Campfire Stories with author Rob Skvarla: Conspiracies, Politics, The Future

We're hello everyone, and welcome to Scary Stories we Tell. I'm your host, Chris Stash you, and I'm joined by my good friend. He is the man all the way up in the Northeast. He goes to the National Archives from here from from time to time, from what I've been told, and he's he's always asking the government for a new document to help the fight for the freedom of information. You're a friend in mine, mister Rob Scavarla.

Hey, how you doing. I'm doing good. Philadelphia still exists. So you know we've lost the Super Bowl. That's why we still exist.

Yeah, that's the paradox. But so, how have things been for you up in the Northeast. It's been a minute since we talked, Rob. I think the last time we talked, there weren't unidentified objects being shot down over Late Huron, at least not in what the frequency there are now, depending on what you believe. Thanks are good for me.

I think since we last talked, I actually had an article in the revived Kream magazine. So there's that on how the CIA stile money from Koreadan's clearwater revival in the seventies. So I'm spreading the good word of all the people to antagonize CCR, not the one you would think, but here we are. Well, it wasn't that the CIA was targeting Famine, was that they were targeting the label. And then the label was like, Hey, we don't want to give you more money, but we'll let you keep the money we're giving you by making sure you don't pay taxes.

So being young musicians, they kind of got roped into something they didn't fully understand and it took them probably close to a decade to get money. They didn't get it from the CIA, they got it from their label and other people like that. But you know, it sort of worked itself out and John Fogerty just got his music back. So good for him, right, I was about to say I saw him that forty years fighting to get that from the same label, Fantasy Records, Which is crazy to think about. Yeah, just like in your life away, or at least you used to when you were a musician.

Yeah, yeah, not anymore. You just make pennies on the dollar for all the Spotify streaming that happened, yea, or labels not labels music on news steal your merch money. That it's one of the new things. Yikes. So other than talking about CCR, what what do you what do you think about the current climate of things, because you know, when we we've talked before about the government meddling and things and the government not being on the level, which obviously they aren't a lot of ways or in almost always, but now we're seeing something that are happening in more visible for I think more mainstream people to be seeing in a daily basis in regards to the UFOs or the unidentified flying objects being shot down last couple weeks seemingly has stopped.

So I'm just curious, Rob, what is you what's your take on everything that's going on? Because you're pretty dialed in, you're pretty connected. I'm pretty annoyed. Yeah, you're pretty yoked, as they would say, I think yeah. I mean, I'm still the same as I ever was on the subject.

I think that we well. So one of the funny things is that they shot down something and then they got into this big zeal to shoot stuff, so they just started shooting anything that was in the sky, and right now it looks like one of the balloons may have been a hobbyist balloon. From I think like Michigan, which is awesome. Our government's getting dunked on by boomer hobbyists. Where did our balloon go?

I don't understand our Where did our balloon go? While we shot it down? So I think that's probably what happened here. I mean they're talking about one of them. I think I said was lindaical and metallic, which you would think is not a balloon.

But there are different types of balloons, and then there's high altitude aircraft that are sort of like zeppelins that our government and other governments have been working on. So I don't think anything that they shot down was actually Chinese. I don't think they were UFOs. I think that again, you know a lot of the stuff I talk about, we're in a new Cold War, So I think that they saw something, didn't know what it was, shot it down, and then immediately they had to keep acting upon that to build up a panic. Now it's possible the first one could have been Chinese.

I don't dispute the fact the Chinese government has been working on high altitude aircraft, has been working on high altitude balloons. We have all kinds of information showing that they have, and I think one of the funniest possible outcomes would be if both countries were just spying on each other for like the last decade, and we both knew about it and didn't do anything until this happened. I mean, in my mind, that has been what's going on. Because so I mean, yeah, to an extent, like, we're always spying on each other, and to be fair, China would be crazy not to spy on us given everything that we've done to other countries and that we continue to do well, we'd be crazy not to spy on them for more or less the exact same reason.

Right. Sure, I don't know the red I mean not using I'm not vouching for it anymore than you are, But I'm saying people who make those kinds of decisions can use that as a as a smokescreen to hide behind. I mean, yeah, every government's going to spy on their rivals to some degree. I mean, that's why you have intelligence services. I don't like intelligence services, clearly, with all of the stuff that I do and write about and post about and all of that.

But you know, if you're going to have an intel agency, that's what they do. So I'm not surprised but I don't think anything that was shot down was a Chinese or b UFOs. No. I I tend to agree with you on the first one. It may have been, but I think, yeah, afterwards, you know, it was just a joke for like an entire week of like, well, they just shot something else down, and they shot something else down, and oh now they can't Now they can't recover it because it's sun to the bottom of the ocean or the bottom of like uron.

It shattered into pieces and it went into the water, and we can't find it anymore, so we'll never know what it is. Yeah, that's not good like that that I think for me, that kind of messaging. It's crazy to me that anyone in the government thinks that kind of messaging is a viable option in twenty twenty three. But because I mean it, because yeah, if you look at all the news coverage immediately after the first balloon got shot down, all of the major news outlets were saying, is it a UFO, is it Chinese? Whatever?

And they kept running with it even now, like you still see stories in like the Wall Street Journal or especially Politico, who's been one of the most favorable sources to these types of stories about new ap UFO in our galactic extraterrestrial I think Margo Rubio just tweeted out a political story today about we need to keep investigating all of these advanced technologies with advanced capabilities and stuff like that. So this story is do work, and they've worked historically for day gads, going back to when the CIA first became involved in this stuff in nineteen fifty two, and even earlier than that. When you look at the story with Roswell, how the US Army Air Force said it was a flying saucer and then changed it to I think just a regular weather balloon.

And I think only within the last twenty years they admitted it was like reconnaissance blooms, like Project Is, yeah, Project Mogul is the ones they've said it actually was. Sure, So these stories have been around with us since, you know, the UFOs first started. And I mean even if you look at the use of propaganda more broadly, the United States government, among many other governments, has used superstition. The Nazis used astrology in World War Two, like they used it both because they believed in it and as propaganda. Other countries have done similar things.

You know, we've done this, we do it now. Havana syndrome another form of you know, this weird superstitious belief manifesting in the public consciousness because the press typically will just report what the government tells them too well. And that for me was I mean, again not surprising, but that for me was the thing that again it's just you're sitting there and you're watching as the media just continues to push it in a direction that is clearly in the aid of what you're talking about. I mean, they're just pushing this narrative that like, just sit and think for a moment if this is really what's going on here, and if it is, great, but if it isn't great, it doesn't matter either way. Like you said, I mean, they've been doing this probably for a decade plus now at least.

So it's been going on for a decade and nobody's done shit about it. And it's not my job anymore than that, it's your job to do anything about it. So why now do we need to give a shit that it is happening unless it's one thing for some reason to push the public in a certain direction. When you look at like the way propaganda functions. People often think that you always have to put out just you know, one specific targeted message, But often tactic that is used is you just put out a lot of information that contradicts itself.

