570: COMPILATION: The Stories That Made Me a Believer
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That's three plus one five plus zero zero.

So today's topics are true stories. So that means stories that are legitimately true, like true crime, things like that. But also a couple of stories that I thought were fake and I thought were debunked, that it turned out they turned me into a believer. So those are interesting. And those were unsettling.

It's weird to have a certain belief for your whole life, do some research and then have your whole world turned on its ear.

Anyway, I don't have my teleprompter when I do these, so I tend to ramble. But I do have some notes, so I know what episodes are coming up. Okay, first is episode... I'm spitting. I'm spitting all over the microphone. You see? This is not a professional operation. First episode is 137. Oh, that's Kenny Veach and the M-Cave. It was a highly requested topic, and...

Writing it was weird because Kenny Veach and the M-Cave, that story has been told over and over. Like every story I tell, it's not like I'm inventing anything new. I'm just giving you my spin.

So I knew the Kenny Beach M Cave story for years. And it's always told the same way. You know, Kenny is an eccentric guy. He's an outdoorsy kind of guy. He goes out hiking in the desert. He finds a cave that's shaped like the letter M. He feels some weird energy that he can't explain, something like evil. So he leaves, which is unusual for Kenny. He's he's he's.

He's the kind of guy who literally will like grab rattlesnakes out of the sand like he's a wild man. So the fact that he's afraid of an empty cave is strange. So he's online talking about this cave and people beg him to go back and find it.

And to stream it or take video or whatever. He was pretty active on social media and YouTube. So he does, and he can't find the cave. You know, he puts up a video of himself hiking, looking for it, the trails that he's on. He doesn't understand, but he can't find where this cave is.

So, people start attacking him online. You know, the trolls come out. I know how Kenny feels. And he says, fine, I will go back out and I will not come back until I find this cave. Well, that's what happened. Kenny Veach went out looking for the M-Cave and he never returned. The only thing that we ever found of him was his cell phone. And if you don't know the story, I don't want to spoil too much of it, but I have a different spin on Kenny Veach than everybody else.

It's because he's always portrayed as kind of an eccentric, of a goofball, of a weirdo. And he is an odd guy. That's certainly true. But the more I researched the story and the more I learned about his life and the things that he was going through at the time, I began to root for Kenny. I became a fan of Kenny. So even though I was aware of all these eccentricities that he had,

He was also very smart. He was very, very talented. He could build anything. He could fix anything. He was well loved by his family. He had a daughter that he loved. He was a person. And I think, well, I don't want to get too much into it, but I get personal in this episode because, you know, it's the only way to tell you Kenny Veach's full story is to tell you a bit of mine.

To most, the Mojave Desert looks like a barren wasteland. Jagged rock, swirling sand, and scrub brush.

But the Mojave is full of life. It's been home to native tribes for thousands of years. And the Mojave is also home to many caves that hold many secrets. Some caves are reported to be secret entrances to underground bases. And not all of those bases are occupied by humans. Other caves are rumored to be portals to different places on Earth or portals to different dimensions.

There are caves in the desert that cause even the most experienced explorers to run away in fear. But when they gather their courage and return to the caves, they can't find them. They're gone. Year after year, adventurers scour the Mojave trying to solve these mysteries. Some brave souls return with incredible stories. But others go out into the desert, and they're never seen again. ♪

Kenny Veach had a passion for the wilderness, but was especially attracted to the Mojave Desert. Where most people see nothing but sand and scrub brush, Kenny saw a beautiful and vibrant ecosystem. And I just came across this fellow. It's been a while since I saw one. It's a nice little Mojave Desert tortoise. Kenny also had an interest in aliens and UFOs. He lived in Las Vegas and often hiked the desert not far from Area 51.

He also spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos about aliens and conspiracy theories. One of his favorite channels is... The Y-Files. No, no, the Y-Files wasn't around yet. But I have a feeling he would have liked this channel. Oh, it's not to like. Check the comments section. They'll tell you. Uh, yeah, no thanks. If I want to be insulted, I'll just call my ex-wife. Which ex-wife? You have three. Exactly.

A channel Kenny watched a lot is Serious Disclosure, run by Dr. Stephen Greer, who I'm sure you know. But in case you don't, Dr. Greer has been one of the loudest voices pushing for the government to reveal what it knows about UFOs and aliens. One video caught Kenny's attention. It was about alternative energy being researched at Area 51.

when they had tested a device that was supposed to be a new type of energy source. And they had taken it out into the range, and it had literally blown up when they tried to activate it. People in the comments exchanged stories about strange phenomena that they'd experienced. Kenny also weighed in. This ain't nothing. I am a long-distance hiker. One time during one of my hikes out by Nellis Air Force Base, I found a hidden cave.

Whatever it was that Kenny was feeling seemed to be coming from inside the cave. That was one of the strangest things that ever happened to me.

I'm sure it wasn't Kenny's intention, but he created one of the biggest internet mysteries in history, a rabbit hole known as the M Cave. Tons of people responded to Kenny's comment. He went back and forth with people online for about four months. Most were just internet trolls, which made Kenny defensive. - I solo hike across mountaintops that most people wouldn't dare go. I have been in more caves than I can count. I play with rattlesnakes for fun.

Some commenters thought he was making it all up. Others said it was probably just an ordinary cave and Kenny was dehydrated so he was seeing things. Kenny was an extreme hiker. He often went on desert hikes with nothing but a candy bar and a small bottle of water.

Now, this is very unwise and extremely dangerous, but Kenny was proud of his ability to survive the desert with minimal provisions. I started at 7 o'clock, but I'm thinking the sun might be down by the time I get back to my truck because I didn't bring a whole lot of water and I only got like one candy bar to get me through. But I like roughing it that way.

But Kenny insisted there was something really off about this cave. - This one particular cave was beyond anything I had ever encountered. Someday I'll go back and I'll bring a weapon with me. All I had at the time was a knife and a wrist rocket.

Yeah.

The online community was thrilled. The search for the M Cave was on.

Kenny Veach was no stranger to the Mojave. He was an extreme hiker. Kenny didn't follow trails, he blazed them. - It's rare for me to take the same hike twice. I don't use trails and I cover extremely long distances. It's brutal on the feet. I often will lose one or two toenails after one of my longer hikes. Yes, this is what I do for fun.

Kenny headed off in the direction of the M-Cave. And if you watch his video, you can tell that he's pretty confident that he could find it again. It's shaped just like the letter M. And it's about level with the ground, like in an area like this. So I really got to keep my eyes peeled because I don't want to pass it. But despite his confidence, Kenny was ultimately disappointed. Well, I...

Kenny returned to YouTube to break the bad news to everyone who had been waiting for an update.

Even though Kenny was disappointed, he was still determined to find the M Cave. He knew it was out there somewhere. He just needed more time in the desert to find it. I'm going again this weekend. I'll be hiking solo for three days. I plan on covering about 40 miles. There are many caves. I have been in hundreds of them. The M Cave is the only cave I ever feared going inside. I really want to find it again.

By now, the M Cave wasn't just Kenny's obsession. Thousands of people were following the story. Everybody in the comments encouraged Kenny to go back out and find it. Well, not everybody. - No, do not go back there. If you find that cave entrance, don't go in. If you do, you won't get out.

That was a strange and ominous comment. Kenny even replied asking, what makes you say that? But Kenny didn't receive a reply, just more encouragement to return to the desert. So on November 10th, 2014, Kenny Veach packed enough supplies for a three-day hike and once again ventured out into the Mojave Desert. But whether he found the M cave or not, we'll never know because Kenny Veach was never seen again.

When Kenny Veach didn't return from his three-day solo hike into the Mojave Desert, his girlfriend Sharon knew something was wrong. She reported him missing on November 14th, and search and rescue teams immediately began combing the area. Kenny's car was easily found, so at least searchers knew where to start.

Kenny had left clues about his intended destination in the videos and comments he posted online. He pointed to and named specific mountains and valleys. - And I head off in that direction. I just go that direction and that's west.

heading towards that's Mount Charleston, that big mountain out there, that's the Mount Charleston range. - Searchers were able to approximate the region Kenny would have been exploring when searching for the M Cave. Helicopters scanned the desert from the air. On the ground, a large team searched canyons and cliffs where Kenny might've fallen. Nothing. Not just no trace of Kenny, but no trace of a campsite or anything that would indicate anybody was out there.

A major break came on November 22nd, but it was almost too obvious. In Kenny's video, he spends a lot of time in front of an old mine shaft. I'm going to take the camera and show you how deep this hole is and kind of show you around real quick. This is kind of iffy. I'm going to step on this thing. It's very old, but I'll just show you down inside that hole.

That goes way down in there. If you fell, that'd be it. You'd be a goner. When searchers got to the mineshaft, they found Kenny's cell phone. It wasn't damaged. It wasn't even scratched. It had plenty of battery left. It's like the phone was just placed there.

If Kenny had fallen in that mine shaft, he could have easily been killed, but cameras were sent down and there was no sign of him. Search and rescue now focused their attention on the area around the mine shaft. Even doing a grid search inch by inch, there was nothing. Search dogs were brought in. They couldn't pick up his scent.

He wasn't bitten by a snake. There would be signs of that. He wasn't attacked by animals. There would be signs of that too. There would be blood, clothes, human remains, but there was nothing. There wasn't a drop of blood anywhere, not for miles. It's like Kenny Veach just vanished into thin air.

But people following the story online thought the search parties were looking in the wrong place. They believe Kenny stumbled somewhere he didn't belong. On the other side of these mountains, I'll show you in a second, is the bombing range, the Nellis Air Force bombing range. Do you know what else is on the Nellis Air Force bombing range? Area 51. Ah!

The United States government owns most of the land in Nevada. In fact, it owns over 80% of the entire state. And corporations own 100% of the politicians.

Look at this map. Only the areas in white are privately owned. The government owns the rest. So Kenny Veach was hiking and disappeared on government land. If we look at Kenny's last known location, it's not that far from Area 51. Now, it's fair to say that it's still really far to go on foot in the desert, but the government doesn't just guard Area 51. They guard all the land around it, and they will not let you get close.

If you try, you'll start seeing black helicopters. Try to get closer, the infamous white pickup trucks will appear. The white trucks will watch and wait and make sure that you don't cross into a restricted area. They're watching us up there. See them up there? Yeah. Now, normally just the sight of the white truck is enough to scare people off. But once in a while, someone pushes their luck. Yours are still off. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Um, that does not look like Friendly Park Rangers checking to see if they need help. No, it does not. These two bikers wanted to see what would happen if they crossed the line by just a few inches. Put your hands up. Put your hands up. I'm not going to tell you again. Turn around. You couldn't even count to two Mississippi until the guns were out. Then the bikers retreated to a very aggressive pat down. And here's something interesting. Who are these guys? Army?

Those look like U.S. Army combat jackets, but there's no branch tape. You'd expect to see U.S. Army or U.S. Air Force on their left chest. Are they military police? There's no unit insignia or unit patch. They don't have any rank insignia either. They don't even have the American flag on their jackets. And most amazing of all, they don't wear name tapes either.

Who were they? They could be anybody. These guys are ghosts. In this case, the bikers were lucky and allowed to leave. But that was a tense situation that looked like it could go sideways very easily. Some have speculated that Kenny Veach might have wandered a little too close to a restricted area. So the search was back on. But this time it wasn't the Nevada Red Rock Search and Rescue Team doing the searching.

Hikers, survivalists, and investigators started retracing Kenny's steps, looking for clues that might lead them to the M-Cave or to Kenny. But to do that, they'd have to cross into some dangerous territory. Then, about two years ago, one YouTuber got a tip from a friend in the military. His friend said he knew the location, but it was on restricted land. This YouTuber took a huge risk going after the mysterious M-Cave, but he found it.

When Kenny Veach went missing without a trace, the internet exploded with theories. Did Kenny run into mobsters or drug dealers and became a witness to something nefarious? Or maybe he found a cave to seek shelter, only to discover it was already occupied. There are a few people living off-grid in the desert, and those people want to be left alone. But Kenny Veach was not the only one.

But Kenny was armed. Even if he did run into the wrong people, there would have been evidence of a struggle. If shots were fired, there would be brass, but there was nothing. The theories kept pointing to Kenny accidentally wandering too close to a military operation.

His last known location was in between Nellis Air Force Base and Edwards, home of Area 51. And it's rumored that there are many underground entrances to these bases all over the desert. If Kenny stumbled upon one of those entrances, he might have gotten himself deleted. A couple of years ago, a YouTuber with the handle AbandonedMinds11 set out to find the M-Cave, and he wouldn't start at the mine shaft. He went right toward Area 51.

After a long hike, and following the tip he got from a friend in the military, he believed he found the M-Cave. The first thing that looks out of place is the stacked rocks. Clearly someone piled those, but why? There's a bottle and some old pieces of wood strewn about, so somebody was definitely here at some point. People have speculated that some caves around the base have doors or hatches.

There's no sign of that, but there are some strange scratch marks on one of the cave walls. We get a nice reverse angle that shows the entrance really is shaped like an M. And it's the right height. Kenny said it was less than six feet high. When I watched this video for the first time, it was interesting enough, but it didn't feel like the right cave. But then an old piece of metal is seen poking out from the rubble. Okay, area 51. Ah!

Restricted area, no trespassing, use of deadly force authorized. Well, I think it's time for me to get out of here. Over the course of a year, that video got so many views that AbandonedMinds11 decided to go back and film an update. But he couldn't. So some new developments here at the M-Cave. It looks like they've installed a...

restricted area sign right there. The cave itself was now a restricted area. Some people online pointed out that this couldn't be the cave. The M Cave was becoming so well known and so many people were searching for it that if it existed, the government would cover it up. They'd wall it off or fill it in. They wouldn't leave the cave open. That's true, but a walled off cave with an M-shaped entrance? M Cave hunters didn't see that as a deterrent. They

They saw it as another clue. And that clue led to another end cave. You know that feeling when you're staring into your fridge at 7 p.m. wondering what the heck to make for dinner? Yeah, we've all been there. I used to find myself in that dinner rut way too often. But not anymore. CookUnity has been a total game changer. I'm talking restaurant-quality meals from award-winning chefs delivered right to your door. And the best part?

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Almost as soon as Kenny Veach went missing, Sean Horlacher went searching. In the description, you'll find links to his channel and all the others that I've mentioned today. Over four years, Sean went on multiple hikes, sometimes overnight, and covered about 75 miles of desert. He used Kenny's videos for reference and retraced his tracks. Sean parks where Kenny parked. He walks through the same rugged canyon that Kenny walked.

He keeps the mineshaft in sight as a point of reference. Sean follows the same path that Kenny took. He points out various rock formations that are clearly natural. But then he comes to a rock formation that looks very out of place. It's not an M-shaped cave. It's an M-shaped opening filled in with a different kind of rock. Sean finds holes that indicate there's something behind the rock. He finds a seam that looks too straight, too perfect.

You have this seam that's running. It's almost like this is a foundation almost. He feels that some of the rocks are loose. But that moves, which means this one right here will move too. I can feel it. I can nudge it. Sean's pretty confident that he's found the M-Cave. So for the record, the M-Cave did exist before.

I think. Now that looks like a pretty good candidate to me. It's not as perfect of an M as I was hoping for, but there's definitely something strange going on with those rocks. If you watch Sean's full video, you'll see him poking around and getting some really close-up shots of the rocks. But we're still missing a piece of this mystery.

Remember how Kenny said that he felt uneasy near the cave and the closer he got, the worse he felt? He described it as a vibration that was making his body literally shake. Kenny described feeling fear that grew worse as he got closer to the cave. But Sean didn't seem afraid. He wasn't experiencing any effects from being near the cave at all. He seemed fine. But a few minutes later...

Sean was hit with a wave of nausea. He couldn't explain it. It came out of nowhere. He tried to breathe through it, but that cave really doesn't want people near it. Get too close and...

For about four straight minutes, Sean was vomiting and dry heaving. The further he got away from the cave, the better he felt. Please. Please don't. Don't show it again. Don't show it again. I can't. I can't. I won't. I won't show anymore. Thank you. Oof. I shouldn't have had those burritos for lunch. Now they're not sitting so well. Oops. Pardon me.

So Sean getting sick is another clue. There's a piece of military tech called an active denial system or ADS. It's basically a heat ray. ADS emits high frequency radiation that penetrates a fraction of an inch into the skin and heats it. It's similar to how a microwave heats food. But there is a way to protect yourself from an ADS attack. How?

Aluminum cooking foil. A tin foil hat is a heat ray helmet? Yep. The level of my genius grows with each passing day.

Another piece of military tech that could have been used on Kenny and Sean is an infrasound weapon. The audio frequencies that can be heard by the human ear range from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz. Anything above 2,000 hertz is considered treble. Anything below 200 hertz is considered bass. I'm all about that bass. About that bass. No treble. Every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top.

If the human body is exposed to frequencies lower than 20 Hz at high decibel levels, bad things happen. It can cause nausea, disorientation, vomiting, internal organ damage, or even loss of bowel control. Right. The brown note is a hypothetical frequency that supposedly causes someone's organs to resonate, leading to involuntary defecation. Mythbusters even tested this on Adam.

He said he was uncomfortable, but fortunately he was able to maintain control of his bowels. Ah, that's okay. There's already enough crap on TV. Agreed. In 2016, people at the American embassy in Cuba started becoming violently ill with no apparent cause. Low-frequency weapons were suspected. This illness became known as Havana Syndrome. The Cuban government denied this, of course, but as soon as the U.S. started investigating, the illnesses stopped. ♪

There are even stranger theories about what could have happened to Kenny. Some people say he stepped into a portal to another dimension, or Kenny came in contact with a race of aliens. Former U.S. Airman Charles James Hall worked at various bases in Nevada in the 60s. He claimed to have had contact with aliens who flew a tic-tac-shaped spacecraft. These aliens were called the Tall Whites. The Tall Whites? That sounds like the name of a losing basketball team.

Paul says the U.S. government has agreements with the Tall Whites and many other alien races. And these aliens have underground bases all over the desert. We covered the Dulce base in another episode. But the story about the Tall Whites is a good one, too. So let me know if you want me to cover it. Yes, please. But there is another very interesting theory about Kenny Veach. That he's not captured or missing or dead. That he's very much alive. And there's camera footage to prove it.

In 2013, after 17 years working as a service tech for a coffee company, Kenny Veach quit. He wanted to follow his passions and live life on his own terms. Kenny dedicated his time to creative pursuits like art and inventing. He even designed a product and a shark tank pitch. You just pull that, put the other one in, and let go. And right now it's not...

They passed on that one. He also invented a Glowler Bear.

And he is so cool, and I've seen nothing like it on the market. This has all the information about polar bears and the trouble they're in. So this is a great idea, but you get to see this when you get to see me. These ideas never got off the ground. He tried to stay positive, but without a steady paycheck, he was burning through all of his savings.

The redneck whistle. Now, I designed this not on a computer. These are stamps that I made myself. And let me tell you something. When you whistle into it, this thing, watch this. Whistle.

Woo! So loud, so cool. This is what it looks like. By late 2014, Kenny was almost broke. His house was on the verge of foreclosure. In a last-ditch effort, he tried to sell his house in an unconventional way, offering himself as a live-in caretaker to potential buyers. And I'm selling myself with the home. What I mean by that is I would become a caretaker, an all-around caretaker, kind of like

Alice from the Brady Bunch, she took care of all those kids' needs, along with the cooking and the cleaning and all the things that she did. Um...

With Kenny out of money and losing his home, some people, including some of his family, thought he might have faked his own death, that he went off-grid for a while and came back with a new identity. Not many people took this theory seriously, but in 2018, something bizarre happened.

Kenny's sister-in-law, Debbie, owns a business in Las Vegas called the Enchanted Forest Reiki Center. It's a type of shop where you buy crystals, candles, incense, that kind of stuff. In 2018, someone broke into the shop. It's all on camera. And the guy who broke in? It looks like Kenny. It was a strange break-in. The only thing he stole was an iPad on his way out the door. Kenny's mother, Susan, is convinced it's him. Is it Kenny? Is it Kenny?

It's really hard to tell. Kenny's mother says it is. Kenny's daughter, Victoria, says it might be. Debbie and most other people, including the police, don't think it's him. But most of Kenny's family think that it's possible Kenny is still out there somewhere.

that the financial stress was becoming too much. The failure of his inventions was demoralizing. So he packed up some gear and headed out to the Mojave Desert, and from there started a new life. They believe he intentionally left his cell phone by the mine shaft so he couldn't be tracked.

The people posting on Kenny's and other YouTube channels didn't buy it. Kenny was such a positive guy, he wouldn't just leave. He has a daughter. He had people in his life that loved him. M Cave fans just wouldn't accept that Kenny would intentionally disappear. They believed he went out in search of the M Cave just like he said he would.

But as the investigation into Kenny Beach continued, followers of the story got some grim news. When Kenny left for the desert that morning, he didn't take his camera with him, but he did take his gun.

The mystery of Kenny Veach and the M-Cave is one of the most requested topics on this channel. Kenny disappeared almost 10 years ago, but the story still fascinates people, including me. The story has everything. The lure of the unknown, the M-Cave. There is an element of danger. The extreme conditions of the desert that put Kenny and anyone who followed him in constant risk. But how much of this mystery is true? Are there things that we can debunk?

Well, there are, but there still are a lot of questions. That's another reason the story endures. There's no closure. There's no resolution. Until we get answers, this mystery will continue to captivate. So what do we know? Were any of the caves we looked at today the M Cave? Well, there's no way to tell. The people who discovered those caves say, yes, they followed Kenny's directions to the letter. But even Kenny contradicts himself a little.

And it's about as tall as I am and kind of narrow. And it's stuck on the side of a mountain. And it's about level with the ground, like right in an area like this. So is the M Cave stuck on the side of a mountain or is it on ground level? If it's ground level, Kenny walked right past it and didn't notice. Look at this shot from Kenny's video. Now this shot from Sean's video.

That's the same rock formation. If that's the M Cave, even if it was covered up, wouldn't Kenny have noticed it? I would think so, but maybe not. He's not experiencing any vibrations or the effects he described earlier, so maybe he just didn't notice. Sean found the cave in 2018. Kenny was there in 2014 and possibly earlier. If that cave was intentionally covered, by the time Sean got there, it had been covered for years.

Also, if there was technology near the cave that was making Sean sick, that tech wasn't operating when Kenny walked by. He stopped for a bit right in front of that rock formation. He didn't mention feeling anything. As for the break-in video, Kenny's mom says it's him, but it isn't. That footage has been run through facial recognition software. It's been examined by experts. That's not Kenny. Kenny's girlfriend Sharon tries to offer some closure, but it's not good news.

