Thinking Sideways: Craig D. Button

have a mystery. Once again we have a listener suggested mystery, and it's an aeronautical mystery, it is. And yes, I know there's probably somebody out there going, oh god, Steve is doing another plane mystery. But hey with us, because I actually sort of managed to find a story that combines my last two episodes. Like I said, my last two episodes. So today's story was a listener's suggestion. As I said, it was suggested by Mr W So thank you,

sir um. And this week what we're gonna be talking about is Air Force pilot Captain Craig D. Button, who died when his A ten Thunderbolt to better known as a ward Hog, crashed into the side of gold Dust Peak in the Rocky Mountain Rain in Colorado. Button it apparently gone completely off mission. He had no reason to be in that area. He kind of did. He sort wandered off the reservation. Yeah, a little bit. So before we get in the mystery, let's do a little bit

of backstory here. Let's talk about Mr. Button. That was his last name. That was the name his parents gave him, which their parents probably gave before them. That's how this works. Job Okay, Well one of their parents gave them one of them. Well they theoretically they were both married, so they they would have this is never mind, let's just keep moving forward. Does his name plane work? Oh it's going to be a long night. Um so, no, Craig Button. At the time of his death, he was thirty two

years old. He had been flying plane since his late teens, and he was always described as a straight shooter. He didn't smoke, he almost never drank. He went to college at the New York Institute of Technology, and while he was there, he was in the Air Force r OTC program, which, for people who don't know, is the Reserve Officer Training corps UM. And while he was there, when he graduated. He got a degree in aerospace engineering, which doesn't smart guy,

and it's probably not easy to get. I don't imagine that is an easy degree. Now, it's too bad to crash this planet going for him, he really did. Hey, did we say what year this is? This is is when this whole thing goes down? Sorry, I just realized I had no idea what time frame we're Well, that's that's because I was giving the backstory first and then we were going to jump forward to the actual time. So we are not yet in We are instead in

the early nineties when he was in college. He graduated and almost it sounds like, basically immediately turned around and went into the US Air Force. That's kind of the way our TC works. I think they give you a scholarship, then you turn around and you've got to kind of join. You kind of gotta repay it in a way. Yeah. Um, But you know the thing is is that he seemed to be totally happy in the Air Force. He initially, after basic training, he spent four years at Laflett Air

Force Base, which is in Texas. He was a flight instructor there and then later after that four year stint, he transferred to Davis month And Air Force Base, which is in Arizona. He was going to go too into the training program for flying the ten. I'd love to fly Award Hog. It's cool plane. We should talk about we should talk about it real quickly. What you probably do. And I think a lot of people do know what the word hog is. By look, you just probably don't

know the name. It's a it's a very distinct looking plane. It's a single seater, so there's no copilot, it's just the pilot. It's got kind of a stubby nose in the front and the kind of horizontal tail that the H shaped tail, which means there's the horizontal fin and then a vertical on each side. But the most distinguishing feature is its engines, which are mounted on between the wing and the tail and above them, and it's there

directed amounted directly onto the fuselage. So it's got these big, huge turbans attached to the side of Yeah, and it's a it's a it's an ugly plane, but I it's pretty in its own way. And the other thing about it too, is it doesn't have like your typical jets, and unlike a typical jets. It doesn't have the sweatback stubby wings. They're straight, nice, big, straight, horizontal, rectangular wings, which is great because it gives it a really nice,

really low stall speed. Yeh, stall speed on that things hud twenty miles an hour. And that's without flaps. Because I saw what in an air show once and he flew right by in front of us really low, I mean really low, and then and then it just turned his nose up like this and took off again. But I could swear he was going a lot slower than folks too, don't know. Stall speed is when the thing stops flying. Yeah, that's what that's what starts to falla fly.

But no, they're they're really cool. They are. They're very blatantly designed for one thing, and that is blowing stuff up. Though. Um it's got that stubby nose because it's got a giant thirty millimeter can in in the nose and that cannon. The fuselage of the body of the plane is actually built around that cannon. It's so huge. The wings are

meant to hold all kinds of munitions. I saw a picture of one that was banking and it looked I think there was a total of ten projectiles on it, so it was all kinds of different missiles and bombs and the thing was just like bristling for wars, like don't mess with it. It's gonna throw everything. And plus that thirty mechanic can really lay down some fire. Yeah, it drops an amazing amount of ammunition in a second. It's it's really it's crazy. It's the depleted geranium bullets.

And when they want to be armor piercing, yeah, yeah, exactly, and they can take out a tank real easy. And that's that's and that's what that slow saw speed really comes in handy because if you're going over like a column like a tank Callum or something like that, you gotta take your sweet time and just you know, and get lots of rounds into each one of them. So yeah, going as fast as you can and hoping that you

hit them with something. Yes, So it has a military advantage. Yeah, And just just to editorialize a little bit, every periodically the Air Force announces that they're going to phase out the A ten. They've done it at least a couple of times now, and you know, I think it's a ploy to just get Congress to pony up more cash and just says, uh, you know, we want to face out the A ten because you know, we just think that we do it with supply lines and support personnel

and all that stuff. It will save us a bunch of money we can put towards our fancier stuff. And and and everybody else says, are you freaking crazy? And then and then and then Congress ponies up a little more money. So I don't think they really intend to do service for a long time. Well, they're planning on keeping them in service for a whole lot longer. Well, that's what I means. They've been in service for a

long time. They as far as I look. When I looked at it, it doesn't appear that they're making new A tens. They're just maintaining their existing stock. Yeah, and they built a lot of these things. They did. They really did enough about the A ten. We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna jump to February. Um Button started his A ten training at Davis monthon the third of February. It's a a D two day program, so he should have been done sometime in the spring, and at that

point he was scheduled to strang to transfer out to. Oh, Joe, you're gonna have to help me with the name of this air base. Okay, I'll go with that. Which is an air Yeah, which is an air base in Germany. Um. So, upon completion of his training, he already had orders to ship out to somewhere else, so he was expected to obviously passage training. We're gonna move about two months into his training to the second of April, Button and two

other planes take off. They have a mission where they're gonna fly from Davis month and Air Force Base to what's called the Goldwater Gunnering Range, which is kind of near Hella Bend, Arizona. And for a bit of reference, Hella Bend is on the very bottom edge of the state. It's about a hundred miles or a hundred sixty pometers from the Mexico border. And it's also about a hundred miles I believe it is west of the actual air Force base, so's it's kind of in the middle of nowhere.

