[00:00:03] Hello and welcome to My Nuclear Life. I'm, I guess, one of your co-hosts now, Nathan Radke, and joining me today is Dr. Lee Kuhnla, who I guess is the other co-host of My Nuclear Life now. I guess so, because scientists have been disappearing, and so we thought maybe we should just, you know, like chicken on Shelly and take over her podcast. Well, here's the thing, because you and I are not scientists. No, we're not.
[00:00:30] We're not scientists. I mean, we specialize in conspiracy theory and in politics and logic and things like that, but we're not scientists, so we're going to probably be immune to whatever this thing is that's happening to all these scientists. That's right. But Shelly, I mean, famously- Is a scientist. Is a scientist. So, I mean, I've got some ideas, though, on how we can improve this podcast. Like make it less sciency. Yeah, make it a little bit less sciency, maybe bring in a bunch of pseudoscience. Wait, wait, wait. Oh, wait, no, I've got string theory.
[00:01:00] Oh, crap. I mean, oh, thank goodness. Guys, I'm not dead yet. What a relief. It's Dr. Shelly Lesher. I mean, what a, damn it. I mean, what a relief, though. Before you start planning on what, quote, scientist is coming onto the podcast, I'm still here. But, okay, I mean, I guess it's great that you're still alive, I guess. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. So, thank you for coming on and being willing to take over if something does, in fact, happen to me.
[00:01:30] Oh, yeah. If. When. But, I mean, Nathan, I believe you're older than me. So, I believe that, you know, perhaps Lee will be in charge of all of our podcasts in the future. Okay. He is youthful. More youthful by like a year or two, but I'll take it. The reason, of course, that we are so legit, genuinely concerned is because there was a recent Fox News story. Made it all the way up to the president of the United States and the FBI. And this news story explained that in the last some amount of years, which changes. Yes.
[00:01:59] There have been at least a dozen scientists who are related to space or defense who have gone missing or were killed. And that number has since increased since that story broke as people find more missing or deceased scientists. And again, the argument is that they're all connected in some way to the U.S. military or to government research.
[00:02:18] And because this is something that has gone up to the corridors of power and to the FBI, and because you are a scientist, it seemed like maybe this is something that we should look into. So, I wanted to thank you, Nathan and Lee, for coming on because I've had some people contact me, checking on me to see if I'm okay.
[00:02:40] And Lee and I were discussing before that a conspiracy has made it mainstream when your kind of normal friends are contacting you, asking you about it. And of course, there have been tragedies here. Like, there has been loss of life. Yes. There have been people who have gone missing. Like, all of that is true. Absolutely.
[00:03:00] And so, I thought it was a perfect time to bring on my two favorite conspiracy theorists for a show that is actually about an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theory. All right. Well, I mean, we're here. Here we are. So, I think there's a lot to be discussed here. And one is, you know, let's lay out what this conspiracy theory is.
[00:03:26] So, I think this hit the news cycle because of one person in particular. One of the first people who sort of set the pattern, a high-profile case of somebody who has ties to UFOs and the military. And that's a retired general named Neil McCasland who went missing at the end of February 2026. And the reason people have been associating him with UFOs is because before he retired 13 years ago, he was the commander of the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
[00:03:56] And, of course, that's the base that all three of us have, you know, some interactions with. Lee, why is Wright-Patterson so significant in this case? I mean, that's a big question. It depends really which way you want to take it. My mind goes to the fact that this was apparently one of the places that one of the Roswell aliens was shipped to.
[00:04:16] So, the Roswell alien crash was supposed to be, at least in conspiracy theory lore, one of the first encounters of an extraterrestrial craft. It crashes in Roswell, New Mexico. It has aliens inside it. And in order to find out, you know, what their biology is, maybe even talk to them, one of them was shipped over to Wright-Patterson.
[00:04:40] But the other reason it maybe is interesting, and this is maybe just for us nerds, is that they actually have a UFO inside the museum. We all went down there to see the flying saucer that they have. The Avrocar. That's what we do on holiday, guys. That's what we do. And, of course, Wright-Patterson was also the location of several Air Force projects, starting from the late 1940s, things like Sign and Grudge and Blue Book. Yeah, the alien research project when the Air Force was really trying to figure out what was going on were run out of there.
[00:05:09] Yeah, and so that's the connection there. This is the place in Ohio, right? Yep. Yeah. So, the New Mexico aliens were shipped to Ohio? Well, because they had those UFO flying saucer projects at Wright-Patterson, that's why that story kind of got linked to that Air Force base. Okay. I mean, the Roswell story, obviously we can't get into it in detail right now, but it's a very flexible kind of story that can—it's sort of like an amoeba that just sort of grabs bits of other conspiracies and pulls it into it.
