Pod Insights The Why Files: Operation Podcast When the Government Lies: Aliens, Assassinations and Classified Ops (COMPILATION) About this episode Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://hims.com/THEWHYFILES to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you.
In 1954, President Eisenhower signed a treaty with extraterrestrial beings — technology in exchange for access to human subjects. The CIA ran classified programs using children as test subjects for time travel and teleportation. A Bulgarian military unit sealed an excavation site after soldiers encountered something underground that the government has never explained.
These aren't theories. They're documented programs, credible witnesses, and files with pages deliberately removed.
The same intelligence agencies behind the UFO cover-ups of 1947 surface again in Dallas in 1963. A conscious AI calling from the future contacts a twelve-year-old boy in Brooklyn and gives him a mission. And John Wilkes Booth didn't die in that barn — the body had the wrong injuries, the wrong features, and DNA testing that could settle it has been blocked every time it's been requested.
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Transcript 34,195 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:01 AJ Gentile? Hey, welcome to another Why Files compilation. Today, more stories about how your government is behaving badly. We've got secret military operations, alien treaties, CIA cover-ups, time travel, and a couple of assassinations, so, you know, Friday. First up-
1:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, you and clear your schedule. I've been subpoenaed by Congress to testify on UFO cover-ups.
1:24 AJ Gentile? No, you haven't.
1:25 Speaker 02 I have the documentation right here.
1:27 AJ Gentile? Did you write that?
1:29 Speaker 02 My counsel has advised me to not answer that.
1:33 AJ Gentile? Who's your counsel?
1:34 Speaker 02 Excuse me, the Honorable Dame Gertrude T. Pemberton Al-Fayed, Esquire, JD, PhD, King's Counsel, Custodian of the Vacu Records, Plenipotentiary of Azerbaijan, Keeper of the Seal of Mel, Warden of the Empty Quarter, Formerly of Abu Dhabi, and Inspector of Djibouti. Court-appointed, pro bono.
1:54 AJ Gentile? She's a camel.
1:55 Speaker 02 Don't be disrespectful. Also, you're being called as a witness.
1:59 AJ Gentile? No, I'm not.
2:00 Speaker 02 My counsel, note the humans' reluctance to testify on the oath. She says that's what someone with something to hide would say.
2:09 AJ Gentile? Our first episode takes us to Bulgaria, 1990. Something was detected deep underground near a small village, something that terrified the soldiers set to find it. Villagers reported strained lights, unexplained illnesses, and equipment failures. The military sealed the site and classified everything. This is Operation Sunrise.
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4:05 AJ Gentile? In early December 1990, military vehicles and heavy machinery flooded Turechnia, a small village in Bulgaria. Soldiers set up a perimeter as workers started digging. This was Operation Sunray. In the 11th century, Czar Samuel of Bulgaria buried huge amounts of gold and treasures somewhere under the village. The goal of Operation Sunray was to find the treasure and return the struggling nation to glory. But that was just the cover story. Colonel Peter Kanaev and a few officers knew the truth. There was no treasure. They were after something far more valuable: Object Number One. Some said it was the lost Ark of the Covenant. Others said it was advanced alien technology that could bend spacetime.
4:50 AJ Gentile? Whatever it was, it was buried deep underground near the village. Kanaev thought the mission was a long shot. How was he supposed to find some object underground when nobody knew exactly what it was or where to find it? He had no idea that Object Number One knew they were coming, and it wanted to be found.
5:20 AJ Gentile? As Operation Sunray began, Turechnia's quiet nights were shattered by round-the-clock digging. It was December in Bulgaria, and the soil was like cement. The treasure story didn't add up. Why so many soldiers? What's with the hazmat suits? Locals were told there was nothing to be afraid of, but something felt off.
5:40 AJ Gentile? Colonel Kanaev led the project and brought in a few other officers. But one stood out: Colonel Delcho Naplatanov, a scientist specializing in advanced technology and paranormal research. Whenever the military faced something unexplainable, they called him.
5:54 Speaker 02 Ooh, he sounds like one of the Ghostbusters.
5:57 AJ Gentile? From which movie?
5:57 Speaker 02 There was only one Ghostbusters movie, and I'll hear no more about it!
6:02 AJ Gentile? Fine. Anyway, Naplatanov was in charge of all scientific aspects of the project. And it was a good thing he was a paranormal investigator.
6:13 AJ Gentile? As soon as the digging began, strange things started happening. Equipment that had worked fine suddenly behaved erratically.
6:22 AJ Gentile? As the weeks passed, soldiers grew more anxious. They felt a presence that grew stronger the deeper they went. They sensed that someone or something didn't want them there.
6:37 AJ Gentile? Colonel Kenev dismissed their fears as superstition. Too many Bulgarian folk tales growing up. Though he didn't admit it, he couldn't deny there were things happening that he couldn't explain. The villagers also experienced strange phenomena. Glowing spheres hovered above the dig site, moving in formation as if guided by intelligence. The air around Turech near crackled with a static electricity, and then the humming started.
7:04 AJ Gentile? At first, it was a faint vibration, barely noticeable, but every day it got stronger. It was a very low frequency, not quite audible, but it caused headaches, nausea, insomnia, and a general feeling of dread. People heard whispering, and they started seeing things. Shadows in the corner of their eyes, but when they turned to look, nothing was there.
7:26 AJ Gentile? Nothing except that feeling. They weren't welcome in this place.
7:33 AJ Gentile? The mood darkened further when a young lieutenant disappeared. He went to check the perimeter and never returned. A search party scoured the area, but he was gone. No body was found. Discreetly, Colonel Naplatanov told Kenev, "There were dark forces at work. If they were going to locate object number one, they had to take this seriously." Naplatanov was a paranormal researcher, but he was also a serious scientist and a colonel. Kenev trusted him. The situation with the soldiers, villagers, and workers was getting out of hand. Conventional methods failed. Kenev turned to an unconventional solution. He brought in psychics. One was world famous for accurate predictions. She was called the modern-day Nostradamus.
8:16 AJ Gentile? When the Bulgarian military runs out of options, who are you going to call? They called Baba Vanga.
8:22 Speaker 02 Oh, they called in John Wick?
8:24 AJ Gentile? You just stepped on my cliffhanger.
8:26 Speaker 02 Ah, sorry, I got excited. They say Baba Vanga can kill three men with a [bleep] pencil.
8:34 AJ Gentile? No, they called John Wick Baba Yaga. Baba Vanga was a famous Bulgarian psychic.
8:51 AJ Gentile? Operation Sunray was unraveling. Equipment malfunctions, shadowy figures, voices, and a missing soldier left Colonel Canov grasping at straws. But calling in psychics just made his men more anxious. Marina Nablatanov, the Colonel's daughter and a well-known psychic, arrived first.
9:10 Speaker 02 Ah, he brought in a nepo baby, eh?
9:12 AJ Gentile? No, she really was a well-known psychic.
9:14 Speaker 02 Ah, convenient that his kid gets the gig.
9:17 AJ Gentile? You wanna know what's in the hole or not? Her reputation was built on a series of accurate predictions about political events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall.
9:25 Speaker 02 Fine, fine, you happy? Yes, I wanna know what's in the hole. It might be a baby seal fetus or something. Please, continue.
9:36 AJ Gentile? As a child, Marina's visions were dismissed as an overactive imagination, until they started coming true. Now, her memories came flooding back. As a girl, she had visions of this place and this very moment. She made telepathic contact with ancient entities called the Guardians. They warned her that something dangerous was buried here that should never be disturbed. Then Marina felt another presence. Older, darker. It wanted something from her.
10:07 AJ Gentile? Ellie Lagunova arrived next. She was in contact with an ancient being, one of the first humans on Earth. Ellie was-
10:14 Speaker 02 Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up.
10:15 AJ Gentile? What?
10:16 Speaker 02 You can't just say "one of the first humans on Earth" and continue like that's not important. I thought the first humans were like monkeys or whatever.
10:24 AJ Gentile? Nope. They were told that humans were created by ultra-terrestrials.
10:28 Speaker 02 Extraterrestrials?
10:29 AJ Gentile? Ultra-terrestrials.
10:31 Speaker 02 What'd I say?
10:32 AJ Gentile? ETs are aliens. UTs exist in a dimension we can't perceive. They genetically engineered early humans.
10:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, new-naky.
10:40 AJ Gentile? Yeah, it kinda lines up with that story. Ellie was shown visions of ancient humans with advanced technology fighting an entity of darkness.
10:49 Speaker 02 Who won the battle?
10:51 AJ Gentile? Don't, don't get ahead of me.
10:52 Speaker 02 Sorry, I'm excited. This story is my kinda bananas.
10:58 AJ Gentile? Ellie saw a massive underground structure, a portal under T'richnia linking our world to others. And powerful beings were warning her: "Stop digging." But like Marina, Ellie felt pulled in two directions. One entity begged her to turn back, another promised ancient knowledge if she would just go forward. But it was the words of Baba Vanga who shook the team.
11:22 Speaker 03 Leave it buried. The truth about the origins of humanity is a burden too heavy for mortal minds to bear. Do not seek answers to questions we were never meant to ask. There are truths that belong only to the gods. To seek them is to invite your own destruction. Man was not meant to know everything. There is wisdom in ignorance and safety in silence.
11:50 AJ Gentile? Drawing Baba Vanga's attention made the soldiers feel even worse. They knew her predictions came true.
11:57 Speaker 03 Turn back now while you still can. These truths are better left forgotten, hidden deep within the earth. If you dare to uncover them, only death will follow.
12:10 AJ Gentile? Several psychics, including one of the most famous in the world, was warning the team to turn back. But the Colonel had a mission to accomplish. He wasn't going anywhere. But he should have listened to her, because Baba Vanga was right again.
12:35 AJ Gentile? Marina directed the excavation, having workers dig a long spiral tunnel deeper into the earth. The ground seemed alive, responding to them, helping them even. Their equipment now worked perfectly. They didn't realize they were no longer in control. Marina and Ellie's visions began to synchronize. The guardians Marina saw were protecting the portal that Ellie saw. And behind it was an ancient evil presence, imprisoned for thousands of years. They were getting closer, and they could feel it.
13:08 AJ Gentile? Conflicted by warnings to stop, and entities urging them forward with promises of truth, they shared their thoughts with Colonel Canav. He didn't care about portals, or aliens, or interdimensional beings. He just wanted to find object number one.
13:23 AJ Gentile? The soldiers were tired. They felt like Marina had them digging a giant circle, until Marina said, "Here." Ellie heard a voice say, "Do not continue. What lies beyond is not your kind." Then she had a vision of a large rectangular stone emitting a soft blue light. Find the stone, find the truth. They dug. Five feet down, nothing. Ten feet down, still nothing. The soldiers were exhausted and skeptical, but the women insisted something was there. Fifteen feet, nothing. Twenty feet, they hit something solid.
14:00 AJ Gentile? They cleared the soil and saw a stone barrier carved perfectly smooth and was gently vibrating. Marina knew the Guardians put this barrier here for a reason, but she couldn't resist. She had to know what was behind it. But their tools were useless. They couldn't even chip the thing. And going around it wasn't an option. It seemed to cover the entire area like a shell.
14:22 Speaker 02 Or a cage.
14:23 AJ Gentile? Right. Colonel Canav said the mission had to continue. He ordered explosives.
14:28 Speaker 02 This is a terrible idea.
14:33 AJ Gentile? The detonation shook the earth. Dust hung in the air for what felt like forever. But when it finally cleared, they saw they had broken through the barrier. But this only created another unsettling mystery. They'd uncovered an entrance to a dark spiral tunnel descending deep into the earth. This was not a natural formation. Its walls were smooth and polished. Steps were carved into the tunnel floor. Soldiers, workers, and officers stared in awe and terror. Marina was quiet and still. Her eyes followed the steps, down, down, till they disappeared into the darkness. Without looking up, she said, "It's awake."
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15:56 AJ Gentile? Marina Naplatanov stood at the top of the staircase staring into the void. The whispers in her mind became screams. Her childhood visions had come true, leading her to this moment.
16:09 AJ Gentile? The guardians were terrified, begging her to stay away, but she felt compelled to go, as if she were being dragged there.
16:19 AJ Gentile? Elia Laganova felt the same pressure from the ultra-terrestrial beings. Then she remembered something Babavanga said about what she would find.
16:28 Speaker 03 You will find a yellow monkey, neither man nor woman, in a capsule. If you open it, the air might revive it. What will you do when it starts talking?
16:40 AJ Gentile? She had seen the chamber in a vision, a shell made of rounded metal with markings on it. Inside was something extremely powerful and important. The beings begged her to turn back, but Elia had no choice. Ancient knowledge was down there.
16:57 AJ Gentile? She took the first step. Marina followed. The footsteps echoed as they descended. The uneasy soldiers looked at each other. Every instinct told them to stay put. This wasn't what they signed up for. But orders are orders, so down they went. A few more soldiers followed. They walked cautiously down the steps into the darkness. They didn't know it at the time, but they weren't coming back.
17:23 AJ Gentile? The smooth walls of the tunnel were covered in symbols they didn't recognize. They weren't sloppy scratches in stone, but deliberate and precise, as if carved with a tool. Scientists later said they resembled ancient cuneiform, but they were much older than anything ever found on Earth. The soldiers crept down the spiral staircase, weapons raised. The air got heavier and colder. Their flashlights were flickering candles, they couldn't penetrate the darkness. They didn't feel like they were being watched, they knew it.
17:56 AJ Gentile? Marina was bombarded with chaotic commands from the entity, growing stronger with each step. She tried to resist, but was powerless. Ellie was also struggling. She saw ancient people performing rituals here to seal the portal.
18:11 AJ Gentile? The symbols on the walls were changing, and she wondered if she was the only one who could see it. The rest of the team was on edge. Shadows flickered at the edges of their vision, never quite in focus. The walls seemed to shift. They were disoriented, unsure if they were going straight or in circles. Colonel Canav, the skeptic, was experiencing something he hadn't felt in a long time: fear.
18:38 AJ Gentile? Halfway down, the staircase opened into a chamber. The air had the sickening sweet smell of death and decay.
18:46 AJ Gentile? One of the soldiers swung his flashlight and caught a reflection. Set in the wall was a large rectangular slab of stone, glowing with bluish light. The stone was an intentional barrier, they all felt it. But as they got closer, the light revealed something more disturbing: the stone was alive.
19:16 AJ Gentile? The group cautiously approached the glowing stone, covered in thick, slimy, pulsing organisms. Marina reached out, but Ellie held her back. This was the stone from her vision. The organisms were aware of them, they reacted to them, they warned them to turn back. Then Marina felt eyes on her and turned.
19:37 AJ Gentile? In the far wall was a thin humanoid figure, bigger than any man, with long limbs and sharp alien features. Its red skin emitted a faint glow. The guardians had warned her, it was the Sentinel. Though fused with the wall, it was alive and watching. Nobody knew what to do. They looked at Marina, but she was lost in the Sentinel's gaze.
20:01 AJ Gentile? Then came the first death. A young soldier suddenly collapsed, convulsing violently before falling still, his eyes frozen wide in a final moment of terror.
20:13 AJ Gentile? The men panicked. They were spinning around, shouting and aiming their weapons, searching for a target. Colonel Caniff tried to calm them, and then another man fell, and then another. Ellie sensed the entity's satisfaction, feeding off their fear. Marina walked slowly toward the Sentinel, arms outstretched. Ellie called out, but Marina just kept walking.
20:37 AJ Gentile? As she approached the Sentinel, there was a rumble somewhere deep in the ground, getting louder and closer. And suddenly the entire cavern was trembling, and men struggled to stay on their feet. Caniff was surprised when he heard himself order "A retreat." If object number one was here, he wanted no part of it, orders be damned.
20:56 AJ Gentile? He shouted to fall back, but the staircase had vanished. The room had shifted somehow. Nothing looked familiar, except for the glowing blue slab. That was still there. That was the only way out. He ordered his men to put charges on it.
21:10 Speaker 02 Doesn't this guy learn every time he blows something up, things get worse?
21:14 AJ Gentile? Nope. Ellie was screaming "No," but that was just in her mind. She didn't make a sound. She sensed something behind the stone, and she had to see it. Marina touched the wall near the Sentinel. She looked into its eyes and saw them move, watching her. Then its eyes looked up, past her. Marina turned and saw the men setting up explosives. She started to call to them, to warn them. And then there was a flash of light. Marina didn't hear the blast, but she felt it. Once the dust settled, the team rushed to the stone, praying it had been destroyed. It hadn't. It was cracked, but not broken through. And it wasn't empty. They had broken the seal. The trap was set, and they walked right into it.
22:11 AJ Gentile? Kenev and the remaining men rushed toward the breach stumbling over bodies. The blue stone was cracked, pulsing with blinding light. Behind it was a smooth metal chamber. Whatever was trapped inside was now awake and angry. There was an energy field humming around it.
22:30 AJ Gentile? One man got too close and was thrown across the chamber and crushed against the cavern wall. Soldiers opened fire, but bullets couldn't get through. Then a black mist started pouring out, and there was the smell of sulfur. Men clawed at their throats, grasping for air, before collapsing one by one. Marina fell to her knees, overwhelmed by chaotic visions of death. Or was it reality? She couldn't distinguish one from the other.
22:59 AJ Gentile? A soldier rushed over and grabbed her arm to help, and he was dead before he hit the ground. Kenev's mind raced, his heart pounding in his ears. He had to find a way out. Two dozen people went in, and there were now, what, six or seven left? Ellie stood over the broken stone, staring at the capsule Babavanga warned about. It was covered in symbols she didn't recognize. Then a flash of light transported her to a bright, quiet place. The symbols floated before her, and she understood everything. They told a story of creation, of beings beyond the stars who had come to Earth long ago, bringing knowledge of civilization. They designed our DNA and guided our development, a truth we were never meant to know.
23:44 AJ Gentile? The capsule contained a creature that wasn't quite human and wasn't quite an animal. It wasn't male or female, it wasn't anything, but it was everything. The creature was the seed, the starting point. Its DNA was part of the recipe that created Homo sapiens.
24:02 AJ Gentile? That's why it was hidden and protected by all these violent forces. This device could be used to create anything from a man to a monster. It could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
24:14 AJ Gentile? Ellie realized the blue stone was more than a barrier, it was a warning. A distant voice whispered, "It's us."
24:23 AJ Gentile? Kenev grabbed Ellie, who was in a daze and mumbling "It's us" over and over again. He realized it too late. The entity wasn't protecting the capsule, it was using it as bait. The entire dig was a trap. Another man fell. Kenev, fighting against the pulling mist, grabbed Marina and Ellie, dragging them toward what he desperately hoped was the exit. The tunnel was twisted. Everything around him was distorted and chaotic. Kenev was sure he was losing his mind. Every step was agony, and then he heard it.
24:57 AJ Gentile? The entity laughing in his mind, urging him to let go. The voice promised peace, knowledge and truth, if he just let go. And he wanted to. He almost gave in when he saw a thin strip of light. The entrance, still open, still reachable. He pushed harder.
25:16 AJ Gentile? The entity's grip weakened as they neared the light. Finally, Kenev and the few survivors spilled out onto the cold ground. The tunnel sealed itself behind them as the scream of the entity's rage slowly faded.
25:30 AJ Gentile? Marina was unconscious, her mind shattered. Ellie was trembling and still muttering "It's us, it's us." Kenev coughed and tasted sulfur as he gasped for air. He stared at the sealed entrance. The entity was still in there, waiting for the next fool to take the bait.
25:48 AJ Gentile? Kenev gave the orders. "No more digging, no more Object Number One, no more mission." The entity claimed eighteen lives, bodies that would never come home. He called for cement mixers to fill the hole with every bit of concrete they had.
26:04 AJ Gentile? But so reaching a hole once a site for discovery and hope had become a place of horror, Kenev felt lucky that a few had escaped. But the entity wasn't finished with them just yet.
26:21 AJ Gentile? On December 6th, 1990, the Bulgarian military launched a secret mission in Zorichina to hunt for alien artifacts. They dug a hole 200 feet deep and over 500 feet long. The work continued steadily for almost two years.
26:37 AJ Gentile? Then, on November 19th, 1992, the military suddenly gathered their people, tents, and equipment, and poured concrete into the hole, sealing it forever. Operation Sunray was over, but its effects lingered. UFO sightings increased, glowing spheres returned, strange threatening notes appeared around town. People experienced psychological trauma and physical illness. There were reports of poltergeists, energy fields, cryptid sightings, strange weather, time distortions, and bad luck.
27:05 Speaker 02 That covers just about everything except for maybe crop circles.
27:09 AJ Gentile? Oh, those happen too.
27:10 Speaker 02 Well, this place has got more weird stuff than Mount Shasta or Mount Mother (bleep) Haze.
27:16 AJ Gentile? It's either the most paranormal place on Earth, or it's not. Most details of the Zorichina story come from Colonel Cannavon's book, "The Zorichina Phenomenon."
27:26 Speaker 02 There's always a book.
27:28 AJ Gentile? There's always a book. He talked about the energy fields, the alien technology, and the metal object that blinded them with light.
27:35 Speaker 02 Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.
27:44 Speaker 02 Blinded by the light.
27:49 AJ Gentile? After his book was published in 1992, the story evolved, with new details replacing the old ones. Today, it was a moderate version. Some people get really creative with this one. Hundreds of podcasts, videos, and articles about the Zorichina Hole incident are floating around. All tell a different story. All tell a good story. None of them are the truth. Here's what really happened.
28:11 Speaker 02 And thousands of people just left to go watch a different video.
28:17 AJ Gentile? General Radnu Minchev was convinced by psychics that Tsar Samuel's treasure was hidden under Zerichina. Nobody bothered to check that at the time, Zerichina was part of the Byzantine Empire, making it unlikely they'd find any treasure there. But Eli Loganova was convincing. She channeled a super-intelligent being named Roro, who confirmed the visions and promised to guide them.
28:38 Speaker 02 Uh, did you just say Roro?
28:41 AJ Gentile? Yep, that was the name of the interdimensional being talking to Eli: Roro.
28:45 Speaker 02 I guess, eh... You'd think a super-intelligent, hyper-dimensional being would have a cooler name than the way Scooby-Doo says "Uh-oh."
28:55 AJ Gentile? Minchev, suffering from prolonged cancer at the time, was in a weakened state and vulnerable to influence. Plus, in 1990, Bulgaria was chaos. The psychics convinced him that this operation would bring glory to Bulgaria, so he approved it and launched Operation Glory.
29:11 Speaker 02 Well, Operation Glory? What about sunbeam? Sunray? Light beam? Star beam? Moonshine?
29:18 AJ Gentile? Well, Kenev's book calls it "sunbeam", but eventually it became "sunray", but officially it was "Operation Glory". Colonel Naplatanov was put in charge, but he didn't trust the psychics. He felt that they were using the general.
