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- [00:02]
Ben
This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap Backwards Planning Financial New Dominion Design Company Rooted Pines Homestead Gray Toad Tallow, the Kingsridge Elderberries Reformation Heritage Books, Squirrelly Joe's Coffee, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors and our supporters at Patreon.com SA.
- [01:14]
Brian
The date was December 12, 1985. The place was somewhere along Howe Avenue on the east side of Sacramento, California. The man was named Hugh Scrutton. He was the owner of a small computer and technology rental company that had been doing quite well for a handful of years. Of course, that was not all this man was. He was also a good and trustworthy and affectionate boyfriend, a respectful son, a loving brother and a good timing friend. Though he had traveled the world and climbed tall mountains, he was nonetheless known as a man of gentle meekness. Later he would be remembered as one who epitomized the virtues of straightforward sincerity, fairness, and kindness to others. But on this day Scrutton was merely leaving his shop in order to attend a trade show on the other side of town. The weather was fair, business was good, and the slight shift in daily rhythm, the kind that makes a man feel secure in the thing that he's given his life to building, made everything feel more important than it probably had a right to feel. That is nothing against Scrutton. We all taste those small joys in the midst of our toils that seem magnified above their smallness, those moments of serendipity that sometimes break in on the vanity of life while a true glory, these moments of joy can sometimes make us miss the forest of life's fragility in a cursed world for the trees of small triumphs here and there, Scrutton looking contentedly at these trees of ordinary joy, thus walked calmly, swinging his keys around his finger and whistling a tune he had heard on the radio that morning down the cracked and dirty sidewalk that lined his store towards his car. But the gentle serenity of a good day suffered its first blow when he saw a strange pile of lumber sitting next to his parking spot. He did not remember seeing it there when he arrived that morning, but that didn't mean much to him. The pile was on the passenger side and he wasn't in the habit of looking back at his car after he parked it. He must have simply missed its presence earlier in the day. At any rate, it was a bit of a mess. Five old boards haphazardly stuck together with nails jutting out sharp side up in all directions. He thought it would be best to drag it out of the parking lot to ensure both he and other employees and owners of the strip mall would not accidentally run over it and puncture a tire. Scrutton upped his pace a little bit. This also meant he stopped whistling and twirling his keys. He hopped to a slower jog over to the woodpile, grabbed a nail free section of it with both hands and started leaning back to pull it towards the corner curb next to the dumpsters. But all in a flash the world changed. The gentle yellow light of a warm December sun in his eyes exploded into bleached white in an instant where he had moments before heard the cool city soundtrack of chirping birds, shipping trucks beeping as they reversed out of the loading docks on the next block. A flag whose wind driven flapping sent its carabiner clanging into the galvanized pole like a gong, and distant police sirens echoing through alleyways far away. He now heard a splitting cacophony. His eardrums seemed ready to explode and pour their liquid from his head. His skin, which moments before had been a thing almost unnoticeable to him, now screamed with stinging pain and total confusion. The senses protested and Scrutton's mind rebelled at the sudden multiplication of inputs. The fire enveloped him and promised a quick death. The blinded eyes began to feel less and less solid, threatening to melt right out of his face. They caught small pieces of gravel and metal that flew towards him with shrapnel quickness. The ringing ears grew black with char and heat. They started to crack, sliced and grated by yet more flinging shrapnel. The skin went all hot and red and around his chest tore away at the intensity of the exploding blowtorch which preceded the jagged projectiles. Scrutton had looked right into the center of the pile. He had not thought, not for a single second, that the small piece of pipe inside was actually a bomb. The attack was over as fast as it had begun and Scrutton found himself flung back onto the ground. His head slammed into the pavement next to his own car's tire. He choked on the spittle and flesh filled blood that rose in his mouth from some destroyed pit down inside of him blinded his eyelids nonetheless did not close, but forced him to stare up directly into the burning sun above. Two US Airmen who had been walking on the other side of the same parking lot as Scrutton leapt to his aid when they realized what had happened. The loud bang, the man laying flat on the ground. It all came together quickly for them and on their short journey over to see the damage prepared themselves for the worst. The worst is what they found. Though clearly still alive, the constant choking up of blood and slight twitching squirms betrayed what the two men had most feared. Nothing at all could be done for this stranger. His chest had a gaping hole in it. His ribs were exposed to the sky like some sacrifice to Zeus, and behind his ribs they could glimpse his heart racing, desperately trying to sustain a life already slipping away. CPR was obviously impossible. Instead, they did what they could. They offered the fallen man comforting words as they waited for the ambulance to arrive, an agonizing 20 minutes that stretched into a year. Later, the man was dead. Years later, the man responsible for the horrific murder came to light. Being a prolific journaler, it was discovered that he had recorded his thoughts after seeing the success of his crime. Here's what he Experiment 97 December 11, 1985 I planted a bomb disguised to look like a scrap of lumber behind rentech computer store in Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20 the operator of the store was killed. Blown to bits on December 12th. Excellent, humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing. $25,000 reward offered. Rather flattering.
- [07:22]
Ben
In 1952, a 10 year old boy named Theodore sat down at his school teacher's instruction to take a test. The boy was excited in the way a shy but very bright pupil gets excited to prove to others that despite his awkwardness and ineptitude at making friends, he was not good for nothing. Only later did he find out just how important this particular test was. He almost sensed it in the moment. After all, no other students were taking it with him. But he didn't totally understand the full weight of what he was doing, and so he simply took up his pencil and leaned down to dial in and work away. And work he did. He did an excellent job on the test, which turned out to be an IQ test. He scored a 167, far higher than even the school had expected of him. Though they had predicted an above average outcome, this score cleared away any and all doubt they may have had about what to do next. Now it was clear Theodore needed to skip a grade. The awkward boy therefore bid farewell to the class of almost six graders he knew and went right along to the seventh grade. The jump proved difficult for the boy, and at many moments his parents and the school wondered if they had made the right choice. Mind you, this regret was not because of the academic rigor. Theodore had absolutely no trouble adjusting to the more advanced work, but he did far worse socially than they had all hoped. They Predicted that since Theodore would be on a more equal intellectual footing with his new classmates, he would have a smoother time connecting with some of them on a personal level. But he didn't. He really didn't care. But everyone else seemed to. Despite this, they kept the arrangement the way it was. After all, the boy wanted to stay in the higher grade. He was loving the work. For a few years, he excelled in school. And tried to put more effort into making friends. But that particular skill never grew any easier for him. Finally, in the 10th grade, he tested again. And both school and parents decided that Theodore needed to skip yet another grade. The 11th. Of course, this second leap proved just as easy academically for the boy to make. But socially, it was even more difficult for him than the earlier leap. He grew more and more shy and awkward, more and more reclusive. But he seemed content nonetheless. So at 16 years old, the intellectual prodigy graduated high school two years early. And true to his reputation up to that point, packed up his things and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Theodore, you see, had been accepted into Harvard. Naturally, Theodore's parents, self made working class folks, Were thrilled with the brilliance and academic prowess of their son. His father especially, was eager to send him off into the great adventure of the intellectual world. Excited to see what kind of name his son might make for himself. And what kind of honor he might bestow upon his loving parents. His mother, though proud of her son, was more hesitant about his going away at such a young age. After all, he was just learning how to drive. And his age contemporaries were barely surviving advanced algebra, the nerves of asking a girl to homecoming. And the drama of teenage school politics. Genius as he was, was her son really ready to leapfrog that entire stage of societal development. And start his driving years off with financial aid forms, strict professor office hours. And collegiate courses in linear systems and mechanical vibration? But in voicing these concerns to her husband, the lamentation of youth and trepidation for the future fell on deaf ears. Their boy could go to Harvard, and therefore he would go. Ah, the dichotomy of father and mother. Theodore's arrival at Harvard was clumsy, to say the least. As with any other freshman, he had no real idea as to what he was doing. Finding a place to live ended up being far easier for him, somehow. Than finding the room where his first classes were actually held. This, of course, is completely normal. But his age was not. Though he was academically mature enough for this next challenge, he was not nearly socially mature enough for it. He could not relate to his classmates in the slightest where they had company and their proverbial misery, he had only misery. Lucky for him, Harvard was no stranger to the young savant and was prepared to do their part to help this young man adjust as best he could. Hence my saying that he had no trouble in finding a place to live for. You see, Theodore was actually one of ten 16 year olds admitted to the school his freshman year. The school had again being used to this sort of thing, decided to house all 10 of these freshmen together in the same house. But even with this forced community, Theodore's habit of shyness and reclusiveness came back with force. In a small group of segregated young students. The other nine tenants of the house often forgot the tenth in their ranks was ever there. It was rare for Theodore to come out of his room for anything other than class. Thus he lived out his days of his first year in the Ivy League. Of course, the academic work posed very little, if any, real challenge for Theodore. He excelled in all of his studies and routinely impressed professors with his writing and test scores before ultimately leaving them feeling a bit disappointed when they actually met this student one on one and found that he could barely carry on a conversation. But it's not as if they could grade on social aptitude. And Theodore was undeniably smart. So his freshman year came and went. And when it was time to move out of his more sheltered freshman housing, he found himself tossed headlong into a massive dormitory on campus. The Elliot House. It was in this house, holed away in his tiny and cheap dorm room, that Theodore gained a reputation as not just a loner, but a sort of disgust. Disgusting one. Students would routinely plug their noses when passing by his door, which was always shut due to the smell of spoiled milk and boiled eggs seeping out from behind it. Theodore never ate in the massive dining hall of the house. Instead, he always took his food back to his tiny room and ate in his bed or at the small desk. Maybe it was this especially odd behavior, or maybe it was something entirely different. But one way or another, the now 17 year old Theodore eventually found himself the recipient of a letter of admittance into a very exclusive psychological study that Harvard was hosting. The man in charge of this great experiment was named Dr. Henry Murray. And he was a man who, among the students of Harvard, needed no introduction. In World War II, the US had hired Murray to produce a psychological profile of the world's greatest enemy, Adolf Hitler. His profile was so useful to the Allied cause that the government immediately hired him on to the CIA's crack team of researchers and Clinical psychiatrists tasked with assessing the psychological fitness of their secret agents. Of course, Murray flourished. When the war was over, Murray had the clout and the credentials to do essentially whatever he wanted. And what he wanted, wanted was cutting edge and groundbreaking, even boundary stretching research. He found just such an opportunity at Harvard. The stated goal of this experiment, which saw Theodore join a team of 21 other students, was to study the effects of severe stress on the human psyche, particularly one under demand. So the experiment proceeded for each student as follows. First, the student was to write an essay for the review board of the clinicians. An exhaustive description and apologetic for the entire worldview of each student. They detailed their personal beliefs, convictions, philosophies on topics that ranged far and wide, from general ethics to their own family. They confessed and defended their most dearly held hopes and distinctive views of the world and how it should all work. The students were encouraged to put their own pathos in vibrant display on the paper. The testers wanted to see what these kids really believed was true. Upon reception of an essay, the testers studied it privately until they were confident they knew the arguments and views of the student, front to back. From there, the student was asked to return to the facility. This began the second phase phase of the experiment. We will use Theodore as the example for what happened next. Upon arriving back at the same room where he had written the essay, Theodore immediately sensed that the mood had shifted. Not only was he now alone in the bright fluorescent room where before he had written his paper in the company of the other participants, but he also heard an aggressive and demanding tone coming from the clinicians. He might have even called it meaning. He took his seat on the salmon colored plastic chair that was on one side of the single wooden desk in the room center. There was no chair on the other side. On the desk was a spotlight lamp clamped onto the wooden flange that ran the perimeter of the top. A copy of his essay and a notebook sat on top of the desk. The notebook, he quickly learned, belonged to the proctor of the experiment. Theodore had no idea what was happening or what to expect to happen next. Everyone in the room left apart from Theodore and the proctor. The lights were dimmed, transforming the uncomfortably large and bright room into one uncomfortably small feeling and dark. What commenced next can only be described as a vitriolic and prolonged personal attack on Theodore from the proctor. He had read the essay and was now come to launch a vehement, exhaustive and degrading and abusive verbal attack upon the young college student who had written it. Theodore sat trying to remain stoic as everything he held true and dear about the world and his life was torn to utter shreds by a man he never met and would never see again. He suffered this attempted course to mental breakdown for multiple hours before the proctor finally ceased his diatribe and Theodore was unceremoniously commanded to leave. Of course, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Theodore. Awkward, unsettled, immature and out of his depth, Theodore returned over and over and over again. He spent a total of 200 hours in that cursed room getting verbally vivisected by people he did not not know, but whom he knew, for whatever reason, hated him with as much passion as he had felt when writing his essay. He found himself drawn back again and again, strangely attracted to the challenge. He wanted to prove to himself that he had the mental fortitude to stand, without any objection up to these slanderous and violent attacks from nameless people. Whether or not he proved himself in the this regard remains up for debate. Theodore asserts that he succeeded in maintaining himself in his own mind. Others are slow to accept his assertions. It's worth noting that these experiments were disavowed as entirely unethical and dangerous by Harvard. Soon after their completion. Murray, as an aid to the CIA, was trying to develop methods of mental breakdown of subjects that the government could use in the interrogation of the state's enemies. But in using college minors as the subject of his study, he betrayed the carelessness of methodology that stood behind it all. Or maybe it wasn't careless at all. Maybe a better word would be nefarious, malicious. Murray, of course, was in deep with the CIA and had already well proven himself as a fruitful tool for them in World War II. Could it be that a man of his psychiatric caliber was left out of the loop of the infamous MKUltra? It appears the answer ought to be no. A large swath of the students used in his Harvard experiment went on to a psychological transmogrification, spiraling into complete psychological disaster. They forgot who they were, became paranoid and devolved into a sort of degeneracy that cost some of them their livelihoods and for all intents and purposes, their lives. Murray, in this experiment, had proven that he could wipe a mind completely clean, leave it broken, and leave it yearning for the warm embrace of some secure authority to build it back up again. An authority that Murray himself would offer offer to the mind. This, of course, exactly follows the stated goal of MK Ultra. Its brainwashing. And so this Harvard experiment has long been considered a side project of the ultimate Masterminds behind the CIA's pet shadow operations. It is worth noting, however, that Theodore himself did not have such a dramatic conclusion of his time under Murray's interrogations. He writes off the whole thing as exaggerated and not really all that bad. In fact, Theodore would later write in an autobiography of his that he remembered his time at Harvard fondly, stating that it was very good for him. But now we come to it, the question arises, who is this Theodore? Why did he write an autobiography? And why do we care about his takeaway from the Murray experiment at Harvard? We care about Theodore for the reason that he was the very one who fashioned and planted the bomb that killed Hugh Scrutton on that December morning in 1985. And what's more, this was not Theodore's only homicide. It was not even his only bombing. You may know Theodore by another name, his abbreviated name, Tet. Ted Kaczynski. Or you may know him by his Macro Cobb title, the Unabomber. That's right. One of America's most infamous mass murderers, A man whose manifesto against technology continues to influence our thought today was a genius social outcast who had been taken into a psychological study at Harvard, a study with virtually undeniable links to the shadowy backrooms of MK Ultra. All of it leaves one wondering, just how deep does this rabbit hole go? Everybody?