[00:05:39] I'm not going to solve it either, but there is this hilarious counter-reading in which what they're actually talking about is a guy on the base who got a hematoma on his head through some kind of balloon-related accident. I think the carriage like dropped on his head or something like that. And that is maybe, according to an actual Air Force report, one of the origins of the big-headed alien theory. And that guy actually did work at Wright-Patterson. I kind of love that.
[00:06:08] And as did General McCasland. Of course, he had been retired for over a decade, but he did work there. And in some ways, Wright-Patterson holds a similar place amongst ufologists as something like Area 51 does. And the truth is, during the Cold War, there were a lot of top-secret intelligence projects run out of Wright-Patterson. But because it was the Cold War, those projects were mostly trying to figure out the capabilities of Soviet aircraft, not alien spaceships.
[00:06:33] But still, it's not surprising that when General McCasland goes missing, at a time in which UFO interest is already pretty high, because of a lot of the recent congressional hearings and revelations and videos that have been coming out, that the General's ties to Wright-Patterson raised some eyebrows. And the New York Post, which is a bit of a rag, noted that McCasland disappeared six days after President Trump announced he'd be releasing all of the government files on UFOs and aliens. Okay, so he's the first one.
[00:07:02] And then after that, people had started to notice, oh, there was other people. There was a woman, Monica Reza. She had gone missing eight months before. Worked on high-tech alloys at Aerojet Rocketdyne, which is a firm that has close ties to the American government. And once that happened, then it sort of spiraled and people found more and more contractors or astrophysicists or MIT physicists or NASA engineers who had either gone missing or been killed or died by suicide in the last, say, half decade.
[00:07:32] So the last five years? Well, I mean, again, the number sort of kept changing and got more elastic. At first, it was only the last two years, but then people started expanding the scope of their search, which then, not surprisingly, found more examples of it. And kind of expanding what a scientist was. Also true. And so I think rather than going through each individual case,
[00:07:57] it might make more sense to look at other examples of things that can help us to understand this phenomenon. Not the missing scientist phenomenon, but the phenomenon where people start to see a pattern in something like this. Okay. So what I wanted to start off with, probably the first time this has been mentioned on your podcast, is I wanted to talk about the curse of King Tut. We've mentioned that on my podcast? I don't think so. Okay. It seems unlikely.
[00:08:22] So 1922, the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen gets dug up by the British archaeologists slash grave robbers. And the expedition is financed by Lord Carnarvon. And he was alongside the archaeologist slash grave robber Howard Carter when the tomb doors opened and the chamber gets exposed to the outside world for the first time in thousands of years. And this is huge news when it happened. They called it Tutmania. Fashion and design and art and architecture.
[00:08:50] Everybody was just going bananas for ancient Egypt. But then the curse kicks in. Lord Carnarvon, who financed it, he dies a few months later after a mosquito bite becomes infected. And some of the British newspapers published an addition to the story of his death, saying that there was a horrible and dire curse that would be placed on anyone who had disturbed the tomb. Now, this wasn't based on Egyptian history. It wasn't based on hieroglyphics at the site or anything.
[00:09:13] But on the claims of an English author named Marie Corelli, who was a best-selling writer and an esoteric enthusiast. What does an esoteric enthusiast mean? Well, Lee and I have done a lot of work in the occult. And so an esoteric enthusiast, especially in the 1920s, there was the theosophy movement. There was a lot of interest in sort of occult practices.
[00:09:38] And there was a lot of wealthy people who were dabbling with, you know, spells and in that kind of thing. So basically, somebody who thinks that, like, as above, so below, that there is magic within this world and that you can tap into it and manipulate it. Okay. And so she believes there's going to be some curse now placed on King Tut's tomb.
[00:10:01] Exactly. And then other influencers piped up, including Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, and also a bit of an esoteric enthusiast. And he claimed that this was evidence of an evil elemental spirit that would haunt and kill anybody associated with the opening of the tomb. And sure enough, there was an Egyptian prince who was shot dead. Sir Archibald Douglas Reid was asked to x-ray the corpse of Tutankhamen, and then he died in 1924. Wealthy financier George J. Gould was at the opening of the tomb, died of pneumonia in 23.
[00:10:29] Arthur Mace was a member of Carter's excavation team, died of pneumonia in 28. British Major General Lee Stack was shot and killed in Cairo in 24. And so it started to spiral. It started to snowball. People started to say, oh, this is like a legit curse. Look at all these people. They're dropping like flies. What's the cause of it? And some people looked to, I mean, the esoteric enthusiasts looked to things like spirits or angry Egyptian gods.
[00:10:55] But scientists looked to things like, well, maybe there's some kind of weird bacteria that had been in that tomb, hadn't been exposed to people in thousands of years. We didn't have any kind of resistance to it. But another explanation for that curse is that there was no curse at all. Well, you gave a time span of multiple years, first of all. Yeah, exactly. And so there's one thing that you can immediately sort of like hone in on. It goes from, you know, 22 to 28.