And where's Davis Monthum, it's about a hundred miles or so from Phoenix, Arizona. And that's a that's an off the top of my head, Yes, yes, yeah, Usually these bombing ranges that could usually kind of out yeah for goods, because you don't want a bunch of people around. So the the U. S. Air Force, they don't typically make

their practice runs a straight line. You want to get some time on the sticks, so they would They were known for doing things like circling around the state and taking kind of a roundabout route to get to the gunnery range. And indeed that appears to be what they did. Before they got to the gunnery range, all of the planes in his formation fueled up. So in air fueling, which is not an easy thing. We were just talking about this. It's like, try to get a straw at

four hundred miles an hour onto something below you. I can't. It sounds amazingly, but all the wind speed is really what I'm reacting to, and they probably don't do it four hundred miles an hour. It's definitely hard though. It's crazy, I would think, especially in turbulence, and there's turbulence quite

a lot of the time about Yeah. So they go through this fueling process and then Button drops back behind the other two planes and a bit of a follow the leader formation, and this is expected, and then all of a sudden he um turns and he leaves the formation and the mission leader sees him flying away and calls him on the radio, but he doesn't respond. As a matter of fact, he's turned off. This plane, by

the way, has three radios on it. He turns off all of his radios or stops responding to them, and he turns off his transponders for tracking purposes, and he just goes dark, and he just flies away and heads off in a northeasterly past and he's gone from there, it is, And the U. S. Air Force really didn't know what to make of it, and they had no

idea what was going on. And it took nearly two weeks to piece together where he had gone and what had happened, based on sightings from people on the ground, because, like we talked about, this plane is so recognizable, its profile is very unique. And then they started finding records in uh airfield's radar logs to say that they had spotted him, that nobody evidently got a hold of him.

And interesting, isn't it. Yeah, seem wrong. It seems a little weird that nobody contacted him more recorded, Hey, what the hell is going on? Yeah? I mean, it's if there's a plane, right basically a bogey that's not responding at all, and it's not that nobody plan and like there's a report of it being like heavily laden with munitions. They wouldn't see that that, but you don't know, like somebody might call I don't know any even if not thought that he had gone down somewhere in the area

of where he had broke formation. So that is one thing to keep in Even if they had didn't have reports of you know, him being having munitions or anything like that, it's still like a war vehicle that's not responding. That's just very expensive vehicle yet through. But that also you know, any of the any of the airspace that he was flying through, was like, oh, we don't know why that's there, but okay, you're not responding, no problem, we won't send someone to figure out what's going on.

You're definitely not going to do any kind of like terrorist e blowy uppy things. Well, now, the a of the airfields he was going past, you're talking about people that small, the small airfields. There's not like he was going past Denver International Airport and get picked up. Although that is the direction he ends up going. Yeah, so let's because because they were able to piece all this together,

we we have an idea of his path. So he after he breaks formation, he spotted flying northeast past Lake Roosevelt, which is in Arizona, and that itself is about a hundred miles or hundred sixty kilometers northeast of Phoenix and at about and that's at about twelve thirty. And then he's seen passing near Tell Your Ride, Colorado around one o'clock that day, one oh eight pm, which is kind of a weirdly specific time. But he's spotted near Montrose, Colorado.

When did he take off? He took off just before noon, just several minutes before twelve, so he made he made really good time. So in an hour and eight minutes they were able to puts around and then do a refielding thing and and and he was able to take off, well, takeoff, take off, I mean, when did he actually lift off from the ground Air Force base. I have not seen the time that his is his flight group left, I didn't see that recorded, so I can't I can't answer that.

All I do know is I know that the time that he broke away so I don't know exactly how long he was in the air. Um. So he then at that point, like I said, he goes from Montrose from that point. Before that point, I should say he had been coming in basically a straight line. He hadn't really been changing elevation, just he's cruising from here, is flying changes rather dramatically. He is seen flying in kind

of a zigzag pattern, and he's changing altitude. I think it was anywhere from sixteen thousand feet to four thousand feet. He's a great no, not a great idea in the Rockies, you're right. Um. So, here's what his path is is that after one oh eight, he turns a few degrees more east and now he's going even more easterly. About five minutes or ish later, he does a basically a hundred n eighty degree turn and now he's heading south.

And then about five minutes later he turns again, and now he's heading northeast again for approximately enter five or ten minutes. And these are all approximates because it's based on you know, sightings and stuff like that. But around one forty in the afternoon, the residents of Aspen in the area around it, they reported hearing a really loud explosion, and they said they saw smoke coming from the New York Mountain area, which is not far from gold Dust Peak.

It's no, it's basically right next door. Yeah, but then how far is that from Aspen Ballpark? I'm going to say that it's less than fifty miles, and that's a ballpark number off the top of my head. I didn't never actually trace the how far it was because I never got an exact point for where he hit. In other words, I never went to the uh satellite images and tried to find that. But I have a ballpark

about fifty miles and I'm probably wrong. Well, what, obviously, as as you've probably guessed by some of the things that we've said so far, what those people heard was Craig Buttons ten flying into the side of gold Dust Peaks and s okay, so I was wrong. It's three times as far as I thought. It was pretty dang close. Yes, probably too far to actually hear the sound of the plane crashing. No, just I think that they could hear a bit of an explosion, you know, it's muffled over

and like that, or maybe something else blew up. I mean, thanks, to blow up. They do. Yeah, so button hits. He strikes the mountain at about a hundred feet below its peak or thirty meters below its peak. And by the way, the elevation of the peak of that mountain is around two hundred feet, which is four thousand meters. When, by the way, whether was there cover, Yes, there was some cloud cover. He was seen flying around the clouds and ducking through holes in the clouds, coming in and out.

