In Search Of... Jesse James

Jesse James was shot and killed by Bob Ford on this date in 1882.

"Yet in 1948, J. Frank Dalton claimed he was Jesse James.  Is it possible that Jesse James could've perpetrated a hoax on the entire country for over 60 years?" So begins an episode of In Search Of... from 1981, that you can watch on You Tube HERE.

Jesse James was not the Robin Hood-figure of popular legend. In reality, he and his brother were veterans of the Civil War from Missouri who fought on the Confederate side as part of a succession of guerrilla groups who perpetrated a series of notorious massacres, sometimes of unarmed men and boys. Like some other bitter ex-Confederates, after the Civil War ended Jesse James and his brother became outlaws, robbing banks. The favorable Jesse James legend was created and nurtured at this time by the pro-Confederate editor of the Kansas City Times newspaper, John Newman Edwards.

"Who knows if the real Jesse James is buried in the plot in Kearney, Missouri?" asks Leonard Nimoy rhetorically at the end of this episode of In Search Of...  Well, in 1995, Jesse James' body was exhumed from that plot and was subjected to DNA testing, confirming his identity.

In Search Of... Michael Rockefeller

In November 1961, while on an expedition to remote, coastal New Guinea searching for art objects for his family's then-new Museum of Primative Art in New York, 23 year old Michael Rockefeller (son of Nelson Rockefeller, and heir to the family fortune) disappeared mysteriously.

He was traveling in a 40 foot catamaran with a Dutch anthropologist and two native guides when it capsized.  Michael elected to swim the three miles to shore.  He was never seen again, despite an extensive search, and was presumed to've drowned in the strong current, or to've been attacked and killed by sharks or crocodiles. The possibility that Michael may've actually made it to shore, only to've been attacked by local tribesmen, who at the time had almost no contact with the outside world and who were reputed to be cannibals and headhunters, was dismissed as lurid speculation.

An episode of "In Search of..." from 1978, which you can watch on You Tube in its entirety HERE, re-examined this mystery, with emphasis on this more grizzly potential ending. In this 35 year old TV interview, the chief of the Asmat tribe denies that they killed Michael Rockefeller, after which narrator Leonard Nimoy intones, "The full and true story of Michael Rockefeller's disappearance may never be known. If the answer lies among the Asmat, a nearly impenetrable cultural curtain prevents a final solution."

But a new book published just weeks ago reveals that local cannibals had indeed attacked and killed 23 year old Michael Rockefeller after he successfully reached the shore in 1961, in revenge for a prior attack on them by the Dutch colonial government in 1958.   The local tribemen then concealed their village from the extensive search parties sent by the Dutch to look for young Rockefeller, and denied to everyone that they had killed him, for fear of retaliation. But they did confess at the time to a Dutch priest who traveled and lived among them.

According to THIS New York Daily News article about the new book, "The priest wrote the Dutch government and included the names of the murderers and which body parts they ate, according to documents Hoffman found in government archives in the Hague. 'IT IS CERTAIN THAT MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER WAS MURDERED AND EATEN BY OTSJANEP,' van Kessel wrote in all caps. 'This was revenge for the shooting four years ago.' But correspondence from the church to van Kessel told the priest to keep quiet. The incident was 'like a cabinet of glass' and he must keep silent so 'the mission will not fall from grace with the population,' church officials wrote."

Bigfoot Hoax Ends In Death

"A man trying to create a Bigfoot hoax on a highway died after being hit by two cars, officials in Montana said... A 15-year-old girl hit him with her car, another car swerved, and a third car driven by a 17-year-old ran him over, CNN affiliate KECI reported."

"[A]ccording to his companions he was 'attempting to incite a sighting of Bigfoot -- to make people think they had seen a Sasquatch,' Schneider said in the KECI report. But authorities received no calls from drivers thinking they had seen Bigfoot, the station reported."

You can read more at CNN HERE.

Update: Amerlia Earhart... Not Found (Again)

I wrote HERE back in May about new discoveries leading researchers to believe that they had identified the south Pacific island on which Amerlia Earhart crashed her plane back in 1937, never to be seen again.

On July 3rd, a $2.2 million expedition was mounted to remote Nikumororo island, but , after having to cut the expedition short due to "equipment malfunctions," they came away with exactly... nothing, apparently.  You can read more detail about all the technical difficulties they encountered while finding nothing on Reuters HERE.