Kenny had struggled with depression for many years, but he didn't want to talk to a therapist or try medication. He told Sharon that depression is like losing an arm. You just get used to it. In the months leading up to his disappearance, Sharon noticed that Kenny was getting more withdrawn and seemed sad. Understandable considering his financial struggles and failing businesses. Eventually, Kenny told Sharon that his father had taken his own life and he never really healed from it.

When police searched Kenny's computer, they discovered he was reading a lot of dark topics about how to hurt himself. They also found an eerie and sad document. Kenny had written, help me, over and over and over again. Sharon believes Kenny went out into the desert with no intention of returning. She believes he left his cell phone so he couldn't be tracked. He then found a cave in a remote part of the desert and never came out.

If that's true, it's such a sad ending to one of the best modern mysteries. But other people in Kenny's family, especially his daughter Victoria, resist the theory. Kenny had such a vibrant, adventurous spirit. To take his own life would be extremely out of character. Also, even though Kenny had burned through most of his savings on his inventions, he wasn't in a lot of debt. He was intelligent, personable, and had a wide variety of skills.

It would have been easy for Kenny to find work if he wanted to, but Sharon said he never wanted to work for anyone again. And Kenny also had a support structure. His mother, his brother, his daughter, and Sharon, they were all there for Kenny. He never had to be alone if he didn't want to be. But depression can be crippling.

I have my own bouts with it. Nowhere near as severe as Kenny, but I've had days where it was almost impossible to get out of bed. So I understand why Kenny kept this to himself. It's embarrassing. He was fearless in the wilderness, but there was a part of his personality that was helpless. I'm embarrassed revealing my own struggles with depression. I wrote this part of the script five times and deleted it four times. But I'm keeping it in because if you're struggling, I want you to know that you're not alone.

One in five people report depression symptoms at some point in their lives, and that number is going up.

This is why the story of Kenny Veach endures. Yes, it has the mystery, the danger, and all the conspiracies, but at its core, the story of Kenny Veach is a story about a man who lived a simple life but wanted something more. He tried and failed. Then he tried again and failed again. And every time he reached out, life beat him back. He lost everything and tried again.

I can relate to this. Can't you? The story of Kenny Veach is the story of all of us. Sometimes life feels like an endless string of failures and disappointments, but you have to keep trying. There's that old saying, when you're going through hell, keep going. And there are people out in the desert right now searching for Kenny. They go out every day and every day they fail, but they wake up the next morning and they go out and they try again.

I have a ton of respect for these people. They don't care about the M-Cave. They care about Kenny. And they believe, like I do, it's time for Kenny to come home. 3 plus 1, 5 plus 0, 0.

Now, what I love about that story is people are still out there looking for Kenny. Every day, they go out hiking his trails, looking for him. And I think that's... Human, did you start already? Where have you been? We've been going after the government too hard. I'm being pursued by a three-letter agency. CIA? No. FBI? No. NSA? No. DHS? No.

That's four letters. Three letters, four letters, what does it matter? They're trying to lure me into some experiment at Denny's.

It's a popular American restaurant chain with over 1,700 locations nationwide. I know what Denny's is. They're offering me free coffee refills and 20% off any Grand Slam breakfast. This is another MK Ultra. I know it. I bet the CIA puts LSD in the J-O-E. No, I'm sure they just... Well, 20% off Denny's isn't going to work on me. I wouldn't eat there for free. It's just a membership offer. You are of a certain age, you know. Ah!

How dare you, sir? I'm still in my prime. Yeah, that Botox isn't fooling anyone. I get that for my migraines. Anyway, no time for chit-chat. I'm having the Beaver Brothers build me a panic room. Whoa, hold on, hold on. Where are you going to build that? In your wife's closet. No, you better not. Have to. The AARP is coming and I got to be ready. If you come home and I'm watching Matlock, you'll know they got to me.

Sorry about that. That bit sounded a little punchier on paper. Anyway, I cover a lot of scary stories on the channel, so people ask me what scares me the most. And it's not nuclear war, it's not pandemic, it's not AI. What scares me the most is a solar event.

Now on this channel, the flood at the end of the Younger Dryas comes up a lot. That's where the polar ice caps melted and raised the sea level by a couple hundred feet. We're talking tsunamis a thousand feet high moving at the speed of sound. So dramatic. The thing is, nobody really knows what caused that.

The prevailing theory is that it was an impact. The big asteroid hit somewhere in North America, specifically Greenland, and that's what caused the ice sheets to melt. The thing is, there's no impact crater. Now, in the soil samples taken around that time, there is evidence of meteor activity, but it's not extreme. And there's no impact crater.

When we look at the impact that killed the dinosaurs, that was, let me try and say, Chicxulub. That impact was 65 million years ago and happened in the ocean, and we still see the crater. Younger Dryas is just 13,000 years ago. So if there's an impact, we should see a crater. We don't. So there are some people that believe that the ice sheets melted because of a massive solar event, and that's what scares me. We should all pay attention to solar weather.

I don't know why more people don't. Maybe because once you start paying attention to it, it becomes kind of scary. So next episode is number 55 and it's about solar storms. Specifically about the Carrington, so hard to say, Carrington event happened about 100 years ago, 150 years ago. If something like that happened now, it would be, could be the end of civilization. And I'm about to describe how it happens.

On September 1st, 1859, a gold miner in Denver started his morning routine. He felt unusually tired but shrugged it off as he prepared his coffee. He was used to waking up at sunrise but noticed the sky was much brighter and redder than usual. Maybe a nearby fire, he wasn't sure. A few minutes later, his wife came downstairs and asked why he was up so early.

Confused, he looked at the clock on the wall. It was 1 a.m. At the very same moment, the ship Southern Cross was sailing off the coast of South America when suddenly the seas turned violent. Waves lashed at the hull and hail pounded the deck. The water, reflecting the red sky above, seemed to turn to an ocean of blood. That morning, an astronomer turned his telescope toward the sun and noticed something strange. What happened next was terrifying. Let's find out why. ♪

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On September 1st, astronomer Richard Carrington was studying the sun when he noticed something unusual.

At about 11 a.m., he was observing a huge sunspot about 10 times the size of the Earth. Then suddenly a flash of intense white light burst out of the spot. What Carrington didn't realize was he had become the first eyewitness of a major coronal mass ejection, or CME, and it was headed straight for Earth.

17 hours later, the night sky in North America lit up like the day. Aurora Borealis, typically seen near the North Pole, were visible in Miami and Cuba and as far south as Columbia. In the southern hemisphere, Aurora Australis were visible north of Brisbane. A few hours later, on September 2nd, the most powerful solar storm ever recorded crashed into the Earth's atmosphere.

Our magnetic field was immediately overpowered and created chaos around the world. Telegraph lines were shorting out in Europe and North America. Equipment was throwing sparks and some burst into flames. Telegraph operators were burned or jolted with electric shocks. The word went out to telegraph operators to shut down the equipment, and they did. But even disconnected from their power supplies, everything still worked. In fact, telegraphs were more powerful than ever. Nobody had ever seen anything like this before.

This became known as the Carrington Event. And at the time, scientists thought this was a unique phenomenon. Well, was it unique? No, it's happened before. It's happened since and it will happen again. And when it does, it could be the worst natural disaster in human history. In 1859, the connection between the sun and the Earth's magnetic field wasn't well understood.

But at the same time Carrington saw the eruption, the Kew Observatory in London reported a large magnetic disturbance in the ionosphere. This allowed scientists to correctly link geomagnetic storms with solar activity like flares, solar wind and coronal mass ejections. The sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is structured by strong magnetic fields. Sometimes these fields become twisted,

slowly building up energy like winding a spring. When these magnetic fields finally realign, that energy is released, which causes a solar flare or an ejection. And they're not the same things? Well, flares and CMEs can happen at the same time, but they aren't the same thing. A solar flare is basically a flash of light. They're relatively small and take place in the lower solar atmosphere.

CMEs, on the other hand, are huge, sometimes bigger than the sun itself. A CME launches billions of tons of superheated plasma into space at several million miles per hour. CMEs happen all over the sun's surface, and most of the time they drift harmlessly into space.

But sometimes CMEs come our way, small ones we don't notice. On the ground, we're fine. Our atmosphere absorbs the cosmic radiation and our magnetic field deflects the sun's plasma into the poles, which fall through the atmosphere, causing auroras. But just like the Earth's weather can vary from gentle to extreme, so does the weather on the sun. On average, CMEs happen two or three times a day.

But once or twice every 100 years, the sun creates super storms that hit the earth. And when they do, the effects can range from inconvenient to catastrophic.

There's evidence of solar superstorms going back a long time. Ice core samples show powerful solar storms hit the Earth several times between 7000 and 5000 BC. In 774 AD, an extreme solar storm called the Miyake event caused the largest rise in carbon-14 levels ever recorded. In 993 AD, a storm left evidence in tree trunks that archaeologists still use to date ancient wood materials.

And this is one of the ways they confirm that the Norse arrived in North America 500 years before Columbus. 1052, 1279, more storms, more spikes in carbon. In 1582, 1730 and 1770, solar storms caused aurora to be seen all around the world, turning night into day.

And there are dozens of reports like this throughout history. But in those reports, the solar storms are nothing more than oddities. - But didn't people freak out? Humans don't like change. - Well, sure, they frightened some people who thought the world was ending or the gods were angry, but the storms didn't cause any damage. But when the Carrington event happened in 1859, civilization was doing something new.

we started using machines and electricity to operate them. And that's where the story goes from science lesson to Hollywood disaster movie. A solar storm can induce current in anything that conducts electricity. This could be the atmosphere, the ocean, and even certain types of rock, though conductivity is pretty low. But electrical wires?

Solar storms love those, and modern civilization is absolutely covered by and dependent on millions of miles of wires that cover the Earth. A large enough solar storm can overload power grids, destroy transformers and cause entire grids to fail. And this actually happened in 1989. The Earth was hit by a solar storm that disrupted radio signals across Russia. Oh, the Russians had to be annoyed. Oh, they were.

At first, they thought American spies were jamming their signals. Then they noticed their satellites were unresponsive. Several satellites were drifting for hours. The space shuttle Discovery suffered sensor malfunctions. The Toronto Stock Exchange went down and suddenly millions of people in Quebec province were put in total blackout for nine hours. In 2003, another storm put millions of people in the US and Canada in darkness for 12 hours.

And the solar storms of 1989 and 2003 were a fraction of the strength of the Carrington event. So what would happen if we were hit with a storm as strong as or stronger than the Carrington event? I'm guessing not good. Not good at all. Picture this. You're on a family vacation driving across the country to see... The biggest ball of twine in Minnesota. Biggest ball of twine in Minnesota. Fine.

Minnesota! Minnesota! What? Might be Weird Al's best song. Anyway, you've got the radio on, but it starts to get staticky. This is how it begins. In the ionosphere, shortwave radio has become overwhelmed with electromagnetic interference. Signals aren't getting through. No VHF, no UHF. UHF might be Weird Al's best movie. You're a little obsessed. Yeah, I'm obsessed. Ship-to-shore communication is disrupted.

Planes using VLF signals are knocked off course. Air traffic control goes dark and planes go blind. Now it's a good thing you're on a driving vacation because airline passengers flying high in the atmosphere just received over a year's dose of radiation in an instant.

Astronauts in space receive an even higher dose. Chances of developing cancer increase tenfold as the radiation has already begun unwinding strands of their DNA. This was just the initial burst, called the precursor stage. These high energy particles move at the speed of light, so there's not much warning.

but a coronal mass ejection moves a little more slowly it hasn't hit yet the worst is yet to come solar radiation continues to pummel the earth the atmosphere is saturated by high energy particles the earth's magnetic field stretches as the plasma tries to strip it away you look at your dashboard your gps is acting weird it can't orient itself

then it loses signal altogether but this is happening to every gps system everywhere around the world as radiation tears through thousands of satellites in orbit shorting out their circuits and frying their electronics this is more than just an inconvenient glitch affecting your vacation global supply chains begin to fail and within hours they will crumble completely military communication which relies on microwaves fails radar is disrupted weapon systems become useless and

And then it gets worse.

By now, a few hours into the event, governments are aware of what's happening, but there's no way to communicate with the citizens. All telecommunications, including emergency services, go offline. Back in your car, you're on a call with a friend describing what's happening. Your friend also reports weird technical issues and mentions the stock market just went offline. But you're having trouble hearing them. Your phone keeps losing the call. And as people around the world all experience these strange events simultaneously, they saturate cell towers.

But it doesn't matter. Nobody's phone can get a signal. Not even satellite phones work. After an hour or so, you start to get concerned and decide to pull off the highway. Maybe this is a good time to fill up your tank, grab lunch, and try to figure out what's happening. When you pull into the gas station, the line is already a quarter mile long. Gas pumps aren't working. There's chaos because credit cards won't work. ATMs are offline. Nope.

Your crypto wallet is dark. Hard drives around the world have been wiped clean. Bye bye blockchain. During these last few hours of confusion, solar radiation has continued to build in the ionosphere. The Earth's magnetic field is stretched hundreds of thousands of miles into space. And when the last of the sun's plasma passes through the Earth, its magnetic field suddenly snaps back like a rubber band. And all of that energy built up in the ionosphere slams into the surface at once.

Then things get really bad. Power stations around the world are overwhelmed. The failures cascade through every country on Earth, leaving entire continents in darkness. Power lines and transformers are set ablaze. Network cables both above the ground and deep under the ocean go down all at once. The entire Internet goes dark. Now, back at the gas station, someone from your family complains that the restroom water isn't working.

Turns out water isn't running anywhere. Pumping stations and water treatment centers are offline. You hear a loud crash behind you. There's a six-car collision where a traffic light stopped working. Looking down the street, you see that no traffic lights are working anywhere. Not here, not back at home, not anywhere. There's no power, no water, no fuel. And this is just the first few hours. From here, things get even worse. Worse! Far worse.

There have been a number of studies outlining solar storm worst case scenarios, and each study is scarier than the next. If the Carrington event or worse, something stronger happened now, it would take months or even years to get back to normal. It's been estimated that some power grids could take up to 10 years to repair.

You could prioritize water facilities, hospitals, and emergency services, but you'd still have millions of people without power for months. Planes would have to be grounded. Trains, too, would have to wait. Some cars would be okay, but not all of them. Electric cars are great, but without charging stations, you'll miss that old gas guzzler.

Still, there would be no traffic control system. Now, this might be okay in rural areas, but in a big city, it's a disaster. One study warned about how the destruction of the supply chain and lack of refrigeration would cause worldwide food riots. No heat, no air conditioning, no sewage disposal.

Banking transactions require power, network access, and satellite uplink. Without these, the global financial system would be in ruins. Right now, there are over 19,000 satellites orbiting the Earth, and many of those would be adrift.

Solar storms cause what's known as satellite drag, and this is where the Earth's atmosphere expands and starts tugging on low-orbiting objects. If we can't restore power to those, they would start falling back down to the Earth one by one. But a strong enough storm would burn out of satellite circuit boards, so there's no way to save it.

According to another study, a severe enough solar storm would cause a complete breakdown of society. Most governments would have to impose martial law immediately, and many governments would simply collapse. Remember those warnings of 2012? Well, yeah, the world was supposed to end. Well, in July, it almost did.

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In July 2012, the largest CME in a century missed the Earth by nine days. That was the luckiest thing to happen to our species in hundreds of years. If that solar storm hit us, a quarter of the Earth's population could have been without power for weeks. 160 million Americans would be in the dark for months. We would still be recovering from the aftermath today. Damage in the U.S. alone would have cost trillions of dollars. And that storm happened in the middle of summer.

How many thousands of people would die around the world without heat for an entire winter? Nine days. That's all that stood between us and an instant 200-year thrust backward in technology that would have changed all of our lives. We haven't good news part of the video yet. This is getting stressful. Well, NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft, called STEREO, launched in 2006.

and it can spot a CME almost immediately. - Oh, good. - But... - Oh, no! - But the STEREO spacecraft can't determine the CME's magnetic field.

Turns out that's a key piece of data. If the CME's magnetic field is aligned with the Earth's, it just bounces off. Magnets repel when their poles are aligned. But you've heard the expression, opposites attract. If the magnetic fields of the CME and the Earth are not aligned, the CME strips away our protection, which means disaster. Now, the Advanced Composition Explorer sits about 900,000 miles from the Earth, and this satellite can detect the CME's magnetic field. We

Which gives us how much time to prepare? About half an hour. A half hour, that's it? That's it. That means we have 30 minutes for planes to be grounded, for satellites to be put into safe mode, and grids to be powered down. Everyone has to go dark, and then we just wait it out and hope for the best. Now, on average, there's a 4% chance of a severe solar storm in any given year, and a 0.7% chance of a Carrington-level event.

Every 11 years, the sun enters a period of peak activity called a solar maximum. Then the odds get much worse. Well, when is the next solar maximum? Well, we're currently in solar cycle 25, which began in 2019 and is expected to peak in 2025. During the solar maximum, chances of a severe solar storm go to 28% and chance of a Carrington superstorm go to 4%. Every year? Every year. A new roll of the dice.

Despite the blackouts and chaos solar storms have caused in recent years, a 4% chance is just not scary enough for governments to take the necessary action. We need more resources diverted to research, more satellites, and a full overhaul of our power infrastructure. And those resources aren't coming anytime soon. Hey, didn't we just pass a big infrastructure bill?

Yeah, yeah, I realized that was a stupid question as I was asking it. We can't count on the government! We absolutely cannot. Instead, we have to rely on ourselves and our local communities, just like we do before a hurricane or a tornado or an earthquake. Make sure your family has a readiness plan. Maintain a supply of food and water. You need thermal blankets, camp stoves, propane heaters in case the heat goes out. You need hygiene supplies, first aid kits, and a hand crank radio.

Keep all these on hand all the time, just in case. So you say you become a prepper? Well, if that's what you want to call it. But being overprepared is better than not being prepared at all. Because it's just a matter of time before the lights go out. And when they do, there is no cavalry coming. In the end, the only one looking out for you and your family is you. You can see why solar weather scares me.

Next up is a controversial topic. It's episode 97 about the Georgia Guidestones. Looking at my notes. Remember, this is not a professional operation. So the Guidestones. They were six stones, granite slabs with ten messages in eight languages or eight messages in ten languages. It was one of those. There were messages on them. And I'm using the past tense because a little over a year ago,

Someone destroyed the Georgia Guidestones. They were in the hills of Georgia. It's on camera. The person threw a bomb at the Guidestones and destroyed them. And what's controversial about that is, to some people, the person who did this is a terrorist. To others, he's a hero. Now, I have my own opinion on which one he is, and now you'll have to decide for yourself.

On July 6, 2022, a bomb detonated on a five acre plot of farmland in Elberton, Georgia. The explosion destroyed a large monument that stood on the property for over 40 years. Known as the Georgia Guidestones, it was four monolithic slabs of granite weighing over 230,000 pounds that contained a set of rules for a more peaceful and orderly society. The identity of the builder was a mystery for 40 years, but today I'll tell you who he was.

But why did he want to keep his identity a secret? Probably for the same reason the Georgia Guidestones were destroyed. Because, according to the Guidestones, the way to a perfect society is through a one-world government, genetic and racial purity, and massive global depopulation. In other words, a new world order. ♪

In June 1979, a well-dressed man using the pseudonym Robert C. Christian approached Joe Finley, president of Elberton Granite Finishing Company. RC Christian wanted to build a monument to rival the magnitude and awe of Stonehenge.

R.C. Christian had recently visited Stonehenge and was impressed, though he felt it was missing something, a message. But what kind of message? The reason R.C. Christian used that name is that he was a Christian. There's no more famous Christian message than the Ten Commandments. And religious or not, the Ten Commandments have rules that all of us should follow. Don't lie, don't steal, don't hurt anybody.

But those are rules for an individual. R.C. Christian was thinking bigger. Oh, I bigoted in the word of God, giving to Moses from the top of a mountain? Yep. Oy vey, the ego in this guy. R.C. Christian said he represented a small group of loyal Americans who had spent the past 20 years planning an unusually large and complex monument. He brought with him a scale model with some very detailed specifications.

The structure would stand 16 feet tall and consist of four stones arranged in the shape of a cross, capped with a central stone. The monument would need to display its message in the eight most spoken languages in the world, English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Swahili. It would also show the message in four dead languages, Babylonian, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sanskrit, and Classical Greek.

Joe Finley wasn't taking any of this seriously, but when R.C. Christian began to describe the monument, Finley stopped what he was doing. Not only was this out-of-towner asking for stones larger than any Finley had ever quarried, he wanted them cut, polished, and arranged as an enormous astronomical instrument. The four standing stones should outline the migration of the moon over a year. A small viewing hole in the middle support stone would need to always show the North Star.

A slot at the top of the middle support stone should align with a winter and summer solstices rising sun and indicate noon at the equinoxes. A hole should be drilled through the capstone that focuses the sun on the center column at noon to indicate the day of the year. RC Christian had one final request that caused a few people to question the purpose of the Georgia Guidestone project. The stone should be made to withstand the end of the world. RC Christian now had Joe Fenley's full attention.

Fenley's granite company mostly dealt in wholesale orders for statues, monuments, and tombstone retailers. He had never had a request like this. Fenley's first thought was, this guy's crazy, how can I get him out of here? Fenley tried to discourage the stranger by quoting him a price much higher than any job he'd ever worked on. He said the job would need heavy equipment, special tools, and expensive consultants. R.C. Christian just nodded and asked, how long? Fenley wasn't sure how long it would take. He said,

Six months, maybe more. But he wouldn't even consider the job unless he knew R.C. Christian had the money. Christian asked if there was a trustworthy banker in town. Well, there's a problem. There's no such thing as a trustworthy banker. Well, that's a good point. But still, Fenley sent R.C. Christian to the Granite City Bank and told him to ask for the bank president, Wyatt Martin. At the bank, Martin and Christian came to an agreement.

Martin would help set up the bank account where funds could be transferred to pay for the Guidestones, but the account couldn't be set up under a false name. R.C. Christian understood and agreed to give Martin his real name, but only if he promised to never tell anyone who he really was or who he represented. No, but we know, right? We do. We're getting there. Fine, but don't take too long. The suspense is giving me agita. Wyatt Martin agreed and would be the only man to ever know R.C. Christian's true identity.

Despite being hounded for years about this, Martin kept his word to his dying day. So R.C. Christian transferred the funds, purchased five acres of land in Elbert County, Georgia, and construction finally began. And just like that, R.C. Christian was gone and nobody would ever see him again.

The five-acre plot of pasture was the highest point in Elbert County and visible from all directions, the ideal location. The Georgia Guidestones were erected and revealed to the public on March 22, 1980, the Vernal Equinox. What? He was erected. Don't be a child. Oh, so in 1980, they revealed their erection to the public? Please don't. Okay, okay, okay. You know I couldn't let that go. Go ahead, I'll behave.

