March 23, 2023 • 44 mins
What is really going with these UFOs? Host, Payne Lindsey unpacks the latest developments in military UAP sightings, explores the infamous Roswell case, and meets a man named Travis Walton, who’s story undoubtedly tops them all.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
absolutely free, but if you want to binge the whole season,
it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
plus subscribers. You'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season.
For more information, check out the show notes.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, Hey Animation.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Do you mind if I toss this mic on you?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Could you just stay your name?
Speaker 5 (00:40):
I'm Travis Walton. Today is January twenty ninth.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
How long has it been?
Speaker 6 (00:49):
Now?
Speaker 5 (00:53):
Forty five years? Forty five years and three months. But
some things don't change, you know, Some things about it
haven't gotten any easier at all. I wish that this
(01:13):
had never happened. It's not been a good thing for
my life, for my family in some ways, they don't
even see the real me, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
This morning I woke up, had breakfast and some coffee, showered,
then went to my office. I had a few zoom calls,
a quick lunch, did some scrolling on TikTok and Instagram,
sent a few emails and some more emails the.
Speaker 7 (01:54):
First yawn of the day.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Left my office, went to my local neighborhood bar. I
love a good Jim Martini, a phone call, another email,
another email, time to eat dinner and go to sleep.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Okay, I think you get it.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
We all have a version of this, a routine, a pattern,
our habits, whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
We all have shit.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
To do, more than enough to worry about, jobs, relationships, politics, religion, COVID, whatever,
the next version of COVID is an endless amount of
things to keep our minds busy. Life can feel like
a hamster wheel doing the things we know until we
get too tired and fall asleep.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
That sounded depressing.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
My point is it's almost by default that we as
humans remain focused on what's right in front of us,
and for the most part we have to. But if
you ever just stop, stop and step outside and just
look at the sky, sometimes all the things in our
(03:09):
daily lives suddenly feel incredibly small, and maybe that's a
good thing.
Speaker 8 (03:16):
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast
cosmic arena. Our planet is a lonely speck in the
great enveloping cosmic dark, the pale blue dot.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
This is the voice of the late Carl Sagan, renowned
astronomer and an astrophysicist, famously describe the Earth as a
pale blue dot. He put our tiny existence into perspective,
artfully explaining not only our responsibility to each other, but
also to our planet.
Speaker 7 (03:49):
Consider again that dot.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
That's here, that's home, that's us.
Speaker 8 (03:55):
Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is
where we make our stand. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to
preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only on.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
We've ever known.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
My name is Payne Lindsay, and for the last five
years or so, I've spent my career making true crime
podcasts and investigating cold cases. Ever since I was a kid,
gazing up at the stars with something I love to do,
wondering what else could be out there, or if there
was anything at all. Well, scientifically speaking, the likelihood of
(04:39):
intelligent life existing somewhere else in the universe at this
point is almost certain. Space is literally so big that
it makes our numeric system look stupid trying to explain it. Example,
we live in the Milky Way, Venus, Earth, Mars, you
know the rest. There are over one hundred billion more
planets in the same galaxy and beyond the Milky Way.
(05:02):
It's believed that there are likely ten trillion more galaxies.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So doing the math.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
That brings us to a whopping one septilian number of
planets in the universe. That's a one with twenty four
zeros after it. What are the odds? We're just so
damn lucky one inceptilian, I guess. But even if science
supports the idea of extraterrestrial life, we here on Earth
have an incredibly hard time grappling with it. Hoaxes, pseudoscience,
(05:32):
attention seeking people. It's all clearly muddy the waters. And
I get it.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Little green men are fun.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
They look cool on a T shirt or a mug
from a gift shop, But what's the real deal here?
Very quietly, over the last two years, the conversation surrounding
UFOs has started to slowly shift. Navy pilots have come forward.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
With evidence, my god.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Aircraft maneuvering in ways that defy our current understanding of
the laws of physics.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Congress is meeting about it, NASA has joined the SARCH.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
If there's ever been a time to look at the
subject a little more seriously, it's probably right now.
Speaker 9 (06:18):
UFOs on radar harassing a US Navy warship off the
California coast.
Speaker 10 (06:24):
This Navy video showing the pilot's reaction to the strange
aerial encounter. What pilots described as aircraft that flew in
a manner that defied physics.
Speaker 7 (06:33):
It's rotating, by god, the whole I have a look
on the NFA.
Speaker 11 (06:40):
The UAPs or unexplained aerial phenomena, that's what the military
calls them, physical evidence of off world vehicles not made
on this.
Speaker 12 (06:50):
Earth, no wings, rotors or detectable exhausts, Unable to track
where they came from or where they disappeared.
Speaker 7 (06:57):
Tool on it.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
Oh my god, I hope that's a plane.
Speaker 13 (07:03):
Oh gee, please be applying, How please we can hire you?
Speaker 5 (07:06):
Ready for this cha?
Speaker 1 (07:09):
And sure there's no wide eyed alien saying take me
to your leader here, But there is a record number
of strange sightings in the sky throughout the entire world
that no country on Earth has been able to rationally explain.
Yet this question are we alone? Has been an everlasting
drive throughout human history. If we could just shake it
all down, cut through all the nonsense, if we could
(07:32):
dissect all the real evidence we have today with an
open mind and a healthy amount of skepticism what might
we actually find, because I think learning the truth about
anything is supremely important. Part of evolving is simply opening
your mind to possibility.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
But the ultimate challenge.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
In this way of thinking still remains, we all have
shit to do, and even if we found all the
answers going to change my life today or the responsibilities
I have tomorrow. But maybe it's a big enough question
worth leaving the monotony of my daily routine and just
attempt to answer. I'm stepping off the hamster wheel because
(08:15):
I know it'll be right there waiting for me if
I ever decide to come back.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
All you have to do is listen. Welcome to high strange.
Speaker 14 (08:31):
Do you believe in UFOs? Applying the correct definition to
the word UFO, that question doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 5 (08:41):
What they're really saying.
Speaker 14 (08:42):
When they ask do you believe in UFOs? Is do
you believe that we're being visited by extraterrestrials? They're not
saying do you believe that there are objects in the sky.
We can't explain two very different things. If you said
to somebody I study UFOs, they laugh. I try to
even avoid the word UFO. I study data about objects
(09:05):
in the sky that we can't explain.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
This is Leslie Kane.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
She studied UFOs for over two decades now, written multiple
articles for The New York Times and made their best
seller list as an author.
Speaker 14 (09:18):
I did not get into UFOs by any kind of
intentional design. What happened was I was working at a
public radio station in Berkeley, California, in the nineties. This
colleague from France sent me this report about UFOs that
changed everything for me.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
The report that made it to her desk was titled
UFOs and Defense, a scientific study into whether there were
any dangers or national security threats related to UFOs?
Speaker 14 (09:46):
Are there any dangers? Are they a national security issue
because these things are up in the skies? It was
a ninety page study written by admirals, generals, a chief
of police, police scientists, authoritative people who weren't going to
be making up stories. They interviewed all these pilots, and
(10:07):
they looked at data from around the world, and they
drew the conclusion that the best hypothesis to explain the
cases they studied, the most valid, logical, rational explanation for
this is that these are visitors from somewhere else. I
couldn't believe it that generals and admirals and police officers would.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Say that these were all qualified experts from extremely varied backgrounds. Scientists, pilots,
technical directors, police chiefs, admirals, air force generals, the kinds
of people you'd probably listen to as a journalist.
Speaker 14 (10:40):
To me, it was like, oh my god, this is huge,
the biggest story there is completely blew my mind. Even
if there's this small chance that we are being visited
by something from another world, isn't that like a massive story.
It was to me. I tried to pitch a story
to a lot of editors, pitch the story to them,
and I learned nobody wants to hear about this topic.
(11:04):
The papers were afraid of taking the risk that they
would be laughed at. UFOs were completely stigmatized, considered to
be a joke.
Speaker 15 (11:14):
Basically, the stigmatization around UFOs has been an enormous obstacle.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
This is Brian Bender, senior correspondent for Politico who covers
national security.
Speaker 15 (11:29):
No one wants to be the UFO guy.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I too do not want to be the UFO guy.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And trust me, I mean it when I say that
I feel like the conspiracy rabbit hole surrounding this topic
is a dark, slippery slope. It starts with just wanting
to know what this thing is. Then the next thing
you know, you're analyzing Egyptian pyramids searching for clues from aliens.