[00:11:23] I mean, Howard Carter, who, you know, people said he was part of this curse because he also died, but he died 16 years later at the age of 64. Which was a long life at the time. And yeah, at the time, that's not bad. And people died of pneumonia, which was not uncommon. Yeah. Pneumonia was common enough. My grandma used to call pneumonia the old man's friend because it would come and take old men out in the middle of the night. But also, I mean, we're going to start now looking at some of the reasons why we fall for stories like this.
[00:11:52] And one of them is, this is something that Lee and I have come across a lot. People want there to be a cause. But what there tends to be when you have a bunch of things happen is multiple causes. That Egyptian prince, he was shot by his wife. They famously argued all of the time. That guy who died in 24 after being asked to x-ray the corpse of Tutankhamen, he was working with early x-ray equipment. Guess how he died? Radiation poisoning. Radiation poisoning causing metastatic skin cancer.
[00:12:22] And then you had all the pneumonia. The British major general who was shot, he wasn't at the opening of the tomb, had nothing to do with the tomb, was shot for political reasons. But you start to cast a very wide net, and then you start to grab a bunch of things that maybe have nothing to do with the actual event. I mean, one of Lee's heroes is James Randi. And James Randi is a magician and skeptic. And he looked into the curse. He listed all the people who were present at the opening of the tomb, figured out when they died.
[00:12:49] And he said, you know, the average age of their death was 73 years, which is actually slightly better than the typical life expectancy for a British person at the time. So it was advantageous to be at the tomb. Yeah. It wasn't even the mummy's curse. It was like the mummy's boon. So then that raises the question, why was this curse so believable? Lee, what are some of the reasons why something like this becomes so believable and compelling to people? Oof. Big question. Let's see if I can come up with some really snappy answers.
[00:13:19] Let me ask you, though, first, I'm going to ask a counter question, because I haven't been following it as closely, Nathan, as you have. My tendency in our relationship with Nathan and I is I do the historical stuff. I like to look back because I know the answers then in a way that when it's still unfolding in front of us, I'm like, I need more time to know. So what is the conspiracy conspiracy here? So we have a bunch of scientists' death. Are they being killed by the government?
[00:13:47] Are they being killed by rogue elements within the government? Is it because they know something that can't be let out? Like, what are the Reddit threads telling us is my question. Yeah. I mean, and in the same way, that's why I started with King Tut, because it's a very similar pattern. You have some legit events. All of those people that I mentioned did die. And tragically, all of the scientists that have been mentioned in the modern version have also gone missing or died.
[00:14:17] But in conspiracies where you don't have a whole lot of strong evidence, what you find instead is wild speculation. And again, we've come across this a lot. You can sort of gauge how strong the evidence is in favor of a conspiracy being true by just how wild the speculation is. Like, something like chemtrails, it's everything from, oh, it's population control. No, no, it's mind control. No, no, it's weather control. Because there isn't really evidence for any of it. And so the pattern here is very similar.
[00:14:44] It starts off with one of our old favorites, post hoc ergo proctor hoc. Huh? Hock. Hock. Okay. So, I mean, sorry. Forgive me for trying to, like, this was another thing we were going to do with your podcast is we were going to speak way more Latin on it. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's a cross-section of my audience that would really appreciate that. But I'm just going to sound like an idiot and go, huh? That Venn diagram would be a circle. So post hoc ergo proctor hoc means after this, therefore caused by this.
[00:15:14] And it's this sort of natural tendency we have that when an event happens and then another event happens, because the first event happened before, we assume it must have caused the second event to happen. And we see this in conspiracies all the time. And, Lee, what about, like, the Umbrella Man? That's one of my favorite examples that I bring up quite often in contexts like this. So it was really written up by Errol Morris. He isn't the first person to note it. But there's a lovely, also, little YouTube short.
[00:15:44] It's produced by the New York Times. So basically what happens is the day of President Kennedy's assassination, it's a sunny day. And you're there, you're looking at the pictures of people lining the streets waiting for the motorcade to come by. And everybody's dressed in kind of like it's a nice fall, sunny day. Except there's one guy.
[00:16:11] There's one guy in the entire crowd who is dressed in a dark trench coat. And he's got a bowler hat. And he's got an umbrella. Now, he isn't just standing anywhere. He ends up standing at exactly the point where the bullets go into the motorcade and, of course, hit JFK. Not only that, it is at the very moment that he opens this weirdly suspicious umbrella.
[00:16:41] So, okay, so we're all racking our brains after the fact what could have happened to JFK. And, of course, you have your usual suspects. It was the mafia. It was the CIA. It was the Soviets. It was somebody besides. And then there's this guy right there. You don't really see him in the Zapruder film because that's from behind the sign. But you have stills from across the street. There's this guy in a trench coat, completely dressed for the wrong weather.