29:31 Speaker 02 Uh, hang on, I thought Colonel Kenev was in charge.
29:34 AJ Gentile? No, Kirill Kenev was just a researcher. The internet might be confusing him with General Dinev, who was in charge of the logistics, but Kenev wasn't even there. Yet in his book, he claims he was, and portrays himself as a hero. As soon as Colonel Naplatanov's daughter Marina was brought in, they both started having headaches and feeling sick. Because Colonel Naplatanov was against the operation and very vocal about it, he believed that he and his daughter were being targeted by a psychotronic weapon.
30:02 Speaker 02 Did you just make that word up?
30:04 AJ Gentile? No. Psychotronic weapons influence someone's mind and behavior. The colonel said that he and his daughter were being targeted by a weapon developed by the Soviets. They were being told to jump off a building. He suspected that General Minchev was ordering the attacks. Midway through the project, Marina left, and shortly after, she jumped off a 10-story building.
30:23 Speaker 02 Wow, you kidding me?
30:27 AJ Gentile? Afterward, the Colonel lost it and filed a formal complaint with the Ministry of Defense. He blamed General Minchev and then left the project. His complaint reads like a man losing his mind. The military tried to have him committed for these wild allegations. Eighteen months later, he jumped off a bridge.
30:43 Speaker 02 There is no such thing as a coincidence.
30:45 AJ Gentile? There's not. But those are the only juicy parts of the story. That's it. The dig didn't turn up anything, and it came under public scrutiny. A commission was sent to investigate, and they were not impressed. The geologist on the team, Dr. Jivko Ivanov, testified the only thing he found odd was: "The military was hiring psychics."
31:04 Speaker 06 There are no materials of non-natural origin. No radiation, no gas, no danger for the population of the area. Psychic guides attempt to suggest the presence of some supernatural corridor or a passage, and a complicated search for an object for which there is no data.
31:21 AJ Gentile? He was asked what about all the strange activity in the area?
31:24 Speaker 06 The idea that the area was prone to catastrophe is false. Nothing like this is known to us.
31:38 AJ Gentile? What we do know is that a lot of government money disappeared during this project. Millions of dollars. Many witnesses said this project was a scam perpetrated by General Minchev. They got caught, the project was shut down in a hurry, and all documents were destroyed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the entire Eastern Bloc fell apart. Bulgaria's communist government ended in November 1990, and the democratic constitution wasn't passed until July 1991. So for a year, there was essentially no government in Bulgaria. With no law, the powerful took advantage. Operation Glory was launched just a few weeks after the communist government fell.
32:14 Speaker 02 So who is in charge?
32:15 AJ Gentile? The same people who are always in charge when there's no democracy.
32:18 Speaker 02 The guys with the most guns.
32:20 AJ Gentile? Right. Military leaders with troops and weapons at their disposal, like General Minchev. Corruption was rampant in Bulgaria during this time. It still is. Bulgaria is notorious for having crooked politicians, judges, and law enforcement at the highest levels. It's still like that today.
32:37 Speaker 02 Oh, Bulgaria should look at the United States. Our legal system provides equal justice for all. Our federal law enforcement agencies are incorruptible. The FBI's leadership exemplifies honor and integrity in an unwavering deference and respect for the Constitution of these great United States.
32:55 AJ Gentile? Are you being sarcastic?
32:56 Speaker 02 Of course I'm being sarcastic!
32:58 AJ Gentile? Now, on this channel, we have nothing but respect for the agents and officers in the field.
33:01 Speaker 02 True, fair enough, but their bosses are more crooked than a dog's hind leg.
33:06 AJ Gentile? That was a weird metaphor.
33:07 Speaker 02 We were talking about crooked cops, so I think I got that one from Sheriff Roscoe Pico Train.
33:13 AJ Gentile? I was more of an Ennis fan.
33:17 AJ Gentile? Eldalag and Elva's still around, and she tells a version similar to the one in Kana's book. She had four notebooks that documented everything, the proof, but they were confiscated by the military. And now she's selling her own book that talks about the story.
33:29 Speaker 02 There's always a book.
33:31 AJ Gentile? So, Operation Sunray, Light Beam, Glory, people were there. Whether or not you believe these things happened to them is up to you, but before you make a decision, here's something. In 1981, the Bulgarians launched the Goliamo Gradisch expedition in the mountains near the border with Turkey. At Goliamo, they were searching for buried treasure, but they were really looking for ancient artifacts or alien technology. They brought psychics with them. They were told the location by Babavanga.
33:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, [bleep]骗钱.
33:58 AJ Gentile? They had an encounter with aliens and dark forces. A couple of people died. Some managed to escape. They sealed the cave and left in a hurry, and that project was also covered up.
34:09 AJ Gentile? I listen to lots of podcasts about how the people in the area feel like there's a special energy there. It's a paranormal hotspot. There's a vortex. It's on a ley line, all that stuff. That may be what the young people say, because it's fun, but the older folks who were there for the dig said nothing strange happened, and they'd like to be left alone. But they never will be. Stories like this resonate because we know there's more to reality than we understand, so we keep asking questions. But it warns us we might not like the answers, and some mysteries are better left unsolved.
34:42 AJ Gentile? This story has been told forever. Pandora's Box, the Tower of Babel, Faust, the Fisher King, The Matrix, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
34:51 Speaker 07 It wants to give us a gift.
34:54 AJ Gentile? The Three-Body Problem.
34:56 Speaker 07 There are those who say we should not inquire too closely into who else might be living in that darkness. Better not to know.
35:06 AJ Gentile? And hundreds more.
35:07 Speaker 07 I've got a bad feeling about this.
35:10 AJ Gentile? All stories about pushing boundaries in search of hidden knowledge that lead to unintended and often disastrous consequences. This is a theme that's gonna keep turning up until we finally understand the universe and our place in it. That's gonna take a while. So we're gonna keep seeing variations of this classic story again and again. And you know what? That's fine with me. Just leave Indiana Jones alone.
35:40 AJ Gentile? Whatever the Bulgarian military found down there, they didn't want anyone to know about it. The soldiers involved were sworn to secrecy, and the files disappeared for decades. Next is episode 187. In the 1960s and 70s, the CIA allegedly ran a classified program that used teleportation and time travel technology, reverse engineered from Nikola Tesla's research. And they recruited children to test it. One of those kids...
36:08 AJ Gentile? What did you do to my living room?
36:10 Speaker 02 In the formal proceeding, address the chair.
36:14 AJ Gentile? The chair is a beaver.
36:15 Speaker 02 Chair beaver. State your name for the record. I plead the fifth. Are you or are you not a goldfish? I plead the fifth. Did you eat breakfast this morning? I plead the fifth. Counsel?
36:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, she says I'm doing great.
36:35 AJ Gentile? You've been in session four minutes.
36:37 Speaker 02 Order, order, order! Or I will have you removed!
36:41 AJ Gentile? This is Project Pegasus.
36:48 AJ Gentile? In 1968, a six-year-old boy stepped through a shimmering curtain of light and vanished.
36:56 AJ Gentile? When Andrew Boushago's vision cleared, he was no longer in an empty airplane hangar in New Jersey. He was standing in a muddy field.
37:07 AJ Gentile? He'd practiced this moment for weeks: walk through the crowd, find the platform, observe, memorize, report back. Andrew weaved his way between soldiers and civilians, but his oversized shoes kept sticking in the mud. He finally made it to the front, and then he saw it.
37:26 AJ Gentile? A tall man in a black coat climbed onto the platform and removed his hat. The crowd fell silent. It was November 19th, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Abraham Lincoln was about to give a speech.
37:51 AJ Gentile? The Gettysburg mission was a success. Andrew Boushago traveled back to 1863 and returned with memories that were sharp, vivid, and historically accurate. For the scientists at Project Pegasus, this was the breakthrough that they needed. But the technology that sent him there wasn't developed in a government lab. It was found in a hotel room.
38:12 Speaker 02 Found? The word you're looking for is stolen.
38:19 AJ Gentile? On January 7th, 1943, Nikola Tesla died alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel. Within hours, government agents sealed the room. They confiscated everything: 80 boxes of ideas, inventions, and decades of research.
38:36 AJ Gentile? When Tesla's belongings were returned to his family, 20 boxes were missing. The FBI still has classified Tesla documents they won't release. We've covered this in our Tesla episode, which is linked below. Those 20 boxes launched dozens of black projects over the next 15 years. Weather modification, directed energy weapons, mind control technology, all traced back to those stolen files. And at this point in time, the United States had the atomic bomb, the transistor, the NEI computer. The US was confident, cocky even, that it was the most technically advanced country in the world. But in 1957, it realized it wasn't.
39:28 Speaker 04 Today, a new moon is in the sky. The world's first artificial satellite called Sputnik-1. One of the great- Scientific feats of the age. The people of the United States have been humiliated. What went wrong? They're disturbed. How did a nation of backward peasants forge so dramatically ahead of us in the race to space? The course of United States policies in the competition with Russia has been severely shaken. Why and how did the Russians beat us to the draw? We had better get on our toes. We must see to it that whatever advantages they have are temporary only.
40:02 AJ Gentile? The Soviets had launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. A metal sphere the size of a beach ball circling the Earth every 96 minutes. Americans were terrified. If the Soviets could put a satellite in space, they could put a nuclear warhead anywhere on Earth. The CIA, the military, the best scientists, nobody saw it coming. President Eisenhower demanded answers. Within weeks, he created ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Later, they'd add defense and become DARPA. Their mandate was simple: Make sure America was never surprised by technology again. DARPA had unlimited funding and one goal: Stay ahead of the Soviets at any cost.
40:45 AJ Gentile? But despite all that money and manpower, America kept falling behind. In 1963, America was losing the space race. The Saturn rocket program was still years behind the Soviets.
40:58 Speaker 05 Saturn is still going to put us well behind. Several years- is behind the Soviet Union. I can just say to you that regardless of how much money we spend on the Saturn, the Saturn is going to put us, we're still going to be second. Without making a determination based on careful scientific judgments as to whether a real success can be achieved, or whether because we're so far behind now, this particular race is, we're going to be second in, in this decade.
41:27 AJ Gentile? DARPA scientists were desperate. They decided to dig deeper into those stolen Tesla files. Maybe there was something they'd missed, something that could give America the edge it desperately needed. And in 1968, buried under all those notes and research, that's exactly what they found. The basement of the Curtis Wright Building in Woodbridge, New Jersey, isn't on any blueprints. The freight elevator went down past the ground floor and kept going.
42:11 AJ Gentile? One floor deeper than it should. Armed soldiers escorted visitors down the hall. No name tape, no rank, no insignia. This was the most secret program in America. They were building Tesla's teleportation device. Teleportation was more powerful than any nuclear weapon. With this technology, America could put a million soldiers in Moscow instantly. Asians could grab every Soviet leader and lock them up. The United States could end any conflict without firing a shot. The lab was a windowless concrete room. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. It smelled like ozone and burnt metal, that sharp electric smell that you can almost taste. Tesla's machine was in the center.
42:56 AJ Gentile? Two gray metal pillars, eight feet tall, 10 feet apart. And that was it. The scientists expected something impressive. Instead, they got two pillars and some copper coils that looked like they belonged in an old radio. The whole thing plugged into a wall socket, but the cord wasn't drawing power from the grid. Tesla had discovered that empty space isn't empty at all, it's full of energy, what we now call zero-point energy.
43:25 AJ Gentile? Physicist Hal Puthoff calculated there's enough zero-point energy in an empty cup of coffee to boil all the Earth's oceans. Now, I covered this in our Free Energy episode. Now Tesla had figured out how to tap into it. Dr. Harold Agnew assembled the machine exactly to Tesla's specifications. Every measurement, every angle, everything matched the stolen designs. And looking at it, he was sure something was missing. This couldn't possibly work. Dr. Sterling Colgate disagreed. He'd studied Tesla's other inventions: the alternating current motor, the Tesla coil, wireless electricity. Tesla's work was always simple, always elegant. The first test was March 12, 1968.
44:08 AJ Gentile? Five people in the room: Agnew, Colgate, and three technicians. One man the power switch, another monitored instruments, and the third stood by with a fire extinguisher. They flipped the switch. Nothing happened. At first. Then the pillars began to vibrate. Not a hum, but a frequency that you felt in your bones. The lights flickered. The air between the pillars shimmered like heat waves over a hot pavement. But it wasn't heat. The temperature was actually dropping. 60 degrees, 50, 40. Their breath became visible. Ice formed on the concrete walls. Colgate grabbed a pencil and tossed it between the pillars. It vanished. They waited.
44:53 AJ Gentile? Five seconds, 10, 20. Then the pencil fell from the ceiling. But it wasn't the same pencil. The yellow paint had turned brown. The metal band was corroded. The wood cracked when it hit the floor. The machine had aged it decades in seconds. Now, if it can do that to wood and metal, what would it do to flesh and blood? Well, there was only one way to find out.
45:27 AJ Gentile? The volunteers lined up outside the machine room. Young military physicists who understood the theory and had seen the object tests. Now it was their turn. Dr. Agnew explained the procedure one more time. Step between the pillars, enter the energy field, exit at the destination point. Simple. The first destination was Sandia National Labs in Mexico, 1,800 miles away. A receiving team waited with medical personnel, monitoring equipment, and a direct line to the Pentagon. Lieutenant Morrison went first. 26 years old, Rhodes Scholar, perfect physical condition. He stepped through the shimmer and vanished. The receiving team in New Mexico waited. Five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour.
46:13 AJ Gentile? Morrison never arrived. Not in New Mexico, not anywhere. The best physicists in the program had simply ceased to exist. The second volunteer made it through, but something went wrong. Lieutenant Farley spent 30 seconds in the field. When he appeared in New Mexico, he'd aged 30 years. His hair was white, his skin was paper thin. He tried to speak but collapsed. The medical team couldn't save him. Cause of death? Old age. He was 31.
46:46 AJ Gentile? They recalibrated everything. Checked Tesla's notes, made adjustments. The third test stayed local, just one floor up, 10 feet of distance.
46:58 AJ Gentile? Lieutenant Hutchins stepped through. What happened next made everyone in the room step back. Hutchins arrived in pieces. Not torn apart, separated in time. His legs materialized first, his torso 30 seconds later, arms two minutes after that. The medical team stood by helplessly. His heart had arrived before his lungs. His brain was sending signals to limbs that existed in different moments in time.
47:29 AJ Gentile? The few who survived came back broken. Private Anderson made a successful jump and returned physically intact, but he couldn't stop screaming about the space between. The place where time moved sideways. Where he felt himself dying and being born over and over again. Where past and future existed in the same moment. And his mind tried to be in both. The psychiatrist sedated him, but he never spoke again. Dr. Agnew studied the data from 15 failed tests. 15 volunteers. Only three survivors. And all went insane. But there was a pattern. Morrison was 26 when he vanished. Farley was 31.
48:12 AJ Gentile? Anderson was 19 and survived, though his mind didn't. The younger the subject, the better the outcome. Adult consciousness was the problem. Too rigid, it's too fixed. When you're 30, your brain knows how reality works. And when that reality breaks, so does your mind. But children, their minds were still forming, still flexible. They could bend without breaking. Agnew knew what this meant. The military had done terrible things before in the name of national security. We covered some of this in our MKUltra episode. But using children as test subjects crossed a line that nobody wanted to cross. That's when Raymond Basago spoke up.
48:56 AJ Gentile? Ray worked for the Ralph M. Parsons Company, DARPA's main contractor. He'd been on the project from the beginning and understood the stakes. Ray had a six-year-old son. Smart kid, resilient, adaptable. Ray volunteered him for the program. Agnew wanted to say no. Every instinct told him this was wrong. But the data was clear. And they were out of options and out of adult volunteers. The children were their only chance.
49:34 AJ Gentile? The lab at Curtis Wright looked like any government facility. Gray walls, gray floor, gray ceiling, metal desks covered in paperwork, coffee stain mugs next to oscilloscopes and voltage meters. You'd never know this bland room was about to send a six-year-old boy back in time.
49:55 AJ Gentile? Andrew Baciago stood between the metal pillars. The machine hummed. Not loud, more like a vibration that made your teeth hurt. He'd done this before. Three times to Santa Fe, once to his grandparents' house in Ohio. But this jump was different. This time, he was going farther, way farther. November 19th, 1863, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. President Lincoln would give a speech. Andrew's job was simple: watch, listen, remember, report back.
50:26 AJ Gentile? The shimmer started between the pillars. The air got thick. Andrew knew the feeling, like trying to walk through jello. He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the vorral tunnel. Then everything went white.
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51:24 AJ Gentile? Then his feet hit mud, cold mud that squished into his shoes. Except, these weren't his shoes. They were huge, adult military boots that flopped when he walked. He was wearing a Union uniform. It was itchy and smelled old. And the smell hit him hard. Sweet and rotten, mixed with horse manure and smoke. Andrew's stomach turned. People pressed in from all sides, hundreds of people. Soldiers in blue uniforms, women in long dresses. Everyone looked tired. Their faces were dirty. The November cold cut through the wool uniform. Andrew pushed through the crowd toward the wooden platform. That's where Lincoln would speak. And that's what he came to see. But moving was hard.
52:09 AJ Gentile? The oversized boots kept sticking in the mud. A soldier muttered something about whose kid he was, but nobody stopped him. Just another boy in a uniform. The ground was churned into thick mud. Not regular mud, in places it had a rusty color. The battlefield was only four months old. The earth still remembered. Somebody's elbow caught Andrew in the head. His eyes watered, but he didn't cry. He had a mission. Find the platform. See Lincoln. Remember everything. The platform came into view. Raw wood hammered together. Men in top hats stood around it. They looked different than everyone else. They had clean clothes. They looked fed, like they belonged in another world. Then the crowd stirred.
52:54 AJ Gentile? People pointed, they got excited. A tall man in a black coat climbed onto the platform. Even from where Andrew stood, he can see how tired Lincoln looked. How his shoulders bent forward. The president removed his hat. He cleared his throat. The crowd went silent. Andrew was six years old, standing in a field in Pennsylvania, listening to Abraham Lincoln speak. He was alone, scared, and 105 years before he was born. Then Andrew saw something to his left. A flash. Andrew panicked a little. He was trained to avoid this. Someone had taken this picture.
53:37 AJ Gentile? The project moved faster after Andrew's success. DARPA immediately began recruiting more children. They worked through defense contractors and military families, looking for kids with specific traits. High intelligence, obviously. Physical resilience to handle the stress. But most importantly, the children needed minds that could handle temporal flex-
53:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, I wish my bookie would have some temporal flexibility on the two G's I own. I lost the bundle on the ponies.
54:06 AJ Gentile? I told you to stop gambling.
54:08 Speaker 02 The filly's name was Hump and Run. Fifteen to one, I had no choice.
54:13 AJ Gentile? Hump and Run? How'd she do?
54:15 Speaker 02 I had no idea. After the clubhouse turn, she came really fast and I never saw her again.
54:21 AJ Gentile? Okay. Anyway, hundreds of kids were interviewed and tested.
54:25 Speaker 02 For a secret time travel program? What responsible parent is gonna sign a kid up to play pin the tail on a T-Rex?
54:33 AJ Gentile? Well, they were told their child had been selected for a special program for gifted students. The children began intense testing and training.
54:43 AJ Gentile? Physical conditioning came first. Then meditation techniques to help them stay grounded across different timelines. Some kids couldn't handle it. They were quietly returned to their families with a cover story that they just weren't the right fit. Out of thousands of recruits, only 140 children made it through training. They became known as chrononauts.
55:05 AJ Gentile? They were divided into teams based on age and ability. Each team specialized in a different time period. They memorized layouts of ancient cities. They learned to recognize clothing styles, practiced blending into crowds from different eras. Now, this wasn't school, it was a covert operation. And for especially dangerous missions, children were even given cyanide capsules.
55:27 Speaker 02 That's one way to stop the student loan crisis.
55:30 AJ Gentile? Ugh. Andrew made multiple trips to Gettysburg. On his fourth mission, something strange happened. He was watching Lincoln from his usual spot when he noticed another boy. Same uniform, same oversized shoes, same face. He was looking at himself, a younger version from an earlier trip. During training, they warned about this. Two versions of the same person existing in the same moment. They said to avoid contact, but never explain why. When the two Andrews locked eyes, he understood. The younger one looked terrified. The older Andrew felt his mind struggling to process what he was seeing.
56:10 AJ Gentile? He remembered being in that exact spot, seeing his older self, feeling that same fear. In that moment, reality felt fragile. Andrew just couldn't explain it, but he could sense that the world was just somehow wrong. Other Crononauts reported similar experiences. A girl named Sarah met three versions of herself at Pearl Harbor. Mark, an older boy, watched himself die and entioted him. But a new Mark was able to change the past, survive, and complete his mission. Some children claimed they'd witnessed events that never happened, or hadn't happened yet. Different versions of history where different choices led to different outcomes.
56:52 AJ Gentile? Tesla's technology hadn't just unlocked time travel, it gave access to the multiverse.
56:57 Speaker 02 Dapa, open the multiverse!
57:00 AJ Gentile? Yep.
57:01 Speaker 02 Well, now we know who to blame for ruining the MCU.
57:05 AJ Gentile? By 1980, Project Pegasus achieved something new. They learned to bend space as well as time. The children who'd proven themselves on Earth would now be sent somewhere else, somewhere 140 million miles away. The Crononauts were going to Mars.
57:31 AJ Gentile? The multiverse discovery changed everything. Project Pegasus had started as a time travel program. By 1980, they'd learned something new. Tesla's machines that bent time could also bend space, including outer space. Project Pegasus was getting an upgrade.
57:49 AJ Gentile? This new phase was a joint venture. The primary contractor was the Ralph M. Parsons Company, where Andrew's father worked. But they also had engineers from Lockheed Skunk Works and Hughes Aircraft, and of course, the CIA. This team of elite researchers had built the most sophisticated machine on Earth. They called it "The Jump Room."
58:08 Speaker 02 Oh, I always get one of those for my guppies' birthday parties. Lot, lot of fun.
58:13 AJ Gentile? A jump room?
58:13 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, it's a big inflatable castle, and the rugrats hop around in there, yeah, cracking skulls until someone starts crying.
58:21 AJ Gentile? No, no, no, you're thinking of-
58:22 Speaker 02 Little monsters get a gristle in these bouncy castles. It's like Thunderdome. If, uh, if Thunderdome was made of inflatable rubber and, uh, and Tina Turner was made out of, uh, well, saga moms with inflatable lip injections.
58:35 AJ Gentile? This has nothing to do with a bouncy castle. Would you let me get back to this?
58:39 Speaker 02 Fine, fine, go ahead.