- [22:12]
Brian
Hey.
- [22:12]
Ben
Okay, what the heck?
- [22:13]
Brian
Dude, you just read. I get to do the welcome.
- [22:16]
Ben
What the heck? Fine.
- [22:19]
Brian
I think do the welcome. I think it's safe to say welcome back to season four, episode two of Haunted Cosmos.
- [22:28]
Ben
I think it's safe to say. We are so back.
- [22:30]
Brian
We are so back.
- [22:31]
Ben
We've never been more so back than we are so bad.
- [22:33]
Brian
Did we have wallpaper last? No.
- [22:35]
Ben
Hey, this is the first episode with a wallpaper. Everyone wave hello to the wallpaper. If you're watching this on YouTube, hello. If you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple, there is woodland creatures prancing behind us. And a mansion and some greenery. It's very lovely.
- [22:50]
Brian
Guys, big announcement. Big announcement. Before we talk about Ted Kaczynski and man made horrors beyond comprehension, I just want to say, like, Haunted Cosmos is growing, and it's because of you guys, we've got, you know, obviously Ben's been working full time in addition to lots of other things at the church and things like that, for Haunted Cosmos, but we've been. I'm not going to say yet who, but we've hired video and audio production help.
- [23:16]
Ben
That's right.
- [23:17]
Brian
As you can see, the last episode.
- [23:19]
Ben
And this episode, it clearly looks way.
- [23:21]
Brian
Better now compared to us just making it up.
- [23:23]
Ben
Yeah.
- [23:24]
Brian
So thank you and we will continue to invest in making this show the best possible show that we can with your help. So thank you to our patrons and.
- [23:33]
Ben
Yeah, we hope that you guys are enjoying the show. We're certainly still having a great time writing it and saying it, I guess. So we're just glad to be here. Hope you guys stick around.
- [23:44]
Brian
One of my favorite genres of review of bad review. Like read my one star reviews.
- [23:49]
Ben
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:50]
Brian
Are people who, they've commented this on YouTube, on the Apple podcast reviews, et cetera. Like, oh, this show, like they have ads and they, they just care about their patrons. Like they.
- [24:01]
Ben
And I'm like, I do care a lot.
- [24:02]
Brian
We express that by releasing all of our main show for absolutely free for you to listen to, even if you don't support the show at all. So, yeah, I just want to say to our one star reviewers, those who don't like, you know that we talk about our Patreon and those that don't like our ad partners and those that, you know, don't like that Ben and I are not feminists. All of the genre of one star reviewers. I'd just like to say that we did take it into careful consideration and we decided that we were going to become worse.
- [24:32]
Ben
We're going to become much worse.
- [24:33]
Brian
Yeah.
- [24:34]
Ben
And hey, keep it up. We like the 1 star reviews and I mean unironically because I only want.
- [24:39]
Brian
Five or one star reviews.
- [24:40]
Ben
Yeah, they boost the algorithm. So if you really want to stick it to us, leave like a two or three star review.
- [24:46]
Brian
So those are. Those really kill your rating. That's brutal.
- [24:49]
Ben
That's brutal. So anyway, shout out to the one star.
- [24:52]
Brian
Speaking of supporters, what are we doing for patrons?
- [24:54]
Ben
Yeah, so for our existing patrons, they'll find out about that on Patreon. So sign up, we'll do a giveaway. But for the new patrons that sign up the day of this episode's release, we will put you into a sweepstakes and you could have the chance to win a copy of this amazing coffee table like style book. That's the big book of conspiracy theories.
- [25:15]
Brian
Who doesn't want that on?
- [25:16]
Ben
I mean, it's amazing. We're gonna give away five of them to new patrons that sign up today. It really like, it looks really cool and fun. Honestly, a great bedtime read with the kids. You know, there's pictures of.
- [25:28]
Brian
And now kids, we're talking about jfk.
- [25:30]
Ben
You know, they have, they have like the spirals in the eyes when they're getting brainwashed and stuff. Yeah, which, by the way, spirals. And then. Yeah, for existing patrons, be on the lookout for something that we're going to be announcing on Patreon. But then also just pretty cool opportunity. Brian and I wrote a book which was a really cool opportunity for the two of us. Your opportunity is that you could buy it if you want to.
- [25:52]
Brian
And. Unreal.
- [25:53]
Ben
Yeah. Stay tuned for later in this episode. You'll see an ad that we. That we do. Don't skip it with the book. Don't skip.
- [26:01]
Brian
Skip it on, though.
- [26:01]
Ben
I promise it'll be funny. Okay.
- [26:03]
Brian
If you skip it on now, like.
- [26:04]
Ben
You have my word, if you skip it, you're gonna skip out on some laughs.
- [26:08]
Brian
Dude, if you skip it, the Black Eyed kids will find you.
- [26:09]
Ben
That's right.
- [26:10]
Brian
If you skip it, the Mothman will take you to wherever he took the.
- [26:13]
Ben
We're just conjuring evils.
- [26:15]
Brian
Actually threatening people with demonic. Okay, never mind, Never mind. None of that. Like the one that's on your side. Jesus loves you.
- [26:21]
Ben
You don't have to buy the book. You're still our friend.
- [26:23]
Brian
Dude, thanks for backing me down for that.
- [26:25]
Ben
But anyway, so yeah, if.
- [26:27]
Brian
If.
- [26:27]
Ben
If you're interested in that big book of conspiracy theories, fully illustrated, really cool. Then sign up to become a patron today and get access to man. At the time of this episode, dropping close to a hundred.
- [26:39]
Brian
Yeah.
- [26:39]
Ben
Episodes of the Dusty Tome. As of today, I'm on episode 76.
- [26:43]
Brian
That's crazy.
- [26:44]
Ben
Yeah, pretty crazy. Wild. Excited to keep going. We'll.
- [26:48]
Brian
We'll do a handful of those. So not just one, but got to sign up today, the day this drops. And you'll be in that drawing. But.
- [26:54]
Ben
That's right.
- [26:55]
Brian
Any other housekeeping before we.
- [26:56]
Ben
No, man.
- [26:57]
Brian
I don't talk about man Made horrors beyond comprehension. Maybe in league with demonic powers.
- [27:01]
Ben
I mean, I guess just as a segue into it. Like, if you want to really cover all your bases and be sure that you don't get abducted by demoniac government agents who want to brainwash you and make you forget that you ever existed or even the concept of existence at all, you should use soap that doesn't have seed oils in it 100%. And so consider our sponsor, Indigo Sundry Soap. They not only love the Lord, but they hate seed oils just as much. And that really says a lot.
- [27:27]
Brian
They hate seed oils like the devil loves righteousness.
- [27:29]
Ben
That's right.
- [27:31]
Brian
Wait, I mean, let me say that again. They hate seed oils the way that Demons hate righteousness.
- [27:36]
Ben
There you go.
- [27:38]
Brian
You saw a cut there. Not because I got it wrong the first time it said demons love.
- [27:41]
Ben
He said something almost like very bad. Really bad.
- [27:43]
Brian
It was an accident. Okay. So, yeah, you know, sign up Indigo Sundries and subscribe for regular deliveries of whatever you need for your house. 10% off automatically. So, yeah, check them out.
- [27:53]
Ben
And I think on that note, let's get into the scope of this episode.
- [27:56]
Brian
Let's talk about what's happening in this episode where we're going following our last one. And yeah, so last episode we talked about the origins of some of these government mind control programs that are really. Honestly, they sound like fictional stories. They're so crazy. Just what we know is so crazy. Yeah, so we talked about, you know, MK Ultra. What were some of the roots that we talked about there with MK Ultra?
- [28:19]
Ben
Project Artichoke.
- [28:20]
Brian
Yep.
- [28:20]
Ben
Project Artichoke was sort of like the. Well, and it used to be Project Bluebird, then Artichoke, then Artichoke. And it was kind of the brainchild that. That blossomed in MK ultra, which was this intentional government, you know, trial and finding a way to brainwash and totally mind control someone insane. So. So, you know, when you read the Manchurian Candidate or you see the movie with Denzel Washington, by the way, great movie, then you're looking at something that's not fictional. It's historical fiction, which is to say, like it's their own story, but it's based on something that completely happened and the government was still, and I would argue is still doing and trying to do, trying to get better at. And it involves everything from eliciting information from prisoners that you're interrogating via truth serum and all these manipulative tactics up to and including making an assassin who has like a trigger word that he can hear over the phone that wipes his memory of everything that he knows, and he becomes like a robot that will follow orders to the T. And then at the end of whatever assassination or crime that he's committing at the behest of whatever state is behind him, he hears the word again and he forgets that he ever did any of it. So it's like this perfect patsy. And then also, if he does a good job, it's the perfect way to get away with a crime.
- [29:37]
Brian
Yep.
- [29:37]
Ben
Because he literally has no memory of it ever happening.
- [29:40]
Brian
Yeah, insane.
- [29:41]
Ben
Yeah. So last episode was much more concerned with what we absolutely, without any doubt, know for sure happened with MK Ultra.
- [29:48]
Brian
With it Japanese and.
- [29:52]
Ben
Yeah.
- [29:52]
Brian
And German parallels, Korean, sort of like.
- [29:55]
Ben
All these other countries, it's sort of.
- [29:57]
Brian
Like an arms race for mind control.
- [29:59]
Ben
Yeah. And that's even what Alan Dulles, the CIA director at the time, was saying, that America's falling behind in brain warfare. And so he started with Sidney Gottlieb, started MK Ultra, to try and catch up. And I think that they succeeded in catching up and potentially even surpassing some of our enemies. So that was sort of what we know for sure. We ended last episode with the story of Charles Manson, which is also something that we all know for sure. But it opens the door into asking, like, what else did this touch? Yeah, like, how big is this umbrella? And so this episode is going to be a little bit more speculative. I think you'll see that we. We do our homework, try to do our homework.
- [30:40]
Brian
And what we're doing in this episode is weaving together facts, eyewitness testimony, which aren't the same thing. You have people who are claiming to know something or have seen something or heard something, along with historical data and attempting to show that, on the one hand, the government hasn't admitted everything that they did with the MK Ultra program and its spinoffs, even during the period we know it existed, they haven't told us everything. But secondly, that there's this question, did it continue?
- [31:13]
Ben
Yeah, did it continue?
- [31:13]
Brian
Did it really stop? Or did they just perfect it?
- [31:16]
Ben
And I think one question worth asking to get into the stories behind that is if it did continue, why?
- [31:26]
Brian
Hey, Ben, I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?
- [31:35]
Ben
Maybe it's Grandma's Butter recipe. Or maybe it's gray toe tallow.
- [31:40]
Brian
Their tallow products are 100% organic and naturally contain the good stuff your skin craves. No mystery there.
- [31:47]
Ben
So say sayonara Sammy to kitchen experiments. And say hello to healthier skin Great O Tallow Trusted by skin Envied by Great Grandma's Butter Recipe.
- [32:00]
Brian
For more information and to get a sample pack, check out grayto tallow.com. don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps COSMOS15 for 15% off your order. Ben, do you know what's weird? The fact that Gobekli Tepe contains adventure.
- [32:24]
Ben
Advanced technology far beyond the time period in which it was made.
- [32:27]
Brian
Okay, nerd, I was thinking more in the vein of health and wellness in this cold and flu season.
- [32:33]
Ben
Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elderberries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals? And antioxidants and antiviral compounds that our.
- [32:47]
Brian
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- [32:56]
Ben
Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that, but did you also know that they're running a special for haunted cosmonauts? That's right. If you use code haunted all caps haunted, you can get 10% off your first order@tkr farm.com dude, absolutely the best.
- [33:14]
Brian
News I've heard today. Want to start reading the Puritans but don't know where to begin? Puritan Treasures for Today from Reformation Heritage Books makes the riches of these godly writers of old accessible for the modern reader.
- [33:33]
Ben
With updated language and helpful introductions, these classic works from John Owen, Jeremiah Burroughs and more are the perfect starting point point for the curious reader.