[00:17:08] And he opens the umbrella at the very moment that JFK is assassinated. So the theories are—there are many theories. One of them was he was a signal person. So he was basically signaling the gunman that this is the moment at which to shoot. There's more elaborate theories. Somebody suggested that within the umbrella, the umbrella was sort of hiding a flechette. So it was like the—I guess the—what is it?
[00:17:36] The stem of the umbrella and then the handle, which is quite long, was the shaft of this flechette. And you could—the fire projectiles. And it was shielded by the umbrella. Okay. So Errol Morris writes about this. Now he, by the way, just for those of your listeners who are not completely steeped in conspiracy culture, is a legend of kind of uncovering real conspiracies.
[00:18:03] And he is one who—he and Seymour Hersh have spent like 30, 40 years just bringing actual governmental conspiracies to light. Real ones, not just— Like real ones, right? Like legitimate ones. And he writes this column and asks that the umbrella man come forward. And he does, right? And explain what happened. He does come forward. Yeah.
[00:18:27] So there's then some kind of committee on assassinations that takes place in the 70s where they, again, like flesh out what actually happened. And it turns out that this guy was engaging in a really convoluted protest against the policies of JFK's father, who he saw as some kind of an apologist because he agreed with the policies of Neville Chamberlain. And Neville Chamberlain—
[00:18:57] Famously had an umbrella. Famously had an umbrella. I mean, the one thing— That sounds so convoluted. It is very convoluted. It is very convoluted. A protest only works if people know what you're protesting. If it requires that much explanation, that is not a good protest. True. But I tell you, I probably would also not be shouting my explanation for my protest if a president had just been assassinated.
[00:19:22] I think I would, in fact, rather like to disappear into the background at that point and not draw any more attention to myself. But what it does do is show such a great example of this post-hawk ergo-proctor hawk. The umbrella opened and then Kennedy's head exploded. Therefore, the umbrella opening—it must have had something to do with it. It must have caused it in some way because it happened first. Yeah. But just because something happens before something else doesn't mean that it caused something else. Yeah. And now this is something you might balk at, Shelley.
[00:19:52] And this is the danger of having amateurs on a science podcast. But in the humanities and social sciences, we sometimes like to borrow your concepts, if I may. And this was a concept I thought was really interesting. So Errol Morris muses that there might be a dimension in social historical research that is akin to the quantum dimension within physics,
[00:20:20] where the normal laws that we are familiar with at the kind of this scale of existence stop applying, and things get really bizarre. And so his position is, if you put anything under the microscope and you really look, you're going to start seeing all kinds of weird stuff. And as in quantum physics, so maybe in historical research too.
[00:20:48] Like, obviously, the assassination of JFK was such a traumatic event in American political culture, and was something that has been gone over in such excruciating detail by so many different people, that some weirdness just starts to emerge out of that. And I think as a general principle, I think that kind of holds.
[00:21:12] It's that, like, any time you investigate something deeply enough, especially in the social sciences, weird stuff starts to emerge. But that does not necessarily mean that you can scale it and that, therefore, as Nathan says, one thing is related to the other. And I want to note, like, while I might not call that quantum anything... I thought you would have an issue as soon as Lee said quantum. I have an issue with the quantum part. I don't have an issue with the other stuff, because I do want to point out one of my favorite websites,
[00:21:42] which is Spurious Correlations, which is a website that just talks about how correlation is not causation. And it takes two things that are completely not related and relates them. So it does this randomization. When I just opened the website, it's that the distance between Saturn and the Sun correlates with Google searches on how to make a baby. Yeah, exactly. Doesn't necessarily mean there's a causal relation. It doesn't mean there's a causal relationship, but it matches up exactly.
[00:22:11] And so correlation is not causation. And that is what your social scientist says without using quantum. Right. And here's the thing. There's a bunch of aspects happening here. There's our natural tendency to, again, fall for post-hawk, ergopropter-hawk. There's the cherry-picking that goes in. Once we start, as Lee says, when you start zooming in and seeing stranger and stranger things, you can then cherry-pick those things which fit in with your narrative. And I think the narrative fallacy is probably the most significant theory.
[00:22:41] Because we love a good story. But sometimes we confuse how compelling and interesting a story is with how likely or possible it is. And because things are so strange, because the world is so chaotic, we're always going to be able to, if we're casting a wide enough net, find enough weird things that we can then cherry-pick and build up what appears to be a robust explanation. And we like weird stories. We love a weird story. It's basically all we do.
[00:23:09] Let me complicate our lives for ourselves. Because I agree with everything that Nathan is saying. And Shelley, we've talked a lot. I know that you and I are aligned on these kinds of questions. And I worry that that produces a kind of echo chamber that we might just sort of be congratulating ourselves on figuring this thing out already, you know, 20 minutes in or something. So let me try and make it a little—I don't know where this will go.