Speaker 7 (11:53):
It's not a career builder.
Speaker 15 (11:55):
It's not a career builder, it's you know, it's a
tenfoil hot wearing Do I want to be considered that person?
As a journalist in Washington covering national security for the
first twenty years of my career, UFOs never came up
at all. I mean, he just wasn't a topic that
people talked about. It didn't mean that there weren't people
out in the world talking about it, It just was
(12:16):
never a topic that as a reporter covering the Pentagon
you ever really came across. If I come to my
editors and say I want to write about UFOs, you
know they're going to.
Speaker 7 (12:25):
Roll their eyes and I'm not going to be taken
very seriously.
Speaker 15 (12:30):
Summer of twenty seventeen, I got a call from a
source of mind. He said, hey, you know, I think
I might have a good story if you're interested. There's
this guy. He's in the Pentagon. He's a career intelligence
officer and he's been working on UFOs. First of all,
I was like the UFOs, the Pentagon studying UFOs.
Speaker 7 (12:53):
Like in modern day. So it was intriguing to me.
Speaker 15 (12:55):
But at the same time, I was like, you know,
I don't know that that's a politico story. There's this guy,
he's about to leave the government and he's leaving quite frustrated,
but he's ready to go public with this.
Speaker 7 (13:08):
So I met him. I also did some betting of him.
Is he who he says he is? And what is
his background and who?
Speaker 15 (13:15):
Was very clear to me in the beginning that he
was very credible, and started digging a little further, peeling
back the onion layer. And it turned out the program
that he was working on in the Pentagon, that was
researching UFO sightings was actually initiated by Senator Harry Reid
from Nevada got some of his fellow senators to put
(13:36):
twenty two million dollars into the budget, a senior politician
who wants the Pentagon to study UFOs, and made it happen.
I mean, I'm a Pentagon reporter and I cover Washington,
and we have a Senator who's got twenty two million
bucks out of the taxpayers send it to this office
over at the Pentagon, and now they're looking into the UFOs.
And now the guy who's been doing it says, I've
(13:57):
learned all these really interesting things and nobody seems to care.
That immediately rang a bell in my head that it's
not just a UFO story, it's also a political story.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
If the government was using taxpayer dollars to fund a
secret UFO research program, who was just the hook he
needed to publish a story. Simultaneously, unbeknownst to each other,
Leslie Kane was chipping away at the same story.
Speaker 14 (14:22):
Because of the years of reporting I'd done on this,
I got to know some of the sort of key
inside players. One of them invited me in October of
twenty seventeen to a meeting with a man named Luis Elizondo.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Lou Elisondo that anonymous source from the Pentagon who claimed
to have run the UFO research program was a man
named Lou Elizondo, and he didn't just have an interesting
story to tell, he had evidence to support it.
Speaker 15 (14:50):
Lou Alexondo was preparing to come out of the government
in trying to pitch this story to mainstream media.
Speaker 14 (14:56):
I went to this meeting with Luis Alessando and three
of there are people I knew. At that meeting, I
was shown these incredible documents, and then I was also
shown these three videos.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Oh going, I can for whin the wind for hunting,
pointing out for the west.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Oh, I think.
Speaker 7 (15:16):
It's rotating, so I rot the thing.
Speaker 13 (15:18):
Oh my god, there's a whole fleet. I have a
look on the FA.
Speaker 14 (15:23):
Actual videos in the possession of the Navy of UFOs.
My mind was blown. All the journalism I'd done nothing
came close to this. The implications of this were huge.
The government was taken this seriously. The government had invested
resources into studying UFOs, which meant they're real. I brought
(15:51):
it to the editors at the New York Times, showed
them everything. There is something real that's unexplained.
Speaker 15 (15:58):
They were going to the New York Times. I think
they talked to the Washington Post. I went to my
editors and when can we run it? There was some
eye rolling a little bit in the newsroom.
Speaker 14 (16:09):
There are real physical objects in the sky that demonstrate
extraordinary technology beyond the capability of what we have.
Speaker 15 (16:17):
What is that How do they do that? How are
they flying that way? No sense from any.
Speaker 7 (16:24):
Of the radar.
Speaker 15 (16:25):
If there's an engine, it's not giving off any heat
going from the service of the ocean to seventy thousand
feet in a couple seconds, which would make any aircraft
we know blow up.
Speaker 7 (16:38):
We really want this.
Speaker 15 (16:39):
Story out, but we're not even sure the mainstream media
will bite.
Speaker 7 (16:44):
We had decided we were going to go with it.
Speaker 15 (16:47):
We ran the first story the same day that the
New York Times did.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
In twenty seventeen, both Politico and The New York Times
ran stories about UFOs witnessed by military pilots, aircraft captured
on radar and video maneuvering in ways that farce topass
our current technology. When the story's published, the Pentagon responded
confirming they were real.
Speaker 10 (17:13):
Now, after a series of unusual encounters by Navy jets,
like this one in twenty seventeen showing an F eighteen
super Hornet encountering an unidentified object, the Navy has decided
it needs to codify how its sailors and pilots record
such unexplained events in case these flying objects are in
fact some kind of advanced aircraft.
Speaker 9 (17:35):
The US Navy and.
Speaker 10 (17:36):
Pentagon are trying to destigmatize reporting what they call unexplained
aerial phenomena.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
For the first time in American history, there was physical
video evidence of an unidentified flying object captured by the
military that the government itself acknowledged to be real, not
just real, but that they don't know what they are.
Alongside these Navy videos, Brian and Lesley's stories unearthed the
top secret Pentagon program that have been studying these things
(18:14):
for years, depending on office.
Speaker 15 (18:19):
That was created in two thousand and seven was called
the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program.
Speaker 7 (18:27):
The acronym was a tip very innocuous sounding name.
Speaker 15 (18:31):
Obviously, there's no UFOs in that name at all, and
I think that was on purpose.
Speaker 7 (18:36):
It was sort of hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 9 (18:39):
Recent report by The New York Times unveiled the existence
of a real life X Files Department.
Speaker 10 (18:44):
Secret UFO program has just been revealed millions of dollars
to look into UFO sidings.
Speaker 8 (18:49):
It's a five year secret government program to investigate mysterious
flying objects.
Speaker 15 (18:55):
It was set up to basically look at UFOs as.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
We think of them, so you know them whatever you will.
Speaker 15 (19:00):
Flying saucers in interviewing pilots or other military personnel that
were reporting these sightings.
Speaker 7 (19:07):
Thirty four studies they commissioned.
Speaker 15 (19:10):
They hired smart people at different universities, scientists to.
Speaker 7 (19:14):
Do basically theoretical studies.
Speaker 15 (19:18):
So, in other words, if the craft is doing this,
it's exhibiting these properties, how might that work?
Speaker 7 (19:25):
What kind of propulsion system might you need to be
able to do that?
Speaker 15 (19:30):
Interviewing some of the witnesses, participants, chronicling what happened and
when it happened. That was the primary role of the
ATIP office. ATIPS spent a lot of time on a
particular case involving the USS Nimts aircraft Carrier.
Speaker 9 (19:45):
The USS Nimets aircraft Carrier and its support ships carrying
the most sophisticated sensor systems in the world, had several
interactions with AAVs that is anomalous aerial vehicles.
Speaker 15 (20:00):
So imagine it's like a normal day if there is
such a thing for the USS Nimics aircraft carrier sailing
off the southern California coast. F eighteens fighter planes take
off from the deck doing drills, doing their normal practice runs,
flown by some experienced pilots who were not just right
(20:20):
out of flight scold lieutenant commanders had been in for
a decade or more.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
They're reporting that they're seeing with their.
Speaker 15 (20:27):
Own eyes, also picking up on the faighteens camera, these
tic TAC shaped vehicles, many of them flying at enormously
high speeds, speeds that they can't even really begin to
keep up with them if they wanted to.
Speaker 9 (20:45):
It was so advanced it rendered US capabilities ineffective. It
showed velocities far greater than anything known to exist.
Speaker 15 (20:55):
Numerous vehicles basically stalked the aircraft carrier days, and by
stock I mean pilots are flying off the aircraft carrier
doing their drills, and these tictacs are just flying circles
around them.
Speaker 9 (21:09):
They could turn itself invisible both to radar and the
human eye, undetectable and unchallenged.