So that's why people think, well, it's weird. They were so straight and then suddenly he was flying around the weather. It's very strange that he would be doing that all of a sudden. But I'm guessing if he's at a lower altitude then it might become a problem at that point. Um okay. So, like I said, US Air Force to take him a couple of weeks to figure out what's

going on. They then start combing the area and they eventually find the crash site and they're able to get people onto the mountain, which takes a little bit longer because the weather is really bad. You know, it's April or snow, it's Colorado. When they get there, though, they discover several things. Uh. The first of which is that they find the wreckage of his plane, and they find his body, and they find the computer that is on

board the plane. But what they don't find is the bombs because because by the way, I didn't mention this, but his his training run was using live ammunition, and the war Hog was carrying four five hundred pound Mark two bombs. They are they're called the dumb bomb. They are not a guided missile of any way, shape or form. You you can, but these were not. It is a five hundred pound bomb that when it hits the ground, causes a big hole and blows stuff. Just a normal bomb.

It's kind of a general purpose explosives. It's not like a nuke or anything crazy. Conventional explosives, but you know, I mean obviously still devastating. Oh yeah, not so they flame the effort. They can flame trapnel for like a mile. Oh yeah, they And we'll talk about some of the specs on him in a bit, but they do. They do some serious damp. I just wanted to make sure we were talking like, no, no crazy weapons, so weird uranium trade or something like that. Bob, Yeah, I think

it goes. It's pretty it's pretty apparent he or the the US Air Force. As soon as they find everything and they figure out that the marketing twos aren't there, they start combing the entire area around the crash site. They make a very very intense I'm I'm guessing it's you know, it's I'm guessing that the kind of search they did was, you know, people on foot, not just circling overhead, because they're using things like ground penetrating radar.

Within a several mile perimeter of where the crash happens.

There's a lot of little lakes in that area, and so they actually started sending divers into those lakes with the idea that maybe the bombs dropped and they hit the water and they either were not activated or they didn't just didn't go off because they hit the water and sank, rather than going in those first and and of course this search, you know, like I said, it took him two weeks to figure out where where he was his plane had gone, and then couldn't get right

in right away, so it takes several weeks to get there. So we're looking at like a month or two lay eater, because they went and did an initial search and then they had to stop because of the weather. And then when they got back there, because obviously the snow melt had happened, the debris field has shifted downhill. So that's why it was kind of tough to figure out where everything was. But there's there's looking everywhere because they want to know where the hell are these bombs tiny? No,

they're not at all. They're they're pretty big. And the nice thing about the market D two is that the pilot has to arm the bomb. It is not as if they are flying around with something that it could just go off at anyone, because that's just foolish. But they were pretty sure that he hadn't armed the bombs, which is probably why they should just be laying somewhere

and easily found. It's unlikely because I mean, they knew as approximate flight course and so actually they flew over it looking for big craters, so that's one way to know that they did not. Yeah. Um, now there's a couple of things here that about it. That I said that the flight computer on the plane was found, and that would have recorded what he had done with the bombs. It would have it wouldn't have recorded say where he would have dropped them, but it would have said were

they dropped and were they armed wind dropped? I thought that wasn't the most weather resistant computer though. Oh it also wasn't very shock resistant because because the impact destroyed it and they couldn't recover any data off of it. I have read conflicting accounts of this next bit that we're going to talk about here, which is the racks on the wings of the plane. I've seen sources that said that they the racks were not disengaged. In other words,

I think of it as a clamp. Clamp is engaged, it's gonna be holding onto it, and disengaged it is going to be open. They said those clamps on the struts of the wings were still engaged, so he shouldn't have dropped the bomb. In other words, it couldn't. It's not as if when he dropped them they close again.

So in other words, I've heard it both ways too, Although if he had crashed with the bombs attached, they should have ripped free, and I would imagine also but also that the mounds would have been also seriously ripped corn off to Yeah, and the accounts that's that say that he released the bombs before I've actually found more credible than the other counts. So yeah, I think he released him well before crash and he made very well. And that's that actually is kind of the end of

the story, which actually just with two different mysteries. One what did did Button commits suicide? Because that's one of the main things you will hear. Why did he fly? What what happened? Why was he there? Why did he break formation? And to what happened to the market he twos? So we have two mysteries and we're gonna start with the first one that I just brought up, which is

did he or did he not actually commits suicide? Because that is the most popular one and you will see a lot of reporting on it, and you will get a lot of stuff from the U. S. Air Force that seems to indicate that he did intentionally commit suicide by Mountain m H. Just to clarify um real quick before we jumped into he was like like very talented right there. I knew that he was talented. He was

a good pilot. They don't let any idiot fly that point, right, But like compared to his peers, was he like, you know, way better? He was a flight instructor for several years, which I would take to indicate that he was skilled stuff. Um. And as after that, I couldn't. I couldn't comment on how he ranked among his his fellow airmen. Cool, Yeah, I would say, you've been flying for since he was seventeen. Yeah,

probably a good plot and a good pilot. Yeah. Okay, So first, before we even get into the theories, I am going to say reiterate what we said earlier, which is he was considered a straight shooter. He didn't smoke, he didn't drink, and there is nothing that ever came up in his body that ever said that he had any substance abuse issues or that he was drunk at the time or anything crazy like that. So those are easy things to just sweep out of the way. Initially,

there was also no evidence of hypoxia, right not. No, I didn't. I saw thoughts about that, and we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but I don't believe that that was the case. First first sub theory inside of suicide is the reason was family objections. From all of the accounts that I've read, Button was excited about the fact that he was going to get to transferred and go to Europe. He was happy where he was, and everybody seemed to think that he was in good shape.

