Murmurations
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Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Flashpoint is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free. But for ad-free listening, early access, and exclusive bonuses, subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. You're listening to Flashpoint, a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast. This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. So, Rudolph's first? I'm in the car with my producer, Doug Matica, and Paul Wolfe, our local guide for the weekend. Doug and I just drove through the night to meet up with Paul. We're clearly outsiders here.

so we needed a local to show us around. We wanted to spend some real time in this part of Appalachia where Rudolph grew up, explore the region, and talk with people who might have known him. And with Paul's help, try to understand where and how he hid from authorities. That's a fascinating landscape, you know, so where we're going to be heading up to the Upper Nantahala is remote even by local standards. We're driving through a town called Topton. It's just outside Murphy, North Carolina.

Paul fell in love with this area and moved here more than 30 years ago. Since then, he's been a backpacking guide and a shaman of sorts to serious hikers exploring Appalachia. Historically speaking, this is in fact where people go to hide. And even some of those encounters where people might see you, most folks here aren't going to pay much attention to that. If you didn't want to be found, this is a great spot. We pass by a tiny church that has maybe six rows of pews inside.

then a few homes, and then a few dogs emerge from those homes and chase after our car. Weirdly, nobody comes outside to hear what the commotion's all about. A single-lane gravel road called Partridge Creek dead ends with a ranch-style home with a wood frame and aluminum siding. So imagine this 20 years ago, folks. I wonder who lives there now.

This was Eric Rudolph's home. In 1982, when he was just 16 years old, he and his family moved here from Florida. Next door is Tom Branham's home, a family friend of the Rudolphs. Tom met the family at their church in Florida, and after he moved to Topson, the family eventually followed. They bought the seven-acre lot next to Tom's, and Eric Rudolph and his brother Dan built out the existing trailer on the property to be the family home. Boy, that's all homesteaded. Looks like he laid all the block for that place himself. Tom still lives here.

His home looks like it's in the middle of a junkyard. There are half a dozen cars and scrap metal lining the property. It almost looks like a paintball course. See the karate target practice dummy in the garden? This part of North Carolina is extremely remote. Access to cell service, let alone internet, is limited. It's isolated. And isolation like that breeds distrust. If you're not around people that are different from you on a regular basis, they become other. Something to be suspicious of.

Even feared. You gotta think, if you bought property up a cove like this, you didn't really want to have neighbors. After hiking and driving around for the better part of the day, we stumbled upon a trash depository. That's where you take your trash when you don't have a garbage truck coming to your house every week. A woman was posted up behind glass in a tiny little nook, monitoring the facility. How long have you worked here? Three years. How far from here do you live? Just up the road. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Been living here for 48 years. Same place. It's a small community. Everybody knows everybody, what they do, when they're going to do it. And they just keep their mouth shut. Mm-hmm.

about 20 years ago during all the Manhattan, when the FBI had staged over here. And we're just kind of, we're looking around and seeing if anybody was around and had any stories around that stuff. About Rudolph? Yeah. Oh yeah. You were around? Yeah. Did you grow up here? I lived here. I was in school. Was it a big deal? Eh, just another day. Do you know the family? Yes. How well? When they see me and they say hi, you know, and all this.

I spoke back and that was it. To me, it was funny. What do you mean by that? It was just funny because the FBI couldn't catch one man. I said, what? Excuse my language. What dumbasses. Right. Yeah, the FBI come to my dad's house and asked him where the kids was. My dad said, I ain't going to tell you a damn thing. Right. They said, he said, if Rudolph comes to my porch right now, I'd feed him.

Episode 5, Murmurations. Alabama abortion clinic bombing suspect Eric Rudolph is still on the loose. Investigators think he's taken refuge in caves and old mines in a densely forested part of North Carolina. It's early spring, 1998.

Eric Rudolph has been on the run since the bombing at the Birmingham abortion clinic in January of 98. You know, he dreamed about this as a young man, him against the world, and now it's come true, and hey, he's enjoying it. It's a 1990s manhunt looking for an 1890s man. We were trying to be very systematic about our search, and as with any search, there's a start point, right? So there was his trailer.

Rick Schwein was an FBI supervisor in the 1990s at the Western North Carolina branch and was assigned to the search for Eric Rudolph. He was one of the few feds who was somewhat familiar with this territory in North Carolina. And it's like throwing a pebble into a pond and you see the rings, right? So you start with the closest rings first and then you work your way out. This first ring for investigators was around Rudolph's trailer, the one he fled from when his name was released to the public.