According to this article, the Discovery Channel will be airing a special on this accident-prone, fruitless expedition on August 19th.  Sounds like appointment television.

10 Unsolved Mysteries of WWII

You can watch a 3 minute video on Bing HERE that profiles, among other things, the Amber Room, Foo Fighters, and Rommel's Treasure.

'Foo Fighters' is a period colloquialism for the UFOs spotted by Allied fighter pilots.  The Amber Room was room in a Russian palace whose walls were spectacularly decorated with amber panels and gold leaf that was looted during WWII and disappeared. Rommel's Treasure is $30 million in gold reputedly sunk off the coast of Corsica as the Nazis fled North Africa.

In Search Of... The Lost Colony

In 1585 an Englishman named John White was part of an expedition supported by Sir Walter Raleigh that traveled to Roanoke Island off the coast of what is today North Carolina. White mapped it before returning to England, leaving others in the group behind. He returned two years later with 150 other colonists, intending to join the men left behind in 1585 and to establish the first English settlement in the New World.  But all those men were dead, and the local Croatoan Indians refused to meet with White.  So, leaving the 116 surviving settlers reluctantly behind (including his daughter and granddaughter), White returned to England to get more supplies. But White was unable to return to Roanoke Colony for three years, until 1590, because his ship was commandeered for use in a war between England and Spain. When he finally returned to Roanoke Island, the entire colony was gone.  The only clue was the word "CROATOAN" carved in a post of the fort, and the word "CRO" carved in a nearby tree, leading historians to conclude that the colonists likely moved about 50 miles away to what is today Hatteras Island, joining the native Americans there, ultimately interbreeding with them.  But the precise fate of the 'lost' colony remains a mystery.

A new look at a map made by White during his first trip in 1585, however, which has been in the British Museum since 1866, may have shed new light on where the 'lost' colonists really went.  According to THIS article, the map was patched in two places.  No one apparently thought to look under the patches until recently. One patch corrected an error.  But the other revealed the location of a planned fort on the mainland, at the confluence of two rivers.  Researchers believe that this spot is where the colonists intended to establish a more permanent settlement, a precursor to Jamestown in 1607.  Today the site lies under a planned Arnold Palmer-designed golf course.

Reading this news today, I found myself vaguely recollecting an episode of the 1970's TV show In Search Of..., titled "The Lost Colony of Roanoke," that I'd seen as a kid. It first aired in October 1979, but you can watch it on You Tube HERE. "The single word 'CROATOAN' that Governor White found would seem to indicate that the lost colony attempted a  move to the nearby island of that name. While the Governor never lived to search there himself, others who did, in colonial and modern times, found no indication that the colonists had ever even been there," asserts narrator Leonard Nimoy.  The show then goes on to profile the so-called "Dare Stones," a set of rocks found between 1937 and 1941 with carvings on them that purport to tell the tragic story of what happened to White's daughter, Eleanor Dare, and her granddaughter, Virginia Dare (i.e. murder and kidnapping by the natives).

Today these stones are widely believed to be obvious fakes.  But they remain in the collection of a small women's college in Georgia. And in 1998, almost 20 years after this TV show first aired, an English signet ring and 16th Century copper farthing were found by archaeologists at the site of the Croatoan capital, seeming to support the original hypothesis that the 'lost colonists' moved to Croatoan island after all, exactly as they had indicated unambiguously by carving the word "CROATOAN" into a post on their fort.

In Search Of... Amelia Earhart

Researchers announced today the discovery of a small glass jar on tiny Nikumororo Island in the south Pacific.  It's believed to be a jar of "Dr. C.H. Berry's Freckle Ointment," an anti-freckle cream popular with women in the 1930s.  This is significant because it may have been owned by missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, a redhead, whose plane disappeared in the region on July 2, 1937, during a record breaking attempt to fly around the world.  You can read the MSNBC article HERE.

It's been widely believed for most of the last 75 years that her twin engine Lockheed Electra airplane ran out of fuel and crashed near Howland Island, about 300 miles from Nikumororo's flat coral reef. Could Earhart and her co-pilot Fred Noonan actually have landed the plane successfully on this reef a few hundred miles away and then lived on the tiny island as castaways? According to this article, in 1940, skeletal remains of a man and a woman were found on Nikumororo island, along with parts of a man's shoe and a woman's shoe, a sextant, remains of a fire, and the bones of turtles and birds. These remains have now been lost, unfortunately.