But according to this theory, he was actually semi secretly struggling with his family's religious beliefs. His mother and father were Jehovah's witnesses, and they had been in that religion for they converted about twenty years prior to that. Now, officially the Jehovah's Witnesses, they don't serve in the military. They pacifists, they don't believe in doing that. Um, it's

against their beliefs. And based on his age and the how far back they had converted, I get the feeling that the family converted when he was a kid, you know, say ten twelve, somewhere in that age system. And I don't believe that he actually became a member of the church, which would explain why he went into the Air Force. But his wasn't. His dad also the World War two and Vietnam era pilot, yes, but that was prior to the conversion. So he did that and he served his

military career before finding his faith. According to this the thing is is that his mother, because of the religious beliefs, she was not happy about him being in the military, and she tried to convince him to leave the military on a very regular basis. Uh. In some families, that is known as nagging mom. I don't know how these conversations went, but I get the feeling that sometimes they weren't always the happiest affairs. But you know, I can

think of alternatives to suicide. If you've got that issue. Number One, mom gets your way. Number Two, you just don't talk to mom that much. There's there's a number of ways around this, but we're going to continue on with it. Even though Joe has a simple solution there,

that's what I would have done. So there he goes, Button experiences a crisis of faith when he realizes, as some people have said, he said, he was being trained to kill people, and it was this crisis that made him decide instead of just simply quitting to take his own life. To be it's probably a little more complicated than that. Very unsimplifying this a lot. Well. I just mean, if he did the r OTC program right, he owed

the U. S. Government a ton of money. If he were to say, hey, I know you guys just paid for me to full ride through four years of college. But I'm not saying that he like actively owed. But I don't think you can just drop out of the military two months after. But but they don't full ride,

you believe me. I remember, guys, I was in college at the same time as this guy, and I remember the kids in the r OTC program when I was there, and they it was they got a healthy amount, but it wasn't as if the the r OTC paid them a full ride because they hey, college kids are unreliable and they can't support every one of the little boogers. Well, okay, so he did, he was required to serve a certain amount of time. He would have owed them a lot

of money. That he definitely would. But I mean, don't go into the r OTC because their parents can pay for their college because they're from really well off families usually right, because they need help paying for it. Yeah, So I just I mean, I think it's a little more complicated than like, oh, he could have just quit his job. Well now, I mean, nobody's saying it could have quit his job, even you know, money aside. That's just not the way the military works. You signed, you

sign your papers year four years or six years. But you know, there's there's also the thing called the transfer. You can say, I have an issue. I am now I've I've taken on this faith and i cannot fly. And you know the military has to have somebody that cleans the bathroom. Well, he could have gone back to being a flight instructor. Yeah, he could have done a million things. But now here's the other thing is is, from what I've heard, he said he really enjoyed blasting

away with that thirty milita candy. And well, let's yeah, so that's the quote here and that's out. I mean, yeah, let's let's get to that right now. So we're gonna we're gonna go back to the family, which is the family had visited in March, both his parents, and they said it was a great visit and he was happy and there was no problems. Um, there was no disagreements.

And he apparently also he kept in touch with the people that he had been renting from when he was stationed in Texas, and he had written them a letter. Because this is back in the day when you still wrote real letters and sent them by mail letters such an antiquated system. But no, so he sends them a letter Strangely enough, they received that letter on the second of April, which is a little weird. But the letter says, actually, Joe, do you mind reading this? It's no, no, in your voice,

not in your German voice? Okay? Uh quote. Flying is going well. I love the ten Most everything we do is low level. I'll be dropping live bombs this week. The gun is a blast my phone for a week just recently, and I took them to the Grand Canyon. Would you believe they had never been there before? Unquote? So that's that sounds like a very excited, happy guy doing what he really likes to do. Yeah, who you could blow things up? Yeah? Well, flying through the air?

Are you kidding me? Oh? Yeah, I believe me. I had. My dad was in the military for years and he loved the fact that he got the blow stuff up. Yeah. I will just add to this theory. The thing that we always say around suicides doesn't mean that he had to have been I mean, you know, this isn't contingent on him have been, you know, particularly unhappy with that situation. He could have been hiding things. You know, people who appear happy killed themselves all the time. We don't want

to belittle that. But let's talk about some other theories. Yeah, so that is the end of that theory. So we're going to go to uh sub theory too, which is the jilted lover theory. I feel like every time we do anything that's like air disappear or military or both really together of military artist appearance, there's always the jilted lover, and there's always the next one. Oh well, well, what about the the naval ones. The naval ones always have it.

Half the US the UFO ones have this, and I actually, you know what, we should just make this a standard filler for all scripts. Actually don't. We just fell out a form anyway, we do see TPS report that's the one, not the TSP, the TPN. Yeah, the TSP TPS when

we fill up. Okay, so no, the jilted lover. According to this theory, when Button joined the Air Force, he had a relationship with another classmate, and according to this reporting, he kind of sort of asked her to marry him and she turned him down, and that apparently he took that quite hard and it took him several years to get over. She apparently called him at the in Christmas and I don't know if they talked or was just

left a message kind of scenario. I don't know. Um, I may be able to shed some light on this having dated someone who was in basic training ones, which I think is similar to this. You can't call them. I mean, well, they were both in the in the service, they were both she was also in the program. I don't know how that deals with at that point, but it's hard to get in contact with people who are in this sort of basic training. This is this is

well past his basic training. I'm sorry, in any kind of training situation in the military, it is hard to get a hold of somebody. Okay, possibly maybe not now, but maybe back twenty years ago. No, actually it's still kind of hardy. They cut down the lines of communication. They really kind of you get to have your cell phone out there in the trenches. No, it turns out that Google maps not so good with the trenches. Neither

his sirie. Okay, don't know what happens here is in nineties six Apparently she calls uh, he calls her back on the first of April, or calls her. I don't think they had had contact between Christmas, and then she's unable to talk at that time, though, and she takes his phone number down and then she calls him back on the fifth or the sixth of April, unaware that he had he had taken his plane and gone a wall.