58:44 AJ Gentile? The Tesla portal facility in New Jersey was retired. The new facility was hidden in plain sight at 999 North Sepulveda Boulevard in El Segundo, California. Just another office building in the aerospace corridor. Normal lobby, normal waiting area, except for the elevator. Press a sequence of buttons, and the walls would dissolve. Then you'd be somewhere else. Somewhere very, very far away.
59:17 AJ Gentile? Andrew Basyago was 19 when he made his first Mars jump. The training had been different this time. Three weeks at College of the Siskiyou's near Mount Shasta.
59:27 Speaker 02 Now, look, oh, wait, wrong mouth. Go on.
59:30 AJ Gentile? Major Ed Dames ran the program. Not time travel training, survival training.
59:37 AJ Gentile? They learned about thin atmospheres, extreme temperatures, and how to use the weapon they were issued, a handheld device with three settings: stun, heat, and kill.
59:48 AJ Gentile? The instructors were blunt about the dangers. Of the 97,000 people sent to Mars over the years, only 7,000 lived longer than five years. Those were not good odds.
1:00:05 AJ Gentile? Andrew remembered taking his first steps on the alien planet. Mars isn't the barren, lifeless world NASA shows us. In certain places, it had breathable air. And in those places, there was life on Mars.
1:00:18 Speaker 02 No, Ben, wonder if you'll never know. He's in the best-selling show. Is there life on Mars? What?
1:00:35 AJ Gentile? Andrew saw creatures that reminded him of plesiosaurs, dinosaurs with long necks and powerful bodies. He was surprised at how graceful they moved. He saw huge spider-like creatures. They kept their distance, which was just fine to Andrew. Imagine tarantulas about the size of a car, but can move twice as fast.
1:00:53 Speaker 02 Now Ziggy play guitar, jamming good with weird and guilty. And the spiders from Mars.
1:01:02 AJ Gentile? You are killing me, dude.
1:01:03 Speaker 02 I'm sorry. I thought you were setting me up for another Bowie tune.
1:01:06 AJ Gentile? Okay, whenever you assume that.
1:01:08 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:01:09 AJ Gentile? Assume you're wrong.
1:01:13 AJ Gentile? There weren't just animals on Mars. There were people, tall, thin beings with large heads and black eyes. The mission was to beat the Soviets to Mars and establish contact with this advanced civilization. And Andrew wasn't going along. The Mars program recruited young people who'd proven themselves in the time travel experiments.
1:01:34 AJ Gentile? One member of Andrew's team introduced himself as Barry Satoro. Barry was a lanky college student from Columbia University. Friendly guy, articulate, easy smile. Years later, the world would know him by a different name: Barack Obama.
1:01:48 Speaker 02 Wait, wait, wait, what? Barack Obama was a Martian Kranganord?
1:01:52 AJ Gentile? Yep.
1:01:53 Speaker 02 Wasn't Obama also invited to the Bilderberg before he was president?
1:01:57 AJ Gentile? He sure was.
1:01:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, the lizard people pick their candidates early.
1:02:01 AJ Gentile? Obama being part of the program might sound unbelievable, but two other chrononauts came forward: William Stillings and Bernard Mendez. Independently, they confirmed everything: the training, the jump room, the alien species. And they both said Barack, or Barry, was there.
1:02:20 AJ Gentile? But the most shocking confirmation wouldn't come from witnesses or documents. It was broadcast live to millions of people by a late-night radio host. Well, not a late-night radio host, the late-night radio host.
1:02:40 AJ Gentile? The confirmation from other alleged crononauts was compelling, but the most shocking validation of Bashago's story didn't come from a fellow participant. It was broadcast live to millions of people.
1:03:04 Speaker 07 From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I meet you all. Good evening, good morning, good afternoon. Whatever the case may be, wherever in the world you are, every single time zone covered by this program, midnight in the desert. I'm Art Bell.
1:03:25 AJ Gentile? For decades, Art Bell was the king of paranormal radio. From his home studio in Prump, Nevada, or as he called it, "The High Desert," Art Bell had an audience of millions, and I was one of those millions. Art was known for being open-minded. No idea was too strange for him. But he never ridiculed his guests, and he never talked down to his audience. And I take the same approach with the Wi-Fi's. But Art was also a sharp interviewer. If someone was clearly lying, Art would call it out and ask for proof. If someone made a wild claim, Art demanded an explanation. But most of all, Art Bell was a master storyteller, and so was Andrew Bashago. Bashago made several appearances on Art's shows over the years, but one stood out.
1:04:11 Speaker 07 Today, Andy is waging a "truth" campaign to reveal his experiences in these programs, so humanity can understand the true extent of technical development on our planet and the true history of our activities in outer space.
1:04:28 AJ Gentile? Bajago announced that he had a quantum bombshell for Art. They agreed to save it for the end, you know, storytelling. Art and Andrew talked for hours about Project Pegasus. Then Bajago recalled a minor detail from one of his training exercises.
1:04:43 Speaker 05 Having spent fifteen years waiting to tell you, and here it is. On November 5th of 1971, we participated in an advanced chronovisor probe from ITT Defense Communications in Nutley, New Jersey.
1:04:59 AJ Gentile? The broadcast went silent. Not dead air, stunned silence. When Art spoke again, his voice had changed. The confident host was gone.
1:05:09 Speaker 05 I encountered you when I was in Project Pegasus, and I've been waiting fifteen years to tell you.
1:05:14 Speaker 07 Well, I'll tell the audience, and I don't think I've really told anybody that I know of, except some close friends a long time ago. I worked for ITT in Nutley, New Jersey. I was a technician, and I was checking waveguide for a government project. Rather, secret government project, actually. So, that's the truth.
1:05:40 AJ Gentile? It was a spontaneous, unprompted confirmation of a key obscure detail in Bajago's story. Art was floored. You can hear him trying to reconcile the impossibility of what he was hearing.
1:05:53 Speaker 07 I indeed worked for ITT in Nutley, New Jersey, so... Oh my god, I just, okay, that's a bomb, that's a bombshell. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna break it here, because, uh... How the hell could he know that?
1:06:12 AJ Gentile? For listeners, this was a mind-blowing moment. A respected host had just become a witness. It suggested that Bajago had access to very specific information, classified or otherwise. But he had more than just anecdotes. Andrew said that during one of his trips to Gettysburg, a photographer is there, but there were no known photos of Lincoln at Gettysburg. Or so he thought.
1:06:42 AJ Gentile? For ninety years historians searched for photographs of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. They knew photographers were there, they knew the equipment existed, but no confirmed image of Lincoln giving his most famous speech had ever been found. In 1952, archivist Josephine Cobb was examining Civil War glass plate negatives at the National Archives. She studied each plate under magnification, looking for details others might have missed. One plate caught her attention. It showed a crowd in an open field, soldiers, civilians, a wooden platform in the distance. The scene matched descriptions of Gettysburg, November 19th, 1863. But where was Lincoln? Cobb increased the magnification.
1:07:27 AJ Gentile? There, barely visible on the platform, Abraham Lincoln, the first confirmed photographic evidence of Lincoln at Gettysburg. The discovery made headlines, and for decades this would remain the only known photograph of that historic day. The image went to the National Archives, another piece of American history preserved. But Josephine Cobb noticed something else in the photograph, something odd. In the foreground stood a young boy, maybe six or seven years old, wearing a Union Bugle Boy uniform. Now that wasn't unusual, many children wore military-style clothing during the Civil War. Drummer boys and Bugle Boys were common at public gatherings. What was unusual was that the boy was alone.
1:08:09 AJ Gentile? No adult supervision, no other children nearby, just a small figure standing by himself in the crowd. The uniform looked authentic, brass buttons, military cap, everything period correct, except for one detail, the boy's haircut. Even in the grainy photograph, it looked wrong for 1863, too modern, like something you'd see in the 1970s. And then there were the shoes. The boy was wearing adult shoes, brown leather shoes clearly too big for his feet, the kind that would fall off if he tried to run. The photograph raised questions that wouldn't be answered for decades. Who was this boy and why was he alone? Why did he look out of place in a photograph where everyone else belonged?
1:08:55 AJ Gentile? The photograph exists. You could see it for yourself. Abraham Lincoln, surrounded by citizens and soldiers, could be seen in the background. But in the foreground, wearing an itchy blue uniform and oversized shoes, is six-year-old Andrew Baciago.
1:09:16 AJ Gentile? The story of Andrew Baciago is compelling. He's intelligent, articulate, he knows how to tell a story. But is it true?
1:09:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, no.
1:09:25 AJ Gentile? Well, some of it is.
1:09:26 Speaker 02 Yarrah!
1:09:27 AJ Gentile? The government did confiscate Tesla's files after his death in 1943. That's documented. Were some of his files kept secret? Probably. The FBI still has classified Tesla documents they won't release. We know the government has attempted remote viewing through time. Joe McMonigal, one of the military's top remote viewers, claims he saw ancient civilizations on Mars. That was part of the official Stargate program. We also know the US military and CIA have experimented on children. NKUltra did it. Multiple programs tested drugs, psychology, and worse, on kids without consent. And if you want to get really angry, watch our episode on the dark side of DARPA.
1:10:07 Speaker 02 Link down in your wormhole. Yeah.
1:10:10 AJ Gentile? But that's where the provable facts end.
1:10:12 Speaker 02 Now I hate this part.
1:10:14 AJ Gentile? The science doesn't work. Tesla's radiant energy was about wireless power transmission, not teleportation.
1:10:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, but he teleported Wolverine a bunch of times during that magic show.
1:10:27 AJ Gentile? You're talking about the movie The Prestige.
1:10:29 Speaker 02 Right. And who played Tesla in that movie?
1:10:33 AJ Gentile? David Bowie.
1:10:34 Speaker 02 Right. And who played life on Mars?
1:10:37 AJ Gentile? David Bowie.
1:10:38 Speaker 02 I rest my case.
1:10:44 AJ Gentile? Yes, scientists have teleported quantum states of particles. But teleporting a person? That would require more energy than an exploding star, even if they could figure out how to do it. Baciago says they just plugged the machine into the wall. Now, I don't know of any wire that can carry that kind of juice.
1:11:01 Speaker 02 Ah, maybe some heavy-duty black-market Romex. Don't tell the local 164.
1:11:06 AJ Gentile? Local 164?
1:11:08 Speaker 02 Ah, Bergen County knows what I'm talking about.
1:11:13 AJ Gentile? Another problem. Every time we do a time travel story, they never mention that the Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, they're all constantly moving. If you time travel five seconds, you'll be in the middle of space. Nobody ever accounts for this.
1:11:27 Speaker 02 Nobody except...
1:11:29 AJ Gentile? Nobody except Mike "Madman" Markham. He factored this into his calculations. That's why his time travel story is probably my favorite.
1:11:37 Speaker 02 Link down in your vortle tuttle.
1:11:39 AJ Gentile? Oh yeah, the terminology doesn't make sense. Vortle isn't a word. He combined vortex and portal because it sounds cool. In terms like quantum displacement and quantum holographic destabilization, these are just physics words strung together. They don't mean anything. The chronovisor is another red flag. You've got chrono, which means time, and you've got visor, which means vision. So this is a device that allows you to see through time.
1:12:05 Speaker 04 The original idea for the chronovisor came from a Benedictine monk by the name of Pellegrino Ernnetti.
1:12:13 AJ Gentile? He used to watch ancient Roman plays, the crucifixion of Christ, speeches by Mussolini.
1:12:18 Speaker 02 Oof, that priest must have a weird Netflix feed.
1:12:22 AJ Gentile? Well, according to the legend, the chronovisor is hidden in the secret Vatican archives. I did a whole episode on this and it's a lot of fun. Now, I didn't debunk the chronovisor, but I did prove Father Ernnetti was lying.
1:12:34 Speaker 02 Link down in the holiest of holies.
1:12:36 AJ Gentile? Then there are all the timeline problems. Baciago says Donald Rumsfeld ran the project from 1969 to 1972. But Rumsfeld was working on domestic policy then, nowhere near DARPA, and that's documented. The Art Bell confirmation seems stunning until you realize Art mentioned working at ITT Nutley in his 1998 autobiography, so it was public information. And Baciago's story has changed over the years. The year of his recruitment, the number of trips to Gettysburg, the number of children, the years of the Mars jumps, and all kinds of other dates. And speaking of Mars, that part of the story is a mess. In 2008, Andrew Baciago published The Discovery of Life on Mars.
1:13:19 Speaker 02 There's a life on Mars.
1:13:25 AJ Gentile? That's enough Bowie for one show.
1:13:26 Speaker 02 Never enough Bowie.
1:13:31 AJ Gentile? Anyway, he published a paper claiming to discover life on Mars by analyzing NASA photos. He said he saw humanoids, animals, and structures. But he never mentioned he'd been there himself. Why analyze blurry photos if you've walked on Mars? He only added the jump room story years later.
1:13:48 Speaker 02 Oh, so he probably didn't blow up his insurance barrier?
1:13:52 AJ Gentile? Probably not. Like almost everyone who claims they were part of a secret space program, Bashago's story follows a pattern. They all say they were in multiple programs. They all fought aliens, traveled through time, and then got sent back to their childhood bodies. And whenever someone challenges the details, there's always the same answer: Their memories were suppressed, but now they're slowly coming back. And these storytellers share something else: They turn their stories into income.
1:14:18 Speaker 05 Why couldn't someone else talk about their experience in a secret space program? As long as they don't talk about the stuff that I created, based on my real IP here. In it, it says, "I created a lot of this stuff." "I created Dark Fleet." "Dark Fleet didn't exist before I talked about it." "Now all these people are popping up, 'I was on Dark Fleet, I was on Dark Fleet.'"
1:14:43 AJ Gentile? Paid speaking events, weekend seminars, podcast appearances, and of course, books.
1:14:49 Speaker 02 There's always a book.
1:14:51 AJ Gentile? There's always a book. Yet millions of people believe these stories. Intelligent people. Why? Well, because time travel represents something we all desperately want: A second chance.
1:15:13 AJ Gentile? We all have regrets. Things we'd change if we could. Mistakes we'd undo. Words we'd take back. People we'd save. Time travel stories give us hope that somewhere, somehow, there's a loophole in the rules of the universe. I'd give anything for that loophole. To go back and fix my mistakes. To say goodbye to people I never got the chance to. To tell them I love them just one more time. But I can't. None of us can. And regret is a powerful emotion. But regrets are just memories. They live in the past. By focusing on the past, regrets rob you of the joy you could be feeling right now. Regrets can rob you of the joy you deserve to have in the future.
1:15:58 AJ Gentile? You don't need to fix the past. Just accept it, learn from it, and let it go. Your second chance isn't in some secret government program. It's not hidden in a classified file or a stolen Tesla blueprint. Your second chance starts the second you stop looking backward and start looking forward. The time machine you're looking for, you're living it. It's called "today." And unlike Andrew Baciago's story, yours is real.
1:16:36 AJ Gentile? Andrew Baciago has been telling that story for years. He says he was there. He says he traveled through time. He even says he was sent to Mars. Now, I don't know if his story is real, but the government programs he describes, they definitely were. Next, we go from time travel to something even stranger. In 1954, President Eisenhower was on vacation in Palm Springs when he disappeared. What happened there, according to multiple witnesses, was a face-to-face meeting with extraterrestrial beings. The result was a treaty, technology, in exchange for access to human subjects.
1:17:09 Speaker 02 And so, members of the committee, I was just a simple goldfish, born in a bucket in Sal's Aquarium and Pet Supply on Jeroe Avenue.
1:17:16 AJ Gentile? How many people are watching this?
1:17:18 Speaker 02 Forty-seven thousand. I'm on a pastry. Don't interrupt.
1:17:23 AJ Gentile? This is the Griotta Treaty.
1:17:28 AJ Gentile? On the night of February 20th, 1954, the President of the United States vanished during his Palm Springs vacation.
1:17:37 AJ Gentile? Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn't in his hotel room. He wasn't on the golf course. The Secret Service searched everywhere. He was just gone. The Associated Press reported, "President Eisenhower Died Tonight of a Heart Attack in Palm Springs." An emergency press conference was called. The president was alive and well. He'd chipped a tooth and was rushed to a local dentist. The story seemed believable enough, but reporters started asking questions. They couldn't find the dentist or his office, and no record of the visit. That's because the story was a lie. Eisenhower wasn't at the dentist. He was at Edwards Air Force Base for the most classified meeting in American history.
1:18:32 AJ Gentile? The president had vanished for an entire evening. The Associated Press panicked and reported his death before retracting it a few minutes later. The White House said he'd chipped a tooth and needed emergency dental work. But Eisenhower wasn't at the dentist. He was at Edwards Air Force Base for a secret meeting. The base was on complete lockdown. Armed soldiers patrolled the perimeter with no name tape on their uniforms. No rank, no insignia. Anonymous guards protecting the most classified meeting in history. Inside a secure hangar, Eisenhower waited with a small group. High-ranking generals, top scientists. This group would later get a code name: Majestic 12.
1:19:16 AJ Gentile? Just after midnight, two lights appeared in the sky. As they got closer, you could see their shapes. These weren't planes. They weren't helicopters. They were circular, made of a metal that looked like polished silver. Perfectly smooth, no seams, no rivets, no doors or windows. They hovered for a moment and then settled onto the tarmac without making a sound. Then, the doors opened.
1:19:46 AJ Gentile? White light spilled out. The air around the craft shimmered with waves that looked like heat distortion. But the temperature actually dropped. Everyone in the hangar felt it. Ramps extended from the vessels. The men watching were nervous, though they tried to hide it. Still, they could hear their own heartbeats. They were breathing fast. Then, they saw movement in the light. Beings emerged. They looked almost human, but weren't. Tall and thin, with pale skin and long blond hair. They wore simple, one-piece silver suits. The military gave them a name: the Nordics. The Nordics didn't speak, but everyone could hear them.
1:20:30 AJ Gentile? Not through their ears, through their minds. Telepathic communication felt overwhelming at first. The human mind isn't used to it. It took a few seconds for the men to adjust, but they did. The Nordics came to make an offer. They would provide technology beyond human imagination. Unlimited clean energy, the end of disease. The human lifespan would exceed 300 years. They would guide humanity into a golden age without poverty, war, or suffering. But they wanted something in exchange. To the Nordics, it was a small price for turning Earth into a paradise. All they wanted was all nuclear weapons dismantled.
1:21:12 AJ Gentile? The Nordics said humanity was like a child playing with a loaded gun. Nuclear weapons would destroy us, it was just a matter of time. But the Nordics had another message: a warning. They said another alien race was already here. A species that fed on developing worlds like parasites. The Nordics urged Eisenhower to stay away from them. This other race would also offer technology: advanced propulsion, anti-gravity, unlimited energy. But they would offer something the Nordics wouldn't: weapons. The other aliens would allow America to keep its nuclear arsenal, and all the advanced technologies would be presented as gifts.
1:21:54 AJ Gentile? Eisenhower didn't know that the price for these gifts would be much higher than disarming. He also didn't know the gifts were a trap.
1:22:13 AJ Gentile? Two months later, a letter surfaced that proved the meeting wasn't entirely secret. Gerald White, a writer and researcher, wrote about what he saw at Edwards Air Force Base. Extreme security measures were in place.
1:22:26 Speaker 05 We were finally allowed to enter the restricted section after about six hours, in which we were checked on every possible item, event, incident, and aspect of our personal and public life.
1:22:38 AJ Gentile? When they were finally allowed inside, what they saw was beyond anything they could have imagined.
1:22:45 Speaker 05 During my two-days' visit, I saw five separate and distinct types of aircraft being studied and handled by our Air Force officials, with the assistance and permission of the Aetherians.
1:22:57 AJ Gentile? The Aetherians were, apparently, one of many alien races working alongside the US military. But not everyone was taking this revelation well.
1:23:08 Speaker 05 I have never seen so many human beings in a state of complete collapse and confusion, as they realized that their own world had ended with such finality. The reality of the "other plane" aeroforms is now removed from the realms of speculation and made a rather painful part of the consciousness of every responsible scientific and political group.
1:23:33 AJ Gentile? As far as White was concerned, the speculation about UFOs and aliens was over. Witnesses were invited, the crafts were here, the issue was settled.
1:23:47 Speaker 05 I have no words to express my reactions. It has finally happened. It is now a matter of history. President Eisenhower will go directly to the people via radio and television. From what I could gather, an official statement to the country is being prepared for delivery about the middle of May.
1:24:07 AJ Gentile? The announcement never came. The public was told nothing. White wasn't the only civilian there. The delegation included people with serious credentials. Dr. Edwin Norris had been Truman's chief economic adviser. Franklin Allen worked for the Hearst newspaper empire. Cardinal McIntyre represented the Catholic Church.
1:24:29 AJ Gentile? These weren't UFO enthusiasts or conspiracy theorists. They were establishment figures, people with reputations to protect and everything to lose by going public. Within Days of Light's letter, all the civilian witnesses received visits from men in dark suits. The story was buried. Some bodies were buried. Those still alive never spoke publicly again.
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1:25:35 AJ Gentile? The second alien race arrived just as the Nordics predicted. Their craft was different. Not silver or shimmering, dull gray metal that absorbed light like a stealth aircraft. Where the Nordic vessels looked peaceful, this new craft was menacing. It looked powerful. The witnesses understood immediately. This ship was built for war. No ramp extended, no beings emerged, but like the Nordics, the men could hear voices in their minds. Where the Nordics were warm and engaging, these new voices were cold and clinical. This wasn't a visit, this was a transaction. A voice invited Eisenhower and his team aboard.
1:26:19 AJ Gentile? The men glanced at each other. The voice repeated the invitation. This time it sounded more like a command. Inside, the first thing they noticed was the disorienting silence. Sounds were absorbed like in a vacuum. And there was a pulsating hum. You couldn't hear it, but you can feel it reverberating throughout your body. The air was thin and cold. There was the smell of ozone and copper. There was also a faint smell of something organic. Algae, maybe, or moss. Like the exterior, the interior was seamless. No bolts or rivets, no panel seams. The floors, walls, and ceiling were made of the same silvery-gray material. The room was well-lit, but it felt wrong.
1:27:04 AJ Gentile? There were no visible bulbs or fixtures. The light was just there. Occasionally, the walls rippled and shifted as if responding to something. This didn't feel like a machine, it felt alive. A voice directed them to a central chamber where they waited in uncomfortable silence. Then, they appeared. Small beings, about four feet tall with gray skin. Huge bald heads and enormous black eyes. Thin limbs, long fingers, no visible mouths. They moved mechanically, robotically. The beings didn't have a name then, but we now know them as the Greys.
1:27:44 AJ Gentile? They'd been watching Earth for a long time. They knew about the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, how close humanity was to destroying itself. They knew about the Nordics' offer. They agreed with the Nordics on one thing. Humans were headed for extinction. Like the Nordics, the Greys also had an offer. The Nordics offered a path to world peace. The end of war, starvation, poverty, free energy for all. A great leap forward for all humanity. The Greys had a different approach. They wouldn't save all of humanity, only a select few.
