.
That's why I'm here.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
You know, it's funny, but I mean the things that
you're describing sound an awful lot like superstitious behaviors or
like things that maybe a baseball player would do in
order to like have quote unquote good luck. Right, But
that's the thing, right, you're basically talking about weaponized psychology,
you know, to try to kind of game yourself into
(03:26):
doing you know, having your brain cooperate and do what
you want.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah, it's it's creating multiple pathways toward the desired you know,
train of thought. And like most people, if you're like
most people, fellow conspiracy realists, at some point you have
experienced a sudden bout of forgetfulness. Even people with the
real life superpower of adetic memory, which is different from
(03:54):
photographic memory because adetic memory is real and photographic memory
doesn't actually exist. Even those folks will have a difficult
time recalling some things. It can be really frightening, you know,
it's weird for most of us. It's kind of like
about of the hiccups or an unintended fart. It freaks
(04:19):
you out, and then it's gone and you move on
with your life. You know who you are, you know
what this object in space that you call yourself is.
Today's episode explores something really odd, an extreme version of
this forgetfulness. We're going to talk about something that might
(04:41):
be unfamiliar to a lot of people. Individuals who are
called the living unidentified, people who for one reason or
another have forgotten themselves. It never clicked back, right, the
lost keys in this case where they're identify tease and
they are still looking for those keys. This is the
(05:03):
story of a man who chose to call himself Benjaman
Kyle Well.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
I think this is a trope that a lot of
people are familiar with from you know, film and television,
Like the idea of someone turning up in a town
and they don't know their own name, or they don't
know who they are. It's a really interesting way of
kind of exploring the mystery, you know, especially when the
person at the center of the mystery doesn't have all
the information like Momento a good example.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Memento is probably the quintessential example of that in the
world of film. And then there's also uh, oh, Angel
Heart Robert de Niro right plays well, I don't want.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
To Yeah, Louis Cipher, Yes, do the math.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, guys, I watched a movie called The Snowman the
other day.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Just isn't hilariously bad. It was pounded in the press.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
The main character is Harry Hole.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Yeah, it's a series of books, I know.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
But it's just zero with zero, like recognition that the
guy's name is Harry Hole.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Come on, oh, Matt, forgot to tell you. Uh figured
out on a different show. We figured out a great
alias as lid Sec. Lets you choose your own name
you should probably go with, or we respectfully submit that
listeners should should consider what what was it?
Speaker 2 (06:39):
No con check.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Check push, which is the singular and plural of specific.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
Marty gra Polish Marty grab type. But we're not talking
about pun check. We're not talking about Harry Hole. We're
talking about.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Benjamin Benjamin, Benja Man m A and am I and Kyle.
Here are the facts. The story The best way to
start the story is in Richmond Hill, a small town
near Savannah in our home state of Georgia, on August
(07:18):
thirty first, two thousand and four, right after Matt and
Nola and I celebrated our birthdays. It's not included in
most of the media, but it's true. There was an
employee at a burger king sun you hour who walked
out to the dumpster. You know there at work. Walk
(07:38):
out to the dumpster only defined an unconscious, nude, sunburned,
rash ridden guy in front of the dumpster and riddled
with fire ant bites. So in fire ants and fire ants, crawling,
crawling on, crawling on the poor guy. And so what
(07:59):
you do, this is not what you signed up for
when you decide to get a paycheck at burger king.
You freak out.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, you go, yikes, I need to call someone. This
looks like it might be a dead body.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Right, this is not a typical day at burger king, right.
And also, you know, I like that you're pointing out
the idea of whether or not it's a corpse, because
if someone's not visibly moving, if they're not visibly breathing,
then the best way for you as a civilian, to
see if they're alive is to touch them, and so understandably,
(08:36):
our pal son yo Auer said, nah, let's call the cops.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Well, it's a real that's a real. This a serious situation.
There to think about whether or not you actually physically
even walk over near the scene, right, you shouldn't. It's
just like we talked about with the gun, right, like,
what do you do? Like, probably the best thing as
a civilian is raise your hand and say, uh, some Boddy,
would the authority.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
To professional do it?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Please?
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Well, not only that, I mean the professional to help
the individual, but also to make sure that you're not
in some way seen as culpable or you know, or
do something wrong or get mixed up in something. By
the way, you guys, you know what, My first ever job.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Was laying in front of a Burger kingdomster.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Not not not in front, Okay, I did take a
lot of trash out to the Burger King dumpster that
you I worked at a Burger King. That was my
first job when I was like sixteen.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Dude, whoppers. Whoppers are awesome.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
I didn't have one until like well into adulthood. We
were doing this show when I finally tried a whopper.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
It's the superior fast food burger, there's no question about it.
But I learned and working there, that you can do
all kinds of stuff, you know, the whole have it
your way thing that's real. You can ask for it hot,
you can ask for it cut in half, you can
ask for it, you know, with all kinds of other fixings,
and yeah, if you ask for it hot, you get
a fresh one. And there's little little modifiers on the
cash redister for those things. They're very real. A lot
(10:01):
of secret menu stuff at Burger.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
King, well you can get. You can get, like if
you go to a fast food place. I would hope
as long as you're not rude and winging and demanding,
you can get people to work with you, you know
what I mean, like for.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Sure, but it really is codified within the whole Burger
King Code of Ethics and Customer Service.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Well, one thing that is also codified at least this
Burger King is knowing when to contact authorities.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Yep, and they did that.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, and they did that, which is the correct move.
This person regains consciousness in the system. Now for the
purposes of law enforcement there in Richmond Hill, this would
be a John Doe no id right, because there are
no clothes. The officer on the scene did it. We
(10:51):
don't want to make them sound like a jerk, because
it was the logical thing. They in their report they
described this individual as a sleepy vagrant. Then the vagrant
catches a non consensual uber to Saint Joseph's Hospital in Savannah, Georgia,
where the hospital staff decides to call him Burger King Doe.
(11:15):
Doe great street name. But also also it makes sense
because if you are in a large medical facility in
a city and you get a lot of people who
are temporarily John Doe's, you have to differentiate between them.
So this is Burger King Doe.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
And interestingly enough, you know they ran tests, they did
all the things. You know, he did have cataracts like
you mentioned, but he did not have it not test
positive for any illegal substances.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And you'll find in some reporting on this story that
people will state he was found bloodied or beaten like
It's not true, at least not according to the.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Reporting in Firing the New Republic.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
The New Republic article that was published, like one of
the original ones that really talked about this in depth.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
They did say that there there were three small depressions
found on his.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Skull, but yeah, but they were older.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Exactly, they'd been around for a long time.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, yeah, he had some. He also had some scarring
h on his left arm and on his neck, but
these were old. These were not fresh wounds. The freshest
wounds he had were from fire ants. And as any
anyone who lives in the US can attest, fire ants
are not to be messed with.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Well, you'll get some weltz from that, but it's not
going to draw blood, right, and it's definitely not going
to mess with your mental state.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
No, No, unless you have an allergy or something, it
could like cause you to go into some sort of shock,
but not not cognitive. I can't imagine even with.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
No otherwise people would be getting high on fire ants,
which they're not curs.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
You don't know.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Probably people have tried to get high on everything we're
talking about. Chist Cookbook, don't trust it. By the way,
the I have multiple versions of that work, and it's important,
but they're not all the same version. There's there's some
trolling in there, but it is how I found out
about nutmeg. The sailor's high.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
So, so this guy is in a delightful seasoning for
your hot cocoa.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
It's pretty great.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
So, this guy is of European descent, he's in his fifties.
Aside from his cataracts which are pretty severe, he looks
like an average dude health wise, as you pointed out.
And there's no trace of serious alcohol, no trace of
(13:46):
serious drugs in his system, nor are there traces of
long term drug abuse, which are also very visible. Right.
Uh And one doctor seemed a little surprised to say, oh, oh,
BK do his lab results are all within normal limits
(14:08):
and the main thing they could tell then it's like
you're looking at a car and you say, okay, the
engine works needs a new paint job.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
But they's got no VEN number.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
But there's no ven.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
That's great. Yeah, actually I like that there's no vin.
And he had a long, scraggly beard with junk in it,
and his fingernails were all raggedy and dirty. But he
looked like a normal guy who had just been living
rough without explanation. Psychologically though, is very, very different, and
(14:43):
folks in the audience today who have medical experience, first,
thank you and Secondly, you might recognize some of these
symptoms we're about to describe. The guy refuses to eat
or speak at first. He's in Saint Joe for about
eight days. He does speak occasionally, like he comes out
(15:05):
of his shell a little bit, but mainly to beef
up with the doctors. He doesn't want the doctors or
the nurses, anyone on the staff to interact with him.
The few things he does say are pretty confusing. He
says he lived in the woods for about seventeen years.
When they asked him about his identity, he gave them
(15:28):
a version of the name they had put on him
in the hospital. He said they called me BK around here,
and whenever someone said okay, yeah, sure, but what's your
real name, he would say they were confusing him and
say they were confusing him on purpose, and then he
(15:48):
would either go back to sleep or feign sleep.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
M M.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
So let's gett through to the psych word and put
him on hal Doll, right is the next logical movie.
I know, I know it's protocol. He was like calling
the nurses' staff demons and you know, spitting at people
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I mean it was yeah, and he was a potentially
physical danger to them. He was, you know, like thrashing
out at them, right.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
He had to be restrained.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, so you know, putting him. I understand what you're saying.
You know, like it seems like a jump, right, but
he was, like he did seem like he could potentially
be dangerous, especially given his like confusion, his state of
confusion he seemed to be in.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, I've got some I've got some uh contacts who
work at a hospital in Atlanta called Grady, And yeah.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
I could see ut We're in audio podcasts and so folks, Paul,
you probably saw this too.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
As soon as I said Grady, Matt and Noel both
at once went because we all know great Grady is.
Grady has one of the best burned slash trauma units
in this part of the country and therefore the world.
(17:08):
It also is a place that has a lot of
similar situations, mental illness, unhoused people, things can get rough.
Folks have to be restrained. If law enforcement arrest someone
and has to take them to the hospital, they often
take them to Grady and handcuff them.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't there a law or
something some policy at Grady where you can if you
go to the emergency room, it's not going to like
bankrupt you like there's a thing.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yes, yeah, that's correct, and it's good that that exists.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
But it also makes it a heavily trafficked hospital to
your point, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah, And you know people don't go to hospitals for fun, right.