Speaker 15 (21:18):
And at one point the faighteen pilots are supposed to
rendezvous some sixty miles away, is part of their daily exercise,
and they find out that the tic TACs they just saw,
they're already there. The tic TACs went from where they
were sixty miles in a couple seconds to the predetermined
(21:38):
rendezvous point. So the question was well, how do they
even know that's where we're going. Not only the pilots
themselves reporting it, but a Navy cruiser with a massive
radar on it also picking up these shaped vehicles on
its radar from multiple vantage points over multiple days. They're
(21:59):
seeing the things that they can't explain. This became a
big deal within the Navy, got reported up the chain,
and nobody really could explain it.
Speaker 7 (22:12):
That became one.
Speaker 15 (22:13):
Of the main cases that the aid TIP program went
back and tried to unpack and tried.
Speaker 7 (22:18):
To explain is there any way we could understand how
those things could be doing that?
Speaker 15 (22:25):
And maybe if we did, we could maybe get a
little further down the road of explaining where they're coming
from and who owns them.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
Is somebody in them?
Speaker 15 (22:35):
If that's a bad guy who had that technology, we're
in big trouble.
Speaker 7 (22:41):
They're twaying with us.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
The first hand accounts from military personnel aboard the USS
nenets were compelling, and if all their claims were true,
then the implications were massive. But there was still one
huge problem.
Speaker 15 (22:57):
Nobody cares, nobody's listening. There's this sort of human nature.
If we can't really come up with good answers It's like,
I don't want to go there. There's no easy answers.
I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
They were captivating news stories, but that's it. The only
question that really mattered was still unanswered. What the hell
are these things?
Speaker 14 (23:24):
Not everybody is on fire about wanting to know more
about UFOs? Are we alone in the universe? What does
this mean? Why are they here? It's something that most
people don't have the time and energy to think about.
It's absolutely understandable to me. People are making living, raising
their kids. They don't have the luxury of the time
(23:45):
to contemplate these kinds of things. This is a paradigm
shifting thing.
Speaker 7 (24:00):
That gets to the point of the stigma changing.
Speaker 15 (24:04):
Just for the last couple of years, there is more
willingness to come forward. But that's not because the Pentagon
decided that one day be more transparent. It's because members
of Congress who control the budget are demanding it.
Speaker 7 (24:18):
They're saying, enough is enough.
Speaker 15 (24:20):
Tell us what you know, and if you don't know anything,
go out there and start studying it.
Speaker 7 (24:26):
There's so much scar.
Speaker 15 (24:27):
Tissue, so much conspiracy theory, so much bs, so difficult
that stigma. We're so conditioned to think of the flying
saucer in terms of like the Hollywood image aliens that
came from some faraway place and oh, maybe they were
here before we were. And it's a very sort of
(24:48):
almost linear way to look at it.
Speaker 14 (24:57):
A lot of people when they think of UFOs, they
think of raw the whole notion of aliens as opposed
to just there being a phenomenon that we can't explain
that really comes from Roswell. Initially, people associate UFOs with
Roswell Wildwell.
Speaker 16 (25:19):
New Mexico headline in July eighth, nineteen forty seven, the
Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has
been found and is now in the production of the Army.
Late this afternoon, a bulletin from New Mexico's ejected that
the widely publicized mestally of the flying pulters may soon
be called.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
When it comes to UFO mythology in American history, there's
arguably one case that stands out, riddled with speculation and
conspiracy theories, now known infamously as the Roswell Incident.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
It goes like this.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
On July eighth, nineteen forty seven, something crashed in the
desert of Roswell, New Mexico. It soon became a national
news story. What exactly crush there has been the topic
of intense debate now for over half a century.
Speaker 17 (26:06):
I'm here to discuss so called flying Saucers' interest in
this problem has been due to our feeling of an
obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability,
anything in the air that may have the possibility of
threat or menace to the United States.
Speaker 14 (26:28):
Rozel has had such a grip on the culture, permeated
the culture in a way that has probably helped the
taboo stay alive. I think it's so fascinating to people
because it involved a crash and beings.
Speaker 6 (26:47):
July nineteen forty seven, Roswell's Army air Base the press
release announcing that the remains of a flying saucer had
been found.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
On the day of the crash, the Roswell Army Airfield
issued a pre release stating they had recovered a quote
flying disc The.
Speaker 6 (27:04):
US military quickly withdrew that statement, saying the crash spacecraft
was in fact the remains.
Speaker 7 (27:10):
Of a weather bloom.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
The conflicting reports made by the government fuel public suspicion.
But it's what happened in the years following that cemented
the Roswell Incident in UFO lore, a local resident named
Glenn Dennis came forward with a bizarre and much more
unnerving narrative.
Speaker 7 (27:27):
In July of.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
Nineteen forty seven, he was a mortician and received a
puzzling phone call from the Air Force. They wanted child
science confidence delivered to the air base.
Speaker 18 (27:37):
How long would it take you to get more? And
I said, how many do you need? He said, that's
not important. How long would it take you to get more?
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Glenn Dennis claimed that the crashed object was some form
of advanced aircraft and that three bodies were recovered from
the scene, bodies unlike anything he'd seen before.
Speaker 18 (27:56):
They definitely weren't demans. Doctors were explaining this that they
couldn't be from our planet. They had to be an alien.
It had to be something, yes, but not in our planet.
Speaker 6 (28:10):
The eyewitness accounts of alien bodies and a cover up
by the US government has given birth to the most
powerful UFO story in American history, known simply as the
Roswell Incident.
Speaker 14 (28:23):
Most of the cases we have on record are things
in the sky, right, It's much easier to stigmatize the
idea of a crash saucer in bodies than it is
to stigmatize something that a pilot sees in the sky
and picks up on radar. It's added to sort of
conspiracy element, this sort of sci fi element to it,
where UFOs are sort of synonymous with the idea of
(28:46):
bodies and aliens. The impact that that's had sort of
underlying everything, has not been helpful. There were so many witnesses,
actual alien bodies, and it was taken away and it
was covered up. They had various explanations for it.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
As the years went on, more and more witnesses came forward.
I got my hands on some of the declassified sworn affidavits,
one from a man named George Roberts, the manager of
a local Roswell radio station at the time, states the
following I made an attempt to go out to the
crash site and see it for myself, but I was
turned back by a military person who said it was
(29:23):
a restricted area. The next morning, I got a call
from someone in Washington, d C. The person said, we
understand that you have some information, and we want to assure.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
You that if you release it, it's.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Very possible your station's license will be in jeopardy, so
we suggest you don't do it a little weird. Another
affidavit from a woman named Sappho Henderson, refers to comments
made by her husband, a high ranking Air Force pilot
station in Roswell at the time. Her statement reads, in
nineteen eighty, my husband picked up a newspaper at a
(29:56):
grocery store. The article described a crash of a UFO
side of Roswell, with the bodies of aliens discovered beside
the craft. He pointed to the article and said, I
want you to read this because it's a true story.
I'm the pilot who flew the wreckage of the UFO. Again,
weird stuff, but who knows.
Speaker 14 (30:16):
No matter how you look at this Roswell event, it's weird.
I'm not going to say that I know, but it's
completely conceivable to me that it was something as the
terrestrial would crash there.
Speaker 15 (30:33):
I don't know what happened at Roswell, and I think
anybody who says they do one hundred percent no doesn't
know either or they're dead. I think something happened here.
There was clearly a government reaction.
Speaker 14 (30:47):
There's no way in hell this thing that fell was
made by humans.
Speaker 19 (30:53):
So the myschis on out in Roswell, that creepy Maxim
and Major Marcel, what could you tell us road?
Speaker 15 (31:16):
But you know, there's a professor a Vi Lobe at
Harvard who's now run something called the Galileo Project Institution
at Harvard. It has real money now to study UFOs.
But Avi Lob at Harvard says that we almost have
to throw out everything else that came before. So difficult,
especially all these years later, to separate what's fact what's fiction.
(31:38):
Let's just start doing some real due diligence using all
the technologies and capabilities we have in the government, out
of the government wherever, and maybe we can at least
get a little bit further down the road.
Speaker 7 (31:52):
When you talk about Roswell.