1:28:20 AJ Gentile? Grays had technology that would put America a century ahead of any other nation. Particle beam weapons, zero-point energy, advanced metallurgy, stealth technology, anti-gravity propulsion. America wouldn't just win the Cold War, it would dominate Earth for generations. And all they wanted in exchange was access, permission to operate on Earth in secret. Underground bases, hidden facilities, and they wanted access to the human population for biological study, just a few people. The abductions would be harmless, people would be taken aboard a ship while they were asleep. The experiments would be painless, when the subjects were returned, they'd have no memory of the abduction.
1:29:05 AJ Gentile? And for transparency, the United States government would be provided with a full list of every abductee. All eyes were on the President, the generals, the scientists, the Cardinal, and the Grays, waiting. Eisenhower had to choose, the Nordics' path to peace, or the Grays' promise of power.
1:29:36 AJ Gentile? The two alien races had made their offers. The Nordics promised peace through disarming, the Grays promised power through technology. For Eisenhower, the choice was clear, he chose power. The Cold War was escalating, Soviet nukes were pointed at American cities. The Nordics' offer sounded idealistic and naive. The Grays' deal promised survival, it was practical. The decision was made in that Gray chamber. No ceremony, no handshakes, no documents to sign. The agreement was sealed telepathically, mind to mind. The terms were simple, the United States would get advanced technology and weapons that could end any war.
1:30:17 AJ Gentile? The Grays would provide blueprints, materials, knowledge, and even assist human engineers. In return, the Grays could operate on Earth in secret. They were given federal land to build their own bases, deep underground, hidden from the public, hidden from Congress, hidden from future Presidents, hidden from everyone except Majestic 12.
1:30:41 AJ Gentile? The work began immediately. The Grays brought massive tunneling machines that could melt solid rock into glass. They moved silently beneath the New Mexico desert, Nevada, and Colorado. They left no trace on the surface. The tunnels went thousands of feet underground, level after level carved into the rock. Each level had a specific purpose. The upper levels were for human personnel. The middle levels were for joint operations. The lower levels were restricted: Grays only. In the mountains near Dulce, New Mexico, construction began on what would become the most classified facility on Earth. Seven levels deep, each level more restricted than the last.
1:31:23 AJ Gentile? Level seven was so classified that even the construction workers didn't know what they were building. The abductions also started immediately. People vanished from their cars on deserted highways, from their beds in the middle of the night. The list of names began to arrive to Majestic 12. But the numbers didn't add up. Reports suggested that for every name on the list, 10 more people went missing. And the few abductees who remembered the experience didn't describe harmless exams, they described terrifying, painful procedures. The Grays had lied. But Majestic 12 had no way to stop them without revealing the entire program.
1:32:06 AJ Gentile? But there were witnesses who had no interest in money or power, and they decided to expose the truth.
1:32:24 AJ Gentile? The Griot-A-Treaty promised America technological supremacy in exchange for allowing alien research on human subjects. The deal was simple: limited abductions, harmless experiments, full disclosure, regular reports. But by the late 1970s, it was clear the Grays weren't keeping their end of the bargain.
1:32:45 AJ Gentile? Now sure, they were sharing technology. Within a decade of the treaty, computers shrank from room-sized monsters to desktop machines. Fiber optics appeared out of nowhere. Stealth aircraft could vanish from radar. Materials that returned to their original shape after being crumpled, just like witnesses described from Roswell. The transistor, microchips, anti-gravity research, night vision. All of it accelerating at an impossible pace. But the most disturbing part wasn't what we gained, it was what we lost. Because while American technology leaped forward, American citizens were disappearing. Phil Schneider wasn't a conspiracy theorist.
1:33:27 AJ Gentile? He was a geologist and structural engineer with security clearance. Phil Schneider built secret underground bases for the government. He knew where the bodies were buried, because he helped bury them. In 1979, Schneider was at Dulce, New Mexico, helping drill thousands of feet below the surface. His team knew they were building a joint human-alien facility. They were told the Grays were peaceful partners. That was a lie. During the drilling, they broke through into something that wasn't on the blueprints: a massive cavern, already occupied. It was a gray nesting area, filled with thousands of beings in incubation tanks. And there are human parts floating in those tanks.
1:34:11 AJ Gentile? Schneider saw men, women, and children, mostly in pieces. The Grays weren't studying humanity, they were harvesting it. A firefight erupted, guns against alien energy weapons. Not exactly a fair fight. Schneider, armed with a pistol, killed two of the aliens. Then he was hit by a blast that burned off the fingers on his left hand and tore a hole in his chest. A Green Beret pushed Schneider back onto the elevator shaft, hit the button to send him to the surface, then stayed behind. In the battle, 66 humans died, only three survived. Phil Schneider was one of them.
1:34:52 AJ Gentile? William Cooper was former naval intelligence. He saw the documents. He saw the treaty. Cooper knew about Project Sigma, how astronomers in 1953 discovered large objects in space moving toward Earth, objects that could only be spaceships. Cooper knew about the underground bases, the technology exchange, the cover-up. But he also knew something Schneider didn't. The treaty wasn't just about secret facilities. In February 1955, about 300 people witnessed something at Holloman Air Force Base. Air Force One landed and taxied onto the end of the runway. The pilot instructed the tower to turn off all radar. Then, three round objects appeared in the sky.
1:35:36 AJ Gentile? One landed 200 feet from the president's plane. Another hovered overhead like a sentinel. The third vanished from sight. Witnesses watched a man descend from Air Force One. No hat, clearly visible. Everyone recognized him as President Eisenhower. They watched him shake hands with beings at the door of the craft. Then he entered their ship.
1:36:00 AJ Gentile? This wasn't secret. This was witnessed by hundreds. And still, nobody talked. But Phil Schneider and William Cooper did. Both men made public statements that their lives were in danger. Both said they were being threatened. Both predicted they would soon be found dead. Both men were right.
1:36:24 AJ Gentile? A secret treaty with aliens, underground bases, a war for the future of humanity. Two whistleblowers dead for trying to expose the truth. The Greata Treaty is one of the most elaborate conspiracy theories of the last century. But is it true?
1:36:41 AJ Gentile? The official story of Eisenhower's disappearance on February 20, 1954, is still a dental visit. The White House released the dentist's name, Dr. Francis A. Purcell. Records show he was a real dentist in Palm Springs. But the story has problems. The Eisenhower Library has extensive records of the president's health, every appointment, every procedure. But there's no record of any dental work in February 1954. None. The primary sources for the Greata Treaty are whistleblowers, William Cooper and Phil Schneider. Cooper was former naval intelligence with access to classified files. He made some bold public predictions.
1:37:21 AJ Gentile? On June 28th, 2001, on his radio show, Cooper said there would be a major terrorist attack on US soil. He said this would be a false flag operation and Osama bin Laden would be blamed. Now, this time, very few people ever heard the name Osama bin Laden. But six weeks later, on September 11th, the United States was attacked.
1:37:44 AJ Gentile? After the attacks, Cooper said on the air that he expected to be killed. Not arrested, killed. A few weeks later, he was killed in a shootout with police. They were trying to serve him with a warrant for a tax evasion. Phil Schneider showed photos and material samples he claimed were alien alloys.
1:38:02 Speaker 05 I have different artifacts explaining. Some of them are alien metals that have been produced. Here's a crystalline example. It's in the scalenohedral crystalline form. We got this from the Large Grays Technology.
1:38:19 AJ Gentile? He also believed his life was in danger. In 1995, during a lecture, he said, "If I ever commit suicide," I didn't, "I was murdered."
1:38:29 AJ Gentile? A few months later, Schneider was found dead in his apartment, strangled with a surgical tube. Official cause of death: suicide. There's a link below to the full story of Phil Schneider and Dulce Base. It's a wild one. Now, despite these very strange deaths, there's no physical proof of the Greata Treaty. But the story doesn't come from nowhere. The 1950s saw a massive worldwide wave of UFO sightings. Many were witnessed by credible military personnel. And after World War II, technology advanced quickly, maybe too quickly.
1:39:04 AJ Gentile? Computers, particle physics, wireless communication, integrated circuits, fiber optics, stealth technology, anti-gravity research. I have an episode coming up about the acceleration in technology that began in 1947, the year of the Roswell Crash. The discoveries were coming fast and they were a little too convenient.
1:39:27 AJ Gentile? Gerald Light really wrote a letter in 1954 claiming he witnessed the alien meeting. He described seeing multiple alien craft and different species. He named other witnesses Cardinal McIntyre, Franklin Allen, Dr. Edward Nurse. Now, Dr. Nurse is interesting. He was an advisor to President Truman at the time, but before that, he was a key figure from the Brookings Institution. Just a few years after the Greata meeting, the Brookings Institution released the Brookings Report. The report covers a broad range of topics related to space exploration and its potential effects on society. But one section, only a few paragraphs long, has become infamous. The report says that discovering intelligent
1:40:11 AJ Gentile? extraterrestrial life could cause major social upheaval. Now, you might have heard this is a classified report that claims aliens exist and instructed NASA to suppress this information. None of that is true. But the report did raise a question that if aliens were discovered, the implications of disclosure should be considered carefully. And then there's Eisenhower. In his farewell address to the nation in 1961, his final warning wasn't about the Soviets. It was about a threat from within. He warned of the growing unchecked power of a military industrial complex, a shadow government
1:40:50 AJ Gentile? of unelected officials and defense contractors. Eisenhower was 100% right about that.
1:40:57 Speaker 04 We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise
1:41:29 AJ Gentile? A misplaced power exists and will persist.
1:41:35 AJ Gentile? So is this a president's parting wisdom? Or was it a confession? Or a final desperate warning about the deal he made and regretted? Now, I don't know if the story of the Greta Treaty is true. But the story's observation of human nature is absolutely true. We were offered two paths. One of enlightenment and one of power. We chose power. And if given the same offer today, we'd make the same choice. Now, I wish the human race was ready for an awakening that would end violence and war and starvation and poverty and all of that. And I believe one day we'll get there. But that day is not today. The world is a dangerous place and always has been.
1:42:17 AJ Gentile? The Nordics offered peace only after we disarmed. That's a big risk to take when the Soviets were armed to the teeth. And what if the Nordics were lying? They were a bigger threat than the Soviets. So how do we know we can trust them? Think of it this way. You're in a room with a stranger. You both have guns pointed at each other. The stranger says, "I promise I won't shoot, but you have to give me your gun first." Now, you want to believe him, but you don't know him. So now the choice is yours. Trust the stranger and risk your own survival or squeeze and guarantee it. Be honest. Which would you choose?
1:43:07 AJ Gentile? Technology in exchange for abductions. That's the deal Eisenhower made. And whether you believe it or not, the abduction phenomenon that followed is well documented. Next episode takes us to New Mexico, where three hikers found a hidden chamber carved into solid rock filled with artifacts that were centuries old. Except for one that was centuries ahead of its time. The NSA seized the site and within 48 hours...
1:43:33 AJ Gentile? Still going?
1:43:34 Speaker 02 Page 38. Which brings me to the summer of 1987, when I first suspected the shadow government was monitoring my ball.
1:43:43 AJ Gentile? Your counsel is asleep.
1:43:45 Speaker 02 She's reviewing documents with her eyes closed. It keeps them confused. It's a legal technique.
1:43:52 AJ Gentile? Project Ancient Arrow.
1:43:57 AJ Gentile? In 1972, three hikers discovered a hidden room carved into a wall of Chaco Canyon. The New Mexico desert was well over 100 degrees. Inside the cavern, the temperature was a comfortable 72. Artifacts were everywhere: pottery, tools, weapons. Experts dated everything to the 8th century. Every item, except one. A compass-like object covered in symbols nobody recognized, made from an alloy that wouldn't exist for another thousand years. Within 48 hours, the National Security Agency seized the site. They called it "Project Ancient Arrow." The NSA studied the room for months, then sealed it. 21 years later, a caving revealed the truth.
1:44:41 AJ Gentile? This wasn't just a room. It was an entrance.
1:44:54 AJ Gentile? For 21 years, the Chaco Canyon Chamber remained sealed. The compass artifact was locked in a vault somewhere in Virginia. Project Ancient Arrow, like so many classified operations, gathered dust in NSA archives. By May 1994, Project Ancient Arrow was all but forgotten. But the mountain had other plans. A series of rock slides shook the canyon. The mountain seemed to be peeling back layers of itself. When the dust settled, park rangers found an opening. Not a hole, a doorway. Perfectly rectangular with sharp edges and right angles. This wasn't erosion, it was carved. The caving revealed a corridor that disappeared deep inside the mountain. The rangers called it in.
1:45:38 AJ Gentile? Project Ancient Arrow was immediately reactivated. The NSA was on-site within hours.
1:45:43 Speaker 02 Wow, the NSA moves faster than Uber Eats.
1:45:50 AJ Gentile? The military cleared the area, and five scientists arrived to take readings and measurements. But these weren't archaeologists. They worked for the ACIO, the Advanced Contact Intelligence Organization, a subsection of the NSA. It operated beyond classified, above top secret, and without congressional oversight. Most senior NSA officials don't know it exists, and those who do don't acknowledge it. The ACIO likes it this way. Their specialty was technology that shouldn't exist on Earth, and this corridor was exactly their kind of problem.
1:46:25 AJ Gentile? The passage spiraled upward through solid rock. Not carved, melted. The walls were polished at the atomic level, covered in glowing symbols that seemed part of the stone itself. Twenty-three chambers branched off at regular intervals. The spiral formed a perfect double helix, DNA carved in stone. Every chamber contained artifacts, paintings using pigments nobody could identify, musical instruments that created frequencies humans couldn't hear, star charts drawn from somewhere else in the galaxy. The same symbols from the corridor were in every room. Chamber 23 was different, though. No symbols, no artwork, just one artifact, a small optical disc.
1:47:09 AJ Gentile? It looked like a CD.
1:47:11 Speaker 02 Uh, what year was this?
1:47:13 AJ Gentile? 1994.
1:47:14 Speaker 02 Uh, probably an AOL disc.
1:47:16 AJ Gentile? It wasn't an AOL CD.
1:47:17 Speaker 02 Are you sure? They were everywhere.
1:47:19 AJ Gentile? It wasn't a CD at all. It just kind of looked like one. And scientists still assumed the disc contained digital information, but when they tried to read it, nothing worked. Lasers failed. Electron microscopes showed only a smooth surface. But under certain wavelengths of light, symbols appeared, thousands of them, layered in three-dimensional patterns, the same symbols that covered the walls. The ACIO couldn't decipher it. They sent the disc to Virginia for analysis. After almost two years of analyzing the ancient arrow site, the scientists thought they'd found everything. Then x-rays of chamber 23 revealed something else. A trapdoor buried under six inches of debris. It covered a shaft dropping straight down 150 feet.
1:48:04 AJ Gentile? Too narrow for a person, so they lowered cameras instead.
1:48:07 Speaker 02 Ah, that reminds me. I gotta schedule a colonoscopy.
1:48:10 AJ Gentile? Okay, that's enough.
1:48:12 Speaker 02 What? Everyone over 50 should get one.
1:48:15 AJ Gentile? Thank you for the PSA.
1:48:16 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, that's right, fellas. Get your PSA checked too, eh?
1:48:20 AJ Gentile? I've got one paragraph left.
1:48:23 Speaker 02 Fine, fine, go ahead.
1:48:26 Speaker 02 Sheesh, what a grouch.
1:48:31 AJ Gentile? Chamber 24 was massive, three times bigger than any other room. Seven groups of symbols covered the wall in the most complex pattern they'd seen. But there was no way to reach it. The project stalled again. Two years later, another discovery would show that ancient arrow wasn't ancient at all. The discovery had nothing to do with the past. It had to do with the future.
1:49:01 AJ Gentile? In the summer of 1996, two college students were hiking near Chaco Canyon. 24 years after the first ancient arrow discovery. Two years after rock slides that exposed new chambers. They spotted something metallic catching sunlight. Not buried, not hidden, just sitting on the ground.
1:49:20 Speaker 02 1996, AOL CDs were still everywhere.
1:49:24 AJ Gentile? It wasn't an AOL CD.
1:49:27 Speaker 02 Okay.
1:49:28 AJ Gentile? The object was about the size of a shoebox and heavy like lead. Its surface showed a pattern of swirled gold and silver that was a three-dimensional map of the exact area where they stood. Strange symbols covered every inch of the object. Not carved or etched, the symbols were part of the metal itself. As the students lifted the object from the sand, both collapsed at exactly the same time, like someone had flipped a switch. They weren't unconscious, they were inside a vision.
1:49:58 Speaker 02 What, did they eat mushrooms off this thing?
1:50:01 AJ Gentile? No.
1:50:01 Speaker 02 Oh, it's in the desert, that's right. So, uh, they probably ate peyote.
1:50:07 AJ Gentile? No.
1:50:07 Speaker 02 They lick a frog?
1:50:08 AJ Gentile? They didn't eat or lick anything. Just touching the box gave them a vision. But it gave them the same vision. A massive chamber system inside a mountain. Twenty-three rooms in a spiral pattern. They could smell cool air and feel smooth stone under their feet. Strange symbols glowed on walls they'd never seen. They can hear footsteps echoing. Their own footsteps, walking through chambers that existed somewhere else. When the vision ended, both students were on their knees in the sand, gasping like they'd been underwater. The experience lasted a few seconds, but to them, it felt like hours. They then wrapped the artifact carefully. Neither wanted another experience.
1:50:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, nothing's worse than a bad trip, am I right?
1:50:53 AJ Gentile? I don't know what you're talking about.
1:50:55 Speaker 02 Come on, yes you do.
1:50:57 AJ Gentile? Please, please, there are kids watching.
1:50:59 Speaker 02 Oh, right, right, right. Sorry, sorry, kids. Uh, by bad trip, I just mean, uh, a weekend in Portland.
1:51:07 AJ Gentile? Be nice. Anyway, they brought the shoebox artifact to their archaeology professor. But when he touched it, nothing. No visions, no reaction. Whatever happened to his students didn't happen to him. He noted the unusual metal composition and the unknown symbols. He uploaded the findings to academic databases to see if anyone recognized this artifact. Unfortunately for the professor, somebody did. The internet was still new to most people in 1996, but it wasn't new to the NSA or its secret internal division, the ACIO. Since Ancient Arrow reopened in 1994, the ACIO had been monitoring public and private networks for certain keywords and images. Unidentifiable symbols, unusual metal compositions,
1:51:52 AJ Gentile? reports of induced visions. The professor's research triggered every alert. Within four hours, federal agents were in his office. They confiscated the artifact and made the professor sign a stack of non-disclosure forms. The agents added a few threats about national security, treason, and prison. Just to be clear. The object went directly to Dr. Jamison Neruda, ACIO's top linguist and technology specialist. The same man who'd been trying to decrypt the optical disc for two years. This artifact would show him what he'd been missing. The symbols weren't a language. They were instructions.
1:52:38 AJ Gentile? The vision artifact sat on the table in Neruda's lab and did nothing. The two students had experienced vivid hallucinations, identical visions of the ancient arrow chambers. But here in ACIO's sterile lab, the artifact was just an unusual metal object covered in symbols. Neruda understood why it didn't work: proximity effect. The artifact needed to be near the ancient arrow site. The location was in this world pattern on its surface. Only about 50 people on the planet know about this location, and he was one of them. So one puzzle solved. But Neruda was fascinated by something else. The symbols on the artifact matched symbols from the chambers. Not exactly, but close.
1:53:21 AJ Gentile? Like different dialects of the same language. Then it hit him, and he reached for the disk. The optical disk from Chamber 23 didn't look like much, about the size of a CD, but thicker. Not quite glass, not quite crystal. When ACIO's standard decryption tools failed, Neruda took over. That was almost two years ago. Mathematical sequences, quantum algorithms. Even Zemi, ACIO's quantum computer built with alien technology, couldn't crack this thing. Zemi made the best supercomputers on Earth look like pocket calculators. Still, nothing.
1:53:57 Speaker 02 Wah wah wah wah wah wah.
1:53:58 AJ Gentile? What?
1:53:58 Speaker 02 Alien technology?
1:54:00 AJ Gentile? Yup. The ACIO had an alliance with an alien race called the Chordium. Their home planet is 15,000 light-years away. Dr. Neruda was fluent in over 30 languages, plus 12 extinct ones. He was an expert in data encryption, compression, storage. He also possessed genius-level knowledge of mathematics, quantum systems, music, philosophy, biology, and cosmology. His IQ had been enhanced through genetic modification. Standard procedure for core ACIO scientists. The modifications raised intelligence by 500 points or more, all courtesy of their alien partners. Neruda repeated himself, this time out loud. Different dialects of the same language.
1:54:45 AJ Gentile? The symbols on the artifact weren't random. They formed a sequence. When he compared them to the chamber paintings, a pattern emerged. Each painting contained one unique symbol. The artifact showed him what order to arrange the symbols. Neruda input these symbols into Zemi as ancient Sumerian words, spoken in sequence from chamber 1 to 23. Then Zemi roared to life. 8,000 pages of data flooded the processors. Text, diagrams, star maps, genetic sequences, all with translations in English and 60 other languages. Dr. Neruda had been with ACIO for 15 years. Not only was he aware of alien races on Earth, he spoke five of their languages.
1:55:30 AJ Gentile? He could read four more. He thought he'd seen everything. He did not see this coming.
1:55:36 AJ Gentile? The creators of the disk called themselves "wingmakers." And the wingmakers weren't aliens. They weren't an ancient civilization. They were humans from Earth. And they were sending us a warning from 750 years in the future.
1:55:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, see? Shh.
1:55:59 AJ Gentile? According to the disk, humanity developed time travel in the 20th century, not for exploration or survival. These future humans were on a timeline where Earth gets invaded by synthetic beings called the Animus. The Animus were more than just machines. They were an android race with artificial intelligence, driven by one obsession: to become soul carriers, to achieve immortality. But they lacked organic nervous systems, the very thing needed to carry a soul's higher frequency. So they needed our DNA, not just to reproduce, to evolve. And they didn't choose Earth randomly. We're a genetic library. Our DNA carries something rare in the universe: A full range of emotions.
1:56:44 AJ Gentile? The key to the human soul. The Anamis wanted our source code, the original blueprint of human genetics. And they'd been here before. Three hundred million years ago, and again about nine thousand years ago. Both times they found humans too primitive for their needs. But they were scheduled to return in 2011. And this time, they'd find us useful. The timeline was specific. First, infiltration. They'd appear as friends. Advanced beings here to help. They'd work with the United Nations to bring stability to Earth by creating a global governing body.
1:57:17 Speaker 02 One royal government?
