The Rumor Equation

especially ancient Tibetan style music. We ask about their diet and you eat vegetables. They like vegetables, and their favorite dish or snack is ice cream, especially strawberry. On October four, Mike Ferrell, best known as Matches B. J. Huneycutt, hosted a very strange television show called UFO Cover Up Live. The show purported to be a revelatory look into what the US government and the Soviet Union, among others, knew

about UFOs. It took the form of a series of apparently rehearsed sit down interviews between Ferrell and various UFO investigators, including Bill Moore and a couple of supposed government insiders who were hidden in shadows and spoke with distorted voices. It was the culmination of a year's long effort by the government to introduce new narratives into the UFO community. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals. Episode eleven,

The Rumor Equation. In the late nineteen seventies and eighties, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations employed Richard Doughty to spread disinformation within the UFO community. The result was not only to cause confusion at the time, but also to create new aspects and strains in the developing UFO folklore. One of the striking features of the misinformation was just

how outlandish the stories were. In the last episode, we heard about Paul Benowits being fed information that led him to believe that hostile aliens were based around and under Archiletta Mesa and that they posed a threat to humanity. During this episode, we'll learn about another bold misinformation campaign, and it raises the question why was the government trying to convince people of such outrageous stories. Wouldn't it be better to spend something a little more restrained. Utah State

Folklore Professor Lynn McNeil. There's actually a really cool, old old study that was done by some psychologists looking at rumor and how rumor works in folk cours know that rumor and legend are really similar, and they came up with what they called the rumor equation. And no, this is not deeply scientific, but it's pretty revealing when we think about it. What they said was that the reach of any rumor, the power of a rumor, the spread of it, is equal to the topics importance multiplied by

its ambiguity. If we have a topic to us that's incredibly important, but we have all the info, but we're going to talk about it. There's gonna be new stories about it, but we're kind of gonna rest easy. We're gonna be like, Okay, really important, Thank goodness, we know every thing. If we have a topic that's incredibly ambiguous but we don't really care, then we're sort of like, whatever, I don't need to know, it doesn't matter to me.

The minute you start that multiplying, exponential growth of something that is both unbelievably important. So of course we can use this as a barometer for our culture. Right what has always been important to us, our military security, the lives and safety of our children, our personal health, anti violence, anti crime, things like that, plus or multiplied by this question of ambiguity. I don't have the answers. I don't know the answers. It's possible someone is trying to keep

the answers from me. You put those things together, and you are just asking for a wildfire spread of rumor of legend of conspiracy theory. So, in fact, a story with outsized implications would be more effective than a more restrained one that on its face might seem more plausible. And that's important to keep in mind as we look at the effort by Richard Doughty and others to feed information into the world of UFO believers through, in particular,

a man named Bill Moore. You may remember Bill Moore from the last couple of episodes. He was one of the researchers for and authors of the Roswell Incident, which brought the Roswell crash story back to the public after years of being ignored. He was also the person that Doughty used to pass a memo to Paul Benewitz that contained allusions to Project Aquarius and m J twelve, which we will hear more about in this episode, but his

relationship with Doughty predates the Benewit's affair. Here's Rich you're Doughty. Well, Bill Moore came to my attention and something that was entirely different than a UFO matter. Bill wasn't providing any secret or classified information. He had a contact with a person inside the Soviet Union who worked for the Russian Academy of Science, and the government was interested in that

particular scientists for a number of different reasons. So the idea was to make a contact through Bill to try to get this uh scientists as a cooperating person for the United States government, and it actually worked out well for the government. During this time, according to Doughty, Moore was also telling him information about two civilian UFO research organizations, a PRO and mouf On, and this information was apparently

of some interest to the government. But then in the meantime Bill wrote the book about Roswell, where with Blitz. The book contained about six of what Bill had gathered. There's a large portion of his research that was never published. Well, we were interested in what he didn't publish, and Bill was open to us, and he provided that information to us and a lot of that information pertained to secretive things that Bill had learned during his time researching it.