Reading this news today, I found myself vaguely recollecting an episode of the 1970's TV show In Search Of..., titled "Amelia Earhart," that I'd seen as a kid. It first aired in January 1977, but you can watch it on You Tube HERE.  It focuses on the sexier possibility that Earhart survived, perhaps making it to Saipan, was captured by the Japanese (who thought she was an American spy in the run-up to World War II), and later died in captivity.

In Search Of... King Solomon's Mines

A couple of nights ago I watched an excellent documentary on PBS called "Quest For Solomon's Mines." You can watch the entire 1 hour episode on the official PBS website HERE.  The description of the program there reads in part, "Countless treasure-seekers have set off in search of King Solomon's mines... inspired by the Bible's account of splendid temples and palaces adorned in glittering gold and copper. Yet... many contend that they are no more real than King Arthur. In the summer of 2010, NOVA and National Geographic embarked on two cutting-edge field investigations that... expose important new clues buried in the pockmarked desert of Jordan, including ancient remnants of an industrial-scale copper mine."

As I was watching this documentary, I found myself vaguely recollecting an episode of the 1970's TV show In Search Of..., titled "King Solomon's Mines," that I'd seen as a kid. It first aired in November 1981, but you can watch it on You Tube HERE.  "The Phoenicians opened up to Solomon the trade routes of the world," Narrator Leonard Nimoy explains. "In return Solomon guaranteed them a regular supply of oil and wheat... The existence of Solomon's sea trade brought strength and wealth to his land. It also brought the most famous woman of the time to him. The Queen of Sheba came from southern Arabia, the wealthiest region in the Semitic world... Did Solomon ever have his own mines? Or did he simply trade with people who did?"

In contrast, this new PBS special never once mentions the Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba, asserts that the prior belief about Solomon's wealth deriving from control of trade was wrong, and posits that the real source of his wealth was a vast copper mine and smelting plant recently found in what is today Jordan. (It also explains that the legend Solomon had 1,000 wives was also likely wrong, since the entire population of Jerusalem in his time was about 1,000 people.)

This PBS documentary also explains that the Bible never makes any mention of any gold mines owned by King Solomon.  Rather, the entire concept  apparently originated in a Victorian-era adventure story.  I suppose that's considerably more intriguing than 'King Solomon's Copper Smelter.'

"Area 51 Declassified" On Nat. Geo.

Last night I watched a 1 hour documentary on the National Geographic Channel called Area 51 Declassified. (You can watch the full documentary on You Tube by clicking on that title.)  It tells the true story of how Area 51 was started by the CIA in Groom Lake, Nevada in 1955, initially to develop the U2 spy plane away from prying eyes. It tells this story via on-camera interviews with clearly visible, fully-named, retired Area 51 personnel.  (No anonymous figures here, photographed in shadow, telling sinister tales.) About 18 months ago I wrote HERE about a similar story published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine at the time. This documentary features many of the same people and their stories.

Many of these men's anecdotes tie back to the fact that they were strictly forbidden from telling anyone, not even their own wives and families, about what they were doing.  They would just get up every day in Las Vegas (or Burbank) and fly off on a chartered plane to Area 51, sometimes coming home that night, and sometimes a week later.  And when they returned, they could offer no explanation. 

The documentary also explains that in the 1950s over half the reported UFO sightings were tracked back by the Air Force's famous "Project Bluebook" to inadvertent sightings of the U2 spy plane, primarily by commercial airline pilots and their passengers.  But because the U2 was so secret at the time, they were forced to proffer to the public all these 'BS' explanations like 'swamp gas' and 'weather balloons.'

In Search Of... Chinese Explorers

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a History Channel special that you can watch HERE called, Who Really Discovered America? Over 2 hours it examined various claims that the Chinese, Vikings, Polynesians and others may have made landfall in North America centuries before Columbus. As it turns out, the 1970s TV show In Search Of... aired an episode in February 1981 called "In Search of....Chinese Explorers," examining the possibility that a Chinese monk had sailed to America in 570 AD, almost a thousand years before Columbus.  You can watch it HERE.

