Sheeple Chase 4 - Strife on Mars

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Hello, listeners, and welcome to Sheeple Chase, the podcast that puts the eerie in conspiracy theory.

I'm Georgie Barker.

And I'm appalled by that intro.

Everyone's a critic.

Well, I'm Celia Ripley, and I'm ready to hear more about your latest dating escapade you were just telling me about.

So it's like that, is it?

It's like that.

Alright.

Well, I think I mentioned a couple of episodes ago that I was going for dinner with this guy I met on a dating app, right?

The serial killer, yes.

Well, it was actually nice.

We talked about work, hobbies, deepest fears, you know, basic first date stuff.

Sure.

And out of curiosity, what did you say is your biggest fear?

I mean, it's tough to choose just one.

They're all great, but it's probably heights.

Or snakes.

Of course, I don't like needles either.

Also, not a big fan of clowns.

Kind of claustrophobic.

Weirdly, chill with spiders, but absolutely no moths.

Oh, puppets really freak me out.

I absolutely hate the the way they move.

You had a nice time at dinner.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we had a nice night and we decided to see each other again.

And?

And he took me bungee jumping.

Bungee jumping.

I told him my biggest fear was heights, and he arranged for me to jump off a 200-foot-high, wobbly box.

Why would anyone think that's a good idea?

He said he thought it would be extra exciting for me.

That is deranged.

Yes, it is.

Did you jump?

Of course not.

I had a panic attack ten feet off the ground.

Then they tried to lower me back down, but the crane got stuck and I had to spend an hour trapped in this windy metal box on my literal nightmare date.

And you with your claustrophobia too.

I know.

No third date, then?

Absolutely not.

Georgie?

I may, however, be seeing the jump instructor for a coffee next week on the ground.

Just don't ask them about their work.

Oh, ha ha.

Just do the read, you big bully.

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So, Georgie, it's your week.

What madness have you got for us this time?

It's a good one, I promise.

Okay.

For thousands of years, humanity has assumed we are alone in the universe.

But are we being watched?

Have we already made contact with an alien race?

Is the truth not only out there, but also down here?

Georgie, no.

Yes.

You can choose something boring like new Coke next week, but today...

Let's talk about space, baby.

Do the government know E.T.?

Let's talk about space.

Let's talk about space.

Ugh, fine.

But you don't get to do them again for the rest of the year.

Deal.

So, I think we can all agree that alien life does exist somewhere in the universe.

We can?

Oh, yeah.

The universe is massive, so there's bound to be something somewhere.

Maybe not little green men, but a fungus or something.

If you say so.

I do.

So that means we can skip straight to asking whether intelligent life has ever made it to Earth, and whether governments or other agencies have been hiding evidence of their visit.

Fine.

So let's start at the beginning.

In Aztec, New Mexico.

You can't be serious.

We are not starting with the racist pyramid thing.

Aztec, New Mexico, 1948.

Oh.

Alright then.

So obviously, aliens didn't build the pyramids or the Mayan temples or the Easter Island heads or whatever.

In fact, sidebar, we already know how people built the pyramids.

They literally drew pictures.

They practically left us an IKEA manual.

Noted.

Now, you were talking about Aztec in 1948?

Was it like a Roswell thing?

No, that was in Roswell and happened in 1947.

But also didn't really happen till the 70s.

What?

We'll get there.

So...

1948.

A flying saucer crashes in the city of Aztec, loaded with extraterrestrial gadgets named doodlebugs.

The incident stays surprisingly quiet until local journalist Frank Scully publishes a story about the crash and the two men who told him about it.

Men who just so happened to be selling these doodlebugs, which they claimed used alien technology to locate gas, oil, and gold.

Ah, the American dream.

Hitting it big in oil with a dousing rod you stole from a dead alien.

Yeah, even I recognize it was a pretty blatant hoax.

Scully Scully did no fact-checking and just printed everything his sources, Newton and Gabauer, told him, and shockingly, those two were eventually convicted for fraud.

Honestly, I actually am surprised anyone even bothered.

So nobody thinks it's legit, but it did have a big effect on UFO hunting as a whole.

How so?

Well, before this, most people thought of UFOs as military rather than alien.

I mean, it was the 40s.

You see something explode in your back garden, then, yeah, your first thought's gonna be war.

But Scully's articles said this UFO came from Venus, and included all sorts of details that are now really familiar.

The craft was saucer-shaped, it worked on magnetic principles, it was made of a super-strong and super-light metal not found on Earth, and it was piloted by small humanoids he described as king-sized Lilliputtians.

King-sized Lilliputtians.

So, just average-sized people.

Nope, uh, king-sized Lilliputtians that were like three feet tall, so short king-sized.

And when Scully published a book about his experience in 1950, militaries around the world were thrilled to have found a new threat to worry about.

Was the book that popular?

Apparently, most countries started collecting files and some even set up covert agencies like Canada's Project Magnet or the UK's more prosaically named Flying Saucer Working Group.

This is why everyone likes Canada better than us.

Can I tell you about my favourite government agency?

Yes,

because that is a totally normal thing to have.

Proceed.