- [33:43]
Brian
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- [34:00]
Ben
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- [35:03]
Brian
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- [35:22]
Ben
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- [35:41]
Brian
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- [35:51]
Ben
What's the end game here? Like, why would a government step into this role of being so malevolent to its constituents that it's actually just using them as pure pawns to achieve their ends? Aren't governments supposed to act for the common good of the people that they're over? And how do we get this so twisted?
- [36:11]
Brian
Yeah.
- [36:11]
Ben
So do you have any thoughts on that? Like, I want to get into sort of a cosmology of how a government could get to this point.
- [36:17]
Brian
Yeah, we talked about it last time. But there are multiple vectors of, you know, justification where people will justify doing evil things, governments will justify doing evil things. Sometimes we're mistaken. We simply make the wrong call. We think that something we're going to do is going to be righteous and turn out righteously or truly help in the cause of good. Even well meaning people who genuinely are, you know, Christians or righteous men or women can make that mistake because we're sinful and fallen people. However, there's an even more nefarious pathway where people become convinced that they are doing something in service of ultimate good. And they become so convinced of the ultimate good, of their conception of the good, that they will justify the most insanely evil means to accomplish that end possible. And that can go wrong obviously in two directions. That can go wrong in, in even if you have the end. Correct. Let's say that you're a Christian or you understand that all things exist for the glory of God and you're genuinely aiming for the glory of God in your life or in your work or in something like that, you can begin to justify sinful activities all over the place in the name of, well, I'm seeking to glorify God. The ends are going to justify the means. I'm going to do this thing. But the even worse version of that, and this is where I think we're going with MK Ultra. And what we see in the government programs is that they substitute the good and the divine for their own false idols and their own false standards of what the good is and who God is, ultimately man ends up often in his folly, making the state into a God. Yeah, and this is what statism is. When he elevates, he essentially asks the question, like, once he falls short of worshiping the Creator and he lands his worship and veneration on the creature, what more tempting creature is there to worship than man? And what greater expression of Man's power and glory is there than the government, than the state, than a nation, than all of the powers of the collective good and capabilities. And what can we put our hand to and accomplish? What rival is there, at least historically, to a nation state?
- [38:43]
Ben
Right.
- [38:43]
Brian
A people with a king or a senator, a senate and a president, and glories and huge, vast amounts of wealth and treasure and armies. And we're tempted to look at these things. It's why the Scriptures often warn against putting your trust in horses and chariots and kings and. Well, because they're very tempting objects of worship.
- [39:02]
Ben
Yeah.
- [39:02]
Brian
Now, of course, we should love and honor the civil magistrate, and he has a glory. In the Psalms, it talks about the glory of a righteous king is like the dew falling upon the grass. Righteous civil government is a good thing. We're not anarchists. As Christians, we believe that God established the civil magistrate as a servant, a deacon of his good, of the good. Romans 13 Peter talks about this as well. And so these are all good things. However, we have to be wary of this instinct to worship the state as God, man personified in his glory, begin to worship him. And once you make that step, then whatever the God says must be good and must be right.
- [39:42]
Ben
Yeah. And so there's some historical mechanics that are happening that is sort of behind all of those things. So. And some of this goes back to stuff that many people have talked about, but I always remember the way that C.S. lewis phrased it in First Loves, where he would say that if you have two positive goods, like I believe that the civil government is a positive good.
- [40:03]
Brian
Yeah, absolutely.
- [40:04]
Ben
But you misorder it in the order of goods and things that you should love, then not only will you lose the thing that you replaced it with, but you'll lose that as well. So, for example, if you love, you know, your marriage more than God, that's always the best example. You'll lose both God and your marriage. But if you love God first, you'll gain the Lord and your marriage, and it'll be fruitful and it'll be good. And so something that happened around this time. Right. Actually, I mean, it was part of the catalyst that started all this was World War II, the Treaty of Versailles, and then the Cold War. And something that was happening especially during and at the end of World War II, was the death of the Christian West. It was. And, you know, things leading up to World War II was, of course, heavily contributing to this, but it was sort of a process of the west apostatizing at a large scale. And so at the end of it, you had this enemy in fascism that was a legitimate enemy that was not good, but it was seen as so bad that all of these other forces had to band together to fight against it, including republicanism and communism. And so the US teamed up with Russia to defeat fascism. And there's no way we could have been privy to the full effects of what we did when we did that. But one of the things that it meant was that communism gained a lot of power and sway.
- [41:30]
Brian
If you want a really good article on this has nothing to do with anything. Spooky. Ben Crenshaw at American Reformer.
- [41:37]
Ben
Yeah.
- [41:37]
Brian
Wrote an article on the post war consensus.
- [41:39]
Ben
Right.
- [41:40]
Brian
So you can. It's what Ben's talking about is the post war consensus. The idea that we needed like a supra state, a super state, to combat the dangers of the extreme loves of particularity and nationalism. So if you want to go read like a deep dive, go check out that article or Reno's book. Reno is the author, the Return of the Strong Gods.
- [42:01]
Ben
Return of the Strong Gods, which is a great book. Pat Buchanan's Unnecessary War is also a great book, very amazing. But one of the things that happens with the post war consensus is that we lose respect in monarchy, but we also gain respect for things like religious pluralism and democratic liberalism, which are ideas that are inherently leftward, left leaning and that inevitably lead, given enough time, to something like communism. Communism is like the fully fledged sapling that comes from the seed of religious pluralism and democratic liberalism.
- [42:36]
Brian
All of these ideas, communism, religious pluralism, even democracy as a universal ideal. One of the things you find running through all these is that they're totalizing views.
- [42:47]
Ben
Right.
- [42:47]
Brian
All of them claim to be the perfect or the ideal governmental system for all peoples everywhere. Which leads you to the conclusion if you're a very powerful nation state and you believe that this is true, you will come to believe that it is good and just and right to, at whatever cost, impose this view on all of the world. So anywhere you find nationalism or fascism, well, we need to go in, we need to do some. We need to drop some bombs for democracy.
- [43:15]
Ben
Yeah, exactly.
- [43:16]
Brian
We need to go blow people up for them so that we can free them from totalitarianism. We need to blow them up and impose a new leader and regime change.
- [43:24]
Ben
Hence a lot of the wars that America got into after World War II was totally consumed with this idea of spreading the gospel of democracy across the world, which is a gospel that, like Brian said, it's not a one size fits all thing it's not good for everyone at all times and places to fit into this mold of American style democracy. And so anyway, that's a little bit like downstream but upstream from. I think what really helps us today is this idea of religious pluralism. What you get when a people, a nation gives itself over to religious pluralism, which is the validity of all religions more or less, you actually just get pantheism. And pantheism is just a fancy way of saying that people are God. And again, what is the best expression? A man made institution that is the most strong, the most durable, the most glorious, the most impressive? Well, it's man made governmental structures that are again, they're not inherently bad, in fact they're good. But if you think that they are God, which is what this leads to, then they can do no wrong. And therefore whatever serves the end of that particular God is the ultimate good that anyone can ever do. So it makes you lose all love for the individual constituent that you're ruling over. And it effectively gives you free license to do whatever you deem as the royal government, whatever you deem necessary for not their good, but your good, the state's good. And of course, I mean using what is a few of your citizens mental health in comparison to your own health as a state, it's nothing. There's no calculus to be done there.
- [45:09]
Brian
And let's say that some charismatic leader arises in the nation and begins to move people towards overt rejection and criticism of let's say your globalist war policy in a given situation, or your military industrial complex in a given situation. And they're swaying a lot of people and we do live in a representative government on some level, however corrupted in the US and so what might a government that is totally committed to the good of its project and that is totally committed to doing whatever it takes, therefore whatever means are required to achieve this glorious end. They'll do. What are they going to try to do to that leader if he begins to gain political or cultural power? Well, what if they might even go so far as to take a perfectly engineered bioweapon, a living brainwashed human, and go and take them out?
- [46:05]
Ben
They might use it to take out. And this is why this topic isn't purely material or just, yeah, we're taking a break from the supernatural stuff to just talk about something else weird. Which is fine to do by the way, but this actually isn't that because we live in a world that's not just stuff. So when something sets itself up as God, that is Not God. It actually oftentimes finds that it summons things beyond its understanding and comprehension.
- [46:32]
Brian
So true.
- [46:32]
Ben
This is like when someone is playing with a Ouija board and they think they're just having a good time. Next thing you know, there's actually evil powers that are at work behind that thing. That person's consent has no bearing on whatsoever.
- [46:46]
Brian
Yes.
- [46:46]
Ben
They don't care if they consent. If they're using the tool, they will be used by the tool. And statism is an example of that. Statism is demoniac pagan style worship. It just is. And one of the ways, and I actually stole this from Bovink, I think it's really interesting. Bavinc says that every pagan religion has its own form of like being in the spirit, you know, prophesying theophany and things like that. And so I was like, oh, that's really interesting. I wonder what, you know, the state's version, a statist version of theophany or prophecy would be. And he was saying the demons have this and it's really obvious. Possession is their form of prophecy and theophany, both. It's like conglomerated into one.
- [47:34]
Brian
They're God appearing.
- [47:35]
Ben
Exactly. They take total control over the person and they then use them to do whatever they want. That's kind of both. And then I was like, oh, that's really funny. And then he said, the modern spiritualist version of this possession is hypnosis.
- [47:52]
Brian
Interesting.
- [47:53]
Ben
So he was like, if you look at the side effects of hypnosis, it is possession. Everything is there.
- [47:59]
Brian
You're putting your mind into another vessel.
- [48:02]
Ben
Your will is given to someone else.
- [48:04]
Brian
Interesting.
- [48:04]
Ben
And their will is removed. They have now no ability to defy you. And if you're not beneficent, it will be to their utter ruin.
- [48:14]
Brian
Wow.
- [48:15]
Ben
And I was like, that's really interesting. So what if we kind of bring all these ideas to bear on something as seemingly trivial as MK Ultra and say, what if it was the statist God's attempt? What if it is still the status God's attempt to demonically possess the people that are beneath it and that are either giving themselves up to it or trying to rebel against it. And they do it in the form of hypnosis, which is just brain control.
- [48:42]
Brian
That's really interesting.
- [48:43]
Ben
We know that they did hypnosis constantly with MK Ultra.
- [48:46]
Brian
Common Bavink Dub Dub.
- [48:48]
Ben
I mean, that guy was so cool.
- [48:50]
Brian
It makes sense that anytime you. Anytime the demons look out and they see man in his sin establishing some sort of babble, establishing some sort of great golden statue of empire that they can worship. They will come down and they will attempt to. They'll say, yeah, let's get involved in this project. Let's help.
- [49:08]
Ben
Absolutely.
- [49:08]
Brian
Because it's all in. There's only the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of God at the end of the day. So they will. They're in perpetual and constant mutual antagonism towards one another. And you will see that it might look different over here. You might have the alien demon thing. Over here, you might have, you know, some people doing something nefarious. And then over here, you might have what just looks like purely government conspiracy. But you're looking at demons all over. I mean, I'm convinced that the aliens are communing. Are demons communing with the government's communing with demons thinking they're aliens, that the governments are doing all sorts of things where demons are coming in and saying, oh, an opportunity. Wonderful. Yeah, we'll help.
- [49:51]
Ben
Exactly that. Like, and people that don't expect that. I'm like, I think that you're maybe not paying attention. You definitely haven't read that Hideous Strength, which is nonfiction.
- [50:00]
Brian
Come on, guys. It's not.
- [50:01]
Ben
It's basically nonfiction. Okay? So if we accept this premise just for the sake of the show, if we accept the premise that it's a status God demonically acting in its own interest and it's in defiance of both the living true God and the constituents that it is supposed to be acting in, the good of, what happens when you start to go against that narrative, some of the mainstays of that government narrative? Well, let's get into some stories that talk about that.
- [50:27]
Brian
And, boy, have we got some stories about people you may have heard of before.
- [50:30]
Ben
Yeah.