A few hundred people, local media, and even Elberton's congressman came out for the unveiling. Each of the outer slabs was 16 feet high, 6 feet wide, and 19 inches thick. The capstone measured almost 10 feet long, 6 feet wide, and 19 inches thick. Including the foundation stones, the monument's total weight was almost 240,000 pounds. Wow, that is a big erection.

What? It is! It is, but would you stop with the... And hot as a rock. Enough! I'm choking. I gotta pee. Oh, well. Okay, go ahead.

Over the years, thousands of visitors from all over the world would come to see the Georgia Guidestones. But what was so special about the stones? It was more than just an impressively large granite construction. It was the new Ten Commandments, sandblasted in four-inch high letters that R.C. Christian left to benefit humanity. Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature. Guide reproduction wisely.

Improving fitness and diversity. Unite humanity with a living new language. Rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts. Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes in a world court. Avoid petty laws and useless officials. Balance personal rights with social duties. Prize truth.

At first glance, some of these commandments seem fairly innocent and maybe even cliche. But when you take a closer look, the guides are unsettling. Some have claimed that the Georgia Guidestones are instructions for a new world order, an open call for eugenics, genocide, and a one-world government.

But we're told this is all conspiracy theory, that there's no evidence to support these claims. But there's evidence. Oh, yeah. Plenty of it.

At first glance, the 10 rules on the Georgia Guidestones sounded like a cheesy New Age bumper sticker. But if you read them carefully, they're disturbing. Let's start with the first one. Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature. The current population is just under 8 billion people. To achieve the Guidestones' ideal population means that roughly 94% of people on Earth would need to be eradicated.

And there are many people and think tanks that support this. On this channel, we've covered the Club of Rome that defines itself as a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues.

Fine. But what the Club of Rome doesn't advertise so openly is that it was created in 1968 by the Morgenthau Group during a secret meeting at Rockefeller's private estate, Bellagio. Oh, here we go. In August 1980, just a few months after the Guidestones went up, Howard Odom, a member of the Club of Rome, said it's necessary that the U.S. cut its population by two thirds within the next 50 years. He didn't mention how this should be accomplished.

But there are theories. Oh, I love theories. I know you do. But it does mean if you want the same standard of living, we're going to have to cut our population in the U.S., for example, certainly to one-fourth. We have so many wasteful things, that won't be hard. You say it won't be hard to cut the population by one-fourth? It just takes one generation to get a population down. If nobody bred for one generation...

You've probably heard of the Bilderberg Group. It was formed in 1954 as a way to prevent another world war. That's what they say publicly. So why are Bilderberg meetings so secret? Secrecy has created all kinds of conspiracy theories. I love theories. I know you do. One of these is that the Bilderberg Group believes that the current population growth is not sustainable.

Oh, no. Ooh, that's not a theory. That's true.

Well, of course it's true. Just look at Twitter. Both Trump and Biden aggressively pressured Twitter into censoring any information that went against their agendas. But whether the Bilderberg group is behind this or not is unknown. - Yeah, unknown only if you're a sheep.

And guess who writes the foreign policy for the Bilderberg Group? The Club of Rome? The Club of Rome. Now, it's been alleged that the Club of Rome supports massive depopulation using any means necessary. But didn't we fight World War II over these ideas? Well, funny you should mention that.

The founder of the Bilderberg Group was Prince Bernard. At the beginning of World War Two, he was a Nazi SS officer. Of course he was. Now, to be fair, after Germany conquered France, Prince Bernard switched sides and fought for the allies. Oh, so that makes him OK? I'm just giving both sides of his story. But many people say that all of this is nothing but conspiracy theory, that the Georgia Guidestones don't want to reduce the current population, but instead are instructions for how to rebuild society after a cataclysmic world event.

Okay, let's say that's true. How should the remaining survivors maintain control of the population?

And who decides? The second Guidestone Rule addresses this. Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity. R.C. Christian wrote a book entitled Common Sense Renewed, which he sent to each member of Congress in 1986. Among a myriad of statements, Christian wrote, It is vitally important that each national government have a considered population policy. The need is urgent and should take precedence over other problems, even those of national defense. Okay.

Okay, so he wants the government in charge. So what kind of people should the government allow to have children? Responsible parenting will consider both genetic and environmental factors. We must seek to produce healthy children and then to mold their characters and to develop their potentials as socially worthwhile adults who will in turn carry the process indefinitely into the future.

Yeesh, this sounds a lot like China. Oh yeah, he's a fan of punishing people who want big families.

A few generations of single-child families will make possible dramatic improvements. Irresponsible childbearing must be discouraged by legal and social pressures. Allowing only worthy people to reproduce to create a generation of genetically superior children? That's called eugenics. So that's frowned upon, eh? It is. It's what the Nazis did, or tried to do. It's also a war crime, but maybe not a crime at all in the New World Order. The

The Rockefeller that helped create the Club of Rome is the same guy who founded the Population Council in 1954. The Population Council supported and still supports research in birth control and early birth termination, specifically in those people with undesirable genetics. How do we know? Rockefeller said so.

One of the members of the Population Council, as recently as 2020, has been accused of supporting forced sterilization.

The council is still active today. It operates its programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Notice that North America and Europe are not on that list. Now, maybe it's just a coincidence, but the council is focused on countries that are primarily nonwhite. The Population Council takes in millions upon millions of dollars every year. And the biggest contributor? The United States government. Improved public health.

has caused the world's infant mortality rate to decline by 60% over the last 40 years. In the same period, the world's average life expectancy has increased from 46 years in 1950s to 63 years today. The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.

Guide number one was population control. Guide number two was breeding a superior society through eugenics. Guide numbers three and five are just as chilling. Unite humanity with a living new language.

Uniting the world under a new single language and rectifying all disagreements in a world court? These are key to creating the New World Order. And local ministers pointed out that the Book of Revelations warned of a common tongue and a one-world government as the accomplishments of the Antichrist.

And guide number four, rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason. This also upset Christians who believe in faith above all. After all, it's the first commandment.

God said, you shall have no other gods before me. God wasn't down with tempered reason. These seemingly anti-faith messages made the Georgia Guidestones a location for alleged satanic worship, witchcraft and pagan rituals. Elberton locals have reported seeing lights near the Guidestones. They've heard chanting. They found melted candles on the capstone.

Now, no humans were sacrificed there, but I can't say the same for a few chickens who had a less than amazing visit to the Georgia Guidestones. Now, other theories suggest that the stones were built on native Hopi lands and that the Hopi have a prophecy regarding the ushering in of a new world. Other theories say that the stones are set on ley lines along with other icons like the Great Pyramids, Great Wall of China and Stonehenge. And that's not even mentioning the

pose connections to the Order of the Rosy Cross, the Rosicrucians, who deserve their own episode. But the biggest mystery of all was, who funded this project? Well, it would take 35 years, but we finally have our answer. The planet can support something like a billion people. If you want more liberty and more consumption, you have to have fewer people. And conversely, you can have more people. I mean, we could even have

8 or 9 billion probably if we have a very strong dictatorship, which is smart. Unfortunately, you never have smart dictatorships. They're always stupid. But if you had a smart dictatorship and a low standard of living, you could have a... But we want to have freedom and we want to have a high sentence, so we're going to have a billion people. And we're now at seven, so we have to get back down. I hope that this can be slow, relatively slow.

and that it can be done in a way which is relatively equal, so that people share the experience and you don't have a few rich trying to force everybody else to deal with it. So those are my hopes. I mean, these are pessimistic hopes, but that's what lies ahead.

Over the years, internet detectives have had many theories about the true identity of R.C. Christian. Businessman and founder of CNN Ted Turner was a leading candidate. He had the money, his foundation was created to protect the environment, and he specifically said that the greatest threat to civilization is overpopulation.

But Ted Turner can't be R.C. Christian. Why not? Because Ted Turner is still alive. Oh, this Christian guy's dead? Yep. Wyatt Martin, the bank owner who knew Christian's true identity, kept Christian's identity a secret. Christian and Martin exchanged letters at least twice a year until Christian's death.

The letters were never sent from the same place, nor were the funds transferred from the same place twice. Martin passed away in December 2021, but he did drop some clues along the way, whether he meant to or not. Martin confirmed that Christian died after the year 2000. He mentioned that Christian had a daughter and that he was in basic training in Georgia before being deployed in World War Two. Martin said that Christian was from the Midwest and at some point he worked in construction. Is that enough? Almost.

What sealed the deal was something that took place in 2005 when a documentary crew was filming Dark Clouds over Elberton. Wyatt Martin had recently suffered a stroke and was in pretty bad health. The film crew pressured him to show them the letters that he received from R.C. Christian over the years. Martin was reluctant, but eventually agreed.

though he was careful to hide his postmarks on the envelopes when he was showing them to the camera. But the cameraman was able to grab a close-up shot of an envelope in the box, which had a return address. Kind of a dick move to take advantage of the old time, eh? I agree. But even though we may not like the way we came about this information, it doesn't change the fact that we have it. So using this information, people on the internet did what they do best. Oh, leave nasty comments on videos about how your content sucks? No, they tracked down the address. Oh.

The letters came from Dr. Herbert "Hinze" Kirsten, a surgeon from Fort Dodge, Iowa. Kirsten is an old German form of the name Christian. He died after 2000, like the old-timers said. Kirsten died in 2005. Yahtzee! Now, according to Kirsten's obituary, he served in World War II. He was a conservationist who loved nature and trees. He was a naturalist who was very involved in environmental and world population issues. Bingo, this is the guy!

Hurston also worked in construction when he was younger, and he had two sons and two daughters. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The guy who wants to limit people to one rugrat had four of them? Yep. Rules for thee, but not for me, huh? You sure this guy wasn't in Congress? I'm sure, but he did have a couple of famous friends.

One of them was William Shockley. Shockley was a physicist and inventor. He actually won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956. Sounds like a good guy. Well, he was also known for being a racist who supported eugenics. I take back what I said. Now, Shockley argued that less intelligent people were having too many children and reducing the average intelligence of the population.

He also believed some races were more intelligent than others. Clearly, Dr. Kirsten, a.k.a. R.C. Christian, shared similar views. Though the Georgia Guidestones aren't specifically racist, we know that Dr. Kirsten was a supporter of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK. Maybe it's not so bad if somebody blew these things up, eh? Well, destruction of the Guidestones is the final piece of the story. Or is it?

On July 6, 2022, just after 4:00 a.m., CCTV picked up an individual running to the stones carrying something. Seconds later, there's an explosion and one of the four monoliths is destroyed. Less than a minute later, a car is captured on camera leaving the scene.

What's strange is, within hours, heavy equipment was brought in to clean up the site. Shouldn't this have been a crime scene for longer than a few hours? ATF was on the scene almost immediately. Weren't they curious about what kind of explosive was used? What components it was made of? What kind of trigger device was employed? Modern forensics can give us all kinds of information, but all the evidence was quickly removed. The Guidestones were in a remote location. There's only one road in or out.

There's no footage of this vehicle once it leaves the area. It's the middle of the night in northern Georgia. It would be one of the only cars on the road, but we don't have any new information. Government was in on it. Well, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying there are questions that can now never be answered because the site, along with any evidence, was cleaned up almost immediately. It's very possible this was carried out by someone who is very anti-government.

or maybe someone who is just anti-hypocrisy. All these people that want us to live by the one child policy seem to have plenty of children. Rockefeller had six kids. William Shockley had three. R.C. Christian, aka Dr. Kirsten, had four. But the rest of us are only allowed to have one child and only if we're genetically fit.

Who decides who's genetically fit? Well, they do. They want to limit the population of the Earth without acknowledging that it was the rapid growth and advancement of the human race that allowed them to amass ridiculous wealth. Now that they have theirs, they want to limit what we can have. These same people are the ones who scream about climate change, fossil fuels, pollution. They want to decide who can own what kinds of vehicles and how much energy you can use to warm your house in the winter. But how did J.D. Rockefeller make his money? Oil.

Aurelio Pache, who founded the Club of Rome, he made his fortune working for Fiat, a huge company that makes cars, trains, planes, tractors and military equipment. When they were making their families rich and powerful, the climate wasn't as big a concern. But now it is. All the problems facing our planet can be solved like they've always been solved through our collective innovation and cooperation.

All of us. But the elites don't want cooperation. They want control. They don't see any problem with this. They have superior genetics. They don't believe we're intelligent enough to make these decisions for ourselves. So they'll make those decisions for us. It's very possible and maybe even likely that whoever destroyed the Georgia Guidestones was aware of this hypocrisy. Now, look, I don't condone the destruction of property.

I know why some monuments and statues are offensive to some people, but those people don't have the right to just decide on their own to tear them down. People should vote on what statues go up and what monuments come down. Anything else is vandalism and vigilantism. I don't like the fact that someone took the law into their own hands and destroyed the Georgia Guidestones. Now, I hope he's found and sent to prison for what he's done. But now that they're gone, I say good riddance.

So, what do you think? Terrorist? Hero? Terrorist? Hero! Hero! That was a monument to the New World Order. Well, that's one of the theories, and there's plenty of evidence to support that. What is that racket? Hey, hey, hey, can you boys take a break, guys?

I'm doing my showbiz thing over here. Sorry, sorry. The panic room is really coming along. I told you to stay out of my wife's closet. You were serious? I thought you were kidding. No, I wasn't kidding. Where did you put all her stuff? Relax. There's plenty of room in the bunker. We don't have a bunker. Not yet, we don't.

the bunker is phase two. Whoa, you can't build that under my house. I know that, you moron. The beavers got the tunnel dug, but they hit a water pipe, so we gotta pump out the

Uh, she doesn't have any life vests in there. Those are not life vests. She is going to kill me. When your beaver's in the mood for a jackhammer, you gotta take advantage.

Next up is episode 113, Crop Circles. This one was highly requested, and I refused to do it for like a year because I was convinced that crop circles were just made by guys with boards and rope. There was nothing more to it than that. It's too obvious. But so many people wanted my take on it. So I started doing research, and I went from skeptic to believer.

I'm convinced that 99.9% of crop circles are fake, but there's 0.1% that can't be debunked. They're scientifically proven to be something very, very strange. This is a long episode, but it's a fun one. So settle in. In 1974, a group of scientists beamed a message into space.

The message, meant to be received by an intelligent alien species, described life on Earth. Written in simple binary code and using the most powerful radio telescope on the planet, the message was broadcast to a dense cluster of stars in the constellation of Hercules. This exercise was just ceremonial, a way to demonstrate new technology in radio astronomy.

Nobody was really expected to receive it. And even if they did, it wouldn't be anytime soon. The nearest star in the direction of the broadcast is 25,000 light years away. So the telescope was tuned to 2380 megahertz, aimed at Hercules and fired up. The scientists congratulated each other, shook hands and went on with their lives. But 27 years later, something very unexpected happened with that message beamed into deep space. Someone wrote back.

One morning in 1966, George Pedley was working his farm in Tully, Queensland, Australia, when he heard a strange buzzing sound. He climbed down from his tractor and started walking in the direction of the sound. Then he saw a circular craft slowly rise above a section of swampland not 50 feet from where he was standing. The craft hovered for a few seconds, shot straight up into the sky and disappeared.

When George went to investigate, he found a large circle of reeds had been pulled from the swamp and flattened into a disc. The circle was 30 feet across, two feet thick, and arranged in a clockwise swirl. Because of the swirl and the thickness of the reeds, locals called the formation a UFO nest. But what this actually was, was a crop circle.

Since the 1960s, thousands of crop circles or crop formations have been found. They've been seen on every continent in almost every country on Earth. But the epicenter for crop formations is Wiltshire in the southwest of England. Crop formations range from the very simple to the very complex. Formations can be circles, stars, and other geometric shapes, but some are pictograms, though nobody knows for sure what they mean.

Though every formation is different, they have a few things in common. Recognizable patterns that are created very quickly, usually at night. The creation of these patterns is always associated with some kind of light, either a beam of light or an orb of light. Whatever that is, that's being worked out. Oh my God.

Though crop formations seem like a new phenomenon, there's evidence they've been appearing for a long time. In the 9th century, Abagard, the Bishop of Lyon in France, wrote about parishioners who were possibly engaged in devil worship or paganism. They were collecting seeds out of flattened circles in the fields and using them for fertility rituals. In 1686, Robert Plott, a professor at Oxford, wrote about crop circles.

He even drew pictures of a couple that appeared near his home. He said they were formed by a flash of light. And once they were formed, animals wouldn't go near them. Around the same time, a pamphlet was released called The Mowing Devil.

It describes how a farmer woke to see a bright light in his field that he thought was fire. When he went to investigate, he found a crop circle. It's called the mowing devil because the farmer said the circle was so neatly mowed that it could not have been done by a mortal man. John Leland served as librarian to Henry VIII. He wrote about patterns appearing in grass overnight. In 1937, a British science journal reported circles found in a field of barley and even included one of the first photos taken of a crop circle.

In 1945, this photo was taken by a balloonist working for the RAF Parachute Training School.

In 1952, the US Air Force investigated circles found in Kansas. In 1963, Sir Patrick Moore, an astronomer writing for the New Scientist Journal, investigated a formation in Charlton. In the wheat fields were features taking the form of circular or elliptical areas in which the wheat had been flattened. One very well defined was an oval, 15 yards long by four and a half broad.

There was evidence of spiral flattening, and in one case there was a circular area in the center in which the wheat had not been flattened. One of the texts discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls is the Book of Enoch. Enoch talks about lightning leaving marks on the earth. So these formations have been seen since the beginning of recorded history. Even though thousands of circles have been found and many people claim to witness them forming, no one had ever caught it on camera until 1996.

John Whaley was camping out on a hill in Wiltshire called Oliver's Castle, named for a fort that was built there many years ago. Around 3:00 AM, something caught his eye. He grabbed his video camera and captured footage of several glowing orbs hovering over a field. Then, like magic, here's the formation from the air. Nobody can agree on what crop circles mean, though most people believe their messages. Now, this is frustrating to many researchers. They say whoever's making these, why don't they just speak English?

Well, in 2001, they did. Intelligent, the intelligent, the control. You see, the object came down and it stopped burning. Nothing random about it. There's no movement in prevailing wind. I can't think what that is. The definitive piece of...

In 1974, the Arecibo message was sent from Earth to a cluster of stars in the Hercules constellation. It's called the Arecibo message because that was the name of the giant radio telescope used to transmit it.

The team that created the message was led by Dr. Frank Drake with assistance from Carl Sagan. The message was 1679 binary digits that could be converted to an image designed to convey information about civilization on Earth. It starts with a representation of the numbers one through 10. This provides a key to the rest of the message. Next, atomic numbers of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus, which are used to make up DNA. Carbon is at the top,

because it's the most dominant in forms of life. The message shows more information about DNA, including the double helix structure. For the bottom, a figure of a human, its average height and the population of the Earth, which was a little over 4 billion at the time. Next, our solar system, starting with the Sun and moving out to Pluto. The Earth is shifted up to identify the planet sending the signal. At the bottom, a graphic representing the Arecibo radio telescope.

Now, the nearest star that could possibly receive the message is 25,000 light years away. So we couldn't really expect a reply for another 50,000 years. But on the morning of August 14th, 2001, a formation was discovered right next to the Chilbolton radio telescope. Now, even if you don't know the full design, when you're on the ground, you can tell you're in a crop circle. There's structure and uniformity to it.

But this new formation was different. It was a mess. It wasn't symmetrical. Nobody could make sense of it until it was viewed from the air. A face. And three days later, this appeared. This became known as the Arecibo Answer. The formation uses the same 23 by 73 grid. The top line shows the numbers 1 through 10, just like the original, but the reply shows silicon as the main element for life, not carbon.

Their DNA is shown as having a third string. In the center is a humanoid figure about four feet tall with a large head, and their population is about 21 billion. Below the figure is their solar system. They appear to occupy three objects in the system, the third and fourth planets, and then there's another shape that could mean a planet or some other object or structure.

On the human Arecibo message is a picture of the radio telescope, which was used to send the message. Whoever sent the reply seems to understand this. So what is this design meant to represent? Well, just a year earlier, this formation appeared in the same place.

Is this the same object? Is this crop formation a representation of a machine used to communicate through space? Again, frustrated researchers and skeptics agree on something. Why don't they just speak English? Well, almost exactly one year later, this formation appeared. My brain, my brain just exploded. Once again, we see a face, but that's not a human face.

And just like the Arecibo message was broadcast in binary code, the disk formation also contains binary code. And for the first time, we get an actual literal message. The code was translated to letters using ASCII, the encoding standard for electronic communication. Beware the bearers of false g-g-gifts and their b-b-broken promises. Much p-p-pain, but still time. B-b-believe. There is g-g-good out there. We oppose d-d-d-deception.

- Conduit close. - Whoever it is that wants to communicate with us is using many different means. In 2004, Robert Ridge was deer hunting a few miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Half buried in the dirt, he found a strange rock.

On the rock is a geometric carving. Robert grabbed it and didn't think it was anything more than a cool rock someone lost at some point. But he didn't keep it a secret. He showed it to friends and anyone who was curious about it. It didn't take long before strange discoveries were made about the rock. For one, it's magnetized lodestone, which is not a kind of rock found in that area. And under a microscope, the Roswell Rock is extremely smooth. There's no carving marks or indication of sandblasting.

But the most fascinating discovery is that in 1996, eight years before the Roswell Rock was found, this crop formation appeared. The designs match up.

Some people think this design is a message. Others think it's a map. Still, others think the Roswell Rock, the Arecibo Answer, and all crop circles are nothing but a hoax. But who would create such elaborate hoaxes, and why? Well, in 1991, we would get the answer when a British newspaper ran a front-page story with the headline, "The Men Who Conned the World." - Oh, no.

On September 9th, 1991, two retirees in their 60s confessed to starting the crop circle phenomenon in 1978. Doug Bauer said the idea came to him one night in a pub. He was living in Queensland in 1966 when the Tully UFO left behind that circle of reeds. Doug thought it would be fun to trick people into thinking UFOs were landing in wheat fields in southern England.

He enlisted the help of his friend, Dave Chorley. All they needed to make a crop circle was a wood plank, a bit of rope, and a twisted piece of wire. At first, their designs were simple and crude, but over time, they became more and more complex. And you could center this through this ring.

walk straight towards it, and lo and behold, you've got the lovely straight line that you could wish for. International media picked up the story, and the mystery was solved. Crop circles were nothing more than a couple of amiable old fellows playing a prank, and that was that. That's it? And the story? It's kind of disappointing. Oh, we're just getting started. Oh, go on. Doug and Dave might have created a few crop circles, but their story has a lot of holes. They demonstrated their circle-making technique, and the results were...

Most crop formations, even back then, were much more precise. Doug and Dave's formations were out of alignment. Every time. The more complicated the design, the worse the formations were. During one demonstration for a news crew, Doug attempted to reproduce one of his circles and accidentally made it twice as big as it should have been.