Speaker 15 (31:53):
And you talk about all of these cases in history,
I think what it doesn't account for is the magnitude
of the lack of institutional knowledge within the government. There's
enough mystery around it, enough things that don't add up
to tell me that whatever the answer is number one,
it's probably not one answer. There could be multiple answers,
(32:15):
multiple truths. It's probably something that we're not even thinking about.
Maybe we're kind of scratching at it a little bit.
I've come to believe that whatever the government does still
have in terms of juicy little secrets about UFOs, they're
not keeping it secret out of knowledge. We're keeping it
secret out of ignorance. They don't want to come forward
(32:39):
and say, there's all these things we've seen and we
have no friggin clue what they are. There are things
out there, we've seen them, we've studied them, and we
don't know they're.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
When I was a kid growing up, I can vividly
remember seeing tabloid magazines about UFO encounters and alien abductions
at the grocery store checkout line. They looked eerie, covered
in weird, grainy photos of flying saucers and alien autopsies.
My mom never let me get them rightfully, so they
were too scary for an eight year old, and she
(33:22):
probably knew they were all full of shit. This concept
of alien abduction has been around for decades. Many people
over the years have come forward with haunting tales of
being taken aboard of spaceship against their will in the
middle of the night. Just scan the Internet. There's plenty
of them, most of which, in my opinion, have no merit.
But since twenty seventeen, a wealth of government documents regarding
(33:45):
UFOs have continued to be declassified. Some of them include
things you'd only expect to find in science fiction.
Speaker 11 (33:55):
Thousands of previously classified documents regarding UFOs have now been
released to the public.
Speaker 10 (34:01):
The shocking details from this fifteen hundred page report.
Speaker 11 (34:05):
Some of the stories include alien abductions, electrical paralysis, and
even sexual encounters.
Speaker 9 (34:11):
From abductions that perceived time loss, the report says humans
have been injured from exposure.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
I'm a person who has spent most of his podcasting
career investigating unsolved murders and disappearances, dealing with facts, physical evidence.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
There's no room for fringe science.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
But while working on this show, I found one case
in particular that's so strange Trying to rationally explain it
feels next to impossible. In nineteen seventy five, seven men
encountered something unexplainable in the mountains of Snowflake, Arizona. I've
managed to get my hands on a ton of archival tape.
Speaker 13 (34:52):
There were seven men out there about three days ago.
They were all coming back here after dark. Saw this bright,
bright light to look to all seven of them like
a saucer or some identified object. Before they actually stopped
their truck, Travis jumped out of the car and ran
(35:13):
up underneath of this thing. If you can imagine. They
all witnessed a blue bluish light that projected from the
bottom of this craft, whatever it was, and at that
time it hit him. He cruppled and fell. They were terrified,
and so they started their vehicle out. That drove the
(35:34):
other way on that rim road for several miles until
they regained their wits.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Now, what was that man's name again? Who's missing?
Speaker 13 (35:44):
The man's name missing is Travis rot.
Speaker 10 (35:47):
The wa lp N.
Speaker 12 (35:53):
And a tend search for Travis Walton proceeded for three days,
dogs and helicopters. They were unable to find him or
any signs of where he was. After they told their
astounding story to the police, they came under suspicion of murder.
Speaker 16 (36:10):
Travis was missing for five days as people searched the.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Woods for him.
Speaker 13 (36:15):
There is no doubt Travis Walton believes he is telling
the truth about what he experienced.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
On November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven men who are
part of a logging crew deep in the mountains of
Arizona claimed to have encountered a flying saucer. One man
by the name of Travis Walton ran towards it to
get a closer look and was struck by some sort
of beam emitted from the craft, and then he was gone.
(36:43):
He was literally a missing person for five days. For
decades now, these men have stuck to their stories. The
man who claims he was abducted, Travis Walton, is now
in his late sixties, apparently still living in the small
town of Snowflake, Arizona. After some searching, I finally found
him on Facebook, told him about the podcast, and he
(37:04):
eventually agreed to meet with me in person to tell
his story. So we rented an airbnb in the mountains
of Snowflake and hit the road. We landed in Phoenix
and drove three hours into the mountains, set up our
microphones and some film cameras to record the interview, and
waited for him to arrive. But about an hour and
a half after our scheduled interview time, I was getting
(37:25):
a little worried and he hadn't responded to my last
three texts, so I tried to call.
Speaker 5 (37:30):
Him give me a little test check.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
One two three, yeah, nine two eight two.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Out of the blue, an old truck pulled into the driveway.
I peeked through the blinds and it was him. I
was about to open the door and greet him, but
I paused and stopped myself. He was sitting in the
driveway with his car off, just staring out the window.
He seemed anxious or like he was contemplating something. Ten
(38:16):
full minutes passed and he was still sitting there same position.
Is he having second thoughts? Is he prepping his story?
If this really happened to him, then it must have
been traumatic.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
That was still very skeptical of all this.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I sat on the couch, stewing in my own thoughts,
and then, hey.
Speaker 5 (38:53):
How long has it been here? Forty five years? Twenty
five years and three months. Some things don't change, you know.
Some things about it haven't gotten any easier at all.
(39:15):
I wish that this had never happened. It's not been
a good thing for my life, for my family. In
some ways, they don't even see the real me, you know.
The area we were working on was a logging contract.
(39:39):
Our job was to come in after the loggers and
clean up the damage. Trees, thin out the overgrowth. It
was really kind of a forest restoration project we were doing.
We did some thinning, but then we were doing fuel
break that day, pretty long day. When it was getting
(39:59):
to our time to head home, worked thirty miles from home,
so it's a bit of a drive. We loaded up
all our equipment into the back of the truck.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
There.
Speaker 5 (40:10):
It's a double caped truck. There was room for all
seven of the crew in one vehicle, four in the back,
three in the front. We were headed home. Everybody's tired,
so there was various conversations going on in the truck,
two here or two there like that. As we were
(40:33):
jouncing along this little logging trail, I could see a
glow through the trees up the head. Closer we got,
the more I was thinking that maybe this glow I
was thinking was maybe some hunters camped there. I thought
maybe the hunters were camped up there on the ridge.
(40:57):
The whole clearing there had this release means glowed to it,
sort of a feel. I don't know, maybe there was
some kind of electrical charge in the air. So I'm
it just had a really weird vibe to it. It
made things you see at work all day looked really
strange in this strange glow.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Heard of it.
Speaker 5 (41:26):
We got to a point where we were past the
thickest part of the growth and we could see the
source of this light. Boom there it was. It was unmistakable.
Speaker 17 (41:38):
For the space.
Speaker 7 (41:39):
You white, that's your name of a habitat.
Speaker 16 (41:43):
And when.
Speaker 7 (41:46):
Didn't riched it?
Speaker 4 (41:47):
You know smoking gine need a wee player, didn't take
a lean with a lean it you've been on the
g there's a bean back.
Speaker 5 (41:54):
I've been going gene because of cool reck. Now she
was over see the pending up.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
I'm talking your depend in a Ben Stupert show, Steve
bud top Ton avert riding men. You well, you can
kind of being down to saying the park peal we
spend at dot com and nine help those boom Nata guys,
we a Nati devil.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for
free every Thursday, But if you'd like to binge the
whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus
on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now.
Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange,
and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email
(42:38):
us at tips at high strange dot com. High Strange
is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence thirteen, created,
hosted and edited by myself Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are
myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner
and myself. Original score by Makeup and Anity Set, sound design,
(43:01):
mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney,
Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman, and Sidney Evans.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Our cover art is by Polygon.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman
featuring Gunna, written by Wesley tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler,
Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster performed by metro
Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from
Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman in three hundred Entertainment
for Gunna. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole
(43:37):
team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media
and Marketing, as well as Chris Corcoran and the team
at Cadence thirteen. This episode features the song Roswell, performed
by Raina del Sid and Tony Lndren. Check out the
show's website at Highstrange dot com, and if you're enjoying
the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing
the podcast and share it with your friends.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 18 (44:05):
M
Hi Strange is released weekly every Thursday, brought to you
absolutely free, but if you want to binge the whole season,
it's available right now on Apple Podcasts for all Tenderfoot
plus subscribers. You'll also get exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season.
For more information, check out the show notes.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hey, Hey Animation.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Do you mind if I toss this mic on you?
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Could you just stay your name?
Speaker 5 (00:40):
I'm Travis Walton. Today is January twenty ninth.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
How long has it been?
Speaker 6 (00:49):
Now?