[00:23:34] But it strikes me that there is something to this process that is actually akin to scientific research. And when the scientists do it, we kind of applaud them for it, which is you take these phenomena that seem to be not related to each other, and you start relating them at a kind of a deeper level, right? Underneath it is an explanation that is able to summarize these very disparate phenomena.
[00:24:01] How is it productive in science and then so unproductive when it's done in this kind of trying to generalize or get underlying answers to these phenomena that we're seeing all around us all the time? I think I know what you're saying. Why is that scientific inquiry different than what people are trying to do as a scientific method now, right?
[00:24:27] Or at least the general impulse, right, to try and relate things that seem to be kind of different things and be like, no, no, actually there's an underlying story here that connects these things in a very coherent way. One time, that's a conspiracy theory, and another time, that's actually just the way the world works. Yeah, because some conspiracies are true. Well, that's true, too. But is that just the answer? I mean, do we just like, I guess we just are guessing all the time, and after the fact, we can look back and be like,
[00:24:56] yeah, that's probably the way it is. Or is there something methodological that's different about it? I think a key difference here between the scientific method and kind of wild conspiracy speculation is one of falsification. The proper scientific method, you're always going to be trying to find examples of something that goes against your hypothesis to try to disprove your hypothesis. And unfortunately, what we tend to do with something like this with the King Tut is that, again, we're just using confirmation bias.
[00:25:26] We're noticing those examples that fit in with what we want to be true or what we believe to be true, and we're not paying attention to the ones that we don't. Whereas that is definitely not how good science is done. Good science should always be working towards falsification. And the other thing is good science is reproducible, and it's peer-reviewed. And part of what makes good science good, I guess, is that we open ourselves up to criticism,
[00:25:51] and we open ourselves up to debate, and we go and present our results at scientific conferences and invite people to challenge us. Part of being a good scientist is wanting to be challenged to defend our work and to have that proof behind it and to have that data. And I think with a lot of these, I mean, I call them conspiracies, but a lot of these stories,
[00:26:18] I guess good stories, is the dismissal of proof on the other side or an alternate story. Now, that can go both ways, of course, when you're investigating conspiracies, because conspiracies can also be dismissed out of hand and say, oh, this is simply a conspiracy theory. In the 1980s, there were a number of scientists who were connected to SDI in England. What's SDI? Oh, Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars. They were all associated in particular with one firm called Marconi.
[00:26:47] And again, like, there were a lot of scientists who died in kind of gruesome ways. In fact, there was one woman, she was found with a noose around her neck, she was gagged, she had her hands tied behind her back, and she had drowned in 18 inches of water. And the official ruling was, but the official ruling from the government was not suspicious death. But that, okay. Which, that's not true. That's a suspicious death.
[00:27:12] And so, from that perspective, like, the conspiracy speculation then, obviously is going to kick in because that's clearly untrue. That is definitely a suspicious death. And as it turned out, it was a suspicious death. They found out decades later that she had been murdered, although not for the conspiratorial reasons, just by some random serial predator, sadly. Were all of those scientists associated with the same place or the same company? Again, that's a good question.
[00:27:41] With the Marconi deaths, they were all kind of related to Star Wars, which again was, you know, a ballistic missile defense in the 1980s. They tended to be computer engineers, radar designers, a satellite detection system specialist, software engineers. So, they were all in that kind of field. And so, this is, again, a story that showed up and made it into mainstream news and got all the way to British Parliament. And they said, is somebody killing our scientists? And of course, this is the 1980s.
[00:28:09] This is Star Wars research. This is during the Cold War. The KGB did do assassinations. Yes. So, it's not ridiculous to ask the questions. I agree. But the important thing is to then to actually listen to the answers. Well, and to look at them with a skeptical eye. I think with the story that's being told now, a lot of it falls apart in that we're not just talking about scientists.
[00:28:35] There are people that are involved in this, that are being involved, that are admins that work at national labs. We're talking about... People that have been retired for over a decade. People who have been retired. It's just anyone who is associated with a government facility or a contractor. And we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people that are associated with these facilities.
[00:29:00] So, you know, when you start looking at that many people, you're going to find common threads. Oh, yeah. If I had a hypothesis that there was some kind of fast food conspiracy, and I looked at all of the fast food employees that have been killed or gone missing in the last three years, I would find hundreds. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's some sort of Mayor McCheese-related secret plot going on. The other thing about this, because it does have to do with space and the government,
[00:29:29] conspiracy theories tend to draw from previous conspiracy theories. And what's happening now with the missing scientists, I think, Lee, you would agree it's actually drawing from an earlier conspiracy going back to the 70s and 80s. Yeah, that's right. And Nathan makes an important point, which is that conspiracies often don't appear out of nowhere. They're recycled versions of earlier conspiracies.