If you go in the waiting room of a hospital,
no one in there is having the best day of
their life, right, So I mean outside of maternity wards anyway,
So doctors figure this guy for a catatonic schizophrenic. He's
(18:09):
got all he's showing the signs of this, and without
further analysis, that's a reasonable assumption, Like you said, Noel,
they prescribe haldall non consensually dose him up with this
pretty strong antipsychotic, and they transfer him to a psychological
ward at another hospital across town. It's called memorial. Whole
(18:33):
time when they can get through to the dude, he
is saying he has no idea where he's from, he
has no idea who he is, and he has no
idea how he ended up in Georgia in the first place.
It's like a sudden moment of clarity, of lucidity decades
into his life, and he had a vague series of
(18:58):
you could call them images in tableau about his life
before he was found in front of that burger king stuff.
You should know, by the way, shout out credit where
it's due. They did a great episode on this several
years back, and I think it was I want to
say it was before the revelations that we're about to
(19:21):
explore today.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
But well, let's talk about that. Tableau is just really fast,
because yeah, what did he know?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
What did he say?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
It was things like I remember the inside of this
one movie theater. I remember I think I worked in
a restaurant, because I you know, I remember certain things
about a restaurant.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I think I had of a spidy sense that I'm
from Indianapolis. I have three brothers. He was certain about
one thing. He didn't know his Social Security number, right,
was huge problem. He didn't know any parents' names, any
family names. But he was certain that he was born
on August twenty ninth, nineteen forty eight, and he said
(19:59):
he had the He said he knew this because he
had the same birthday as Michael Jackson just ten years earlier.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Wow, it's really interesting. Well, you know, and as an
attending doctor for somebody like this, you've probably seen something
very similar before, where in the end of that interaction
you find out, oh that that person was putting it on,
they were faking it. So you might then apply that
same logic to this situation. Say, this guy's, yeah, come on,
(20:28):
he's trying to get away from something, right, Why would
you feign amnesia like that? You're you're running from the law, right.
But again, that's just logic kind of taking over.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Right, right, And we're not painting the doctors here as
jerks at all. They're working off precedent, and say ten
people who are claiming they have this kind of amnesia,
they're going to they're going to get better, or they're
going to reveal that they had untoward motives.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Well, and saying, I mean, I'm you know, maybe I
don't mean to sound flippant or like I'm disregarding medical professionals.
I know it's very difficult to be, you know, a
physician in one of these high pressure situations. We obviously
have a lot of work to do on the healthcare
system in this country, but they're following protocol. I mean,
at an operation of that scale like this or like
(21:20):
a Grady situation, you have to tick boxes. There's only
you have to follow a certain standard operating procedure, and
that's just that's what you do. It's the only way
to get people through and to make sure that people
get the best care possible, which you know, maybe isn't
always the best care, but it's the best care possible.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
And so we've got if we look at our timeline now, right,
it's August two thousand and four, eight days at Saint Joseph's.
He ends up in that psych ward at Memorial for
four months, and after this he is transferred to kind
of a halfway house, a place for people who need
help or assistance in one way or another called J. C.
(22:00):
Lewis Primary Healthcare Center, and he tells the staff he's
tired of going by the name BK or BK do,
so he chooses his own name, just like you're in
witness protection, which will come up later. He goes by
the name Benjaman Kyle until someone can help him find
(22:21):
his identity, So still BK technically, you know, right, yeah, Matt,
you were saying that off air too, Like that's you'd say,
like that's how he went with it. Or part of
the inspiration. We're speculating, but that does have the ring
of truth. Also, he makes a good name for himself.
He's not a crazy dude. He likes to assist. He's
(22:43):
volunteering to do chores. He's clearly articulate. He is able.
This is important. He's able to remember the people and
the events over there at JC Lewis Primary Healthcare Center. Right,
there's a store. Sorry again in this great New Republic
article by Matt Wolfe, where he apparently goes into the
(23:06):
supply closet or the clothing donation bend and dresses in
a way that's like a staff uniform, and he wants
to help mop up, even though he can't see very well.
He's basically legally blind at this point. And he starts
to make friends as Benjamin Kyle, and for years and
(23:29):
years no one can figure out who he was, at
least that is until twenty fifteen. We're gonna pause for
a word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive further
into the strange case of Benjamin Kyle. Here's where it
(23:52):
gets crazy. Sometimes it just takes one person, one person caring.
You know, history hinges on these tiny things in this case,
I would posit that a lot of the credit for
solving the mystery goes to a nurse at Elsie Lewis
named Catherine Slater.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Yeah, it's interesting you pointed out Ben in the outline
the idea of like, you know, living off the grid
even or just having no identity isn't exactly a crime.
I mean, I guess it's technically you're supposed to have
a Social Security number, right, I mean, is that the law?
Do you have to have one?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
You can use an a tax ID or an EI
and some some like income tax activists go with that,
got it?
Speaker 4 (24:44):
So Yeah, to your point, like, there wasn't like a
criminal you know, report file because I guess a crime
hadn't really been committed other than like, you know, he
was naked, but he was you know, a victim essentially, right,
So he wasn't a criminal. So therefore the was really
no follow through you know from either the FBI and
Savannah or the police you know who initially came to
(25:07):
the scene at that Burger king right.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Right, Like to Matt's point, he wasn't actually beaten. That's
some misreporting. Uh So who are you gonna file a
criminal complaint against the fire ants. You're gonna take him
to like fire ants court. How does that even work?
Corurie for ants.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Let's uh, let's get into this person who helped bk
Benjamin out, Catherine Slater, because she's really important. She she
worked a late shift, like a night shift at the
same time when Benjamin Kyle was doing a lot of
work there, some of the volunteer work, and they ended
up just striking up of friendship and they started just
talking with each other, being very friendly. And she is
(25:49):
the one who basically was like, I saw him as
way more than just this guy who's also you know
who's there a patient. She saw him as a human being,
as somebody that she wanted to help.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, and again that's the thing, is the humanity, right,
the empathy inherent here. She's also a bit of a bloodhound, right.
She has an investigative, interrogative nature. She's the one who
reaches out to the FBI. She's the one who reaches
out to the cops and they say, rightly in their defense,
(26:24):
they say, well, there's not really a crime here. And
at this point we should talk a little bit about
the FBI. They have currently as of twenty twenty three,
as we're recording, they have the world's largest known fingerprint database.
I'm snarkily sneaking in largest known because between between just
(26:47):
us and the Puzzle Palace folks, I'm pretty sure that
five Eyes has more fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah, well, I mean, just think about all the background checks.
There are basically two reasons why you were going to
get fingerprinted in the United States at least, and it
does vary by state, of course, because we have states loss.
But it's because you get picked up for some misdemeanor
to a felony, right, something criminally wrong you did, You're
going to get all ten year digits fingerprinted, or you
(27:18):
have to go through a criminal background check to get
a job or to get approval for a couple different things.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Interesting other aspect here, and I'm surprised more people don't
talk about this. There was a mass collection of innocent
people's fingerprints with identic kits for kids, right, Yeah, that's
how they got a lot of people. But weirdly enough,
(27:46):
Benjaman Kyle doesn't have his pause on any of these databases,
so the FBI gets in this weird like Joseph Heller
esque Catch twenty two situation. They know the guy, they
know where he is, but they don't know who he is,
so they put them on their missing person's page. They
(28:06):
contact Interpool and they have to explain this to Interpool. Yeah,
we got a missing person. I mean he's here, I guess,
but we don't know who he is. Do you do
you got any leads? What about you? Canada? And they're like, oh,
break this down to me And I was like, well,
he's missing, but he's not missing. How do you define missing?
(28:27):
Shout out to this one special agent who went off
the books, did the right thing, contacted the marshals discreetly
in the US and said, Hey, is this guy maybe
in witness protection And they said, no, we don't know
who he is. Have you have you tried to run
his fingerprints? And he's like, my god, you guys, dude.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
We need we need to get iris scanners for everyone, right, protect.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Your children, give all their biometric data over to to
an Orwellian government. So shout out to you an employee
at the GBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, because every
every state has a Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
How about just a big old roundom applause for the GBI.
I know they're doing a ton of work that we
really don't hear about very often. Good work.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, Oh did I tell you? I one of my
old friends, and I probably shouldn't say the name on
air may have mentioned before works for the GBI in
basically in the level of forensics where you go in
and figure out how people died. And this person's sense
(29:37):
of humor ten out of ten.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yes, yeah, I imagine these are off air stories because
we don't want to get too specific.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
But remind me when we're not recording, there's this thing
with the lava lamp. You gotta hear it. Yeah, it's
exactly what you're thinking. I says, of course it is,
of course it is. So okay, let's talk about this
GBI employee, Bo Preston. Bo Preston is training law enforcement
(30:07):
in the ins and outs of using this enormous FBI database. Right.
This thing is labyrinthine. There's a lot of stuff there. You,
It's not like riding a bike, right, So Bo Preston,
she knows the system better than anyone else. So she
is the person who is probably best suited to figure
(30:29):
out whether this guy Benjaman Kyle is there under a
different name.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
So in this database you find eighty thousand active missing
person's cases and over the next year again, you know,
just to your point, Ben Preston taking this upon herself,
actually you know, combed through three hundred and fifty cases
generated by the system personally with no real you know, results,
(30:59):
no hits.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
She was trying to find stuff that could possibly be
tied to this guy. So like she's plugged in demographic
data basically right, bereft of fingerprints, that's what she's checking.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
So then she had a pretty genius idea to you know,
incorporate Kyle's case into her training curriculum, you know, which
made sense because it was a teachable kind of case
in terms of how to deal with cases folks like this,
but also perhaps one of the trainees may recognize them,
(31:33):
you know, that's really what it takes.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Sad yeah, it is well, it is well, and sadly
none of that works. Nobody still, nobody recognizes this.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Picture that moment in every class she's teaching, you know,
where you're essentially playing the lottery and you're like, and
here's one we couldn't find anybody, bueller, and it just yeah,
so prop suppressed him because that's the right thing to do.
But again, looks like there are no leads. It's two
(32:09):
thousand and seven, so it's three years since Kyle was found,
right since BK Doe was found in that Burger King
parking lot. And this nurse, Catherine Slater, reaches out to
the media. Benjaman Kyle becomes a news phenomenon. The story
is first reported in Savannah. National media picks it up.