Speaker 5 (00:53):
Forty five years? Forty five years and three months. But
some things don't change, you know, Some things about it
haven't gotten any easier at all. I wish that this
(01:13):
had never happened. It's not been a good thing for
my life, for my family in some ways, they don't
even see the real me, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
This morning I woke up, had breakfast and some coffee, showered,
then went to my office. I had a few zoom calls,
a quick lunch, did some scrolling on TikTok and Instagram,
sent a few emails and some more emails the.
Speaker 7 (01:54):
First yawn of the day.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Left my office, went to my local neighborhood bar. I
love a good Jim Martini, a phone call, another email,
another email, time to eat dinner and go to sleep.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Okay, I think you get it.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
We all have a version of this, a routine, a pattern,
our habits, whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
We all have shit.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
To do, more than enough to worry about, jobs, relationships, politics, religion, COVID, whatever,
the next version of COVID is an endless amount of
things to keep our minds busy. Life can feel like
a hamster wheel doing the things we know until we
get too tired and fall asleep.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
That sounded depressing.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
My point is it's almost by default that we as
humans remain focused on what's right in front of us,
and for the most part we have to. But if
you ever just stop, stop and step outside and just
look at the sky, sometimes all the things in our
(03:09):
daily lives suddenly feel incredibly small, and maybe that's a
good thing.
Speaker 8 (03:16):
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast
cosmic arena. Our planet is a lonely speck in the
great enveloping cosmic dark, the pale blue dot.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
This is the voice of the late Carl Sagan, renowned
astronomer and an astrophysicist, famously describe the Earth as a
pale blue dot. He put our tiny existence into perspective,
artfully explaining not only our responsibility to each other, but
also to our planet.
Speaker 7 (03:49):
Consider again that dot.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
That's here, that's home, that's us.
Speaker 8 (03:55):
Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,
Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is
where we make our stand. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to
preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only on.
Speaker 5 (04:15):
We've ever known.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
My name is Payne Lindsay, and for the last five
years or so, I've spent my career making true crime
podcasts and investigating cold cases. Ever since I was a kid,
gazing up at the stars with something I love to do,
wondering what else could be out there, or if there
was anything at all. Well, scientifically speaking, the likelihood of
(04:39):
intelligent life existing somewhere else in the universe at this
point is almost certain. Space is literally so big that
it makes our numeric system look stupid trying to explain it. Example,
we live in the Milky Way, Venus, Earth, Mars, you
know the rest. There are over one hundred billion more
planets in the same galaxy and beyond the Milky Way.
(05:02):
It's believed that there are likely ten trillion more galaxies.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So doing the math.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
That brings us to a whopping one septilian number of
planets in the universe. That's a one with twenty four
zeros after it. What are the odds? We're just so
damn lucky one inceptilian, I guess. But even if science
supports the idea of extraterrestrial life, we here on Earth
have an incredibly hard time grappling with it. Hoaxes, pseudoscience,
(05:32):
attention seeking people. It's all clearly muddy the waters. And
I get it.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
Little green men are fun.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
They look cool on a T shirt or a mug
from a gift shop, But what's the real deal here?
Very quietly, over the last two years, the conversation surrounding
UFOs has started to slowly shift. Navy pilots have come forward.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
With evidence, my god.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
Aircraft maneuvering in ways that defy our current understanding of
the laws of physics.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Congress is meeting about it, NASA has joined the SARCH.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
If there's ever been a time to look at the
subject a little more seriously, it's probably right now.
Speaker 9 (06:18):
UFOs on radar harassing a US Navy warship off the
California coast.
Speaker 10 (06:24):
This Navy video showing the pilot's reaction to the strange
aerial encounter. What pilots described as aircraft that flew in
a manner that defied physics.
Speaker 7 (06:33):
It's rotating, by god, the whole I have a look
on the NFA.
Speaker 11 (06:40):
The UAPs or unexplained aerial phenomena, that's what the military
calls them, physical evidence of off world vehicles not made
on this.
Speaker 12 (06:50):
Earth, no wings, rotors or detectable exhausts, Unable to track
where they came from or where they disappeared.
Speaker 7 (06:57):
Tool on it.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
Oh my god, I hope that's a plane.
Speaker 13 (07:03):
Oh gee, please be applying, How please we can hire you?
Speaker 5 (07:06):
Ready for this cha?
Speaker 1 (07:09):
And sure there's no wide eyed alien saying take me
to your leader here, But there is a record number
of strange sightings in the sky throughout the entire world
that no country on Earth has been able to rationally explain.
Yet this question are we alone? Has been an everlasting
drive throughout human history. If we could just shake it
all down, cut through all the nonsense, if we could
(07:32):
dissect all the real evidence we have today with an
open mind and a healthy amount of skepticism what might
we actually find, because I think learning the truth about
anything is supremely important. Part of evolving is simply opening
your mind to possibility.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
But the ultimate challenge.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
In this way of thinking still remains, we all have
shit to do, and even if we found all the
answers going to change my life today or the responsibilities
I have tomorrow. But maybe it's a big enough question
worth leaving the monotony of my daily routine and just
attempt to answer. I'm stepping off the hamster wheel because
(08:15):
I know it'll be right there waiting for me if
I ever decide to come back.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
All you have to do is listen. Welcome to high strange.
Speaker 14 (08:31):
Do you believe in UFOs? Applying the correct definition to
the word UFO, that question doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 5 (08:41):
What they're really saying.
Speaker 14 (08:42):
When they ask do you believe in UFOs? Is do
you believe that we're being visited by extraterrestrials? They're not
saying do you believe that there are objects in the sky.
We can't explain two very different things. If you said
to somebody I study UFOs, they laugh. I try to
even avoid the word UFO. I study data about objects
(09:05):
in the sky that we can't explain.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
This is Leslie Kane.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
She studied UFOs for over two decades now, written multiple
articles for The New York Times and made their best
seller list as an author.
Speaker 14 (09:18):
I did not get into UFOs by any kind of
intentional design. What happened was I was working at a
public radio station in Berkeley, California, in the nineties. This
colleague from France sent me this report about UFOs that
changed everything for me.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
The report that made it to her desk was titled
UFOs and Defense, a scientific study into whether there were
any dangers or national security threats related to UFOs?
Speaker 14 (09:46):
Are there any dangers? Are they a national security issue
because these things are up in the skies? It was
a ninety page study written by admirals, generals, a chief
of police, police scientists, authoritative people who weren't going to
be making up stories. They interviewed all these pilots, and
(10:07):
they looked at data from around the world, and they
drew the conclusion that the best hypothesis to explain the
cases they studied, the most valid, logical, rational explanation for
this is that these are visitors from somewhere else. I
couldn't believe it that generals and admirals and police officers would.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Say that these were all qualified experts from extremely varied backgrounds. Scientists, pilots,
technical directors, police chiefs, admirals, air force generals, the kinds
of people you'd probably listen to as a journalist.
Speaker 14 (10:40):
To me, it was like, oh my god, this is huge,
the biggest story there is completely blew my mind. Even
if there's this small chance that we are being visited
by something from another world, isn't that like a massive story.
It was to me. I tried to pitch a story
to a lot of editors, pitch the story to them,
and I learned nobody wants to hear about this topic.
(11:04):
The papers were afraid of taking the risk that they
would be laughed at. UFOs were completely stigmatized, considered to
be a joke.
Speaker 15 (11:14):
Basically, the stigmatization around UFOs has been an enormous obstacle.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
This is Brian Bender, senior correspondent for Politico who covers
national security.
Speaker 15 (11:29):
No one wants to be the UFO guy.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I too do not want to be the UFO guy.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
And trust me, I mean it when I say that
I feel like the conspiracy rabbit hole surrounding this topic
is a dark, slippery slope. It starts with just wanting
to know what this thing is. Then the next thing
you know, you're analyzing Egyptian pyramids searching for clues from aliens.
Speaker 7 (11:53):
It's not a career builder.
Speaker 15 (11:55):
It's not a career builder, it's you know, it's a
tenfoil hot wearing Do I want to be considered that person?
As a journalist in Washington covering national security for the
first twenty years of my career, UFOs never came up
at all. I mean, he just wasn't a topic that
people talked about. It didn't mean that there weren't people
out in the world talking about it, It just was
(12:16):
never a topic that as a reporter covering the Pentagon
you ever really came across. If I come to my
editors and say I want to write about UFOs, you
know they're going to.