Then he just gave up on making it. And their story changed over time. They said they started making circles in 1976. Then it was 1975. Then it was 1978. In fact, they never could agree on the year they actually started. Now, they claim to have created certain circles and then later said they didn't, but they helped people who did.

And Doug and Dave said they created this famous crop circle in 1983 called the Cheesefoot Head Circle. Doug showed a diagram of it, but his diagram had footpaths in it. The circle had no paths. It had no disturbances of any kind. When asked how they created the circle without making tracks in the crop,

Doug said they pole vaulted into the field. Did you just say pole vaulted? Yep. He said in an interview that you should have seen us running through the fields with our sticks sailing over the corn. I would like to see that, actually. Oh, me too, pal. Apparently these men, in their 60s, pole vaulted into fields carrying their wood boards. They laid down a perfect crop formation and pole vaulted out again.

Now, Doug looks pretty fit for an older guy, but he's getting winded walking in a circle. Pole vaulting seems a little outside of his athletic range. They also added details to their story as other crop circles were found. One day, a couple of people investigating a circle told Doug they were looking for a jelly-like substance that was found in a formation. Doug told them it was probably waste ejected from a plane. Later, Doug had a story about making a crop circle, and while he was doing it, he got hit in the head with a piece of frozen waste.

ejected from a plane's toilet. And he called those Boeing bombs. Right. Big old frozen chunk of poopy. He stumbled back to his car, dazed with blood trickling down his face. The problem is, planes don't dump waste over that area. It would be illegal, dangerous, and disgusting. Another story came out about people finding bits of metal thought to be meteorites at crop formations.

Soon after that, Doug and Dave's crop circles had little bits of iron scattered all around. So, a few things. Did Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley create some crop circles? Yes. When Doug and Dave came forward, about 1,500 crop circles had been seen in at least 23 countries. Well, you can't pole vault in Belgium. Right. Even Doug couldn't do that. But they inspired a lot of copycats.

Soon most crop formations were man-made. So is there a scientific way to tell if a crop circle is not a hoax, but genuine? There is.

Most crop formations are man-made. The vast majority are. And there are telltale signs of this. Sometimes spotting a man-made crop circle is as simple as finding a footpath through the field leading up to the design. But often crop formations intersect the lines made by tractors called tramlines, which can hide tracks. To spot a hoax, we look at the plants themselves.

Man-made crop circles done by flattening plants with boards are destructive to the plants. You'll see cracks and bruises on the stalks. On the ground, the crushed plants look messy. The leaves and flowers will be mashed to the ground. Marks will be visible on only one side of the plant where it was stomped by a plank of wood. Many of those marks are creases where you can actually bend the stalk. Genuine crop circles don't look like this at all.

First, the lay of the pattern will flow like water. There's a gentleness to it and elegance. And many times the stalks are layered and even braided. In genuine crop circles, most plants aren't damaged. They'll continue to grow horizontally and then after a few days return to their vertical position. In this formation found in May 2005, the flowers weren't damaged at all. They were somehow laid down gently.

A group of clumsy men with wooden boards couldn't do this. We know this because it was tried. A group of crop circle makers attempted to reproduce this formation. From the air, it looks pretty good. But on the ground, the man-made version is a mess. The plants are trashed.

You don't.

You don't. Another sign of a genuine circle can be seen, especially in wheat. In late summer, when wheat turns gold, the kernels become heavy and bend over from the weight. They also become stiff and are impossible to straighten. But the wheat within a crop circle, the kernels have straightened out and can't be bent. So what would do this? Radiation.

Wheat stalks are separated by structures called apical nodes. These are like the knuckles on your fingers. In the 1990s, biophysicist William Levengood started analyzing plants taken from crop circles. His team found the nodes in crop circle wheat were elongated, and in many cases they were ruptured. Oh, a rupture on an elongated node? I think they make a cream for that.

This rupture is called an expulsion cavity. The only way this could be replicated is with bursts of microwave radiation. The way your microwave oven works is it heats up water, fats, and sugar in food. Microwave energy is heating up the water in the wheat stalk nodes. The water turns to steam and then they burst, just like popcorn. Now, you can't fake this. It happens to the plant internally. There's no way you could hoax that.

People who claim to have witnessed crop circles being made, and there's quite a few witnesses, report seeing a mist over the pattern immediately after its form. This mist is actually steam coming from the plants that were flash-heated by microwave radiation.

While experimenting with radiation, Levengood found crop circle seed had a huge increase in growth compared to non-crop circle seed. By exposing seeds to short, controlled bursts of radiation, they grow bigger and faster than seeds not exposed to radiation. Another experiment showed that wheat harvested from within a crop circle

has a much higher amount of protein than wheat outside the circle. So there's evidence that whatever energy is used to create crop formations is leaving residual traces of this energy in the area. Some crop formations are covered in a dusting of microscopic spheres of magnetized iron.

Specifically, meteorite iron. Researchers call this a magnetic glaze. These spheres are usually found around the perimeter of a formation and they're distributed linearly, not randomly. Because the iron particles are magnetized perfect spheres, it means they were melted and formed within a highly energetic magnetic field. When people are inside crop formations, many are affected by electromagnetic radiation. Just look at this.

As part of an experiment,

A woman with an enlarged thyroid sat in a crop formation for two and a half hours. While being monitored by a doctor, her thyroid shrunk by 40%. Often cameras, watches, and other electronic devices stop working inside a crop circle. In fact, pregnant women and people with pacemakers are discouraged from going near one. Now, to skeptics, all this talk about energy sounds woo-woo, but I just showed you the real effects on plants and people.

Now, it's fair to say that the elongated nodes and growth rates of wheat could be a coincidence. It's also fair to say that the physical reactions experienced by people could be psychosomatic, all in their minds. But skeptics, how do you explain this?

These are called ghost formations or ghost circles. This is when the design of a crop formation is still visible after the field has been plowed. Sometimes a ghost formation remains through the following season. Sometimes it remains for two years before finally fading.

But this doesn't happen with all crop formations. Nobody knows why, but it could have something to do with where the patterns are found. A study was done in the early 2000s of all the crop circles in southern England found that year. The study showed that 98% of all non-man-made formations were over chalk aquifers. And by the way, chalk aquifers can be used for generating electricity. Everything keeps pointing back to electromagnetism.

If there's an epicenter for crop formations in southern England, it's Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill was built thousands of years ago. It's 129 feet tall and covers an area of about five acres. Nobody agrees on what it was originally used for, but every year crop formations appear near it, sometimes right next to it. And by the way, the whole thing is one giant pile of chalk.

Not far from Silbury Hill is Stonehenge. Crop circles appear there too. One of the most famous of these is called the Stonehenge Surprise. On Sunday, July 7th, 1996, this formation appeared near feet from Stonehenge.

It's been called one of the most complex and spectacular crop circle designs ever seen. The design is a julius set, a type of fractal. Fractals are visual representations of mathematic formulas that repeat themselves at different scales. Zoom way in or way out, the pattern is the same. Look at how close Stonehenge is to the formation. Look at the visibility.

Stonehenge has 24-hour security. The guards saw nothing unusual the night before. Prop formations also appear near Avebury, which is in the same area. The Avebury Henge is massive, twice the size of Stonehenge. Now, a ley line is believed to be an invisible path or energy line that connects sacred sites. Ley lines are thought to create a network of energy across the Earth, influencing the flow of energy and aligning with cosmic forces.

The area around Stonehenge is on one of those ley lines. If crop formations are an attempt at communication, they're clearly using mathematic concepts. And this would make sense. Math is a universal language. But what do the messages mean? What story do they tell? Are crop formations proof of space travel? Do they offer an explanation for space travel? Are crop formations a map? Are they blueprints for a machine? Well, the answer to all those questions is yes.

Over the years, crop formations got more and more complex. What started out as simple circles became patterns like this. This is the famous Milk Hill Galaxy Spiral, found in 2001. The spiral consists of 409 perfect circles, a thousand feet across, spread over 700,000 square feet. And look at how clean the design is. That's not even flat ground.

This formation is a hard one for skeptics to deal with. Remember, England is pretty far north. In the summer, the days are very, very long. The night the spiral was made, there was only about four hours of darkness. It would take a huge crew of people to lay down this pattern in four hours. And by the way, it was raining the night it appeared. You'd think the field would be full of muddy footprints by the army of hoaxers it would take to make this. But nope, the Milk Hill Spiral is pristine.

Fractals are a common theme with crop formations. Geometric shapes and other expressions of mathematic functions are also quite common. Even complex math problems are expressed. Squaring the circle is a problem in geometry first proposed in Greek mathematics. Squaring the circle involves using a compass and a ruler to create a square and circle with the same area.

Now this has been proven impossible since calculating the area of a circle requires using pi. And if you remember your math lessons, pi is an irrational number, meaning it can never be exact. So you can never get the area of a circle to equal the area of a square.

But there are methods that allow you to get close. And these methods have been seen in crop formations for years. Crop formations often use other mathematic concepts, like the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers. Here's a formation that, when it appeared, people found very confusing.

Then a mathematician solved it. It's a representation of pi out to 10 decimal places. The lengths of the arcs represent each digit. There's even a decimal point and an indication that the number continues forever. But there are also designs that at first glance look like geometry, but not exactly right. That's when some researchers had the idea to stop looking and start listening. This particular circle resembles what's called a cymatic pattern.

A cymatic pattern is a shape that forms when sound waves vibrate a material like water or sand. Ernst Chladni was a German physicist and musician who documented cymatic patterns. He proved that different sound frequencies create different patterns, and these patterns could be predicted and repeated. Could the builder of this crop circle be telling us that this sound frequency has special meaning? If it does, how do we apply it?

Well, let's look for more clues. In 2011, this double spiral formation appeared on Windmill Hill, the location of another ancient site. The same day, another double spiral appeared near Stonehenge, just a few miles away. Dr. Jerry Croft thought these formations could represent neutron stars. And although it's very rare, sometimes neutron stars collide and form a magnetar.

What makes magnetars unique is their incredibly strong magnetic fields, which are among the strongest known in the universe.

These magnetic fields are thousands to billions of times stronger than those of neutron stars. A magnetar's gravity is so strong that it dramatically warps space-time around it. In theory, this warping of space-time could lead to an Einstein-Rosen bridge, better known as a wormhole. A wormhole, again in theory, can connect two very distant points in space, essentially creating a shortcut

that allows you to travel to a location faster than light could get there in a straight line. Now, I'm aware this is a lot of in theory and possibly and maybe regarding these crop formations. After all, magnetars are so rare that in the entire galaxy, only 10 have ever been found. Well, 11.

because the following day, literally the day after these crop formations appeared, a new magnetar appeared. I don't mean it was always there and was just discovered. I mean, it wasn't there yesterday and it's there today.

Then in 2022, this crop formation appears. Two sections of concentric rings connected by a line. It's been theorized that this represents a wormhole. It shows two points in space surrounded by warped spacetime and then a portal between. The outer ring represents the bending of spacetime. Now maybe this crop formation is just a design with no special meaning, but that would be rare.

Almost all crop formations have a message or purpose. So let's assume for fun that all these messages are puzzle pieces, that when the pieces are fit together, they show proof of a wormhole and a map of how to get to it. But how? How do we do that? Well, that's the question that electrical engineer Nicola Romanski asked. Nicola saw this image of a crop circle that seemed to be meaningless. It didn't have a recognizable geometry. It wasn't symmetrical. But Nicola had an idea.

He brought the shape into his 3D software and extruded it around the center axis, meaning he spun it around to make a shape. So Nikola found more crop formations and did the same thing. He rotated the designs around a central axis to create their shapes in 3D. And after a while, he had a collection of what appeared to be blueprints, instructions on how to create some kind of machine. So what did he do? What do you think he did? He built it.

Nikola Romanski reached out to filmmaker Charles Maxwell and asked for help. Maxwell was working on a documentary about prop circles. Nikola needed help and funding to build his machine. This machine, he thought, was a vehicle that ran on zero-point energy, could alter gravity, and reach light speed. How can you not build it? So they enlisted 3D designers and machinists. They hired electricians and fabricators. It took over three years, and they finally had their prototype. Go!

It didn't work. - No. - Well, they got some plasma to ignite, but they ran out of money. - No. - The entire process is in the documentary, which I linked below. The truth is, whatever they were building probably wasn't gonna work. But it's possible that Nikola was onto something, that the secret to zero-point energy, gravity, and space-time all comes down to one thing: spin.

Whenever government whistleblowers describe reverse engineering UFOs, spin is always a core piece of the technology. According to Mark McCandlish, a former aerospace designer, UFO anti-gravity and propulsion are achieved by rotating liquid mercury. The infamous Nazi bell-shaped UFO, Deglaca, was said to use similar technology. Bob Lazar talked about studying Element 115 when he worked at Area 51.

E-115 is said to power alien spacecraft. And while Lazar made those claims in the 1980s, there was no such element. But in 2003, E-115 was discovered. A whistleblower came forward just a few weeks ago. He claims to have been a military contractor working on reverse engineering UFOs.

He said their engines use counter-rotating cylinders with element 115 as the power source. Russian physicist Nikolai Kozyrev believed the twisting and spinning of space-time called torsion was the secret to unlocking gravity and unlocking everything. In 2019, an engineer working for the US Navy filed a patent

for a plasma compression fusion device. This is a machine that can generate a tremendous amount of power, like terawatts of power in a small package. The device is about the size of a car, but can put out as much energy as a nuclear power plant.

If it's real, the energy is clean and unlimited. His invention is based on spin. The scientist is Salvatore Paes, and he currently works for the US Space Force. He's filed quite a few interesting patents on behalf of the United States government.

Propulsion engines, room temperature superconductors, inertial mass reduction devices, and high frequency gravitational wave generators. This may sound like science fiction, but the U.S. military is taking these patents very seriously. Every single one of them is based on spin.

Now, I don't know if it's irony or poetic justice, but it could turn out that nature's most mysterious secrets, like gravity, won't be discovered in a lab. It's possible that unlocking the secrets of nature might be done in a field of wheat. Crop circles are a controversial subject. The history of the crop circle community, if that's what you want to call it, is filled with intrigue, lies, and double crosses.

Today, if you bring up crop circles in any mainstream venue, you'll get eye rolls and laughter. But that wasn't always the case. At one time, crop formations were taken seriously by the media, the government, and the general population. A new type of science emerged called seriology, named for Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and grain crops. Journals were created. Articles about crop formations were mainstream. Nick Pope spent over 20 years investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defense.

He said the army started investigating crop circles in 1985. Then glyphs started to appear in southern England in 1989, and crop formations were becoming complex. There seemed to be an intelligence at work. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked her cabinet to find out what the hell was going on. The following summer, Operation Blackbird was launched. ♪

Blackbird was a three-week surveillance operation with the goal of filming a crop circle forming in real time. The project was planned by prominent crop circle researchers Colin Andrews and Pat Delgado. It was sponsored by the BBC and Japanese national television. Not only did the project have the blessing of the British government,

But the crops to be filmed were on land owned by the Ministry of Defense. By working with the MOD, acres of farmland could be cordoned off to keep out hoaxers and prevent any genuine crop circles from being trampled by a curious and excited public. The military had every inch of the field covered with cameras. They had night vision and even infrared cameras to detect body heat.

If a circle was going to form, it would definitely be seen. This was a huge event. Millions of people around the world watched. And every day, Colin Andrews would appear on TV and describe the day's events. On day two, a crop circle appeared. And Colin Andrews went on television and spoke very enthusiastically about the discovery. And then everything came crashing down.

The formation was a hoax, not just a hoax, but an embarrassing one. The design was crude and placed in the center of the circle was an astrology board game. Colin Andrews, a serious investigator and the face of the crop circle phenomenon, was humiliated. - Somebody's had a laugh, they've had a joke, they've actually done none of us any good, but sets these sort of things, only set the research back.

In the span of an afternoon, the field of crop circle research went from mainstream science to fringe theory. And it's been there ever since. Hang on. What? If the army had the whole thing blocked off and covered with cameras, how come they didn't see nothing?

It was a setup. It was a setup. Well, allegedly. Totally a setup. Colin Andrews believes, and I think there's plenty of evidence to support his theory, that the Army intentionally wanted to discredit him and the entire crop circle phenomenon. That doesn't mean the military didn't believe in crop formations. Quite the opposite. At the same exact time the highly public Operation Blackbird was going on, the Army was running a secret surveillance operation a few miles away on Silbury Hill.

In fact, they allegedly had film of bright orbs flying over the fields just to the south of the hill. But this operation only became known later. It appears that Blackbird was sleight of hand. Get the public focused on Blackbird while the real operation took place a few miles away. Even now, when crop circles or glowing orbs appear, it's not uncommon for military helicopters to show up.

Not only do the helicopters patrol the area, but they'll also chase the orbs around the countryside. Clearly, the military believes that crop formations are something more than simple hoaxes. But after the Blackbird fiasco, none of this mattered. Crop circles were debunked,

and Colin Andrews became a fringe character. Colin's partner, Pat Delgado, was so disheartened by the Blackbird hoax that he retired and gave up his research. Sounds like Deep State wins again, eh? But that's not the end of the story. Go on. Colin Andrews may have become fringe in the public's eye, but he was a serious investigator, and crop circles were a real phenomenon. Even without mainstream support, he was a serious investigator.

he continued his work, and plenty of people supported him. Believers in crop circles were now fringe believers, but they still believed. This could be a problem for the government. They couldn't allow crop circles back into the mainstream, so British intelligence began a disinformation campaign, and to help them spread disinformation...

They brought in the best. CIA. CIA. In his 1999 book, Cosmic Top Secret, The Unseen Agenda, author John King got Colin Andrews to sit for an interview. Colin knew that the only way hoaxers could get onto that field during Blackbird was if it was an inside job.

When Colin made the announcement that a crop circle appeared, he hadn't even seen it yet. It was pitch black. He was pressured to make the announcement, so he did. He didn't report what he had seen with his own eyes. He reported what was described to him by the army. As soon as the sun came up, he knew it was a hoax, but there was nothing he could do.

He had a deal with the military that they would provide people, equipment, and land, but he had to cooperate with them. Big mistake. You shake hands with the military-industrial complex, you're making a deal with the devil. Yep.

According to Colin, phase one of the disinformation campaign was to debunk crop circles with Operation Blackbird. Phase two was Doug and Dave, who showed up a year later. Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley admitted to being the makers of crop circles. And to this day, that's the official explanation. Colin doesn't think they're part of the intelligence community, but he believes they were used by and compensated by people in the IC. They were paid? Oh, yeah. They were paid thousands of dollars for their story.

We know this for a fact because they were only paid half up front. They had to sue for the other half. Deal with the devil. Next came phase three. A freelance journalist named Jim Schnabel arrived on the scene. According to Colin Andrews, Schnabel was CIA. Now, James Schnabel was not an official CIA officer.

but he certainly could have been an agent. If you search his name in the CIA database, you'll get plenty of hits. And Schnabel's name is always connected to paranormal cases like crop circles and remote viewing. Anyway, Schnabel was conducting private interviews with everyone involved with Blackbird and with other crop circle researchers. He was driving wedges between people, misquoting them, and pushing the narrative that crop circles were debunked.

Colin Andrews became convinced of Schnabel's CIA involvement during a spooky conversation. Schnabel had recorded and read to Colin the details of private conversations Colin had one evening while sitting in his car alone. And Colin Andrews has other evidence that he was being bugged and surveilled. It has to do a lot with invoices and stuff, and I'll link below if you want the specifics. He literally has the receipts. He has the receipts.

And look, it's very, very common for the CIA to use journalists as assets. More common than people think. People talk to journalists, so they're useful at collecting intel. And people listen to journalists, so they're great at spreading disinformation. You may have heard about Operation Mockingbird. This was a project where over 400 American journalists were working as direct assets for the CIA. Carl Bernstein exposed how at least

10 journalists and editors at the New York Times

were CIA operatives for years. This is still happening right now, and I can prove it. But covering that and Operation Mockingbird is a full episode. And if you'd like to hear the whole story, let me know in the comments. Now, whatever your favorite newspaper is or your favorite news channel is, assume 10% of editors, reporters, and media personalities are working for the CIA or FBI in some capacity. Yes, it's that many. JFK warned us this would happen. He certainly did.

Colin Andrews remembers a direct approach from a CIA operative. He met a man who claimed to have seen a crop circle being formed while he was out one night studying foxes. Oh, sexy broads. No, actual foxes. Ah. The man used this story as a way of being accepted in the crop circle scene. People got used to seeing him around. Well, a few weeks later, this man knocks on Colin's door. They

They go for a walk and the man asked Colin tons of questions about crop circles, their locations, what he thinks they are and on and on. But Colin started to get annoyed when the man was asking if he knew if the Russians were involved. At the end of their talk, the man tells Colin, you're one of us now. I said, what do you mean? And he said, and it sounds even funny coming out of my mouth, but he said, CIA.

The man told Colin that there was a large amount of money waiting for him in a Swiss bank account. All he had to do was state publicly that crop circles were a hoax. Colin could go on researching circles all he wanted. The CIA would help him become the number one crop circle expert in the world. They would give him special equipment. They would give him a staff. They would give him a budget. But when he came across a real crop formation, he was to call this man and nobody else.

Colin Andrews passed on this offer, but the man harassed him with phone calls for a while after that. Soon the calls became so threatening that Colin contacted the British Ministry of Defense, but they said there was nothing they could do. What? Well, they said it was out of their jurisdiction. Was he in England? Yep. That is a bunch of bulls**t.

Yeah, Colin was annoyed. But after a short time, the call stopped. Eventually, Colin Andrews moved to the US. And here he was approached by a Pentagon analyst who introduced him to a writer named Rosemary Ellen Guiley. You might know her name from her many appearances on the Coast to Coast radio show.

She wrote 49 books and even hosted her own radio show all about the paranormal. Colin said Rosemary went to, in his words, every extreme to try and convince him to co-author a book with her. And she wanted to work on the book in his office, which would give her access to Colin Andrews' entire database on crop circles going back 30 years. She was persistent, but he turned her down. Colin is convinced, without a doubt, that Rosemary's

that Rosemary Giley was a CIA asset. Again, Rosemary Giley was the perfect candidate for an intelligence asset, especially since she was a regular guest on Coast to Coast, where she would be heard by millions of people. She would be allowed to continue her work in any way she wanted, but from time to time, she would be instructed to disseminate information provided by the intelligence community. It's more common than you think. So yeah, Rosemary Giley was the perfect asset. Ah!

I can't help but notice you're speaking about her in the past tense. Yeah, she died in 2019 at the age of 69. That's kind of young to die, isn't it? Isn't it? There's another Crop Circle's character with an interesting story.