"About 1500 years ago a sudden cultural surge occurred in Central America which has mystified the world of archaeology for many years," explains narrator Leonard Nimoy. "Some believe this may have been brought about by contact with China... In China we filmed many serpent heads, only to find identical figures in Central America... The Mayans believed these serpents to be the representation of the man-god who brought them knowledge.  Is it possible that this contact with Chinese culture accounts for the Mayan's remarkable knowledge of astronomy?"  (I suppose that's a slightly less insulting possible explanation than attributing their cultural achievements to contact with space aliens.)

"Recent discoveries from the ocean floor may provide answers to some of these questions," Leonard Nimoy concludes. "Bob Meistrell and Wayne Baldwin have discovered what are believed to be Chinese stone anchors."  These are purportedly stone anchors from ancient Chinese ships dating to the 6th Century, the show posits.  In Search Of... then includes a brief interview with both divers wherein they explain how they found the stones in 1972 while diving for lobsters off Palos Verdes, California

As 2010's  Who Really Discovered America? makes clear, however, as it turns out, while these stones were in fact anchors from Chinese ships, they are from fishing vessels that crossed the Pacific in the 19th Century, not the 6th Century.

As an aside, I thought it interesting that Bob Meistrell had actually co-founded Body Glove in 1953, after he and his brother invented the first practical wetsuit.  I also thought it noteworthy that interviews with two different experts were featured extensively in this episode of In Search Of: one with a marine archaeologist named Larry Pierson and the other with a professor of history and archaeology from the University of San Diego named James Moriarty III.  It goes unmentioned, however, that in 1980, just months before this episode first aired in February 1981, the two had co-authored an article published in the Anthropological Journal of Canada arguing that these stone anchors were convincing evidence of this earlier arrival by the Chinese.  As an epilogue, Larry Pierson still lives and works in San Diego today.  Both he and Bob Meistrell were interviewed on camera again 30 years later for Who Really Discovered America? Though in this 2010 interview, Pierson has ditched his full beard and also makes no assertions about what century these Chinese stone anchors date to.

In Search Of... Lost Vikings

Over the weekend I stumbled on part of a History Channel special that you can watch HERE called, "Who Really Discovered America?" Over 2 hours it examined various claims that the Chinese, Vikings, Polynesians and others may have made landfall in North America centuries before Columbus. The part about Leif Ericson establishing a colony in Canada called "Vinland" reminded me of an episode of the 1970s TV show In Search Of... that I had seen as a kid.  Called "In Search of....Lost Vikings," it first aired in  December 1978.  You can watch a segment HERE. 

While I was very open as a child to the existence of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, I remember being incredulous (for whatever reason) at the assertions in this episode that a colony of vikings had sailed in open boats from Greenland to Canada around 1,000 AD (500 years before Columbus), and established a colony there.   The irony is that this is one of the claims that In Search Of... examined during its six year run in the late 1970s that is now widely regarded as accurate.

But rather than focus on the more generally accepted archaeological work done at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, this episode instead focused on now widely dismissed claims made by a Canadian archaeologist named Thomas Lee that another site, on Pamiok Island in Ungava Bay, was the location of the first Norse colony.  Watching it again this morning, I was struck by how many times interbreeding with the native Inuits was mentioned. A focus of Lee's claim was a 10 foot tall stone monument there, which he named "The Hammer of Thor" (see photo).  It's now widely believed that this was actually an Inuit stone monument. Lee died in 1982, less than four years after appearing in this episode.

In Search Of... The Angel of Death

A few days ago I watched an excellent episode of a National Geographic channel TV series called Nazi Hunters.  It profiled the decades-long search for the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death." The show detailed how the Israeli Mossad almost captured Mengele at the same time they kidnapped Adolph Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, which was news to me.  Eichmann and Mengele had apparently met several times for coffee in Buenos Aires in the late 1950s, since they both lived relatively openly in the area at the time. Another revelation was that Mengele actually died in 1979 while body surfing at a beach not far from São Paulo, Bazil, where he had lived out the last years of his life.

This latter detail reminded me of an episode of the 1970s TV show In Search Of... that I had seen as a kid, which detailed Simon Wiesenthal's then-ongoing search for Josef Mengele. This episode, which you can watch HERE, was also titled, "Angel of Death."  Little did I or anyone else know at the time it first aired on February 1, 1979, that Josef Mengele had less than a week to live.