Speaker 7 (12:25):
Roll their eyes and I'm not going to be taken
very seriously.
Speaker 15 (12:30):
Summer of twenty seventeen, I got a call from a
source of mind. He said, hey, you know, I think
I might have a good story if you're interested. There's
this guy. He's in the Pentagon. He's a career intelligence
officer and he's been working on UFOs. First of all,
I was like the UFOs, the Pentagon studying UFOs.
Speaker 7 (12:53):
Like in modern day. So it was intriguing to me.
Speaker 15 (12:55):
But at the same time, I was like, you know,
I don't know that that's a politico story. There's this guy,
he's about to leave the government and he's leaving quite frustrated,
but he's ready to go public with this.
Speaker 7 (13:08):
So I met him. I also did some betting of him.
Is he who he says he is? And what is
his background and who?
Speaker 15 (13:15):
Was very clear to me in the beginning that he
was very credible, and started digging a little further, peeling
back the onion layer. And it turned out the program
that he was working on in the Pentagon, that was
researching UFO sightings was actually initiated by Senator Harry Reid
from Nevada got some of his fellow senators to put
(13:36):
twenty two million dollars into the budget, a senior politician
who wants the Pentagon to study UFOs, and made it happen.
I mean, I'm a Pentagon reporter and I cover Washington,
and we have a Senator who's got twenty two million
bucks out of the taxpayers send it to this office
over at the Pentagon, and now they're looking into the UFOs.
And now the guy who's been doing it says, I've
(13:57):
learned all these really interesting things and nobody seems to care.
That immediately rang a bell in my head that it's
not just a UFO story, it's also a political story.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
If the government was using taxpayer dollars to fund a
secret UFO research program, who was just the hook he
needed to publish a story. Simultaneously, unbeknownst to each other,
Leslie Kane was chipping away at the same story.
Speaker 14 (14:22):
Because of the years of reporting I'd done on this,
I got to know some of the sort of key
inside players. One of them invited me in October of
twenty seventeen to a meeting with a man named Luis Elizondo.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
Lou Elisondo that anonymous source from the Pentagon who claimed
to have run the UFO research program was a man
named Lou Elizondo, and he didn't just have an interesting
story to tell, he had evidence to support it.
Speaker 15 (14:50):
Lou Alexondo was preparing to come out of the government
in trying to pitch this story to mainstream media.
Speaker 14 (14:56):
I went to this meeting with Luis Alessando and three
of there are people I knew. At that meeting, I
was shown these incredible documents, and then I was also
shown these three videos.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Oh going, I can for whin the wind for hunting,
pointing out for the west.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Oh, I think.
Speaker 7 (15:16):
It's rotating, so I rot the thing.
Speaker 13 (15:18):
Oh my god, there's a whole fleet. I have a
look on the FA.
Speaker 14 (15:23):
Actual videos in the possession of the Navy of UFOs.
My mind was blown. All the journalism I'd done nothing
came close to this. The implications of this were huge.
The government was taken this seriously. The government had invested
resources into studying UFOs, which meant they're real. I brought
(15:51):
it to the editors at the New York Times, showed
them everything. There is something real that's unexplained.
Speaker 15 (15:58):
They were going to the New York Times. I think
they talked to the Washington Post. I went to my
editors and when can we run it? There was some
eye rolling a little bit in the newsroom.
Speaker 14 (16:09):
There are real physical objects in the sky that demonstrate
extraordinary technology beyond the capability of what we have.
Speaker 15 (16:17):
What is that How do they do that? How are
they flying that way? No sense from any.
Speaker 7 (16:24):
Of the radar.
Speaker 15 (16:25):
If there's an engine, it's not giving off any heat
going from the service of the ocean to seventy thousand
feet in a couple seconds, which would make any aircraft
we know blow up.
Speaker 7 (16:38):
We really want this.
Speaker 15 (16:39):
Story out, but we're not even sure the mainstream media
will bite.
Speaker 7 (16:44):
We had decided we were going to go with it.
Speaker 15 (16:47):
We ran the first story the same day that the
New York Times did.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
In twenty seventeen, both Politico and The New York Times
ran stories about UFOs witnessed by military pilots, aircraft captured
on radar and video maneuvering in ways that farce topass
our current technology. When the story's published, the Pentagon responded
confirming they were real.
Speaker 10 (17:13):
Now, after a series of unusual encounters by Navy jets,
like this one in twenty seventeen showing an F eighteen
super Hornet encountering an unidentified object, the Navy has decided
it needs to codify how its sailors and pilots record
such unexplained events in case these flying objects are in
fact some kind of advanced aircraft.
Speaker 9 (17:35):
The US Navy and.
Speaker 10 (17:36):
Pentagon are trying to destigmatize reporting what they call unexplained
aerial phenomena.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
For the first time in American history, there was physical
video evidence of an unidentified flying object captured by the
military that the government itself acknowledged to be real, not
just real, but that they don't know what they are.
Alongside these Navy videos, Brian and Lesley's stories unearthed the
top secret Pentagon program that have been studying these things
(18:14):
for years, depending on office.
Speaker 15 (18:19):
That was created in two thousand and seven was called
the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program.
Speaker 7 (18:27):
The acronym was a tip very innocuous sounding name.
Speaker 15 (18:31):
Obviously, there's no UFOs in that name at all, and
I think that was on purpose.
Speaker 7 (18:36):
It was sort of hiding in plain sight.
Speaker 9 (18:39):
Recent report by The New York Times unveiled the existence
of a real life X Files Department.
Speaker 10 (18:44):
Secret UFO program has just been revealed millions of dollars
to look into UFO sidings.
Speaker 8 (18:49):
It's a five year secret government program to investigate mysterious
flying objects.
Speaker 15 (18:55):
It was set up to basically look at UFOs as.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
We think of them, so you know them whatever you will.
Speaker 15 (19:00):
Flying saucers in interviewing pilots or other military personnel that
were reporting these sightings.
Speaker 7 (19:07):
Thirty four studies they commissioned.
Speaker 15 (19:10):
They hired smart people at different universities, scientists to.
Speaker 7 (19:14):
Do basically theoretical studies.
Speaker 15 (19:18):
So, in other words, if the craft is doing this,
it's exhibiting these properties, how might that work?
Speaker 7 (19:25):
What kind of propulsion system might you need to be
able to do that?
Speaker 15 (19:30):
Interviewing some of the witnesses, participants, chronicling what happened and
when it happened. That was the primary role of the
ATIP office. ATIPS spent a lot of time on a
particular case involving the USS Nimts aircraft Carrier.
Speaker 9 (19:45):
The USS Nimets aircraft Carrier and its support ships carrying
the most sophisticated sensor systems in the world, had several
interactions with AAVs that is anomalous aerial vehicles.
Speaker 15 (20:00):
So imagine it's like a normal day if there is
such a thing for the USS Nimics aircraft carrier sailing
off the southern California coast. F eighteens fighter planes take
off from the deck doing drills, doing their normal practice runs,
flown by some experienced pilots who were not just right
(20:20):
out of flight scold lieutenant commanders had been in for
a decade or more.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
They're reporting that they're seeing with their.
Speaker 15 (20:27):
Own eyes, also picking up on the faighteens camera, these
tic TAC shaped vehicles, many of them flying at enormously
high speeds, speeds that they can't even really begin to
keep up with them if they wanted to.
Speaker 9 (20:45):
It was so advanced it rendered US capabilities ineffective. It
showed velocities far greater than anything known to exist.
Speaker 15 (20:55):
Numerous vehicles basically stalked the aircraft carrier days, and by
stock I mean pilots are flying off the aircraft carrier
doing their drills, and these tictacs are just flying circles
around them.
Speaker 9 (21:09):
They could turn itself invisible both to radar and the
human eye, undetectable and unchallenged.
Speaker 15 (21:18):
And at one point the faighteen pilots are supposed to
rendezvous some sixty miles away, is part of their daily exercise,
and they find out that the tic TACs they just saw,
they're already there. The tic TACs went from where they
were sixty miles in a couple seconds to the predetermined
(21:38):
rendezvous point. So the question was well, how do they
even know that's where we're going. Not only the pilots
themselves reporting it, but a Navy cruiser with a massive
radar on it also picking up these shaped vehicles on
its radar from multiple vantage points over multiple days. They're
(21:59):
seeing the things that they can't explain. This became a
big deal within the Navy, got reported up the chain,
and nobody really could explain it.