(32:32):
He's on NBC, he's on ABC, you name it. He
starts a Facebook page, and as we all know, Facebook
is really good at getting personal information. But even Mark
Zuckerberg doesn't know who this guy is. I feel like
I walked a little bit down the street to take
that potshot at zucks.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Because he's like personally going through all of our private
data for laughs.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, it's like, who is this guy?
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (33:01):
But every year, four years, each and every single attempt
to discover this dude's true or former identity ended up
with bupkis failure across the board.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
And it's not like he wasn't shown on the news,
Like seriously, the news, Benjamin's face was on there, there
were reports about him. He went on Reddit and did
an ama and This isn't a time when Reddit was
in its heyday, when everybody was like, oh, we got
to use Reddit. Reddit's the best. At least that's when
I think that's a week on Unreddit and AMAS were
(33:39):
a big deal there, at least for a while. I'm
not sure where they stand right now. But he went on,
he did all that stuff, nobody recognized him. Still it's
ten years later and nobody knows this guy.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
And so again it sounds like we're shouting this guy
out a lot. The journalist Matt Wolf, with whom we
have not spoken directly, but right now, Wolf has, at
least for my been bucks, Wolf has the best reporting
on this in the New Republic. He really the story.
Yeah he he. Wolf has this beautiful quote where he
(34:18):
notes just how extraordinary and unusual and disturbing the Kyle cases.
He says, quote, we live in an age of extraordinary
surveillance and documentation. The government's capacity to keep tabs on
us and our capacity to keep tabs on each other
is unmatched in human history. Matt Wolfe, welcome to the show.
We've been waiting for you.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Hello, Hello, old imagine Ben.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Please Well, Matt goes into like the NSA's you know
capabilities and like outlines a lot of the stuff we've
discussed on this show, and I love, I love. He
points out how ridiculous it is. It seems ridiculous that
somebody could fall through the cracks.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Yeah, this guy is a ghost. This is a real
weird habbyist corpus case.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
You know, you have the.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Body but nothing else, right this guy, like, this guy
is either the worst person at committing pseudo side or
he's telling the truth. And even if this is a
great point in your public article, even if Benjamin Kyle
quote unquote is faking amnesia, there would have been some
(35:33):
trace of him somewhere. Again, logically, it would just be
a case of finding the name.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
We're looking for someone who's never had military service, They've
never had a background check, they've never been arrested at
least brought in right even to a tank. And they
are not one of those generations that got signed up
to fingerprinting in childhood. Let's intro guy out of Atlanta,
(36:05):
our hometown, a neuropsychologist named Jason King. Jason King is
the first expert who really gets an in depth psychological
analysis of Kyle.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
Yeah, he was able to take a look at him,
speak with him, examine him directly, and he came to
the conclusion that Kyle was likely suffering from what's called
dissociative amnesia, which, as you may have put together, is
a kind of memory loss that is specifically brought about
(36:38):
by trauma stress associated with trauma specifically. So in two
thousand and eight, Slater and Kyle do what the next
logical step here is to fly to la and go
on the Doctor Phil Show. I'm sorry, I'm only laughing
because it's just, you know, it is you know, I
know what you're gonna say, Matt, and you're totally right.
I think it's another way of blasting this out, you know,
(37:00):
giving it a wider audience, a wider reach, in the
hopes of, you know, turning up some results.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
Still is a terrible person.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Well he is despite all that. In two thousand and eight,
Doctor Phil is the huge Yeah, I mean seriously, two
thousand and eight, Doctor Phil's a little hits a little
different than he does right out because he was so
he was well liked by millions of people, and that
you can see that by the numbers here, right, It's
(37:28):
not like nobody saw that episode.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, more than four million people tune in
when the episode goes live October sixteenth, two thousand and eight.
It's it's a segment called or the episode is called
who am I? And spoiler, they don't answer it because
they're trying, you know, and they can't do it. And
you can you can see that Catherine Slater, you know,
(37:55):
she accompanies Benjamin Kyle. She doesn't want to go on air,
but the producers really push her to do so, so
against her better judgment, she becomes part of the Brujaha.
And now we have to think, right, So people see
their doctor Phil's segment or whatever, they see their evening
news at their regional affiliate and they think, huh, that's weird,
(38:18):
and they might go to internet forums and do some
armchair sleuthing, but eventually they forget about the story. And
the thing about news cycles is that the stories continue
well after ABC or NBC or insert here stops talking
about it. And I think we should pause just to
(38:38):
acknowledge how much the situation there's no other way to
say it. The situation sucks for this guy you think of, like, okay,
so there's like an order of operations to exist in
US society, right, you got to have a Social Security number.
You gotta have some version of a birth certificate, whether
it's from Hawaii or Kenya. Who hot takes?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Oh yeah, how do you get something like Barack.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Obama was born in the US. It's pretty yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Okay, now I'm just joking, but no, but really, so
you don't have a birth certificate, how do you get
something like a Social Security number which is issued after you,
like right after you're born.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at too
earlier about like, is not illegal to not have a
Social Security number?
Speaker 3 (39:28):
But I guess you do.
Speaker 4 (39:30):
You are supposed to have some sort of identifying you know,
like the VIN number argument to me alive, you're supposed
to be tagged.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
If you don't have those two things, what form of
identification are you taken down to the DMV to get
a driver's license or a state I D.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Right, I would say again, you can get that like
tax i D thing or.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
With what though, what do you get a tax ID with? Well?
That's people who are in.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
This guy parents can do this. It is to your point, Noel,
is not illegal on the books to not have a
social security number. But I would argue it is functionally illegal. Yeah,
the same way like in the movie Gadiga, which is
an awesome film. In the movie Gadiga, they don't make
(40:21):
it illegal not to be genetically modified. They just make
it in practice impossible to succeed in society.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Prohibitably difficult to just live do basic things.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
You know, you price people out.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
Yeah, dude, I mean I had to get my mom's
car title transferred to me. I went to the DMV
in two cities no less than six times before I
was before I had all the appropriate documentation, you know.
So bureaucracy is.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
A and so this guy like, it's terrible. You can't
get a job, you can't get a house, car, a
bank loan of any sort, you know what I mean.
And if you ever get jammed up with the law,
things immediately escalate. Who is this guy? You know what
I mean? What's your real name? I don't Oh, I amnesia.
(41:13):
I bet buddy, get in the car. So, luckily we
said this was going to be a bit of a
good news episode. Luckily there is good news. DNA came
into play. So we're going to pause for a word
from our sponsors and then we'll come back with some
good news and some well you know, the show, some
disturbing questions.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
And we've returned. Okay, so we've discussed testing this person
by looking at any potential documentation that could exist around him. Nope,
can't check that box off. We've tested his fingerprints, Nope,
not in any databases. We've even looked at his DNA,
but it's not in databases either. There's another technique that
(42:01):
is developing around this time in twenty fifteen. Well it's
a little before that, but it's really becoming a more
robust set of technologies and techniques called forensic genealogy, where
you take somebody's DNA and you compare it to other
samples of DNA that have been given. Right, We've talked
(42:23):
about this with several case companies that do this, and
yet we talked about it with cold cases like with
the Golden State killer. What if we run his genetic
data through one of these processes.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
And this is where we want to shout out. A
team of genealogical forensics folks led by CC MORE, Capital CE,
Capital CE and More gets into the trenches, right, and
they're finding some relatively weak matches, but then they hit
(42:57):
the mother load. They find a very strong match. They
also find a couple of implied skeletons in the closet,
things that are described euphemistically as non paternity events. Whole
other bag of badgers doesn't really matter for this story.
What does matter is that CC Moore and team found
a connection for Benjamin Kyle. And he goes on to
(43:20):
his Facebook page and he says the following.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
A little over two months ago, I was informed by
ccmore they had established my identity using DNA. Many people
have shared their DNA profiles that they may be compared
with mine. Through a process of elimination, they determined my
ancestral bloodline and who my relatives were. A DNA test
taken by a close relative has confirmed that we are related.
(43:44):
And this was all courtesy of Moore's company, the DNA
Detectives dot Com, who spent two years working on this case.
So it's not just like a Google search, you know,
genetic Google search. The word detectives here is pretty appropriate.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
So the guy says, he always said back when he's
bk do, he always said he vaguely thought he was
from Indianapolis. He felt very certain that he knew his birthday,
and he related to Michael Jackson, the King of pop
And he also had a couple of other vague spidery
sense recollections. C. C. Moore and her company they mentioned
(44:24):
DNA detectives. They go through this quite throw process of elimination.
Eventually they find a family called the Powells or group
of families, and then from there they find a subgroup,
a very specific set of Powells, and these Powells are
(44:45):
in Lafayette, Indiana. Ultimately, she and her team get to
a high school yearbook from nineteen sixty seven in the
town and in the book a picture of a guy
named William Powell. He is in tenth grade when the
picture is taken. He's wearing glasses, he's wearing plaid. You
(45:09):
can you can find the picture and it's one of
the You know, they're at a weird point here because
for a decade people have been looking at this picture
Benjamin Kyle and saying, hey, you look kind of like
a guy I saw at a waffle house. That's true,
that's someone said that. So now they're armed with DNA, right,
(45:30):
So now a physical resemblance matters a lot more. At
the same time. By the way, his life still stinks.
He's forced off the grid because he doesn't have the
paperwork and the id that you need to exist in
this country. An outfit out of Orlando, a nonprofit called
I Dignity get it?
Speaker 2 (45:49):
They they are an id ignity.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
You know, it's I dig nitty Nity. So so Nitty
hells him out, uh with get with getting a Florida
I d And just a month later, it's November twenty
first he officially finds out who he was, or who
he used to be. Q gat ye his real name,
(46:14):
William Burgess Powell. That's a person he used to know.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Is that another reference? That's a person that he used
to know.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
This so it is a good song. He was right
about his birthday.
Speaker 2 (46:33):
Right, and he was right about going with a b
as a first name, Billy, right, he probably grown up?
He was probably Billy.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
Mm hmmm, yes, yes, very presumptuous if you're mad. It's
a very diminutive nickname, you know, are you kidding? Should
be should be saddled with the billy? It's yeah, he does.
He doesn't even go by that anymore. He goes by William.