The second ring included the Partridge Creek home that we drove past earlier, next to Tom Branum's property.

And we used a lot of different techniques, whether it was, you know, helicopters with infrared capability at night looking for heat signatures, or it was use of man trackers, you know, people that had specialty skills in tracking human beings, whether it was scent dogs, specially trained dogs. But Rudolph had some training, so he knew how to avoid those techniques.

There was an incident where we just missed him in Andrews. He had forded a river and he was foraging and he was close to the command post and agents came upon him. He could hear us, he could see us. It's plausible that tactical teams walked right by him and didn't see him. That's the nature of that environment. And it's not because of lack of trying or lack of skill. It's hide and seek on a whole different level. And for most of the investigators on the ground, especially the feds,

This region was foreign territory. This was not their home. This was not their land. It's rugged. There are lots of vast tracts of land that's not improved. No roads, very few trails, overgrown. The rhododendron slicks are really tough. There's a lot of elevation change. You know, you'll be walking along and then there'll be a sheer cliff.

One of the guys on my team slipped and fortunately got his weapon up and caught between two trees and it prevented him from going off a 40-foot drop off. You know, people would get stung by bees or these ground-dwelling wasps. There were poisonous snakes that we would run across. We would occasionally walk across a black bear. So just a lot of hazards.

On the other hand, it's an easy place to sustain yourself, right? There are a lot of people that have sustenance gardens. There's a lot of stuff that you can forage and eat, you can hunt. There's lots of shelter out there. So not an impossible place to sustain yourself, but a difficult place to search. He has the edge. They may have the helicopters, they've got the technology, but he's got the know-how and the experience in the area that they're totally inept in.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

So he learned to stay between the lines of drift, which in this area is pretty easy.

Between the Lines of Drift is really just another way of saying, off the beaten path. Paul Wolfe has hiked these trails countless times. He's a professor who teaches at Southwestern Community College in Western North Carolina, where he's the Outdoor Leadership Program Director. The Eric Rudolph story is one that he's very familiar with, one that he saw unfold as a local. And now, decades later, he likes to retrace those steps that Rudolph took.

I've been hiking leading groups in this area for over 25 years now and I still discover stuff that I didn't know was there. You can be close, you just have to be several steps off because people are going to take the path of least resistance so they can just go around you. How many times do you think he just sat there and watched folks? He'd had those close encounters with hunters. Same thing, keep still, lie down. If you're not looking for someone, you're not going to see it.

There is a home field advantage to having grown up and lived, hunted, and if he really was out there looking for clandestine spots to grow weed, he would know the back of that stuff more than anybody. He grew up here. This is home to him. This is his playground. It's tough, it's rugged, and it's vast. And right now he's got the upper hand because he knows these woods. And he also knew these people. But folks here are good folks in general.

fiercely independent, proud, you know, God-fearing, church-going, conservative in general, but people in general are nice and friendly. Anyone will help you out. That's one of my first experiences here with my car broken down. A person came out in a snowstorm and helped get me going, and when I asked what I could do for him, he said, just help return the favor to somebody someday. Zoning and regulations are frowned upon. People like to do what they want with their land and don't like government and other folks telling you

I think there were a small group of people in western North Carolina that empathized with him. A lot of the federal land out there was taken from people to create those national forests, the Pisgah and the Nantahala National Forests. So there are families out there that lost their farmland or lost their homesteads. So there is sort of a mistrust. And then there were anti-government groups out there. There were

you know, supremacist groups and Christian identity groups that were active in the search area. Rudolph had kind of bounced around some of those groups, knew some of those people. You know, I think there was that balancing act of, hey, we need to gain the trust of people in that area. Rick connected us with a very good friend he worked with during the search, a former FBI agent named Terry Turchy.

Before the Rudolph case, Terry was the leader of the FBI's task force for the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Terry spent four years building that case for trial. But ultimately, the Unabomber pled guilty to avoid the death sentence and was sent to ADX Florence, a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado.

Terry returned home, very much looking forward to spending time with his wife and kids back in San Francisco. However, two days later, he was told to get on a plane and was designated the inspector in charge of the Eric Rudolph manhunt. One of the very first things we did, take off the camouflage, get rid of the FBI caps, and let these people know who you are. And give them your card and say, look, don't think that you're calling the great big government if you see something.

If you go out one morning and you see somebody out in your pasture that doesn't belong there, call us. These are our names. Call us and we will come out here. And that made it personal. And that helped us to start getting the information we needed. On May 5th, 1998,

Nearly four months into the search, a press conference was held, announcing that Eric Rudolph had been added to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list with a $1 million reward. You know, there's a flood of people. And then over time, you know, that gets scaled back because it's expensive. And while there were a lot of sightings, there wasn't anything that was so credible and so actionable that you could throw that kind of resource behind it and have a successful outcome.