You know, you'll put out one point, then come out with another, and then come out with another. And there's so much information that's being put out there. Most people don't have the capacity to remember everything. They're not a freak like me who searches for these little nuggets and tries to you remember all this stuff. So they'll see a headline and that is what they remember, and maybe they see something a couple of weeks later where it's debunked.

One of the things that you see with UFOs historically, Havana syndrome more recently is these stories aren't stories that play out on a week by week basis. You'll have what is known in the UFO community as a flap, which is just a lot of sightings in a short amount of time. So if you look at Roswell, for instance, Roswell was not the beginning of a UFO flap. It was actually the end of one sort of A couple weeks before there was a pilot named Kenneth Arnold, who was a commercial pilot in the Northwest. He said he saw nine glowing objects when he was out on a flight, and that set off rash of sightings, which became probably the first official UFO flap.

And my personal opinion is that the military is someone in the military, the US Army Air Force knew that was in the news and saw an opportunity to cover for their special you know, reconnaissance balloon that went down. They said, oh, here's a flying saucer. Next day they came back and said, oh, no, it's something else. Because people don't have that capacity to stick with a story. So these ideas, these pieces of propaganda, they pop up, they go away, they pop up again periodically because it's just there to refresh you keep you abreast of what the government wants you to know, and no one really challenges it because you know, who's to say who's right on something like that.

Most people trust the government, even though you know, we see these stories, you know, distrust of government at its highest. Ever implicitly, people trust their own government, especially against outside foreign threats. Other governments. Well, yeah, you position the United States government favorably against quote, the Chinese government, right nobody in this country is going, oh, yes, I am a Chinese government sympathizer, like you'll get I mean, you get run out of here by I mean, maybe not me and you, but I mean and like by a whole raft of people that really don't like when people say anything contrary to the United States government, even about things that we know to be true, like you said about meddling in foreign governments, like assassinating or paying to have foreign leaders assassinated.

We know this shit's going on. It's is, this is not in question. But yet people in our government continue, people in our government and citizens of our country continue to support it explicitly as if they're pretending like they don't know what's going on. Well yeah, I mean there's also a generational thing where even if something that had happened in the past, like recently, there was a story that came out a day or two ago about the Department of Energy, and they did a new assessment or updated their assessment confident the confidence level on their belief that COVID had leaked from China, where they upgraded it from undecided to low confidence. But if you actually look at like the channels through which it came out first.

It was a low confidence assessment. When you're looking at confidence levels with intelligence analysis, what low confidence typically means is that it's either unsubstantiated or the links are tenuous. Things are not you know, they don't really trust it that much, so they have a low level of confidence. They have some idea, but they can't prove anything, so that's obviously not something that's useful. But then it linked out through journalists who had been big supporters of WMD's in Iraq.

But many of the people who would be reading this story wouldn't know that unless they actually looked into the reporters themselves. So there's this lack of generational awareness. People know bad things happened in Iraq, but many people don't know what they don't know, like that we tortured people, or they might have a vague idea of that, but no specifics. They won't know that. For example, like I think a quarter of the nine eleven Commission's report is based on testimony of Guantanamo detainees, most of whom we're probably tortured, and much of that information was later retracted by the CIA because it was bad.

So there's this lack of generalational awareness, where you know, every ten to fifteen years, we just keep repeating the same mistakes because no one really remembers anything well. And also, I mean to your point, there's also this lack of follow through in our country when it comes to pieces of information or news stories. You know, people like you said, they hear one thing and then they don't keep track of the story. They don't see how the story changes, they don't see how the people who are writing the story continue to get involved. I mean someone like Glenn Greenwald.

I mean, that's been his whole thing. Is he's doing that specific thing because that's specifically what he wants to do, and that's what he's made a name for himself doing. Is it hard to imagine that other people haven't been doing the same thing, but less overt as someone like Glenn Greenwald. No, it makes perfect sense, because the way to do it is to just be the guy who gets paid or has a source, but that source clearly is biased or clearly has an agenda, does too like he has his own agenda. So even people in immedia sphere do that, Like the Snowden stuff, I think that Greenwald only if I remember right, released like a small fraction of the documents that he got up as a part of Life the NSA Lakes.

And when I say a small fraction, I mean like the vast majority thousands, tens of thousands of documents were just hidden in a vault and nothing has been done with it. I think in twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen, Greenwald's like, yeah, we're not going to do anything with that anymore. But he won't release them to other people. So even Greenwald, and I would say especially Greenwald's since his Fox News turn, you know, he has his own implicit biases. A lot of these people who even work in the media sphere have this about them, right.

I just it's I think a lot of people kind of forget that or don't think about that unless you're being as vocal about it as someone like a Glenn Greenwald is. Because again, like the people that are working at Political and Wall Street Journal have a bias and they have an intent behind what they're doing. And it's not just to share the news. It's just not. It can't be.

Yeah, But I mean Greenwald worked with a guardian too. I mean that's where a lot of his big stories came from, and they're or if they had about a lot of this stuff. There's that great story I think about, like in the early twenty tens, when all that stuff was getting released. I believe the British government literally like went into one of their offices and made them destroy hard drives with hammers, like they watched them as they did it. And these guys, you know, they did it because they have to I guess, I don't know, quote have to unquote.

Yeah. So, I mean, like the idea of an unbiased, impartial observer, even within Western media, isn't something that truly exists because it's all driven by market forces. When you live in a capitalist system, you're going to bend to the pressures of capitalism, and in a situation like this, intelligence agencies often have the force, you know, the money to pressure institutions and organizations. Historically we've seen this. They infiltrated newspapers in the sixties and seventies.

A lot of journalists now work in a revolving door system with you know, various arms of government. I know some people who've written about havanas in for example, one was an x State Department official who wrote about Russian disinformation. Another was once described as the CIA's mop up man because he would send his stories to the CIA for approval before they got published in the La Times. So you know, the system that we exist in there isn't really, I hate to say, there isn't truth. There are many versions of the truth, and you have to sort through whatever you find to be the most useful of those truths well and in an attempt to distill it down or do something with it where it's more palatable or easier to use in a way, because yeah, I mean, the amount of noise on the line is just I can't fault people for not giving a shit about the news, because it's hard to give a shit when there's so much noise on the line.

But there's no other way to get this information is other, I mean, unless you're going to something like Twitter or a crowdfunded or crowdsourced information, which even then, like even now, with Twitter being what it is, that in and of itself is a problem and it helps to stymy free speech as free as the speech could be in this country at least. Yeah, And I mean, if you look at the way the UFO story has unfolded historically, like it was initially always relegated to the tabloids because it was not something that was seen as a serious subject. You would occasionally get it in the news when there were big flaps in fifty two, for example, I mentioned earlier the CIA became interested in UFOs around that period, and that was for a specific reason.