Speaker 5 (46:58):
Oh, all right, he doesn't go William okay so also
named shout out, I Bet, I bet the hardest of
hard cases that listens to the show right now goes
by Billy seriously there and they're that name.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Wetstone, you know, Billy magnuson right now, come on, let's go.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
So Yeah, he does go away Bill. It seems okay,
but the mystery is not solved because all this reporting, right,
we found the name of the former identity, and it
does not seem like the guy is faking. Nobody said, hey,
this uh Willie Powell jerk skip Town, and he's responsible
(47:46):
for rampant selling of loose cigarettes and counterfeit stamps or anything.
He's not running from anything.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
Yeah, like crime.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
But what happened we don't know.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Man.
Speaker 3 (47:56):
Sometime in nineteen seventy six, it looks like he cut
ties with everyone. He took the first steps toward pseudo side.
He abandoned his life. He was living in mobile home
at the time. He had a car. He just left
him there and skipped down to Colorado with a coworker.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, and his brother attempted to find him for years.
His brother created a missing persons report, and his brother
had been looking for him for forty years and he
basically gave up. He was like, oh, it's been forty years.
This guy he died somewhere. I just don't know. And
that's it. I guess that's it.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
And William Powell slash Benjamin Kyle was twenty five when
he moved to Colorado. Also, you can find other reports
that the home life of the Powells was not super great.
The brother Furman, who will get to in a second,
He is on record in multiple sources saying that their
(48:55):
father was at times abusive and that he believes his
brother William got the worst of it.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
Yeah, you know, amnesia. Well, so, yeah, that's that's the
operative word, right, Ben. I mean, we were talking about
this dissociative amnesia having you know, been I guess diagnosed.
Was it an official diagnosis or was it just sort
of like I speculate that this is what it is anyway,
whether whether or not that's the case brought on by trauma,
(49:23):
serious emotional trauma. So we know that there's some mental
health issues at play that probably would have been at play,
you know, from the beginning when when this when this
person did split down.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
Yeah, and this the neuropsychologist Jason King from Atlanta is
qualified to diagnose people with these states. So that's why
we bring that guy up, because it's important to have
an expert. It's not just someone who is not familiar
with these like disciplines and assessments. It's a guy who
knows what he's talking about. And we'll get back to
(49:58):
him in a second. What we need to know is
that again our journalists here, Matt Wolfe, was able to
confirm by tracing Powell's security number that as William Powell,
Benjamin Kyle worked a couple of different jobs at least
until nineteen seventy seven. The last case is nineteen eighty three,
(50:23):
and from nineteen eighty three all the way to two
thousand and four, this guy was a ghost, which is
very difficult to do. Cecymore reaches out to the brother
that you mentioned earlier, Matt Furman. Powell and Benjamin, who
now goes by Bill ended up moving back to Indiana.
(50:44):
In a great piece by the Journal Courier, you can
you can see how his life has progressed. That Courier
piece is from twenty sixteen. I think he's now just
a regular dude. This summer August is coming up as
we record Bill Powell Benjamin Kyle will be seventy five
(51:06):
years old as a happy ending. But there's a mysterious ending.
No one sure what happened. What could cause somebody to
completely lose track of themselves, especially because people are obsessed
with themselves. How would you just forget all.
Speaker 2 (51:23):
That, especially considering he wasn't on a bunch of drugs, right,
or at least he had been off of drugs for
a long enough time to where they were not detectable
within his system. Right. It's not as though he was
out drinking every night because again, alcohol was not detected
in his system when he was found unresponsive or like
mostly unresponsive. I don't know, man, it feels like he
(51:47):
did get in some kind of altercation at some point
because of those small indentations within his skull that were
first discovered when he was found. Because that feels like
some you know, being hidden with something, probably not an
impact of from a fall at least again, that's can't say,
but that's just what you know if you're deducing it.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
I I don't know.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
It feels like he maybe did get rattled at some
point when he was living rough.
Speaker 3 (52:16):
Right, And well, we also fair point. We also don't
really know if he was living rough. Like the evidence
is the fingernails and the beard. He might just thought
have been super into super into hygiene. More severe like
mild head injuries don't cause long term amnesia, but more
(52:37):
severe injuries can cause permanent amnetzsa. This guy is still
rediscovering his life, you know what I mean. Imagine if
you woke up one day and you found out that
for decades you were you were a completely different person,
and you only had a few things in common. You know,
this is where we have to mention the good folks
(52:58):
at the National Missing and I Identified Person's System here
in the US street name NAMOS. NAMOS is part of
the US Department of Justice, and they have a lot
of databases, but they're still struggling to assist what they
call the quote living unidentified. And while Powell Slash Kyle's
(53:20):
case is the most famous by far, he's not unique.
There are other living unidentified people And I don't know,
maybe we intd this way. Could he have faked it?
Could he have faked the whole thing for some unknown reason?
Speaker 4 (53:39):
You know, there's a really really excellent film called Moros Perros.
There's a character who's like he's an assassin, but he
looks like a vagrant and he does that by design
where at the end it's minor spoiler. I guess he
needs to make a getaway, so he trims his fingernail
(54:00):
and he cuts off his beard and he looks like
a completely different person. And I always thought that was
really brilliant, like storytelling. It's like, oh, what a great
way to operate under the radar, you know, like as
as kind of like you know, because he's invisible for
all intents and purposes. That's people don't regard folks like
that with much attention, you know, so they can kind
of float in and out and do what they need
(54:21):
to do. And that just always does this makes me
think of that. I mean, I'm sorry the roundabout way
of saying, I don't think that he faked it, but
if he did, maybe it was something like that, and
it would have to be hella calculated, you know what
I mean, Like, really to to trick this, this psychologist
and ben Off Mike you pointed out, the only way
(54:42):
to truly know it would be to do some really
intense tests hooked up to you know, to monitor brainwaves.
Speaker 3 (54:49):
City you would have to you would have to do
he would have to do active brain monitoring while asking
polygra level questions, right, what day is it? And then
measure brain activity, right, what's your name? Measure brain activity?
Speaker 4 (55:08):
Right?
Speaker 3 (55:08):
Who is the president? And he knew these he knew
these third party facts, like when he was in the
hospital out in Saint Joseph's he knew who the president was.
Like He's true, wasn't completely adrift.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
He even knew about the invasion of Iraq in two
thousand and three.
Speaker 3 (55:24):
So yeah, guy was up to speed on a lot
of things, just not himself, which you know, not not
to sound flip about it, but this is this is
a real thing. And because people still don't know exactly
how it happened. I like your theory, Matt about possible
traumatic brain injury, just because it seems most logical and
(55:46):
most possible. But without knowing how it happened, we can
only speculate that it could happen again. It could happen
to someone, I mean, anybody walking down the street. Could
it happened? Cute cheesy, dramatic music to you.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
See, this is why we all, everybody on the planet
needs to get on the back of their neck, a
QR code tattooed that has all of your information, you.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
Know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (56:24):
Also get a little tattoo on our inner wrists while
we're at it.
Speaker 2 (56:27):
Huh. I think that's a great idea. I guess we
can use the Freemasons to roll out the planet. It'll
be for sure.
Speaker 4 (56:34):
Yeah, yeah, Elimination Global Unlimited will be thrilled.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
Yeah. So with a with a shout out to I
gu uh, we're gonna end it there, folks, We're going
to pass the torch to you here. What do you
think it's it's a bit of a dilemma because again,
without some serious testing that to our knowledge has not
been conducted, it is functionally impossible to know the the
(57:00):
absolute truth here. Now, I will say that after we
dug into this, I don't think he's faking. I think
you will probably be offended. Someone's probably asked him. I'm
sure the cops have. Uh, it doesn't it doesn't seem
like this guy has been pretending. Uh what do you think, folks?
(57:20):
Let us know, we're all over the internet. Uh, send
us a picture of the QR code on the back
of your neck.
Speaker 2 (57:28):
I know some of you got him don't do that. Really,
I hope you can hear the sarcasm that we emanated.
Speaker 4 (57:36):
Let us know if you support Matt's plan for a
totalitarian future regimes.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
I mean, and it's gonna happen, and.
Speaker 3 (57:46):
Well doesn't make it.
Speaker 4 (57:48):
That doesn't make it right. Let's just get on board.
You can get on board with us via social media
by reaching out to us via Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook
at the handle conspiracy stuf on Instagram and TikTok where
conspiracy stuff show.
Speaker 3 (58:04):
I'm asking chat GPT right now, should all people have
ID codes tattooed on their bodies?
Speaker 2 (58:10):
Let's see yes?
Speaker 3 (58:12):
Uh so if you like check chat GPT said tight, No,
it didn't. So it's said as it's had. As an
Ai language model, I cannot blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (58:25):
Oh okay, okay, I cannot dictate how I'm going to
brand you. Uh okay. So if you like to call people,
call one eight three three std WYTK that's our voicemail system.
When you call in, you've got three minutes. Please give
yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we
can use your name and message on the air. If
(58:45):
you don't know who you are. Please don't call in
asking you know questions about who you are, because we're
not going to be able to tell you. I'm so sorry.
Do reach out to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
If you've got more to say, they can fit in
that three minutes. Why not instead send us a good
old fashioned email conspiracy.
Speaker 6 (59:01):
iHeartRadio dot com Stuff they don't want you to know
(59:23):
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Speaker 2 (59:25):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Paul Mission controlled decant. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know. Let's start today with a question. Guys,
have you ever walked into a room only to forget
(00:48):
why he came in there in the first place?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Consistently?
Speaker 4 (00:55):
And it's sort of like, you know, losing your keys
or something like that too. I think it's that he
comes from the same place of kind of you know,
scattershot brainedness.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
We learned something about this Ben, something with doorways, right.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Right, Yeah, you're on the money. We're on the same page.
This is a helpful psychological I don't know if it's
a hack because it's not going to be to the
advantage of the human mind. But when people walk through
entrances or exits, on some level, the neurotypical brain will
(01:32):
assume it's a new situation, like a new level of
a video game. Right, so you are no longer in
some way, You're no longer the person that was on
the other side of the entry. So if you want,
I guess the hack is, if you want to forget stuff,
just walk through a bunch of doorways.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, I'll tell you what works for me. I'm serious
because this really does happen to me quite frequently in
my new especially in my new house, because it's less
familiar to me. I think, so the new doorway really
is a reset. I walk back out the same door,
whichever one I went into, and I just kind of
stand there for a moment, collect my thoughts, and then
(02:13):
generally I can remember why I went into that other place.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
You can also do I don't know if there's a
real thing. This is just something I do. I call
it micro mnemonic approach. Like when you are before you
go to look for the thing, when you realize you
lost something, do a small motion that will create a small,
short lived sense memory, like cross your fingers and to
(02:39):
your point noel like cross your fingers and think keys,
or you know, put your arms a kimbo. A word
we never get to use and say to yourself keys
and then go look for them. And then if you're
in a room and you're wondering, why am I here?