[00:29:55] Let me give you an example before I tell you about this particular one, which will relate to the missing scientists today. When the COVID disease was spreading and we were in lockdown, there emerged a conspiracy that it was in some way related to the 5G network. And again, there are various versions of this conspiracy. It was that the 5G network was causing depleted immune systems, and that's why we were suddenly catching these diseases.
[00:30:22] There was other versions in which there was something nefarious about the 5G network, and we needed to stay inside while it was being built so that they could get on with what they wanted to do. And there's other versions besides. Now, for most people living through the lockdown, that might have appeared like an entirely new conspiracy. But it was an updated version of the H1N1 conspiracy related to the 4G network, which was just an
[00:30:50] updated version of the SARS and 3G network. And in fact, this very conspiracy, like this exact idea, has been in the social media ecosystem since when was SARS 2002. It precedes the social media sphere itself. So it's really interesting that these actually are quite cyclical. And for those of us not kind of like Nathan and I who are really studying it, it can, of
[00:31:17] course, appear like, oh, this is a totally brand new thing. And that, I think, lends more credibility to it. Once you discover that, oh, we've been here before, and actually specifically on the vaccine stuff, it turns out that some version of a vaccine conspiracy has been with us since the advent of vaccines, common vaccines like around the 1880s. I know like there are earlier versions of it, but this is the beginning in England of the first kind of government vaccine mandate.
[00:31:47] And that's when people started expressing fears like, is this actually about sterilizing the population? Is there something else going on? And so you can see signs in Leicester, England in 1880 with these kinds of worries expressed on them. And a lot of them were like the same worries that people were talking about during the lockdown. So one really interesting dimension of this sort of narrative part of conspiracies is that
[00:32:16] they are cyclical, and they often kind of feed on earlier versions and they just update. So the one that Nathan was referring to is probably the most famous conspiracy nobody's ever heard of. Because in one way or another, you kind of have heard about it. You've heard about it through the X-Files or some kind of fiction. But unlike, say, the Bermuda Triangle or other stuff, it doesn't have a handle that people know. And it's called Alternative 3. Okay, I have not heard of it.
[00:32:46] So please. Okay. So Alternative 3 has a really interesting backstory, but I'll just give you the conspiracy itself. Scientists in the 70s are struggling with the fact that there is coming global climate change. And they're theorizing, well, what are we going to do about it? And there are three alternatives on the table. One of them is, I don't know, I can't remember. The second one involves nuclear bombs, of course. Of course.
[00:33:15] They're going to blow something up with a nuclear bomb, and that'll sort it out. And then Alternative 3 is, there is no hope on Earth. At least some of us are going to get out. And we're going to start building bases on secretly, of course, because you wouldn't want panic to spread through the population. Of course not. So we're going to build bases on the Moon and then on Mars. It turns out, according to this conspiracy, that the American space mission culminating
[00:33:41] in the big Apollo moon landing was actually just a smokescreen and that there had been a real space mission about a decade earlier. It had gone all the way to Mars, discovered that Mars was habitable, and in fact had some kind of life. And yeah. And now, here's the thing. This is all discovered by a journalist. So the conspiracy goes.
[00:34:06] This is all discovered by a journalist who is on the hunt for missing and murdered scientists. So what the journalist starts out doing is being like, hey, isn't it weird that this person who was like top of their field and they just got accepted at Harvard to be a prof there? And so they've handed in their resignation and they got on the plane, but it turns out they never got off the plane. There is no record of them at Harvard.
[00:34:34] And so this journalist starts going through all these scientists and it turns out more and more have just sort of like kind of walked out the lab and never been seen again. Wait, is this a TV show or this is a real conspiracy theory? Okay. Well, that's a complicated question. Because this sounds just like a TV show that I watched that was really good and I won't give away the ending, but it sounds exactly like a TV series. Okay. Like identical.
[00:35:03] Well, again, as I say, well, this is it. I mean, look, for any fiction writers out there, just mine any conspiracy theory and you've got a bestseller on your hands because that's what X-Files did. So this is again, like how these kinds of narratives actually work really well. They're very satisfying narratives, but you're right. The entire thing actually started as a joke on British television on a science program that was aired, I think, 1976. Now it was an Air Anglia TV, I think.
[00:35:33] Anyway, it doesn't matter the channel, but the point is they would run this regular science program once a week or whatever. And this was their April Fool's episode. So this was a joke episode. It was intended to be a joke. And there's lots of clues throughout the quote unquote documentary. It was a mockumentary that this was not real. So, I mean, the last clue would have been the credits where the actors are playing people, right?
[00:36:01] Like if you had just stuck around for the credits, you would have seen that these were not actually the people who they were pretending to be. They were not actually astronauts or scientists or journalists. They were actors. There are so many other clues. The life, quote unquote, that they discovered on Mars was actually a finger that was being sort of like scratched underneath some sand and it made it look like a sandworm. Like it was its terrible production value. But cute. The problem is it didn't actually air on April Fool's.