In the summer of fifty two, notorious flap happened over Washington, DC, where allegedly there were UFOs over the White House. This was in major newspapers. This led to the creation of the Robertson Panel, which involved the CIA investigating UFOs. So it got coverage there. But you know, between that point and then the seventies, there really wasn't a lot of serious writing about it.

And then you get a brief moment where again towards the end of the decade, people are into UFOs, They're into big Foot, they're into these spooky things. It gets covered the nineties. You know, there are these brief moments where there are financial incentives to write about this, and today there's a financial incentive to write about it because of this brewing Cold War with China and Russia and whoever we now consider to be the new Axis of Evil or whatever. We're calling it at this time. Have they come up with a name for it yet?

No, I mean, and they keep adding new people. So we'll see what countries are on the enemy list next. Well, now it's Moldova, so there we go. Belarus is another one I saw in the news recently. Yeah, well, I mean anything, Cuba's good now or we're gonna we might take them off of the list.

Wink wink. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. Because the last time we tried that, Havana syndrome happened. So so I mean, obviously, I think we've talked about this before with the the the quote Cold War that we're in now, you know, the early stages of it were when when would you say this this kind of began to ramp up? Now that we've got a couple of years from maybe when it started, or was it more recently than than the last couple of years, or was it more recently than like five to six years ago.

I mean, I don't think the Cold War ever fully ended. You know, there's that Ukayama quote about the end of history with the fall of the USSR, But I don't think it was ever I don't think the Cold war ever fully ended. I think it was just in a period where you know, relations were maybe a little better, tensions dropped a little bit. But I mean even during the nineties, immediately after the fall of communism in the USSR, the first thing that we did we didn't try to help them. We sent in, you know, our corporate raiders from places like m I T to try and rehelp, to try and help them restructure the country in a way to make capitalism palatable to the former communist block.

But what it really did is these people just rated the country and they created the oligarchs that existed there. They helped create the conditions under which someone like Pudin could rise to power, and from that relations were always going to deteriorate because Pudin. Well, I am critical of our policy in Ukraine. I'm also highly critical of Pudin, who is clearly not someone who I mean, he himself has said he wants to cast off the legacy of Lenin and he wants to rebuild I guess he's spoken towards like Russia's Zarist past. So he's clearly someone who hasn't appear imperial agenda, So not someone who probably was ever going to lead Russia in a direction that was going to be peaceful, and that's partially our fault because we created the conditions in which someone like that would exist.

So I mean, if you're asking me when it started, I think it never ended because it was always going to be there. And then there were conflicts in the twenty tents, like when they invaded Georgia, and then again, you know during Maiden in twenty fourteen. Whether you think that was a false flag or if you think that was a legitimate revolution, I don't know, but you know, all of that was there. We send people out into other countries purpose laid to overthrow governments, whether they were elected or not. We were caught doing it in Belarus like a year or two ago, where it was in the news briefly, I think, in like the Financial Times.

So I think it was always there. We've always tried to export democracy, so countries were always going to push back. It was just a matter of us figuring out after the War on Terror ended, what is the most useful target next, and I think that was Russia, China and many of the countries who move in that milieu. I would I would be I would be inclined to agree with you. I mean, obviously when we talk about, you know, the Cold War and what where this could be heading.

I mean, I don't think it's heading anywhere in particular. I again, I think you would agree. I mean, I think you would also agree, like all this is, this is all for purely financial gain. There's no, I mean nothing, nothing here is being done for anything other than a financial gain, which is ironic given the country that's doing a lot of this claims to not be a capitalist country and refused to be a capitalist country rightfully so or unrightfully so for the longest time. But now it is being driven solely by financial I mean, yeah, Putin takes Ukraine to what end?

Right to to what end? Does any of this even matter anymore? Because lines on a map or just lines on a map in twenty twenty three, Well yeah, I mean I don't think that. Like, so, if you're talking about a Cold war, part of the point is you want it to stay cold. You don't want it to get hot, because there's more money to be made that way.

If you get into like an actual war between the US and Russia, for example, we haven't, like many of the businesses haven't fully left Russia yet. Some have, but there are still many with connections to them. So I think a lot of what's going on right now is, you're correct, financially based, like the stuff with like. So this is my personal opinion. I think partially one of the reasons that Russia invaded Ukraine.

I'm sure there were issues with NATO or territorial expansion, however you want to say that, but I think a lot of it was also financial. If you look at, for example, Post twenty fourteen, when Russia went in and claim some of the land there, they took possession of areas that were in the Black Sea, which was going to become a big natural gas pipeline for Ukraine, and that would have challenged Russia's natural gas, challenged them as an exporter of that. If you look at the nord Stream pipeline, I personally believe that the US probably had a hand in taking it out. I'm not sure if they did it directly or if Ukraine was involved who blew it up, but I mean that was a purely financial decision because it harms Russia financially.

Russia has probably done many of the similar, many similar actions along that vein to fight back or to counteract what's happening. So I think a lot of what's happening there specifically is financially oriented. And this war more broadly, or the Cold War that we're talking about, is a financial war, because the original of Cold War was a financial war. It was about making defense contractors and people in the military and people with access to all of the resources that go into those types of things to make them more powerful and richer and allow them to live on hundreds of thousands of acres out in Wyoming. Yeah, exactly, I mean, you know, and that's the thing that again, like it's because you know, we talked about a year ago right when this conflict began, because it's been a fucking year now, its yeah, And you know, I think a lot of people were really vocal about their support for Ukraine then, and I think people are still vocal about their support for Ukraine now, myself included, but like yourself, I do have a massive problem with the way our country is responding because, like anything else, that is money being spent elsewhere.

Yeah, four things that are hard to quantify at home when we have as many social problems and issues in this country that nobody wants to throw money at and you know we I mean, you know, obviously nobody's student debt has been taken care of yet, and that ten thousand dollars fucking pittance has never been paid out. But yet let us back up a fucking mactruck to everybody else and give them money, not complaining about it. As someone whose last name is Stahu, as someone whose grandfather was fucking Ukrainian and wrote on the back of Nazi tanks to get away from the Russians, I have no love for Russia. None, no love. I like your face.

I can't believe I had never told you that before. Yeah, no, I mean, the Red Army liberated a ton of people in Ukraine, and they also killed a lot of people too, many of the Nazis. I know, my grandfather and his family didn't run away because they were Nazis. They only ran away because they had been I know. But they had been persecuted by the Russians worse than the Nazis, unfortunately, So I get I get the response, but at the same time, I have no love loss towards Russia.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to sit here and extol the wisdom of what the United States is doing either. Sure, yeah, I mean unequivocally I think Ukraine has a right to exist. It's just that the way things have played out, the way things have played out have they've worked in such a way as to where I feel that this conflict was unavoidable because it was always something that was going to happen for the financial reasons we mentioned earlier, US trying to cut Russia off from the rest of Europe as an exporter of natural gas and other resources, Russia trying to expand its influence in that sphere. So there was always going to be some kind of conflict. It just was a matter of like where would that happen that unfortunately it happened in Ukraine to the Ukrainian people.