It just kept getting whittled back and whittled back and whittled back. And at the same time, investigators in Birmingham and Atlanta were working hard to pull together all the physical evidence to make a criminal case against Rudolph so that he could be charged and convicted. As time passed, there were a group of us, myself included, that thought he was still alive. He was probably spending a lot of time in western North Carolina, if not all of his time, and that he was spending a lot of time in the woods. But not everybody believed that.

It's hard to find something that ain't there. Probably somewhere drinking drinks with them little umbrellas on top. And he could be somewhere six foot down. Everything that we know about him leads us to believe that he will not leave this area. You sit there and you wonder, where could he be? Is he dead now? Is he still around here? Has he been able to get out?

There were people that thought he went overseas. There were a lot of people thought that he had died. And, you know, every time we found human remains in the search area, we made sure they weren't Eric Rudolph's. I thought there were enough indicators, enough sightings, enough odd things. For example, a house gets broken into, the stereo equipment, the television is left, but clothing, a big wash basin,

And Rick was right. As law enforcement was beginning to experience investigation fatigue, Eric Rudolph was often just a stone's throw away, laughing at them.

Then, in July of 1998, two months after Eric Rudolph landed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list, FBI agent Terry Turchy gets a call. A local resident named George Nordman contacted a deputy and asked for law enforcement to come to his home for a visit. Nordman did not like, did not trust the U.S. government. He just was one of those people who just had a lot of reasons, he felt. For weeks, Nordman noticed that things were just off around his house.

There were fewer eggs being laid by his hens. Some of his food was missing. Things were out of place inside his home, not quite where he put them last. He said, I'm here to tell you that I got home from work the other day. Eric Rudolph was in my house. He was having something to eat. He knew I had a lot of supplies there from the health food store. And here's what he said to me. He said, what I want to do, George, is I need a truck. And Norman happened to

have every car or truck that he'd ever bought for his kids or anybody else. You know, once it wore out, he just left it in the driveway. So, you know, Eric wanted one of these cars and he wanted George to give him a lot of food. And he said, well, I'll do is when I leave here in the truck, I'll tie you up, put a gag in your mouth and I'll do all these things. And then you can tell the authorities that you had no choice. And Nordman said, I don't

I don't think I want to do that. So they went back and forth. Finally, Rudolph said, well, okay, I'll get rested up here and then I'll leave again. But I've got to get out of here. I know I can't stay very long. Well, Norman got up the next day and he went to work. And before he left, he said, yeah, I want you to leave. You got to leave. I don't want any part of this.

And while he was at work that day, Friday, Nordman made up his mind that, look, you know, I thought Rudolph was innocent, but now I don't think so. And regardless of how I feel politically, I got to tell somebody when he came back, Rudolph had left, but Rudolph took a truck anyway.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories. Firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Rudolph had been pressured by the army of federal agents out there that were searching for him. He was burning more calories than he could intake. He had been running out of food. And he was pretty successful in evading us. He was very successful in evading us. But I think the pressure that we put on him had put him in an unhealthy deficit from a calorie standpoint. And he made a decision to break cover. That reinvigorated the manhunt.

I was part of a tactical team, a SWAT team that scouted the area around Norman's place. And we actually found the spot

that Rudolph had surveilled. He sat there for a couple of days and watched Nordman's place before he approached him. And he buried some trash to conceal that he had been there, and we were able to obtain his fingerprint off the wrappers, the food wrappers that he buried. So it gave us a new start point, if you will, and allowed us to get back on his trail. Two days after Nordman spoke to federal authorities, his truck that Eric Rudolph had stolen was found.

There was a note inside the windshield that read, Truck Broke Down. Trouble. Please contact George Nordman at Better Way Health Food Store, Andrews, North Carolina. The handwriting was not Nordman's, and dynamite residue was found on the steering wheel. The task force felt vindicated. Their belief that Eric Rudolph was still in those woods was confirmed. Following the Nordman tip, over 200 federal agents descended on the area. They now had a scent to follow.

And around this time, the FBI also officially charged Eric Robert Rudolph with all four bombings to date. How far out could this possibly go? We will continue until we find him. But that's a large footprint to make in an area that doesn't always take kindly to outsiders.

How long can the residents of this area be expected to be patient with what they have to go with? We're going to have to be here until we find him. They just want people to leave. They're ready for their small town to be back to the small town. They're tired of it.