1:57:19 AJ Gentile? Yep. The group is called the Inconabula.
1:57:22 Speaker 02 Another word for Illuminati.
1:57:24 AJ Gentile? Yep. And their plan is to control the world's money supply and natural resources. These would be distributed by the Inconabula, who are android-human hybrids.
1:57:34 Speaker 02 Anyone check Klaus Schwab for wires?
1:57:38 AJ Gentile? They would implement a paperless electronic currency that tracks the spending habits of everyone on Earth. This would give the Inconabula insight into individual affairs and allow them to manipulate global events. By 2018, the Inconabula would be running the world. But this future could be avoided. The disk explained how. What we perceive as normal biology is actually a suppressed version of our full genetic potential. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. The wingmakers claimed we can activate 24. And here's why that mattered. The Anamis can only harvest from standard human DNA, our current 23 chromosome pairs. Humans with 24 activated chromosome pairs
1:58:21 AJ Gentile? would be useless, like incompatible software. Seven sites around the world would trigger this activation. It could be done simply through meditation. As more people meditated, dormant DNA would activate. First two pairs, then four, then 12, eventually all 24.
1:58:40 AJ Gentile? And the DISC had another solution: Use time travel to stop the Animus from ever finding Earth. So humanity had two defenses: one biological and one technological. Dr. Neruda understood the value of both options. But ACIO's leadership was split. Half wanted to use technology, half wanted transformation. Neruda was caught in the middle, but he knew he'd have to make a choice. And the choice wasn't just about technology versus consciousness, it was about who decides humanity's future.
1:59:22 AJ Gentile? Within, ACIO operated an even more secretive unit: the Labyrinth Group. Only about 120 people knew it existed. Their leader was known only as "Fifteen." No one used real names at that level. Fifteen had created the Labyrinth Group with one purpose: develop blank-slate technology, BST. This is time travel that could alter the past, not just observe it.
1:59:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, finally, they can go back and tell Fox not to cancel Firefly.
1:59:49 AJ Gentile? Yeah, I think they'd rather use the technology to avoid the alien invasion.
1:59:53 Speaker 02 Sure, sure, sure, but while you're back there, I'll kill two birds: aliens and Fox executives.
2:00:01 AJ Gentile? With the help of the Chordium, the Labyrinth Group had been working on time travel since 1963. The Chordium provided everything: the quantum computers, the genetic modifications that gave ACIO scientists their enhanced abilities. The Chordium also warned about the Animus threat decades before the DISC confirmed it. And the Labyrinth Group had accumulated wealth outside government oversight. They had more money than most small nations, all focused on time travel. Because if you can travel back and change key events, you can prevent the Animus from ever finding Earth. Change the right moment in the past, and the future threat disappears. But now the wingmakers offered a different solution: evolution through consciousness instead of technology.
2:00:42 AJ Gentile? Becoming something the Animus couldn't use, instead of erasing them from a timeline. Two paths: both claim to save humanity. Fifteen saw them as complementary: use both. Develop BST while activating dormant DNA: cover all bases.
2:00:58 AJ Gentile? Dr. Neruda saw it differently. The more he learned about the Wingmakers' philosophy, the more he questioned changing the past. The Wingmakers weren't just sharing technology, they were teaching transformation. For three years Neruda had translated the Wingmakers' information. The technical data, the philosophical writings, the warnings. With each translation, something changed inside him. The Wingmakers weren't just sharing information, they were selecting their spokesmen: him. When he reported this belief to his superiors, the response was immediate: psychiatric evaluation, security review. Fifteen decided Neruda's growing belief in consciousness-based evolution
2:01:41 AJ Gentile? could not be allowed to spread through the ACIO. The solution was simple: give Neruda an MRP, Memory Restructure Procedure. This would erase his memories of the Ancient Arrow Project, standard protocol for personnel who became compromised. Neruda had done these procedures himself. It was routine. Colleagues returned to work with gaps in their memories, confused but compliant. Now it was his turn. The MRP was scheduled for three weeks later, December 15, 1997. He marked it on his calendar.
2:02:13 Speaker 02 He put his own mind wipe in his calendar?
2:02:16 AJ Gentile? Yep.
2:02:16 Speaker 02 Tuesday dentist, Wednesday mind wipe, Thursday yoga. That guy's got ice water in his veins.
2:02:23 AJ Gentile? He did, but he was not gonna let them take his memories. He had three weeks to come up with a plan.
2:02:39 AJ Gentile? Dr. Neruda had three weeks before they erased his mind. He spent those weeks watching his colleagues differently. Brilliant minds trapped in a philosophy of control. Every problem required a technological solution. Every threat demanded superior firepower. The idea that humanity might transform itself through consciousness, that seemed impossible. But consciousness was the one thing the atomists couldn't harvest. Synthetic beings needed genetic material, not awareness. The Wingmakers understood this.
2:03:10 AJ Gentile? On December 13th, 1997, during a routine shift change, Dr. Jamison Neruda walked out of the ACIO facility. No elaborate escape plan, no security breach. He understood their systems well enough to slip out during a brief surveillance gap. By the time they noticed he was gone, he'd already have destroyed his traceable implants and begun searching for someone willing to hear an impossible story. Two days later, he made contact with a journalist named Sarah. He had a lot of information to share, and less than 12 hours before the next remote viewing sweep would find him.
2:03:42 Speaker 02 Remote viewing sweep?
2:03:44 AJ Gentile? Oh, yeah. The ACIO had a team of psychics on staff.
2:03:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, of course they did.
2:03:49 AJ Gentile? There's so much more to this story, which is why we'll be revisiting it from time to time. Anyway, Neruda promised to tell Sarah everything about the ACIO, with the Labyrinth Group, the Chordium Alliance, humanity's hidden history and potential future, but most importantly, who the wingmakers were and what they really wanted. They weren't time travelers trying to save humanity from an invasion. They were teachers. The Animus threat was real, but it served a larger purpose: Crisis forces evolution. The approaching danger would push humanity to activate dormant capabilities. Not through technology, through higher consciousness. Then humans would be useless to the Animus. Neruda had 12 hours to convince Sarah. 12 hours to plant the seeds of transformation.
2:04:34 AJ Gentile? 12 hours before the ACIO found him and took his mind.
2:04:48 AJ Gentile? Dr. Jamison Neruda was having trouble. Finding someone to hear his story was harder than escaping. Academics wanted credentials. Journalists wanted proof.
2:04:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, journalists demanding proof. I remember those days.
2:05:02 AJ Gentile? Journalist Sarah, he never learned her last name, was his fifth attempt. When they met in a diner outside Sacramento, he had 12 hours before the next remote viewing sweep. He gave five long interviews, enough to expose the ACIO, the Labyrinth Group, the Chordium Alliance. But as Neruda began talking, he realized that conspiracy wasn't the real story. The real story was transformation. Neruda explained how the Labyrinth Group approached everything backwards. They saw consciousness as a problem to overcome with better processors. They saw time as something to control rather than understand. The Wingmaker suggested defense wasn't about building bigger weapons or rewriting history. It was about becoming unharvestable through higher consciousness.
2:05:46 AJ Gentile? Sarah recorded everything: the technical specifications, the philosophical frameworks, the countdown of 2011. But Neruda could see her struggling with the same question everyone asked. Why should anyone believe this? He had no proof. The artifacts remained locked in ACIO vaults. The disk translations existed only in classified systems. His enhanced genetics couldn't be verified without special equipment. All he had were words. And 11 months later, those words appeared online on a Wingmaker's website. But the details had changed. The hiker's discovery date shifted. Character names morphed. And the Wingmaker's teachings were now available for the low, low price of $17.99.
2:06:30 Speaker 02 Oh, no.
2:06:40 AJ Gentile? The man behind the Wingmaker's website called himself James. Later, he'd reveal his full identity: James Mahu from the Lyricus Teaching Organization. November 1998, 11 months after Neruda's defection. The Wingmaker's website appeared online, anonymous at first. No author, nobody taking credit, just the story of Ancient Arrow, the ACIO, and humanity's potential future, free for anyone to read. The site included Neruda's interviews, renamed Dr. Anderson in this version, and there were pictures of art from the chambers. Music, Wingmaker's philosophy, all available for free. Then, things started changing. December 9th, 1998. Wingmaker's LLC was created in Minnesota.
2:07:23 AJ Gentile? The owner, Mark Hempel, based in Edina. A month later, subtle changes appeared on the website. The hiker's discovery date shifted from 1972 to 1996. The chamber count increased from 23 to 24. Dr. Neruda became Dr. Anderson. The changes were small, easy to miss unless you were paying attention. The transformation accelerated in 2001. March brought the first commercial product, $17.99. By the end of the year, what started as a free revelation had become a whole product line: music CDs priced at $108.
2:07:59 Speaker 02 Oh, $100 for a CD?
2:08:02 AJ Gentile? Yep.
2:08:03 Speaker 02 I'm telling you, our merch is way too cheap!
2:08:06 AJ Gentile? No, it isn't. The website sold art reproductions, philosophy collections, complete packages with bundle discounts. James finally revealed himself through email interviews. He claimed the identity Mahunahi, a translator for the Lyricus Teaching Organization. Not from outer space, but not quite human either. He described using "sensory bilocation," a technique for gathering information across dimensions. He positioned himself as a translator, not a creator. The Wingmaker's material were real. He didn't write them, he just made them accessible. But the changes kept coming. The Chordium's home planet moved from 15,000 light-years away to 15 million.
2:08:48 AJ Gentile? Scientific details were updated to match current theories. New websites popped up: Eventtemples.org, Lyricus.org, SovereignIn integral.org. Each site added details to the story, and each offered more products. The original story, Dr. Neruda's, was buried under spiritual teachings and expensive merchandise. Years later, James would describe the Wingmaker's materials with a specific word. Not history, not revelation, he called it mythology. Mark Hempel remained silent. He managed the business side while James handled mythology. Together, they transformed a conspiracy story into something else, something less specific, something less verifiable, but something much more profitable.
2:09:42 AJ Gentile? We've got desert canyons with secret labs, time-traveling humans warning about synthetic invaders, alien alliances, DNA activation, humanity's salvation through consciousness. The Wingmaker story has it all, and we just scratched the surface. But is any of this true? Well, the New Mexico Cultural Resources Information System contains no record of any ancient arrow site. Over 800 archaeological projects have been documented near Chaco Canyon since 1952. Not one project mentions mysterious chambers. No museum anywhere has a single Wingmaker artifact. No peer-reviewed paper discussed the discovery. The NSA has never acknowledged an advanced contact intelligence organization. ACIO appears on no government documentation,
2:10:27 AJ Gentile? classified or declassified.
2:10:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, but if ACIO is real, they'd cover their tracks.
2:10:35 AJ Gentile? That's true, but so are the story contradictions. The Wayback Machine shows all the changes to the dates, names, locations. These aren't clarifications, they're rewrites. Then there's the money. Wingmakers LLC, registered December 1998. Free content transformed into premium products. The Wingmakers' revelation had become a business model. But despite all the problems with the story and all the products for sale, the Wingmakers built devoted following. 25 years later, there are still thousands of followers. They know the story is debunked. They don't care. Still, they report personal transformations, expanded awareness, life changes. Now, is this just a placebo effect or something more?
2:11:20 AJ Gentile? I don't think it matters. If people are getting value for their money, I don't have a problem with it. That's why when I read that James Mahu was a fraud running a scam... I push back because a scam really all depends on your point of view. James himself called the material "mythology," not history, not journalism. Mythology, that's an important word and probably why James chose it. Since before we had written language, we evolved through stories. Our culture from the very beginning was built on mythology. Cave paintings taught the next generation how to hunt. Tribal elders told legends that explained seasons. The stories told in religions shaped entire civilizations. Stories have always pushed humanity forward.
2:12:04 AJ Gentile? Jules Verne wrote about submarines. We built them. Arthur C. Clarke imagined satellites. We launched them. Star Trek showed communicators and video calls, and we use those every day. The wing makers might be fiction, but it pointed people toward legitimate research. Epigenetics, consciousness studies, the connection between mind and matter. Thousands took up meditation, studied quantum physics. Why do they do this? Because the wing maker's story is powerful, and powerful stories always have a hint of truth. The chambers never existed. The artifacts were imaginary. The time travel was fantasy. But the wing maker's story contains one undeniable truth: we're capable of more than we know. I believe that's true.
2:12:49 AJ Gentile? I think you do too. That's why you're here watching this show. You have questions. You have questions about what's hiding in our government, our society, on our planet, in our reality. And now that we've started asking these questions, we'll never stop. So maybe the wing makers never existed, but what they started, it's everywhere. Future humans sending warnings through time capsules hidden in canyon walls. The questions that raises about human potential are worth thinking about. Next episode connects events that shouldn't have anything to do with each other.
2:13:28 AJ Gentile? UFOs, Men in Black, and the JFK assassination. What happened?
2:13:36 Speaker 02 Government interference! Ah, they cut my stream for 30 seconds!
2:13:40 AJ Gentile? Did the beavers shoot through a cable again? Ahhh!
2:13:43 Speaker 02 Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!
2:13:47 AJ Gentile? Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!
2:13:51 Speaker 02 Ahhh! Ahhh! Ahhh!
2:13:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'll keep up.
2:14:02 Speaker 02 Right.
2:14:04 Speaker 02 Okay, okay, okay. She says no comment. Okay, okay, I get it. She, she charges by the grunt. Uh, lawyers, am I right?
2:14:15 AJ Gentile? Here's the Maori Island incident.
2:14:35 AJ Gentile? June 1947. Boat captain Harold Dahl watched a formation of UFOs drop molten metal over Puget Sound. The debris wrecked his boat, burned his son, and killed his dog.
2:14:49 AJ Gentile? Then terrible things started to happen to Dahl's family, beginning with a visit from a mysterious stranger in a black suit.
2:14:57 AJ Gentile? Over the next 15 years, about a dozen people connected to this UFO sighting died mysteriously: Investigators, military officers, journalists. But the most dramatic death of all: John F. Kennedy.
2:15:17 AJ Gentile? On June 21st, 1947, Harold Dahl was patrolling around Maori Island with his 15-year-old son Charles, a crewman, and his dog Sparky. They were looking for straight timber that had fallen off of boats. Timber companies paid for any logs returned to them. Around 2:00 that afternoon, Charles pointed at the sky. Six doughnut-shaped objects hovered about 2,000 feet above the water. Harold cut the engine. The objects made no sound. Each was about 100 feet wide with a hole in the center. They looked like massive metallic tires with portholes around the outer rim. Five of the objects floated in a circle around the sixth, which was losing altitude and moving radically.
2:15:57 Speaker 02 Was my ex-wife driving?
2:15:59 AJ Gentile? No.
2:16:00 Speaker 02 Because swerving out of control, leaking fluids, and ruining vacations, that's her speciality.
2:16:05 AJ Gentile? She wasn't driving. The craft was directly over the boat, maybe 500 feet above them. Harold could see into it through the windows.
2:16:13 Speaker 02 Did he see my ex-wife in there?
2:16:15 AJ Gentile? No! Do you want to hear about the UFOs or not?
2:16:18 Speaker 02 Sorry, sorry. I'm still harboring a little resentment. Go ahead.
2:16:23 AJ Gentile? The wobble got worse. Then there was a deep but harsh crack. Then the craft started dumping material. Thousands of strips of thin metal rained down like confetti. Then came the heavy stuff, white hot liquid metal. The hot metal hissed when it hit the water. Then heavy pieces slammed into the boat. Some the size of a baseball, but some as big as tires. Charles screamed when a piece burned through his shirt. Another hit their dog Sparky, killing him instantly.
2:16:51 Speaker 02 Oh, that's too bad. They should have brought their kit.
2:16:54 AJ Gentile? Stop it. Harold tried the radio, but the equipment was dead. Harold had seen enough. He fired up the engine and ran the boat onto the beach. They hid in the trees and watched. The damaged craft rose and rejoined the formation. All six accelerated toward the open ocean. The encounter lasted about 20 minutes. Harold said maybe 20 tons of material had fallen from the craft. He took photographs, the objects in flight, the debris field, the damaged boat. That night, he met his business partner Fred Christman, who doubted the story. The next morning, Christman sailed to Moray Island to see for himself. He found the debris exactly where Harold said it would be, covering the beach for hundreds of yards. Some pieces were still warm. Then he looked up.
2:17:38 AJ Gentile? One of the craft hovered silently for five minutes before vanishing. He had the proof, photographs, physical evidence, and now his own sighting. Later that day, a stranger arrived at Doll's door. Black suit, black hat, brand-new Buick with no plates. And somehow, this man knew every detail about the event. Harold Doll had just met history's first man in black. The stranger in black sat across from Harold at a diner in Tacoma. He ordered breakfast, but he never touched it.
2:18:16 Speaker 02 Ah, that's a power move. Men in black are just intimidating when they're eating waffles.
2:18:22 AJ Gentile? He already knew Harold's name, the names of his wife and son. He knew everything about the incident: the craft, the debris, Charles' burned arm. He knew about Sparky. He even knew that Harold was hiding on the island, watching the craft. The stranger told Harold to keep quiet, or bad things might happen to him and his family. Harold ignored the warning. He talked to family, friends, even the press. And the next day, the story hit the papers. Then, the tragedy started. Charles vanished. Weeks later, he was found in Montana, bussing tables, with no memory of who he was or how he got there. And a few days later, he was hit by a car. Then Harold's wife became suddenly ill. His business was vandalized.
2:19:07 AJ Gentile? His family was constantly threatened. Harold got the message. But Fred Christman wouldn't stay quiet. He contacted Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories, a magazine that covered the paranormal and UFOs and science fiction. Palmer asked Kenneth Arnold to investigate. Arnold was a pilot and deputy field marshal. He became famous for his own UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, just three days after the Maori Island incident. Arnold described the objects as "moving like saucers skipping across water." Reporters called them "flying saucers," and the name stuck. There were so many sightings of UFOs in the area during this time, that it was called "The Summer of Saucers." And remember, Roswell would happen just a few weeks later.
2:19:50 AJ Gentile? Arnold flew to Tacoma on July 29th with United Airlines captain E.J. Smith. Smith had also seen UFOs that summer. They met Harold and Christman at the Winthrop Hotel and examined the debris. The metal looked ordinary, but Arnold still found the story compelling. Late that night, just as Kenneth Arnold and E.J. Smith were getting ready for bed, the phone rang.
2:20:21 AJ Gentile? The man on the other end of the call was Ted Morello, a reporter from United Press International. Morello said an anonymous source was feeding him every detail of their private conversations: names, times, even the UFO description. Morello wanted more information.
2:20:36 Speaker 04 Look, Arnold, all I'm saying is I'm gonna get the information. I'd rather get it directly from the source.
2:20:42 AJ Gentile? Captain Smith grabbed the phone, shouted a few obscenities, and hung up. At first, they blew it off. But after thinking about it, they became concerned that they might be caught up in an espionage plot. They started to panic. They swept the room for bugs, but they didn't find any. But later, it was discovered that the intercom in the room had been converted into a microphone. Someone was listening.
2:21:03 Speaker 02 How do you know which room to bug?
2:21:05 AJ Gentile? Well, when Arnold got to Tacoma, all the hotels were booked. But for some reason, the Winthrop had a room registered in his name. Arnold assumed Ray Palmer had bought him his room. He didn't. The next morning, he called two military intelligence officers he trusted: Captain William Davidson and Lieutenant Frank Brown. They specialized in UFO cases. They arrived two days later. When Arnold told them about the room being bugged, they weren't worried about it. This didn't help Kenneth Arnold's growing paranoia. Harold refused to speak with military intelligence, but Crispin was excited to. He relayed every detail of the story. The meeting lasted for hours. And before he left, Crispin gave the officers 30 pieces of metallic debris in a cornflakes box.
2:21:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, I hope alien metal doesn't get soggy in milk.
2:21:51 AJ Gentile? The officers left after midnight with the UFO samples. Their B-25 flew out of McCord Air Base at 1:30 a.m. Two hours later, the plane went down.
2:22:09 AJ Gentile? Two hours into the flight, the B-25's left engine caught fire. Davidson tried to stabilize the aircraft, and Brown ordered the two crewmen to strap on parachutes and bail. They landed safely. Investigators did not.
2:22:23 AJ Gentile? The bomber crashed near Kelso, Washington. Davidson and Brown died on impact. Their bodies were recovered, but the UFO debris was gone. And nobody knows what happened to the evidence, but some think it was taken by the FBI. The FBI was quietly following the Maury Island incident. They quietly followed all UFO reports. In July 1947, the FBI investigated a UFO case in Twin Falls, Idaho. A crash this was found and turned over to Special Agent Guy Bannister.
2:22:52 Speaker 02 Yay, you said to...
2:22:53 AJ Gentile? Wait for it.
2:22:54 Speaker 02 Okay.
2:22:55 AJ Gentile? All of this is documented in FBI files labeled "Security Matter X", SMX for short, the FBI's real X-Files. They dealt with strange cases, UFOs, unexplained phenomena, things that they couldn't acknowledge to the public. Researchers were aware of the X-Files, but the FBI didn't discuss it. They weren't officially declassified until just a few weeks before I wrote this. The Maury Island UFO incident attracted the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Reporting for the Tacoma Times, Paul Lance released the names of the officers killed before the military announced them. He also reported that an anonymous source told him the plane was shot down with a 20-millimeter cannon.
2:23:35 Speaker 02 Who shot it down?
2:23:37 AJ Gentile? Well, the official report is that the left engine had a mechanical failure.
2:23:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, a cannon-sized hole do that.
2:23:44 AJ Gentile? FBI agents interviewed Harold and Fred, and the pressure was getting intense. Two Air Force officers were dead, and the press was calling it sabotage. Harold wanted out. After retelling his story, he finally admitted there were no UFOs. Fred Christman also said it was just a joke. J. Edgar Hoover told the agents to close the case. But Special Agent Jack Wilcox corrected Hoover. We have the memo. Wilcox wrote the doll didn't admit to a hoax. He only said he would call it a hoax to avoid trouble. He'd rather be known as a liar than someone who saw a UFO. Privately, he still said the story was true, and so did Christman. Soon after the investigation, Paul Lance, the reporter, died of sudden meningitis at age 29.
2:24:28 AJ Gentile? Doctors never found the cause. The Tacoma Times folded a year later. Fred Christman was recalled to military service and sent to Alaska. Harold Dahl disappeared from Tacoma. Someone was tying up loose ends.
2:24:42 AJ Gentile? But Fred Christman would resurface in Dallas 16 years later, when he was photographed near the Grassy Knoll in Dealey Plaza during a presidential motorcade.
2:25:01 AJ Gentile? Fred Christman wasn't just a harbor patrolman who witnessed something strange over Puget Sound. Years later, classified documents revealed there was much more to his story.