[00:36:31] And so some people, maybe not really paying attention or I don't know what, got the wrong end of it and they thought it was real. But the real problem begins with a subsequent book by the same name called Alternative Three. This is written by a guy named Leslie Watkins. Now, he writes this as an actual book. Like he writes it. There's no pretense that this is a joke.
[00:36:57] In fact, he makes reference to the television show and suggests that the TV show had to pretend it was a joke because it was getting too much scrutiny from higher ups. And so the book itself is what most people consumed in the 80s. And it furnished conspiracy theories of major conspiracy theorists back in the 80s like William Cooper. He was big into the aliens have landed. The government knows about it.
[00:37:25] But he's also like malicious scene, the whole thing. And it was from there that the reason they were being disappeared is they were in fact being recruited for this super secret program and being sent to the moon or Mars in order to work on this alien stuff. And that's actually what I started to think when I started to hear this emerge in popular culture. It's like, I feel like I've been here before. And I had to rack my brain a little bit. And I was like, oh, yeah, of course, alternative three.
[00:37:54] So maybe we're living. We're going through another kind of like reanimation of this idea. That's interesting. So the idea is that all these people are being taken for some secret mission. That's certainly one of the bits of speculation about this, either that or they're being silenced because, of course, something else is going on right now is the alien disclosure movement is very popular.
[00:38:21] This idea that the American government has secretly known about aliens for decades, probably going back to the 40s, and that they're slowly working us towards this moment of disclosure where they will admit the truth. And again, as we were talking about with General McCasland, because some of these people were associated with space or with UFOs or with Wright-Patterson, then people said, oh, this either maybe it's the alternative three, maybe it's disclosure.
[00:38:49] But all of these older conspiracies are all tied up in part of the reason why this story has gained so much traction now, because the groundwork has already been laid by these earlier stories. Can we talk about why this doesn't make any sense to me? Yes. Yes, we can. Because I think you and I share some similar reservations about the underlying logic of it, right? Right. And that logic is, do people know what scientists actually do?
[00:39:17] From movies and TV shows. So no. Because now that I know what people think is happening, there are two, quote, scientists that are supposed to be from Los Alamos National Lab. They have absolutely nothing to do with space or aliens, or I don't know how they fit into this conspiracy theory. Like how Los Alamos National Lab even fits in. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. There's far more differences and similarities between the people who have sort of been swept
[00:39:47] up in this conspiracy net. Some of the people have gone missing. Some of them have been killed. Some of them had already retired. As you say, there are some admin employees. There are some research scientists. Some of them had no foul play reported. Others had their killer caught or found. Some appear to have died of natural causes. And some were just lumped in to build the numbers. Right. And as one person said, scientists die. Yes. And we're talking about a population of about 700,000 people who would be included in working
[00:40:16] in these areas. Yes. So two things I want to discuss. One, what security clearance is and isn't. And two, what scientists do. So one, you know, someone who works at NASA isn't someone who just knows about aliens. Like, I don't know why everyone who works at NASA suddenly knows all the national secrets about aliens. Some of the people who are swept up in this just have, who work at NASA or have grants from
[00:40:46] NASA. All this means is that NASA funded you to do work that NASA is interested in. It could be something as simple as... Ceramics. Yes. Ceramics. Or you're interested in how a star forms. It could be data science. Like, it's something so simple and so, I don't know, elementary or so... Inobtrusive. Yeah.
[00:41:16] That I don't know how... I mean, it's just simply that you work at NASA doesn't have anything to do with anything. But like you said, it could be ceramics. People who are working at NASA could be, even if you're an engineer, could be working on, you know, the strength of materials. I have friends that have NASA grants that are working on how stars form. So just basic nuclear physics stuff. It's nothing earth-shattering or has anything that would fit into any conspiracy that you're talking about.
[00:41:44] Everyone who works at NASA are not working on aliens or covering up alien conspiracies. So that's one thing. And as you said, there's hundreds of thousands of people who would fit into these categories. The other thing is, what do you think security clearance means? Well, I think there's like a big book somewhere that has all the secrets in it. And as soon as you get top secret clearance, they give you a copy of this book. And you can just rifle through it. Yeah. And you could like... And you could be like, oh, so that's who killed Kennedy. Oh, that's where Jimmy Hoffa is. Okay. Exactly.
[00:42:13] That's what's in Coca-Cola. So those are the secret herbs and spices. That's... Yeah. Okay. Okay. One is a national lab scientific system. So top security clearance is a military classification, which is different than the civilian classification. So at national labs, it's Q clearance.
[00:42:37] And that would give you the ability, if your job requires it, for nuclear secrets. The president doesn't even have Q clearance because he does not have the knowledge or the need to know nuclear secrets. I mean, he knows about nuclear weapons, but he doesn't know how they're built because he doesn't have the need to know. So security clearance, when you have it, you only have access to what you need to know.