- [50:43]
Brian
In 1959, a young man named James wandered the streets of Missouri in early autumn, thinking of very little and contemplating nothing much at all. He was an ex con. In fact, he was already an ex con many times over and had only been released from prison for his third time a year earlier. Ray. Ray was James's surname, had never really been good with foresight. From his early high school years, years he never finished, he seemed to either not care about or be incapable of measuring the consequences of his actions ahead of time. And so, by taking up random opportunities to earn a quick buck here and there, some of them schemes of questionable legality, he found himself well acquainted with the American justice system. Maybe Ray would admit to having a bit of a chip on his shoulder. After all, he had served his country in World War II, volunteered for it, even since he hadn't wanted to finish high school. A part of him felt cheated by the country to which he had already given so much of his strength and goodwill. And this feeling of being slighted led him down the road of self pity. A road which helped to justify his lawless deeds with every mile traveled. It also offered him a convenient excuse for not being able to get his life into order. How could he, when everyone, even his own homeland, was fighting against. Against his success? To do well would be to kick against the goads of powers far beyond his own self. Or so he thought. While Ray walked down the bustling roads of St. Louis, he nursed these thoughts of bitter resentment in his heart. Their fruit was a longing to vindicate himself, to take revenge on the society that had done him so much wrong. In this stew of bitterness, he took up a pistol. He didn't know much about them, but he picked one up from somewhere and someone and walked boldly into a downtown grocer. Ray pointed the pistol at the clerk and the customers, shouted them in nervous tones to give him all the cash they had and made a hasty retreat with shaking hands and an extra hundred and twenty dollars in his pockets. He was almost immediately found and arrested. Now for the fourth time in his life, given his habitual sin and the increasingly aggressive aggressive nature of his crimes, this was his second armed robbery. Though he never meant to hurt anyone, he was sentenced to 20 years in the Missouri State Prison at Jefferson City. Initially, Ray wanted to prove that he could do his time quietly. He hoped for leniency in upcoming parole hearings. And so for two years he became a nameless face in a crowd of convicts that surrounded him. But all the time he kept his eyes peeled for some means of escape. After, after all, he wanted a good parole hearing. But freedom outright would be a far better deal for him if he could get it quicker by other means. I know, I know it all seems straightforward to you and me But Ray could never seem to think in a straight line. Maybe it was those voices in his head that he talked about. Maybe they were confusing him. He made his first escape attempt in 1961, but it was a dismal failure. It became clear to every officer in the prison that the man they were dealing with was far from a criminal mastermind. They figured him to be the same sort of scared high school boy in way over his head, harboring delusions of lawless grandeur for his life. He got some time in solitary for the attempt, but it didn't last long. The short time he spent in the hole did have a lasting effect on Ray, though. He met some kind of latent madness in that small, small room. Or maybe it was a madness he had always known but never before labeled. Either way, James Earl Ray officially requested psychiatric care upon his return to the general prison population. His request was accepted for session after session. Recounting his time in the European theater of war got him all riled up with fright and excitement. The doctors would listen carefully before sedating him with drugs. Ray didn't know what the drugs were, but he was glad to find that they quieted the voices that haunted him. His next chance at escape came six long years later when Ray was working in the prison bakery and had a genius idea. After successfully convincing an unnamed accomplice, Ray climbed inside one of the massive crates of bread that would be shipped out to local farms that same day. His helper placed a false bottom over top of him and piled bread as thick as he could on top of that. Without any drama and in a way most unfulfilling for a story, Ray rode off into the Midwestern sunset on that truck. And this time, his escape stuck. It almost seems too easy, as if Ray was being guided by some unseen and beneficent hand. The only loose end, really, was the accomplishment he had left behind. But that man never talked. There's good reason why, in fact, it wasn't long before he couldn't talk at all. See, soon after Ray's escape, that man was found dead via hanging in his cell. Now, curious thing for a man found dead hanging in his cell. But both of his arms and legs also turned out to be broken as well. Now, who could have done that? What happened next was a strange series of movements all around the country at the behest of a friend Ray had made soon after his escape from prison. A man named Raul, who, in spite of his Hispanic sounding name, had bright white skin and absolutely no apparent Hispanic or Spanish heritage. Raul met up with Ray soon after his escape and proved to be a very generous friend for apparently no reason at all. Ray was puzzled. He'd never known this guy before and was uncertain as to how much good he had really brought into his life. But despite this doubt, Ray gladly took the money that Raul gave him to do what seemed like menial tasks. These, Raul said, would help him better smuggle guns to militant groups in foreign countries. Ray thought little of it. He had money and dozens of fake IDs and passports to help him guarantee that he would never find himself behind a cell door again. Now remember, Ray was not a smart man, the older he got, the more aware he became of this. Hence his confusion at the out of nowhere partnership of this warlord named Raul. A man who was always just exceedingly nice to Ray, despite having no history together at all. Now, one day, Raul approached Ray and told him about a new project they had. Some Cubans were going to be coming into Memphis in the next few weeks and they wanted to buy hundreds of rifles from Raul and Ray. With a delegation arriving in Alabama soon, Raul sent Ray into a local pawn shop with specific instructions on what to buy. Ray needed to buy a Remington. 760chambered in. 30 06. That was what the Cubans in Memphis wanted, and so he wanted to provide a sample to the advanced party coming in from Alabama. That's what Raul told Ray. Now, unfortunately, simple Ray, the man who knew next to nothing about guns, despite time in the military and two armed robberies on his rap sheet, had to try and purchase this rifle twice since. The first time, he didn't get the rifle chambered in the correct caliber. A silly mistake, but not a big one. Ray had bought the gun in.243 and needed to get it in.30 06. So he returned it and got the correct caliber. But all this did create a paper trail. Now, Raoul was quick to forgive, and the Cubans were ultimately happy with the product. And so the stage was set for the big arms deal. When it was only a few days away, Raul and Ray drove to Memphis in Ray's white Mustang, his prized car that Raul had bought for him and prepared for the meeting on the outskirts of town, next to a diner called Jim's Grill. To cover their tracks with obscurity in the event anyone grew suspicious, Raul told Ray to order a room in the house above Jim's Grill in his own name. He said that even if anyone saw Raul inside that room, they would find it registered to Ray's name and wouldn't be able to connect the dots with any suspicion. Of course, Ray agreed. On the day of the deal, Ray was told to wait outside in his Mustang next to the boarding house. Raul would actually close the deal upstairs, but Ray would be ready in case anything went wrong and the pair needed to get away fast. Raul took the same. 30:06 Remington. 760 that Ray had bought a few weeks earlier, wrapped it in a sheet to make it appear less suspicious, and walked calmly into Jim's Grill and up the stairs into the boarding house. Suddenly, Ray heard a gunshot ring out in the Memphis sky. People gasped and started running to where the shot was. Fired. Ray waited patiently and longed for Raul to run out of the room so the two could flee together. He was sure the deal had gone gone south, and he was praying his friend had not been wounded or killed. Just before he was about to flee and save himself, Raul sprinted from the restaurant and threw himself into the passenger side window. Reyes sped away at a breakneck pace and watched with bated breath as far in his rearview mirror now he saw the flashing blue and red lights of the police. The pair drove and drove without so much as a word passing between them. Finally, Raul told Ray to slow down on a little bit on the freeway. Ray, thinking it was to avoid looking suspicious, obliged. In the next moment, Raul had thrown himself out of the car. He rolled on the dirt shoulder and sprinted into the woods lining the Alabama border with Georgia. Ray never saw Raul again. For his part, Ray just kept driving towards Atlanta when eventually startling news came over the radio. Just that day, at a motel on the edge of Memphis, Tennessee, a shot had been fired from the area right near Jim's Grill, right where Ray had been. A shot which had killed none other than civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Ray grew confused, but ultimately he did not know what to think. So he pushed on to Atlanta. There he met a big man with a thick accent who looked and walked like a mobster from the movies. The strange man stopped the nervous Ray and slapped a package full of money and fake IDs into his hands. With these gifts from the unlooked for hand, Ray continued to evade a massive manhunt through the US and Canada for two months. Finally, on March 10, as Ray sat in another hotel room, this one in London outside of the Heathrow Airport, police broke down his door and placed him under arrest. When he asked what crime he had committed, they informed blankly, for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. After the shot was fired, the police had arrived at the scene in a little over two minutes, ignoring the pleas from eyewitnesses imploring them to search the bushes on the other side of the building housing Jim's Grill. The Memphis force split into two groups. One stormed up into the second story boarding house and searched the communal bathroom that, were it not for tree branches blocking the way, would have provided a perfect view of the Lorraine Motel across the street where MLK was shot. The second team charged around to the department store on the other side of the building and immediately found a strange bed sheet laying on the sidewalk in a sort of bundle. Inside this bundle were clothes and a Remington 760 chambered in 30 06. The clothes belonged to James Earl Ray. And so did the fingerprints they that covered the gun. During James Earl Ray's service in the army, he worked in the newly minted Office of Strategic Services, or oss. The OSS was the wicked mother that would, right after the war, give birth to none other than the Central Intelligence Agency. Ray remained in the service of this agency for some time. Indeed for long enough for the Agency to actually take note of him. He was young, unstable, directionless, seemingly witless and disaffected with the culture that had formed him. They started to take him into special meetings wherein, according to Ray's own testimony, they brainwashed him and tortured his mind. They gave him drugs and told him strange things and kept him constantly confused and paranoid. He never knew the purpose of all of this, but he did know that he was the butt of some proverbial joke and that it must have meant something to his superiors. All those years later, as he sat in a cell for a crime he didn't commit, he thought he had figured it out. Had James Earl Ray been an experiment of the MKULTRA program? Had he been prepared to serve as a witless patsy for the unrestrained deep state to deploy at their discretion? Or does the conventional story told by the FBI and CIA, the one with James Earl Ray pulling the trigger on that 3006 from a bathroom window across the street from MLK Jr. Stand up to scrutiny?
- [63:29]
Ben
So, listeners, what you just heard is the story of MLK's assassination from James Earl Ray's perspective. But obviously that's not the official story. No, because James Earl Ray is the guy who died in prison for killing Martin Luther King.
- [63:45]
Brian
99 years prison sentence, died in prison, never exonerated.
- [63:50]
Ben
So why do we care about that? Why do we care about his version of the story? He's just a murderer. Well, maybe it's because of just how many holes there are in the official version of events. So maybe we should go through the official story and then, I don't know, start to just get questions at it.
- [64:07]
Brian
We'll go through the official story. This is what the FBI, this is what the government, to this day, if you try to Google this, it's really funny, I found a dichotomy. If you try to Google this and get information, you go right to, like, the nih, all the government reports, things like that. The House Select Committee on Assassinations addressed it.
- [64:26]
Ben
FBI documents.
- [64:27]
Brian
We'll talk about that. Because, by the way, the House select committee in like, 1977 had an investigation on assassinations because of mounting public pressure that the CIA was killing people in America. Jfk, rfk, rfk, Martin Luther King, mlk. Okay. Turns out that the guy giving them all of the information, they didn't know this, but he was a CIA agent. Okay, so the CIA provided information to investigate the CIA and determined that the CIA did nothing wrong.
- [64:58]
Ben
This is the Spider man meme where they're just all pointing each other.
- [65:02]
Brian
So we want to walk through the official account of what happened to mlk, and this was the court case that convicted him and James Earl Ray. And then we'll talk about some of the discrepancies. And listen, you can decide. This is not a part of the biblical canon. You can decide like, these guys are crazy. They're just conspiracy nuts. Whatever, Whatever. If you are a dullard enough to decide that the FBI didn't kill MLK Jr.
- [65:27]
Ben
They're just batting a thousand on this.
- [65:29]
Brian
Then, like, I don't know how to help you. You should listen to another podcast. You should listen to, like, Blues Clues or something.
- [65:36]
Ben
Like, I'm part of the problem, maybe.
- [65:39]
Brian
Is Fauci doing a podcast?
- [65:41]
Ben
Yeah, you could listen to Fauci, see.
- [65:43]
Brian
If Bill Gates is doing a podcast. You'd love that podcast.
- [65:45]
Ben
You love cnn.
- [65:46]
Brian
CNN is for you.
- [65:47]
Ben
Stephen Colbert is your guy.
- [65:49]
Brian
Stephen Colbert.
- [65:51]
Ben
So, look, you're gonna hear us laugh a lot. We're not laughing at someone dying.
- [65:55]
Brian
We're not laughing at Martin Luther King getting shot in the face.
- [65:57]
Ben
But if you don't laugh at some, I'm gonna be like, you're not a human being.
- [66:01]
Brian
Yeah. Some of this is comically obvious, so. And the including, like, how comically dumb James Earl Ray was. Like, he wasn't a criminal mastermind.
- [66:10]
Ben
No, this guy was not smart.
- [66:11]
Brian
No. And a lot of the story that he came up with that has all this strange external corroboration, like, he's not smart enough enough to have come up with it. Just trust me. James Earl Ray was not.
- [66:20]
Ben
He's not like the Joker. It's like genius level intellect who just hates humanity.
- [66:25]
Brian
No, he was like a petty criminal who didn't. Couldn't even get away with armed robbery.
- [66:29]
Ben
You know, like a grocery store, when Alfred says, some people just want to watch the will burn. He's talking about the CIA, not James Earl. That's who he's talking about.
- [66:37]
Brian
James Earl Ray just wanted, like, 120 bucks in his pocket to go in.
- [66:40]
Ben
Some cigarettes, go vibe somewhere. Yeah.
- [66:42]
Brian
You know, like. Anyway, so people kept showing up in James Earl Ray's life and handing him Boxes of cash and IDs and being like, look, we just need you to buy this gun and be at this.
- [66:50]
Ben
Place at this time and like, maybe move to Canada for a while.
- [66:53]
Brian
And he was like. He's like, why not?
- [66:55]
Ben
Like, that sounds great, dude.
- [66:56]
Brian
Why not? So, yeah, Google wouldn't tell you anything about it. Like, you go in and it will just take you to your government sources, debunking all of the, you know, conspiracy theories and et cetera. I refuse to say debunking. What was funny, though, once we. We had finished researching this episode, and we were about to the morning that we started recording, because we've done it in several segments. Hence Ben's new shirt, right? Yeah.
- [67:20]
Ben
And my now full belly that's making me tired is making us tired.
- [67:25]
Brian
But I thought, I wonder if ChatGPT will tell me the red pill, like if it will tell me all the conspiracy. So I started asking it, like, well, what did James Earl Ray said happened? What about this? What about that? Dude, it said everything that's crazy to me. And it knew, like, it added details to things that I had known about the general gist of. But then I need to fact check this. So I chased it down and there were a few points where it was like, it added things I'd never heard. So it made Me think chat GPTs got access to some Reddit threads deep in the Internet or like some.
- [67:59]
Ben
It's on like the Tor browser or something.
- [68:01]
Brian
Yeah, it's going deep. Maybe they'll shut that down after this episode. Episode comes out, but which, by the.
- [68:06]
Ben
Way, everything that we're about to say is satire.
- [68:08]
Brian
It's all satire. We love the FBI. Pro FBI. FBI has never done anything wrong ever in their life.
- [68:15]
Ben
And listen, here's the thing. I know this, I know this.