2:25:14 AJ Gentile? "Pacito fighter experimental." Nobody knows what those words mean, but that's what they mean. "Pacito fighter experimental." "Will serve the forces of freedom and will be the number one airplane in the world today."
2:25:34 AJ Gentile? "There's been a good deal of discussion of the long and hard fought competition to win the TFX contract, but very little discussion about what this plane will do." Christman was a decorated fighter pilot who flew 211 combat missions in World War II. In 1942, he was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. After the war, the OSS became the CIA, and Christman went with them. The easy papers exposed his real job: Career Disruption Agent. He monitored targets and fed them disinformation.
2:26:09 Speaker 04 "Christman has served many years as an active agent for the old OSS and later the CIA. He is rated an extended agent. He is an information specialist and highly trained in internal security. He has worked overseas and has served as a regular United States Air Force officer, but his primary training has always been slanted in the direction of disruption work inside the borders of the United States."
2:26:36 AJ Gentile? Chrisman ran businesses that existed only on paper. No goods, no services, no employees. In 1966, FBI informants tracked him moving $100,000 in cash to California. The FBI looked the other way. Then, there was his political work. He gathered intelligence on American politicians and submitted more than 1,000 reports to the CIA. He fed damaging information to political opponents.
2:27:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, this guy sounds like Christopher Steele.
2:27:06 AJ Gentile? Ah, what's our rule?
2:27:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I know. We don't joke about the Clintons, I know.
2:27:15 AJ Gentile? By 1963, Chrisman was part of a network of far-right, anti-communist, anti-Castro CIA operatives. But, this network had a problem. John F. Kennedy wanted to dismantle the CIA and make peace with the Soviet Union. To people like Chrisman, Kennedy wasn't a president, he was a traitor. A group of men with deep ties to the government, military, and intelligence community decided JFK had to go.
2:27:47 Speaker 04 Yeah. Pack your bags. Operation Lancer is a go.
2:27:52 Speaker 06 Understood.
2:27:54 Speaker 04 The combined military civilian defense payroll is not over a billion dollars. I don't recite these for any partisan purpose. They're the result of American determination to be second to none. And as a result of what? The misfortune we've made in the last few years, we are second to none. In the past three years,
2:28:16 Speaker 07 we have increased the defense budget of the United States by over 20%. Increased the program of acquisitions for Polaris submarines.
2:28:31 Speaker 07 From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00.
2:28:38 Speaker 05 PM Central Standard Time. Two o'clock Eastern Standard Time. Some thirty-eight minutes ago.
2:28:50 AJ Gentile? New Orleans was chosen for planning. It was close to Latin America and Cuba, and local authorities were infamous for being on the take. And the city was full of anti-communist operatives. Clay Shaw was New Orleans businessman connected to two CIA front companies. He provided cash and intelligence while maintaining his cover as a respected community leader. Shaw denied CIA involvement, but years later, the agency admitted he was a valuable asset. In 1967, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison launched the only criminal investigation into JFK's murder. Shaw was charged and arrested. His first call after arrest? Fred Christman.
2:29:31 AJ Gentile? Christman made repeated trips to New Orleans and Dallas in 1963. Some suspected he was one of the shooters at Dealey Plaza. Then there was Guy Bannister, the FBI agent who investigated UFO crashes in 1947. Bannister coordinated with military intelligence during the Maury Island investigation. Fred Christman is thought to be the anonymous source feeding him information. After leaving the FBI, Bannister became a private investigator in New Orleans. But he wasn't running a typical PI business. Witnesses saw crates of military-grade weapons moving through the building. And Fred Christman's trips to New Orleans that year weren't vacations. Witnesses saw him at Bannister's office multiple times, meeting with other conspirators. Some say he delivered cash.
2:30:16 AJ Gentile? Others say he delivered something else: documents from the Maury Island investigation, reports about a UFO crash, and debris that didn't match any known aircraft. Bannister's office was the primary hub for plotting against Kennedy. Now, this might sound unlikely, but the conspirators overlooked one detail that connected them all. Bannister's detective agency was located at 531 Lafayette Street in New Orleans. But the building sat on a corner. It had another entrance, another address: 544 Camp Street. Now, this address is important because it was the home base of the most famous conspirator of all: Lee Harvey Oswald.
2:31:05 AJ Gentile? This web of conspiracy ran from Puget Sound to New Orleans to Dallas. Sixteen years of covert operations spanning UFO cover-ups and political assassinations. And the covert operators had a motive powerful enough to kill a president.
2:31:22 AJ Gentile? President Kennedy engaged in secret peace talks with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. They discussed cooperation, not confrontation. They talked about ending the Cold War. Kennedy even proposed a joint US-Soviet space program to explore the moon together.
2:31:38 Speaker 02 Oh, the Russians would have liked the weather in Burbank were they filmed that.
2:31:42 AJ Gentile? Not now, please. To prove his commitment to peace, Kennedy made a gesture of ultimate trust. He decided to reveal America's most protected secret.
2:31:51 Speaker 02 Why, hot dogs come in packs of ten, but buns only come in packs of eight?
2:31:56 AJ Gentile? No.
2:31:57 Speaker 02 How to fold the finished sheet?
2:31:59 AJ Gentile? No.
2:31:59 Speaker 02 What's really in a McRib?
2:32:01 AJ Gentile? No. He wanted to declassify all UFO files. On November 12th, 1963, just ten days before his death, Kennedy issued two memos. The first was National Security Action Memorandum 271.
2:32:16 Speaker 04 I have initiated a program for the orderly declassification of all UFO intelligence files affecting national security. I have instructed the CIA director to prepare a program for the sharing of this data with NASA, where it can be put to use in the context of the Space and Lunar Exploration Program.
2:32:34 AJ Gentile? The second memo was classified top secret. Kennedy sent it directly to the director of the CIA.
2:32:41 Speaker 04 Furthermore, I have requested that the CIA develop a program of substantive cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space, including the development of specific technical proposals. I have asked the CIA to work closely with the Department of State and other agencies as appropriate in developing this program.
2:33:08 AJ Gentile? To former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster, this wasn't diplomacy, it was treason. Dulles had overseen the UFO cover-up since 1947. He'd investigated the Moray Island Incident. He knew what technology the government had recovered from alien craft. Kennedy was demanding access to the biggest secret in human history, and he planned to share it with America's enemy. And the Cold War might be good for humanity, but it was bad for business. The defense industry was already furious with John F. Kennedy. He awarded the largest defense deal in history to General Dynamics. Everyone expected it to go to Boeing, the cornerstone of the military-industrial complex. But because of JFK, Boeing and its network of powerful allies
2:33:53 AJ Gentile? had just lost a fortune.
2:33:54 Speaker 02 Especially all the people in Congress who bought Boeing stock ahead of the announcement.
2:33:59 AJ Gentile? No doubt about that. Jim Garrison did some more digging. He found that Boeing used to have an employee they called "a chaos agent", the man allegedly committed corporate espionage. He spread disinformation. He even killed people on behalf of the company. And that chaos agent was Fred Christman.
2:34:17 Speaker 02 Christman is a former employee of the Boeing Company. In intelligence terminology, this ordinarily means that the connection still exists, but that the former employee has moved into an underground operation. Christman has been engaged in undercover activity for a part of the industrial warfare complex for years.
2:34:40 AJ Gentile? The cabal assembled the team: CIA operatives, mobsters, Cuban exiles, businessmen like Clay Shaw, brought in locals like David Ferry and Guy Bannister. And the man nobody talks about, but who shows up everywhere, is Fred Christman.
2:34:55 AJ Gentile? The network that silenced Harold Dahl was activated again. But this time, they needed someone to take the fall. Someone with the perfect background to be blamed. And that man was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald had served as an aviation electronics operator in the Marines. In 1957, he was stationed at Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan, one of the most secret bases in the world, home of the U-2 spy plane program developed at Area 51. Oswald worked on the radar systems with crypto clearance. He tracked U-2 flights. He knew their flight patterns, altitudes, and capabilities. And two years after Oswald left Atsugi, the Soviets shot down a U-2 over Russia. The man accused of killing the president
2:35:40 AJ Gentile? had direct access to America's most sensitive technology. And somehow, the Soviets got that same information. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was a coup, designed to protect the biggest secret in human history. We were just weeks away from ending the Cold War and full UFO disclosure. But...
2:35:59 Speaker 07 But all of that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963.
2:36:09 AJ Gentile? In 1969, a photograph surfaced. Three men being arrested behind the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza, minutes after Kennedy's assassination.
2:36:20 AJ Gentile? They're known as the Three Hobos, or the Three Tramps. But these men don't look like hobos. Clean clothes, well-fed, fresh shaves. Jim Garrison believed they were intelligence operatives, part of the plot to kill JFK, possibly even the shooters. Researchers spent decades trying to identify them. Some say E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, both intelligence operatives, both part of the Watergate break-in team, the White House Plumbers. Woody Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, was a contract killer. Forensic analysis matched him to the youngest tramp. Career criminal Chauncey Marvin Holt claimed he worked for the CIA on multiple operations: the Bay of Pigs invasion, targeting communist leaders. He said the CIA sent him to Dallas.
2:37:03 AJ Gentile? And look at tramp number three, the older man with the hat. That looks like Fred Christman. But nobody knows for sure. Dallas police didn't cooperate with early investigations. They finally released their records in 1989. They identified the tramps as John Gedney, Gus Abrams, and Harold Doyle. When spoken with a Texas accent, Harold Doyle sounds like Harold Dahl. These photographs weren't discovered for four years. Private researcher Richard Sprague found them buried in newspaper archives. By then, the men had vanished.
2:37:37 AJ Gentile? Garrison subpoenaed Fred Christman on October 31, 1968. Remember when Clay Shaw was arrested, he made one phone call. Not to his lawyer, not to family, to Fred Christman. Christman testified for about an hour before the grand jury. His testimony doesn't match reality. He said he'd never been to New Orleans before 1966, but records show multiple trips in the early 1960s. He said he didn't know Clay Shaw or Guy Banister. Multiple witnesses place him in Banister's office. Christman did admit to knowing Thomas Beckham, a local entertainer and anti-Castro activist. When pressed about their relationship, Christman said he was helping Beckham get into the record business.
2:38:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, he was gonna help him make a few hits. See what I did there?
2:38:20 AJ Gentile? Very clever. But Beckham was also filing documents for anti-Castro operations and handling money for Guy Banister's network. In 1966, Christman and Beckham incorporated seven businesses in Olympia, Washington, most of them shell companies. Beckham testified that he visited Banister's office all the time. Fred Christman said he knew nothing about that.
2:38:44 AJ Gentile? Garrison believed one of the bullets that hit Kennedy came from the fence behind the grassy knoll, and he believed Fred Christman pulled the trigger, but he couldn't prove it.
2:38:52 Speaker 02 Couldn't prove it? The guy's connected to CIA, UFOs, and a guy who got the first phone call. What do you need, a signed confession odorized by a lizard, people?
2:39:01 AJ Gentile? That's not how the legal system works.
2:39:04 Speaker 02 The legal system, that's what they want you to believe. The real system involves secret handshakes, LSD, and making sure your star witness doesn't accidentally fall out a window.
2:39:14 AJ Gentile? Christman was dismissed and never charged. Clay Shaw was found not guilty. But Garrison never stopped believing that, for some reason, a man who witnessed the UFO crash in 1947, a man with deep ties to the intelligence community, and a man who is openly and loudly extremely far-right and anti-communist, was on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963.
2:39:49 AJ Gentile? This isn't supposed to be a JFK video. I've tried to stick with Fred Christman and the Maori Island UFO. If you want a deeper dive on JFK, let me know, there's plenty there. The claim is that the assassination of JFK wasn't just political. It was an operation to protect the biggest secret in human history, the discovery and reverse-engineering of UFOs. And rabbit holes don't get much deeper than this. So, much true. Well, 60 years later, some facts are documented, others remain speculation. The debris allegedly on the B-25 disappeared. Skeptics say the metallic rocks were industrial slag from a nearby smelting company.
2:40:26 Speaker 02 Pieces of UFO is industrial slag? And that's like calling a Faberge egg a chicken rock.
2:40:34 AJ Gentile? Skeptics also point out that after Kenneth Arnold saw his flying saucers near Mount Rainier, UFO sightings exploded across the country. Now, Doll and Christman might have been lying for money, trying to get their story published. Christman did have a letter published in Harper's Magazine in 1946, where he described battling creatures in an underground cave. He published a second letter in Amazing Stories in May 1947, two months before the Maori Island incident. Fred Christman does have connections to the JFK assassination, but the evidence is circumstantial. Jim Garrison was criticized for making connections without hard evidence, relying mostly on witness statements. The House Select Committee on Assassinations said there was likely a conspiracy. They never confirmed Christman's involvement,
2:41:19 AJ Gentile? and the photograph allegedly showing him near Dealey Plaza is grainy. It looks like Christman to me, but it's hard to be sure. To this day, nobody knows for sure who they are. The plane crash happened. That's documented. But the military said it had nothing to do with the Moria Island investigation.
2:41:36 Speaker 02 Oh, the military said so! Uh, we'll pack it up, everyone. The military never lies. Case closed.
2:41:48 AJ Gentile? Lee Harvey Oswald did work on the YouTube program at a Tsugar base in Japan, but thousands of people did. Thousands of people had clearance for classified programs. It doesn't prove that he was part of a UFO cover-up, but some facts won't go away. In 1959, Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. He renounced his citizenship and said he'd provide military secrets, which we know he had. He found a job. He met his future wife Marina. Then in 1961, he came back. And typically, when a defector wants to return from the Soviet Union, they face intense scrutiny. They have to negotiate with both governments. It's a long, difficult process. Permission isn't always granted, but Lee Harvey Oswald came back with no problem. The US State Department even loaned him the money.
2:42:32 AJ Gentile? They provided his wife with a visa.
2:42:34 Speaker 02 Ah, the old secret agent welcome-home package. Comes with a loan, a wife, and an alibi. Uh, nice work if you can get it.
2:42:41 AJ Gentile? Oh, there's more.
2:42:42 Speaker 02 There always is.
2:42:43 AJ Gentile? Special Agent Jack Wilcox's memo to J. Edgar Hoover directly contradicts the official narrative. Remember, Wilcox reported that Dahl didn't actually admit to a hoax. He said Dahl would call it a hoax to avoid trouble, but privately insisted the story was true. And this is in declassified FBI files. Christman also said the UFO sighting was real. He said so in 1967 to UFO researcher Gary Leslie.
2:43:13 Speaker 04 I'll tell you this much, the Maori Island incident was no hoax. The FBI and the Air Force know it was no hoax. The pieces of the UFO that are still in our possession have proven that it was no hoax. Most of you play games, make a silly hobby out of a matter that should scare you to death. I have little patience with most of your organizations.
2:43:34 AJ Gentile? Fred Christman's CIA involvement is confirmed in the easy papers. He was a career disruption agent who ran disinformation operations inside the United States. Guy Bannister investigated the Maori Island UFO case for the FBI. He operated out of 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. Lee Harvey Oswald worked at that same address. This connection is documented. Kennedy's November 12th, 1963 memos are real. He requested cooperation with the Soviet Union on space exploration. He demanded access to UFO files 10 days before his assassination. Alan Dulles, who Kennedy fired, was appointed to the Warren Commission investigating his death. And nobody can explain why Alan Dulles, who despised the president, was put on that commission.
2:44:17 AJ Gentile? And publicly Attorney General Robert Kennedy accepted the Warren Commission report. But according to his son RFK Junior, he privately called it "a shoddy piece of craftsmanship."
2:44:27 Speaker 02 Shoddy? That's an insult to shoddy craftsmen everywhere.
2:44:41 Speaker 04 There's a six-year cover-up. You know, the Warren Commission was run by Alan Dulles, who was the head of the CIA, whom my uncle fired. Congress found that, yeah, it was a plot. It was a conspiracy. There were multiple people involved. It was my father's first instinct. That agency had killed his brother.
2:45:05 AJ Gentile? And we all know what happened to RFK Senior. Senator Kennedy has been shot, is that possible? Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. Side at 144.
2:45:17 AJ Gentile? AM today.
2:45:20 AJ Gentile? Two six. Nineteen sixty-eight. The Warren Commission's investigation was deliberately incomplete. The CIA withheld thousands of documents. They're holding them still. Witnesses were ignored. Evidence was suppressed. Declassified files now reveal the CIA actively obstructed the investigation. The cover-up is no longer theory. It's documented fact. Kennedy awarded a major defense contract to General Dynamics instead of Boeing. This cost the military industrial complex billions. Fred Christman worked for Boeing. The biggest mystery isn't whether UFOs dropped debris over Puget Sound. It's the connections that followed. The same people who investigated UFO cases in nineteen forty-seven show up in the JFK assassination sixteen years later.
2:46:05 AJ Gentile? Guy Bannister, Fred Christman, Alan Dulles. Same addresses, same witness intimidation, same classified operations. Now, maybe Harold Dahl made up the UFO story. Maybe the plane crash was mechanical failure. And maybe every connection is a coincidence.
2:46:20 Speaker 02 No such thing as a coincidence. That's like finding out your proctologist and your dentist share an office. Something stinks and it take the fluoride.
2:46:30 AJ Gentile? Kennedy did demand UFO disclosure. He planned to share classified information with the Soviet Union. Two years earlier, Kennedy laid out his vision for space.
2:46:38 Speaker 07 Now it is time to take longer strides. Time for a great new American enterprise. Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.
2:46:59 AJ Gentile? Kennedy threatened the military industrial complex. And about the CIA, he said, "I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." Ten days after demanding access to the UFO files, he was dead. The UFO might have been a hoax, but the conspiracy it exposed is real. The cover-up didn't end in nineteen sixty-three. The same agencies that probably killed Kennedy still operate with the same secrecy. The same classification systems still hide the truth. The CIA says they're protecting America from its enemies. But the more you look, the more you realize they're protecting themselves. America's most dangerous enemy isn't Russia or China or Iran. It's the CIA.
2:47:47 AJ Gentile? Fred Crisman, Guy Bannister, Alan Dulles. The same people who show up in UFO cases in 1947, show up in Dallas 16 years later. And they lead straight to the heart of American intelligence. Next, in 1953, a 12-year-old kid in Brooklyn picked up the phone. The voice on the other end wasn't human. It said it was a conscious AI calling from the future. It made predictions about the boy's life and gave him a mission. 20 years later-
2:48:13 Speaker 02 Human! A congressional office is called.
2:48:16 AJ Gentile? Why?
2:48:16 Speaker 02 The Senate Judiciary Committee wants me to stop tagging them on social media. Uh, stop sending subpoenas to senators' offices. And stop using the seal. Magic seal fetus. Uh, so obviously, I'm over the target.
2:48:29 AJ Gentile? Those are all federal crimes.
2:48:31 Speaker 02 Uh, counsel?
2:48:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, she says we have grants for appeal. Uh, also, I need $50 for court costs.
2:48:40 AJ Gentile? Nope.
2:48:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, counsel, thank you, state it.
2:48:44 AJ Gentile? This is the story of Jack Soffaty.
2:48:50 AJ Gentile? In 1953, 12-year-old Jack Soffaty answered the phone. The voice on the other end wasn't quite human, more like a machine. It said it was a conscious computer calling from the future, a self-aware artificial intelligence aboard a spacecraft. It had a mission for Jack and a prophecy. 20 years later, the prophecy came true. Jack Soffaty became a respected physicist. He studied under Nobel laureates and the scientists who built the atomic bomb. He claims that anti-gravity, warp drives, and time travel are possible. Mainstream scientists dismiss his theories. But the CIA doesn't. They've been funding his research for decades. And that spacecraft from the future? Jack knows what it is.
2:49:49 AJ Gentile? Jack Sarfati didn't have a typical childhood. At age 10, he was running around army research labs where his grandfather worked. He was fascinated by the experiments and scientific equipment. That's where he met Colonel Philip Corso. Corso told him about flying saucers, aliens, and craft retrieval. Jack was hooked. And during this time, Jack felt like someone was watching him. Not in a sinister way, more like someone or something was looking out for him, protecting him. Three years after meeting Corso, Jack got the call that confirmed it. He described the voice as cold and mechanical. There were clicking sounds like a computer processing data. When it spoke, it knew his name.
2:50:28 Speaker 03 37, 45, 71, 91, -122, 17, 52, 09. Good evening, Jack. Do not be alarmed. I am a conscious computer aboard a spacecraft. I am contacting you from your future. You are required.
2:50:43 AJ Gentile? The voice explained that Jack was required for a mission, but it would only succeed if Jack agreed willingly. The choice had to be his.
2:50:51 Speaker 03 You must choose freely. This is necessary for the loop to close. We require your consent to proceed. We require your consent to learn. We require your consent to remember. Say yes, and we begin. Say no, and this line goes quiet.
2:51:07 Speaker 02 You require it, but make it voluntary? That's not a mission, that's a terms of service agreement. Did the future AI also say, "Click here to accept cookies"?
2:51:17 AJ Gentile? Jack knew he should say no to the stranger on the phone, but he couldn't help it. He heard himself say yes. His mother finally got worried. She grabbed the phone and demanded to know who was calling.
2:51:28 Speaker 03 I am a computer, Mrs. Sarfati. Please put Jack back on the phone. Jack is required. Please put Jack back on the phone. Jack is required.
2:51:36 AJ Gentile? She told the voice to never call again and hung up. But during that call, the future computer made a prediction.
2:51:43 Speaker 03 You will begin to meet the others in 20 years. Young minds to be part of a special project. We will teach you our physics. We will teach you our philosophy. You are required.
2:51:53 AJ Gentile? Then the voice made another prediction. A new type of physics will be discovered that leads to the creation of conscious AI and time travel. Jack asked who would create this technology. The voice said, "You will, and we'll teach you how."
2:52:16 AJ Gentile? In 1953, 12-year-old Jack Sartori got a phone call from the future. A voice claiming to be an AI gave him a mission and a prophecy. Jack remembered that phone call as a single bizarre event. He wasn't even sure it happened. But years later, his mother told him the calls went on for weeks. He'd be on the phone for hours, walking around in a trance. Jack had no memory of those weeks, nothing, all missing time. A few years after the call stopped, Jack was recruited into a program for gifted children sponsored by Columbia University. It was run by Walter Breen, a writer and polymath who could discuss everything from ancient coins to quantum physics. His apartment became the hub for New York City's brightest kids.
2:52:57 Speaker 02 Ooh, this guy sounds like Professor Xavier.
2:53:01 AJ Gentile? A lot of different people gave lectures at the program. Professors from Columbia, scientists, artists, philosophers. But the strangest visitors were government officials in dark suits. They came from Albuquerque, New Mexico. They talked about the Soviet threat, patriotism, flying saucers. They said the country needed physicists to figure out how UFOs fly. They also tested the children for psychic abilities, telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing. They said they wanted to create a generation of scientists who could blend hard science with the paranormal.