And but to get on like the spooky stuff that we were talking about before, I find it very odd that, for example, like there really aren't any UFO sightings in Ukraine, there's not been a case of Havana syntrom and you would think in a conflict like this, if these things are manifesting elsewhere, they would be there, particularly especially Havana syndrome, where you see like allegedly high level. CIA officers in Cuba are getting zapped, yet no one in Ukraine, like Zelenski, hasn't been zapped with the ray gun that gives people havana syntrom Why is that? I find it very odd well, and you know it's I have to assume it has something to do with the amount of focus being put on it now and if they were doing it there versus somewhere where people aren't focusing on like a Cuba Immediately, when you're doing it somewhere where there's a lot of people and you can have the focus being kind of looking at it, I feel like then it loses its power, right because, like you said, people aren't following People aren't following these stories.

I mean people. All people know about Edward Snowden is that he leaked documents, but nobody knows the conclusion of that, which is a circuit court in this country deemed what the government was doing unfucking constitutional. Nobody fucking followed that story to the end. I hear very few people talking about that aspect of the story. But this is the same thing.

People aren't following the havana syndrome story past reading about it in a in one or two publications maybe, But to be fair, havana syndrome is not getting mentioned. I mean I haven't seen it mentioned on the major news sources. But maybe it isn't. I'm just not seeing it, oh, I mean, it is something that gets covered in major news sources, like sixty Minutes has done multiple segments speaking to a legend havana syndrome victims. The New York Times has covered it.

It pops up periodically. But like I was saying before, these stories are spread out over time because it's not something you can't solve. These problems intentionally, they're made to be problems that are unsolvable. So if they pop up periodically, it's just a reminder of all of this stuff to continue to make you scared of what exists out there in the dark, you know, as scary story as we tell. Yeah, well, and that brings me back to this thing that we're talking about, where I don't understand how you you help quell that in your populace by saying, well, we shot something down but we don't know what it is, or we shot something down and we can't recover it.

Like, in my mind, that is antithetical posturing to what we're talking about, because again, yes, you want to scare people, but at the same time, you, as the US government, don't want to appear inept which I mean they don't need to do that to appear in net. I think for a lot of people following what the US government does, their ineptitude is fairly obvious. But you would think you wouldn't want to appear in nept in what you're doing while protecting the best interests of your population. Right. Well, so I'm going to disagree they're a little bit because I think that or a lot of people, the institutions that are popping up here aren't institutions that are necessarily seen as incompetent.

I don't think people see the CIA as incompetent. I think that's a story that gets put out there by journalists sometimes. You know, how could the CIA, How could you think they engage in these large scale conspiracies because you know, they couldn't kill the del Castro even though they tried six hundred times, right, I think many people actually see them highly competent, and in many cases they are highly competent in specific areas. But like I think, these stories pop up and they never reach resolution, because that's what they're designed to do. There's a great memo that was sent from I forget his exact position he worked.

He worked on the science end of things the CIA. His name is H. Marshall Chadwell. In nineteen fifty two he sent this to CIA director William Bettell Smith about the UFO flap, and what he said about Americans was a fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to accept to the acceptance of the credible. In this fact lies the potential for the touching off of mass hysteria and panic.

So I think many of these people going back decades realized that the way Americans are conditioned by their media, the way that historically Americans just have gone about their lives, they're people who, while they might be intelligent, they are people who don't have a lot of time to dedicate to things, and they're often people who have incoherent and strange beliefs. And you can exploit that one of the big findings. For example, like when people talk about MK ultra, they always talk about the brainwashing aspect of it, But one of the things that people neglect to look at is a lot of the social science research that was being funded was looking at how to influence large groups of people. There were studies of like Hungarian immigrants to figure out why they turned against communism, and there were studies of I think Chinese immigrants in a similar capacity.

So they were always looking to figure out how to influence large groups of people. And that's something that you know for decades, you know, communications studies, media studies, that's precisely what that is. It's trying to figure out how to influence mass audiences. And I don't think it's as simple as you know, injecting a belief into a population, but there are ways to influence large groups of people, especially in America where people are so reliant on sensational media, constant reinforcement help. Yeah, I mean the twenty four hour news cycle, right.

You know, again, there used to be a time and a place where you couldn't open your phone and see everything, or go on the TV and have thirty forty fifty one hundred however many channels. That wasn't a thing. But they were still doing it then, but they had that they had fewer lines to get to you through, so it wasn't as constant and overbearing as it feels now because it feels constant, So I'm going to push back there a little. But I think it was actually easier to control media narratives decades ago. I think they've definitely had to become more sophisticated.

But if you look at like how coverage worked, like we had a censorship board during the fifties, If you look at like the Psychological Strategy Board and other groups that existed, they often were working hand in hand with journalists. The CIA and FBI had friendly journalists that they would work with, or they would plant their people within organizations, and there were fewer channels of media to deal with, so it was often easier to get a message out there. And if they couldn't do it directly, like one of the things the CIA did, they're not technically allowed to create propaganda networks that exist in the United States, so they would create one in London, which then the information would channel into the United States from the publishing house in London because journalists would pick it up as a story broke somewhere else the world.

So there are always there's always been ways to do it. It's just they've had to become more sophisticated today, so I think the methods and the ways that they do it are probably more sophisticated. Oh I must I must have misspoke, because I actually agree on the way that they were doing it. They had less ways to do it, so it was easier because you don't have to wrangle as much bullshit as you do now, yeah, or worry about as much noise on the line. There didn't used to be crowdsourced news places like Twitter and Reddit, because fuck, I mean to be honest with you, I'm sure you probably do this yourself.

I don't. When I search for something, I normally type in Reddit or Twitter Twitter afterwards, just to see if I can find direct information from someone, even if, again, the reliability of it is going to be suspect, possibly, But is the reliability of it any less suspect than receiving it directly from one of the big news sources. Your definition of reliability is going to come into play there more than anything else, right, And one of the things that goes along with that, Even with the big news sources, you can sort of learn what journalists are good and bad by following them or looking into them. I mentioned that journalists who had worked for the La Times that was called the CIA's mop up man.

He works for a major news network. He its NBC. His name's Kendallanian. That's information is all out there. You can look him up.

And when I saw he was one of the people who was reporting on Havanas Dram, I was like, that's really interesting. Why would you send it to that guy? And if you are a major news network, why would you bring this person on? If they have a history of collaborating openly with government institutions, And there are obviously reasons for that. But you can learn a lot from even mainstream sources by looking into the people who report on specific subjects.

Who develops a beat, why they're on that beat, how they gain access to you know, their sources. So there's a lot that can be learned even within the mainstream, within the world of mainstream journalism. Well, and they're I mean, they're the ones that have the notoriety, right, I mean, it's going to be harder for anybody who doesn't have a Fox News or a CBS or an NBA see behind them, or at least they can say that's where they're coming from. But at the same time, I mean you're right. You know, you have these journalists who are not I mean again, do they have to be open and honest and forthcoming with all this?