So here things get a little tricky because the account we have of how More got involved in the business of passing what he believed to be secret government information back to the UFO community doesn't quite square with what we just heard from Doughty. Author Greg Bishop is a friend of Moore's. He wrote the book Project Beta about Doughty's operations involving Bennewitz and More. Here he talks about how More came to be recruited into this effort. He

got involved because he wrote the Roswell Incident. Him and Charles Burretts actually did most of the research, and Charles Burletts form a triangle guy, did most of the writing. And anyway, so More was doing interviews about the book. He was on a book tour and somebody called him at one of the radio stations and said, you're the only person that seems to know what they're talking about. We'd like to meet with you. And this this is the second time it happened. The first time he said,

I can't meet with anybody. I'm going to my next book stop. And this time he was an Albuquerque. He said he did have a day so he met this person turned out to be Falcon, as he's known in the book. Um. That was a name that More and his partner gave to these people. More in his partner, a man named Jamie Shanderay, gave code names based on birds to the different people from the government that they dealt with. This will become a little complicated later when

more than one person will be known as Falcon. But at this point, the guy named Falcon is not Richard Dody. We don't, in fact know for sure who it was. They just called at the aviary and gave all the people they had contacts with bird names so that they could talk about them on the phone to People wouldn't know who they were talking about if they were listening in on the phone. Here's Bill Moore on the show

UFO Cover Up Live talking about his recruitment. I got a phone call after appearing on a radio show from a man who said, you're the only person we've heard talk about this subject who seems to know what he's talking about. He convinced me that he was a government intelligence agent and wanted to begin disseminating some information about UFOs to the public and the man Bill is referring to his Falcon whom we've seen in shadow to protect his identity. That's right. I didn't think that I could

handle it all alone. The volume of material I was getting from Falcon was rather mind boggling. So I got together with Jamie. Jamie is fellow UFO researcher Jamie Shandray. This government intelligence agent offered More an arrangement. Other UFO

researchers were interested in things around military basis. So what they told More was, if you could a tab on what people are talking about and what information is going through the uf OL community, so we know who knows what, then we will give you information basically what everybody says. It's disclosure. They said they'd give him official government documents on UFOs, so he said, yeah, sure, I'll do it. It's not entirely clear who first met with More, but

Richard Doughty became his handler. More was valuable because he was a respected UFO investigator who had worked with the two main civilian UFO groups, a Pro and Moufon. Bill had a both feet right in in with these groups. He was trusted and so Bill agreed to provide us information that the UFO groups were gathering. And I would say most of the information that was provided to us

with mundane stuff that we weren't really interested in. But there was some information that was being gathered by the new Found groups, a new Found or appro group that was of interest to the government, and it pertained to sightings.

People who were reported sightings, sightings that were never publicized, people who would report a sighting or a close encounter that occurred at a certain place, and we were interested in those cases because of connections with research, whether it was maybe one of our craft's highly classified craft that was being seen at certain locations, or just keeping track of what the et s are doing. This is an

interesting comment from Dodi. The first part seems reasonable that the government was trying to determine whether UFO researchers were observing secret military projects, and then at the end he suggests that they were also trying to keep tabs on what aliens were up to. At the risk of stating the obvious, the two reasons for government is given here range wildly in terms of plausibility, and this is where again I'll remind everyone that Richard Doughty is a former

professional counterintelligence agent. He spread misinformation for a living, and I feel pretty sure he did during our conversations. I don't think it makes sense to put much stock in anything he says. But what he says is interesting, even

if it's not literally true. George Mason University Professor Deborah L. Tanzi Shutika, even if a story, even if you're conmpletely convinced that someone is lying to you, when someone tells you a story, I think that the important thing to consider is, you know, like, why are they telling this particular story? What does this communicate about them? Their community, um, their belief system, et cetera. Our job is to analyze, like their ability as a storyteller. You know, are they

a good story toller? Are they engaging? You know, are they able to hold their audience? Folkloreists are here to judge the quality, context, and content of a story, more and more interested in the event itself as an event and what it communicates about the people and their community. When you're part of a community, you're going to have developed a repertoire of stories that are part of that communal folklore. Right. It's like almost like when Christians have

conversion experiences. All those stories kind of have similar elements that have been refined by the experience of being in the community. So what's interesting to think about as we listen to Richard Doughty is this we know that he was spreading stories to make UFO researchers believe that they were on the trail of actual aliens rather than secret defense projects. Why tell the particular stories that he did.

What does that tell us about the beliefs of the UFO community and what they were willing to accept into the developing UFO folklore. With add in mind, here's Richard Doughty again. The government knew, at least at the briefing I was given in Night, that Earth has been visited. I mean, we had two crafts, we had alien bodies. We had one alien that was alive telling us different things, briefing us about his society, his planet. So we knew. The government knew that Earth has been had been visited.