According to this theory, after we know this a little bit about this lady, the theory goes that he realized that he was in love with her and she wouldn't talk to him, and that coupled with the fact no joke, this is part of the theory that he had bought a VCR at a copy of The Bridges of Madison County. That was what pushed him over the edge. So that the last movie that poor guy ever saw that's the

one that he bought with the VHS player. And by the way, this theory, this comes from the psychological autopsy that was by the US Air Force. And I've never heard of a psychological autopsy before. I can sort of see that. Can someone please tell me the plot of Bridges of Medicine County. It is a sad love not meant to be movie with Clint Eastwood and some other actress Barrel Street, and they they want to be but their lives won't let them and move. I never saw

that movie. I never want to Oh, I don't, I don't ever want to watch like fifteen minutes once and then I ran, I've literally never heard of it. So you'll be trying for weeks. I'm a bad girl. I guess you are that. You know what I mean? Seriously to me, I don't want to see Clint Eastwood on the screen without a gun in his hands. Know his son, Scott Eastwood. I would see him any day of the all right, you too back on topic here, So we're gonna move from that silly theory to another silly theory,

which is suicide sub theory three gay lover. Yep, this one's always in there as well. And I'm gonna say right now, I couldn't substantiate this except for a few places which mentioned a supposed undisclosed US Air Force insider who said that the Air Force had discovered that Craig Button was in the closet. No, this is something that came out and uh and has been out there for a while. Sorry that was a bad turn of phrase. Um,

but no, this was out there for a while. And that's it's really There's not a whole lot to this, Joe, nothing to back it up. That's one and a half paragraphs. Yes, and that's because I patted it with a little bit of history. So the story goes that one of Craig's previous lovers was planning to come forward and disclose their relationship. And today that doesn't seem like it's a big deal. I'm sorry, I'm air quoting. Wouldn't be a big deal. It wouldn't be a big deal to day, he shouldn't

be a big deal. But but at the time, this is ninety seven, and in ninety four, Bill Clinton had signed into effect Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which said that if you were a closet, if you were in the closet, you could be a service member, but if you were out of the closet, you could not serve in any branch of the U. S. Military. I mean, it's it's it's a it's a huge known thing. But that would have meant, according to this law, that means that this person coming forward would have been the end of his

military career, dish honorable discharge. Right, I'm not sure if no, no, not not by I mean in the days of McCarthy, Yeah, that had totally been a court martial but not not at this point. But I think it was a discharge. It was definitely wasn't an honorable discharge either, but I don't remember the specifics of how they did it. Yeah, there there's like honorable general and dishonorable. And I don't

think they're gonna waste time on a court martial. Even back in the old days, they just discharge you, Yeah, wasting time on a trial. Right, what about gay suicide Pact? No, no, I haven't and we're going to leave that alone because that's not anywhere in here. But you just made it up for fun. No, he just pulled it from a different one, you know. Oh, that's you're looking at the wrong TPS form that was on the other one from last week. Okay, so that is the end of the

he committed suicide theory. Let's now move into Craig Button was murdered theory. Yeah, because this one is well, this is interesting, is how I'm gonna put it. There's a gentleman by the name of William W. Warwick the Fourth. I read some of the stuff I have too. I've read a lot of his stuff actually, and he makes a lot of claims he's connected this story to some UFO sightings and he's he's jen really made a big stink on the internet about it. So here try to

connect this to like nine eleven. Uh, you know, he may have and I probably just didn't go that far through his stuff. It's how you can do that. But you know, he's very creative in his ways. He is. He's a very creative man. So here is what Warwick says. On the thirteenth of March. A series of unexplained lights are seen in the night sky over Phoenix. That is what is commonly referred to as the Phoenix Lights, and it is a UFO citing. It is something that we

may talk about in the future. So I'm just going to give the barest, simplest description of the event, which is that stationary lights were seen and described they were. They were first described as a pair, and then there was a third and then a fourth light, and then they went out, and then a new set of three lights. It appeared supposedly smaller lights were peeling off of them

and then coming back to them. And then there was also a triangular formation of lights that were seen in the sky at a different time and a different location of Phoenix. So there's this whole thing, like the whole city is freaking out because they see lights in the sky. That is the simplest version of the Phoenix Lights. Yeah, but I mean I've read a little bit about the Phoenix Lights. But actually it wasn't like everybody in the city saw these things, right, No, but a lot of

people reported it, A lot of people. But I mean out of the population of Phoenix, really a tiny percentage actually reported it, right. I don't I can't answer that. I don't know, Joe. I didn't do but the basest looking into the Phoenix light because I was really focused on what this guy's theory was for this. I didn't want to cover the Phoenix Lights that way. We have it open to someday talk about it there, Okay, Okay, So no spoilers from Joe, but I will because here's

what the U. S. Air Force says. They said that they actually had a set of a tens flying a nighttime mission in the area at that time, and they're responsible for the stationary lights because what was happening is they were on a night time practice bombing run. But rather than dropping munitions or live munitions. Even more so, what they were doing instead is they were dropping flares. Yeah,

it makes total sense. Well, if you think about flares from a far distance on a parachute floating through the sky, you could see how people would say, oh, well, that's weird. Is a stationary set of lights that's really strange. There's two,

now there's three, now there's four. So this is This is the Air Forces description of the events where it claims that it is a complete and total cover story, and that the lights really are UFOs, and that the US Air Force is covering for some reason for the e t s that were there, because of course they are, because of course they are literally what the US Air Force does. And Button he uh, he was possibly a member of the flight crew that was covering or chasing

the aliens. Mainly he makes his connection, I think because it was a tens and buttons and a ten pilot. But that's just my guess um. But Button, hearing all of this stuff four years later that's going on about the Phoenix lights, decides that he's gonna blow the whole thing wide open, and the U. S Air Force realizes that their only course of action is to kill him.