John Lundberg is an English artist and documentary filmmaker who founded the website circlemakers.org in the early 90s. He's responsible or claims to be responsible for some of the more elaborate crop formations that have been found over the years. On the Circlemakers website, which is still around, there are links to the many crop formations that the group takes credit for. There's no doubt that the Circlemakers created complicated and often very beautiful crop formations.

But crop circle researchers Robert Hulse and David A. Caton think there's more to John than meets the eye. But in our opinion, the whole circle makers website and Lundberg and co are all part of a disinformation campaign, possibly funded by government.

Robert Hulse said at one time, the CircleMakers website had a recruiting link that took you directly to the recruitment page for MI5, British Military Intelligence. Hulse believes that the CircleMakers group is funded by British intelligence and was specifically created to spread disinformation. Hulse believes the CircleMakers goal is to muddy the waters and confuse serious crop circle researchers.

to make it as difficult as possible to determine what was and wasn't a genuine crop formation. Now, there's no hard evidence that the Circle Makers or its founder are connected to military intelligence.

But in 2009, researcher Richard D. Hall dug into Lundberg's background and found a lot of interesting information. Lundberg got his master's from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1992. At this time, Slade was next door to the then secret headquarters of MI5 at 140 Gower Street. It was literally next door. The two buildings shared a courtyard.

Paul makes the point that intelligence agencies often recruit final year college students. That's always been true and is still true today. Lundberg started making crop circles immediately after graduating. Paul notes that if you view the HTML source of circlemakers.org, the second keyword is MI5. Now that was in 2009, but even today, the site's keywords contain entries like MI5 and CIA. And something I just noticed while researching this episode

Why is alleged CIA asset Jim Schnabel a keyword on this site? In 2004, the CircleMakers website teased Colin Andrews, who at the time was raising money for his research. CircleMakers said that if the fundraising fails, Colin could just join MI5 PsyOps and retrain to be a crop circles maker. Now, PsyOps is short for psychological operations, which is the use of psychological techniques and tactics to influence the perceptions, attitudes,

and behaviors of a group of people. And this is a type of strategic communication used by military intelligence and government organizations all the time. - It sure is, just turn on the news. - Well, that's true. If you spent an hour reading the news today, you consumed government intel.

Believe me. Now, Hall acknowledges that these references to MI5 seem just too blatant, but he believes they're a double bluff. Meaning if we sarcastically connect ourselves to the intelligence community, people will think we're joking. Nobody would be so obvious. But this is absolutely a real and effective psyops technique. Hall found that the website was hosted in Pittsburgh. Now, at the time, and even today, to some degree, it's uncommon for British organizations to host their sites in the US. And

And Hall found that the administrative contact for the domain belongs to a colonel in the US Air Force. Now, it could be a coincidence, but the man has an unusual name. Now, I'm not going to name him here, but I'll link to Hall's research down below. Richard Hall looked into CircleMaker's finances, trying to figure out how they pay their bills. Lundberg had registered a couple of companies, but they were inactive. But there was an interesting quote on the CircleMaker's website. You'd be surprised how expensive running a successful website can be. Don't panic.

We're not going to ask you for money. Our retainer, from sources we'd rather not disclose, has kept our virtual head above water. What does that mean? A retainer? From who? Who's financing them? Making crop formations is technically a crime.

It's trespassing, vandalism, destruction of private property. One investor would fund that and become complicit in those crimes. Plus, there could be civil liability. If you create a crop circle and a bunch of strangers show up and tear up my field, I could sue you for that. Even if they're minor crimes and rarely prosecuted, it doesn't sound like a good investment. Hall did a land registry check on the apartment where Lundberg was living at the time.

He found that technically there are no apartments listed on the deed. Paul dug further and found that there are four apartments, including Lundberg's, that have their rents paid by the local government.

So did Richard Hall reveal that John Lundberg is, in fact, an asset working in media whose job is to spread disinformation about crop circles? Well, the evidence Hall provides is purely circumstantial and coincidental, so there's no way to know for sure. In fact, some of Hall's evidence is so far-fetched, I left it out of this episode. But a few years after Richard Hall conducted his research, Lundberg directed a documentary, a documentary that I've referred to multiple times on this channel. It's called Mirage Men.

Mirage Men covers Richard Doty, a retired special agent who worked for OSI, the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigation, Air Force Intelligence. Richard Doty is, according to Mirage Men, one of the chief architects of the military's campaign to disseminate lies to the UFO community. In other words...

to spread disinformation. Doty's job was to muddy the waters so UFO researchers wouldn't know what sightings were real and what were hoaxes. Now this is, according to Hall, Hulse, Caton, and many others, exactly what the Circle Makers have done and have been doing to the Crop Circles community for years. There's a reason why John Lundberg would make a great intelligence asset, and Rosemary Giley, and James Schnabel, and countless other writers, journalists, and media figures.

They already work in the paranormal community. They're trusted by that community. They continue to do their work, but every so often they spread a little bit of disinformation to that community, a little nugget to steer people away from the truth. This is why you shouldn't trust anyone in the media. Whether it's your favorite news anchor, TV show host, podcaster, blogger, or writer, be wary of anyone with influence. These media personalities may seem trustworthy. They may seem like they have your best interests in mind,

But some of that is just a performance. Not all of it, but some of it is a performance designed to sway your opinion or even alter your entire belief system. The intelligence community does not want you to know the truth about crop circles, UFOs, secret space programs or alien technology.

That's a fact. Millions, perhaps billions of dollars are put into black budget programs designed to distract and confuse you from the truth. When CIA needs to spread disinformation, they look for trustworthy people with large audiences to deliver their message. So keep your eye out for clues. An intelligence operative, an agent, an asset could be anyone.

Yep, that one turned me into a believer. And here's another one. This one coming up is in the moon compilation, but I have to put it here too. Because this is another story that at first I thought the theory was crazy. Just bonkers. That the moon is a hollow spaceship brought here from another part of the galaxy. That was insane. So I started researching it.

And about halfway through the episode, I was thinking something was up with the moon. And then by the time I finished researching and read the episode, I was convinced the moon is a hollow spaceship brought here from somewhere else in the galaxy. This isn't our most watched episode, but when people recommend this channel to others, this is one of the episodes they recommend. I do too. I think it's a great one. Hope you enjoy it. 5-0-0.

Despite it being humanity's constant companion through all of recorded time, the Moon is still a mystery. Science hasn't been able to explain how the Moon was formed, its unusual orbit, its distance from us, its density, its composition, its structure. These are all still questions. Now, there are theories about the Moon that solve some of these puzzles, but they don't solve all of them. There's only one theory that answers every scientific question about the Moon.

Just one. But the moon is a hollow artificial structure brought here by someone else. Let's find out why. Let's start at the beginning. We're taught that the moon has been here forever. But there's controversy about this because scientists can't agree on how the moon was formed in the first place. The first theory of how the moon became linked to the Earth is the capture theory. It says the moon was just floating along, drifted near the Earth and was pulled into orbit.

This is almost impossible. Another explanation is the accretion theory that the moon and earth formed out of dust clouds in the early solar system. But when systems formed through accretion, they share similar traits. If the moon was formed this way, it would have an iron core like the earth. It would spin on an axis like the earth.

But neither of these are true. The fission hypothesis was popular for a while, and this says the early Earth was spinning so fast that the moon was formed out of rock in the Pacific Ocean that was flung into space. But we later learned that moon rock is much older than the bottom of the ocean, so this is unlikely. The most popular explanation is the giant impact theory.

This says that a large object about the size of Mars smashed into the proto-Earth. The debris field from the collision coalesced to create the Earth-Moon system. Again, these conditions would have to be so perfect that the odds are astronomical. Right. Now, a recent theory is a combination of all of these. That a large object collided with the Earth about four and a half billion years ago, essentially vaporizing it.

And this vapor is called a synestia. And the synestia was spinning very rapidly, forming a torus. And the moon formed on the edge of this torus. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Taurus? What's a torus? Well, this shape is a torus. Uh, that looks like a donut. It does, but in geometry, if you revolve a circle around an axis in three-dimensional space, it's called a torus. Yeesh, and you wonder why you're not popular at parties.

I'm very popular at parties, aren't I? So we still don't know how the moon was created. You would think that actually going to the moon and collecting rock samples would solve some of these puzzles. But when moon rocks were brought back and studied, it only created more questions. Since landing on the moon in 1969, there... The moon landing was as fake as a teenager's Instagram. I knew you were going to do this. Look, do you like the idea that the moon is a hollow spaceship?

Yeah, I gotta admit, I do kind of like this idea. Okay, so for us to explore this theory, you need to concede that we went to the moon.

Fine, I will concede we went to the moon. Thank you. But those were unmanned missions. The landings were actually filmed in a studio in Burbank, California. Fine, I'll take what I can get. Moon rocks and soil samples brought back from the moon are strange. On Earth, the newest rocks are at the surface, and the rock gets older as you go deeper. This is obvious and logical. But on the moon, the soil on the surface is older than the rocks underneath.

And the surface rocks are older than the rock underneath them. It's backwards. The only way this happens on Earth is when we drill, dig, and mine, bringing older material to the surface. But we see this all over the moon. Now, if the moon was somehow hollowed out, older rock would be on top.

but the list of anomalies goes on typical planetary structures have denser materials toward the core and lighter materials toward the surface on the moon this too is reversed and no one could really explain why the moon's surface is pockmarked by asteroid impacts that have happened for billions of years so you would expect the rock around the impact craters to be different ages

But there is a strange uniformity in the age of these rocks. The chemical makeup of lunar dust is also very odd. If lunar dust is the result of billions of years of impacts, why does it have a different chemical makeup of the rocks around it? The moon doesn't have a magnetic field, yet moon rocks are strongly magnetized.

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old, but the oldest rocks we've found are much younger than that. Moon rocks are older. Much older. Some rocks have been dated to the very beginning of the solar system, and some are said to be even older than that. Uranium-236 and Neptunium-237 are found on the Moon.

This is notable because those radioactive elements don't occur naturally. The only way we see those isotopes on Earth is if we create them. Titanium, chromium and zirconium are rare on Earth, but these are found in abundance on the moon. If the Earth and moon were formed together,

Why such a big discrepancy? And those metals happen to be some of the most strongest materials that are known to exist, and they're highly resistant to corrosion. If you wanted to reinforce a structure, these are the metals you would use. This structural reinforcement could explain why moon craters all seem to be the same depth, no matter how wide they are. Shouldn't craters of different sizes be of different depths?

It's as if there's a resilient metallic shell just beneath the surface of the moon, preventing anything from penetrating further. Now, if there were some type of instruments on the moon's surface that could detect seismic activity, we could test the hollow moon theory by intentionally colliding objects with the moon. This sounds like a setup. We did this, didn't we? We did. And is it hollow? Well... Heyo!

After returning to the command module, the Apollo 12 crew intentionally released the lunar lander, crashing it into the moon's surface. Then something very unexpected happened. Seismic measurements showed that the moon rang like a bell and reverberated for more than an hour. This was with a very small object compared to the size of the moon. So during Apollo 13, an even heavier object was crashed into the surface.

This time, the Moon rang for over three hours, and vibrations traveled to a depth of 20 miles. This doesn't happen on Earth. Reverberations last only a few minutes because of the Earth's density. And on Earth, vibrations slow down as they move toward the Earth's center, where material is denser. But the vibrations on the Moon actually got faster around 40 miles down.

indicating the interior of the moon is not only far less dense, but perhaps has large hollow cavities. The density of the moon is something that's difficult to explain. The moon is about 25% the size of the Earth, but it's only about 1% of the Earth's density. If the moon were a hollow shell, this would explain that. Besides the density issue, the moon has a lot of characteristics and coincidences that we don't see anywhere else.

The moon is actually more like a planet than a moon. At one quarter the Earth's size, no other object in the solar system has a moon this large. This occurs nowhere else, not in our solar system or any other solar system that we've found. And the moon orbits much more closely than it should. And its orbit is also a mystery. It's the only object we've ever observed with a near perfectly circular orbit.

We don't see this anywhere else either. Because of this near-perfect orbit and its size and distance from the Earth, the Moon appears in the sky as almost the exact same size as the Sun. This is what allows us to have eclipses. Our distance to the Sun is 400 times our distance to the Moon. And the size of the Sun is 400 times the size of the Moon. Could this be a coincidence? Nah.

Well, when enough coincidences pile up, we may have to adjust our thinking and be a little more open minded. And that's what happened in 1970. Two Soviet scientists looked at all the evidence and all these coincidences and came to what they felt was the only logical conclusion. And they agreed that their theory sounded crazy, but said not only is the moon hollow, but it's also a spacecraft that traveled here in the distant past. So now we have to ask who built the moon?

Every ancient culture on Earth has stories about the moon. But it's interesting that the further back you go, the fewer stories there are. And if you go back far enough, there are stories that talk about a sky before the moon arrived. Roman and Greek authors in the 5th century BC have stories about the proselynes, and they lived in an area called Arcadia.

And they said they've been here since before there was a moon in the heavens. Now, on the other side of the world, the ancient culture of Tiwanaku in Bolivia also refers to a time when there was no moon. The Tiwanaku claim the moon arrived between 11,500

and 13,000 years ago. If you're into ancient theories as much as I am, you'll recognize that this time coincides perfectly with a period called the Younger Dryas. And all kinds of myths and mysteries are said to have happened during the Younger Dryas, and we'll cover them on this channel. Now, going back to Africa, there are Zulu legends that specifically say the moon is hollow, and living inside is an intelligent race of reptilian extraterrestrials. Lizard people? Yep. Lizard people built the

That's what they believe. They seem to be. The Zula believed the moon was put into orbit by two brothers who were gods. And this legend is similar to what the Sumerians believed. The Sumerians also had a legend of two brothers, Enki and Enlil, who were called Anunnaki. Yup.

Anunnaki, the extraterrestrial gods who created mankind. Everything is falling into place with this one. Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet. How about this? The Zulu also believed that before the moon arrived, the climate of the Earth was very different. There were no seasons and a blanket of thick water vapor covered the entire planet. And we now know that the moon does stabilize our climate.

Without the moon's gravity, the Earth's axis would wobble. There would be no consistent seasons, no tides, extreme weather. The presence of the moon is what allows life on Earth to thrive. So back to the Zulu. The Earth was covered by a thick layer of water vapor, and you could only see the sun through this hazy mist. When the moon was finally placed into orbit, all this water vapor fell at once, and it created a cataclysmic global flood. Oh!

Always a flood. Always. Every time. Every ancient culture has a flood myth. And there's mounting evidence that this did indeed happen during the Younger Dryas. Cultures around the world have myths that are in perfect sync with each other. The coincidences keep piling up. The Zulu legend talks about how the arrival of the moon changed the tides and stabilized the climate.

And this is something that wasn't understood by science until the past hundred years. Yet somehow the ancient Zulu were able to make the connection between the moon and the tides and the seasons. All of these myths and legends, plus strange coincidences and anomalies about the moon, start to add up to a compelling theory that the moon is hollow.

is artificial and was placed here by intelligent beings long ago. But coincidences aren't proof and myths aren't proof. We need to know what's been happening on the moon lately to see if we can make our case with hard evidence. Lucky for us, the evidence is there. Science tells us that the moon is a cold, lifeless place. It has no atmosphere. There hasn't been seismic activity for millions of years. Its core, unlike the Earth's, is cold.

For a supposedly dead world, there's an awful lot of activity up there. On March 7th, 1971, a cloud of water vapor appeared on the moon that covered 100 square miles, and it was there for 14 hours before it dissipated. There's not supposed to be atmosphere on the moon, but for those 14 hours, there was.

In fact, six astronomers in the past hundred years have documented a glowing mist in the crater named Plato. The same mist, the same crater over many years. Boulder tracks are seen on the moon all over the place. And that's weird enough. But how do boulders roll for miles and then go uphill like in this photo?

And since the days of Aristotle, astronomers have seen strange lights appear on the surface of the moon, sometimes visible with the naked eye. NASA even reported that between the years 1540 and 1967, there were 570 sightings of light flashes on the moon that couldn't be explained.

Sightings of strange lights continue to this day. The Aristarchus crater was photographed in 1992, and it shows a glowing blue light now called the Blue Gem. And this anomaly has been seen by Earth-based telescopes every few years since.

Some have even speculated it's a fusion reactor. And these events of mysterious light and mist happen so frequently that there's even a name for them. Transient Lunar Phenomena, or TLPs. But things get even more weird. There are plenty of photographs of what appear to be artificial objects on the surface of the moon. Towers that reach several miles high.

pyramids, symmetrical structures. These have been photographed by astronomers, probes, even the astronauts themselves. And the biggest anomaly of all? Why haven't we gone back to the moon?

Sergeant Carl Wolf was working as a technician for the Air Force, and he was repairing equipment that transferred images from a lunar satellite. Those photos, according to Sergeant Wolf, showed artificial structures on the moon, what he described as a base. And this is corroborated by another technician working with Wolf. And Wolf wasn't a UFO ET moon theory guy. He was just a tech.

He said he was excited to see the pictures on the news and have NASA explain what they were. He was surprised when the photos never turned up. The photos were found in a very early release from NASA.

These structures are very large and very tall. You can even see they cast shadows. And these are photos I'd like to learn more about. But I can't. They no longer exist. Now, almost immediately after landing on the moon, the Apollo 11 crew said they saw something that shook them up. Watch the press conference they gave when they returned. These men aren't acting like they made history or had a life changing experience. It's a beginning of a new age.

They look sad, frightened, uncomfortable, even depressed.

Why? Is there a reason we haven't returned to the moon? And could it be that the Apollo missions discovered something that ancient cultures knew centuries ago? Something that reputable scientists believe is the only answer to this list of mysteries? That the moon is not what it seems or what we've been told. The moon is hollow, artificially constructed, and appeared in Earth's orbit from somewhere else far away. Makes sense to me. Does it make sense to you?

So what can science explain about the hollow moon spaceship theory? Well, the formation of the moon is still unknown, so score theory one, science zero. The density problem is said to be because after the giant impact, the Earth's upper mantle formed the moon. The mantle is much less dense than the core. Okay, the problem with this is the giant impact theory probably isn't what happened.

And the theory about the Earth and the Moon forming out of that big donut shape? Um, in geometry, that's called a torus. Taurus.

Well, that wouldn't explain the density discrepancy. We're told the moon ringing like a bell is because the moon is much less dense, and the moon's rock has much less water. So vibrations reverberate longer and farther. This can't be proven, but okay. The perfect eclipses? Well, here's where science wins. The eclipses aren't exact. They're close, but not perfect.

Besides, the moon is drifting farther away from the Earth every year, so eclipses are becoming less and less perfect all the time. And whether the moon arrived 14,000 years ago or was formed billions of years ago, it was much closer to the Earth, so it was much larger in the sky. Now, NASA claims that we know the moon isn't hollow because of seismic

observations and that's fair but it's still conjecture look we don't know for sure what's at the center of the earth much less what's at the center of the moon if there's anything at all right

Now, the structures are said to be shadows or optical illusions. Nope. And the lights are from meteor impacts or reflections from glassy patches on the surface. Nope. But the bottom line is this. Yes, the hollow moon spaceship theory is a wild one. I admit that. And many of the anomalies found on the moon can be explained. The explanations aren't perfect, but they're enough to satisfy skeptics. And I consider myself a skeptic, but I'm open-minded. I just want to know the truth.

When I started researching this story, I thought it would be a fun ride, a pure tinfoil hat experience that we could button up with science. That's not what happened. There's just so much unknown and unexplainable that something doesn't feel right about what we've been told about the moon.

But as always, the space agencies and the governments they serve are very selective about the images and information they release. So I have a message for them, for NASA, the European Space Agency, Russia, China, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and anyone with the resources to put people back on the moon. The message is this. If you want us to believe your explanations, you're going to have to prove it.

I told you the moon is weird. And now that more countries are going there, things are going to get interesting. Next up is a change of pace. True crime. This is a true crime story. I'm looking at my notes, but it fits the channel. So imagine this small town in Ohio. You start receiving letters, crazy handwritten letters in the mail. And these letters written in

Like the scrawlings of a madman. Know all your intimate secrets. Things that nobody knows. Not your spouse, nobody. And the thing is, these letters start going to everybody. Everyone in the neighborhood is getting these crazy letters with all their secrets. And then the letters start revealing secrets to the other neighbors. It...

It's dramatic. And people's lives were destroyed over this. And a couple of lives were lost because of this. This story is the Circleville Letters. This is a mystery that's gone on for decades. And it's still unsolved. 1-5-1-0-0

We all keep secrets. For most of us, these are nothing more than minor embarrassing details about ourselves. But some of us have dark secrets, which, if discovered, could destroy lives. For years, the residents of Circleville, Ohio, received bizarre threatening letters from someone who somehow knew every salacious detail of their personal lives. The letters cost people their jobs, their marriages, their freedom, and sometimes their lives. Overall,

A thousand letters were sent over 20 years, yet somehow whoever wrote them got away with it. Let's find out why.

Circleville, Ohio is about 25 miles south of Columbus. In the late 70s, it was the typical small American rural town. With a population of 13,000, Circleville has been described using cliches like nobody locks their doors and everybody knows everybody. A problem with small towns is that it's hard to keep secrets. This story begins in 1976. Circleville residents started receiving anonymous letters postmarked from Columbus

handwritten in strange block letters, and the letters were full of details of their private lives. There was never a return address, but the writer was clearly someone with intimate knowledge of the town's residents and their secrets. Gordon Massey was the superintendent of Westfall Schools in Circleville. When he got to work on the morning of March 3rd, 1977, there was a letter waiting for him. Dear sir...

According to my GF, you have asked her to go out many times. And have asked the other female bus drivers too. This must stop at once for the good of the school and families. If they are not stopped, I will be forced to write to the school board. And I would hate to do that. The prey on another man's girl is untouchable. I suggest you find yourself a pimple-faced whore and start up with her, and leave my girls alone.

And more letters followed, each with escalating threats. One even said they would cut the brake line in his car if he didn't stop sleeping with his employees.

That same day, a letter arrived with a school board describing how Massey approached, assaulted and sometimes carried on extramarital affairs with the female bus drivers. The writer demanded Massey be fired. He wasn't. He denied everything. And there was no proof of any wrongdoing. But a couple of weeks later, the school's vice principal received a letter. Near school. Talk to Gordon Massey about his affairs.

That letter was oddly specific.

Though he didn't name anyone, he used an employee number. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the school and its employees would have that information. They looked up the number 62917. It belonged to bus driver Mary Gillespie.

Mary Gillespie was not someone you'd suspect of a scandal. She had a nice group of friends and a close family who lived nearby. And according to everyone who knew her, Mary was a good friend, an attentive mother to her two children, and a loving wife to her husband, Ron. Mary led a quiet life.