Now since seventy eight, I had received knowledge of other e t races that had been visiting Earth that didn't come until later. So that wasn't a surprise to the government in the military and intelligence community, because we knew it. That information just never got out to the public, I mean officially. The reason is that a lot of the information that was coming through the UFO community pertained to

classified projects that we were working on. Some might have been reverse engineering of an alien craft, or some might be our own craft that we developed. Doty says he wasn't briefed on the technological origins of these projects. He also says he witnessed some strange things. I saw some things fly at Area fifty ones that were probably not from this Earth, but that wasn't the information that they

wanted to get back from more. But what Bill was reporting to us were mostly incidents involving our crafts, highly classified crafts such as the F one seventeen, the Aurora, some highly classified drones that we had back then, and people were seeing these things and reporting of and as UFOs, which in fact they were post of the Skeptoid podcast

Brian Dunning. Back in the days of the Cold War, the U S was developing things like the U two, the S R seventy one, and then the most significantly, the F one seventeen, a stealth fighter, and the Air Force had very legitimate security concerns about not letting the

Soviets find out about these programs. And yet on the mountaintops around every Air Force base in the US were these groups of UFO researchers with their telescopes trained at the base who believed, for whatever reason, that the UFOs hiding aliens or or whatever it was, here's these UFO

researchers watching the Air Force. The Air Force had, I believe a legitimate concern that these UFO researchers might get a real photo of an F one seventen, which then might, by being published wherever, fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. And what we had to do was we had to convince through Bill that what they were seeing was hey UFOs and not some highly classified government craft. You might call that disinformation. We call it counterintelligence, and

that's part of it what Bill was doing. They were giving information about the government's dealings with alien races in exchange for information about the movements of these UFO groups and whether there might be any Soviet agents infiltrating them, because realistically, it does make sense that Soviet agents would infiltrate UFO groups if they were doing things like getting on mountaintops and actually getting footage of F one S stealth fighters right that that actually makes sense. It was very,

very very easy. I gotta remember every member or most members of the UFO community, where if you wanted to try to convince them of something, you did just had to plant an idea to with him because they were already believers. It wasn't very difficult to do that. And that was a type of information that we wanted the UFO group to spread within to keep away from the fact that that craft was really a highly classified US government craft and it's it's a form of counterintelligence. I mean,

it wasn't difficult to do. I mean we didn't have to go through any elaborate means to do it. We had just had to tell somebody that was a UFO and they would believe it. In addition to the exchange of information and disinformation, a second strange effort was undertaken that created a narrative of incredible scope, an effort that would bring more and Shanda Ray deeper into the government's

campaign against the UFO community after the break. Remember in the last episode, Bill Moore passed Paul Benowit's a doctored memo that included references to Project Aquarius and a group called m J twelve. That was the first known mention of these two elements of what would become a much larger narrative. The second part came with the delivery of a package to Jamie Schanderrey Greg Bishop. He was set this package with the Eisenhower briefing document in which everybody

knows about now Brian Dunning. The background on that is the m J twelve, Majestic twelve the full name. It's a document, it's about three page is long. What it

purports to be is a letter. It's a memo written by the Director of the CIA in nineteen fifty two and addressed to President Eisenhower, and what it's doing is advising him of the existence of this group called Majestic twelve, which is twelve scientists and military officials who were assembled in ninety seven after the Roswell landing crash from the TV special UFO cover Up Live. This is the man code named Falcon. He is presenting this information about m

J twelve as facts that he knows. As an intelligence operative. M J twelve was a group of people with the government. MJ TWOB was created by President Truman, then their job was to investigate the track of information pretending to UFOs. Part of their job was scientific a maanscements, but the primary purpose was to keep track of the information coming in on the UFOs and to analyze the information, both scientifically and in a way that would advance our technology.

There are government officials and elected officials that are thematically brief in the existence of the m J twelve activities. These officials include the President, the Vice President, as elected officials, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the director of their national security agency. The m j Twealth Policy is headquartered the Naval Observatory in Washington, d C. The United States Navy has the primary operational responsibilities of field activities relating

to the end AH world policies. All information gathering in the field, not necessarily by Navy personnel, is transmitted to the Navy for analysis. Other known government agencies feed information to m J twelve through a top secret cover project known to US his Project Aquarius. That was Bill Moore on the same program. Chandore wasn't the only person to receive those documents more and at least one other researcher did as well, but Shandera was the first to publicize them.