Of course, of course, Well here's a great thing this is, this is how he He makes a lot of suppositions here and this is the one I like the best, which is they decide to simply remotely control his plane and fly it into the mountain side for him, thus silencing him during this this training run. So they make him do some weird behavior and then just fly away. They the US Air Force. Then, uh, they well, you know, actually, I guess this kind of goes in two different directions.

They could have floated into the mountain in Colorado, or they could have just crashed his plane during the training mission. It would have been simpler because going on the Colorado is a joint pan of the butt. But then what they would do, remember we found a plane in Colorado

that was an E ten. They would have taken wreckage from an A ten and deposited it onto the mountain side along with his body, and then later on quote unquote found it to then keep their whole story stitched together as a sound of you guys so far, well go ahead. I guess I would say, like the zombie plane theory makes a lot of sense to me. This

is something that they talked about. We talked about a little bit maybe with MH three seventy where they are talking about with m H three seventy, know that they would have killed him and remote controlled the entire time from takeoff to land pilot controlled as piloted in the cockpit ever um, and that they would have done the whole mission so that the other people who were doing the mission could have corroborated the story that oh, yeah, he was totally in the air with us, and he

was alive, and then he you know, went then he went off and did his own thing, and like who knows what happened, and that none of them would be in on it, but that the higher ups would go and crash them into the side of a mountain, the closest mountains they could find, which is probably about Colorado. Okay, the closest uninhabited mountains. You know, there's mountains. They are not the only hard surface on the planet, believe it

or not. Turns out the planet itself is quite hard, and it turns out and it and it turns out for something like that. If you really need to kill him, you just have have your hitman stabbed him or strangle him, and in order to remote control the plane all the way to Colorado, you get agree with the controller and and you gotta have somebody who installs it on the plane. So there's there's a whole there's a whole thing that. Yeah, there's a whole lot. And I have not heard of this.

We are able to remotely control and a ten. You would think that you would not want to have that ability on a plane so that your enemy could not hijack your own plane against you. You're not going to

lead that stuff just you know, and routinely installed. But that's my point is that in order to remote remotely control one, you'll have to have a whole team of guys develop all this stuff and install it on the plane just to take out one dude, Yeah yeah, or technically possibly take out two, as we're going to find out. Yeah maybe, But it would be a lot easier just to put put a bomb on the plane, very easy. That's that's that's detonated by an altimeter and you only

need one assassin to do that. Are better still just murder I'm und parking lot somewhere and and that way you don't lose it's a random crime, Yeah you don't. You don't lose an expensive airframe. So we're all in agreement that this is kind of fetched in the farest forest reaches of the land, but I'm gonna keep going

with it. It's it's that actually as absurd as as the idea that they killed him somewhere else and then it just got some random wreckage from an a tenants And well, let me let me, let me keep going with this, because this is where this goes. Is that Warwick again he is saying that, Okay, what's an obvious clue that they planted this thing there? Well, one of the things is is that the search helicopters when they were looking for him, they saw paper fluttering around on

the mountain side, and that's how they figured out. And then they saw the metal and they figured out they were in the right spot. And he says, well, how can there be paper there when he he drove the plane into the mountain, and how would paper survive the

obvious fireball that was gonna happen. Well, I guess more of my question is like, how would paper survive the you know, onslaught of it was a map supposedly was just gives his flight maps that were flo that were just enough blowing around and stuff I don't know that it had been snowing or or if it was just really cold, crappy conditions. But they said that there was

paper flying around and it was supposedly a map. But if we keep going with this, they then say that because um, there's further evidence that this is going on, is that two weeks after he died or after his accident, he dies. Uh. There is a U. S Air Force captain named Amyba. I'm gonna hope that's how you pronounce her name. She died in a ten accident as well. Um, And according to him, and this is totally according to work. I haven't seen this anywhere else. She was his trainer

when he was in Texas. So that's that's a This is a giant leap of faith that he is saying. Now, there's a lot of problems obviously, as we talked about, there's the whole remote controlling of a plane is really weird. And I also I also have to push back on the there would have been this giant fireball, so there shouldn't have been any paper because one of the things that you need to have for a giant fireball is

a fuel source. When they did the math, they figured out that at the very most, when his A ten crashed into the side of gold Dust Peak, it had maybe five minutes of fuel left, if any. So this thing he was running on empty, which means when he went in there would have been some fire, but it wouldn't have been as if he went in with a full tank and it is a giant movie scene style explosion then incinerate everything. Yeah, things don't don't explode generally speaking,

in like they do in the movies. But autopilot is a thing, right, Like the autopilot could have been switched on. It doesn't need to be remote control, like falling around could have been autopilot, and then he could have just run out of going into our next serio. Actually perfect, so let's let's let's go there because the next the next theory is that he was incapacitated and or it was an accident. So the theory goes that there there

is talk that he suffered some kind of accident. We're pretty sure that it couldn't have been hypoxia because that should have shown up in his in his blood work as far as I understand it at least, But for some reason other than that, he was rendered unconscious and

the plane was on autopilot almost the entire time. Now, that's kind of easy to discount because of the fact that at the last twenty minutes or whatever it was, he was seeing changing elevations, zig zagging back and forth, going through cloud formations like that doesn't that's not what an autopilot does. Autopilots don't shut off all your radio

and exactly. That's also a very very good point. And if there was a problem, why wouldn't he have simply ejected the plane from the plane, Because by the way, when you eject the the it sends out a beacon. You know, it's a come fined me, rescue me kind of beacon automatically on purpose. So I seem to remember somewhere that pilots of the eight tens could shut that off so that the enemy couldn't find them. But I gets off the back of my head, I pull that.