- [68:18]
Brian
And I love you.
- [68:19]
Ben
Money, please. Here's the thing. If I ever end up in a boating accident, okay, know that I'm not a big boating guy.
- [68:26]
Brian
No.
- [68:26]
Ben
If I ever end up drowning, know that I'm a pretty good swimmer.
- [68:29]
Brian
My mental health is very good.
- [68:30]
Ben
I'm cheerful, I'm really happy. Like, I absolutely love my wife, love my family, love my job. No. So anyway, like, I, you know, there's.
- [68:37]
Brian
A guy, they get shot because he apparently was mistaken for a deer. You'll find out later. Like, I just want, you know, look at Ben and I. Ben doesn't look like a deer.
- [68:43]
Ben
I don't have the lissom nature of a deer.
- [68:46]
Brian
I don't look like a deer at all.
- [68:48]
Ben
No, I look More like that monster that was like the child of Loki from that movie the Ritual on Netflix. That just, like, beast with folds of flesh. Dang, that's more my style. If someone mistake me for that, I'd.
- [69:01]
Brian
Be like, pass, you're handsome.
- [69:03]
Ben
Dude, I needed that after that Chipotle.
- [69:06]
Brian
I just ate so bad. Okay, so why don't we talk about mlk? Like, this wasn't the first time he ran into threats of death.
- [69:14]
Ben
No, that's the thing. Like, the whole story of MLK is laced with death threats. He was no stranger to people. I mean, and that makes sense. Look at what he did. In fact, in 1958, he was stabbed in the chest. Ouch. Yeah, but it obviously didn't kill him. It wasn't until, though, 1963, when JFK was assassinated with similar, you know, kind of shady stuff surrounding that whole event, that MLK finally was like, that's gonna happen to me.
- [69:44]
Brian
Yep.
- [69:45]
Ben
That same thing is gonna happen to me. What he meant by same thing, that's up for debate. But I think that subtext will tell us exactly what he meant by that.
- [69:54]
Brian
So let's talk about the official narrative. This is what the FBI, CIA, dea, nsa, abc, NBA, fda, cnn, ep, epa. Epa. This is what they say happened. They say that BMW, BMW, Globetrotters. They say that. I almost said Ben Garrett. They say that James Earl Ray.
- [70:13]
Ben
Dude, don't put that on me.
- [70:15]
Brian
Yeah, I'm sorry. They say that he was sort of a racist Southerner and that he was displeased with mlk civil rights activism, that there had been a circulating promise of monetary reward from the KKK for anybody who would kill Martin Luther King Jr. And so he was kind of in low IQ, little petty criminal.
- [70:35]
Ben
He was an escaped convict.
- [70:36]
Brian
Convict already, you know, down on his luck.
- [70:38]
Ben
He needed cash. He's also a racist. And so he's like, whoa, this lines up perfectly with my situation.
- [70:43]
Brian
So he. He bought his Remington 760chambered in. 30, 06, accidentally bought a.243 first, and then thought, well, I need a bigger gun. Because he didn't know a lot about guns. He barely qualified in the military with the rifle training.
- [70:55]
Ben
Yeah.
- [70:55]
Brian
Like, he got the lowest possible score and still passing.
- [70:58]
Ben
Right.
- [70:59]
Brian
So he wasn't a big gun guy. He got his.36. He went to this. What is it? Hotel Over.
- [71:07]
Ben
Over this, like, over Jim Grill.
- [71:09]
Brian
And he knew that MLK was known to stay at this hotel, which he was. The Lorraine Motel.
- [71:14]
Ben
The Lorraine, Yeah.
- [71:15]
Brian
They even named a room after him because he was. He was well known to stay there.
- [71:18]
Ben
Room 306.
- [71:19]
Brian
So he found out that he was there and then he. He went to a communal bathroom because this was like a hostel hotel kind of thing where they have rooms down a hall. And then you'd go to a hallway. The end of the hallway there'd be a bathroom that everybody would use. And he opened the window. This was across the street. Martin Luther King Jr. Comes out of the room and he is looking over the balcony. He's on a second story or an upper story balcony. He looks over into the parking lot to talk to Jesse Jackson, who is there in the parking lot. He aims his gun, he fires a single shot from his 30.06Strikes MLK Jr in the face and neck area, which doesn't instantly kill him, but he falls to the ground bleeding everywhere. People come and try to render assistance. Ultimately, he's taken to a hospital and declared dead. Meanwhile, James Earl Ray, after pulling the trigger, immediately takes his gun. He doesn't eject the bullet. The shell casing from. Because it's a bolt action rifle, so he doesn't eject the shell casing. He runs to the room where he was staying, throws the rifle onto a bedsheet, along with the strangest collection of stuff.
- [72:29]
Ben
Yeah. A bunch of like personal items.
- [72:31]
Brian
Clothes, bobby pins.
- [72:32]
Ben
Yeah. And also just to interrupt.
- [72:34]
Brian
Yeah.
- [72:35]
Ben
You were talking about how like he actually did the shooting. And I wanted to interrupt and interject so bad and say like a shot rang out in the Memphis sky. I know Free at last they took your life but they couldn't take your pride in the name of love I.
- [72:47]
Brian
Knew that that was ringing in your heart.
- [72:49]
Ben
So anyway, the bed sheet.
- [72:50]
Brian
So he throws the gun on the bed sheet, he wraps it up, he flees down the stairs, down through the hotel, out onto the street. He ends up dropping the bundle because he's scared. He hears police sirens or something. And he's got this rifle shaped sheet. So he drops it in front of a department store there along the street, gets in his white Mustang and drives out of there like a bat out of H E Double Hockey stadium out of Hades. Yeah, exactly.
- [73:18]
Ben
But here's the weird thing. I want to make sure people get this.
- [73:20]
Brian
Yeah.
- [73:21]
Ben
So he did the bedsheet thing. He walks out of Jim's Grill because it's at the bottom of this boarding house. And let's say he's coming out of the door of Jim's Grill with his bed sheet. He takes a left, just for the sake of spatial awareness. He takes a left, he walks some yards 20, 50 yards down the sidewalk, puts the bed sheet in front of the store. That's in the same building, by the way.
- [73:44]
Brian
Literally same building.
- [73:46]
Ben
He's not hiding. And it's in the sidewalk.
- [73:48]
Brian
There's bushes.
- [73:48]
Ben
There's bushes right there. Yeah. He puts it on the side. He turns around and goes back the other way, passing the front door of Jim's Grill again, as if he had gone to the right. That's where his car is. Gets in the car, speeds off.
- [74:01]
Brian
And all of this happened from the moment he pulled the trigger until he speeds off, allegedly in two minutes or less. Because that was when the police got there and he was already gone. The, the, I mean they descended in mass and he was already gone in his white Mustang.
- [74:16]
Ben
Yep.
- [74:16]
Brian
He had fled the scene. His new white Mustang.
- [74:18]
Ben
So he, he fires the bullet. He goes, puts the gun into the bed sheet, wraps up the bed sheet, leaves the room, walks down, you know, it's on the second story. Walks down to the, to the first floor, leaves the building, goes left, walks a while. And by the way, like walking calmly.
- [74:38]
Brian
Yeah, yeah. All this in less than two minutes.
- [74:40]
Ben
And then walks all the way back, gets in his car, gets away in less than two minutes.
- [74:44]
Brian
And then not only that, he drives away. And he successfully evades the police across multiple nations for several months until he is England arrested close to Heathrow in London. So several months he evades him. He has tons of cash and multiple fake identification documents that are convincing enough to get away with this for months and months before he's caught. In spite of a huge manhunt looking for someone with his description and ultimately knowing who he was even from the gun because see the gun. There were multiple lines of evidence that ultimately convicted James Earl Ray. One of them was the gun which they know he purchased. He really did purchase this gun. Interviewed the clerks at the store where he purchased the.243 of the Remington. Didn't made a mistake. Went back and said I actually needed. Which by the way, the whole idea that he was like he needed a bigger gun. A.243 is a deer rifle. Yeah, my grand.
- [75:43]
Ben
Plenty big enough.
- [75:44]
Brian
My grandfather hunted deer with a.243.
- [75:45]
Ben
Right, we'll get into maybe why he went back. Yeah, in a minute.
- [75:50]
Brian
Oh yeah, yeah. So it was a 70 or 80 yard shot. 243 would have been plenty. But anyway, they interviewed him. They had the whole exchange where he paper trail and everything where he had bought the.243. Next day comes back. This was just a few days before the shooting successfully got the 30 06. So that gun had his fingerprints all over it. And they know that it was his gun. Yeah, the clothing in the bed sheet, his clothing, the room, all sorts of.
- [76:15]
Ben
Stuff was registered in his name, in his name. He really had reserved that room.
- [76:19]
Brian
So that's. Those are the mult big evidences. And then another line of evidence was the eyewitness who saw him fleeing.
- [76:26]
Ben
Right. Guy named Charles Stevens, who said.
- [76:30]
Brian
And his was their star witness placed James Earl Ray at the scene, fleeing with the gun and everything. And then he goes to jail. So he was put in jail for 99 years, as we've already said. And he ultimately died in prison.
- [76:46]
Ben
Right, he died some years ago. But that is a little too easy.
- [76:52]
Brian
It's just a little too easy guys.
- [76:53]
Ben
So why don't we start poking some holes in the story And I would like to say, just to fire us off if I may. James Earl Ray had a black girlfriend. I rest my case.
- [77:07]
Brian
Yeah, he had had a black girlfriend.
- [77:08]
Ben
He wasn't like the KKK loving, you know, grand dragon.
- [77:12]
Brian
He wasn't known as like a Kleagle of the whatever. He didn't do his Kegels or whatever it is. I'm sorry, what? Nevermind. He also. The whole reward thing from the kkk, the people who had even put that award out turned out they had been dead for a long time before that this all happened. Like there's just not a reason that he could have collected this reward. It's kind of a strange motive. Yeah, he was not that smart.
- [77:40]
Ben
No. The way that he had escaped prison before was basically like, oh, this bread barrel happens to be empty. I know I'll get in it in full daylight like with my accomplice.
- [77:53]
Brian
Yes.
- [77:53]
Ben
And I'll use that as a means of escape. It somehow works. And by the way, the guy who helped him was like found dead later in the jail.
- [78:01]
Brian
Yeah. And then he happens to meet Raul. In the story that I read, you know, they. The guy that helped him escape, get into. He got in a crate, they put a false bottom in it, filled it with bread, they load the thing on the truck and he escapes. That guy was found hanging in his cell with his arms and legs broken.
- [78:18]
Ben
With arms and both arms, both legs broken.
- [78:20]
Brian
And they were like clear, suicide.
- [78:22]
Ben
This is a suicide.
- [78:23]
Brian
There's multiple of those in this, in this story.
- [78:26]
Ben
But the real reason that like that it became mainstream to kind of question this narrative in particular is because all of the details that we're about to go through and tell you and they are quite funny. Culminate in the King family being fully convinced that James Earl Ray did not.
- [78:43]
Brian
Was a patsy, that he was innocent.
- [78:44]
Ben
That he was a patsy. He was fully innocent of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. So much so that they actually took it to trial.
- [78:52]
Brian
Yep.
- [78:52]
Ben
They filed a civil suit for wrongful death against Martin Luther King Jr. Well, alleging that.
- [78:58]
Brian
Against the government. Alleging.
- [78:59]
Ben
Yes. And they won.
- [79:01]
Brian
They won. And they went through this whole civil suit. They asked for damages of $100.
- [79:07]
Ben
Yep.
- [79:07]
Brian
Because they didn't want anybody to think they were doing it for the money. And not only did they win the case, did the court find that there was government collusion in the death of Martin Luther King Jr. But they decided so unanimously.
- [79:21]
Ben
Right.
- [79:22]
Brian
The jury delivered a unanimous verdict and sided with them and gave them their $100.
- [79:29]
Ben
And so given that, it might behoove us to look back at these details and be like, all right, okay, he had a black girlfriend. But that's kind of circumstantial. That doesn't mean anything. Right.
- [79:37]
Brian
Could have changed his mind later.
- [79:38]
Ben
Well, what about some more. What about some more concrete stuff?
- [79:41]
Brian
Let's talk about first. Maybe you would think, but I know that James Earl Ray pled guilty.
- [79:47]
Ben
Right.
- [79:48]
Brian
And you'd go, that's true.
- [79:49]
Ben
He did.
- [79:49]
Brian
He did plead guilty initially at the instruction of his lawyer, who said, you're going to be put to death if you don't plead guilty.
- [79:57]
Ben
Yep.
- [79:57]
Brian
The only thing you can do, this case is open and shut, is you can plead guilty, and they will take the death penalty off of the table. And not only did he do that, but the lawyer representing him said that heavily implied, if you don't take the guilty plea, I'm probably not going to try very hard.
- [80:17]
Ben
I'm not going to do very good. Oh, and by the way, if you. You don't plead guilty, your brother might get in trouble for that thing that he did.
- [80:23]
Brian
We think they're going to arrest your brother, too, and try to stick stuff to him. So he pled guilty, then he changed his mind and he fired that lawyer.
- [80:31]
Ben
Yeah.
- [80:32]
Brian
James Earl Ray fired that lawyer like, three days into the proceedings, and he ended up going with a different lawyer. He was still convicted and all of that, but he basically took back and said, I want to reverse my guilty plea. So the Kings fought all along for a retrial for him. And, and they brought in that trial that we mentioned. They brought 70 witnesses, transcripts, an extraordinary number of documents. And the, the, the issue is that James Earl Ray died from prison Fight related prison riot related injuries. Before they could end up, they were attempting after that to try and get him. Yeah. To get a trial.