Until 1985, it was widely believed that Mengele was still living in Paraguay, where he was last sighted. This conventional wisdom is reflected in this 1979 episode of In Search Of...  "The closer one gets to Mengele, " concludes narrator Leonard Nimoy, "the more elusive he seems to become... Wherever Mengele is in Paraguay, he has the protection of the Stroessner regime....This road, which leads to a well-guarded gate that we were unable to photograph, is the access to a hacienda where Mengele lives today..."

Not quite, as it turns out.  But it wasn't until 1985, when, acting on a tip, German police raided the home of a long-time Mengele family administrator named Hans Sedlmeier (who'd been secretly sending Josef Mengele  money from Germany for decades) that the truth was finally learned and the location of Mengele's grave in Brazil was discovered. And it wasn't until those remains were DNA tested in the early 1990s, that Mengele's identity (and, therefore, his fate) was conclusively established.

The episode of Nazi Hunters ends with an intriguing footnote to this story.  At the time of Menegle's death in 1979, his friends in Brazil apparently sought permission from his family in Germany to cremate Mengele's remains.  Because of the secrecy, however, they were unable to obtain that permission in a timely manner, and so his body was buried instead.  Had Mengele's remains been cremated (and therefore rendered unable to be DNA tested later) it's likely, the show concludes, that many people today would still not believe he was actually dead.

In Search of... UFO Coverups

Have you seen the newest footage purporting to show  the body of a dead space alien, which this time apparently originated in Russia?  If not, you can watch the 1 minute video HERE.  It's caused a 'viral video' sensation in recent weeks, and now has almost 10 million views.

This reminded of an episode of the 1970s TV show In Search Of... titled "UFO Coverups" that first aired in 1980, alleging that the government was secretly keeping dead alien bodies in Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. You can watch a 10 minute segment from this episode by clicking HERE. I liked the TV show In Search of... a lot as a kid. I've enjoyed re-watching some of the old episodes and lovingly critiquing, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, some of the explanations proffered for the mysteries the show examined. 


This episode features clips of an interview with a man named Peter Gersten, who is described as an attorney who sued the government to force it to release classified UFO-related documents. As an epilogue, Peter Gertsen is still alive today and has retired to Sedona, Arizona.  In a 2007 interview posted on You Tube HERE, he details his plan to leap off Bell Rock there at 11:11 AM on December 21, 2012 (the Winter Solstice)  because he believes that at that precise moment a 'cosmic portal' will open there and propel him through it.


When I saw this episode as a kid, it was the first time I'd ever heard of Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. "For 30 years rumors have spread about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base," explained narrator Leonard Nimoy. "According to the stories, the US government is concealing under top security flying saucers from another world, and alien bodies cryogenically suspended in huge freezers...The stories and rumors all mention a mysterious Hangar 18."  


A man named Ray Fowler, introduced as a 'leading civilian UFO investigator for 17 years,' then produces an un-named eye witness to a UFO crash in Kingman, Arizona in 1953, who agrees to an on-camera interview only if his identity is hidden.  The mystery man then relates an amazing story about having been unwittingly drawn into a surreptitious  military mission to recover the wreck of this alien spacecraft, and about having seen 'two bodies.' Leonard Nimoy makes extended references to how long Ray Fowler has known this un-named man as a friend, and to Ray's own professional background working on the Minuteman missile.  Presumably this was all done to bolster the credibility of this anonymous witness.


According to Wikipedia, Ray Fowler is still alive today as well, and is in his late 70s. Though in a 1991 book he apparently acknowledged publicly for the first time that he had himself been abducted by extraterrestrials. According to Wikipedia, this revelation caused a rift in his family and he was thereafter forbidden from seeing his grandchildren for some time.

In Search of..... Atlantis

A surprisingly compelling National Geographic Channel special aired a few weeks back examining an increasingly accepted theory that the mythical city of Atlantis may actually have been based on a real ancient city located on southern coast of Spain, just beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. You can watch a 4 minute preview of the show below. It re-airs next on May 22, apparently. 




Watching it, I was reminded of an episode of In Search Of... titled simply "Atlantis" that first aired in 1976. You can watch a 10 minute segment from this episode by clicking HERE. I liked the TV show In Search of... a lot as a kid in the 1970's. I've enjoyed re-watching some of the old episodes and lovingly critiquing, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, some of the explanations proffered for the mysteries the show examined.  This episode starts by profiling another traditionally accepted potential inspiration for Plato's Atlantis, Santorini. (Though the show does indulge in some typical hyperbole, like referring to the remains of an old astrolabe found there as, "part of an ancient computer.")