Great.

So in 2010, the British Ministry of Defence released loads of previously classified documents about UFO encounters.

And the Sydney Morning Herald thought, hey, we should get our government to do the same.

So they put in an official freedom of information request to the Australian UFO Research Association.

They asked for every single file the Australian government collected on UFOs over 50 years.

And the government's response was, we'd love to, but we've just found out all but two of them were destroyed six years ago.

We don't know by whom or why.

And we've just lost another one down the back of a sofa.

Anyway, here's one file.

Was it a good one at least?

It's wonderful.

It's a crayon drawing of a flying saucer scribbled on a napkin by some official who watched the thing for 20 minutes before going, actually, lads, I think it's a snow cloud.

Sounds about right.

Then, in 1956, two books are published in the US.

The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J.

Ruppelt and They Knew Too Much About Flying Sources by Gray Barker.

No relation.

The first one was meant to debunk the idea of UFOs as alien spacecraft, but it was so unconvincing, people instead believed the book was part of a cover-up.

And the other one, They Knew Too Much About Flying Sources, is both a cracking read and the first printed reference to the men in black.

What, like the films?

Yes, like the films.

But the films are based on comics which are based on real stories about the real men in black who would go around.

Okay,

the allegedly real men in black who dress in black suits and coerce UFO witnesses into silence on behalf of the government.

And I assume we're talking about the US government again.

Of course.

It seems like what Mesopotamia was to agriculture, the US is to conspiracies.

So is this just going to be another chemtrails or flat earth where it all falls apart as soon as you realize other countries exist?

I mean, when you say it like that, it sounds stupid.

Uh-huh.

So, anyway, both Barker and Ruppelt's books are about the Maury Island incident, when US pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine shining disks flying over the Washington Mountains.

He was so sure they were alien spacecraft that he started investigating with two journalists from the Oregon Journal, the U.S.

Air Force and the FBI.

All well known for their transparency when it comes to their sources.

Now, Barker was writing about it as evidence that aliens had visited Earth, while Ruppelt wanted to discredit the whole thing as a hoax.

The problem was, no one had heard of the incident, so the more he told people it wasn't true, the more people ended up learning about it.

Yeah.

It massively boosted its profile, and at the same time, a bunch of weird stuff started happening.

Weird, as in easily explicable coincidences blown way out of proportion?

Or

so the two journalists from the Oregon Journal never publish.

And at the same time, the investigating Air Force officers both die on their way back from visiting the crash site when their plane spontaneously caught fire.

Coincidence.

They were both skilled pilots.

Look, I'm no Air Force pilot, but I suspect that once your plane is already on fire, there's not a lot you can do about it.

And the journalists just didn't publish anything because man wrong about sky isn't exactly headline news.

Ah, but the really weird thing is how much the details matched the Aztec hoax in 1948.

Is that weird?

You said the Aztec hoax was influential.

Ah, except the Maury Island incident actually took place in June 1947,

before the Aztec story occurred.

But the books were published in 1956, which is after 1948.

But both writers match up almost perfectly on the details, even though there's no evidence they knew anything about each other.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but whatever.

What are the details?

Disc-shaped crafts, a little smaller than human planes, shedding a white metal so light Arnold initially thought they were dropping newspapers.

You found the missing Oregon Journal articles, then?

Except that they found the metal.

Let me guess.

Tin foil for hats?

Okay, it was officially recorded as aluminium.

There it is.

But it was only ever investigated by the Air Force pilots whose plane crashed on their way back to base.

I still think it's a coincidence, but it is at least an interesting one.

Good enough.

Now, moving on to the 1960s, there's quite a few things I've got to do.

Moving on to the 60s?

Don't tell me we're going through 80 years of UFO hunting chronologically.

How far through your notes are you?

Well,

I'm on page three of 15, but

but I can go faster.

Georgie, you can lose some of those pages or you can lose me for the date because I do not have time for fifteen pages.

Georgie.

Alright, alright.

We'll have an ad break and I'll try to cut some stuff.

Oh!

Oh, sorry, Celia.

It's all this packaging from my monthly delivery of doomsday supplies.

I just don't know how to get rid of it.

That's alright.

I used to have the same problem before I switched to EcoPocalypse.

Eco Pocalypse?

What's that?

EcoPocalypse offers greener emergency rations with entirely vegan ingredients and 100% recyclable packaging.

Once you've eaten their long-life meal packs, just send the tins straight back for recycling using whatever postal service has managed to survive the collapse of civilization.

Hmm.

That sounds expensive.

It does cost a little more than the next cheapest brand, but with their smaller anti-food waste ration pack sizes, you might find you save money.

Well, I'm sold.

Thanks, Celia.

I'm going to switch to Eco-Apocalypse for all my post-delivered doomsday prepping needs.

Okay, so now we're going to skip ahead to 1978.

The big one.

In an interview with UFologist Stanton Friedman, retired Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel reveals that a government story about a crashed weather balloon in Roswell, New Mexico had been nothing more than a flimsy cover story to distract the public from the crash landing of a potentially extraterrestrial spacecraft.