I mean, how to should feeling there? It's it's their obligation and their lacks on that, and we as a public aren't holding them to a higher standard that we should be, even though I think the messaging is that we're we are, or at least a large portion of this country claims that they're holding their media to a higher regard. And it's like, I think you're just saying that because you look at the way the media is being portrayed from the other side and thinking that everything they say is bullshit. Yeah. I mean there's also the point where, like, I know, I am shooting on the mainstream media a lot here, but some of what happened here, some of what's happening here is by design.

I mean, we exist again. I keep going back to capitalism because of that. That's ultimately what influence is how things work in America. But if you look in like the sixth season seventies, for example, there was a financial incentive for investigative journalism that was dangerous because it offered the potential to change things. The government was worried about the Pentagon papers, you know, even underground newspapers like the Los Angeles Free Press, We're getting out there and publishing stories, you know, publishing the names of members of undercover agents in the Bureau of Narcotics in California.

So there was this financial incentive for that. Because there were so many news sources out there, both above ground and underground, that it challenge power. So if you whittle that down, it makes it much easier to control the news sources that exist. And if you throw in I don't know what the phrase I'm looking for here is if you poison the well with you right wing propaganda sources like Fox News, the Daily Wire, you can change the media environment. You can make it more sensationalistic.

If you've noticed one of the things that is different between a mainstream news source like your local newspaper. Here in Philadelphia, we have the Philadelphia and Choir that's reader supported mostly. It was sold to a nonprofit a few years ago, so they're looking for grant funding. But primarily they have to get by on, you know, the will of the market. They have to play to market needs.

Whereas the right wing news sources, the Daily Wire, the federalist sites like this, they're underwritten by rich financers, you know, the Washington Free Beacon, they're written underwritten by hedge fund manage hedge fund managers. They don't exist, you know, in the market the way actual news sources do, so they're not beholden to the same financial needs. They can do whatever they want. So part of why the media sucks is because it's been made to suck for this reason. This was something that was developed in the sixties and seventies through you know, rich financers like Richard Mellon Schaffey and its Project Accuracy and media.

So the media was destroyed so that it would have to be like this. Even in the sixties and seventies, when you had mainstream news sources like the New York Times who were still favorable in are to the government narrative, you would still get stuff like the Pentagon Papers, you would get co Intel pro you got Watergate. You had all of these stories breaking because they could not ignore it. There was a financial imperative to report on this stuff, and if you didn't, someone else would well, and you know, I would say, where are those sources now? And one of them for the longest time, it seemed like was BuzzFeed.

Yeah, they were actually really really good, which is like fucking crazy to say at all, because I know, you know, in a certain subsection of people, in certain circles of people, BuzzFeed is seen as the listical and quiz website, and it is one hundred percent the listical and quiz website. But they also have a massive amount of investigative journalism that they were and have been doing. I haven't seen anything from them in a while, but for what felt like a couple of years there they were. They were dropping all of the new massive stories. They were the ones making.

Were they one of the ones that made headway on the me too movement? Or am I crazy? I don't know if they did, but I know that they have broken a bunch of big stories. One of their reporters was responsible for covering what was happening with the Whitmer stuff in Michigan, with the kidnapping. Actually, one of the best sources on Havana syndrome was a BuzzFeed reporter, Dan Vergano, who was one of the few skeptical voices, and he was one of the first people to get dissenting.

You know, there was a report released a Belief in twenty twenty or twenty twenty one by him. It had been written in twenty eighteen, but it was never released publicly by Scientific Board. Jason, he was the first person to get it out there. To your point about them being a listical site, I think that's probably why they launched the investigative side, because they wanted to be seen as something serious, something other than just a twenty tens meme joke. So they put all of this money into investigative journalism, and they for a couple of years were the best news source on the Internet because they had actual, hard hitting journalism.

Is that not the case anymore though? Well so, I mean they've slowly that's been dismantled because I mean that's just the media environment right broadly. So many sites that you know, we're built up in the twenty tents were slowly disappearing. A couple of them still exist. I think the interset mostly does good work, but yeah, like the media environment that we exist, and nothing can last because they all eventually get bought out, and when a company gets brought out, they have to downsize, and then journalists are out of work.

So again there's a financial incentive there. People learn over time, you don't write stories that bring that speak truth the power. You report stories that you know buttress or back up those in power, right, which is which is where we are now with places like Fox News getting themselves in trouble with their Again, it's interesting that everybody knows they're being duplicitous, but then to find out that they're being duplicitous and see the messages and see them talking about it, it's it's sobering, but it's also to pointing because again, to think that that's the only place that's happening is to be naive. Frankly, Yeah, I mean, if you look at the cover, if you look at Fox News in twenty fifteen and early twenty sixteen, they were actually very anti Trump.

They wanted someone like Jeb or Rubio one of those guys to win, and they had to switch because Trump knocked all of them out, you know, low energy Jeb and little Marco. He just literally knocked them out of a campaign. So they had to do it. And then at the end of like twenty twenty, they were sort of testing the waters to see if they could turn against him. Initially, they weren't supportive of the idea that the election was free and fair fully, but they were like, oh well, it sounds like everything's on the up and up until their own fan base, you know, the Trump people started attacking them and saying that, you know, rhinos and all this shit.

So it's clear that, you know, Trump is the financial imperative for them. He's what forces them, at least in part, to act the way they do right now. They had to engage in election denial with dominion because their audience was primarily a group of Trump supporters. Has there been a groundswell movement like that in the past with mainstream media before. I can't remember it taking over as quote respectable news organization the way that movement did, and it is and the waves of it are being felt now.

I mean, like Fox was always sort of partisan. They were just partisan in a different way. It's always been a neo con outlet. So like they always like in the two thousands and early twenty tens, they were defending George Bush when it was clear the guy was an idiot. But yeah, I can't think of anything where it's like that clearly out in the open where they you have like records of them saying, oh, yeah, we don't believe this, we're worried about this, we think all of this dominion stuff is bullshit, and then running with the story of saying the exact opposite.

At least on like an institutional scale, I'm sure you could probably find individual instances of journalists lying. I know the cigarette industry did a lot of that from the what thirdies through the nineties, when they would pay journalists, doctors, anyone they could, and people would do that. But like, I don't I can't think of a full institution like Fox, which is crazy because again, like you've said, like everybody kind of knew, and that was always the joke was like, oh, you're watching Fox News, fucking fair and balanced. Everybody like yeah, because yeah, because that was the slogan that was there. I mean, it might still be for all I know, for the amount of Fox News that I've watched.

But it's just so wild because you know, I was reading this, I was reading somebody tweeting something and they were like, you know, well this some some unprecedented and then the tweet response was can we just stop pretending like Trump hasn't created every unprecedented scenario that we've dealt with in like the last ten years now, right, And I think that's a fair point. Like one of the things that you look at a lot of people try and say, you know, Trump started all of this stuff. It was always there Trump, you know, he just picked up the threads of like Nixon with a Southern strategy and all of this other stuff that existed in America, but sort of was not talking talk about openly. He made a lot of it public, but he wasn't you know the first with like when you talk about America and you talk about a specific event, it's never just that event because there's always a history of things leading up to that.