- [81:10]
Ben
Yeah.
- [81:10]
Brian
And. And to try it again. So let's start. Maybe one of my favorite elements of this story is that there was a tree.
- [81:23]
Ben
I got dibs on Charles Stevens.
- [81:24]
Brian
Okay, you get Charles Stevens, I'll do the tree. There was a tree that grew because, remember, James Earl Ray supposedly shot out of this upper story bathroom window 80, 70 yards over to the balcony, killed across the street, and it was from up there. So there's a two couple things with that. First of all, the bullet trajectory from that height doesn't make sense with the scene. Martin Luther King Jr. Was leaning down, looking over, down the balcony. And the trajectory of the bullet would indicate that it came from below, traveling upward, not level or above him, traveling downward. Now you might go, well, that could be his head was just in a different position. Blah, blah, blah. Okay. But there was a tree. There was a tree that grew right in front of the window from this bathroom.
- [82:11]
Ben
When we say right in front of. There was a branch, it's right in.
- [82:14]
Brian
Front of a huge limb where multiple people from the scene who knew the place, who looked at it, they said, hey, you can't. That is impossible. It couldn't have come from that window, because I can draw a line. You'd have to shoot through a whole tree to get there. It's just not possible. So you might ask, like, how did this not come up in court? Well, we'll tell you how it didn't.
- [82:38]
Ben
Come up in court.
- [82:39]
Brian
It's because the very night of the shooting, like, the shooting happened. And then that night, late in, the Memphis Police Department, along with another city works department, ordered the immediate removal of the tree. Supposedly to help with the crime investigation. With the investigation. They cut down the whole tree.
- [83:00]
Ben
Yeah. And the thing is, when the police arrived on scene, they. The first thing that they did was run up the stairs of the boarding house.
- [83:11]
Brian
Yes.
- [83:11]
Ben
Into the communal bathroom and said, this is where the shot was fired from. They failing to apparently look out the open window and see that it was covered by a massive chunk of wood.
- [83:22]
Brian
And guess what never appeared in the trial? The many witnesses who saw shooters, which we'll get into in the bushes below the building from the correct trajectory.
- [83:32]
Ben
Right.
- [83:33]
Brian
Several, many witnesses, multiple that we'll bring up, said the shooting came from outside of the building. Like, I heard it out my window or it was.
- [83:43]
Ben
Okay, so actually this gets into Charles Stevens.
- [83:45]
Brian
Yeah, let's talk about Charles.
- [83:46]
Ben
So Charles Stevens Lead witness for the US Against James Earl Ray. Lead witness. His wife was staying in the boarding house. Okay. She. Her story was she looked into the communal bathroom, saw no one was in there, heard a gunshot from outside, and then ran outside to see what had happened.
- [84:08]
Brian
So she was where the shots allegedly came from.
- [84:10]
Ben
Yes. So maybe one reason why she did that and Charles did something a little different is because she was sober at the time.
- [84:16]
Brian
Charles had what you call what doctors call a drinking problem.
- [84:20]
Ben
He had a bit of a drinking problem problem. And so he's like, sloshing himself around. He sees who he believes is James Earl Ray, the shooter. Okay. This is the witness.
- [84:32]
Brian
You can. You can literally look up. The video Ben's about to describe is.
- [84:35]
Ben
The funniest video you'll ever see. Okay. He's sitting down with, like, ABC or something, some news reporter who's doing an expose on the case. And they have the lead witness, Charles Stevens, and they show Charles. Charles Stevens, a picture of James Earl Ray. And the lady or the guy says, so this is what he looked like on the day of the shooting too. And James. Or. And Charles Stevens goes, that is not the same.
- [84:58]
Brian
That's not the guy.
- [84:59]
Ben
Or he's like, who is that?
- [85:01]
Brian
Who is that?
- [85:02]
Ben
He said, who is that?
- [85:03]
Brian
Who's that?
- [85:03]
Ben
And the reporter goes, this is James Earl Ray.
- [85:05]
Brian
He's like, oh, that's not who I saw.
- [85:07]
Ben
That is not the same.
- [85:08]
Brian
He doesn't have the same face. His face is much less full. Yeah, he's got too much hair. He. Yeah, especially in a profile like that wasn't him at all.
- [85:16]
Ben
The profile is all wrong.
- [85:18]
Brian
So the point is, someone did. We'll get to this. Someone did go through the area with a gun. Yes, by the way, but Charles Stevens. Not only was he a drunken, didn't even identify James Earl Ray later with a clear picture. He had already been arrested more than 150 times, mostly for drunk and disorderly.
- [85:36]
Ben
He was a. A career heady criminal. But isn't that just the funniest thing? He's like, yeah, that was actually not the same guy. Now, the biggest piece of, like, hard evidence. Yeah, I mean, it just ends. The irrefutably means that James Earl Ray, or at least it wasn't the gun that they said. Was that the gun that James Earl Ray had? His fingerprints all over that Remington 7603006 had a different rate of twist on the rifling inside the barrel than the gun that had fired the bullet that killed mlk. This is a thing that, like, it is like fingerprints. Yeah. If it's different, there's no question as to whether or not it's like maybe that was a bad test, maybe this, maybe that. No, if it's a different rate of twist on the rifling in the barrel, it is a different firearm.
- [86:22]
Brian
If you're unfamiliar rifling, they're grooves that are bored, sometimes four, sometimes six, depending on the rifle. They're bored into the bore of the rifle or the barrel of the rifle. They spin as they go down and they spin the bullet when it's going down the barrel so that it's spinning in flight and shoots straight, unlike a musket ball or something. And they're very similar across multiple of the same model of gun. But between the mechanical action of firing the bullet, what's striking the primer to the grooves in the barrel, where the groove starts and how it ends, they are all so different that they're like a fingerprint. The gun that fired the bullet, best we can say that was recovered from MLK, had a 1 and 11 and a half. 1 and 11. So every 11 and a half inches that the bullet would travel down the barrel, it would turn once.
- [87:17]
Ben
A single turn. Yep.
- [87:19]
Brian
The gun that James Earl Ray allegedly put in the sheet that they have had a 10 inch rifling for every. Every 10 inch would turn at once. So 1 to 10 versus 1 and 11 and a half. Additionally, there's a manufacturing defect which is not like a defect that made the gun not work, but you know, a little imperfection here, a pitting in the barrel or some kind of. It will mark the bullet as it passes through. There's a manufacturing defect in the rifle that James Earl Ray that was recovered, that was not present in the bullet.
- [87:53]
Ben
Right.
- [87:54]
Brian
And so if you go and you look at the debunkers today, they will now claim that it's inconclusive. They'll be like, oh, because this is such damning evidence that if this is true, it is open and shut. James Earl Ray did not shoot Martin Luther King Jr. Period. It was. His gun wasn't used. And not only that, but his gun was clearly planted with the intention of framing him. Because it's got a spent cartridge in the. I mean, all of that.
- [88:17]
Ben
Yeah.
- [88:17]
Brian
So they'll now claim that it's inconclusive, but at the minimum, we can say that it's strongly likely that the gun that they recovered simply was not the gun. Now, remember in James Earl Ray's story, he said that Raul, this mysterious white Hispanic man that gave him Gun, lots of money and IDs, and told him this whole story about why he needed. Was insistent that he get a.30 06 Remington.760 and was insistent on all these details that he would have needed to know to plant the gun or to use the same gun as James Earl Ray, that they were going to.
- [88:55]
Ben
James Earl Ray comes back with a Remington. 760 chambered in. 243. Yeah, well, yeah, it's a big enough caliber, you know, it can kill a man, no doubt.
- [89:04]
Brian
Yeah.
- [89:05]
Ben
But it's not a.30 06. And they need it to match the cow.
- [89:08]
Brian
And that's too much to cover.
- [89:09]
Ben
Exactly.
- [89:10]
Brian
And this time, by the way, they didn't have ballistics advanced enough to do this kind of analysis. And the problem is that now James Earl Ray's gun, the gun, the more you fire it, it changes the characteristics as you clean it or get it dirty. So there's a huge debate over whether they could clean the gun to continue testing it because the buildup was making it less and less conclusive. And they were never able to get a clear. They thought, well, cleaning it would probably compromise it enough again, that we wouldn't be able to match it anyway.
- [89:37]
Ben
Yeah.
- [89:38]
Brian
So needless to say, this piece of evidence today wouldn't stand up in the court of law. It'd be tossed out.
- [89:43]
Ben
Yep, absolutely.
- [89:44]
Brian
But no jury would be convinced or no reasonable jury would be convinced by this. This piece of evidence.
- [89:50]
Ben
Part of why we're so confident that the rifle was planted and that James Earl Ray did not actually put it in that bed sheet is because his fingerprints were really found on the rifle.
- [89:59]
Brian
All over.
- [89:59]
Ben
100%. It really was his rifle. But his fingerprints were found nowhere in the bathroom, the communal bathroom in the boarding house, or in the room that was rented in his name. So the argument would have to be that James Earl Ray, criminal mastermind, completely.
- [90:16]
Brian
Wiped clean the bathroom, the room that.
- [90:19]
Ben
He had stayed in, the bathroom that he had used multiple times in the night that he had stayed there, but he failed to wipe clean the rifle that he used to actually commit the murder that he then just ditched on.
- [90:29]
Brian
The side of the road with clear obvious that he had was the one who bought it. Yeah, but that does accord with his story, which is that he actually didn't go in to that building at all. He rented the room ahead of time because Raul had told him, hey, if anything goes wrong, I need you to have a room here so that it can't be tied to me and also so that you have a getaway you need to be right outside. And so he had been waiting outside and waiting outside, and then he was about to leave, thinking something God wrong after the gunshot went off, thinking, oh, they killed Raul. Yeah, this gun deal went wrong. Then Raul runs out, gets in the car. Makes perfect sense how he was able to flee the scene in under two minutes. Yeah, because James Earl Ray wasn't in that bathroom. Didn't have to run all the way to the room, pack up his things, come all the way down, go hide it around the corner, run back the other way, get in his car, turn it on, drive away. Which, by the way, you'd have to be like an Olympic sprinter.
- [91:22]
Ben
And by the way, James Earl Ray was not the one to put the bed sheet in front of Guy Canopy's store.
- [91:28]
Brian
No, let's talk.
- [91:29]
Ben
Without a doubt, let's talk about that. Maybe it was Raul. Maybe it was somebody else. But the guy who owned the store, Guy Canape, Guy Canopy, whatever.
- [91:35]
Brian
I don't know how to pronounce it.
- [91:36]
Ben
But his name is funny. He came forward and he said, okay, this is what I witnessed. I was standing behind the counter of my store. I can see outside the glass paned front door. I'm not an idiot. What I saw was a man wearing a hat, very calmly walk up with a bed sheet full of stuff. And he just put it down very calmly again, very calmly, right outside my front door, turned around, walked away. I was like, that's kind of weird. Maybe he'll come back for it. A few minutes later, instead of the guy coming back for it, he hears a gunshot ring out in the Memphis sky. MLK is dead. So the gunshot that killed MLK happened after the bed sheet filled with the Remington rifle had been placed in front of Guy Canopy's store.
- [92:22]
Brian
Surely this man was put on the stand as a witness in the case.
- [92:25]
Ben
You'd think, you'd think.
- [92:27]
Brian
Surely the drunk guy's wife was put on the stand in the case, right?
- [92:30]
Ben
No, and surely. In fact, even Charles Stevens, the drunk guy, he only. I forgot about this. He only came forward once the FBI released a reward.
- [92:40]
Brian
Oh, come on.
- [92:42]
Ben
With James Earl Ray's face saying, can you identify this man? And Charles Stevens was like, yeah, I was there on that day. I'll take that money.
- [92:50]
Brian
That was him.
- [92:51]
Ben
I saw him.
- [92:51]
Brian
A couple of bottles of vodka that I can get completely soused on every day. That'd be wonderful.
- [92:59]
Ben
Now. Yeah, I was gonna say.
- [93:01]
Brian
Okay, go ahead.
- [93:02]
Ben
You remember the guy who owned Jim's Grill? Brian, I got bad news the other day. I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also I started googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts.
- [93:30]
Brian
Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl.
- [93:38]
Ben
Well, I know that that now, but what am I supposed to do about it then?
- [93:41]
Brian
You ignorant Normie? All you've needed to do is go to indigos sundrysoap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties.
- [93:55]
Ben
Okay, I am literally going to indigosundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy.
- [93:59]
Brian
Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle.
- [94:08]
Ben
Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men's six pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't.
- [94:15]
Brian
So true King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry Soap Company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps, discount code, Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.
- [94:28]
Ben
Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?
- [94:32]
Brian
Ben, you ignorant Normie. It's always in the show description.
- [94:36]
Ben
Okay, so I'm going to go to indigosundrysoap.com I'm going to pick the men's six pack bundle and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout. All caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show.
- [94:48]
Brian
Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified.
- [94:58]
Ben
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- [95:17]
Brian
New Dominion Design Company is ready to provide that help. Unashamedly Christian, New Dominion Design Company exists to labor alongside fellow members of the Body of Christ as we engage in this great work of reformation.
- [95:28]
Ben
With over 15 years of design and marketing experience spanning across multiple industries, new Dominion Design Company was launched in 2024 to help like minded businesses, ministries, institutions, publishing houses and other content creators around the globe raise the bar of excellence and our Christian culture.
- [95:48]
Brian
If you're ready to build, new Dominion Design Company is ready to work with you. Visit newdominiondesignco.com that's newdominondesignco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs. And as always, that link will be.