Speaker 7 (22:12):
That became one.
Speaker 15 (22:13):
Of the main cases that the aid TIP program went
back and tried to unpack and tried.
Speaker 7 (22:18):
To explain is there any way we could understand how
those things could be doing that?
Speaker 15 (22:25):
And maybe if we did, we could maybe get a
little further down the road of explaining where they're coming
from and who owns them.
Speaker 7 (22:32):
Is somebody in them?
Speaker 15 (22:35):
If that's a bad guy who had that technology, we're
in big trouble.
Speaker 7 (22:41):
They're twaying with us.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
The first hand accounts from military personnel aboard the USS
nenets were compelling, and if all their claims were true,
then the implications were massive. But there was still one
huge problem.
Speaker 15 (22:57):
Nobody cares, nobody's listening. There's this sort of human nature.
If we can't really come up with good answers It's like,
I don't want to go there. There's no easy answers.
I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
They were captivating news stories, but that's it. The only
question that really mattered was still unanswered. What the hell
are these things?
Speaker 14 (23:24):
Not everybody is on fire about wanting to know more
about UFOs? Are we alone in the universe? What does
this mean? Why are they here? It's something that most
people don't have the time and energy to think about.
It's absolutely understandable to me. People are making living, raising
their kids. They don't have the luxury of the time
(23:45):
to contemplate these kinds of things. This is a paradigm
shifting thing.
Speaker 7 (24:00):
That gets to the point of the stigma changing.
Speaker 15 (24:04):
Just for the last couple of years, there is more
willingness to come forward. But that's not because the Pentagon
decided that one day be more transparent. It's because members
of Congress who control the budget are demanding it.
Speaker 7 (24:18):
They're saying, enough is enough.
Speaker 15 (24:20):
Tell us what you know, and if you don't know anything,
go out there and start studying it.
Speaker 7 (24:26):
There's so much scar.
Speaker 15 (24:27):
Tissue, so much conspiracy theory, so much bs, so difficult
that stigma. We're so conditioned to think of the flying
saucer in terms of like the Hollywood image aliens that
came from some faraway place and oh, maybe they were
here before we were. And it's a very sort of
(24:48):
almost linear way to look at it.
Speaker 14 (24:57):
A lot of people when they think of UFOs, they
think of raw the whole notion of aliens as opposed
to just there being a phenomenon that we can't explain
that really comes from Roswell. Initially, people associate UFOs with
Roswell Wildwell.
Speaker 16 (25:19):
New Mexico headline in July eighth, nineteen forty seven, the
Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has
been found and is now in the production of the Army.
Late this afternoon, a bulletin from New Mexico's ejected that
the widely publicized mestally of the flying pulters may soon
be called.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
When it comes to UFO mythology in American history, there's
arguably one case that stands out, riddled with speculation and
conspiracy theories, now known infamously as the Roswell Incident.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
It goes like this.
Speaker 1 (25:53):
On July eighth, nineteen forty seven, something crashed in the
desert of Roswell, New Mexico. It soon became a national
news story. What exactly crush there has been the topic
of intense debate now for over half a century.
Speaker 17 (26:06):
I'm here to discuss so called flying Saucers' interest in
this problem has been due to our feeling of an
obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability,
anything in the air that may have the possibility of
threat or menace to the United States.
Speaker 14 (26:28):
Rozel has had such a grip on the culture, permeated
the culture in a way that has probably helped the
taboo stay alive. I think it's so fascinating to people
because it involved a crash and beings.
Speaker 6 (26:47):
July nineteen forty seven, Roswell's Army air Base the press
release announcing that the remains of a flying saucer had
been found.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
On the day of the crash, the Roswell Army Airfield
issued a pre release stating they had recovered a quote
flying disc The.
Speaker 6 (27:04):
US military quickly withdrew that statement, saying the crash spacecraft
was in fact the remains.
Speaker 7 (27:10):
Of a weather bloom.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
The conflicting reports made by the government fuel public suspicion.
But it's what happened in the years following that cemented
the Roswell Incident in UFO lore, a local resident named
Glenn Dennis came forward with a bizarre and much more
unnerving narrative.
Speaker 7 (27:27):
In July of.
Speaker 6 (27:28):
Nineteen forty seven, he was a mortician and received a
puzzling phone call from the Air Force. They wanted child
science confidence delivered to the air base.
Speaker 18 (27:37):
How long would it take you to get more? And
I said, how many do you need? He said, that's
not important. How long would it take you to get more?
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Glenn Dennis claimed that the crashed object was some form
of advanced aircraft and that three bodies were recovered from
the scene, bodies unlike anything he'd seen before.
Speaker 18 (27:56):
They definitely weren't demans. Doctors were explaining this that they
couldn't be from our planet. They had to be an alien.
It had to be something, yes, but not in our planet.
Speaker 6 (28:10):
The eyewitness accounts of alien bodies and a cover up
by the US government has given birth to the most
powerful UFO story in American history, known simply as the
Roswell Incident.
Speaker 14 (28:23):
Most of the cases we have on record are things
in the sky, right, It's much easier to stigmatize the
idea of a crash saucer in bodies than it is
to stigmatize something that a pilot sees in the sky
and picks up on radar. It's added to sort of
conspiracy element, this sort of sci fi element to it,
where UFOs are sort of synonymous with the idea of
(28:46):
bodies and aliens. The impact that that's had sort of
underlying everything, has not been helpful. There were so many witnesses,
actual alien bodies, and it was taken away and it
was covered up. They had various explanations for it.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
As the years went on, more and more witnesses came forward.
I got my hands on some of the declassified sworn affidavits,
one from a man named George Roberts, the manager of
a local Roswell radio station at the time, states the
following I made an attempt to go out to the
crash site and see it for myself, but I was
turned back by a military person who said it was
(29:23):
a restricted area. The next morning, I got a call
from someone in Washington, d C. The person said, we
understand that you have some information, and we want to assure.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
You that if you release it, it's.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Very possible your station's license will be in jeopardy, so
we suggest you don't do it a little weird. Another
affidavit from a woman named Sappho Henderson, refers to comments
made by her husband, a high ranking Air Force pilot
station in Roswell at the time. Her statement reads, in
nineteen eighty, my husband picked up a newspaper at a
(29:56):
grocery store. The article described a crash of a UFO
side of Roswell, with the bodies of aliens discovered beside
the craft. He pointed to the article and said, I
want you to read this because it's a true story.
I'm the pilot who flew the wreckage of the UFO. Again,
weird stuff, but who knows.
Speaker 14 (30:16):
No matter how you look at this Roswell event, it's weird.
I'm not going to say that I know, but it's
completely conceivable to me that it was something as the
terrestrial would crash there.
Speaker 15 (30:33):
I don't know what happened at Roswell, and I think
anybody who says they do one hundred percent no doesn't
know either or they're dead. I think something happened here.
There was clearly a government reaction.
Speaker 14 (30:47):
There's no way in hell this thing that fell was
made by humans.
Speaker 19 (30:53):
So the myschis on out in Roswell, that creepy Maxim
and Major Marcel, what could you tell us road?
Speaker 15 (31:16):
But you know, there's a professor a Vi Lobe at
Harvard who's now run something called the Galileo Project Institution
at Harvard. It has real money now to study UFOs.
But Avi Lob at Harvard says that we almost have
to throw out everything else that came before. So difficult,
especially all these years later, to separate what's fact what's fiction.
(31:38):
Let's just start doing some real due diligence using all
the technologies and capabilities we have in the government, out
of the government wherever, and maybe we can at least
get a little bit further down the road.
Speaker 7 (31:52):
When you talk about Roswell.
Speaker 15 (31:53):
And you talk about all of these cases in history,
I think what it doesn't account for is the magnitude
of the lack of institutional knowledge within the government. There's
enough mystery around it, enough things that don't add up
to tell me that whatever the answer is number one,
it's probably not one answer. There could be multiple answers,
(32:15):
multiple truths. It's probably something that we're not even thinking about.
Maybe we're kind of scratching at it a little bit.