That original memo that came out and was sent out both to a. Bill Moore and Jamie Schanderrey and Toothy Good in Britain. In fact, they were forced to release it because they said, if you sit on this any longer, Tim Good is going to release it and you won't get any credit. So I think at the national UOFO conference in Burbank here in El l a and the early eighties, they introduced the MJ twelve documents and said they didn't know if they're real or not, but the

thought that probably they were. So somebody was sending this to UFO authors, not to scientists, not to reporters, not to anyone with any kind of mainstream credibility, but to UFO authors. They were hoping that someone would publish this in the UFO literature. So once it appeared with Jamie Schandra, Jamie Schandra developed the film, looked at the pages, shared it with some of his other UFO buddies, and it

kind of entered the pop culture at that point. So if we can accept that that is the correct history of what happened, in my opinion, based on the research that I've done, I do accept that that's the correct history of where it happened. It did show up at multiple people's doorstep with no known origin. Nobody knows who sent it, so who wrote it? Who was trying to

get information out to UFO authors? Well, if some real information, they're the last people in the world you would have sent it to, Right, you would have sent it to someone with a little bit more credibility. You've given it to The New York Times. I think the default assumption is that it's a forgery, reasonably obviously, the question is who forged it. As the years went on, at this point More it's not pretty much convinced. He is convinced that it was totally posed, but at the time more

shander Ray and others had not reached that conclusion. They researched the original documents in great detail and discovered others, generally with the help of cryptic clues pointing them in the direction of documents that seemed likely to have been planted Jamie Chander Ray and Bill Moore. And then they were follow up postcards ethiopenial picture postcards mailed from New Zealand with puzzles and riddles. Right, the puzzles were clues

for example for a stylish loop shop simp Land. This at us to the National Repository in Suitland, Maryland, where we discovered the existence of top secret documents and filed the freedom of information request, which led us further to the Coupler Twining document. Legendary UFO researcher Stanton Friedman had worked with Bill Moore on the investigation into the Roswell crash, and he again worked with more on trying to verify

the legitimacy of the m J twelve documents. Here he is talking about this treasure hunt in the government files. You'll notice a slight difference in where these files were actually found. My colleague has got some postcards, crazy postcards talking about going to Washington. They've gotten a postcard and said from box one something like that, I place in New Zealand, crazy place more in Chanderay went to Washington,

d C. To see what they could find. But when they got there, I had been told that they were declassifying the Air Force Headquarters files. They went to those and they found this document between pages and folded up as if it had been in somebody's pocket. And it was in box one, which is quite unexpected. Anyway. It's just a brief note, but it says NSC National Security Council m J twelve Special Studies Project, and the name on it is Robert Cutler. He was Ike's Special Assistant

to the President for National security. And he's just telling General Twining that a meeting will take place during an a race scheduled meeting instead of after it as originally instructed to it. This is the Cutler Twining document that More mentioned earlier. It is generally considered to be another forgery. More eventually wrote a book called the m J twelve Documents.

It's about a hundred pages long. It's just an analysis of all the documents that he got that he could talk about or thought that we're promising, and then a great as to whether he thought they were imminist partners, that they were real or not, and half for more of them they said, you know, probably not real or not not enough information to tell. But at this point he says, no, I don't think there's anything real to

it at all. It's the actual people in it, because those people, of course did exists, and the Majestic twelve people were supposedly in contact with the aliens and knew all about them and everything. And so once this document came out, which didn't happen until that has sort of become a foundational document for many of the in the UFO community who believed that this serves as a flute proof that the government not only knows about alien contact

but maintains active diplomatic relations which them. So that's that's the story of m J twelve, But it's still with us, and people still believe that that's a real group that has some kind of per view over UFO information. And as far as I'm concerned, it's just some group that somebody in the government somewhere decided that they want UFO researchers to think had some activity with the subject. I'm

concerned that's not true. It's just a red herring. An outcome of the MJ twelve documents initiative was UFO Cover Up Live, which we've heard from in this episode. Among other things, the show covered m J twelve talked to Soviet scientists, and featured two alleged government insiders who are filmed in shadow and had their voices altered. On this bizarre program, the advanced UFO and alien storylines to a television audience. This excerpt starts with host Mike Farrell asking

the man known as Falcon about extraterrestrials. We asked, Falcon, where do you found out so much about extraterrestrial biological entities or e v s. This book, or all the Bible within the m G Wall community contains historically everything that occurred from the Truman era helped through the Three Aliens being Yes the City, United States government, technological data gathered from the aliens, medical history gathered from the aliens,

and we're found in the desert, autopsy information gathered from dead aliens found in the deserts, and information obtained from the extra terrestrials regarding their social structure and their information pertaining to universe? Was there an additional source of information? Presently, as of the United eighty eight, there is one extra terrestrial being. He's a guest of the United States Government

and he's remained hidden from public view. The Yellow Book is a book that was exclusively written by the Second Alien.