- [96:01]
Ben
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- [97:34]
Brian
All of their coffee is hand selected and roasted fresh every day by a family of fellow believers. Try them out and you'll savor exceptional coffee while knowing that your investment supports a company committed to following God's teachings and upholding truth and righteousness. Ensuring your hard earned money contributes to the growth of God's kingdom.
- [97:52]
Ben
So stop giving that hard earned money to pagans who support Evil. Instead, buy Christian. And right now, Squirrelly Joe's has a fantastic offer for our listeners. You get your first bag of coffee for free.
- [98:05]
Brian
What?
- [98:05]
Ben
All you have to do is cover shipping. Are you kidding?
- [98:07]
Brian
What?
- [98:08]
Ben
So head over to squirrellyjoes.com Haunted Cosmos. That's squirrelyjoes.com Haunted Cosmos to claim your free bag of coffee. Let's flip and go link in the description below. I'm a poet. Didn't even know it.
- [98:23]
Brian
Should I start getting. His name is Lloyd.
- [98:26]
Ben
Yeah, but do you remember what he did with a rifle?
- [98:29]
Brian
Oh, I do, yes.
- [98:30]
Ben
On the day of the shooting. Would you like to tell the fine people, Lloyd.
- [98:33]
Brian
Remind me, Lloyd. What's his name?
- [98:35]
Ben
Lloyd Jowers.
- [98:36]
Brian
Lloyd Jowers, that's right. He showed off his.30:06 the day after the shooting. And a waitress also saw him with muddy pants and a stained shirt seconds after the shooting, running into the store to hide something behind the counter beneath the counter of Jim's Grill, which is pretty interesting that he and did. He had a 30I6 he'd hidden under the counter after running from the direction.
- [99:12]
Ben
Where shooting with muddy boots and a stained shirt happened.
- [99:15]
Brian
And then was. Was boasting about the note. Now, Jowers didn't shoot Martin Luther King.
- [99:19]
Ben
Jr. That's so true.
- [99:20]
Brian
We're gonna, we're gonna get to who did probably.
- [99:22]
Ben
Oh, we definitely, definitely.
- [99:24]
Brian
We have names. But yeah, so he's the owner of the, of the grill. Now. Enough of this stuff started to percolate up through the media that many years afterward, people, you know, kept calling, hey, we need to get Lloyd Jowers store. He's got to come clean. He's got to tell us what he did in 1993. Jowers went on ABC and he explained what happened. And the story he told was that he was paid $100,000 to help facilitate an MLK's murder and to coordinate between hitman like the person who was actually gonna do the shooting. He was paid by known mobster Frank Liberto.
- [100:07]
Ben
Frank Liberto.
- [100:08]
Brian
Frank Liberto. And what Jowers was to do was allegedly he was going to provide his place. They would meet in his store. He would help organize certain aspects of the details. But then he would take the rifle immediately after the shooting because he was placed very conveniently. He would hide it right after the shooting so that the other gun could be placed, the patsy could be framed. And then eventually so like within a few days later, he, after boasting and the waitress seeing him showing off the 30 out of six. Because these are all dumb guys.
- [100:39]
Ben
Yeah.
- [100:40]
Brian
At the end of the day, that someone else then disposed of the real murder weapon by throwing it off a bridge.
- [100:46]
Ben
Yeah.
- [100:46]
Brian
This brings us to a guy named Frank Liberto.
- [100:48]
Ben
Frank Liberto.
- [100:49]
Brian
Frank Liberto.
- [100:50]
Ben
Very interesting guy.
- [100:51]
Brian
Super important character. Frank Liberto is a guy in the area in Memphis who's connected with organized crime. So, like the Mafia?
- [100:58]
Ben
Yeah.
- [100:59]
Brian
He is owner of. Just like most organized crime folks, he's.
- [101:03]
Ben
Owner of legitimate businesses.
- [101:05]
Brian
Packing plants, produce packing plants. Well known to hate Martin Luther King Jr. And hate the civil rights movement, partly because in Memphis, it was really disrupting the social order and, like, hiring of factory workers who were black. And there was all this, like, talk of communism. And this was at the height of the Red Scare.
- [101:25]
Ben
Yeah.
- [101:26]
Brian
And Martin Luther King Jr. Was proposing things that most people were thinking, like, hey, that's communism.
- [101:30]
Ben
Yeah.
- [101:30]
Brian
And so there's these workers revolution. There's all this, like, fomenting stuff that's disrupting his business and organized crime. And so Frank Liberto allegedly paid Lloyd Jowers to help conceal this. And actually, interestingly, John McFerrin, who's a black businessman and civil rights activist who worked in one of Liberto's produce plants, said that he was working in one of his plants on April 4, 1968, when he heard Liberto answer the phone. Cue a telephone ring there. Mr. Sound Design Guy. Not actually right now, that one. Thank you. And he said, quote, I told you not to call me here. Shoot the son of a blank when he comes on the balcony. So that's just one guy. I mean, I don't know if he's telling the truth, but he said that Liberto also, over the years is claimed to have boasted more than once in drunken states to, like, a lover, a woman, and then another man at a different point, that he's the one who had that S.O.B. martin Luther King Jr. Killed. And guess who else was really good friends with Frank Liberto?
- [102:41]
Ben
Who?
- [102:42]
Brian
A guy by the name of Percy Foreman.
- [102:44]
Ben
Percy Foreman, like Percy Jackson?
- [102:47]
Brian
No. Percy Foreman was the first lawyer that was assigned to James Earl Ray's case that told him, I'm going to throw the case. And by the way, they're going to arrest your brother. And also, you got to plead guilty today.
- [102:59]
Ben
Oh, he was good friends with Frank Liberto.
- [103:01]
Brian
Good friends with Frank Liberto. There's even talk that Liberto is the one who then met, because. So James Roy drives away. He says, Raul said, stop the car. Raul gets out of the car, runs into the woods.
- [103:12]
Ben
He didn't stop the car.
- [103:13]
Brian
He, like, slowed down.
- [103:14]
Ben
He was like, hey, man, slow down the car. He's sitting in the back seat. He opens the door and jumps and rolls.
- [103:19]
Brian
Rolls.
- [103:20]
Ben
First of all, I love how James Earl Ray does not stop. He's like, yeah, all right, cool, man. Like, bye, dude. I trust you. You know what you're doing.
- [103:27]
Brian
So then at this point, James Earl Ray didn't even know about the assassination. It was later. He's like, all right, maybe Raul's up to something. I don't know what he's got to do. I'm going. And then he hears on the radio that there was a shooting in Martin Luther King Jr. And then he gets more details, and eventually he hears they're looking for a man in a white Mustang. And that's what made him start running. Yeah, he was like, oh, no.
- [103:48]
Ben
And so he goes.
- [103:49]
Brian
He meets a guy.
- [103:50]
Ben
He meets a guy in Atlanta, you know, big guy, kind of mysterious, right. And he knows that he's friends with Raul, and this big guy gives him a bunch of money and a bunch of passports, more fake identification, and basically, this guy's Frank Liberto. Like, that's the whole idea.
- [104:06]
Brian
Okay, I want to back up before we continue into who actually we think killed him and. And some more details, but there was also a detective of the Memphis Police Department.
- [104:17]
Ben
This is one of the best details. It's so overlooked.
- [104:20]
Brian
He's assigned to Martin Luther King, basically. And he was basically to protect him and help keep Martin Luther King safe and that sort of thing.
- [104:30]
Ben
Guy named Lisa.
- [104:31]
Brian
Edward Reddit, which is a hilarious name.
- [104:33]
Ben
Yeah, Reddit.
- [104:34]
Brian
It was pre Reddit.com, but Edward Reddit. So Edward Reddit, though, if you read the story, he wasn't there the day of the shooting, which is kind of the time when you'd really want your police to. Protection to be there to prevent you from being shot. Where was he?
- [104:48]
Ben
Oh, he was hiding at home.
- [104:50]
Brian
Why would he be hiding at home, Ben?
- [104:52]
Ben
Oh, it's because he received a threat on his life.
- [104:55]
Brian
Okay.
- [104:55]
Ben
And so they said, hey, Reddit, you go stay at home so that you.
- [104:59]
Brian
Don'T get killed till we send someone to protect you.
- [105:02]
Ben
Yeah, exactly. And then they were like, well, who made the call to put in the tip about his life being threatened? Oh, it was the FBI.
- [105:10]
Brian
The FBI did.
- [105:11]
Ben
They didn't even use a different phone.
- [105:13]
Brian
And then later they said that was a false tip.
- [105:16]
Ben
Yeah. Oh, and by the way, before King was shot, most of the Memphis Police Department was diverted into other locations.
- [105:24]
Brian
What was a bomb threat?
- [105:25]
Ben
Yeah, there were some bomb threats that were totally unrelated and, you know, they ended up all being false.
- [105:31]
Brian
Look, that if I had to count the number of times that a bomb threat has happened, very close, but conveniently drawing off all the law enforcement from an area where the government totally isn't assassinating a political figure like it's. It happens.
- [105:43]
Ben
If I had a nickel, it happens. Hey, now here's another really funny. A funny one. There was a hobo, okay? The hobo's name.
- [105:52]
Brian
Oh, this is so good.
- [105:53]
Ben
The hobo's name was Cornbread.
- [105:54]
Brian
Cornbread.
- [105:55]
Ben
That was his Christian name. Cornbread. And cornbread, at 6pm on April 4, was drinking in some bushes outside of the boarding house. Just enjoy. I mean, honestly, just enjoying himself. Sounds like he was having a good old time. And next thing you know, he hears a gunshot and it's really close to him, scares him. He rolls over, sees a man in a white shirt running past him with a rifle in hand.
- [106:24]
Brian
Right.
- [106:24]
Ben
Clearly, he didn't just take that shot. The shot came from the bathroom, the communal bathroom above him.
- [106:31]
Brian
I often clean my deer rifles in the bushes below a hospital.
- [106:35]
Ben
Now, look, this is a hobo named Cornbread who was drinking at the time.
- [106:38]
Brian
Do we know that he's reliable?
- [106:40]
Ben
No. Yes. But if Charles Stevens is reliable, as the star wins.
- [106:46]
Brian
Come on.
- [106:47]
Ben
Then maybe we should give Cornbread the benefit of the doubt.
- [106:49]
Brian
The biggest thing is that just that none of these people were ever called. The lawyers phoned it in. None of this was ever called. So you might be asking if. If he didn't take the shot, if James Earl Ray didn't take the shot, who did?
- [106:59]
Ben
Right.
- [107:00]
Brian
And there's good evidence to believe that it was a team, based on eyewitnesses, that it was a team of two shooters, a primary and a backup shooter that were both in the similar location in these bushes down at the foot of the hotel, you know, where up below the window where he was allegedly shot from, people saw potential shooters running in two directions. Lots of eyewitnesses saw this. One ran around the building one direction and then the other one ran another direction and had to hop down a wall and then go the other way. So there were two men who are allegedly involved in this shooting. And this is according to Lloyd Jowers, again, the guy he was supposed to take on that Frank Liberto helped via the Mafia hire. And one is Earl Clark of the Memphis Police Department. Lt. Clark had already allegedly been accused many times of taking bribes from organized crime and being associated with Frank Liberto. He was Also known as one of the best marksmen on the Memphis pd. Jowers claimed that once the shot was taken, Clark ran down the hill from where he'd taken the shot, handed the rifle to Jowers so that he could hide it and dispose of it, and then Clark then escaped in a another white Mustang, one of two at the scene that day, the other belonging to James Earl Ray, which had, by the way, been purchased. We keep seeing, by the way, but it's true, by the way, that that new white Mustang had been purchased because Raul said, take some money, go buy a car. Tell me what car you buy basically, and buy something non discreet white Mustang. It'll blend in. So they had another white Mustang prepared with the shooter to confuse things as well. And then there was a backup shooter from the PD as well, a guy named Strauss. Now, Strauss, there's eyewitness testimony that says that Strauss spent the whole day before the shooting at the police range practicing shooting his.30 06. So look, so either one of them could have taken shot Strauss or Earl Clark, but that's what Lloyd Jowers. Sad.
- [109:11]
Ben
Absolutely amazing. Okay, and now maybe we should get into why was King assassinated?
- [109:18]
Brian
Yeah, why now? Why would they kill the guy?
- [109:20]
Ben
Why? Why April 4, 1968. Well, you know, going back to what we talked about after the cold open, I'll just put it very simply. Later in his career, King started to harp on something that he hadn't really been touching on as much earlier on. He became vocally and forcefully critical of what's called the American military industrial complex. Right. He started to go vitriolic against America's proclivity to go into these smaller countries and basically set up a puppet state by their military force in order to enact their own version of American democracy. King hated this. And he saw an example of it, a really prominent example of it in the Vietnam War. And so he came out as a really high level opponent of the Vietnam War. And I think maybe it's as simple as that.
- [110:16]
Brian
Yeah. And so this was again, height of red scare communism. Anti communism communist agents are everywhere. Communism's really bad, by the way. And not all of that was bad. But when you combine some of the civil rights activism along with the anti war stuff, you start to see a through line where JFK was into similar stuff. He was saying we need to be careful of the military industrial complex. We need to investigate the CIA. And so it would be very convenient for Martin Luther King to be taken out. Additionally, a lot of the local politics of Memphis come into Play as well.
- [110:56]
Ben
Yeah.