Trump learned how to do what he did from a lot of people, Nixon, Roy Kone, Yeah, roy Kone, Roy Cone, like five times over, Roy fucking Cone. But but I do I do find it funny because I've had that same conversation with people where it's like, well something twenty sixteen. It's like, are you fucking with me? Right? You staying was a Nixon guy.

It's like come on, yeah, like are you fucking with me? Like twenty sixteen is an easy time and place to look at and it's a moment to say, well, this is what was happening then. But I think everybody forgot that there was, like you said, years decades of this like this, like the dirty tricks and politics only exists now in that post Trump lifetime, Like are you out of your fucking minds? So I do think like Trump in some sense, you could look at him like a Pandora's Bob where he unleashed things that had existed in America. Periodically they would pop up, but they would go back beneath the surface to what we were talking about at the beginning of the episode with UFOs.

I think one of the reasons why we are in such a conspiratorial time right now is because there are periods in American history where the concept of conspiracy rises up and rises up, or you know, descends down out of the ether and hangs over America like a dark cloud because of just the way things exist in this country. We've always been a country controlled by you know, a small group of powerful people. Historically, you know, even back to the founding, the country was set up in a way to prevent most people from having a say. Originally, it was only supposed to be white landowners who could have a say in this country. And only men I think African Americans or well, they wouldn't even be considered Americans at the time.

Only counters like three fifths of the person, right, So stuff like that. America has always been controlled by a small group of people. It was designed to be controlled by an elite. So conspiracy pops up periodically because you can't hide that fact. You can't hide this country.

You know, there's something deeply sick at its core. And Trump was someone who rose to power in a way because he was He spoke in that language, He spoke in some ways like a normal person. Whereas politicians have, you know, constituencies, they have to pay lip service too. So because you know, he could get away with accusing Marco Rubio's dad of being what the zodiac was that what he did, was it Marco a Ted Cruz, That was Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz. I think he accused someone else of being involved in the JFK assassination that was also Ted Cruise's dad might have been the same for no.

I think he called he called Ted Cruise's dad a player in the JFK assassination. And I think he called Ted Cruise the Zodiac Killer. Oh okay, yeah, so which makes even less fucking said frankly, But okay, right, Trump can speak in these terms, and out of that, you know, it gave I don't want to say gave rise to Q and on because there were precedents for that period before, but it helped, you know, solidify that in a public way. So I think a lot of people took notice of that, you know, intelligence agencies, private organizations, and that's why we're in the UAP situation that we're in. They realized Americans are again in a period where they're open to, as the CIA pointed in fifty two, an acceptance of the incredible.

So they exploited that for their own needs to kind of again like the most logical conclusion or the most drastic of conclusions. Again, you know, I don't want to speak hyberbolically here because other people do it for us. You know, there's tons of morons on the internet speaking hyperbolically about everything. But yeah, to sit here and go, oh, all of this just started, you know, seven years ago, and this is this has never been happening before. It's like, do you does anybody remember that Ken Starr tried to impeach Clinton for reasons other than what he actually did, Like, there's always people looking for or an angle.

Why are we pretending like it's just now? Yeah, I mean, the stuff has always existed with us. I'm not a fan of Richard Hofstadterer on the subject of conspiracy, but he in his essay The Paranoid Style on American Politics, he traces this back to I think like the seventeenth or eighteenth century, with like the Millerites and all of these other groups that existed in America, you know, even from its founding. So it's always been there, you know, these ideas have always sort of existed. The idea of conspiracy is something that I don't want to say as uniquely American, but the way it exists in America is unique because it's it's always been fundamental to our politics well, and it always feels like just simmering underneath the surface.

Yeah, are the conspiracies right? And now it doesn't feel like it's simmering anymore. It feels like it's just there. I can't. I can believe because I've seen it.

But twenty years ago, I think if you had told someone that a major political candidate would be sitting in front of people and screaming that the election was stolen, and people believed him. Well Nixon. Nixon's people wanted him to push for that in sixty because there was the belief that the Chicago outfit helped jfk All just funny voters, Yeah, which is funny because they were ultimately m some of the guys who got killed as a part of his assassination, you know, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. So there was there was a belief previously. It's just it was never pushed to the surface because to what you were saying, Um, Nixon specifically didn't believe the American public would accept it, whereas now you know, you have half the country who doesn't believe U elections are legitimate.

And I don't personally believe elections are legitimate, just for different reasons. I think all elections are bullshit. But you know, don't let me in with them. I'm different from them, but I think the same idea. I'm with you, I'm with I think the last one probably Biden did.

In fact, when if you're going based on the fact, like the way polling went in just the country in general, and what like the recent mid term he actually did better than expected. So not a fan of the guy, but he probably did win, you know, on a level. And you know, I think at some point, and maybe this is just me, someone who would like to appear progressive and someone transgressive, fucking move on. Like well that's the thing though, because I say fucking move on, but people are still obsessed with JFK's assassination. I'm obsessed with Jeff I mean, you know, but you know what I mean, you know what I mean, Like, but you know what I mean when I say, like, fucking move on.

But at the same time, like it will be a sticking point for people until the day they die. Oh, I mean, yeah, we're gonna get books written about it, you know, January six, all of that stuff is going to keep popping up, period cottage industry. I mean, so is Trump in a lot of ways. I can't tell you how many books I've seen at the library or at Barnes and Noble where it's like Trump trum, trump tump, Trump trum trum, trumps all derivations of Trump be it. I like Trump, I hate Trump, Trump's enemies, Trump's friends, Trump's wife, Trump's family.

It's like, I look at four bushes books about George Bush. That's it. And there's like a thousand bushes, which a book, Jesus thousand books about Donald Trump. It's like, what the fuck? But again, all for finance, all for financial gain, all because again, we live in a time in a place where there is a message for everybody.

And because there's a message for everybody, there's somebody shilling that message too. Yeah. I think my mom was recently gifted the Maggie Haberman book and she didn't want it, so she gifted it to me, so I have it. I'm probably not going to read it, but you know, it's one of those things where periodically I'm just somehow fallen into having I have more than one Trump book, even though I've never actually bought one. I think, what was that Michael Wolf book, Fire and Fire, Rage and Fury or whatever or something.

Someone gave that to me and I'm like, why, guy I was working for at the time, I was like, why are you giving this to me? I don't like Trump. I don't give a shit. He's like, I don't want it, you can have it. I haven't read any of the books written about him, that the Maggie Haberman book would be the only book I'd be interested in reading.

And that's about it. But like, at the same time, like I lived it for fuck's sake, just like you did. I. Yeah, I don't nothing that has happened in the last six years. Do I feel like I need to have somebody tell me what was really going on, because I feel like it's pretty clear what was going on.