What has life led me to cross your fingers again?
Or put your arms a kimbo, And then it'll hit you.
(03:01):
You'll be like, oh, I'm supposed to record a show.
That's why I'm here.
Speaker 4 (03:05):
You know, it's funny, but I mean the things that
you're describing sound an awful lot like superstitious behaviors or
like things that maybe a baseball player would do in
order to like have quote unquote good luck. Right, But
that's the thing, right, you're basically talking about weaponized psychology,
you know, to try to kind of game yourself into
(03:26):
doing you know, having your brain cooperate and do what
you want.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah, it's it's creating multiple pathways toward the desired you know,
train of thought. And like most people, if you're like
most people, fellow conspiracy realists, at some point you have
experienced a sudden bout of forgetfulness. Even people with the
real life superpower of adetic memory, which is different from
(03:54):
photographic memory because adetic memory is real and photographic memory
doesn't actually exist. Even those folks will have a difficult
time recalling some things. It can be really frightening, you know,
it's weird for most of us. It's kind of like
about of the hiccups or an unintended fart. It freaks
(04:19):
you out, and then it's gone and you move on
with your life. You know who you are, you know
what this object in space that you call yourself is.
Today's episode explores something really odd, an extreme version of
this forgetfulness. We're going to talk about something that might
(04:41):
be unfamiliar to a lot of people. Individuals who are
called the living unidentified, people who for one reason or
another have forgotten themselves. It never clicked back, right, the
lost keys in this case where they're identify tease and
they are still looking for those keys. This is the
(05:03):
story of a man who chose to call himself Benjaman
Kyle Well.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
I think this is a trope that a lot of
people are familiar with from you know, film and television,
Like the idea of someone turning up in a town
and they don't know their own name, or they don't
know who they are. It's a really interesting way of
kind of exploring the mystery, you know, especially when the
person at the center of the mystery doesn't have all
the information like Momento a good example.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Memento is probably the quintessential example of that in the
world of film. And then there's also uh, oh, Angel
Heart Robert de Niro right plays well, I don't want.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
To Yeah, Louis Cipher, Yes, do the math.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, guys, I watched a movie called The Snowman the
other day.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Just isn't hilariously bad. It was pounded in the press.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
The main character is Harry Hole.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Yeah, it's a series of books, I know.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
But it's just zero with zero, like recognition that the
guy's name is Harry Hole.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Come on, oh, Matt, forgot to tell you. Uh figured
out on a different show. We figured out a great
alias as lid Sec. Lets you choose your own name
you should probably go with, or we respectfully submit that
listeners should should consider what what was it?
Speaker 2 (06:39):
No con check.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Check push, which is the singular and plural of specific.
Speaker 4 (06:49):
Marty gra Polish Marty grab type. But we're not talking
about pun check. We're not talking about Harry Hole. We're
talking about.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Benjamin Benjamin, Benja Man m A and am I and Kyle.
Here are the facts. The story The best way to
start the story is in Richmond Hill, a small town
near Savannah in our home state of Georgia, on August
(07:18):
thirty first, two thousand and four, right after Matt and
Nola and I celebrated our birthdays. It's not included in
most of the media, but it's true. There was an
employee at a burger king sun you hour who walked
out to the dumpster. You know there at work. Walk
(07:38):
out to the dumpster only defined an unconscious, nude, sunburned,
rash ridden guy in front of the dumpster and riddled
with fire ant bites. So in fire ants and fire ants, crawling,
crawling on, crawling on the poor guy. And so what
(07:59):
you do, this is not what you signed up for
when you decide to get a paycheck at burger king.
You freak out.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, you go, yikes, I need to call someone. This
looks like it might be a dead body.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Right, this is not a typical day at burger king, right.
And also, you know, I like that you're pointing out
the idea of whether or not it's a corpse, because
if someone's not visibly moving, if they're not visibly breathing,
then the best way for you as a civilian, to
see if they're alive is to touch them, and so understandably,
(08:36):
our pal son yo Auer said, nah, let's call the cops.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Well, it's a real that's a real. This a serious situation.
There to think about whether or not you actually physically
even walk over near the scene, right, you shouldn't. It's
just like we talked about with the gun, right, like,
what do you do? Like, probably the best thing as
a civilian is raise your hand and say, uh, some Boddy,
would the authority.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
To professional do it?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Please?
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Well, not only that, I mean the professional to help
the individual, but also to make sure that you're not
in some way seen as culpable or you know, or
do something wrong or get mixed up in something. By
the way, you guys, you know what, My first ever job.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Was laying in front of a Burger kingdomster.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Not not not in front, Okay, I did take a
lot of trash out to the Burger King dumpster that
you I worked at a Burger King. That was my
first job when I was like sixteen.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Dude, whoppers. Whoppers are awesome.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
I didn't have one until like well into adulthood. We
were doing this show when I finally tried a whopper.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
It's the superior fast food burger, there's no question about it.
But I learned and working there, that you can do
all kinds of stuff, you know, the whole have it
your way thing that's real. You can ask for it hot,
you can ask for it cut in half, you can
ask for it, you know, with all kinds of other fixings,
and yeah, if you ask for it hot, you get
a fresh one. And there's little little modifiers on the
cash redister for those things. They're very real. A lot
(10:01):
of secret menu stuff at Burger.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
King, well you can get. You can get, like if
you go to a fast food place. I would hope
as long as you're not rude and winging and demanding,
you can get people to work with you, you know
what I mean, like for.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Sure, but it really is codified within the whole Burger
King Code of Ethics and Customer Service.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Well, one thing that is also codified at least this
Burger King is knowing when to contact authorities.
Speaker 4 (10:28):
Yep, and they did that.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Yeah, and they did that, which is the correct move.
This person regains consciousness in the system. Now for the
purposes of law enforcement there in Richmond Hill, this would
be a John Doe no id right, because there are
no clothes. The officer on the scene did it. We
(10:51):
don't want to make them sound like a jerk, because
it was the logical thing. They in their report they
described this individual as a sleepy vagrant. Then the vagrant
catches a non consensual uber to Saint Joseph's Hospital in Savannah, Georgia,
where the hospital staff decides to call him Burger King Doe.
(11:15):
Doe great street name. But also also it makes sense
because if you are in a large medical facility in
a city and you get a lot of people who
are temporarily John Doe's, you have to differentiate between them.
So this is Burger King Doe.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
And interestingly enough, you know they ran tests, they did
all the things. You know, he did have cataracts like
you mentioned, but he did not have it not test
positive for any illegal substances.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And you'll find in some reporting on this story that
people will state he was found bloodied or beaten like
It's not true, at least not according to the.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Reporting in Firing the New Republic.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
The New Republic article that was published, like one of
the original ones that really talked about this in depth.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
They did say that there there were three small depressions
found on his.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Skull, but yeah, but they were older.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Exactly, they'd been around for a long time.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, yeah, he had some. He also had some scarring
h on his left arm and on his neck, but
these were old. These were not fresh wounds. The freshest
wounds he had were from fire ants. And as any
anyone who lives in the US can attest, fire ants
are not to be messed with.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Well, you'll get some weltz from that, but it's not
going to draw blood, right, and it's definitely not going
to mess with your mental state.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
No, No, unless you have an allergy or something, it
could like cause you to go into some sort of shock,
but not not cognitive. I can't imagine even with.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
No otherwise people would be getting high on fire ants,
which they're not curs.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
You don't know.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Probably people have tried to get high on everything we're
talking about. Chist Cookbook, don't trust it. By the way,
the I have multiple versions of that work, and it's important,
but they're not all the same version. There's there's some
trolling in there, but it is how I found out
about nutmeg. The sailor's high.
Speaker 4 (13:20):
So, so this guy is in a delightful seasoning for
your hot cocoa.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
It's pretty great.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
So, this guy is of European descent, he's in his fifties.
Aside from his cataracts which are pretty severe, he looks
like an average dude health wise, as you pointed out.
And there's no trace of serious alcohol, no trace of
(13:46):
serious drugs in his system, nor are there traces of
long term drug abuse, which are also very visible. Right.
Uh And one doctor seemed a little surprised to say, oh, oh,
BK do his lab results are all within normal limits
(14:08):
and the main thing they could tell then it's like
you're looking at a car and you say, okay, the
engine works needs a new paint job.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
But they's got no VEN number.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
But there's no ven.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
That's great. Yeah, actually I like that there's no vin.
And he had a long, scraggly beard with junk in it,
and his fingernails were all raggedy and dirty. But he
looked like a normal guy who had just been living
rough without explanation. Psychologically though, is very, very different, and
(14:43):
folks in the audience today who have medical experience, first,
thank you and Secondly, you might recognize some of these
symptoms we're about to describe. The guy refuses to eat
or speak at first. He's in Saint Joe for about
eight days. He does speak occasionally, like he comes out
(15:05):
of his shell a little bit, but mainly to beef
up with the doctors. He doesn't want the doctors or
the nurses, anyone on the staff to interact with him.
The few things he does say are pretty confusing. He
says he lived in the woods for about seventeen years.
When they asked him about his identity, he gave them
(15:28):
a version of the name they had put on him
in the hospital. He said they called me BK around here,
and whenever someone said okay, yeah, sure, but what's your
real name, he would say they were confusing him and
say they were confusing him on purpose, and then he
(15:48):
would either go back to sleep or feign sleep.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
M M.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
So let's gett through to the psych word and put
him on hal Doll, right is the next logical movie.
I know, I know it's protocol. He was like calling
the nurses' staff demons and you know, spitting at people
and stuff.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I mean it was yeah, and he was a potentially
physical danger to them. He was, you know, like thrashing
out at them, right.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
He had to be restrained.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Yeah, so you know, putting him. I understand what you're saying.
You know, like it seems like a jump, right, but
he was, like he did seem like he could potentially
be dangerous, especially given his like confusion, his state of
confusion he seemed to be in.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
Yeah, I've got some I've got some uh contacts who
work at a hospital in Atlanta called Grady, And yeah.
Speaker 5 (16:40):
I could see ut We're in audio podcasts and so folks, Paul,
you probably saw this too.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
As soon as I said Grady, Matt and Noel both
at once went because we all know great Grady is.