But that would all change in March 1977. Mary opened her mailbox and found a strange anonymous letter, handwritten in eerie block letters. Stay away from Massey. Don't lie when questioned about knowing him. I know where you live and have been observing your house and know you have children. This is no joke. Please take it serious. Everyone concerned has been notified and everything will be over soon. This is upsetting, but rather than tell her husband Ron, she kept this to herself.

Over the next few weeks, more and more letters came in, and each one was more threatening than the last, and each revealing more personal information. The writer obviously knew where she lived, but also what bus she drove and the names of her husband and her children. Still, she ignored the letters.

So the writer raised the stakes. He wrote directly to Mary's husband, Ron Gillespie. The circle of the letter was gaining confidence. The letter to Ron described his wife's affair with Massey and threatened to kill him if he did nothing about it. The writer claimed to know where Ron worked and described his vehicle, a red and white pickup truck. Ron and Mary were definitely being watched.

And when Ron confronted Mary about the letter, she denied having an affair with Gordon Massey, but she admitted she'd been receiving similar letters for a few weeks. They decided once again to ignore them. But two weeks later, Ron received another. The letter writer had now changed the handwriting to be even blockier, probably to make it harder to trace. And this letter informed Ron that he knew that he had done nothing about Mary's affair with Massey. And if she didn't admit the truth,

The writer threatened to put up signs and billboards and broadcast the truth on CB. CB? Radio? Yeah, the buses communicated with each other with CB. Wow, CB takes me back. It does? Oh yeah, I used to drive truck in the 80s. Really? This is Hicklefish at the Porkchop Express and I'm talking to whoever's listening out there. It's like I told my last wife. I says, honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it's all in the reflexes.

That was a good one. Anyway, besides the letters, Mary and Ron started getting phone calls from the person they believed was writing them. They didn't know what to do or who to tell about the threatening letters and calls, so they went to the people they trusted the most, their family. This turned out to be a huge mistake.

To fight back against the anonymous letter writer, Ron and Mary Gillespie enlisted the help of Ron's sister and her husband, Karen and Paul Freshour. They put together a list of suspects. From the beginning, Mary suspected another school bus driver named David Longberry. David made a few passes at her and became resentful when she rejected him. So they decided that Paul Freshour would write to David Longberry.

In their letters, they told David that they knew what he was doing and threatened to go to the police if he didn't stop immediately. Did the letters stop? They stopped, and everyone's life went back to normal. Oh, boy. What? This is the part where you say everything was fine until... In August 1977, the letters and phone calls had stopped, but now...

Signs appeared. Suddenly, Ron and Mary began seeing signs posted all over the town written in the same crude block letters. They accused Gordon Massey of having an affair with Mary. Some even accused Massey of having an affair with Mary's daughter, Tracy, who is only 12 years old. Yeah, this isn't cute anymore. I hate this guy. I get it. So did Ron and Mary. In fact, every morning, Ron would get up early and drive around town, removing all the signs he could find.

so his wife and daughter wouldn't see them on their way to school. But things get worse. Mary Gillespie went out of town to clear her head. Ron stayed home in Circleville with the kids. On the evening of Friday, August 19th, the Gillespies' home phone rang.

The caller said he was watching the Gillespie house and he knew what Ron's truck looked like. This set Ron off. He started ranting that he recognized the voice as the letter writer and was finally going to put a stop to this. So he grabbed his pistol, kissed his daughter goodbye, hopped in his red and white pickup and tore out into the night. Did he find the guy? Ron Gillespie never made it home. Oh no.

Around 10:25 p.m., just a few minutes after Ron Gillespie left his house on his way to confront the letter writer, his red and white 1971 Ford pickup crashed into a tree. Though just a few miles away from his house on familiar roads, Ron apparently failed to make a turn. He was partially thrown from the truck and declared dead on arrival at the hospital.

When Pickaway County Sheriff Dwight Radcliffe arrived at the scene, something looked strange. A bullet had been fired from Ron's gun. But there was no bullet hole anywhere and no actual bullet, just an empty casing. The Gillespie family was convinced this was no accident. They believed Ron had caught up with the letter writer, took a shot at him, and lost control of his truck while in pursuit. Or they thought maybe Ron was run off the road. But...

An autopsy showed Ron's blood alcohol level was 0.16, twice the legal limit. As far as the sheriff was concerned, this was the answer. Ron had too much to drink, left the house in a rage and lost control of his vehicle. Case closed. The Gillespie family wasn't having it. Ron wasn't much of a drinker and he wouldn't leave his kids in the house alone unless he was dealing with something urgent. They wanted the sheriff to investigate further, but he wouldn't. Sheriff Radcliffe called the whole thing an accident.

Ron's family demanded to look at the truck, but they couldn't. It was sent to a junkyard and crushed just days after the incident. It was later learned that there was a suspect in custody, but they passed the polygraph test. It's assumed the suspect was David Longberry, but his name was never released. The town now had more questions than answers. Why did the sheriff suddenly change his mind? Who was the suspect? Why was the car quickly disposed of?

And why is the sheriff refusing to investigate? The town of Circleville now had a conspiracy on its hands and the letters kept coming. Now people were receiving letters claiming the sheriff was covering up the truth. Nobody was more vocal about this than Paul Freshour, Ron's brother in law. But Sheriff Radcliffe wouldn't budge. And two years later, we get a twist.

Two years after the death of her husband, Ron, Mary Gillespie finally admitted to having a relationship with Gordon Massey. What? But, but, but, but, but, but she said the affair started in 1979 after receiving the letters. Oh, come on.

She said the stress and the trauma brought them together. Hey, that's what she said. That's one way of looking at it. Mary hoped that finally being open about her relationship with Gordon Massey, the letters would stop. They kept coming. Over the next seven years, Mary Gillespie received almost 40 letters. She was called a cheater, a homewrecker, a murderer.

Some letters threatened the lives of her children. The signs continued too. Graphic images and vulgar language about her were posted all over town, specifically placed on her bus route so she and her children would see them. In 1983, Mary had enough.

She was driving her school bus near the intersection where her husband Ron died a few years earlier. There she saw a sign posted that talked about Massey and an inappropriate relationship with Mary's daughter, using very obscene language. She stopped the bus and went to grab the sign. Then she noticed a piece of string connecting the sign to a box about the size of a shoebox. And inside the box was a handgun propped up by styrofoam blocks.

And the string was connected to the trigger. When the police examined it, they told her the gun was loaded and set to fire. If Mary had pulled on the sign by standing in front of it, she would have been shot in the face or chest point blank. The Circleville letter writer was no longer just a nuisance. He wanted to trade ink for blood. But whose gun was this? Don't tell me. The serial number was filed off.

It was, but one of the forensics technicians was able to recover it. The gun belonged to a man named Wes Wesley. Who the hell is Wes Wesley? Wesley worked at Anheuser-Busch in Columbus. When police asked him about the gun, he said, yes, it was his, but he recently sold it to his supervisor at work. Who's his supervisor? Paul Freshour. What?!

So, the gun belonged to Paul Freshour, the man who kept trying to find answers to Mary's husband's death. The man Mary and Ron first went to to help with the letter writer. When the police questioned Ron Freshour about the gun, he freely admitted that it was his, but it had been stolen a few weeks earlier. Yeah.

He just forgot to report it. According to company records, Paul had taken the day off the day the trap was placed, but he had an alibi. Still, the sheriff brought him in for questioning. Paul insisted he was being framed and the letter writer was behind everything. And if the sheriff had done his job and caught whoever was writing the letters, Mary would have never been in danger and Ron would still be alive.

Well, the sheriff showed Paul Freshour a few of the Circleville letters. He asked Paul to copy them as best as he could, which he did. He then asked Paul to write a few sentences using that same handwriting if he could. So Paul did. The sheriff looked at what Paul had written and claimed this was a perfect match and placed Paul Freshour under arrest for the attempted murder of Mary Gillespie. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What? The sheriff told him to copy the letters? Yep.

And that's how the handwriting matched? Uh-huh. Now any judge would throw that evidence right out. Well, Paul Freshour was found guilty and sentenced to 7 to 25 years in prison. What? That's some sloppy police work. But at least they finally got the guy. And while Freshour was in prison... Don't tell me. The letters kept coming. Oh no!

While in prison, Paul Freshour continued to claim that he was innocent. He was imprisoned in Lima, Ohio, over 100 miles from Circleville. Yet somehow the letters kept coming. And like always, they were anonymous, written in that weird blocky handwriting and postmarked Columbus, Ohio.

By now, the letters were going all over central Ohio, not just Circleville. The prosecutor in Paul's case was accused of corruption. The coroner who did Ron Gillespie's autopsy was accused of child abuse, which actually turned out to be true. So who knows? Maybe there was a cover up. Over a thousand letters went out and some were even dusted with poison.

Sheriff Radcliffe demanded that the warden get Paul Freshour under control. The warden insisted there was no way Paul could be writing these. Not even putting Paul in solitary confinement stopped the letters. So in 1990, after being in jail for seven years, Paul Freshour was up for parole. The parole board said that his ongoing campaign of hate mail proves he's not ready to enter society. The warden even spoke up for Paul.

and said he was a model prisoner and absolutely could not be writing the letters. Still, his parole was denied. And shortly after that, Paul received a letter of his own. Fresh hour. Now, when are you going to believe you aren't getting out of there? I told you two years ago, when we set them up, they stay set up. Don't you listen at all. No one wants you out. No one. The joke is on you.

Tell no one of this letter. I saw the paper. Great news. Great. The sheriff loved it. Ha ha. Do you believe it now? Do you?

Wait, wait, wait. Did they say when we set him up? Yeah, it did. Interesting. Isn't it? They finally released Paul Freshour from prison in 1993 after 10 years. He proclaimed his innocence until his death in 2012. Around the same time Paul was released from prison, the Circleville letters stopped, and there hasn't been one since. When Paul Freshour was arrested, this case was officially closed.

But there are so many unanswered questions that even after all these years, the case is still fascinating. Every major true crime TV show, blog, and podcast have covered the Circleville Letters case. Even the show Unsolved Mysteries did two episodes on it.

In 2021, the CBS program 48 Hours had two FBI experts examine the letters. One said Paul definitely wrote them. The other said Paul definitely didn't write them. So let's look at the evidence and see if we can figure out who done it.

There are a few theories. Here are the primary suspects. Some think the answer is simple. Paul Freshour did it. It was his gun, his handwriting, that's it. Now, could Paul have sent hundreds of letters from prison, unnoticed, all postmarked Columbus, Ohio, over 100 miles away? Nope. Sure, I guess it's possible. Nope.

Some think it was David Longberry, the bus driver who made a pass at Mary who rejected him. Longberry was troubled. He got caught abusing a young girl and left town in 1993 to avoid prosecution. It was around this time that the letter stopped. But there was a large group of people, including professional investigators like Martin Yant, who think Paul's wife, Karen, deserves a closer look.

While all this was going on, Paul and Karen Freshour were going through an ugly divorce. Really, really nasty. When Martin Yant was investigating the case, he said he'd never seen someone hate another person as much as Karen hated her ex-husband, Paul Freshour. Yant discovered a witness that could have possibly exonerated Paul, and she made herself available to the defense, but was never called.

She was also a bus driver who had the same route as Mary. About 20 minutes before Mary found the trap, this witness says she saw a tall man with sandy brown hair near the sign and parked next to the sign was a yellow El Camino. Why is this important? Well, first of all, Paul was short with dark hair.

But at the time, Karen Freshour was dating someone, and he was described as tall with sandy brown hair. Any chance Karen's boyfriend had an El Camino? No. Karen's brother did. Oh no!

Maybe. Karen had multiple motives. Mary had cheated on her brother Ron, who is now dead. And if she could frame Paul for the murder, well, that solves two big problems for Karen. If you read the divorce decree, Paul pretty much got everything. The house, retirement savings, the kids. But if Paul goes to jail, Karen gets everything. In fact, Paul

Paul insisted this was her plan all along. Paul even believes his son Mark stole his gun a few weeks before the incident. And Paul didn't report it because he didn't want to see his teenage son go to jail. And Paul's son Mark became severely depressed and took his own life in 2002. And some have speculated that he just couldn't deal with the guilt anymore. And Karen testified against Paul that she had found dozens of letters in her home that she claimed Paul wrote.

When the court asked her to produce those, she said she threw them away. Also, during the divorce proceedings, Karen visited Paul's sister and asked to borrow a typewriter. And Paul's sister thought this was an odd request.

Yet at about the same time, the Circleville letters were no longer handwritten. They came typed. Martin Yant does not paint a very nice picture of Karen Freshour. But others come to her defense, saying she was a victim of domestic abuse and that Paul was the culprit all along. Okay, so who did it? Well, nobody really knows. But I think it started with Gordon Massey's son, William, and potentially David Longberry. The early letters were very specific.

and contain details that you'd only know or even care about if you worked in the school district. Karen and Paul Freshour knew Mary, but they wouldn't know her employee number. And once Mary and Ron Gillespie shared the letters with the Freshours, I think the Freshours found a way to wage an anonymous war against each other while going through their bitter divorce. Things quickly got out of control, as they tend to do, and lots of people got hurt.

But I can understand why all the players in this story are portrayed the way they are. The story of the Circle of the Letters has so many layers of mystery, it's only natural that if we can't solve the puzzle, let's at least try to put some pieces in place. And every good story needs a hero. That's Paul Freshour, a husband, a father, wrongfully accused and sent to prison. The villain is Karen, a vindictive wife obsessed with destroying her husband.

Mary is cast as deceitful and unfaithful, who had an affair that set the entire story in motion. Ron is a victim, a man trying to protect his family, who had the courage to confront his attacker and whether by accident or not, was killed. But the more you look into the story, and I encourage you to do so, there is a ton of material about it, you'll see that each of these characters is not so black and white. Everyone is a shade of gray. Now,

Now, I have a hard time believing Paul Freshour was the only letter writer, but also he wasn't the saint that a lot of the podcasts claim him to be. And Karen isn't as awful as is widely reported. In my opinion, the Circleville mystery has no villains. It also has no heroes. All this story has is victims. And if you want to solve this mystery because of curiosity, I think that's okay. Everyone loves a puzzle.

But there are some people who want to solve the Circleville letters because they think justice wasn't served and they want someone to pay. I'd encourage those people to really think about what these families and the community endured for 20 years. And before demanding punishment, they should ask themselves, haven't these people been through enough?

Now keep an eye out for the What Files. That's going to be another channel that we're launching that's going to be all true crime. And don't worry, I'm not hosting that. Ewan! Ewan! Great news! We got

Well, good, but what is that sound? What did you think? We'd get rid of the water with buckets? We're not savages. We're using a diesel-powered water pump. Yeah, but where are you sending the water? Your swimming pool. I don't have a swimming pool. Yeah, consider it an early Christmas gift. I don't...

Hang on, let me do this. Next video is Operation Mincemeat. This is where a single corpse determined the fate of World War II. British intelligence, using nothing more than a dead body and a briefcase full of lies, tried to deceive Hitler. But the consequences of this operation rippled far beyond the 1940s. It's a fun one. There, there.

On April 30th, 1943, in the middle of World War II, a body washed up on the shore of Huelva, Spain. The deceased man was wearing a British military uniform. There was a briefcase strapped to his body containing British and American military secrets. The man was Major William Martin, a Royal Marine who was the single victim of a fatal plane crash at sea.

He had just returned from temporary leave in London, where he had gone to the theater and purchased an engagement ring for his fiancee, Pam. But there was something very strange about Major William Martin. He didn't exist.

It was the winter of 1942, and the Allies needed a win. Hitler's Nazi war machine had steamrolled all of Europe, and everybody knew England was next. The United States had just been dragged into the war by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and American bodies were piling up by the thousands. Inside job. What? Pearl Harbor was an inside job. Didn't you see that image that was going around? Show me. See, look.

the planes fly this distance in 1931? Uh, you know that was meant as a joke. Eh, maybe. And you know the Earth is round, right? Allegedly. No, it really is. Could be round, could be flat. You know, who's to say? Uh, science is to say. Oh, right. Science. I tried to make air quotes, but my fins wouldn't bend. Anyway...

German forces were better trained, better equipped, and of singular purpose. But Germany did have a weakness. It's not a country rich in natural resources. To wage war in the 1940s, you need iron, oil, rubber, and food. Germany had to import all of these. If the Allies could disrupt Germany's supply lines, the Germans would no longer have the ability to fight, and the war could come to a quick close.

but that was easier said than done. German engineers were among the best in the world. Every time the German army seized an inch of land, it was quickly fortified. Any allied advance on mainland Europe would be repelled and would result in catastrophic losses.

but the coastline of the Mediterranean was not as heavily fortified. UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill called this the soft underbelly of Europe. The key to taking back Europe was Italy, and the key to taking Italy was Sicily. Unfortunately, the Germans understood the strategic importance of Sicily as well. They were fully expecting the Allies to attack it.

And if the Allies had any hope of winning, they'd need the element of surprise. MI5, Britain's intelligence agency, was tasked with tricking the Germans into thinking the Allies would attack Greece instead. If the Germans bought the ruse, they would divert forces from Sicily to Greece, leaving Sicily unprotected and ensuring an easy win for the Allies.

One of the British intelligence officers working on crafting this deception was Charles Chumley. Hang on. What? Chumley, that's not what it says on the screen. Yeah, I know. That's how he pronounced his name. Well, he pronounced it wrong. Chumley's primary role in the war effort was an ideas guy. Charles Chumley remembered a top-secret memo distributed to British wartime intelligence at the beginning of the war. It became known as the Trout Memo because it compared intelligence to fly fishing. Oh.

Why would anyone want to catch flies? No, no. Fly fishermen try to catch fish. Those fishermen.

The Trout Memo listed 51 specific ideas for fooling the Germans. The list was pretty wacky. It included dropping glow-in-the-dark footballs in the water to attract submarines. There was one about a fake treasure ship, and there was another about explosives being disguised as food. But the craziest idea in the Trout Memo was number 28. It involved loading up a corpse with phony documents, then dropping the corpse from a plane behind enemy lines.

And when you read the entire Trout memo, you can't help but think whoever thought of this stuff would be great at writing spy novels. The Trout memo officially was written by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, but it was actually written by Godfrey's assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, the same Ian Fleming who went on to become a novelist best known for a series featuring the character James Bond. Idea number 28 on Ian Fleming's Trout memo was titled A Suggestion and Not a Very Nice One.

The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thompson: "A corpse, dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed." I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but of course it would have to be a fresh one.

The idea was so crazy that Chumley thought it might be just the way to fool the Germans into believing the Allies were planning to attack Greece instead of Sicily. He presented it to his superiors,

and they assigned a naval officer named Ewan Montague to help him develop the plan. Before the war, Ewan Montague was a lawyer. He came from an extremely wealthy family of bankers. And when the war broke out, he was too old for active service, but found himself rising through the ranks of naval intelligence. You know, I noticed that people from wealthy families tend to rise through the ranks rather quickly. Yeah, that does seem to be the case.

As it turned out, an inclination for wartime intelligence work ran in the family. Ewan didn't know it at the time, but his own brother, Ivor Montague, was actually a spy for the Soviet Union. Uh-oh. Well, luckily, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom were fighting this war on the same side. That's true. So did this Igor... Ivor. Ivor. Ivor. Ivor. Did he stop spying for the Russians after the war?

- Uh-huh. - The Montagues were also Jewish, so Ewan's wife and children spent the war in America for safety reasons. Ewan wanted in on this unique operation, to serve his country, of course, but also to keep his mind off how much he missed his wife. Chumley and Montague fleshed out the plan for their mission.

they would deliver a dead body via a submarine just off the coast of Spain. The body would be carrying information identifying him as a Royal Marine and most importantly, falsified documents regarding an upcoming military offensive in Greece. Spain was the ideal country to find the body because though they were officially neutral, they were in close communication with the Germans.

And if military secrets washed up on the Spanish shores, there was a good chance those secrets would end up in the hands of the Germans. Chamlea Montague had the plan. Now they just needed a dead body. But not just any dead body. It had to be male and of military age.

The cause of death needed to line up with the story of a plane crash at sea. So drowning, exposure, shock, or traumatic injury. And the man shouldn't have any pesky family members who might not appreciate their loved one's corpse being dressed up as someone else and taken out of the country. Ewan Montague was friendly with a local coroner who agreed to keep an eye out for just such a body. It is.

And on January 26th, 1943, the coroner called Montague and told him, I got one. Glendermichael had a hard life. His father attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the neck with a knife. He was taken to a mental hospital where he caught influenza and later died. His

His mother struggled to care for the family on her own. They were often homeless and there was never enough food. Shortly before the war, she died of a heart attack. Glender was declared ineligible for military service, though it's not clear why. It could have been for poor physical health, poor mental health or both. He eventually became homeless and wandered the streets of London. On January 26th, 1943, Glender Michael consumed rat poison in an abandoned warehouse.

It could have been suicide, but most likely he was starving and found some bread. The bread had been laced with rat poison and Glender died two days later. Death by rat poison is a rough way to go. But considering the forensic technology available at the time, dying from rat poisoning could pass for drowning. Chumlee and Montague now had a body.

Not for long, though. Montague's coroner buddy, Corpse Guy, stressed that Glender's body was already starting to decompose. He could keep him on ice, but he needed to be deployed within the next three months. At this point, Chumlee and Montague's mission had also been given an official codename, Operation Mincemeat. And this was a dark joke. Mincemeat

Mincemeat is a recipe combining chopped meat or animal fat with fruit and spices and whatever you've got lying around. And when those things you've got lying around include sugar and alcohol, it's a good way to preserve meat. At this time in the UK, people needed to preserve meat to make their rations last longer. But this time, the meat was a man.

It turned out that acquiring a highly specific dead body was the easy part. - It's good to have a corpse guy. - Now Montague and Chumlee needed to create a new identity from thin air, and it had to stand up to German scrutiny. He needed to be a military officer if it was going to be believable that he had possession of sensitive documents. They chose the Royal Marines because it was a common uniform and easy to get. To avoid the uniform looking too new, Chumlee wore it every day for the next three months. Now they needed a name.

Montague and Cholmondeley looked through the list of servicemen and found several Royal Marines named William Martin who were around the rank of captain.

The Germans likely had access to the same list of names, but not their postings. So Montague and Chumley borrowed the name. The fictional William Martin also needed identification. Royal Marines carried ID cards on them at all times that included a picture. Montague and Chumley attempted to photograph the dead body, but this was unsuccessful. - They couldn't pull a weekend at Bernie's. - Well, they tried, but the body was in rough shape and getting worse. The pictures were frightening.

But working in another department was a man who looked similar to Glendor Michael, and he was willing to be photographed. Montague and Chumlee barred his face. There was one more thing they needed, but this one they wouldn't be able to give back.