The presence was massive. It was SWAT teams from the southeast, the FBI's hostage rescue team. There were Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents that came up. And it really was several hundred law enforcement officers working out of National Guard armories and campsites, physically hunting for him.

Here at Apple Tree Group Camp, this is a National Forest Group Campground. There are four designated sites here. Two of the sites hold up to 25 people. Two of the sites hold up to 50. Apple Tree Group Camp housed over 200 agents during the height of the search, 80 of whom were sent into the mountains every day to actively search for Rudolph. Our guide Paul showed us around the site.

The FBI was spending over $16,000 a night in Andrews for lodging and meals because most of the folks drove in then came back out here to the base of operations in the daytime. We are three miles from Nordman's house. We're a half a mile from one of Eric's on-the-move campsites where they did track dogs back to. Eric was intentional, tried to lead him over here to keep him on this side of the gap. So it was a very smart move.

Hundreds of investigators, infrared, helicopters, dogs. How much more was needed to find one man? And we want to leave no stone unturned. I encourage anyone who has information regarding Mr. Rudolph's whereabouts to come forward. It's a mystery, isn't it? They have an impossible job, I like. At this point, Rudolph had likely been watching the base camp for months. He might have even known some of the investigators by name.

This is eerily similar to the bombing at the clinic in Birmingham. Rudolph sat at a distance, watching and waiting, and then eventually pressed the button. In this case, he was fully immersed in a long-term game of hide-and-seek, of cat-and-mouse. And later, we would learn it was a game that he lived for.

I personally believe he got assistance. I don't think it was consistent. I think it was here and there. But he has a unique personality type where, you know, he didn't really need a lot of human interaction. But I do think that he had people that periodically assisted him. You know, you can sustain yourself for a while, but we had some really severe winters during that time period. It's just hard for me to believe that he didn't have some help.

You can look at something and find the beauty or you can look at something and find the bad. There are two sides to every story. Of course there's two sides to Eric Rudolph. Good and bad. It boils down to good and bad.

Folks have long assumed that Eric Rudolph had help, that the locals were somehow in league with him.

Earlier in this episode, we talked to a random stranger who empathized with him. Nearly 30 years later. That says a lot. He has not been proven guilty. I don't even begin to speculate on it. If he was to come down out of these woods here and hungry, I'll feed him a meal. I'll never tell on him. They got to prove something to me. More than that, boy, I'd turn a man in. At my age, I'll guarantee you, I wouldn't turn him in for the reward. That's not right.

You gotta have something to prove that a man's done something wrong. I'm spun upside down and sideways, standing here with you as you explain it, as we walk through it, drive through it. As the sun began to set on the Nantahala Forest, we felt a chill in the November air. We said goodbye to Paul and headed back to our cabin back toward Murphy for the night. That evening, I decided to give Tom Branham a call. Tom was friends with the Rudolph family back in Florida, and later, the family followed his path to North Carolina.

where they moved in right next door. Tom was very much a father figure to Eric Rudolph. He still lives in the same home. He's the one with the scrapyard homestead that we drove past earlier. Surprisingly, he answered. Do you get a lot of people up there?

Yeah.

In 1984, federal agents raided Branham's house and found illegal weapons and explosives. An 18-year-old Eric Rudolph was at Tom's house when it happened. I was protected by the Lord, actually. The Holy Spirit protected me from... They tried to put me away for like 30-some years. Just having some machine gun dynamite, some autoshears, different stuff I've collected...

The weapons conviction was later overturned, but Tom says Eric saw something that day.

hidden outside that they never found. And it was all in case of war. But Eric, after that, after Eric saw what these government people were doing here in this house, I think that really tweaked Eric. It made him hate the government even more. He always wanted to be somebody famous. Eric wanted to be like a famous officer, a famous general or something that he could be.

You knew he was very, very knowledgeable about the war between the states, the Confederates and all that. Very knowledgeable about it. They were heroes to him, the Confederates. He wanted to be somebody famous like that. But when he went in the military, Eric told me himself, these black officers or sergeants, whoever, they realized just looking at him, he was a white racist. So they made him do all kinds of crap work and, uh,

Eric told me himself the only way he could get out of it was just keep smoking dope right there openly. And they finally got rid of him because of it. He wouldn't stop. This is one way of getting out. You know, he fantasized it was going to be in the military and all, but it's been taken over at this point. Nothing but perverted people and homosexual monsters and running the whole operation in the military now. We're just being destroyed as a nation that way, of course.