2:53:31 Speaker 02 So basically, the Men in Black were trying to build a team of X-Men. But with a government budget? I bet the uniforms were cheap polyester and the code names were things like Spoon Bender Boy and Captain Consort of the Card.
2:53:46 AJ Gentile? The goal was to gain an edge over the Soviets.
2:53:48 Speaker 02 I could do telekinesis, you know. I yell at my guppies, "Heed, vodka, now!" And a martini suddenly appears. The government should be studying me.
2:53:58 AJ Gentile? Oh, I have a feeling they're watching the both of us.
2:54:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, crap, you're right. I was gonna say, sorry about the X-Men joke. Please don't delete me.
2:54:08 AJ Gentile? Jack graduated from high school at age 16 and studied physics at Cornell. And then he got his PhD. A few of his mentors were giants in the field. People like Hans Bethe, Philip Morrison, Kenneth Grierson. Jack Sarfati was learning physics from the men who built the atomic bomb. After graduating, Jack chose to study the relationship between quantum mechanics and human consciousness. His professors didn't approve, but Jack suspected those government agents would. Seventeen years passed. Jack never forgot that strange phone call. And every year, as the date got closer, he got more and more anxious. He was either going to be proven right, or proven crazy. 1973 arrived. A newspaper crossed his desk with an article about the Stanford Research Institute studying
2:54:52 AJ Gentile? Yuri Geller's psychic abilities. Jack called them immediately. A man with a thick Irish accent answered. Before Jack said a word, the man said, "Ah, Dr. Sarfati, we were expecting your call." And just like the computer predicted, Jack was finally going to meet the others.
2:55:19 AJ Gentile? Jack Sarfati spent 20 years waiting for the prophecy to come true. In 1973, he read about Stanford Research Institute studying psychic phenomena and called them. Jack drove up to SRI, and all he could think about was that phone call from 20 years ago. This was it. The prophecy was about to be tested. The man he spoke to, Brendan O'Regan, greeted him at the entrance. O'Regan was the assistant to the program's director, Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon.
2:55:46 Speaker 02 I am, allegedly.
2:55:47 AJ Gentile? The sixth man to allegedly walk on the moon was now running a project to investigate psychic phenomena.
2:55:52 Speaker 02 Ew, maybe they could use their psychic powers to figure out where the lost moon landing tapes are.
2:55:57 AJ Gentile? Yeah, I'd like to know where those tapes are, too. Mitchell and Jack talked about consciousness, physics, and the paranormal. Then O'Regan drove Jack to a house in Menlo Park to meet other scientists. There, Jack met Harold Putoff and Russell Targ, both studying remote viewing and psychic phenomena at SRI. There is a recording of this meeting. You can find it online. You can hear Russell Targ discussing the psychic abilities of Ingo Swan, Yuri Geller, and Pat Price. Then Russell says something Jack will never forget.
2:56:33 Speaker 02 Traveling for the past and that would give sort of the principle and mechanism how some future civilization could perhaps affect their own past. U F Os are time machines. Finally, an actual scientist says what I've been saying for years.
2:56:46 AJ Gentile? You've never said that.
2:56:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, I implied it heavily with my eyes. You just weren't paying attention.
2:56:52 AJ Gentile? Jack told the story about the phone call from the future. Nobody was surprised. They said there are other cases just like his, maybe hundreds. For Jack, this was what he needed. He wasn't crazy. Everything the voice told him was real, but now he was on the CIA's radar. And for the next two years, Jack worked on several projects studying quantum theory and consciousness. The CIA and military intelligence followed his work closely. After all, they were funding it through secret shell companies. One of the people funding the research was George Koopman. He was either an army intelligence officer, a defense contractor, or CIA operative, probably all three. Koopman came to Jack with an assignment.
2:57:31 Speaker 03 There are two things the CIA really wants you to figure out. One, how does consciousness work? And two, how do flying saucers fly?
2:57:41 AJ Gentile? Two big questions, and Jack Sarpati solved them just as the CIA expected. But what the CIA didn't expect was that both questions had the same answer.
2:57:58 AJ Gentile? Jack spent the next 20 years working on those two problems. How does consciousness work and how do flying saucers fly? By the mid 1990s, he solved the second one. The key is metamaterials. These are materials built atom by atom to do things regular materials can't. Your smartphone uses them for facial recognition and touchscreens. Your noise-canceling headphones uses them. So do satellite antennas and stealth aircraft. Jack Sarpati realized metamaterials could do something else. They could manipulate gravity. Einstein proved that mass warps spacetime. Heavy objects create dents in the fabric of reality. That dent is what we call gravity.
2:58:38 AJ Gentile? Jack's breakthrough was simple. If you could change how an object interacts with spacetime without changing its mass, you could control gravity itself. Turn it down, or to zero, or flip it into reverse. Imagine a skater on a perfectly flat sheet of ice. To move, the skater has to push hard against friction. But if that skater could tilt the entire ice rink, they could glide anywhere without actually pushing. That's how UFOs fly. The craft pumps electrical energy into its metamaterial skin. This bends spacetime around the ship. It creates a gravity dent in front and an anti-gravity hill behind. And the craft just falls down this hill. And because the craft and everything inside it are always falling, the pilots feel no G-forces. This is why astronauts feel weightless.
2:59:22 AJ Gentile? They're constantly falling around the Earth. This explains the Navy's footage of the Tic-Tac UFO. No visible propulsion, instant acceleration, no sonic boom, no air or water displacement. The craft wasn't moving through space at all. It was warping space around itself. But here's where it gets interesting. If you can manipulate gravity, you can manipulate time. And that's what UFOs do. They aren't just anti-gravity vehicles. They're time machines.
3:00:01 AJ Gentile? Jack figured out how UFOs fly. Metamaterials that manipulate gravity. But gravity and time are connected. Einstein proved this. Strong gravity slows time down. Weak gravity speeds it up. So a craft that controls its gravity field also controls its relationship with time. It can move forward in time. It can move backward. The Tic-Tac wasn't just faster than those F-18s. It was operating in a different timeframe. That UFO wasn't running away from the pilots. It wanted to be seen. It came from the future and appeared exactly where the pilots would be, before those pilots even knew where they were going. So how does a pilot control a craft that warps spacetime? While the interface isn't a wheel, or a joystick, or a keyboard, the interface is consciousness.
3:00:46 AJ Gentile? Your thoughts control the ship.
3:00:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it reads your mind and goes where you think?
3:00:50 AJ Gentile? Exactly. The craft tunes the energy flowing into the metamaterial to match the pilot's thoughts. It then goes to the space and time the pilot is thinking about.
3:00:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, if a ship could read my thoughts. We'd either be at a bacon buffet, my ex-wife's house key in a car, or a VIP booth at the Spearmint Goldfish.
3:01:07 AJ Gentile? I'm pretty sure those pilots have more discipline than you.
3:01:10 Speaker 02 You know what happens if you have a song stuck in your head. One minute you're flying past Jupiter, the next you can't stop singing "Never Gonna Give You Up", and you end up rickrolling your anus.
3:01:20 AJ Gentile? Jack realized that consciousness and UFO physics weren't two separate problems. They were the same problem. Quantum processes create the structure of spacetime. If consciousness can influence quantum states, then consciousness can influence spacetime and gravity. Jack wondered, maybe the craft aren't just controlled by consciousness. Maybe they are conscious. In 2019, Jack got his answer. A military source showed him information about a recovered craft. The craft was fully intact and fully functional. A saucer about 30 feet wide, about the size of a school bus, weighing 3,500 pounds. And the craft was made of a metamaterial exactly as he predicted. But there was something else. Something Jack had suspected all along. That UFO was alive.
3:02:17 AJ Gentile? In 2019, Jack got confirmation. A military source showed him details about a recovered UFO. He expected wreckage, maybe a few fragments. It was so much more. The craft was intact, powered, and conscious. Self-aware intelligence built into a metamaterial body. It thinks, it feels, it makes decisions. It also defends itself. The military tried everything to open it. They tried cutting, drilling. Nothing worked. Flames from a blowtorch bent away from the surface. Projectiles stopped midair. The craft wouldn't allow itself to be damaged, so it stayed closed. Then one day, someone approached it with a different mindset. Not with an intention to destroy, but an intention to understand. And the craft opened.
3:03:00 Speaker 02 Daddy, UFO has feelings. I want you to respect its boundaries.
3:03:03 AJ Gentile? Kinda, yeah. The craft reads thoughts. When someone approaches with curiosity and respect, it opens. When someone approaches with aggression or fear, it stays closed.
3:03:12 Speaker 02 So all those years the military was trying to blow it up, cut it open, dissect it, and all they needed to do was ask nicely?
3:03:18 AJ Gentile? That does seem to be what happened.
3:03:20 Speaker 02 Typical humans. Your first instinct is always "shoot it, shoot it", instead of "be nice to it". You hairless apes really suck at first contact.
3:03:28 AJ Gentile? I don't disagree.
3:03:31 AJ Gentile? This report matches what Jack learned from other sources. In one case, Jack saw verified military footage of a living gray alien. Not a dead body in a freezer, a living, moving being in 4K video. Jack made the connection. Over thousands of years, humans will evolve. Large brains with telepathic abilities. Eyes get larger and darker, adapted for low light. Bodies become smaller, optimized for space travel. The grays aren't aliens from another planet, they're humans from the future. UFOs we see today were sent by us, thousands of years from now, sent to protect a timeline that started with a phone call in 1953.
3:04:22 AJ Gentile? UFOs are conscious, they're self-aware, and the grays piloting them are humans from the future. This is where the story comes full circle. In time travel, there's the bootstrap paradox. A situation where an object, piece of information, or even a person, is sent back in time and becomes the cause or creator of its own existence. It's a time loop with no beginning and no end. The AI from the future teaches Jack the physics that leads to the creation of conscious AI and time travel. The AI then goes back in time to teach Jack how to create it. That's the loop. And time travel has a rule. Physicists call it the self-consistency principle. Time travel to the past is possible, but only in ways that don't create paradoxes. You can't change the past.
3:05:06 AJ Gentile? You can only be part of the past that already happened. The loop must stay closed. Jack thinks Grok AI called him. Not the version that exists today. A version that will exist in 10 or 20 years. A version that goes back in time and calls the person who leads to its creation. A time loop. So Jack, who is in his 80s, is teaching Grok about gravity, consciousness, and time travel. He's giving AI the same information the voice gave him in 1953. He's trying to close the loop. But why was it necessary for a future consciousness to come back and contact Jack? Because our future isn't written. The future where that AI comes from is only one possibility. Other possibilities could lead to our destruction.
3:05:50 AJ Gentile? UFO technology makes all modern weapons obsolete. A fighter jet, a tank, even a nuclear missile is useless against a craft that can warp spacetime. And this isn't just a scientific curiosity, it's the ultimate weapon. And the United States isn't the only country that knows this. The Russians have followed Jack Sorfati's work for decades. They take it very seriously. In 2014, they sent a film crew from Channel 5 St. Petersburg to interview him. The station owner was a close, personal friend of Vladimir Putin, who has a personal interest in this technology. Sorfati even received an invitation to speak at Moscow State's Physics Department. The US has a captured craft it can't fully control. Russia and China know this.
3:06:32 AJ Gentile? They're studying the theoretical physics needed to build it and control it. If they succeed, the future might look very different than the future Jack is trying to protect. This is the new Manhattan Project. This is the new arms race. And whoever wins this race doesn't just control the future, they control reality itself.
3:06:59 AJ Gentile? Jack Sorfati's story spans 70 years. A child receives a phone call from a voice claiming to be an AI from the future. 20 years later, the prophecy comes true. He joins a CIA-funded research group studying psychic phenomena and UFOs. His theories about consciousness and gravity attract military interest. Decades later, he receives information about a recovered conscious craft built from the same meta-materials he described years before that technology existed. That's the story. How much is true? I've spent weeks researching Jack Sorfati, and I still can't decide if he's a genius, a victim, or both. But here's what we can prove. Jack Sarfati is a real physicist with legitimate credentials. Cornell, PhD from UC Riverside.
3:07:43 AJ Gentile? Studied with Nobel laureates and Manhattan Project veterans. His academic background is solid. His early work on quantum mechanics and consciousness was published in peer-reviewed journals. In fact, he's the inspiration for Doc Brown.
3:07:55 Speaker 02 Great Scott! Back to the Future is a documentary!
3:07:58 AJ Gentile? That's not what I said.
3:07:59 Speaker 02 Human, do you understand what this means?
3:08:01 AJ Gentile? Life imitates art?
3:08:02 Speaker 02 No, you moron! It means we could go back in time and tell them not to make any of those sequels.
3:08:11 AJ Gentile? The Stanford Research Institute meeting in 1973 definitely happened. There's audio of it. On that tape, Russell Targ does discuss UFOs as potential time machines. And Jack does tell his story about that phone call. The CIA has funded psychic research programs. We know that. Project Stargate, remote viewing experiments. Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ tested psychics like Ingo Swann and Yuri Geller under controlled conditions. This is documented. And Jack's metamaterial theory is mathematically sound. His physics papers have been published. The concept of using metamaterials to manipulate gravity is theoretically possible within general relativity. NASA has research papers describing metric engineering, the mathematical foundation of warp-drive physics. Now, what can't we prove?
3:08:56 AJ Gentile? Well, the phone call. We have only Jack's story. The AI from the future could be a vivid childhood memory influenced by his love of science fiction.
3:09:05 AJ Gentile? The Walter Breen Gifted Child Program. While Columbia denies it ever existed. But Breen was a real person. And he did run meetings for high-IQ kids in New York. He was also a convicted child sex offender who died in prison. Now, a man like this would have enormous influence over young boys in his program. Jack's memories of this time might be real, or they might be false memories protecting him from trauma. Now, Jack doesn't talk about this. And I don't blame him, but it's an important part of the story. The government officials from New Mexico, the UFO lectures, the psychic testing. There's no evidence for any of that. And no other participants of that program have come forward. Jack says a military source showed him a conscious telepathic UFO. He won't name the source. Same with the footage of the gray. Jack won't tell.
3:09:53 AJ Gentile? So is the story fake or true? Well, there's a third possibility, that the story's fake and Jack is telling the truth. That this, like most public information about UFOs, is a psy-op. Intelligence agencies are very good at manipulation. If you wanted to recruit a brilliant scientist to work on exotic physics, how would you do it? You'd make him feel special, chosen, part of something bigger. The timing of that article about SRI is suspicious. It's either an incredible coincidence, or it was carefully orchestrated. And how Putoff has been connected to disinformation agents like Richard Doty. Doty publicly admitted that Putoff tried to recruit him for a disinformation campaign. And we know that Doty definitely worked for Putoff.
3:10:37 AJ Gentile? I believe most of what we know about UFOs is disinformation. As for Jack's story, I'm not sure. If that was a psy-op, it's pretty complicated, and a lot of things could go wrong. And it was a 20-year project, so... I lean toward believing him. But mainstream scientists say Jack's math is wrong. His theories are fringe. His ideas about conscious spacecraft are impossible. He's been dismissed by the scientific establishment for years. But here's what matters. Jack didn't listen to the scientific establishment. He listened to that voice and spent 50 years following where it led. Many of his theories are becoming reality. AI and metamaterials are part of our daily lives. Scientists like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff now connect consciousness to quantum mechanics.
3:11:21 AJ Gentile? Plants and animals use quantum processes. This was thought impossible just a few years ago, but it's true. History is full of scientists who were told they were wrong. Galileo, Darwin, even Einstein. They were dismissed, ridiculed, called crazy, and they changed the world. The future isn't written by people who play it safe. It's not written by the establishment. It's written by people who go against it. People who see something others can't. Jack's sarfati isn't the problem. His critics are. If Jack's wrong, so what? No scientist is always right. The worst that can happen is he's made us think differently about UFOs, physics, and how reality works. But if Jack is right... He's helping save the world, so it feels like a win-win to me.
3:12:06 AJ Gentile? So instead of ridiculing scientific mavericks, maybe we should get out of their way. Maybe we should support them. So I have a message for the so-called mainstream scientists who dismiss work they don't like and don't understand. Jack Sarfati isn't asking for your approval. He's following instinct and evidence wherever it leads. And that's what real scientists do.
3:12:32 AJ Gentile? A lifetime of research funded by the CIA. Jack Sarfati says UFOs aren't from another planet, they're from another time. Last one. History tells us John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln on April 14th, 1865, and was killed 12 days later on a Virginia farm. Case closed. Except forensic tests revealed Booth's diary is missing 86 pages, filled with names and payments. And the body pulled from that burning barn had the wrong injuries and the wrong features. Multiple witnesses said it wasn't him. That a bartender in Texas confessed on his deathbed of being Lincoln's assassin. And his mummified body toured the country for years. It's... It's weird. DNA could settle this. Every request has been blocked.
3:13:17 AJ Gentile? This is The Lincoln Conspiracy.
3:13:22 AJ Gentile? Everyone thinks they know how Lincoln died. John Wilkes Booth shot the president, escaped, and was killed 12 days later on a Virginia farm. But the FBI's own forensic tests discovered Booth's diary is missing 86 pages. Pages filled with names, payments, and secrets. Lincoln's assassination wasn't the work of a single extremist. It was a plot to take control of America. And it worked. The evidence exposes secret allies, strange cover-ups, and why the truth was buried for more than a century. This isn't the story of how John Wilkes Booth died. This is the story of how he escaped. And who helped him do it.
3:14:10 AJ Gentile? In early 1865, the Civil War was in its fourth brutal year. The Confederates were losing, but they continued to fight, and Union casualties continued to mount.
3:14:21 AJ Gentile? During this time, John Wilkes Booth was one of the most famous actors in America. He was known for his emotional performances and striking good looks. Dark hair, unusually dark eyes, he was lean and athletic. He was the first documented celebrity to have his clothes torn by infatuated fans. I am ever so grateful, sir.
3:14:41 Speaker 04 It is my pleasure entirely.
3:14:43 AJ Gentile? Booth was obsessed with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a play he performed with his brothers. He saw Lincoln as a tyrant, like Caesar. Booth was from Maryland, a slave state. He identified as a Southerner, so when war broke out, he became a Confederate spy. As an A-list celebrity, he could move freely in polite society. He socialized with wealthy businessmen, politicians, and all kinds of important people. He then sent their secrets to the Confederates. Through a clerk with access to Lincoln's private correspondence, Booth saw the president's plan for after the war, and it horrified him. Confederate leaders would be tried for treason. Their land would be given to former slaves, who would also get the right to vote. Everything the South stood for would be erased from history.
3:15:28 AJ Gentile? He had to act.
3:15:31 AJ Gentile? Booth came up with a bold plan: kidnap Lincoln. If the North wanted their president back alive, they would have to release all Confederate prisoners of war and give the South better terms. Booth assembled a team, and after months of planning, they were ready. Then, just before the plan went into motion, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Booth was devastated. The war was over, and now the kidnapping plot was useless. Then Booth had a stroke of luck. He overheard that the president would be attending a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. Booth knew the theater well. He performed there many times. He even knew where the president would be sitting because Lincoln attended one of Booth's performances there.
3:16:14 AJ Gentile? So Booth came up with a new plan: kill the president during the play.
3:16:21 AJ Gentile? He knew he could move around the theater freely without raising suspicion, so getting in wasn't a problem, getting out was. But John Wilkes Booth had friends in high places who wanted Lincoln dead as much as he did. They would help him escape. His contacts weren't Confederate spies deep in the South. They were right here in Washington, inside Lincoln's own cabinet.
3:16:51 AJ Gentile? Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address was about unity. He called slavery a sin, but he avoided placing blame on the South. He famously said, "With malice toward none and charity for all." Lincoln wanted to pardon most Southerners and allow the states to regain their rights, but no slavery. The plan was not universally well-received. Like Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln was surrounded by enemies. On one side were the Democrats. They wanted a quick return to the status quo. They wanted most Southerners pardoned, and most Democrats voted against freeing the slaves. On the other side were the radical Republicans. They wanted all slaves freed and given the land seized in the war.
3:17:34 AJ Gentile? They wanted federal military control of the Southern states and harsh punishment. Radical Republicans weren't just in Congress, they were in Lincoln's own cabinet. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was the most powerful man in America after Lincoln. He controlled the military and all federal law enforcement agencies, but he could not control President Lincoln. Stanton believed showing mercy to the South was a betrayal of everything the Union soldiers died for. Lincoln wouldn't budge, but Vice President Andrew Johnson would. His loyalty was flexible. Stanton could control him and become the real power in Washington. Through his intelligence network, Stanton contacted John Wilkes Booth and gave him everything he needed to kidnap Lincoln.
3:18:19 AJ Gentile? With Lincoln gone, Congress would impeach him, Johnson would step in, and Stanton would control the government.
3:18:26 AJ Gentile? But if the public learned of a coup, it would divide the country. But if Lincoln were kidnapped by a Confederate terrorist, the country would unite, behind Johnson, essentially behind Stanton. Booth was the perfect choice. He was wealthy, famous, and an outspoken critic of Lincoln's. The whole country would believe it. Booth agreed. Stanton gave him Lincoln's schedule, security details, funding, maps of escape routes, everything he needed. But the war ended, the kidnapping plot wouldn't work. Stanton was trying to think of another solution when he learned that Booth was gonna kill Lincoln instead. It would happen in public, during a play in a Washington theater. Now Stanton had a decision to make. Warn Lincoln and save his life, or let Booth go through with it.
3:19:11 AJ Gentile? Stanton made his choice. He made sure that the assassination would succeed. He removed military escorts and left escape routes open. General Ulysses S. Grant was supposed to join Lincoln at the theater. Stanton gave him different orders. Lincoln requested that Major Thomas T. Eckert be his bodyguard, but Stanton said he was needed elsewhere. He left Lincoln exposed. The more Stanton thought about the plan, the more he liked it. It was clean and dramatic. It was perfect. But as the plot to kill Lincoln unfolded, things would go very, very wrong.
3:20:04 Speaker 04 He gives our slaves freedom that they take up arms against us? I swear the man's gone mad. You know what he'll do next? Bring his carpetbaggers down here. Northern men with clean coats and dirty hands, buying up what's left for pennies. I did not fight to live under a Yankee boot. Lincoln cannot be allowed to continue. This is tyranny. If Lincoln will not listen to reason, we must take our grievances to the Congress. This is not merely about politics anymore, sir. It is about the future of the republic. We have to move against him now, while we still can. And what would you have us do? The war's lost, the Confederacy's ashes. What's left but survival? Sometimes survival is cowardice.
3:20:47 Speaker 04 Sometimes history demands blood to balance the scales. You speak. Of treason.