I'm not sure exactly that would make sense. That does make sense. I'm pretty sure that you can. Yeah, But I mean this this whole he had some kind of accident that incapacitated him kind and then he flew on all up pilot till he suddenly woke up then crashed into the mountain. It makes me think of like something that would happen in the the epic chicken fight scene from Family Guy. Now, this is like one of those random things that they fall through and they hit a

plane and you know, something happens. It's it's it's really out there and there isn't isn't actually any evidence to support that it was just some random, weirdo accident other you know, I don't know. I mean, I wanted to be just some random accid. I mean I wanted to be He was on autopilot and he came to and he realized he's out of fuel and he's trying to search for some place to land. But just nothing that

really shows that's what he was doing. It doesn't make any sense because, like we talked about, he could have turned everything back on to find somewhere to go. Yeah, he could have decided to go rogue and everything and somehow got lost in the clouds and didn't realize there was a mountain in front of him. He could have misjudged his descent because like we said, he hit a hundred feet for the peak he would it could have been let's say he was out of fuel and he

was just gliding. He may have thought I've got this, I've got this, I've got this. Oh crap, I don't got this. But then again again, why not punch out? Why not get out of the airplane at that point? So I don't know, it's really strange if he was if he actually was in clouds and didn't realize he was about to fly into a mountain, then boom. That's a good point. If he was gliding through cloud coover thinking he was safe. Yeah, and it could have been he needed to be a hundred feet to the right

and the left or where he where he impacted. Um, yeah, I mean that's so that's the end of did he commit suicide? Was he killed? Was in an accident? Of those? I don't either to be gone. I've ping ponged all over the place on this. Yeah. Okay, So let's move on to mystery number two, which is what happened to the Mark eight twos. So the first theory of the Mark eight twos is that he did not actually drop them. Like I said, the US Air Force they scoured everywhere

and they don't find him. Ground penetrating radar metal detectors. They're pretty sure that the weapons aren't armed. The reason I say I think that they believed there weren't armed is that if they had been armed, upon impact, they would have gone blue. And those that two thousand pounds of munitions would have made a very big impact. Five pounds, well yeah, five times four exactly. Sorry, I was doing math, I'm not. I don't. I'm not known for doing math.

I'm not, I admit it. But yeah, So it's that that two thousand pounds of munitions would have made a big hole in the ground, and somebody would have reported that probably, well they should have seen that would have blown snow off the ground. I'm guessing, um now, And I went to the manufacturer's website because you can find this enough on the internet to look up what does the A two or they excuse me, the mark eight two do and it blows it? Yeah, they they're they're

engineered to blow up. But they make a they make a crater that is anywhere from fifteen to thirty feet in diameter or five to ten and they make a crater that is anywhere from three to thirteen feet deep or one to four meters. So a single one makes that size hole. All four together should have made a

really big hole. Um there. And now something I will bring up because this is something I thought about initially, was well, what if the bombs didn't go off initially, but then in the crash and the heat of the fire they went off. And that is something that can happen. There's a term, it's called uh cooking off, Yeah, cook off, and that is when an external heat source or thermal source effects ammunition to the point that it sets it off.

It makes it explode like you know, it falls into the burning hull of a ship, and that which happens in enaval accidents, and eventually the fire causes those to go off, which is then a whole series of problems. Well, you would think that except like we talked about, he had almost no fuel on left on the plane, so there wouldn't have been enough heat to cause cook off because these things are rated for two and a half

minutes of high temperatures. So well. Plus also the bombs should have been torn off the wings when he hit right right, and those you know what are you what are we calling them? The clamps? Clamps? Yeah, the clamps, the clamps. Clamps would have obviously been destroyed, should have been destroyed. There should have been evidence of the explosives in terms of residual chemicals, should have been should have been obvious when they analyzed the parts. Yep, none of

that was around. There should have been trapnel mile or so away, but closer to Yes, So there's there's all these things that should would indicate if they had gone off, and none of that indicates that that was the case. And or and if they hadn't gone off, they should have just been laying in the wreckage. So that means that they didn't drop them. Theory is kind of on shake ground. So we're now going to go into he

did drop though. I read a really interesting article which pointed out really good thing that I had not thought of at all, which is the effect of that two thousand pounds of munitions on his fuel. Well that's yeah, that's it's the drag is going to cause is gonna you know, cost him fuel, and he probably could not have made it nearly as far as he did had

those weapons been on board the whole time. Now, he only traveled about right you know when I when I tracked it, I had it at six hundred fifty, but I've seen it called eight hundred miles, so we're just gonna stick with eight hundred miles. So, yes, he traveled about eight hundred miles total, which is I mean the rain. We were looking this up earlier. The range of a fully fueled board hog is something like twenty five hundred miles, so he obviously wasn't full of fuel when he went

down or when he started the journey. Yeah. So the likely answer here then, based on that fuel consumption issue, is that he must have dropped them. And these folks really point out they make a good argument, which is that he probably dropped them right away because he was in an area that was known for being a practice range. So it's entirely possible that he could have dropped them unarmed. Let's say he dropped them unarmed and they fall into

this this firing range. They could have been buried by subsequent explosions from other bombs that are dropped in practice runs, or maybe they were hit a direct hit set them off. I know, the chances that are really minute, but it's something that could have happened, but you wouldn't and if they were live, good luck discovering that crater from the eight thousand craters that are next to it. This is obviously from Craig Button Light. Yeah. They also the other

thing too is you know these things have fans. They're gonna they're gonna go in kind of like they go down and they have a sharpol nose on him. They could just bury themselves in the ground. They could actually. Have you guys seen the did you ever do any looking at the fins that are available for these things? They what is it the snake guy? Is that the one that they called they have that is it's just weird.