Grady has one of the best burned slash trauma units
in this part of the country and therefore the world.
(17:08):
It also is a place that has a lot of
similar situations, mental illness, unhoused people, things can get rough.
Folks have to be restrained. If law enforcement arrest someone
and has to take them to the hospital, they often
take them to Grady and handcuff them.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
Correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't there a law or
something some policy at Grady where you can if you
go to the emergency room, it's not going to like
bankrupt you like there's a thing.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yes, yeah, that's correct, and it's good that that exists.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
But it also makes it a heavily trafficked hospital to
your point, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah, And you know people don't go to hospitals for fun, right.
If you go in the waiting room of a hospital,
no one in there is having the best day of
their life, right, So I mean outside of maternity wards anyway,
So doctors figure this guy for a catatonic schizophrenic. He's
(18:09):
got all he's showing the signs of this, and without
further analysis, that's a reasonable assumption, Like you said, Noel,
they prescribe haldall non consensually dose him up with this
pretty strong antipsychotic, and they transfer him to a psychological
ward at another hospital across town. It's called memorial. Whole
(18:33):
time when they can get through to the dude, he
is saying he has no idea where he's from, he
has no idea who he is, and he has no
idea how he ended up in Georgia in the first place.
It's like a sudden moment of clarity, of lucidity decades
into his life, and he had a vague series of
(18:58):
you could call them images in tableau about his life
before he was found in front of that burger king stuff.
You should know, by the way, shout out credit where
it's due. They did a great episode on this several
years back, and I think it was I want to
say it was before the revelations that we're about to
(19:21):
explore today.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
But well, let's talk about that. Tableau is just really fast,
because yeah, what did he know?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
What did he say?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
It was things like I remember the inside of this
one movie theater. I remember I think I worked in
a restaurant, because I you know, I remember certain things
about a restaurant.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I think I had of a spidy sense that I'm
from Indianapolis. I have three brothers. He was certain about
one thing. He didn't know his Social Security number, right,
was huge problem. He didn't know any parents' names, any
family names. But he was certain that he was born
on August twenty ninth, nineteen forty eight, and he said
(19:59):
he had the He said he knew this because he
had the same birthday as Michael Jackson just ten years earlier.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Wow, it's really interesting. Well, you know, and as an
attending doctor for somebody like this, you've probably seen something
very similar before, where in the end of that interaction
you find out, oh that that person was putting it on,
they were faking it. So you might then apply that
same logic to this situation. Say, this guy's, yeah, come on,
(20:28):
he's trying to get away from something, right, Why would
you feign amnesia like that? You're you're running from the law, right.
But again, that's just logic kind of taking over.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Right, right, And we're not painting the doctors here as
jerks at all. They're working off precedent, and say ten
people who are claiming they have this kind of amnesia,
they're going to they're going to get better, or they're
going to reveal that they had untoward motives.
Speaker 4 (20:59):
Well, and saying, I mean, I'm you know, maybe I
don't mean to sound flippant or like I'm disregarding medical professionals.
I know it's very difficult to be, you know, a
physician in one of these high pressure situations. We obviously
have a lot of work to do on the healthcare
system in this country, but they're following protocol. I mean,
at an operation of that scale like this or like
(21:20):
a Grady situation, you have to tick boxes. There's only
you have to follow a certain standard operating procedure, and
that's just that's what you do. It's the only way
to get people through and to make sure that people
get the best care possible, which you know, maybe isn't
always the best care, but it's the best care possible.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
And so we've got if we look at our timeline now, right,
it's August two thousand and four, eight days at Saint Joseph's.
He ends up in that psych ward at Memorial for
four months, and after this he is transferred to kind
of a halfway house, a place for people who need
help or assistance in one way or another called J. C.
(22:00):
Lewis Primary Healthcare Center, and he tells the staff he's
tired of going by the name BK or BK do,
so he chooses his own name, just like you're in
witness protection, which will come up later. He goes by
the name Benjaman Kyle until someone can help him find
(22:21):
his identity, So still BK technically, you know, right, yeah, Matt,
you were saying that off air too, Like that's you'd say,
like that's how he went with it. Or part of
the inspiration. We're speculating, but that does have the ring
of truth. Also, he makes a good name for himself.
He's not a crazy dude. He likes to assist. He's
(22:43):
volunteering to do chores. He's clearly articulate. He is able.
This is important. He's able to remember the people and
the events over there at JC Lewis Primary Healthcare Center. Right,
there's a store. Sorry again in this great New Republic
article by Matt Wolfe, where he apparently goes into the
(23:06):
supply closet or the clothing donation bend and dresses in
a way that's like a staff uniform, and he wants
to help mop up, even though he can't see very well.
He's basically legally blind at this point. And he starts
to make friends as Benjamin Kyle, and for years and
(23:29):
years no one can figure out who he was, at
least that is until twenty fifteen. We're gonna pause for
a word from our sponsor, and then we'll dive further
into the strange case of Benjamin Kyle. Here's where it
(23:52):
gets crazy. Sometimes it just takes one person, one person caring.
You know, history hinges on these tiny things in this case,
I would posit that a lot of the credit for
solving the mystery goes to a nurse at Elsie Lewis
named Catherine Slater.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Yeah, it's interesting you pointed out Ben in the outline
the idea of like, you know, living off the grid
even or just having no identity isn't exactly a crime.
I mean, I guess it's technically you're supposed to have
a Social Security number, right, I mean, is that the law?
Do you have to have one?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
You can use an a tax ID or an EI
and some some like income tax activists go with that,
got it?
Speaker 4 (24:44):
So Yeah, to your point, like, there wasn't like a
criminal you know, report file because I guess a crime
hadn't really been committed other than like, you know, he
was naked, but he was you know, a victim essentially, right,
So he wasn't a criminal. So therefore the was really
no follow through you know from either the FBI and
Savannah or the police you know who initially came to
(25:07):
the scene at that Burger king right.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
Right, Like to Matt's point, he wasn't actually beaten. That's
some misreporting. Uh So who are you gonna file a
criminal complaint against the fire ants. You're gonna take him
to like fire ants court. How does that even work?
Corurie for ants.
Speaker 2 (25:26):
Let's uh, let's get into this person who helped bk
Benjamin out, Catherine Slater, because she's really important. She she
worked a late shift, like a night shift at the
same time when Benjamin Kyle was doing a lot of
work there, some of the volunteer work, and they ended
up just striking up of friendship and they started just
talking with each other, being very friendly. And she is
(25:49):
the one who basically was like, I saw him as
way more than just this guy who's also you know
who's there a patient. She saw him as a human being,
as somebody that she wanted to help.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, and again that's the thing, is the humanity, right,
the empathy inherent here. She's also a bit of a bloodhound, right.
She has an investigative, interrogative nature. She's the one who
reaches out to the FBI. She's the one who reaches
out to the cops and they say, rightly in their defense,
(26:24):
they say, well, there's not really a crime here. And
at this point we should talk a little bit about
the FBI. They have currently as of twenty twenty three,
as we're recording, they have the world's largest known fingerprint database.
I'm snarkily sneaking in largest known because between between just
(26:47):
us and the Puzzle Palace folks, I'm pretty sure that
five Eyes has more fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah, well, I mean, just think about all the background checks.
There are basically two reasons why you were going to
get fingerprinted in the United States at least, and it
does vary by state, of course, because we have states loss.
But it's because you get picked up for some misdemeanor
to a felony, right, something criminally wrong you did, You're
going to get all ten year digits fingerprinted, or you
(27:18):
have to go through a criminal background check to get
a job or to get approval for a couple different things.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Interesting other aspect here, and I'm surprised more people don't
talk about this. There was a mass collection of innocent
people's fingerprints with identic kits for kids, right, Yeah, that's
how they got a lot of people. But weirdly enough,
(27:46):
Benjaman Kyle doesn't have his pause on any of these databases,
so the FBI gets in this weird like Joseph Heller
esque Catch twenty two situation. They know the guy, they
know where he is, but they don't know who he is,
so they put them on their missing person's page. They
(28:06):
contact Interpool and they have to explain this to Interpool. Yeah,
we got a missing person. I mean he's here, I guess,
but we don't know who he is. Do you do
you got any leads? What about you? Canada? And they're like, oh,
break this down to me And I was like, well,
he's missing, but he's not missing. How do you define missing?
(28:27):
Shout out to this one special agent who went off
the books, did the right thing, contacted the marshals discreetly
in the US and said, Hey, is this guy maybe
in witness protection And they said, no, we don't know
who he is. Have you have you tried to run
his fingerprints? And he's like, my god, you guys, dude.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
We need we need to get iris scanners for everyone, right, protect.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Your children, give all their biometric data over to to
an Orwellian government. So shout out to you an employee
at the GBI, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, because every
every state has a Bureau of Investigation.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
How about just a big old roundom applause for the GBI.
I know they're doing a ton of work that we
really don't hear about very often. Good work.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Yeah, Oh did I tell you? I one of my
old friends, and I probably shouldn't say the name on
air may have mentioned before works for the GBI in
basically in the level of forensics where you go in
and figure out how people died. And this person's sense
(29:37):
of humor ten out of ten.
Speaker 4 (29:39):
Yes, yeah, I imagine these are off air stories because
we don't want to get too specific.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
But remind me when we're not recording, there's this thing
with the lava lamp. You gotta hear it. Yeah, it's
exactly what you're thinking. I says, of course it is,
of course it is. So okay, let's talk about this
GBI employee, Bo Preston. Bo Preston is training law enforcement
(30:07):
in the ins and outs of using this enormous FBI database. Right.
This thing is labyrinthine. There's a lot of stuff there. You,
It's not like riding a bike, right, So Bo Preston,
she knows the system better than anyone else. So she
is the person who is probably best suited to figure
(30:29):
out whether this guy Benjaman Kyle is there under a
different name.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
So in this database you find eighty thousand active missing
person's cases and over the next year again, you know,
just to your point, Ben Preston taking this upon herself,
actually you know, combed through three hundred and fifty cases
generated by the system personally with no real you know, results,
(30:59):
no hits.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
She was trying to find stuff that could possibly be
tied to this guy. So like she's plugged in demographic
data basically right, bereft of fingerprints, that's what she's checking.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
So then she had a pretty genius idea to you know,
incorporate Kyle's case into her training curriculum, you know, which
made sense because it was a teachable kind of case
in terms of how to deal with cases folks like this,
but also perhaps one of the trainees may recognize them,
(31:33):
you know, that's really what it takes.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
Sad yeah, it is well, it is well, and sadly
none of that works. Nobody still, nobody recognizes this.