Well, and none of the types of Trump books that I would read, you know, like the Bush equivalent, Family of Secrets or House of Bush, House of solid you know, the conspiratorial stuff, none of it really exists about Trump yet because those books took a few years to come out. So I'm waiting for like the interesting stuff that actually you know, not that I guess there have been one or two. I think there was one called Compromat, where it's supposed to be about Trump being a Russian agent, but I think most of that's bullshit, so I won't look into it. But I'm waiting for like the actual stuff about like the weird shit that was happening both within the White House and Trump's family, you know. Well, And I'm with you because because to your point, it's like, I don't want to read some fucking just rehashing of January sixth, or rehashing of oh yeah, Trump threw a plate at the wall he was screaming at people like okay, no shit like that.

That's not even far outside of the realm of possibility for me to believe. I could visualize that in my head happening with a degree of certainty that I feel like anyone who would read that would be able to understand because we've seen him acting that way. So it's it's not like, oh, someone said that Ronald Reagan was slitting the throats of goats in the Oval office and dancing around with their blood, Like it's not they're not saying that. They're literally saying yeah, well, yeah, right, fair while saying aids, mind you, he wouldn't say it any other time, but when he was in the Oval office by himself. But it's not like like you've just said, like, I want to know the things that I can't just see on my own, like I could see he acts like a complete loon, Like I don't just turn on any news outlet today and they'll tell you about what he's been up to either in text or in audio format or video format, like why, like you said, I want to read the thing where it's like, this is what was really going on, to be honest.

The best, Yeah, the best books about Trump have been about his followers. There's one that came out a few years ago, Strangers in their Own Land, and it was about it's a general theme that pops up in politics, especially around the time of Nixon, about like the politics of grievance and resentment, which primarily drive Trump voters, which I find that more interesting than Trump himself. He's an interesting figure, but I don't think until maybe like Rick Pearlstein, releases a book on him, I probably won't bother reading anything about Trump until then, because I don't really trust a lot of the people who've written about him up until this point. Trump Land, trump Land, I've got Nixon, Land, Reagan, trump Land.

I mean we haven't. I mean, I think he'll probably do Bushland first that I would be into. Yeah, same, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I'm glad you brought him up. Like Rick Pearlstein, for me, is one of the great American historians. Fuck yeah, I mean I for me, in a lot of ways.

I think he is the great, at least more for contemporary conversations at least absolutely. Yeah. I still haven't finished all of Nixon Land. I've gotten through most of it, but I have to go through and sections because it's like, like, what like a thousand pages or so. How do you feel about Garrett Graff?

I haven't read any of his stuff? What has he written? He wrote the way he wrote the Watergate one. Yeah, yeah, so um. There's a section in there where he quotes from G.

Gordon Letty's book. I've only looked into that section because it's about an it's Operation nin and Fog, which he had named literally after a Nazi operation Lyddy, where it was they were going to kidnap protesters before the seventy two Republican National Convention and shift them off to Tijuana, probably to get killed down in Mexico. But when I saw that, I was like, wait, I read that somewhere because it got posted in, of all places, Politico, So I need to read that book. I haven't read the new one yet. It's very good.

I also his book on nine to eleven is also fantastic, The Only Plane in the Sky, But I think he similar to Rick Pearlstein's. He's doing what we're talking about, which is actually taking time for the event whatever to have some space because, like you said, a Trump I don't want to read a Trump book written now. I don't want to read a book about UFOs or anything else written now. I want to read about it years removed from the inciting incident, because that's really the only time where we're going to know as much information as we can. Theoretically, I don't know, I think we need some more writing about UFOs right now, because all of it's like, oh, it's got to be from another world, or it's got to be China.

But if you look at like historically, you know, the balloon blow up that we had recently, our government has had those balloons for types of balloons for decades. We've always used high altitude balloons for a variety of reasons. Project Mogul, Project Moby Dick, Project Skyhook. This was all stuff that existed in the fifties. A couple of years ago, I think in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, US Southcom, which is the command group that controls Latin America and South America, they did a test of high altitude balloons in like Wisconsin, Ohio and a few other states because they want to use those for reconnaissance purposes at the border for both drug cartel stuff and immigration.

So we have this stuff. It's not a surprise that you know, this stuff is happening out of nowhere. You need cheap, low cost options to monitor populations, and you can't use a satellite, for example, to watch drones that are moving around. You need something that's actually, you know, in the air. So a lot of the high health two balloons that exist serve that function.

And that's why it cracks me up. And they're like, we don't know what we shot down. It's like, how is that? You guys? You know what the fuck you shot now?

And you just don't want to have to apologize to the hobbyists in Michigan, who's balloon you destroy? Exactly. That cracked me up because I saw that exact thing where it's like hobbyists in Michigan or missing their balloon in other news, Wait, one and one might equal to here and not always, but here it might no totally. So in that sense, I think there should be more writing on UFOs right now, just especially Havannah syndrome too. I've tried writing about it, but it's one of those things where it's a weird thing, where there's a niche for it, but no publications really seem to be interested in it because you don't want to accuse.

For example, in the case of Havana syndrome, there's this taboo and American culture around personal testimony. You can't tell people their liars to their face, especially when it comes to a traumatic event. So for example, with Havana syndrome, you can't tell the CIA officer he's lying because this was personal trauma that was inflicted upon him. In American society, trauma is maybe even more than money, the highest form of capital, because it's a kind of emotional or mental capital that you can expend. So yeah, it's just weird the way the Havannah syndrome stories work because there isn't really anyone saying this is a psychological operation or this is some kind of influenced campaign.

It's just, well, maybe the government misled these people into thinking something well, and it's so essentially calling the government on its bullshit is something we're not okay doing. I don't understand that because that's all people do well, So it's it's not even the government, it's individual people. So one of the things that you see with not Havanna syndrome, with the UAP stories. One of the reasons the media started taking it seriously is the government. I don't think they've done an official capacity, but you see a lot of jet pilots, fighter pilots who are going out there saying, we saw all this weird shit.

They're out there. They trot them out on sixty minutes, trot them out there in the New York Times, and they're giving these personal testimonies. So you can't tell them they're wrong, because to do so, you'd be calling them a liar. And you're attacking a person individually rather than attacking an institution, and many people see that as a form of punching down or as kind of an ad hominem attack. You know, you can't attack the character of the person, so to even call into question their personal testimony, you're attacking them.

So I think the way this has been structured, where it's built around you know, the stories of individuals, you know, fighter pilots or CIA officers who've been afflicted with havana syndrome. It's you know, it's not like it's a new tactic, but it's an effective one precisely because you're diverting the attention away from the source of power, and who's going to call a military officer on their bullshit? Well, so yeah, I mean I think a lot of people will do a lot of people are apprehensive about that because even if even in America, where institutions are flagging in public trust, you know, police, military, whatever, the institutions that are still the most trusted are the police, the military, and groups like that, even more so than like civilian components like Congress.