Tom Branham is overtly homophobic, racist, and anti-government. And he had no reservations expressing those sentiments to me. He owns that shit with pride. I'm not sure why he'd think I might share his thinking. Or maybe he just doesn't care. There's a whole lot more I could tell him. There's only one or two people I've told other things about Danny. Danny's paid for whatever the hell he's done. Branham told me that Eric Rudolph's older brother, Dan, was always a troublemaker.

Dan currently lives down in Bradenton, Florida, with his mother, Pat. And I sent him a few letters, tried calling the house, but he didn't respond. And during the manhunt for his brother, Dan did something pretty extreme. Danny goes in the garage and he had a camera set up on a tripod. And there he's got his radio arm saw. He's got the video going. He rolls up his sleeve.

Puts his arm under the machine and says, this is for the FBI and the media. And cuts his left hand off at the wrist right there. You hear him go, ugh, you know, the terrible moan. But cut it clean off immediately, put a tourniquet on. He had all this figured out ahead of time. Stopped the bleeding. Went out to his vehicle and drove to the hospital. Left his hand there on the table where the saw was.

And they sent someone back to retrieve the hand, which they did, and they reattached it. Why do you think Dan cut off his hand? Why would you cut off your hand? For who? For what? Because the media was on the road with cameras looking and the FBI was asking you questions? That isn't a reason to cut off your hand. The reason he cut off his hand was because...

Well, you know how it says in the Bible, if a right-handed offender, he cut it off? Well, Danny was raised that way, biblically. Danny cut off his hand because he was so involved with it all. And I think the FBI knows it because the FBI isn't that stupid. They know Danny was involved, but I'm sure they got word from higher up to leave that guy alone. Because if they started trying to prosecute Danny for being involved...

So you think Dan was involved in the bombs? Anyway, so...

Was Dan involved? I don't know, but it's possible. Tom Branham is the first person we've met who actually knew Eric Rudolph. For years, very formative years, the two of them were close. Branham was like a father to him.

And Rudolph was always very close with his brother Dan. They were best friends. They did nearly everything together. The people in our immediate orbit, they strongly inform who we are and what we think, whether they want to or not, for better or worse. Have you ever seen a murmuration of starlings? It's this massive flock of birds that huddle together in flight and swirl in the air like a blanket. They're mesmerizing to watch. And when you get a little closer and you start to hear the murmuring sound they get their name from,

They're also haunting. But the thing about starling murmurations is that in these flocks of sometimes thousands and thousands of birds, no individual bird in the group is ever taking its cues from more than six or seven other birds in their immediate vicinity. Ever. There's no leader. There's no organizing principle or directive at work beyond stay warm and survive. But they move with such fluidity that from a distance, they appear to be a single organism. But here's the other thing.

These murmurations are blind. They're a hive mind, let loose and flying free. They wreak havoc on nature, on cities, on technology. They cause car wrecks, sometimes massive pileups. They completely ravage the foliage and the trees. If you're underneath the swarm, it feels like an air invasion. It is an air invasion because they shit everywhere. And I mean everywhere.

And sometimes, with the really giant murmurations, like the one that shuts down the city of Rome every summer, they can even block out the sun. The whole world going black. Next time on Flashpoint. So I was assigned to the overnight shift. So I worked from 10 at night to 6 in the morning. And it was a pain in the butt of a shift. And I will tell you, I hated it. And frankly, to be honest with you, nothing ever happened. And this night, I went into the Valley Village Shopping Center and

And as I came around the left side of the building, I activated my right alley spotlight. I observed a silhouette of somebody kind of crouch down in the road. And I immediately recognized that there appeared to be some type of a large object that was kind of slung over the individual's upper torso. But it looked like a weapon. And I exited my patrol car, took cover behind my door with my weapon drawn, and began giving commands to who this individual was.

Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia. I'm your host, Cole Lacascio. Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Matica and myself on behalf of 7997. Lead producer is Alex Vespestad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Stedman. Our associate producer is Whit Lacascio. Editing by Alex Vespestad.

with additional editing by Liam Luxon and Sydney Evans. Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan. Artwork by Station 16. Original music by Jay Ragsdale. Mix by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, and the Nord Group. Special thanks to Angela Kew, Tali Ravid-Matica, and Tim Livingston. Special thanks to Matthew D. Taylor for his discussion with us about Starling Murmurations. From his first book,

Scripture people. For more podcasts like Flashpoint, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of Flashpoint. This series is released weekly, absolutely free. But for ad-free listening, early access, and exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts or at tenderfootplus.com.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.