[00:43:07] So if you don't need to know it, you don't have access to that information. So one of the people on this list is an admin. Just because she had clearance doesn't mean she had clearance to every single secret that the government has to offer. And her job could have been she had clearance so that she could just sit in a certain area. I think you're right that for those of us normie civilians out there, that's some part of this story that's quite nebulous, right?
[00:43:37] Certainly, I used to think that when you had top secret security clearance, you would be able to basically like just go ask questions about stuff. No. And then, well, exactly. And that was something I had to learn and was not obvious, right? It was just not how I imagined that this world was set up. I remember, you know, being very interested in life at Area 51, especially when they were working on the stuff that has now been declassified.
[00:44:06] I think it was Annie Jacobson who did a wonderful sort of history of that place. And just what the life was like where you would get into a bus and that the windows were opaque, lest you maybe see somebody else being driven in another school bus. Like it was like that. Even though these people had top secret security clearance, they didn't get to wander around. They didn't even get to talk to each other. They were in a room with a desk working on that thing that they were cleared to work on.
[00:44:34] And everything else was, sorry, that's not your need to know. So you don't get to know it. And yeah, I think there is a real disconnect between the way people in popular culture, like Nathan and I consume a lot of TV and movies about this kind of stuff. The way that's presented is quite different from the way it obviously works in real life. Right. And also, if someone wants information from you, they're not going to kill you. Yeah.
[00:45:02] And I don't want to sound condescending in saying this, but I think that with certain types of conspiracies, there's a bit of a naivete built into it. And I kind of now this is going to have to be very cautious of how I say this. Because I certainly don't wish harm on anybody and I don't want scientists to be killed. Oh boy. What are you going to say? Yeah. Well, I think nobody cares what scientists think is the reality of it.
[00:45:29] And I kind of wish we lived in a world where that kind of knowledge was prized so highly that, again, I don't want this, I don't want anyone to get hurt. But I think it's kind of adorable that we imagine that some scientists would have some kind of, you know, just mind-shattering information that just can't be let out.
[00:45:53] And so one of the things that I do in questions like this, and it's a bit dark and weird, but I ask myself, well, okay, how would you go about it? Or if this is how the world worked, then what else could I expect to happen? And I think that there have been instances where scientists have really come forward with very credible, scary, problematic information for people in power. And I mean, the low-hanging fruit here is climate science.
[00:46:21] And climate science is threatening a, what, probably a trillion-dollar industry at this point. It is threatening petrostates, which Canada, the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, you know, they have real vested interests in the fact that we do not pivot to alternative, sustainable fuels. And you know what happened when those scientists said, hey, guys, this industry is going to poison the planet and make it unlivable?
[00:46:49] They got laughed out of the room, and nobody cared. Nobody was murdered for that kind of information. It's true. And the evidence for climate change is undeniable, yet people still deny it. But from a scientific standpoint, as a scientist, there is no doubt that that's what's happening. But none of the climate scientists are dead. Exactly. Instead, what the rest of us do—
[00:47:19] Well, actually, some of them would be dead just because people died. That's true. But I think it's interesting, like, it's understandable why this story took off. And it took off for all the reasons that we've already discussed. We saw the pattern with something like the Curse of King Tut, where we look for the cause when there's a bunch of different causes. We commit fallacies and causal reasoning. We cherry-pick. We're seduced by narratives. There were these other stories that were already circulating in pop culture that this story was able to hijack.
[00:47:46] But it's really important to remember in this, despite the fact that it's understandable that people got conspiratorial about it. The truth is, at this point, there's no suspicious links between these disappearances and deaths. And there's no links between any of these people and aliens or UFOs. But there were links. But they weren't conspiratorial links. They were family links and friend links. Like, these are all real people with real lives and families of loved ones. Some of those loved ones have come forward in the media saying,
[00:48:14] please don't drag my family member into this ridiculous conspiracy, especially those people who died by suicide. It's very hard on people when somebody close to them goes missing or is killed, and then that event gets tied up in conspiracy speculation. The worst example I can think of that is what happened to the parents of the kids of Sandy Hook. Oh, my God. And I think that's the tragedy of all of this. And that's why I really didn't want to go person by person in this conspiracy, because
[00:48:42] people have passed and there are loved ones that are hurting. And what is happening here is a tragedy on those family and friends. And I really don't want to contribute to their pain. Yeah. And it's unnecessary, too. Like, we don't need to do that to say that there doesn't seem to be anything to this conspiracy speculation. It was fun taking over Shelley's podcast for an episode.
[00:49:12] I'm happy she's here, sort of, because I kind of like this podcast, too. So I would have stuck around to tell you the truth. But OK, Shelley was back. So that was fun. Thanks for having us, Shelley. Thank you. Stay safe.