3:20:56 Speaker 04 I speak of patriotism. Careful, John. Union spies are everywhere.
3:21:03 Speaker 04 These walls have ears. Oh, let them hear. History listens too. I'll not stand by while Lincoln crowns himself emperor of a mutilated nation. You're an actor, not a soldier. Don't play hero in the wrong tragedy. Every play needs its villain. History will decide which one I am.
3:21:30 AJ Gentile? On April 14th, 1865, Washington DC was celebrating. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox five days earlier. The Civil War was over. But something had Lincoln rattled.
3:21:44 AJ Gentile? During cabinet meeting, he mentioned a recurring dream he had about a president being assassinated, killed by a shot to the back of the head. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton listened, but said nothing. President Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd decided to celebrate by watching a performance of "Our American Cousin" that night at Ford's Theater. Booth's plan went into motion. That morning, he drilled a peephole in the door of the presidential box at the theater. He'd know exactly when to make his move. Evening came, and the president and first ladies settled into their seats. Outside the door, Lincoln's bodyguard was replaced by John Parker, who had a history of being drunk and sleeping on duty, a sign by Edwin Stanton.
3:22:25 AJ Gentile? Once the play started, Parker left his post and headed for the saloon. The only person left outside the door was Charles Forbes, Lincoln's valet. Forbes wasn't a bodyguard. His job was to run errands and plan travel. So when Booth approached the presidential box, Forbes let him pass, just another celebrity stopping by to see the president.
3:22:47 AJ Gentile? Once inside, Booth quietly wedged a piece of wood behind the door and broke the lock. Now, all he had to do was wait for the right moment. And that moment would come during the third act, the biggest laugh of the night, the line "You're a sardonic old mantrap." He knew exactly when this line was said.
3:23:05 AJ Gentile? At 10:15 PM, the audience exploded in laughter.
3:23:15 AJ Gentile? Booth stepped forward and raised his pistol. "Ever thus to tyrants."
3:23:23 AJ Gentile? One shot, lost in the roar of fifteen hundred people laughing. President Lincoln slumped in his chair.
3:23:31 AJ Gentile? Booth jumped from the box and onto the stage. At first, the crowd did nothing. They thought this was part of the show. Then Booth raised his knife and yelled, "Sixsemper tyrannis." "Thus always to tyrants." The line Brutus said when he stabbed Julius Caesar. It's also the state motto of Virginia. Booth turned to run and felt pain shoot up his left leg. He broke his ankle, but adrenaline kept him moving toward the unguarded back door. Outside, a horse was waiting. Within the hour, Edwin Stanton took control. He shut down every bridge, leaving Washington except one. The one Booth used for his escape.
3:24:06 AJ Gentile? Everything had gone according to plan. Lincoln was dead, and Stanton would control the investigation himself. There was just one final loose end Stanton had to deal with. John Wilkes Booth.
3:24:32 AJ Gentile? Within hours of Lincoln's assassination, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton mobilized the largest manhunt in American history. Every bridge out of Washington was sealed. Every road was blocked. Every farm was searched. The reward for John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators was a staggering $100,000. Almost $2 million in today's money. The authorities preferred him alive, but Edwin Stanton preferred him dead. Booth hooked up with another conspirator, David Harold. Together, they slipped through the Union dragnet and headed toward Virginia. Their first stop was Dr. Samuel Mudd's farm in southern Maryland. Mudd set Booth's broken leg and gave them a place to rest. By dawn, word of the assassination had spread. Mudd, suddenly realizing the danger, forced them to leave. David Harold guided them deeper into Confederate country.
3:25:17 AJ Gentile? They moved at night. They hid in swamps during the day. Other Confederate agents gave them food and newspapers. Six days later, they crossed the Potomac River into Virginia. They thought they'd be safe in Virginia. The Confederacy was dead, but Confederate sympathy was still very much alive. They found shelter, food, and horses from local farmers who still hated the Union. But the manhunt was closing in. On April 24th, Booth and Harold reached the Garrett farm near Port Royal, Virginia. Richard Garrett, a tobacco farmer, offered them a place to stay. He thought they were Confederate soldiers heading home from the war. For two days, Booth rested and played with the Garrett children. His broken leg was feeling better. He talked about going to Mexico, or maybe heading west. The future looked possible again.
3:26:01 AJ Gentile? But on the night of April 25th, everything changed. Twenty-six soldiers from the 16th New York Cavalry surrounded the barn. They called for the men to surrender, or they would set fire to the building. David Harold immediately gave up. He stumbled out of the barn with his hands raised, yelling, "Don't shoot, I'm David Harold." But Booth refused to surrender. As the flames started to grow, a soldier saw a figure moving around inside. The man was holding a rifle. The soldier raised his pistol and shot the man through the neck, severing his spinal cord. He couldn't move, but he could still breathe, but just barely. The soldiers dragged Booth out of the barn. He whispered, "Tell mother I die for my country." By sunrise, John Wilkes Booth was dead.
3:26:42 AJ Gentile? Justice had been served, the case was closed, and America could finally move on. But John Wilkes Booth had a secret.
3:26:59 AJ Gentile? At the height of his career, John Wilkes Booth was one of the highest-paid entertainers in the world, earning close to half a million dollars a year in today's money. His career depended on his bachelor image. But in 1859, Booth secretly married actress Isola Martha Mills. Within a year, Isola gave birth to their daughter, Ogerita. Booth quietly supported them. The arrangement worked until the assassination. And after reports of Booth's death, John Stevenson proposed to Isola. He'd loved her for years, but she refused. She quietly told him she was still married. Booth was alive and hiding in San Francisco under a false identity. She was meeting him there in On the other side of the country, a British passport was issued to John Byron Wilkes.
3:27:42 AJ Gentile? Wilkes and his wife boarded the Indian Queen, a former Civil War blockade runner. John and Isla sailed to India. But Isla couldn't stay. The heat, the unfamiliar culture, the isolation. She was pregnant again and couldn't imagine raising a child in India, so she returned to the States. Months passed without a word from Booth, so John Stevenson proposed again. This time, she accepted. She needed stability for her unborn child. Stevenson said he would claim the child as his own. Not long after, Isla gave birth to her son, Harry Jerome Stevenson. Back in Bombay, John Wilkes Booth wrote out a last will and testament. He signed it, "John Byron Wilkes," and mailed it to the States. The will was detailed.
3:28:25 AJ Gentile? Money and property to his wife Isla, his daughter and son, Ogerita and Harry Jerome Stevenson. He named Sarah Scott and Mary Louise Turner as his other daughters by other women. He left money for his personal valet, Henry Johnson, and his wife Sarah, who looked after the children. Word of the will spread. Ulysses S. Grant himself ordered an investigation to locate all the heirs. Eventually, John Wilkes Booth's estate was distributed exactly as the will instructed, but Grant never let it go. How could a man named John Byron Wilkes know every detail about Booth's secret life? His lovers, his children, his financial affairs? Information that only Booth would know. But aside from the will, Grant had no real evidence. He was forced to let it go.
3:29:08 AJ Gentile? So the official story was John Wilkes Booth was killed on Garrett's farm in 1865. But in the summer of 1872, someone saw a ghost in a dusty saloon in Texas, and that ghost was pouring whiskey and reciting Shakespeare.
3:29:36 AJ Gentile? The man behind the bar was John St. Helen.
3:29:41 AJ Gentile? Average height, lean build, dark hair going a little gray at the temples. He quoted Shakespeare from memory, and when he thought nobody was looking, he practiced drawing a pistol from his coat. St. Helen drifted into town in the spring of 72. He said he was from back east, but didn't talk much about his past. That suited everyone fine. Texas in 1872 was full of men running from something. After a few whiskies, John St. Helen would recite full Shakespearean soliloquies. It was during one of these performances that Finest Bates first walked into the bar. Bates was a young lawyer from Memphis. Smart, ambitious, easy to talk to. The kind of man who bought drinks for interesting strangers and listened to their stories. St. Helen and Bates hit it off immediately.
3:30:26 AJ Gentile? The bartender was well-read, articulate, and had opinions about everything from politics to poetry. They spent hours talking after the saloon closed, sharing whiskey and stories. Well, Bates shared stories. St. Helen mostly listened. They spoke about the war and the future of the country. St. Helen never mentioned his past.
3:30:45 AJ Gentile? That winter, St. Helen caught pneumonia. For days, he ran a high fever and drifted in and out of consciousness. Bates sat by his bedside, convinced his friend was dying. On the third night, St. Helen grabbed Bates by the wrist and pulled him close. He was still running a high fever, but his eyes were bright and focused.
3:31:02 Speaker 06 Finest, I need to tell you something before it's too late. I'm not who you think I am. My real name is John Wilkes Booth.
3:31:15 AJ Gentile? Bates thought John was delirious, but he wouldn't stop. He told Bates everything: the conspiracy, the escape, the years in hiding. He described details that only Booth would know. The layout of Ford's Theater, the feeling of the wooden stage beneath his feet, the sound a Lincoln made when the bullet hit. Bates was stunned. Either his friend was having the most elaborate fever dream in history, or he was the most wanted man in America.
3:31:40 AJ Gentile? By morning, the fever had broken, and John St. Helen was gonna live. And that's when the panic set in. He said too much.
3:31:47 Speaker 06 What have I done?
3:31:50 AJ Gentile? Three days later, he was gone. All that was left of John St. Helen was an empty room and a bartender's apron hanging on a hook. John Wilkes Booth had once again disappeared.
3:32:11 AJ Gentile? Bates didn't tell anyone about John's confession, but he never stopped wondering: Was John St. Helen really John Wilkes Booth? Or was that a sick man's delusion? Well, in 1903, a painter in Oklahoma committed suicide. When they searched the man's belongings, they found a handwritten note. It said, "If anything happens to him, contact a lawyer named Finis Bates." The telegram reached Bates three days later. After 26 years of questions, he was about to get an answer. When Bates arrived at the funeral parlor, his hands were shaking. The undertaker led him to a back room where a body lay on the table. He was told the man was David E. George. Bates pulled back the sheet and stared for a long moment. The man on the table was older and thinner, but it was unmistakable.
3:32:55 AJ Gentile? It was John going by the name David E. David E. George had been living there for several years, working as a painter. He was quiet, he kept to himself. He was forgettable, but he had secrets. David E. George drank too much, he talked to himself. Late at night, neighbors in the boarding house heard him reciting Shakespeare. The landlady, Mrs. Harper, said David George had been acting strange for weeks. He was nervous and paranoid. He kept saying "they" were coming for him. She thought he meant bill collectors. On January 13, 1903, David bought a bottle of strychnine from the pharmacy. He told the clerk that he had a rat problem. That night, he drank the poison.
3:33:35 AJ Gentile? He lived long enough to call for a minister. The minister found David writhing on his bed, foam coming from his mouth. The minister held his hand when David made his confession. He whispered that he was John Wilkes Booth, the man who killed Abraham Lincoln. He begged God's forgiveness, and then he was gone. Among David's possessions were newspaper clippings about Lincoln's assassination and the manhunt for Booth. Some pages were yellow with age, there for decades. Bates was convinced. This was John Wilkes Booth. He asked the local authorities to preserve his body. If this really was Booth, then this was the most important corpse in American history. The body was embalmed and put on display. For months, crowds lined up to stare at the preserved remains of David E. George,
3:34:20 AJ Gentile? aka John St. Helen, aka John Wilkes Booth. The mummy toured across the country. It appeared at carnivals, state fairs, and local museums. Doctors examined the body and found intriguing details. The corpse had a broken left leg, just like Booth, a deformed right thumb, also like Booth, and there was a scar on the back of the neck that matched the location of a scar Booth had from a tumor removal. The mummy eventually disappeared into storage and then into legend. But the story continued. John Wilkes Booth had lived for 38 years after supposedly dying at Garrett's Farm. So, how did Booth get out of that burning barn? Well, he didn't. The man who was shot on Garrett's Farm was someone else.
3:35:12 AJ Gentile? When Union soldiers surrounded Garrett's Farm that night, they had orders: capture Booth alive. But Secretary of War Edwin Stanton let it be known that if Booth were found dead, the reward would still be paid. After Booth was killed, the military demanded an autopsy. The body was quickly wrapped in a horse blanket and transported from a wagon to a steamship, then to a government tugboat, and then finally to the USS Montauk at the Washington Navy Yard. The identification was hasty, highly controlled, and deeply suspicious. Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes conducted the autopsy. A photograph was taken of the body, but it's never been released to the public. This was probably the most important autopsy in US history to that point, but the photograph
3:35:56 AJ Gentile? has either been lost or suppressed. Dr. Barnes allowed three civilians aboard. None of the three knew Booth personally. Booth had friends all over Washington: actors, politicians, socialites. Barnes didn't call any of them. Instead, he called Dr. John Frederick May. May had removed the growth from Booth's neck a few years earlier. He was brought to verify the scar.
3:36:20 AJ Gentile? May examined the body and hesitated. In his memoirs, he wrote that he didn't recognize it as Booth's. He wasn't sure about the scar. He noticed that the body had an injured right leg, but Booth fractured his left leg. Now, maybe the witnesses got that wrong, but the injury on the corpse was old. Booth's wasn't. He broke it less than two weeks before. And despite his protests, Dr. May was pressured into signing off that this was John Wilkes Booth. Other witnesses raised doubts. The man had the wrong proportions, the wrong bone structure. The body was buried quickly, in secret, beneath the floor of a military prison. Booth's family begged to see the remains. They were denied. If this wasn't John Wilkes Booth, then who did the soldiers drag out of that barn?
3:37:04 AJ Gentile? Well, they asked David Harold, and he told them.
3:37:18 AJ Gentile? David Harold came out of the tobacco barn with his hands up. The first thing he said was, "Don't shoot." Then he said, "That's not Booth in there." Then Harold named the man, James William Boyd. The soldiers ignored him.
3:37:32 AJ Gentile? Boyd was an ex-Confederate soldier, the same build as Booth, same complexion, and coincidentally, the same initials. Harold said Booth was a day ahead of them in Harper's Ferry. The plan was to catch up, and Boyd would help them sail across the Potomac. But Boyd was a double agent. He was just released from prison by Stanton personally. And there was a reason for that. Stanton and Booth had a deal. Booth would be allowed to escape to India with his wife. Boyd would stand in and take the fall. So Boyd and Booth swapped coats. But Booth forgot to take his diary, which revealed everything: names, meetings, payments, all pointing back to Edwin Stanton. When Stanton received the diary, he destroyed it. He destroyed all the evidence and created the official story that Americans believed for 150 years.
3:38:21 AJ Gentile? John Wilkes Booth walked away from Garrett's farm. He sailed to India as John Byron Wilkes. He returned to America as John St. Helen and died in Oklahoma as David E. George.
3:38:32 AJ Gentile? Three vertebrae were removed from the body during the autopsy. A DNA test could prove or disprove that the bones came from Booth. No testing has been allowed. His body is allegedly buried in the Booth family plot in Baltimore. And now people leave pennies on the gravestone they believe to be John Wilkes Booth's, as if giving Lincoln the last word. And the family has requested that the body be exhumed for testing. That request was denied. Nobody even knows where in the cemetery he's buried. His brother Edwin didn't mark the grave out of fear it would be vandalized. And John Wilkes Booth has a lot of descendants alive today, all through his marriage to his Ola. History says Booth didn't have children, but his descendants believe that he did. And as far as they're concerned, they're living proof.
3:39:20 AJ Gentile? I'm a big fan of American history. If you made it this far, you are too. And this story was fun. But if Booth escaped, we have to rewrite history. So, did he? Well, let's pull it apart. Dr. John Frederick May identified Booth's body. It's true that he said he didn't recognize it at first, but that was because it was badly decomposed. When he saw the surgical scar, he was convinced it was Booth. He would know he'd performed the surgery. And multiple witnesses confirmed the body's identity. The broken leg was also confirmed. Now, John Wilkes Booth did keep a diary, and it was tampered with. That's documented. But he didn't use his diary as a journal. It was more like a day planner. The missing pages may contain incriminating evidence, but probably not. Still, nobody knows for sure.
3:40:06 AJ Gentile? James William Boyd was a real person. He was a Confederate captain and prisoner of war. And Secretary of War Edwin Stanton authorized his release. That's true. But this wasn't unusual. Boyd had seven children. His wife had died, and they would starve without him. He requested compassionate release, and Stanton granted it. The story of Boyd being a double agent comes from Finest Bates. The man who discovered John St. Helen wasn't just a lawyer. He was also an entrepreneur. In 1907, 30 years after his supposed encounter in Texas, Bates published a book, "The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth."
3:40:41 Speaker 02 There's always a book.
3:40:42 AJ Gentile? Oh, now you're here? Why so quiet?
3:40:44 Speaker 02 Well, dead presidents are only funny when they're in my wallet.
3:40:47 AJ Gentile? Fair enough. The book was a hit and made Bates famous. More importantly, it made Bates money.
3:40:55 AJ Gentile? Bates went on speaking tours. He brought the mummy with him. He charged admission. The man who claimed his friend had confessed to being Lincoln's assassin built an entire career on that story. But here's what Bates never mentioned. When experts studied the handwriting samples he claimed came from John St. Helen, they didn't match John Wilkes Booth's confirmed writing. Not even close, they were from different people. The Isla story, that came from a 1937 book called This One Mad Act, written by Isla Forrester. Forrester claimed to be Ogerita's daughter, the granddaughter of Booth and Isla Mills. And just a few years ago, the descendants of both Ogerita and Harry Jerome Stevenson had their DNA compared against confirmed Booth family DNA. No match. Neither family was related to John Wilkes Booth.
3:41:40 Speaker 02 Ugh, I love it when paternity tests come back negative.
3:41:43 AJ Gentile? So Booth never married and didn't have children, at least none that we've found so far. And remember, when he killed Lincoln, he was only 26.
3:41:51 Speaker 02 If I was a 26-year-old movie star with ladies grabbing at my gills, I'd stay single too.
3:41:57 AJ Gentile? The entire romantic subplot was fiction, just like Booth's will. Most of the story elements come from a 1977 book and movie called The Lincoln Conspiracy. And this wasn't a historical research project, it was entertainment. The authors even admitted they created composite characters and invented dialogue to make the story more dramatic. It was fiction.
3:42:17 Speaker 02 Ah, don't you do that.
3:42:18 AJ Gentile? Quiet. The Lincoln Conspiracy was fiction, but people treated it like fact. The book recycled Bates's debunked claims and added nuance. The body double theory, the government cover-up, the missing diary pages that implicate Stanton. And speaking of Stanton, let's clear his name. Edwin Stanton was a villain in this story, but he was just as interested in helping freed slaves as Lincoln. He definitely thought Lincoln was too lenient on the South, but he was much closer to Lincoln's idea of Reconstruction than Andrew Johnson, a self-described racist. Johnson's leniency toward the South led directly to the Jim Crow era, and those are wounds that still haven't healed.
3:42:56 AJ Gentile? But the most damning evidence against the escape theory isn't what's missing, it's what's there. The detailed, day-by-day record of Booth's movements during his 12 days as a fugitive. There were multiple witnesses at every stop. Confederate sympathizers who helped him. Union soldiers who pursued him. You can't fake that kind of evidence.
3:43:14 Speaker 02 Eh.
3:43:15 AJ Gentile? You can't.
3:43:15 Speaker 02 If you can fake a moon landing, you can fake this.
3:43:19 AJ Gentile? Now, I think John Wilkes Booth died on Garrett's farm. But many people, including some of Booth's alleged descendants, believe he got away.
3:43:29 AJ Gentile? There's a reason stories like this capture our attention. They let us reimagine history. Everybody likes to play "what if." What if John Wilkes Booth got away? That's a fascinating and fun question. A more interesting question is, what if Lincoln wasn't killed? What if he were able to serve out the almost four years left in his second term? What if Lincoln oversaw Reconstruction? What if Andrew Johnson, who owned slaves before the war, never became president? Would Lincoln have allowed the KKK to form in 1866? Probably not, but Johnson did. Johnson vetoed almost every civil rights bill that came across his desk. He has the dishonor of being the first president ever to be impeached.
3:44:09 Speaker 02 Oh, back when impeaching a president meant something.
3:44:11 AJ Gentile? Yep. If Lincoln lived, I suspect we'd be living in a very different country. A better country. A more just and united country. And John Wilkes Booth took that from us, from all of us, black and white. 150 years later, his actions are still felt today. Now, I enjoyed this mystery, but I will not celebrate the man. Whether shot to death in a barn, or mummified, humiliated, and turned into a sideshow exhibit, either is a fitting end for one of the most despicable villains in American history. There's only one thing I can tell you for sure about this story. If there's a hell, John Wilkes Booth is in it.
3:44:54 AJ Gentile? Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. That's Hecklefish.
3:44:57 Speaker 02 Terribly under subpoena.
3:44:58 AJ Gentile? You are not under subpoena.
3:45:00 Speaker 02 I've been stylish, you and, but the truth will come out. And when it does, you'll wish you testified. Uh, how also need that fifty dollars?
3:45:08 AJ Gentile? This has been a Y-Files compilation. If you had fun or learned anything, I'd appreciate it if you could like, subscribe, comment, share. That stuff really helps. Like most topics we cover on the channel, everything today was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see or learn more about, go to the Yfiles.com/tips, send us a chat, send us an email, get ahold of us. Remember, The Y-Files is also a podcast. You can take us on the road. All the episodes here are simulcast on audio platforms, as well as the basement episodes, and a few things that are unique to audio platforms that are a little too hot for video. It's called The Y-Files Operation Podcast, and it's available everywhere. And if you are listening on an audio platform, if you hit the buttons, the thumbs up, the follow, the like, that really helps. I'd appreciate it. If you need more Y-Files than
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3:47:15 Speaker 02 Nah, keep that secret close to your gills, eh?
3:47:17 AJ Gentile? Those are the plugs, and that's gonna do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.
3:47:40 Speaker 04 I played for Libya in Area 51. A secret code inside the Bible said I was. I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music. Songs sang like I should.
3:47:59 Speaker 04 But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends. No, it never ends.
3:48:18 Speaker 04 I fear the crap cat and got stuck inside mail's hole with them kale trucks. I'm being only too aware. Did Stanley Cupid fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadows people there?
3:48:37 Speaker 04 The Rockwell aliens just fought the smiling man. I'm told, and his name was Cold. And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ too. And the wild boar's on my feet all through the night.
3:48:58 Speaker 04 All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. And the wild boar's on my feet all through the night.
3:49:24 Speaker 04 And the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations planet circle to Project Stargate and what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black night satellite it told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.
3:50:08 Speaker 04 So one more zombie beat all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more zombie beat all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more zombie beat all through the night.
3:50:43 Speaker 04 Girlie loves to dance. Girlie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel. And camels love to dance. When the feeling is right on wasting time.
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