Speaker 3 (31:46):
Picture that moment in every class she's teaching, you know,
where you're essentially playing the lottery and you're like, and
here's one we couldn't find anybody, bueller, and it just yeah,
so prop suppressed him because that's the right thing to do.
But again, looks like there are no leads. It's two
(32:09):
thousand and seven, so it's three years since Kyle was found,
right since BK Doe was found in that Burger King
parking lot. And this nurse, Catherine Slater, reaches out to
the media. Benjaman Kyle becomes a news phenomenon. The story
is first reported in Savannah. National media picks it up.
(32:32):
He's on NBC, he's on ABC, you name it. He
starts a Facebook page, and as we all know, Facebook
is really good at getting personal information. But even Mark
Zuckerberg doesn't know who this guy is. I feel like
I walked a little bit down the street to take
that potshot at zucks.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
Because he's like personally going through all of our private
data for laughs.
Speaker 3 (32:58):
Yeah, it's like, who is this guy?
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (33:01):
But every year, four years, each and every single attempt
to discover this dude's true or former identity ended up
with bupkis failure across the board.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
And it's not like he wasn't shown on the news,
Like seriously, the news, Benjamin's face was on there, there
were reports about him. He went on Reddit and did
an ama and This isn't a time when Reddit was
in its heyday, when everybody was like, oh, we got
to use Reddit. Reddit's the best. At least that's when
I think that's a week on Unreddit and AMAS were
(33:39):
a big deal there, at least for a while. I'm
not sure where they stand right now. But he went on,
he did all that stuff, nobody recognized him. Still it's
ten years later and nobody knows this guy.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
And so again it sounds like we're shouting this guy
out a lot. The journalist Matt Wolf, with whom we
have not spoken directly, but right now, Wolf has, at
least for my been bucks, Wolf has the best reporting
on this in the New Republic. He really the story.
Yeah he he. Wolf has this beautiful quote where he
(34:18):
notes just how extraordinary and unusual and disturbing the Kyle cases.
He says, quote, we live in an age of extraordinary
surveillance and documentation. The government's capacity to keep tabs on
us and our capacity to keep tabs on each other
is unmatched in human history. Matt Wolfe, welcome to the show.
We've been waiting for you.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Hello, Hello, old imagine Ben.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Please Well, Matt goes into like the NSA's you know
capabilities and like outlines a lot of the stuff we've
discussed on this show, and I love, I love. He
points out how ridiculous it is. It seems ridiculous that
somebody could fall through the cracks.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Yeah, this guy is a ghost. This is a real
weird habbyist corpus case.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
You know, you have the.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
Body but nothing else, right this guy, like, this guy
is either the worst person at committing pseudo side or
he's telling the truth. And even if this is a
great point in your public article, even if Benjamin Kyle
quote unquote is faking amnesia, there would have been some
(35:33):
trace of him somewhere. Again, logically, it would just be
a case of finding the name.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
We're looking for someone who's never had military service, They've
never had a background check, they've never been arrested at
least brought in right even to a tank. And they
are not one of those generations that got signed up
to fingerprinting in childhood. Let's intro guy out of Atlanta,
(36:05):
our hometown, a neuropsychologist named Jason King. Jason King is
the first expert who really gets an in depth psychological
analysis of Kyle.
Speaker 4 (36:17):
Yeah, he was able to take a look at him,
speak with him, examine him directly, and he came to
the conclusion that Kyle was likely suffering from what's called
dissociative amnesia, which, as you may have put together, is
a kind of memory loss that is specifically brought about
(36:38):
by trauma stress associated with trauma specifically. So in two
thousand and eight, Slater and Kyle do what the next
logical step here is to fly to la and go
on the Doctor Phil Show. I'm sorry, I'm only laughing
because it's just, you know, it is you know, I
know what you're gonna say, Matt, and you're totally right.
I think it's another way of blasting this out, you know,
(37:00):
giving it a wider audience, a wider reach, in the
hopes of, you know, turning up some results.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
Still is a terrible person.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Well he is despite all that. In two thousand and eight,
Doctor Phil is the huge Yeah, I mean seriously, two
thousand and eight, Doctor Phil's a little hits a little
different than he does right out because he was so
he was well liked by millions of people, and that
you can see that by the numbers here, right, It's
(37:28):
not like nobody saw that episode.
Speaker 3 (37:30):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, more than four million people tune in
when the episode goes live October sixteenth, two thousand and eight.
It's it's a segment called or the episode is called
who am I? And spoiler, they don't answer it because
they're trying, you know, and they can't do it. And
you can you can see that Catherine Slater, you know,
(37:55):
she accompanies Benjamin Kyle. She doesn't want to go on air,
but the producers really push her to do so, so
against her better judgment, she becomes part of the Brujaha.
And now we have to think, right, So people see
their doctor Phil's segment or whatever, they see their evening
news at their regional affiliate and they think, huh, that's weird,
(38:18):
and they might go to internet forums and do some
armchair sleuthing, but eventually they forget about the story. And
the thing about news cycles is that the stories continue
well after ABC or NBC or insert here stops talking
about it. And I think we should pause just to
(38:38):
acknowledge how much the situation there's no other way to
say it. The situation sucks for this guy you think of, like, okay,
so there's like an order of operations to exist in
US society, right, you got to have a Social Security number.
You gotta have some version of a birth certificate, whether
it's from Hawaii or Kenya. Who hot takes?
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Oh yeah, how do you get something like Barack.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
Obama was born in the US. It's pretty yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Okay, now I'm just joking, but no, but really, so
you don't have a birth certificate, how do you get
something like a Social Security number which is issued after you,
like right after you're born.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting at too
earlier about like, is not illegal to not have a
Social Security number?
Speaker 3 (39:28):
But I guess you do.
Speaker 4 (39:30):
You are supposed to have some sort of identifying you know,
like the VIN number argument to me alive, you're supposed
to be tagged.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
If you don't have those two things, what form of
identification are you taken down to the DMV to get
a driver's license or a state I D.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Right, I would say again, you can get that like
tax i D thing or.
Speaker 2 (39:55):
With what though, what do you get a tax ID with? Well?
That's people who are in.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
This guy parents can do this. It is to your point, Noel,
is not illegal on the books to not have a
social security number. But I would argue it is functionally illegal. Yeah,
the same way like in the movie Gadiga, which is
an awesome film. In the movie Gadiga, they don't make
(40:21):
it illegal not to be genetically modified. They just make
it in practice impossible to succeed in society.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Prohibitably difficult to just live do basic things.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
You know, you price people out.
Speaker 4 (40:35):
Yeah, dude, I mean I had to get my mom's
car title transferred to me. I went to the DMV
in two cities no less than six times before I
was before I had all the appropriate documentation, you know.
So bureaucracy is.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
A and so this guy like, it's terrible. You can't
get a job, you can't get a house, car, a
bank loan of any sort, you know what I mean.
And if you ever get jammed up with the law,
things immediately escalate. Who is this guy? You know what
I mean? What's your real name? I don't Oh, I amnesia.
(41:13):
I bet buddy, get in the car. So, luckily we
said this was going to be a bit of a
good news episode. Luckily there is good news. DNA came
into play. So we're going to pause for a word
from our sponsors and then we'll come back with some
good news and some well you know, the show, some
disturbing questions.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
And we've returned. Okay, so we've discussed testing this person
by looking at any potential documentation that could exist around him. Nope,
can't check that box off. We've tested his fingerprints, Nope,
not in any databases. We've even looked at his DNA,
but it's not in databases either. There's another technique that
(42:01):
is developing around this time in twenty fifteen. Well it's
a little before that, but it's really becoming a more
robust set of technologies and techniques called forensic genealogy, where
you take somebody's DNA and you compare it to other
samples of DNA that have been given. Right, We've talked
(42:23):
about this with several case companies that do this, and
yet we talked about it with cold cases like with
the Golden State killer. What if we run his genetic
data through one of these processes.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
And this is where we want to shout out. A
team of genealogical forensics folks led by CC MORE, Capital CE,
Capital CE and More gets into the trenches, right, and
they're finding some relatively weak matches, but then they hit
(42:57):
the mother load. They find a very strong match. They
also find a couple of implied skeletons in the closet,
things that are described euphemistically as non paternity events. Whole
other bag of badgers doesn't really matter for this story.
What does matter is that CC Moore and team found
a connection for Benjamin Kyle. And he goes on to
(43:20):
his Facebook page and he says the following.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
A little over two months ago, I was informed by
ccmore they had established my identity using DNA. Many people
have shared their DNA profiles that they may be compared
with mine. Through a process of elimination, they determined my
ancestral bloodline and who my relatives were. A DNA test
taken by a close relative has confirmed that we are related.
(43:44):
And this was all courtesy of Moore's company, the DNA
Detectives dot Com, who spent two years working on this case.
So it's not just like a Google search, you know,
genetic Google search. The word detectives here is pretty appropriate.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
So the guy says, he always said back when he's
bk do, he always said he vaguely thought he was
from Indianapolis. He felt very certain that he knew his birthday,
and he related to Michael Jackson, the King of pop
And he also had a couple of other vague spidery
sense recollections. C. C. Moore and her company they mentioned
(44:24):
DNA detectives. They go through this quite throw process of elimination.
Eventually they find a family called the Powells or group
of families, and then from there they find a subgroup,
a very specific set of Powells, and these Powells are
(44:45):
in Lafayette, Indiana. Ultimately, she and her team get to
a high school yearbook from nineteen sixty seven in the
town and in the book a picture of a guy
named William Powell. He is in tenth grade when the
picture is taken. He's wearing glasses, he's wearing plaid. You
(45:09):
can you can find the picture and it's one of
the You know, they're at a weird point here because
for a decade people have been looking at this picture
Benjamin Kyle and saying, hey, you look kind of like
a guy I saw at a waffle house. That's true,
that's someone said that. So now they're armed with DNA, right,
(45:30):
So now a physical resemblance matters a lot more. At
the same time. By the way, his life still stinks.
He's forced off the grid because he doesn't have the
paperwork and the id that you need to exist in
this country. An outfit out of Orlando, a nonprofit called
I Dignity get it?