The book relates to the Aliens, planet, solar system sons, the culture and society make up on the planet, the social structure of aliens and aliens, life among Brothleys, now Condor tells us about a deal our government made with the aliens from what he understands, and the green sign between our our US government and the extra astrials, and there's such an agreement says that we won't disclow your existence if you do not, and we allow you to

operate from the designated baser. United States gets in the state of the Veta in an area called think back to last episode and Paul Bennowitz's Project Beta report that includes his warnings about the dangers of signing a treaty with the aliens. Two people in the UFO community familiar with that storyline this exchange both supports and expands on it. Anyway. The man in the shadows during this show, who has identified as Falcon, is thought by many people to be

Richard Doughty. He's even listened as such on the IMDb website. Doughty, however, disputes this number one. I wasn't that wasn't me. I wasn't on that program. No, but I had some meetings with the producers of that program, and they wanted me to come on in uniform. They wanted me to come on and disguise. They wanted me I refused to, but I was busy. I was someplace entirely different at that

time period, but people claimed it was me. He does think though, that people within the government were involved and that they saw this as a way to potentially get information to the public. I think the producer wanted and I think maybe somebody within the government wanted disclosure, some sort of a disclosure, and that's why they were helpful

in this program UFOL Alive. Moore's involvement with the government's efforts to spread disinformation in the UFO community ended in spectacular fashion at a high profile UFO conference in greg Bishop was a friend of Moore's at this point and attended the conference. I'd only known him a couple of years up to that point, but he said, you know, you're going to the moulf On conference. I said, yeah, I guess I can. And I didn't even have enough

money to fly there. I had to take a bus from l A to Las Vegas and staying at the cheapest hotel I could find, and then I would just you know, I would walk or I don't know, take a cab or something over to the hotel. With here having a convention anyway, I wanted to go because he said, I'm gonna knock everybody sucks off, he said, and I said, was what I don't want to tell you. He wouldn't tell me. He didn't tell anybody. I don't think. He called me and told me that he was going to

make this speech. I was there. He toned it down, believe it or not, of what his original idea was. I told him, you gotta be careful what you say, Bill, So he toned it down somewhat, but it was an earth shaking speech within the UFO community that he had been working for the government for years. He was like the featured speaker on Saturday Night, which is basically, you know, the one that everybody wants to see, the last speaker

on Saturday Night. There was no place to sit. When I got there was like standing room only in there. I don't know, probably thousand people. Big room, really big room. Bill Moore got up to speaking. He started describing what happened with Benewitz while he was doing what he was doing.

His speech, which had originally been built as addressing revelations from his MJ twelve investigations, instead was a nearly ninety minute account of his arrangement with the government, his work with Doughty, and what this all meant for the UFO community. This is an exerpt from that speech in which he publicly talks about his work with the government to give

disinformation to Paul Benowitz. It's read by an actor. As I've already stated, I was personally aware of the intelligence community's concerted efforts to systematically confused, use, discourage, and discredit Paul by providing him with a large body of disinformation on the subject of UFOs, the malevolent aliens who allegedly pilot them, the technology, the employee, and the underground basis

they supposedly possess and occupy. The entire story of a secret treaty between the US government and the aliens, of exchange of technology between US and the aliens, of battles between aliens and American armed forces, and of aliens allegedly having implanted hundreds of thousands, even millions of human beings for the purpose of taking over the world and using us as cattle or slaves. Came about as a result

of this process. I know because I was in a position to observe much of this process as it unfolded and I was providing regular reports on its effectiveness to some of the very people who were doing it to Paul. And I can tell you that it was effective because I watched Paul become systematically more paranoid and more emotionally unstable as he tried to assimilate what was happening to him.