But the episode then veers into the more 'speculative,' by focusing on an underwater rock formation off the coast of the Bahamas called the 'Bimini Road,' first sighted in 1967.  The idea that this rock formation was part of the ruins of Atlantis was originally inspired by a prediction made by the American psychic Edgar Cayce in 1940. "It was precisely where Cayce said Atlantis would be.... Huge white blocks, chiseled with incredible precision... No one knows how they got here, 35 feet beneath the sea off the coast of Bimini," intones narrator Leonard Nimoy. "Two possible explanations exist.One, the stones are the remains of a network of paved roads. Two, they are the tops of huge stone walls that once enclosed the palaces of Atlantis."

Actually, it turns out that there was a third possible explanation: that the 'Bimini Road' was merely a natural rock formation.

In Search Of... Stonehenge

I was fascinated by Stonehenge as a kid.  (How was it built?  And why? Were aliens involved?)  I fulfilled a childhood dream by making it there in the winter of 2003. What struck me most was something that's not shown on television: two major roadways run right by it on either side.  Big trucks and other traffic rush by constantly, really breaking the mood.

I liked the TV show In Search of... a lot as a kid in the 1970's. I've enjoyed re-watching some of the old episodes and lovingly critiquing, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, some of the explanations proffered for the mysteries the show examined. An episode of In Search Of... titled "The Mystery of Stonehenge" first aired in 1977. You can watch a 10 minute segment from this episode by clicking HERE.  "There are a number of theories as to whether there is any reality to the magic power of megaliths," explains a so-called expert, Francis Hitching, interviewed in this clip while standing in front of Stonehenge. "It is known that around some of these sites, underneath tombs, around the standing stones, there are anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field. And here I think may lie the secret to the power of these megaliths. Is it just possible that people in those times somehow knew how to tap the electromagnetic anomalies that were in these stones and used them in their healing? Is it also possible that they used it, as birds do, and dogs seem to, in telepathy?  They could find their way by these stones. They could perhaps communicate from one stone to another.  They were perhaps like a giant psychic grid which could be used for telepathic purposes."

I remember being a little iffy about the 'psychic telephone' theory, even as a kid.  But I wish that In Search Of.... had explained that Hitching was then (and presumably remains) a self-described 'dowser' who had also written a book called Earth Magic that was published the same year as this interview.  That would have given his theories on Stonehenge a little more 'context.'

Last week I watched a National Geographic Channel documentary called Stonehenge Decoded. It re-examined Stonehenge in light of new archaeological discoveries, focussing on the work of British professor Mike Parker Pearson. He has theorized that Stonehenge was linked, more prosaically, only with another site a mile away called Durrington Walls (once the location of a wooden equivalent to Stonehenge). Pearson believes that the area around Durrington Walls Henge was a place of the living, while Stonehenge was a domain of the dead. A journey from Durrington Walls (the site of a large Stone Age settlement) along the nearby River Avon to reach Stonehenge would have been part of a ritual passage from life to death to celebrate past ancestors and the recently deceased.  

This documentary also vividly illustrates some generally accepted current theories about how Stone Age people could have hauled the huge stones from their source 180 miles away in Wales and then built the monument, given the technology of the time 4,500 years ago.  This perhaps answers the open ended note on which narrator Leonard Nimoy ended this episode of In Search of... while standing alongside a 'cosmic' poster of the Milky Way galaxy.  "The question which still eludes us is who erected these working monuments.  Clearly they were the work of people more advanced than we had thought possible for that time.  We can speculate that our ancestors were possessed of knowledge that was somehow lost to succeeding generations.  Or perhaps they had 'help'... "

Not quite.  Here's a 2 minute preview of this new National Geographic Channel documentary that vividly answers these questions and debunks the concluding 'implication.'

In Search Of... Jimmy Hoffa

Jimmy Hoffa, the former head of the Teamsters union, disappeared from a suburban Detroit restaurant on this date in 1975, where he was scheduled to meet two mob associates. His remains have still never been found. The 1970's TV show In Search of..., which I really liked as a kid, once did an episode examining Hoffa's mysterious disappearance that first aired in November 1980. You can watch a 10 minute segment from this episode by clicking HERE.