It's his fin that you know, you think of fins on a missile and there their upright and it you know, it's kind of guides it. Well, this is actually they're a parachuting fin and they create drag, they flare out and wind pushes them. It slows the bomb down. Yeah, it's not exactly a parachute, but yet and there's this four of them and they're just you know the same place that the fins would be. They slow it down. Yeah, and so it was really interesting. But that that is

one thing. If if it was if the Mark eight twos were equipped with something like that, I wouldn't be as willing to say maybe they nosed it and buried themselves, because those fins are meant to slow them down. I didn't see any mention that they had that special kind of They didn't mention anything in the reporting of what these things were equippedment there than they were the basic

market E two. Yeah, well, I mean it seems like that's what you would train with, right, you train with the cheapest Oh yeah, you don't pet the fancy things on there. We're gonna give you the fully decked out rig the first time. Good luck. Well there, yeah, the whole the snake as if I can't remember, pretty sure that's what it was. But yeah, the fins really really

low altitude. They are in slow and slow movements because the idea for everybody that's listening the idea here is that if this finn is not there, the bomb will drop and strike the target fast enough that it will throw shrapnel back up into the plane that actually dropped it. So that's why they're slowing it down to give the plane time to get away exactly. And it's low air speed. Yeah. So he was only into his training course for what two months? Two months, so he's probably was, and this

was his first live AMMO run. He wasn't running though level, so which means that they should have had enough speed. Yeah. Possibly in a very till old up gunnery range, the things could have very easily buried themselves. But that doesn't explain why then they would say that it didn't look like the racks had been disengaged. So I don't know.

The more credible sources I've seen and say that their acts looks like the bombs have been dropped, and I would believe that, But the racks not being disengaged idea leads us into our last sub theory of what happened to the market E two's, and that is the he

sold them or gave him away theory. And you will see this out there occasionally, and this is one of those theories that gets bandied about, and when it comes up, it's usually followed by that person the name of that person's favorite terrorist organization, and the theory basically goes Craig Button, he flies somewhere, he lands, they unload the bombs, and then he takes off. Okay, why he then takes off and flies into a mountain. Well, maybe he wasn't actually

on the plane. Maybe he did actually punch out and he had a dead body in the cockpit, or maybe he you know, it was a pig or a decoy or something like that. You know, so he got away all a dB Cooper. But you know, you would think, well, the US Air Force should know that, a the freaking the the ejection seat is gone and this is a pig. But then again, hell, if we're gonna keep going this way, maybe they're in on it. And so they're covering the whole thing up, which adds even more layers of absurd

complexity to this whole story. Well, you know, the cockpits and these things are not exactly really exactly, and and also smuggling and corpse across the airfield climbing into the plane with it. You know, what nobody knows in it. What I was getting at is that if he when he stopped at his clandestined, that's when they loaded the extra corps. And well, you know, maybe he did some fancy mcgiver wizzywig stuff with a computer and we took

off on autopilot by itself. And then the pig woke up, and the pig was steering in the plane and That's why it went back and forth, because Cuber Wilber Wilbur realized that there was a problem. Yeah, I guess that was kind of the reason I was asking, like, was

he an exceptionally talented pilot? It was it possible that the air Force was looking to do something kind of clandestine and they didn't They were looking for somebody to and he was tapped for that, and he's tapped for that, and they said, we're gonna pay a bunch of money,

just get out of here. I don't think it's likely, but you know, that was I guess why I was kind of asking the bombed like a cannabis farmer or something like well, or just you know, they were or they were trying to sell these munitions or whatever, that he flew some black black opposite of Black Book operation of some kind. Yeah, it seems really unlikely, but literally everything in this entire story seems super unlikely. So I

guess I'm willing just as willing to say. You know, my my UFO theory is that he was abducted by aliens and they stole communitions because they wanted to investigate what humans were capable of, and then they dropped him back into airspace, and suddenly he was like, I don't know where I am. I don't know what's going on. I just got abducted by aliens into the side of the mountain. Well, if if we're gonna go with that, then he should also be shutting. Why is this big

chicken punching me? Because that's just as likely. Well, they're all, yeah, I really, well, actually there's another possibility. Okay, you know, I mean maybe he maybe he took something like you know, I don't want to don't laugh. There's always ergo er good, of course, but also it was also you could have eaten some mushrooms not realizing that there was that there were the special kind, you know, or something like that, or somebody's loiked them some LSD. It's always kinds of weird.

I mean, there's right that could cause using that is that is not outside the realm of possibility evidence, of course, And of course they didn't find anything those blood streams, so that's the hard part. In fairness, though it doesn't always take drugs to have a psychotic break. He could have had a psychotic break. It's true. He could have

thought that he was being chased. That's why could have been hallucinating in some way, shape or form doing these evasive maneuvers and through the clouds and stuff like that. But it doesn't explain where the bombs went or anything. So yeah, maybe the bombs will turn up. I mean they scoured those lakes, every lake around there. For example, that would have been a logical place for him to drop the bombs lake It totally would have the most

most lakes and places like that. Couldn't have very salty bottoms. They could, they could vary. It took him a long time to get around the searching those things. But they were, it wasn't I mean they were. They had divers, they were using equipment, you know, metal detectors and stuff like that. You think that they would have found them, and I know detectors, they metal detector I know that they were

using metal detectors. And I remember seeing images of guys walking through water and they had these weird handle contraptions, part of which we're in the water because they were doing the searching, which I believe was some sort of radar or metal detecting device. I don't remember now that you asked me. If you hadn't asked me, I probably wouldn't be able to do it imprompted, but that's the way it always works. So yeah, I guess I don't. I don't have a good theory for either. I don't either,

all right, I think he just went nuts. So it's a it's a it's a unanimous it's family guys, right, Yeah, Okay, Well, let's go ahead and give you the important bits that I know everybody likes to hang on for. First off, we do have a website. That website is we do. That website is Think King Sideways podcast dot com. You can go there and find this in all episodes. There will be some links for our red from our research for each and every episode on there. You will also

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