He had to stop probably five six, eight times, so people had calmed down and stopped yelling at it, and I kind of just stood there watching the whole thing. Oh my god. I didn't know people were so passionate about this. I had just got back into the subject after not really being into it since I was a teenager. And here I am in my early twenties, very early twenties, standing there watching the circus and watching people getting so

upset that wow, um this this is amazing. For the question and answer, he he provided his own questions and answers. He didn't actually take questions from the audience because he realized it would just been chaos. Um it was anyway, don he was done, he ran out the back door, the door next to the stage. He didn't like stay around to ask a question, to answer any questions because he knew it had just been he would have been

mobbed and maybe, uh, I don't know, maybe worse. It was just that revelation of that he had been working with the government, because according to them, was the enemy, the enemy of view awful researchers, the government and its cover ups and the fact that he had cooperated with them just drove them nuts. And I think that well, that did him. Uh, it took him away from any credibility within the Ufol community. He stayed within. He did a lot of things on his own for a number

of years, publishing what he thought was the truth. Um. But it was a a gut wrenching speech for a lot of people within the Ufo community. Two people in the Ufo community. More speech not only revealed that he had worked with the government to undermine the work of investigators, it also let them know that the stories that they believed described the reality of the Ufo situation were in fact of fiction, created by the government and funneled through More.

To them, the process they had been a part of was not government disclosure but instead folklore creation. In the end, the campaign by the government through the Air Force Office of Special Investigations against the Ufo community can best be seen as a small part of a much larger counterintelligence

effort against our national rivals during the Cold War. People don't realize that that was part of a huge operation having to do with trying to find out who from Russia, China, anybody else was was watching our military projects, who was watching how they were getting the information they were getting. They're trying to actually just map all these networks of spies and espionage people, just trying to find out you know. One of the avenues they used was talking to UFO researchers.

I'm a UFO researcher from Russia. Did you tell me what what you're working on? And it could be something around a military base, So anyway there, that's what they were worried about. They didn't care about UFOs. What they cared about in this operation was who knows what and

how is that information getting out? And in some cases they wanted to map these uh networks because they wanted to start throwing crap in the in the water, just start throwing junk out their disinformation to Russians and Chinese and whoever else was looking at our stuff because they could it's like, Okay, this person talks to this person, this person. This is the direct direct line into you know, the KGB. And so if we tell them something and it has some plausibility to it, it will get to

the KGB or the Kremlin. They'll be acting on on wrong information and it will miss less lead and missdirect them. There was a we call an annex, a part of a major operation or a war plan or something that was developed in Washington and the Pentagon, way above my pay grade. And I wasn't the only one doing this. There were a d twenty two other agents in the United States that we're working on the same thing I was doing. So it was just me, but it was

following a plan. We were following a plan, and when these matters popped up, we would report it up the chain and chain of command. Messages would come down to us telling us to go ahead and nact, do follow this particular procedure and we and we did that. So it wasn't a single isolated incident or plan. This was happening all over the United States and probably other foreign

countries too. Bill Moore told Greg Bishop about how he saw his role in this faster effort, which involves William Casey, the CIA director at the time, and Falcon the one who recruited him, not the one from the television show. What Bill told me, He said, imagine that it's a big play. And Richard Doughty is one of the bit players, and I'm one of the big players. And Bennewitz is a bit player in one scene in one part of

the player of the movie or whatever it is. And there's a whole other player movie going on that as little, very little to do with what we're doing, but we're just tangentially connected with them. A giant show being. And he said, you know, and and Falcon was like, like the director of the play, but the producer was he said,

was most likely William Casey. He said, if you look at it that way, William Casey's a producer, Falcon is a director, and Rick Dody and I and Ben and Woods are all just a little bit players in one

little scene in this giant thing. To this point, in this season of Strange Arrivals, we've looked at how folklore was created through the Reyndels from Forest incident, how Alan Heinek and the Project Bluebook investigations created a narrative of government cover up, and now how the government itself fed storylines into the UFO community to ostensibly muddy the waters

around military experimental aircraft. But there is another force that has shaped our understanding of UFOs, and like the government's disinformation operation, it both borrows from existing UFO folklore and creates new arratives. This force is popular culture. Okay, great, um, all right, well, why don't we just sort off? Could you introduce yourself? Chris Carter, best known as creator of the X Files, next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of i Heeart, three D Audio and

Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky, and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio on

archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Mild dot com, and find more podcasts from my heart Radio by visiting the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You myst