As part of a pardon agreement with President Nixon in 1971, Jimmy Hoffa was barred following his release from Federal prison from participating in Teamsters activities until 1980, a ban he was actively seeking to overturn (and undermine) at the time of his disappearance in 1975.  His efforts had met with resistance from many quarters, however, even among his supporters. 

"If Hoffa's disappearance was a mafia hit, what was the motive?" asks narrator Leonard Nimoy near the end of this episode. "[Investigative reporter] Dan Moldea believes an angry Hoffa had begun to squeal about connections between the mafia and the CIA in Cuba... Did Hoffa know the secret behind the 'Crime of the Century'?  Hoffa hated the Kennedys for hounding him during the McClellan Hearings.  But did he know more than the rest of us about the President's murder?" Investigative reporter Dan Moldea himself then asserts in an on-camera interview, "During my investigation the FBI informant also added that Traficante quote 'made it clear' that it was Hoffa who was making the arrangements for the President's assassination."

Ah yes, the Kennedy assassination. Of course.  That explains it: Jimmy Hoffa masterminded the Kennedy assassination and had to be killed (12 years later) to cover it up. What's not revealed in this episode is that Tom Moldea had just written a book detailing these theories titled The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels , Politicans and the Mob, which had been published in 1978.  At the time, Moldea was only 28 years old. He's still alive today (he's only 60) and even has his own website HERE.

A significant part of the story was not known in 1980, however.  Just a few years later, wire taps on mobsters in Kansas City proved for the first time what had previously only been suspected: that the Chicago 'Outfit' had used under-the-table loans from Teamsters pension funds to build Las Vegas casinos in the 1960s and 1970s.  The 'skim' from these casinos was believed to be their most lucrative racket at the time. It's now believed that Hoffa, bitter about a lack of support for his bid to retake leadership of the Teamsters, may have been killed because the mob feared that his high profile legal wrangling and electioneering might draw unwanted attention to this link, or, in the unlikely event he succeeded in re-taking the Teamsters' Presidency, that he might ultimately put an end to this arrangement.

On June 16, 2006, the Detroit Free Press published in its entirety the so-called Hoffex Memo, a 56-page report prepared by the FBI in January 1976. While it did not claim to establish conclusively the specifics of his disappearance, the memo memorializes law enforcement's belief that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of organized crime figures who deemed his efforts to regain power within the Teamsters to be a threat to their control of the union's pension fund.

Alien Technology From Roswell Crash

Almost everyone has heard at one time or another, I think, the claim by 'conspiracy theorists' that for decades the US government has secretly reverse-engineered futuristic technology from crashed alien spaceships to develop a wide array of modern weapons and aircraft. These claims may have reached their peak of popular familiarity in the 1990s when the X-Files was a top rated network TV show, coinciding in 1997 with the 50th anniversary of the 1947 'Roswell Incident.' Even though I'm tempted to label these theories "crackpot," I've nonetheless always been intrigued by the whole concept, however baseless and counter-factual.  ("I want to believe," I suppose. But don't.) 




I've noticed over time that these claims are rarely ever specific. No one ever seems to point to a specific human scientist by name who developed any specific fighter plane or weapon using reverse-engineered alien technology.  These claims rarely seem to get more specific than dark references to Area 51 made over video footage of "No Trespassing" signs in the Nevada desert. As a result, I was impressed by an episode of the TV show UFO Files that I saw for the first time the other day (despite first airing on the History Channel in 2005, apparently).  This was the first TV show I ever saw that made very specific claims about who did the alleged reverse engineering, and what specific innovations were developed therefrom. 


This episode examined claims made by a long-retired Lt. Colonel in the Army named Philip Corso in his 1997 book The Day After Roswell. (That's him above.) In his book Corso asserts that in 1961 he was personally put in charge of a project to reverse-engineer technology from the alien spacecraft that (purportedly) crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. (Notice the coincidental date of publication of his book? Nonetheless you can buy it on Amazon HERE.)  In the book Corso claims that his team of scientists developed lasers, fiber optics, integrated circuits and night vision goggles from this alien debris.  Very specific indeed.  


Even more impressively, I thought, this 1 hour episode then interviewed an assortment of nobel laureates and other eminent scientists who actually developed these technologies in reality (some, as a matter of record, years before Corso claims to have reverse-engineered them),  who go on to explain how no one could never have developed them otherwise (with alien technology or without) because of the critical need of other converging technologies or scientific instruments, like scanning electron microscopes. It was great to see a show on this topic that didn't end with a vaguely skeptical question mark. You can watch the entire 1 hour episode on You Tube.  Part 1 is HERE. 