When you say reveals, you mean alleges, don't you?

Well, all right, but given he was the officer in charge of investigating the crash, that technically makes him a witness, and his testimony would hold up in court.

Would it, though?

Really?

His son corroborates it, claiming his dad showed him alien debris from Roswell when he was 10.

Again, I'm not sure I'd trust a 10-year-old to tell the difference between an alien spaceship and a weather balloon.

Ah, but what about the timing?

Although nobody noticed it at the time, the original crash occurred in 1947, just a few days after the Maury Island incident.

Right.

See, it all fits together.

If by all you mean a couple of coincidental dates, then sure, why not?

Fair, but I think you have to admit that whether you think it's aliens or not, there's clearly some sort of cover-up going on.

The military have put out multiple competing stories about what they found at Roswell.

First, it's a weather balloon, then it's a kite, then it's part of a top-secret project monitoring Soviet nuclear weapons.

Not to mention how Marcel was promoted to lieutenant colonel suspiciously quickly after the Roswell incident.

Oh, yes, because if there's one thing the US military is known for, it's rewarding whistleblowers.

Also fair, but UFO hunters started putting in freedom of information requests to the FBI, and it turns out they have over 800 reports on UFO sightings in the summer of 1947 alone, many of which are still classified.

Why would they do that if they didn't at least believe there was something to them?

Better safe than sorry?

And what about all the other people who've gone public with their own stories about Roswell later, including Glenn Dennis, a mortician working for the the Air Force in Roswell, who claimed to have worked with a nurse who'd performed an autopsy on a small humanoid alien in 1947.

Ah, yes.

The my sister's friends, hairdressers, dogs, pathologist once dissected an extraterrestrial defense.

Well, you say that, but there has been some really interesting testimony coming out of the most recent US hearings, which do

which we'll have to cover in another episode because we're out of time today.

So, what do you think?

You sound pretty convinced.

Sort of, but not really.

I doubt the US Air Force has a secret alien graveyard, but there was definitely a cover-up.

All those coincidences taking place at the same time, in the same part of the world, and the US government actively trying to keep it quiet?

That's weird.

Sure, but if Roswell really was a...

What was it, they said?

A nuclear surveillance thing, they would absolutely keep it hush-hush.

You can't really believe they were spying on Russian nuclear weapons with a balloon in 1940s New Mexico.

I think it's more likely than aliens visiting Earth just to freak out some rural North Americans.

Okay, but what if instead there was some more plausible cover-up, like human experimentation or something that had an effect on the population to make them more prone to believe in conspiracy theories?

What?

Like a conspiracy conspiracy.

Why not?

The US government could be deliberately fueling UFO rumors with the Aztec hoax, and people like Kenneth Arnold are acting on orders to make people believe there were aliens.

And then, if people dig too deep, they send out Glenn Dennis to make it all ridiculous again.

Have you ever been to New Mexico?

No, but I'd love to go.

They have a UFO museum.

You should.

I think you'd fit right in.

Well, if that's all on Little Aluminium Men?

Yeah, I think that about wraps it up for now.

Great.

At least until we dive deeper in parts two through seven.

Great.

Can't wait.

Me neither.

Bye, everyone.

Yep.

Bye.

Sheeplechase and the Magnus Protocol are podcasts distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 international license.

Sheeplechase was created by Sasha Sienna, directed by April Sumner and based on the works of Jonathan Sims and Alexander J.

Mule.

This episode was written by Sasha Sienna and edited with additional materials by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J.

Newell, with audio edits by Nico Vitese, mastering by Meg McKellar, and music by Nico Vitese.

It featured Sasha Siena as Georgie Barker and Lori Ann Davies as Celia Ripley.

To subscribe, explore exclusive extras and enjoy early access ad-free episodes, visit members.rustyquill.com or join our Patreon.

Rate and review us online, follow us on social media or email us at mail at rustyquill.com.

Thanks for listening.

One inspired by John and Martin, and another inspired by the mysterious Ex Altiora, a book from the library of Jürgen Leitner.

Sucrabay also make official perfumes for our friends over at Old Gods of Appalachia, including Blood and Bone and Unknown Roads.

You should check them out.

Sucrabay is a women-owned and operated perfumery that is vegan and cruelty-free, witchy and sometimes irreverent.

Expect perfumes like You're in a Cult, Call Your Dad, or Vodka and Swearing, the ever-popular Chloroform, or Papa's Waffles.

Sucrabay do a range of exciting and unique fragrances you won't find anywhere else.

They broadly fit into the following five categories.

Classic scents that pass the test of time.

Goth scents for those who like it dark and mysterious.

Witchy scents that are mysterious and potiony.

Nerdy scents for all the self-professed nerds out there.

And femme scents, the classically floral and sweet scents, but we recommend them for anyone of any gender.

Sucra Bay's small batch perfumes are not like any other.

You can find out more by going to www.rustiquirl.com forward slash perfume.

That's rustyquirl.com forward slash P-E-R-F-U-M-E.

Also, you can join the supportive and kind Sucra Bay community with over 18,000 members on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash sucrabay that's s u c r e a b e i l e

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