A British military officer at the time would have been wearing underwear. Underwear was rationed in the UK at the time, meaning you couldn't find it in a store and no one was giving theirs up. Ah, and this is where the expression going commando comes from. Uh, I don't think that's right. Well,

Montague presented this predicament to one of his superiors, and it just so happened that one of his superior's academic enemies had recently been run over by a truck. He was delighted to acquire his former colleague's underwear for Operation Mincemeat. Montague and Chumlee now turned their attention from the physical to the fictional.

They needed a backstory for Major William Martin. Every night they would go out with a few of their colleagues and fill in details on William Martin's backstory. He liked fishing and was bad with money. He was romantic and secretly wanted to be a writer. The team came to view Major William Martin as a friend. The backstory they created would be told to the Spanish who found the body and hopefully the Germans they showed it to in the form of pocket litter.

Pocket litter is the term for the random stuff people carry in their pockets. For the fictional William Martin, that included his falsified military ID card, the military documents hinting at the Allied plans to invade Greece, ticket stubs from the theater, a receipt for an engagement ring, an overdraft letter from the bank, and a photograph and love letter from his fiancée Pam. Jean Leslie, a secretary working at the agency, agreed to provide a photograph.

Jean now became Major Martin's fiancée Pam. And here's where things get a little awkward. Ewan and Jean began spending a lot of time together. They went dancing, they went to the movies. But not as themselves, not as Ewan and Jean. As William and Pam. They may have been playing characters, but the romance was real enough that Montague's own mother wrote to his wife suggesting she come back to the UK as soon as she could. But there was one last, very important letter to be written.

the military communication from a general revealing the supposed joint American and British attack on Greece. The work on this letter took over a month, and after many drafts were written by an increasingly frustrated Ewan Montague, they just had the general write the letter himself. - Nobody likes getting notes. - That's true.

And in the letter was placed a single eyelash. Eyelash? Yep. The British needed to know if the letter was opened. If the plan worked, they'd have the documents returned to them. If the eyelash was missing, that means someone opened the letter. Yeah.

But the month of rewrites was a problem, considering the three-month window given to Operation Mincemeat by the coroner. Go up, Skye. They needed to get Glender Michael, the photo of Jean, the worn uniform, the love letters, the dead academic's underwear, the all-important military document, and the pocket litter to Spain. And they needed to do it fast. Because acting major William Martin was starting to rot.

At this time, MI5 employed one of the UK's most famous race car drivers. During the war, Jack Horsefall had been recruited by British intelligence to provide transportation for its agents when they needed to get somewhere and get out of somewhere fast. In this case, he needed to transport Ewan Montague, Charles Chumley, and a secret package from England to Scotland, where Ewan and Charles would meet a submarine that would deliver Major William Martin to a specific location off the coast of Spain.

Glendermichael's body had been placed in a special container that was created for this exact purpose. It was essentially a thin coffin packed with dry ice. This would help keep the body cold to slow down the decomposition process and help keep it secret. It would also save the submarine's crew from being trapped in a small space with a very bad smell. They decided to travel overnight to risk being seen,

But the UK was under a strict blackout at the time. Every night, entire cities went dark to make them harder for German bombers to identify from overhead. This meant all streetlights were out and all vehicle headlights had to be covered. So Montague and Chumlee were going to be driven at high speed by a race car driver in pitch darkness.

And by the way, Jack Horsefall was legally blind and refused to wear glasses. Kind of a badass. Maybe, or stupid. Horsefall wouldn't wear glasses because he was always very well-dressed. He liked martinis and was famous for driving an Aston Martin. Which is like... James Bond. You'll be using this Aston Martin DB5 with modifications. Now, pay attention, please. No!

James Bond was a composite character based on real people that Ian Fleming knew, including Jack Horsefall. The overnight road trip from England to Scotland was crazy and included a couple of close calls, but they made it to Scotland on time. In Scotland, they met the crew of the submarine HMS Seraph,

and loaded in their suspiciously large container, which was labeled optical instruments. In the early morning hours of April 30th, 1943, the submarine reached its destination. The officers aboard the HMS Serif performed a brief funeral service for Glender Michael, then placed his body with the briefcase attached into the water.

Then the sub was positioned in a way that the propellers could be used to propel the body toward the shore. They gunned the engine and the body was on its way. Their final task was to sink the body's container, and this turned out to be one of the biggest hurdles Operation Mincemeat faced. Part of the special container's cooling system included air pockets, and so when placed in the water, it floated. They tried shooting at it, but it still wouldn't sink.

And if they couldn't sink it, this would be a big problem. Imagine a strange coffin riddled with bullet holes washing up on shore just after Major William Martin's body. The Spanish would know things were not as they seemed. So the sheriff crew decided to blow it up. The explosion was loud, but the container did finally sink. And Major Martin, he ended up on the beach.

At around 9:30 on the morning of April 30th, 1943, the body of Royal Marine Acting Major William Martin was discovered by a fisherman in Huelva, Spain. This was chosen as the drop off site because of one specific Huelva resident, Adolf Klaus. That's the most German name I ever heard. Klaus was a notorious German spy who was the key to making sure the falsified documents were seen by the Germans.

The fishermen who found the body notified the Spanish authorities, who informed the British consulate in Spain, and now began a delicate diplomatic dance. After enough time had passed for news of Major William Martin's death to travel through official British channels, the British needed to start requesting Martin's briefcase. And by pushing for the return of the briefcase, it would alert the Spanish and hopefully the Germans that there was something juicy inside.

But they couldn't push too hard, or the Spanish might return the briefcase before the Germans could get a peek. But they did eventually need to get the documents back if this thing was going to work.

Because look, if the Germans believed that the British believed that their documents had been lost and the Germans had possibly gained possession of them, they would likely cancel the planned Greek attack. No reason to attack if the Germans know it's coming. And that couldn't be allowed to happen. The Germans had to read the letter and have it returned unopened. So a delicate dance. Less delicate was the matter of the autopsy.

Glendermichael had of course not died by drowning or blunt trauma or shock or exposure. He ate rat poison. A detailed autopsy would almost certainly have revealed that something was off. But by this time, the stench of the body was so foul that the British vice consul who was aware of Operation Mincemeat was able to cut the autopsy short. He told the staff in the coroner's office, "It's hot, this place stinks. Let's go grab lunch instead, I'm buying." And that was the end of the autopsy.

A few days later, a funeral was held for Major William Martin. He was buried in Spain with full military honors. Among the crowd of mourners was the German spy, Adolf Klaus. Adolf knew about Major William Martin's arrival in Spain and was already working on obtaining a copy of the documents. It took a week and a half, but the documents did make their way into the hands of the Germans before finally being returned. No eyelash? No eyelash. Together,

To get the letter out of the envelope, the Germans inserted a thin wire and actually wound the letter into a tight scroll. The scroll was carefully pulled from a small fold in the envelope. It was dried, copied, twisted around the wire again, and put back in the envelope without breaking the wax seal. It was then soaked in seawater and returned. Even if the eyelash was there, the British would have known the letter was red because when they dried it out, it curled up like a potato chip.

And then the information from the falsified documents made it all the way to Hitler.

On July 9th, 1943, the joint American and British invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation Husky, began. The Allies were met with stormy weather, but little German resistance. The enemy was too busy planning for the invasion of Greece. Hitler had bought the Operation Mincemeat deception completely. The British had expected 10,000 killed or wounded in the first week of fighting, but only suffered 1,400 losses. The Navy expected that 300 ships would be sunk in the action, but they lost only 12.

The predicted 90-day campaign was over in 38 days. Operation Mincemeat is now considered one of the greatest episodes of wartime deception in history, and it's broadly credited with one of the turning points of World War II. But this successful operation had a dark side effect. It ushered in a new era of espionage. It opened a Pandora's box of intelligence operations focused on deception, but

But the targets of the deception were no longer military. The targets were now civilians. In 1942, the United States military created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. This was an intelligence agency modeled after Britain's MI6. After the war, the OSS was dissolved. But in 1947, a new intelligence agency was created, the CIA.

Technically, the CIA is a civilian agency tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world.

But CIA operations are much more creative and devious than simple intelligence gathering. In 1953, the CIA helped overthrow Iran's government via Operation Ajax. In 1954, Operation PB Success overthrew the president of Guatemala, a democratically elected president. Syria, Indonesia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Uruguay, Panama. In these countries and many others, the CIA attempted coups.

attempted to remove elected leaders and in some cases, assassinate those leaders. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is taught in every American school. It's a story about Soviet aggression and the bravery of President JFK.

What's not taught is that in the years leading up to the crisis, the CIA established a base of operations in Miami. The only place that had more CIA officers in the world was headquarters in Langley. - These men belong to a terrorist organization responsible for a recent wave of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations.

They are Cuban exiles waging a terrorist war against Fidel Castro, and their base of operations is an American city. From the Miami base, Operation JM Wave was launched. Cuban exiles were recruited and trained by the CIA to operate as agents.

Those agents then spent years engaging in an extensive campaign of terrorism on economic and civilian targets. A lot of civilians were killed, and this was a major factor in the Soviet decision to place missiles on Cuba. These terrorist attacks continued for years. In 1976, Cubana Flight 455 was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 73 people aboard. The CIA was immediately suspected, but naturally they denied it.

But in 2007, independent research connected the bombing to a CIA asset.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA spun up the Phoenix Program. This program was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong, the VC, via infiltration, assassination, terrorism, and torture. Phoenix was shut down after the abuse, torture, and murder were exposed. In the 1970s back home, the CIA's Operation Chaos targeted anti-war protesters. I thought the CIA only operates overseas and doesn't spy on Americans.

Yeah, yeah, I realized how stupid I sounded when I said it. Hey, it's a good thing that the CIA, FBI, and other agencies aren't being weaponized and used against American citizens, eh? Sarcasm!

Operation Condor ran for over 20 years and was a program of terrorism, assassination, and overthrow attempts of every socialist leader in South America. There's compelling evidence to show that for over 30 years, the CIA helped organize, train, and fund death squads in El Salvador. During the US-inspired civil war, at least 75,000 civilians were killed. MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program

The CIA was testing drugs that could be used to force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The program ran for 20 years before being exposed. Through the '80s and '90s, the CIA was the biggest illegal drug trafficking and money-longering operation in the world, though this is only alleged. Operation Mincemeat is hailed as a great success, a major turning point in World War II that led to the Allied victory and probably saved millions of lives. And I believe that's true.

But out of the ashes of the war, and emboldened by the success of the OSS, emerged the CIA.

Now, the CIA and its defenders will say that, yes, mistakes were made, but the ultimate goal of the agency is to protect American lives and America's interests overseas. And that's what we're taught here in the U.S., and that's what we're shown in every movie about the CIA, which all have to be approved by the CIA. But there are people around the world and throughout history that view the CIA as an instrument of evil.

Thousands, perhaps millions of people would say the CIA is the most villainous organization ever conceived by man. And I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying every story has two sides. So is the CIA a hero or a villain? Well, it all depends on which side of the table you're sitting, on which end of the gun you are, on which end of the needle, on whether you are the tortured or the torturer.

Now, given the nightmarish abuses and atrocities it's committed, and given the political weaponization of the agency that exists today, the CIA, at least the way it's currently structured, might be doing more harm than good. But if America is going to have a powerful intelligence agency like the CIA, and I think it should, that agency needs to do better. And we the people, we need to demand it.

Okay, let's bring it back to the present. At the Las Vegas airport, there's a terminal with no official name that operates an airline with no official name that has airplanes with no markings. And every day they fly out to the desert and turn off their transponders illegally and no one knows where they go. Yeah.

Go to Area 51. Why would you spoil the ending? I didn't know you were talking about Area 51. You weren't exactly subtle with your clues. Anyway, next up is Janet Airlines. J-A-N-E-T. Just another non-existent terminal. Um, you could visit the terminal if you want to, but I don't recommend it. Go to Area 51.

One of the government's biggest secrets is hiding in plain sight in Las Vegas. Janet is the top secret government airline that doesn't exist. Let's find out why.

All right, here's what you do. Next time you're in Vegas, visit one of the big casinos next to McCarran Airport. I'm talking about Luxor, Excalibur, Mandalay Bay. You're going there anyway. So when you get there, look east at the airport. Okay. All day long, but especially early in the morning and late in the evening, you'll see mysterious planes taking off and landing. And you can't miss them. They're big. They're Boeing 737s. And...

And they have no markings, no logos. They're plain white with a single red stripe. This is Janet Airlines. Where are we going with this? Well, Janet is a top secret Air Force owned commuter airline for civilians. And Janet's mission is to fly employees, contractors and government VIPs into and out of America's top secret installations. OK, I'm interested.

But the destination Janet goes to the most, I'm talking a few times a day, is... Please say it, please say it. Area 51. Yes, grab your tinfoil hat.

An airline call sign is how planes are identified on the radio. And call signs are often simple, like American 441 or Delta 54. And sometimes call signs have a little more pizzazz, like British Airways uses Speedbird and China Airlines uses the call sign Dynasty. Then there's the call sign Janet. Just Janet.

Janet! For years, Janet has been a mystery. It's an airline that really isn't an airline. The fleet uses no logos or special markings of any kind. But for years, Janet has been operating in plain sight, taking hundreds of people into and out of McCarran Airport in Las Vegas every day. Now, the only way to fly Janet is if you're a government contractor or employee with very, very high security clearance. Don't don't just show up at the terminal. How you doing? Clear.

Okay. Step up here for me. I'm right there. Who could you point me to at the base who could give me some information? Okay, what I want to tell you right now, you're trespassing on private property. Is it government property or is it just private? No comment. You're trespassing. You're trying to kid, bud. I just kind of...

me and quit it. Janet isn't even the airline's real name. It officially doesn't have one, though people have said it stands for Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation or just another nonexistent terminal. Oh, creepy. Now, if you didn't know any better, day to day activity at the Janet terminal looks completely normal. Overnight, there are only 20 or 30 cars in the parking lot.

But during the day, there were hundreds of cars parked there. People show up in civilian clothing. They get on the planes. They go to work. Most of the passengers fit on four seven three sevens. They're gone all day. They come back in the evening, get in their cars and they go home. Just no big whoop. But

But where do these people actually go every day? Well, the government won't tell us. In fact, the government hasn't acknowledged that Janet even exists. Naturally. So let's do some digging. Janet planes have airline codes and flight numbers just like regular commercial planes. And just like typical planes, Janet's planes are equipped with transponders that allow them to be tracked using a few websites linked below. You can track almost every flight in the world. But something strange happens when you track a Janet flight.

As soon as it gets about 20 minutes north of Las Vegas, the plane vanishes. Whoa. You know what's up there? Area 51. The government officially calls it Homey Airport or Groom Lake. But yeah, that's Area 51.

Well, how do we know? Well, first of all, unless it's an emergency, planes are required to keep their transponders on. But when a Janet airline enters Area 51 airspace, it turns off its transponder every time. And second of all, the airspace around Area 51 is highly restricted. But if you try to fly in without permission, best case scenario is you'll be escorted out by fighter jets. Worst case scenario, you'll be turned into scrap metal by fighter jets.

Either way, there's fighter jets. Janet also flies to Air Force Plant 42, the Tonopah Military Test Range, and the China Lake Weapons Testing Facility. Now, these are the most restricted airspaces in the world, but somehow, every day, Janet Airlines fly in and out of them without a problem. Okay, so here's the current Janet fleet. Hey, uh, should we be showing this? What? This is public information. Yeah, that wasn't my question. What was that? You hear that? F***.

So using the fleet information, you can go to the FAA website and see who owns the plane. So let's do that.

Bingo. Right. OK, so this definitely is a U.S. government plane that is owned by the U.S. Air Force. Considering the patterns of the flights, it's safe to conclude that the planes are definitely taking government employees to the facilities where they work. But the destinations are also classified. Frequently, a Janet flight will tell the tower it's going to one place, but actually go somewhere completely different. The government lies. Well, you can knock me over with a feather.

But Janet is not technically operated by the government. It operates like a civilian airline. OK, so if the Air Force owns the airline but doesn't operate it, who does?

So who actually operates Janet Airlines? A little cyber sleuthing gives us more clues. Area 51 was originally established by the CIA as a secure airport for testing advanced aircraft and testing other things. In the early 70s, authority of the base transferred from the CIA to the Air Force. At that time, employees were either bussed in or they took shuttle flights from Lockheed Martin in Burbank, California. Lockheed Martin again. Yep.

And for you guys that are new to this channel, it seems like we can't get through a single conspiracy video without Lockheed Martin coming up. This is not an accident. Doesn't seem to be. A few years later, Janet Operation was transferred to defense contractor EG&G. And EG&G was one of the companies who helped develop the atomic bomb. So. So they were involved in shady stuff.

They were. EG&G bought a few used planes from China, transitioned the fleet to Boeing 737s and moved the op to Gold Coast Terminal in Las Vegas. Now, if you Google the location of the Janet Airlines terminal, you get something called the AECOM hangar, which Google describes as a non-governmental organization. Suspicious. I thought so, too. So let's backtrack.

AECOM Hangar used to be called the Gold Coast Terminal. The original operator of the Gold Coast was defense contractor EG&G. How do we know it was EG&G? Well, they posted a job listing saying so, and I'll link it below. Now, EG&G was acquired by the Carlyle Group in 1999, which was acquired by the URS Corporation in 2002, which was acquired by AECOM in 2014. So AECOM Hangar. That's a huckleberry. Yep. So what does AECOM do? Well,

Well, the company describes itself very vaguely as a global network of design, engineering, construction and management professionals partnering with clients to imagine and deliver a better world. Word salad. With revenues of $18 billion. Word salad with government contracts. Yep. And there's more. AECOM recently posted a job opening for a first officer slash co-pilot in Las Vegas, Nevada. The preferred qualifications include Boeing 737 experience,

Okay. And high performance and or jet aircraft experience. Okay. The job listing doesn't make any reference to Janet, but candidates must qualify for and maintain a top secret government security clearance. Yep. That's Janet. Definitely Janet. This week, we've heard the contention of UFO researchers that there is a secret government within our government. While that may be hard to believe coming from the UFO perspective, we've certainly learned at Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal.

that factions within our government can and do pursue their own hidden agendas outside of the law, outside the control of Congress, or the knowledge of the American people.

Area 51 is inside the Nevada test and training range, which is made up of smaller, distinct areas with different purposes. And many sections are designated Area X. So yes, there is an Area 49, an Area 50, an Area 52, and so on. Now, surrounding Area 51 is Nellis Air Force Range, which covers a huge amount of Southern Nevada. Now, at

At various points in time, Area 51 has been called the Watertown Strip, Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Homey Airport, The Area, The Remote Location, or Out of Town. Isn't that cute? Or sometimes it's simply referred to as Nowhere. Nowhere?

It's a place we've been there sucks. Area 51 has been home to some of America's most highly secret aviation programs, among other things. This is where the U2 spy plane and Lockheed A-12 were secretly tested, where the F-117 Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft was developed before being deployed to the Gulf. And now who really knows what's hiding in the hangars? They're unidentified.

But we do know that on average, about a thousand people a day take Janet planes from Vegas to Area 51 and back. Could they be working on the Lockheed SR-72, a spy plane capable of Mach 6 or 4,600 miles an hour? Or are they working on the B-21 Raider, a new generation of stealth bomber that can deliver a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world? Or...

He says he was hired to work at an area called S4, which is a few miles south of Groom Lake. At S4, he says, are flying saucers, antimatter reactors, and other working examples of technology that is seemingly beyond human capabilities. Right, this came from somewhere else. I mean, as bizarre as that is to believe, but I mean, it's there, I saw it. I know what the current state of the art is in physics, and it can't be done.

Could these people be commuting from Las Vegas on a secret airline to work on extraterrestrial spacecraft? I think so. It's possible. Nobody really knows. But every year we seem to get closer to some kind of reveal. For years, the government denied Area 51 even existed, but finally admitted it in 2013. And after years of denial, the CIA just released a bunch of UFO documents acknowledging they exist.

And a full document dump is happening later this year. Air Force and Navy pilots are coming forward with stories and footage. Major news organizations are covering UFOs as legitimate stories. Every day for at least a couple of years. Wait a minute, every day for a couple of years? UFOs aren't fringe anymore. People, regular, normal people, want to know what's going on. The U.S. government won't acknowledge that Janet Airlines exists, but...

That's OK. We know that it does. Considering the ubiquity of information today and the speed at which it travels, it's becoming more and more difficult for governments to keep secrets from its citizens. And overall, that's a good thing. Now, I live in Las Vegas and I work pretty close to the airport and I see those planes all the time. You mean we got a problem? We.

I don't like the sound of that. Do we have a code brown? Just tell me, what did you find?

Bones like a body? No, no, no. Dinosaur bones. Are you sure they're dinosaur bones? A hundred percent. Morgan has a master's in paleontology. He says it's an allosaurus. Allosaurus? It's a large carnivorous theropod that lived during the late Jurassic period. I know. Wait, what's the problem? Well, this fuzzy moron sent a picture to his buddy at the Natural History Museum. Now the whole freaking neighborhood knows. Our entire property is cordoned off and

Three months? I told you not to...

Did you just say bowling alley? Great. Oh, I'm sure he loved that. Great. Thanks. Let me wrap this up and I will get over there.

I don't, I lost my place. I'm out of sorts. Ah, last episode for today is one of my favorite internet mysteries, Cicada 3301. One day, out of nowhere, an image appears on 4chan, the picture of a duck. Nobody knows what it is. Some people do some digging and realize the image contains a secret message, and that leads to a series of puzzles that become more and more difficult to solve.

And that leads to an international scavenger hunt with all these puzzles and mysteries to solve. And it spans a couple of years. And the thing is, nobody knows who is behind Cicada 3301. But it all seems very deliberate. Early in the morning of January 4th, 2012, a strange message appeared on the internet. Just a few lines of text on a black background posted anonymously. Hello? Hello?

We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301.

Many speculated that it was a recruiting tool for the NSA, the CIA, MI6, or even the Masons. But who was really behind this? And what was its purpose? And did it even have a purpose? Whether it did or not, it didn't matter. Because when you post a puzzle on the internet looking for highly intelligent people, that's a challenge that's simply impossible to resist. So the hunt for Cicada 3301 was on. ♪

On January 4th, 2012, the first puzzle was posted on 4chan by a self-identified group called 3301. The post was simply an image with text. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us.

The puzzle was open to anyone and everyone. As you solve each clue, you move on to the next level. The image that was posted on 4chan was the first clue. Solvers tried various methods to extract the secret message. Some used Photoshop to view the pixels. They applied different filters and techniques to see what could be hidden in the image. But the solution to the puzzle wasn't visual. It was plain text.

When an image is opened in a text editor, it looks like nonsense, strings of characters and symbols. But to a computer, these symbols make sense. It's a binary format representing pixel placement, color information, metadata, and all kinds of other stuff. And when the 3301 image was opened in a text editor, there was a string of characters at the end of the file.