I've come to believe that whatever the government does still
have in terms of juicy little secrets about UFOs, they're
not keeping it secret out of knowledge. We're keeping it
secret out of ignorance. They don't want to come forward
(32:39):
and say, there's all these things we've seen and we
have no friggin clue what they are. There are things
out there, we've seen them, we've studied them, and we
don't know they're.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
When I was a kid growing up, I can vividly
remember seeing tabloid magazines about UFO encounters and alien abductions
at the grocery store checkout line. They looked eerie, covered
in weird, grainy photos of flying saucers and alien autopsies.
My mom never let me get them rightfully, so they
were too scary for an eight year old, and she
(33:22):
probably knew they were all full of shit. This concept
of alien abduction has been around for decades. Many people
over the years have come forward with haunting tales of
being taken aboard of spaceship against their will in the
middle of the night. Just scan the Internet. There's plenty
of them, most of which, in my opinion, have no merit.
But since twenty seventeen, a wealth of government documents regarding
(33:45):
UFOs have continued to be declassified. Some of them include
things you'd only expect to find in science fiction.
Speaker 11 (33:55):
Thousands of previously classified documents regarding UFOs have now been
released to the public.
Speaker 10 (34:01):
The shocking details from this fifteen hundred page report.
Speaker 11 (34:05):
Some of the stories include alien abductions, electrical paralysis, and
even sexual encounters.
Speaker 9 (34:11):
From abductions that perceived time loss, the report says humans
have been injured from exposure.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
I'm a person who has spent most of his podcasting
career investigating unsolved murders and disappearances, dealing with facts, physical evidence.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
There's no room for fringe science.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
But while working on this show, I found one case
in particular that's so strange Trying to rationally explain it
feels next to impossible. In nineteen seventy five, seven men
encountered something unexplainable in the mountains of Snowflake, Arizona. I've
managed to get my hands on a ton of archival tape.
Speaker 13 (34:52):
There were seven men out there about three days ago.
They were all coming back here after dark. Saw this bright,
bright light to look to all seven of them like
a saucer or some identified object. Before they actually stopped
their truck, Travis jumped out of the car and ran
(35:13):
up underneath of this thing. If you can imagine. They
all witnessed a blue bluish light that projected from the
bottom of this craft, whatever it was, and at that
time it hit him. He cruppled and fell. They were terrified,
and so they started their vehicle out. That drove the
(35:34):
other way on that rim road for several miles until
they regained their wits.
Speaker 5 (35:40):
Now, what was that man's name again? Who's missing?
Speaker 13 (35:44):
The man's name missing is Travis rot.
Speaker 10 (35:47):
The wa lp N.
Speaker 12 (35:53):
And a tend search for Travis Walton proceeded for three days,
dogs and helicopters. They were unable to find him or
any signs of where he was. After they told their
astounding story to the police, they came under suspicion of murder.
Speaker 16 (36:10):
Travis was missing for five days as people searched the.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Woods for him.
Speaker 13 (36:15):
There is no doubt Travis Walton believes he is telling
the truth about what he experienced.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
On November fifth, nineteen seventy five, seven men who are
part of a logging crew deep in the mountains of
Arizona claimed to have encountered a flying saucer. One man
by the name of Travis Walton ran towards it to
get a closer look and was struck by some sort
of beam emitted from the craft, and then he was gone.
(36:43):
He was literally a missing person for five days. For
decades now, these men have stuck to their stories. The
man who claims he was abducted, Travis Walton, is now
in his late sixties, apparently still living in the small
town of Snowflake, Arizona. After some searching, I finally found
him on Facebook, told him about the podcast, and he
(37:04):
eventually agreed to meet with me in person to tell
his story. So we rented an airbnb in the mountains
of Snowflake and hit the road. We landed in Phoenix
and drove three hours into the mountains, set up our
microphones and some film cameras to record the interview, and
waited for him to arrive. But about an hour and
a half after our scheduled interview time, I was getting
(37:25):
a little worried and he hadn't responded to my last
three texts, so I tried to call.
Speaker 5 (37:30):
Him give me a little test check.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
One two three, yeah, nine two eight two.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Out of the blue, an old truck pulled into the driveway.
I peeked through the blinds and it was him. I
was about to open the door and greet him, but
I paused and stopped myself. He was sitting in the
driveway with his car off, just staring out the window.
He seemed anxious or like he was contemplating something. Ten
(38:16):
full minutes passed and he was still sitting there same position.
Is he having second thoughts? Is he prepping his story?
If this really happened to him, then it must have
been traumatic.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
That was still very skeptical of all this.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I sat on the couch, stewing in my own thoughts,
and then, hey.
Speaker 5 (38:53):
How long has it been here? Forty five years? Twenty
five years and three months. Some things don't change, you know.
Some things about it haven't gotten any easier at all.
(39:15):
I wish that this had never happened. It's not been
a good thing for my life, for my family. In
some ways, they don't even see the real me, you know.
The area we were working on was a logging contract.
(39:39):
Our job was to come in after the loggers and
clean up the damage. Trees, thin out the overgrowth. It
was really kind of a forest restoration project we were doing.
We did some thinning, but then we were doing fuel
break that day, pretty long day. When it was getting
(39:59):
to our time to head home, worked thirty miles from home,
so it's a bit of a drive. We loaded up
all our equipment into the back of the truck.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
There.
Speaker 5 (40:10):
It's a double caped truck. There was room for all
seven of the crew in one vehicle, four in the back,
three in the front. We were headed home. Everybody's tired,
so there was various conversations going on in the truck,
two here or two there like that. As we were
(40:33):
jouncing along this little logging trail, I could see a
glow through the trees up the head. Closer we got,
the more I was thinking that maybe this glow I
was thinking was maybe some hunters camped there. I thought
maybe the hunters were camped up there on the ridge.
(40:57):
The whole clearing there had this release means glowed to it,
sort of a feel. I don't know, maybe there was
some kind of electrical charge in the air. So I'm
it just had a really weird vibe to it. It
made things you see at work all day looked really
strange in this strange glow.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
Heard of it.
Speaker 5 (41:26):
We got to a point where we were past the
thickest part of the growth and we could see the
source of this light. Boom there it was. It was unmistakable.
Speaker 17 (41:38):
For the space.
Speaker 7 (41:39):
You white, that's your name of a habitat.
Speaker 16 (41:43):
And when.
Speaker 7 (41:46):
Didn't riched it?
Speaker 4 (41:47):
You know smoking gine need a wee player, didn't take
a lean with a lean it you've been on the
g there's a bean back.
Speaker 5 (41:54):
I've been going gene because of cool reck. Now she
was over see the pending up.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
I'm talking your depend in a Ben Stupert show, Steve
bud top Ton avert riding men. You well, you can
kind of being down to saying the park peal we
spend at dot com and nine help those boom Nata guys,
we a Nati devil.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
High Strange is an eight part series released weekly for
free every Thursday, But if you'd like to binge the
whole series right now, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus
on Apple Podcasts to get all the episodes right now.
Follow the show on TikTok and Instagram at high Strange,
and you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at
Payne Lindsay. If you have your own UFO story, email
(42:38):
us at tips at high strange dot com. High Strange
is a production by Tenderfoot TV in association with Cadence thirteen, created,
hosted and edited by myself Payne Lindsay. Executive producers are
myself and Donald Albright. Editing by Mike Rooney, Cooper Skinner
and myself. Original score by Makeup and Anity Set, sound design,
(43:01):
mixing and mastering by Cooper Skinner. Additional production by Mike Rooney,
Dylan Harrington, Eric Quintana, Sean Nurney, Meredith Stedman, and Sidney Evans.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Our cover art is by Polygon.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
This episode features the song space Cadet by metro Booman
featuring Gunna, written by Wesley tyre Glass, Sergio Kitchens, Leland Tyler,
Wayne Alan Ritter and Jack Queis Webster performed by metro
Booman featuring Gunna courtesy of Republic Records under license from
Universal Music Enterprises for metro Booman in three hundred Entertainment
for Gunna. Special thanks to Orrin Rosenbaum and the whole
(43:37):
team at UTA, the Nord Group, Station sixteen, Beck Media
and Marketing, as well as Chris Corcoran and the team
at Cadence thirteen. This episode features the song Roswell, performed
by Raina del Sid and Tony Lndren. Check out the
show's website at Highstrange dot com, and if you're enjoying
the show, please help us out by rating and reviewing
the podcast and share it with your friends.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 18 (44:05):
M
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