As an interesting epilogue, Corso retired from the Army in 1963, and became a key aide to Senator Strom Thurmond.  Corso died in 1998, just a year after his book was published.

Retired Area 51 Workers Tell Their Stories

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times magazine has interviewed a few men who worked at Area 51 during the Cold War. Veterans of the CIA or the military now in their 70s and 80s,  they relate stories of their time there over lunch, which they're only now being allowed to tell publicly. You can read the entire article HERE.  Here's an excerpt:


"On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.  Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: 'Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane.' Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. 'I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board.' The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

"As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. 'They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash.' The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch--except for the reaction of his wife, Jane. 'Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word.' The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. 'Boy, was she mad,' says Collins with a chuckle."

The Third Secret of Fatima

Are you familiar with the story of how, on this date in 1917, three shepherd children claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary on multiple occasions in Fatima, Portugal?  This vision became popularly known as "Our Lady of Fatima." The site became a destination for mass pilgrimage when the kids said that Our Lady of Fatima had promised a miracle upon her final appearance in October 1917. Seventy thousand people allegedly flocked to the site on that day.  But more enduringly, the children also claimed that Our Lady of Fatima had shared with them three "secrets." 


Two of the three shepherd children died in  the Great Spanish Flu epsidemic of 1918-1920.  But the oldest child, Lucia, lived until 2005 and became a nun. Lucia revealed two of the three secrets publicly in a memoir she wrote as an adult.  The first secret was a vision of Hell. The second concerned instructions on how to save souls from Hell, as well as prophecies about the potential conversion of Russia to Catholicism.  But the third "secret" remained a tantalizing mystery. Lucia had revealed it to the Vatican, but with instructions that it be revealed to the world only after 1960.  But in 1960, the Vatican announced that it was "most probable the Secret would remain, forever, under absolute seal."  This proclamation, not surprisingly, had the opposite of its intended effect.  It greatly increased interest in the secret and prompted speculation about it's nature: was it an apocalyptic vision of nuclear annihilation?


It was in this context that I first heard about the "third secret of Fatima" in the early 1980s, after Pope John  Paul II publicly proclaimed his belief in Our Lady of Fatima. The Cold War context renewed speculation that the hidden "third secret" concerned a vision of world-wide nuclear annihilation.  The Vatican ultimately revealed the third secret in June 2000, however. In the end it was "merely" a vision about the death of the Pope and other religious figures.


I once watched a very interesting 1 hour documentary on this whole thing which aired on The History Channel.  It was an episode of the series "History's Mysteries" and has now been posted (in segments) on You Tube.  You can watch part 1 by clicking HERE.

In Search Of... King Tut

What really killed Egypt's boy pharaoh "King Tut," who died in 1324 BC at the age of 19?  The 1970's TV show In Search of..., which I really liked as a kid, once did an episode (May 1979) that examined the boy pharaoh's life, including various hypotheses about his death.  Was he murdered, a teenage victim of court intrigue? You can watch a 10 minute segment from this episode by clicking HERE. "Scholars are not at all certain what caused the death of Tutankhamun" explains a Dr. James Braschler, then the head of the Institute of Antiquities and Christianity at Claremont College, in an interview shown near the end of this episode. "The mummy itself was somewhat decomposed because of  the excessive use of unguents and spices that the priests carried out.  And therefore the physical evidence is ambiguous. Some who have investigated suggest then that the death of Tutankhamun came as a result of respiratory ailments such as tuberculosis or pneumonia." Narrator Leonard Nimoy then immediately adds, "still others believe that his death may have been hastened by poison."  Nimoy goes on to theorize that court priests may have poisoned Tut while he was ill, because they feared losing influence and power over him as he aged from a young boy into adulthood.

As I wrote previously HERE, researchers announced in February that, using modern scientific technology, they had finally been able to determine conclusively what had killed King Tut.  As it turns out, he died of complications resulting from a compound fracture of his leg that he sustained after falling off a chariot on a royal hunting trip (and a severe malaria infection in his brain), not the more glamorous royal assassination. As an aside, James Brashler is still alive today.  He is now a "Professor of Bible" and Director of Graduate Studies at Union Presbyterian Seminary.  You can see his bio (and a current photo) on their website HERE.