Because of the repeating characters and the name Tiberius Claudius Caesar, people quickly and correctly guessed the message was encoded with a Caesar cipher. A Caesar cipher works by shifting the letters of the alphabet a fixed number of places down or up. You choose a shift value, for example, three. And for each letter in the original text,

replace it with the letter that's located three positions down. If you reach the end of the alphabet, you wrap around to the beginning. For example, using a shift value of three, A becomes D, B becomes E, C becomes F, and so on. The Caesar cipher is easy to crack with modern methods and isn't considered secure, but it's historically significant and often used as a basic introduction to cryptography. Such was the case with the first puzzle. When the

When the message was decoded with a shift of four places, the result was a URL, which turned out to be another image. - Whoops, just decoys this way. Looks like you can't guess how to get the message out.

The participants hit their first wall. Opening this image in a text editor showed nothing. Turned out that the image contained two keywords that hint at how to get the real message out. The words guess and out. Those keywords indicated you needed to run the image through OutGuess, a small application used for steganography. Throughout this complicated scavenger hunt,

Outguess would become a favorite tool of Cicada 3301. Now, steganography is hiding a message, image, or file within another message, image, or file. Unlike encryption, which scrambles data so that it's unreadable without the correct key, steganography conceals the fact that a secret message exists at all. Imagine you have a digital photo and you want to hide a text message in it. You

You could subtly change the color values of certain pixels to encode the text. To anyone looking at the image, it appears normal. But someone who knows where and how to look could extract the hidden message. Outguess revealed a page on Reddit and a different clue, a book cipher. ♪

Book ciphers are almost impossible to crack without the book. But 3301 knew how to give us just enough information to keep us hooked. And people were hooked. So when solvers finally made it to Reddit, they realized that Cicada 3301 was just warming up.

When the image of the duck was processed without guess, it revealed a URL and a book cipher. A book cipher is a type of encryption where the key to deciphering the code is a specific text, such as a book or article. Each word or letter in the secret message is replaced by a coordinate that points to its location in the chosen text.

For example, if the word Apple is found on page 42, line 5, word 3 of the book, you'd replace Apple in your message with the coordinates 42, 5, 3. The Beal ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts that

that supposedly reveal the location of $43 million of hidden treasure somewhere in Bedford County, Virginia. They were first published in 1885, and the second text was actually decoded using the Declaration of Independence. The other two texts are still a mystery, but over 100 years later, people are still looking. - Yeah, 43 mil keeps you motivated. - It does.

So to decode 3301's book cipher, we'll need the book, which could be found on Reddit. But when you got to the page on Reddit, it was full of posts with encrypted titles. There was also an odd image in the header. Even the page had a title that looked like random characters. But by now, everyone knew there was nothing random about it. There were also several lines of text and two additional images. Using Outguess on the Welcome Mat image gives us this.

From here on out, we will cryptographically sign all messages with this key. It is available on the MIT key servers. Patience is a virtue. Good luck. 3301. This information was extremely important to the people following the clues. There were a lot of imposters popping up pretending to be Cicada 3301. But because 3301 implemented PGP encryption, new messages could be authenticated.

PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, and this is an encryption system used for sending emails and sensitive files. How it works is you create two keys. One is public, which you share with everyone. The other is private, which only you have.

So if someone wants to send you a secure message, they encrypt it with the public key that you shared, and then you use your private key to decode the message. 3301 would encrypt all their clues going forward, like the clue hidden in the second image, which was a stereogram, which is an optical illusion that creates a 3D image when viewed in a specific way. This stereogram kind of looked like the Holy Grail. - Cute. - And this image also contained a secret message.

The key has always been right in front of your eyes. This isn't the quest for the Holy Grail. Stop making it more difficult than it is. Good luck. 3301. - The subreddit also contained many lines of what appeared to be encrypted text. The question that everyone faced was, which cipher method had to be used and how do you find the key? The hidden message provided a hint. The key was literally in front of your eyes. It was the image in the header.

Those symbols are actually Mayan numbers. The title translates to... What are you talking about? The clue. I'm going to solve this one. Okay. What is it? Yeah. No. The letters make up a... No, they make up a...

No, it's a key. It's not a Mayan word. It's an encryption key. Remember the subreddit was full of posts with encrypted titles? It was determined that they were encoded with a Vigenere cipher, which is another letter-shifting encryption technique. Vigenere-encoded text needs a key. The string of letters made from the Mayan numbers was that key.

Without the key, decoding a visionary encrypted message is almost impossible. Even with the key, it would take a long time. And if you miss just one letter, you end up with meaningless texts. So your translation has to be perfect. But there's no reason to do it manually. It takes a lot of processing power, but computers can eventually guess most visionary keys.

But if you already have the key, computers can easily decode the message. There are even websites to help you do this. The decoded text was from Thomas Bulfinch's mythology. This was a classic work based on the tales of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and their hunt for the Holy Grail. So now the solvers knew the book that was needed to decode the book cipher. But this time it wasn't a message or a webpage or an image. It was a phone number.

At first, people thought Cicada 3301 was just an online troll pumping out puzzles to waste everyone's time. But there was just too much work put into it. Whoever was behind the puzzles was someone with computer skills and advanced knowledge in cryptography. So the duck image led to a book code and a page on Reddit. And the page on Reddit led to two more images, Maya numbers and the book cipher. And the book was about King Arthur's quest for the Holy Grail. Get on with it. Yes, get on with it.

Now we can use the book code mentioned in the outguessed message from the initial image. A book code encodes each letter with two numbers, the line number and the character index in the line. By applying the book code to the text, we get the following text string. Call us. Telephone number 214-390-9608. When the book cipher revealed a phone number in Austin, Texas, codebreakers thought they'd finally learn who was behind Cicada 3301.

Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final dot JPEG image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye.

No answers, just another clue. Cicada 3301 was a series of intricately woven puzzles. Each puzzle got progressively more complex, but future puzzles often referred back to earlier ones, indicating this entire process was thought out well in advance. The length of the scavenger hunt also weeded out casual participants. Only those with patience would continue. It was natural selection.

Solvers went back to the original image, looking for anything that would indicate a prime number. Outguess revealed nothing. Scanning the image with Photoshop and other forensic tools also provided no help. People counted the characters and the spaces in the text. They converted the characters to ASCII. They ran the text through every cryptography algorithm you can think of and still nothing.

But like many of the cicada puzzles, the answer was hidden in plain sight. The original image looks like a square, but keen observers noticed it wasn't a perfect square. The image was actually 509 pixels wide by 503 pixels tall.

509 and 503 are prime numbers. Multiply 509 by 503 by 3301, and you get 845145127. Add a .com, just like the voicemail said, and that's where we see the infamous cicada image for the first time.

Under the image was a timer, and it was counting down. When the countdown reached zero, the timer was replaced with a list of coordinates. 14 locations in five countries all over the world, with an invitation to find the location nearest you. Up until now, the puzzles existed exclusively on the internet, but now Cicada 3301 was going out into the real world.

The list of 14 locations around the world indicated that Cicada 3301 was a global organization, or a handful of people with the time and money to create complex puzzles and travel the globe. But by taking the next round of puzzles into the real world, Cicada created another filter. In order to move forward, not only did you have to be excellent at cryptography, you had to have the means to travel to one of the locations provided, and only the most committed could proceed.

At each of the coordinates was a poster containing the Cicada image and a QR code. Scanning the QR code resulted in a link to another JPEG file. Like before, running the image throughout guests revealed secret text. - A poem of fading death, named for a king, meant to be read only once and vanish. Alas, it could not remain unseen. - The image also included a warning.

Considering the difficulty of the puzzles and the mystery surrounding them, it was only natural that people were talking and sharing information and collaborating. If you didn't live near one of the Cicada locations, you almost had no choice but to ask for help.

But Cicada 3301 was clearly watching, and if you got caught teaming up, you'd be out. And it didn't take long to identify the text referred to by the last clue. It was the poem Agrippa by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson. Agrippa is a very Cicada type of poem. It was originally distributed on floppy disk, and after you read the poem, it encrypted itself. "Meant to be read only once and for all." Solving the book code resulted in another URL.

But this one was different. A .onion extension. Onion routing makes the data's source and destination untraceable by encrypting the data multiple times, like the layers of an onion. Onion pages aren't accessible with a regular web browser. You need a specialized browser designed specifically to access pages hosted on the Onion Router Network, or Tor network. In other words, the dark web.

When most people think of the dark web, they imagine a place full of illegal activities, a place where people can buy and sell drugs, weapons, and worse. And it's true, those things exist on the dark web, but that's only a small fraction of what's there.

The dark web is actually a part of the deep web, which is all the unindexed parts of the internet, including private databases, email accounts, and subscription services. In fact, most of the data on the internet exists on the deep web. The dark web is specifically the section of the deep web accessible only through specialized tools like the Tor browser, which makes web traffic anonymous. Before it was made public, Tor was used by the U.S. Navy to secure government communications.

Later, it became a beacon for privacy advocates and anyone looking to shield their online activity from prying eyes. Not just criminals, though. Journalists use the dark web to communicate with activists in oppressive countries. Whistleblowers have used the dark web to remain anonymous. If you want to remain anonymous and untraceable, you go to the dark web. It's only natural that a group like Cicada 3301 would end up there.

So Cicada solvers who made it this far typed the Onion link into their Tor browser and were greeted with the following message.

Congratulations. Please create a new email address with a public free web-based service, one you've never used before and enter it below. We recommend you do this while still using Tor for anonymity. We will email you a number within the next few days in the order in which you arrived at this page. Once you've received it, come back to this page and append a slash and then the number you received to this URL.

33-01. This would be the first time that Cicada would communicate directly with people. Very few made the cut, but those that did received an email a few days later. This message will only be displayed once. Here is a message that has been encrypted with RSA. The encrypted message is a number. Break the decryption key, then come back to the same URL and enter the decrypted message to continue.

Since each participant was assigned a unique number, Cicada 3301 was able to track who was sharing information. If you got caught, you were out.

But those who were able to solve the puzzle and solve it alone received an email. The email contained the following text along with a piece of music.

The music was encoded as a MIDI file.

MIDI is music expressed as code. It was found that there were two tracks that provided two different messages. Each message had fewer than 26 combinations of pitch and tone, which hinted that each combination could represent one letter. The music was decoded into a cryptogram, which could then be broken.

Very good. You have proven to be most dedicated to come this far to attain enlightenment. Create a GPG key for your email address and upload it to the MIT key servers. Then, encrypt the following word list using the Cicada 3301 public key. Sign it with your key. Send the ASCII armored ciphertext to the Gmail address from which you received your numbers.

Everyone who received this email was also given a set of 50 unique words. Those words were to be encrypted and emailed back. What happened after that is unknown, but about a month later, the image on the subreddit changed.

Hello? We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus, our month-long journey ends. For now, thank you for your dedication and effort. If you were unable to complete the test or did not receive an email, do not despair. There will be more opportunities like this one. Thank you all. 3301.

And just as cryptically as the Cicada puzzle started, it finally ended. It was assumed that the mysterious group, whoever they were, finally found the highly intelligent individuals it needed. Cicada 3301 stopped posting messages and was largely forgotten. But a year and a day after the first puzzle was posted, Cicada 3301 was back. Cicada was quiet for a year, but on January 5th, a new image was posted to 4chan.

Like before, running the image throughout guests led to a book code, which led to a URL, which led to a file. A large file. This file was its own mini operating system.

When you booted it up, it displayed the prime numbers up to 3301 and then restarted the computer. It would do this indefinitely. But there was also a message within the numbers. The key is all around you. Good luck. 3301. Those numbers led to a Twitter account that was posting tons of encrypted text that nobody could decode.

But on the mini operating system, someone realized that you could break the boot sequence and browse the file system. In one of the folders, there was a song, this time an MP3 file. ♪

According to the ID tags, the title of the file was "The Instar Emergence". Software's tried all sorts of techniques on this file to search for hidden meanings. They played it backwards, they isolated frequencies, they even ran the sound through spectral analyzers, but they found nothing.

There were hidden messages and odd mini poems all over the place, but nothing seemed connected. Then someone determined that the messages from the Twitter feed were actually lines of binary code, which could be assembled into a file. But it was encrypted and nobody could figure out how to decode it. It turned out that the messages were encoded with the binary data from another file as the key. That file was the song. So using the song, the Twitter data was decrypted into an image.

a rune table. The rune table image also contained secret text, which led to more puzzles, which led to the dark web and to more posters around the world with different coordinates. In order to move forward from here, you'd need to have solved every puzzle so far. Now, on the posters, there were phone numbers, and each phone number required an access code that you'd decipher using the rune table. Once you got past the access code, a computerized voice then read you a string of letters and numbers, which turned out to be a hex code.

and then the hex code converted to a page on the dark web which had a test for you to take there were 19 questions in total some mathematical some logical some philosophical very few people made it past this test but those that did received an email congratulations your testing has finally come to an end we hope you have enjoyed the vacation over the last few weeks

You will be very busy now should you choose to join us. You have all wondered who we are, and so we shall now tell you. We are an international group. We have no name. We are drawn together by common beliefs. That tyranny and oppression of any kind must end. That censorship is wrong, and that privacy is an inalienable right. Cicada 3301 was pretty well known by now and was being connected to hacker groups, and this was addressed in that email.

We do not engage in illegal activity, nor do our members. If you are engaged in illegal activity, we ask that you cease any and all illegal activities or decline membership at this time. We will not ask questions if you decline. However, if you lie to us, we will find out.

But the big question was why? What does Cicada 3301 even do? We are much like a think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate. Liberty, privacy, security.

And if you choose to accept membership, we are happy to have you on board to help with future projects. So that was it. Cicada 3301 found a few more recruits and went dark. But the following January, people eagerly waited to see if Cicada would return. And they did not disappoint.

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Ooh, but not so much of that. Sign up at WorkMoney. Get money-saving tips. Skip the rent. Get more rich. Sign up at WorkMoney.org slash MoreRichContest for your chance to win $50,000. After being inactive for a year, in January 2014, the Cicada Twitter account tweeted a link to a new image. Hello. Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301.

During the time Cicada was quiet, there were lots of fake puzzles floating around claiming to be from Cicada 3301, and they all turned out to be fakes. But running this new image through Outguess revealed a new message that proved to be authentic. Cicada 3301 was back, and they followed their familiar format. They embedded messages and images that could be extracted with Outguess. These images led to more clues on various webpages and the dark web.

and a new piece of music was also discovered. This one was called "Interconnectedness." Using some familiar techniques, as well as some new ones, Cicada solvers concluded that Cicada was focusing on a single document.

It's called the Liber Primus, or first book. As more puzzles were solved, more pages of Liber Primus were uncovered. The book was written using the runes found in earlier puzzles. But the solution to every puzzle seemed to be a clue to yet another puzzle. People went back to the music file. They found more clues. From image files, they extracted more codes and more puzzles like magic squares and anagrams.

All of those were decoded to reveal strange poems, which were nothing more than more clues. Libra Primus is 59 pages, and only a handful have been solved. And the pages that are solved are still mysterious. January 2015 came and went with nothing from Cicada. Some people speculated that Cicada had enough recruits for whatever it was they were doing. Others thought that Cicada would stay silent until

until all of Libra Prima was solved and they could be right. In January 2016, Cicada tweeted a link to a new image. Running the image throughout guests proved it was authentic.

Hello? The path lies empty. Epiphany seeks the devoted. Liber Primus is the way. Its words are the map, their meaning is the road, and their numbers are the direction. Seek, and you will be found. Good luck. 3301. Beware false paths.

Many speculated that their numbers are the direction was the major clue, but still no progress was made. In 2017, a user stumbled across a message from Cicada in Google's cached pages that nobody had noticed. Beware false paths. Always verify PGP signature 3301.

And that was the last anyone heard from Cicada 3301. It's been a few years with no solution to Libra Primus and no further contact from Cicada. This was disappointing to a lot of people. After all this, over several years, we were still no closer to finding out who Cicada 3301 was or what they did. But Libra Primus was the third quest. The first two were solved. And the people who solved them? They started talking.

When that first image appeared on 4chan looking for highly intelligent individuals, the chase was on. The mysterious group known as 3301 presented clues and challenges that thousands of techies and puzzle solvers found impossible to resist. Each mystery became more complex.

The clues that connected Julius Caesar and King Arthur to cryptography were genius and easy enough to solve that people became hooked. The solutions that led to phone numbers and geographic coordinates made the search even more real. But over time, it became clear that 3301 was looking for a specific type of person. To solve Cicada, you needed knowledge of the concepts and the tools used in encryption. You had to have computer skills, understand operating systems, and be handy with programming.

It also didn't hurt if you had expertise in Mayan numerology and pre-Christian literature. Yeah, who doesn't?

But who was Cicada? A popular theory was that this was a recruiting effort for a government intelligence agency like CIA, NSA, or MI6. There was plenty of precedent for that. During the Second World War, the top secret government code and cipher school used crossword puzzles printed in the Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park. Those recruits, along with Alan Turing, went on to solve the Enigma machine, which helped the Allies win the war.

NSA and CIA ran similar contests over the years. Companies like Google and Microsoft have also used cryptography and puzzles to recruit. But one of the early winners said Cicada was none of these.

After solving the final round of puzzles in 2013, he received an email with a username and password along with a site address on the dark web. The site had two parts: a message board and a chat room. The message board had various topics, including a welcome section and an area for Cicada's goals and current projects. The chat room had about 20 members. According to a couple of the winners, Cicada wanted to further the use of cryptography so more people would have access to internet privacy.

Cicada had some big goals, but in the short term, they wanted to recruit highly technical people to develop open source cryptography software. - All that to find people to write free software? - Yep, and I think this was Cicada's big mistake. The recruits didn't wanna write software, they wanted to solve puzzles. And when the puzzles stopped, the membership dwindled. There were spikes in membership when new challenges appeared, but it was the same story. The winners weren't interested in writing software. They weren't driven by ideology. They didn't care about politics.

They just wanted to solve puzzles. The same thing happens when NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and other intelligence organizations do recruitment drives. Many of the winners are offered positions in one of these agencies, and many of them refuse. They don't want to work in government. - Yeah, they're too smart to work in government. - Well, that might be part of it, but really, they just want to solve puzzles.

Whenever you achieve a task, your brain rewards you with a hit of dopamine. This could mean finishing a workout, completing a school project, or figuring out an escape room. Achieve a goal, get some dopamine. Our brains love dopamine. It turns out that solving problems is one of the biggest, if not the biggest source of dopamine for the brain. Solving puzzles like those presented by Cicada reward us with dopamine while we're working on them. And when we actually solve one,

Well, Cicada solvers describe that feeling as nothing less than exhilarating. Now, plenty of people are interested in politics and ideology, but not too many of them would describe their interest as exhilarating. Puzzles make us happy. When was the last time politics made you happy? And although two of the goals of this channel are to educate and inspire, the primary goal is to entertain. In other words, the Y-Files is here to make you happy. So that's why I've included a Cicada-type puzzle in this video.

Think you can find it? Okay, now, I don't know if you caught the end of that, but there is a cicada-type puzzle in that episode. Now, my puzzles are nowhere near as complicated as cicada, but I still think I made them pretty challenging. So I was kind of annoyed and surprised when someone solved it in 90 minutes. And I thought, oh, no, I made it way too easy.

But I didn't. He admitted that he got very, very lucky with one of the clues, that he didn't really solve it. It was almost an accident, which turned out to be true because 1,200 people thought they solved it.

over the next two, three, four days, and 21 of them got it right. And I don't know how many other people tried, but I got 1,200 responses, and only 21 got it correct. So if you like solving stuff like that, like 3301, go watch that episode and look for the clues. They are there.

Anyway, this has been a Y-Files compilation episode. My name is AJ. That's Echo Fish. I didn't want to do this, human, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to pull rank on you. I'm with the mattress police. There are no tags on these mattresses. I hope you had some fun and learned some new stuff today. I hope at least one of those episodes was new for you. Like...

Every topic we cover on the channel, like every episode you saw today, each one was recommended by someone in the audience. So if there's a story you'd like to see, go to thewildfiles.com slash tips and let me know. And remember, The Wild Files is also a podcast. Twice a week, I post deep dives into the stories we cover here on the channel, and I also post the occasional stories that wouldn't be allowed on the channel, at least not allowed on YouTube. I don't even really want to say... Yeah, well...

They're called Unredacted, and I cover things like the World War II guy, the bad guy from World War II, how he possibly escaped and lived. That's a good episode. I did one on Aleister Crowley. Can't cover that on YouTube. Definitely not for the kids, but stuff like that is up there. So it's called The Y-Files Operation Podcast, and it's available everywhere.

Now, when our schedule is all mixed up like this and you're missing the Y-Files, you can always check out our Discord server. We've got over 60,000 people on there. So 24-7, there's someone on there talking about all the crazy stuff we talk about here on the channel. And it's a community that's become, it's really become like a part of my family.

It's a lot of fun. It's a very supportive community and it's free to join. So check it out. And special thanks to our amazing Patreon members who make all this possible and who allow me to take breaks like this. I could not do this channel without you. I could not take these breaks without your support and without your trust. And I appreciate you. And the thing I'm most proud of...

is the community that we've built, our patrons have built. It's...

Really mostly you. I'm just the guy who talks to the fish. You guys are amazing. And if you're not part of our community and you'd like to join a very supportive group of amazing people, consider becoming a member on Patreon. For as little as three bucks a month, you get perks like episodes early with no commercials, access to merch that only members get, you get special access on Discord, access to certain channels that are only available to members. Plus on Discord, you get two live streams every week just for members, which is

And those are unique. Those are a lot of fun. That's my web webcam is on like this. I'm here like this. Plus, you get to meet everybody else in the wife house team. So, Gino, Jen, Victoria, Ibrita's on there, Mischief, everybody you get to talk to. And you can put your camera on, hop up on stage and interact with us, ask a question, make fun of Gino's hair, talk about Victoria's feet, whatever you want to do. Don't talk about my wife's feet.

I mean, I kind of want to. I kind of want to tell you about them, but she would kill me. I'm already pushing my luck with her with this episode. Fortunately, she never watches this far, so I'm probably safe. Anyway, I think that's the best perk there is for being a Patreon member. Other live streams.

But another great way to support the channel is just grab something from the Wife House store. Grab a Hegelish t-shirt or one of these coffee mugs for fisting or drinking or whatever you like to do with your leisure time. Or grab something with my face on it or a deck of cards or one of these squeezy animal Hegel fish talking toy fishes. That's going to do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind. Know that you are appreciated. Because you are.

No, it never ends.

Fear the crab cat and I got stuck inside Mel's home with MKUltra being only two away. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadow people there?

The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told, and his name was cold And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes Hecklefish on Thursday nights with AJ2 And the robots have many eyes All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So what?

The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come to a gun, the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets are both to project escape, and what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though, the black knight said a lie to told me so. I can't believe I'm dead

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