Well, I mean, we've talked about this before, maybe not you and I, but we've brought it up on the show before. If you look at for a time, the trusted sources of UFO information and the people that were being believed by the public were often that list of people you just mentioned. Lump the politicians in there, because they were often the ones that were trusted as well, But cops, military, anybody who was in a position of power who had something to lose by being upfront and honest about this, you would assume, well, they're doing this even though they know there is a threat to their well being or livelihood, but so we should believe them then. And it's like I think in this day and age that that I feel like that is no longer trending in the direction it used to, which is a constant.

I feel like we now understand, I think, more or less altogether hopefully that just because someone is in a position of power, they shouldn't be believed. I know that's not the case though. Yeah, no, I was gonna say, I think it's still appeals to authority are still very effective. I think maybe less effective than they used to be, hopefully a little maybe, I don't know. I mean still when you're talking about sources of information with like the up situation, one of the things that was always you were always able to discount.

It was like, for example, the abduction stories. Those became very hot in the seventies, eighties, and nineties after Betty and Burney Hill, and that sort of discredited the wider UFO movement because a lot of the stories, you couldn't tell these people that they were lying. You would just have to be polite about it and say, well, I think there's something else that happened to them, and they're working through some kind of trauma. You know, you'd have to say that, yeah, like the idea because a lot of the stories in a similar vein to the Satanic Panic. One of the reasons people didn't want to challenge stories early on was because children were saying they were being sexually abused.

With UFO stories and abduction stories specifically, a lot of the stories mirror the Satanic panic abuse narrative, where people are being poked, prodded, whatever, And one of the things that would always come up is like, maybe they're working through, you know, sexual trauma that they've never fully grappled with. But it helped to discredit the wider UFO movement, the disclosure movement, because these stories were so outrageous that you didn't really believe anyone was being abducted. So now you don't see an emphasis on that. For a reason, you see people in positions of power saying yes, I have seen UFOs fighter pilot saying I've seen strange objects glowing in the sky. Well, that could be a drone, that could be any number of things.

Right, So by selecting who gets to talk, it's very important. People in positions of power typically project a better image than just some random person who said they are abducted and abused by the Grays, the Pleiadians or whoever. Well, and to your point, I mean, I would you know, again this sounds it's kind of antithetical, but the people that are going out the fighter pilots are going to be the ones that are seeing things, like you said, I mean, if not them, who I mean. It's like the people that go looking for Bigfoot. Go looking for Bigfoot.

You might find something that you can't explain that you attribute to Bigfoot because you're out in the fucking woods at night. And I'm not just like squat and I've never seen Bigfoot. Well that's a shame. But you know what I say. Last year we've talked about that.

Yeah, but you know what I mean, right, Like you know, I go yourself. You don't put yourself out in the middle of the ocean looking for a giant octopus and say, well, I hope I don't find anything, just like you know, I don't like the water, right, But you know what I mean, Like a fighter pilot up in you up over the lake Huron who sees things he can't explain, is going to be different than me in my house seeing them. But at the same time, I still don't trust them because it's the nature of the story too. It's something that's slightly more believable from a person who is often seen as a credible source. Now, again, there are lots of factors that play into this.

It could be combat stress. You know a lot of people. When you're in under deep stress, you can have visual hallucinations. It could be drones. It could be high altitude blans, it could be glare.

It could be any number of things. So the fact that it's unidentified does not itself make it significant without further corroboration. But the problem is in America, like I was saying, personal testimony is highly important. It's been used for decades to convince people of things. The Gulf War, for a sample, there was that young woman who was from Kuwait who said she saw Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators.

It was later found that the story was literally just fucking made up by a Kuwaiti lobbyist group with connections to the Bush administration. But because this young woman was coming out in front of the Congress saying she saw Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators. That was highly powerful. It was like, personal testimony is one of the most important things you can use to convince an American of something, which is why you have someone like Trump or Juliani or Biden or other people standing in front and trotting people out to give that testimony or referring to their stories during speeches or get you know again, like like you said, I mean, during all of the January sixth stuff, both before and after, they were trotting people who had Oh I saw it, and here's my testimony and all.

And I was there and I was in the room, and it's like, guys, you're lying. Like guys, you're literally lying. You you know you're lying. We some of us know you're lying. But like you said, the people that don't or the people that don't care, that's who that's who you want, that's who you've gotten, that's who you're playing too.

Yeah. No, And it's just that, unfortunately, we're in a period where it's going to be difficult to get to cut through the noise because so much of the way the media functions today it's just throwing out lots of that, lots of that lots of that, so you periodically these stories will continue to pop up, and it's not that they ever have any formal resolution. When they first shot down the blue and everyone was like, oh, here's evidence. Finally UFOs and then they shot down another one and they said, well, we don't know what it is, and they shot down another one. We don't know what it is.

The stories are designed in a way where they will never have resolution because they can't add resolution resolution. We don't have contact with UFOs, and if we did, the government would not disclose that publicly. You know, you can't rely on an institution that is built around keeping secrets to tell the truth. Yeah, even when they claim they're telling the truth, like with all the things that they were disclosing in the last couple of years of those Navy UAP footage that they released what last year or the year before, So yeah, like that stuff has periodically been dropped. If you look at the individuals who are involved, they are all people who, in various ways are compromised.

There are people who work within the intelligence community. Why would you trust someone who works in the intelligence community Their entire job is to I don't want to say why, because sometimes they have to tell the truth, but like manipulate opinion, because that's what intelligence is, it's gaining information figuring out how to exploit it. Yeah, and there and I you know, I, like so many other people, would love to believe that there will be a time in a place where where we can get the right information from the right people. But again, like you've said, there is no need for that in a capitalist society, folks, There there is no need because if everything is the truth and nothing is the truth.

Yeah, exactly. So, rob when you're spinning your version of the truth or the version of the truth that I'd like to subscribe to, where can people find you on the internet? So, like I said, there's that recent Cream article. You can get that magazine if you want to read about CCR and the CIA. There's also I'm on Twitter at Robert Scovarla.

I have a personal blog. I'm trying to write more for maybe in the future I'll do a podcast or something. Who knows and don't do a podcast, man, it's a waste of time. I've run series, not something ongoing. Yeah boy, yeah, good choice.

Good the wise choice. A monthly limited series even better, so you don't have to do it every week because boy yeah yeah. As for me, you can find me at Scary Stories, weetell dot com and a weird ingwaymedia dot com, which is the podcast network where all the things I work on and so many other cool people who are making great audio content post everything that they work on as well as for this show, big thanks as always to maggoty Ad and Dustin Rutledge for the album artwork, and to our good friend Alex Malmac for the music for the show. You can find him on Spotify, just Blondo Rob. Thank you so much for joining me.

As always, it's fantastic to have you on because the things we talk about I don't get to talk about with anybody else. Had a great time. Anytime you want to hear me spend crazy shit, just invite me back on and as always will it. Our good friend, the former host Decidings, mister Tim White, lead us out. No mystery is closed to an open mind.