Speaker 2 (45:49):
They they are an id ignity.
Speaker 3 (45:53):
You know, it's I dig nitty Nity. So so Nitty
hells him out, uh with get with getting a Florida
I d And just a month later, it's November twenty
first he officially finds out who he was, or who
he used to be. Q gat ye his real name,
(46:14):
William Burgess Powell. That's a person he used to know.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Is that another reference? That's a person that he used
to know.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
This so it is a good song. He was right
about his birthday.
Speaker 2 (46:33):
Right, and he was right about going with a b
as a first name, Billy, right, he probably grown up?
He was probably Billy.
Speaker 4 (46:41):
Mm hmmm, yes, yes, very presumptuous if you're mad. It's
a very diminutive nickname, you know, are you kidding? Should
be should be saddled with the billy? It's yeah, he does.
He doesn't even go by that anymore. He goes by William.
Speaker 5 (46:58):
Oh, all right, he doesn't go William okay so also
named shout out, I Bet, I bet the hardest of
hard cases that listens to the show right now goes
by Billy seriously there and they're that name.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Wetstone, you know, Billy magnuson right now, come on, let's go.
Speaker 3 (47:23):
So Yeah, he does go away Bill. It seems okay,
but the mystery is not solved because all this reporting, right,
we found the name of the former identity, and it
does not seem like the guy is faking. Nobody said, hey,
this uh Willie Powell jerk skip Town, and he's responsible
(47:46):
for rampant selling of loose cigarettes and counterfeit stamps or anything.
He's not running from anything.
Speaker 4 (47:52):
Yeah, like crime.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
But what happened we don't know.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Man.
Speaker 3 (47:56):
Sometime in nineteen seventy six, it looks like he cut
ties with everyone. He took the first steps toward pseudo side.
He abandoned his life. He was living in mobile home
at the time. He had a car. He just left
him there and skipped down to Colorado with a coworker.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, and his brother attempted to find him for years.
His brother created a missing persons report, and his brother
had been looking for him for forty years and he
basically gave up. He was like, oh, it's been forty years.
This guy he died somewhere. I just don't know. And
that's it. I guess that's it.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
And William Powell slash Benjamin Kyle was twenty five when
he moved to Colorado. Also, you can find other reports
that the home life of the Powells was not super great.
The brother Furman, who will get to in a second,
He is on record in multiple sources saying that their
(48:55):
father was at times abusive and that he believes his
brother William got the worst of it.
Speaker 4 (49:02):
Yeah, you know, amnesia. Well, so, yeah, that's that's the
operative word, right, Ben. I mean, we were talking about
this dissociative amnesia having you know, been I guess diagnosed.
Was it an official diagnosis or was it just sort
of like I speculate that this is what it is anyway,
whether whether or not that's the case brought on by trauma,
(49:23):
serious emotional trauma. So we know that there's some mental
health issues at play that probably would have been at play,
you know, from the beginning when when this when this
person did split down.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
Yeah, and this the neuropsychologist Jason King from Atlanta is
qualified to diagnose people with these states. So that's why
we bring that guy up, because it's important to have
an expert. It's not just someone who is not familiar
with these like disciplines and assessments. It's a guy who
knows what he's talking about. And we'll get back to
(49:58):
him in a second. What we need to know is
that again our journalists here, Matt Wolfe, was able to
confirm by tracing Powell's security number that as William Powell,
Benjamin Kyle worked a couple of different jobs at least
until nineteen seventy seven. The last case is nineteen eighty three,
(50:23):
and from nineteen eighty three all the way to two
thousand and four, this guy was a ghost, which is
very difficult to do. Cecymore reaches out to the brother
that you mentioned earlier, Matt Furman. Powell and Benjamin, who
now goes by Bill ended up moving back to Indiana.
(50:44):
In a great piece by the Journal Courier, you can
you can see how his life has progressed. That Courier
piece is from twenty sixteen. I think he's now just
a regular dude. This summer August is coming up as
we record Bill Powell Benjamin Kyle will be seventy five
(51:06):
years old as a happy ending. But there's a mysterious ending.
No one sure what happened. What could cause somebody to
completely lose track of themselves, especially because people are obsessed
with themselves. How would you just forget all.
Speaker 2 (51:23):
That, especially considering he wasn't on a bunch of drugs, right,
or at least he had been off of drugs for
a long enough time to where they were not detectable
within his system. Right. It's not as though he was
out drinking every night because again, alcohol was not detected
in his system when he was found unresponsive or like
mostly unresponsive. I don't know, man, it feels like he
(51:47):
did get in some kind of altercation at some point
because of those small indentations within his skull that were
first discovered when he was found. Because that feels like
some you know, being hidden with something, probably not an
impact of from a fall at least again, that's can't say,
but that's just what you know if you're deducing it.
Speaker 4 (52:09):
I I don't know.
Speaker 2 (52:10):
It feels like he maybe did get rattled at some
point when he was living rough.
Speaker 3 (52:16):
Right, And well, we also fair point. We also don't
really know if he was living rough. Like the evidence
is the fingernails and the beard. He might just thought
have been super into super into hygiene. More severe like
mild head injuries don't cause long term amnesia, but more
(52:37):
severe injuries can cause permanent amnetzsa. This guy is still
rediscovering his life, you know what I mean. Imagine if
you woke up one day and you found out that
for decades you were you were a completely different person,
and you only had a few things in common. You know,
this is where we have to mention the good folks
(52:58):
at the National Missing and I Identified Person's System here
in the US street name NAMOS. NAMOS is part of
the US Department of Justice, and they have a lot
of databases, but they're still struggling to assist what they
call the quote living unidentified. And while Powell Slash Kyle's
(53:20):
case is the most famous by far, he's not unique.
There are other living unidentified people And I don't know,
maybe we intd this way. Could he have faked it?
Could he have faked the whole thing for some unknown reason?
Speaker 4 (53:39):
You know, there's a really really excellent film called Moros Perros.
There's a character who's like he's an assassin, but he
looks like a vagrant and he does that by design
where at the end it's minor spoiler. I guess he
needs to make a getaway, so he trims his fingernail
(54:00):
and he cuts off his beard and he looks like
a completely different person. And I always thought that was
really brilliant, like storytelling. It's like, oh, what a great
way to operate under the radar, you know, like as
as kind of like you know, because he's invisible for
all intents and purposes. That's people don't regard folks like
that with much attention, you know, so they can kind
of float in and out and do what they need
(54:21):
to do. And that just always does this makes me
think of that. I mean, I'm sorry the roundabout way
of saying, I don't think that he faked it, but
if he did, maybe it was something like that, and
it would have to be hella calculated, you know what
I mean, Like, really to to trick this, this psychologist
and ben Off Mike you pointed out, the only way
(54:42):
to truly know it would be to do some really
intense tests hooked up to you know, to monitor brainwaves.
Speaker 3 (54:49):
City you would have to you would have to do
he would have to do active brain monitoring while asking
polygra level questions, right, what day is it? And then
measure brain activity, right, what's your name? Measure brain activity?
Speaker 4 (55:08):
Right?
Speaker 3 (55:08):
Who is the president? And he knew these he knew
these third party facts, like when he was in the
hospital out in Saint Joseph's he knew who the president was.
Like He's true, wasn't completely adrift.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
He even knew about the invasion of Iraq in two
thousand and three.
Speaker 3 (55:24):
So yeah, guy was up to speed on a lot
of things, just not himself, which you know, not not
to sound flip about it, but this is this is
a real thing. And because people still don't know exactly
how it happened. I like your theory, Matt about possible
traumatic brain injury, just because it seems most logical and
(55:46):
most possible. But without knowing how it happened, we can
only speculate that it could happen again. It could happen
to someone, I mean, anybody walking down the street. Could
it happened? Cute cheesy, dramatic music to you.
Speaker 2 (56:06):
See, this is why we all, everybody on the planet
needs to get on the back of their neck, a
QR code tattooed that has all of your information, you.
Speaker 3 (56:22):
Know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (56:24):
Also get a little tattoo on our inner wrists while
we're at it.
Speaker 2 (56:27):
Huh. I think that's a great idea. I guess we
can use the Freemasons to roll out the planet. It'll
be for sure.
Speaker 4 (56:34):
Yeah, yeah, Elimination Global Unlimited will be thrilled.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
Yeah. So with a with a shout out to I
gu uh, we're gonna end it there, folks, We're going
to pass the torch to you here. What do you
think it's it's a bit of a dilemma because again,
without some serious testing that to our knowledge has not
been conducted, it is functionally impossible to know the the
(57:00):
absolute truth here. Now, I will say that after we
dug into this, I don't think he's faking. I think
you will probably be offended. Someone's probably asked him. I'm
sure the cops have. Uh, it doesn't it doesn't seem
like this guy has been pretending. Uh what do you think, folks?
(57:20):
Let us know, we're all over the internet. Uh, send
us a picture of the QR code on the back
of your neck.
Speaker 2 (57:28):
I know some of you got him don't do that. Really,
I hope you can hear the sarcasm that we emanated.
Speaker 4 (57:36):
Let us know if you support Matt's plan for a
totalitarian future regimes.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
I mean, and it's gonna happen, and.
Speaker 3 (57:46):
Well doesn't make it.
Speaker 4 (57:48):
That doesn't make it right. Let's just get on board.
You can get on board with us via social media
by reaching out to us via Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook
at the handle conspiracy stuf on Instagram and TikTok where
conspiracy stuff show.
Speaker 3 (58:04):
I'm asking chat GPT right now, should all people have
ID codes tattooed on their bodies?
Speaker 2 (58:10):
Let's see yes?
Speaker 3 (58:12):
Uh so if you like check chat GPT said tight, No,
it didn't. So it's said as it's had. As an
Ai language model, I cannot blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (58:25):
Oh okay, okay, I cannot dictate how I'm going to
brand you. Uh okay. So if you like to call people,
call one eight three three std WYTK that's our voicemail system.
When you call in, you've got three minutes. Please give
yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we
can use your name and message on the air. If
(58:45):
you don't know who you are. Please don't call in
asking you know questions about who you are, because we're
not going to be able to tell you. I'm so sorry.
Do reach out to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
If you've got more to say, they can fit in
that three minutes. Why not instead send us a good
old fashioned email conspiracy.
Speaker 6 (59:01):
iHeartRadio dot com Stuff they don't want you to know
(59:23):
is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (59:25):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.