- [110:56]
Brian
The head of the Memphis police was a 25 year veteran of the FBI. And a lot of the people involved are related to Memphis politics and Memphis, like local issues that were related to civil rights activism kind of being a problem. Just as one little side note, as some of this percolated through the media and people were putting together, hey, there were these eyewitnesses and this stuff doesn't really fit together. Harry Avery, who was the Tennessee State commissioner at the time, he tried to do his own investigation. Not necessarily trying to prove that MLK Jr. Was a CIA cover up, but just asking the question of like, how did James Earl Ray get all this money and fake IDs and his stuff, which he was like sophisticated stuff. And immediately when he started this investigation, the Governor Ellington fired Harry Avery.
- [111:49]
Ben
Yeah.
- [111:50]
Brian
From his position as state commissioner.
- [111:51]
Ben
And there's a lot of like, weird kind of cloak and dagger stuff like that. Like for example, before staying at that hotel or the motel. Lorraine.
- [112:00]
Brian
Yeah, this is strange.
- [112:00]
Ben
King actually wanted to change rooms. He had normally stayed in that room 306, but he actually wanted to go to room 202, particularly because he was worried it could put him at risk of being harmed. Yeah, by staying in the same room over and over again, he would be too predictable. So he wanted to change to room 202. But when he got there, he thought like, okay, I'm going to go to room 202. That's my reservation. The hotel informed him that someone from his team had called them earlier that day asking to switch to room three.
- [112:33]
Brian
Cancel the change.
- [112:33]
Ben
Yeah, cancel the change. No, keep it at room 306. And King and all of his team were like, no, none of us did that.
- [112:39]
Brian
When they got there, there's like, no, we, we didn't make.
- [112:42]
Ben
No, none of us did that. But at that point, again, according to the, to the motel manager, all of the rooms were already taken up.
- [112:49]
Brian
Now. They were all.
- [112:49]
Ben
And so they had no choice but to stay in room 306.
- [112:52]
Brian
And so they. And there's still no. Nobody knows who did that. Who actually changed that room. Couldn't have been the FBI.
- [112:58]
Ben
They definitely, they don't have the resources for that.
- [113:01]
Brian
In this so far we've got James Earl Ray's story of Raul, this mysterious guy who was using a fake name. Clearly he wasn't really named Raul. He was like a white guy.
- [113:09]
Ben
Yeah, absolutely no chance.
- [113:10]
Brian
And he had financed him, convinced him of this story that perfectly conveniently placed him with the same type of weapon used to kill Martin Luther King Jr. At the right place in his hands with his fingerprints on it to have him placed at the scene with a room booked in his name and all of that sort of arranged perfectly. It's not necessarily obvious that they wanted James Earl Ray to be caught. They set him up so he might escape. But if he was caught, he would just be a patsy.
- [113:36]
Ben
He'd be easy.
- [113:37]
Brian
Patsy wouldn't be a big deal kind of low IQ guy. And so they're like, well that'll be fine. So you might say, well how? What about the confidence? There's some eyewitnesses, there's all this. Jowers said some things, but it's not just from these random eyewitnesses and maybe people lying and mafia connected stuff. Daniel Ellsberg, who is the guy behind the 1971 Pentagon Papers release, which is a whole different thing we won't get into. It's kind of like a leak of classified documents that was exposing nefarious activities of the government. I think he ended up being exonerated in the trial and they didn't actually convict him for that. Daniel Ellsberg but he swore in an affidavit that Agent Brady Tyson of the FBI told him in confidence that J. Edgar Hoover, who's the director of the FBI at the time, had had Martin Luther King Jr. Killed. And that Hoover was well known for using this kind of hatchet man named Clyde Tolson to carry out his dirty work. And Clyde Tolson would allegedly again use things like organized crime connections. The way the CIA and a lot of government conspiracy works is that they don't necessarily have a stable of elite assassins all the time in their hire. That's sort of movie stuff. But what they will do is in different countries they will fund local guerrillas or they will fund someone who will do something or they will work with criminals like organized crime street informants. It's a common tactic in law enforcement generally to actually carry out the activities. So Clyde Tolson would have been perfectly positioned to know Frank Liberto and other mafia related people who would then know low lives. They would have corruption influence again via the Mafia. They had connections with the Memphis PD who would be paid off in bribes to look the other way with this mafia related activity. So there's this whole pipeline that on an affidavit the agent says yeah, that's exactly what happened. And not only that, but he alleges that Tolson paid off the warden at the prison where James Earl Ray was incarcerated and allowing him this convenient escape through the bread box because and here's the whole tie in to this episode. The whole point is that James Earl Ray, in his military career, worked with the oss, the early CIA, and he told his brother that they would give him drugs. He told him that the oss, later, the CIA was like the Mafia, that once you got in, you were never really out. So they had sort of identified him and prepped him to be one of their patsies via something like MK Ultra.
- [116:18]
Ben
Yeah. And he's the perfect mark because he's not an intelligent man. He really isn't. And so it makes total sense to me that this would be the kind of guy that he gets in. He's trying to do the right thing, trying to maybe turn his life around. I don't know, maybe he wasn't. But he gets in with OSS and he's sworn up and down like, yeah, they gave me drugs. And I mean, our next story is gonna show you that. Yeah, when people say that about the CIA and the MK Ultra time, maybe we should believe him because it's most of the time true. And so who's to say what all that entailed? Like when he says, yeah, they gave.
- [116:52]
Brian
Me drugs, he doesn't even remember.
- [116:54]
Ben
He doesn't remember. That could have been anything. And that was at the time that OSS was, was just dipping their toe into this whole brain warfare idea. I mean, James Earl Ray was like an ace in their back pocket that they could use at any time. The other thing that's kind of interesting, this is like more circumstantial. These names, Raul Liberto, they pop up in connection with another really high level assassination, and that's that of jfk. I think that that's just worth. There's a lot of like, prominent players in the JFK assassination with similar or identical names.
- [117:27]
Brian
There's a few more tying some of these things together. There's a few more discrepancies to point out with the MLK shooting. One of them is that just the very day of the shooting, the FBI immediately took over the investigation. And if not illegal, this is certainly abnormal.
- [117:44]
Ben
It goes totally against protocol.
- [117:45]
Brian
The FBI law enforcement has certain protocol for who has jurisdiction. You know, for example, any attempt on the President's life is the jurisdiction of the Secret Service. And then the FBI, terrorism is the FBI. If there's a crime that crosses state lines, FBI can jump in. They can be invited by local law enforcement. But this was just a local. I mean, it was high profile, but for all intents and purposes, this was a local murder in Memphis, Tennessee that with no reason to believe that it was federal in nature, but immediately they took over. And then all of a sudden the chopping of the tree, these shady sorts of things. They never performed an autopsy on MLK's body. A nurse at the hospital actually said that when mlk. Okay, this is. Let me back up a second because this is another interesting connection. There's a picture of MLK right after he'd been shot. He's laying down, he's bleeding, it's a horrible picture. And someone's like administering aid to him or trying to check for signs of life. And I can't remember. I think it's McCollum or something like that, his exact name. But it was not known who that was for a long time until later they were able to identify him. That guy was an ex CIA agent who had gotten into the Martin Luther King inner circle and is widely believed to be the means via which they for years surveilled and wiretapped Martin Luther King wherever he went. There was a long term CIA, FBI, it was called cointel. It was an illegal government surveillance operation. I believe the government either even later ruled that they had violated his civil rights with cointel. So that guy administers aid, whatever, he's right there, this CIA, he ran up the stairs right away, the ex CIA guy who happens to be right there.
- [119:31]
Ben
And he's like checking if he's alive, who's surveilling mlk.
- [119:34]
Brian
He gets in the ambulance, they take him to the hospital. This nurse says they bring MLK and they're working on him. He's still alive. They say he's got a pulse, he's still alive. When all of a sudden multiple men.
- [119:43]
Ben
In suits, black eyed or black. Men in black.
- [119:47]
Brian
Men in black. It was just a black eyed children. And they say, step away from the body. And so they all back away and only one doctor is allowed to kind of be there. And then later that doctor's the one who declares the time of death. And the nurse says it was that he declared the time of death as earlier than they had even worked on him while he was still alive. And so they removed the. And she even says they've removed life saving equipment from him.
- [120:14]
Ben
Yeah, they, they were like, we're gonna make sure that this guy dies. It's honestly really dark. Some of the COINTELPRO stuff, yeah, is important because we know, part of why we know that that happened is because we know that some of these like seedier parts of MLK's life are potentially true. Yeah, Things like his. Him being unfaithful to his wife, et cetera.
- [120:36]
Brian
Yeah.
- [120:37]
Ben
The reason that we know that in the first place is because they were putting bugs in MLK's room, hotels, home, all that, so that they could get intel on them, on him. And as they did this, they also got like, kind of like blackmail, personal blackmail that they could use to sully his character. Now, of course, they could be lying about that, but they're basically saying, like, no. The reason that it's common knowledge that MLK was an adulterer is because of cointelpro.
- [121:05]
Brian
They. If you remember the last episode, I said, I have this theory that whenever someone who's like a problem politician gets in office, the first day they sit down their desk after the election, they get a manual envelope full of, hey, we know what you did. Whether true or fake, pictures or real stuff. They did that with mlk. They wrote an alleged letter. We have this. I would read it, but I don't have it in front of me. From allegedly some black man who was against him and threatened. Basically, the gist of the letter was, Martin Luther King, you should kill yourself. We know about all your abnormal behavior, all this stuff, your adulteries. You're not a king, you're not a reverend. I won't call you this. The only thing you're like, is King Henry VIII an adulterer and all this stuff. Well, it turns out the people who sent that letter, their name has three letters in. Starts with an F, it ends with.
- [121:57]
Ben
An I. Oh, no way.
- [122:00]
Brian
Yeah.
- [122:00]
Ben
The FBI.
- [122:03]
Brian
FBI. So surrounding Martin Luther King's death and its investigation, you also find a series of mysterious deaths.
- [122:13]
Ben
Yeah, like, for example, there was this cab driver named Lewis Ward, and he was talking to another cab driver, Buddy of his, named Buddy. Buddy the elf, which, I mean, Buddy the cab driver is one of the most comic book things that I've ever heard in my life.
- [122:28]
Brian
Oh, my name is a body.
- [122:29]
Ben
I love how back in that time, like, it used to be real. Like, they were like, oh, yeah, look at this rifle. Yeah, Yeah. I just came over from the bushes. A guy hobo named Kornbread was watching me shoot mlk.
- [122:42]
Brian
I got it out of a hobo named Cornbread. See, Shane.
- [122:45]
Ben
Anyway, so all true. This guy Lewis Ward is talking to his cab driver, Buddy named Buddy. And Buddy says that right at the time that MLK was shot, he was in that area and he was going to pick somebody up to give them a ride. And he just kind of happened to see, like, in the. In the hustle and bustle of it all. A guy running out from the bushes with a gun. And this Buddy, he's like, there's your shooter.
- [123:09]
Brian
He even said he was looking. Cause, I mean, Martin Luther King and his entourage were over there, that he had looked up, seen Martin Luther King Jr. Shot.
- [123:18]
Ben
Yeah.
- [123:18]
Brian
And he was like, oh, shock. Turned and sees a guy running with the gun from the bushes.
- [123:24]
Ben
He gets into a nearby vehicle, and then just zoom in on my face.
- [123:28]
Brian
Off. Zoom in on my face.
- [123:30]
Ben
What the heck, guys?
- [123:31]
Brian
What the heck?
- [123:32]
Ben
So then a few days later, and.
- [123:34]
Brian
And Buddy certainly was called on trial as a witness, right, Ben?
- [123:37]
Ben
No. And here's why.
- [123:38]
Brian
What?
- [123:38]
Ben
Because a few days later, Lewis Ward, that guy whose Buddy's name was Buddy, he showed up at the cab agency, and he's like, hey, where's Buddy? I haven't seen him in a few days.
- [123:46]
Brian
Yeah.
- [123:46]
Ben
And the guy's like. Or, you know, the other guys, the other cabbies, they're like, oh, yeah, Buddy. He jumped out of a moving car at high speed. He was immediately run over and killed. It was suicidal. Before his death, he was trying to tell everyone about the shooter that fled the scene.
- [124:02]
Brian
Buddy, I'm sorry, Buddy.
- [124:05]
Ben
You were astray.
- [124:06]
Brian
He's not alone.
- [124:07]
Ben
You caught a stray.
- [124:08]
Brian
He's not alone. CIA, Another mob connection. Another strange death early on in the the process. Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer. Jimmy Hoffa. Totally different story. If anybody knows, call buried dude under that football field.
- [124:23]
Ben
The Mythbusters figured it out.
- [124:24]
Brian
The lawyer's name was ZT Osborne. He said that he was going to take the trial because he noticed some of these discrepancies. He's like, I can get you a new trial. This is ridiculous. So he said, james Earl Ray, I'll take your. I'll take the case. Three months later, ZT Osborne is found dead of an apparent suicide. His wife swears up and down he would never commit suicide. He was not depressed. There were no signs of that. He just all of a sudden, supposedly. And she, for her life, said, nope, Osborne would never do that.
- [124:55]
Ben
Okay? So then a judge looks at that, looks at the evidence, and he's like, no, no, no. There should be a new trial. There's some discrepancies here. He mysteriously died of a sudden heart attack.
- [125:06]
Brian
He died of a heart attack. I mean, and judges die of heart attacks.
- [125:08]
Ben
Judges die of heart attack. They got a stressful job, okay? But then another judge.
- [125:11]
Brian
Don't be a conspiracy theorist.
- [125:12]
Ben
Then another judge was like, no, that other judge was right.
- [125:15]
Brian
The next judge that took his Place.
- [125:17]
Ben
Right. We should actually look at this. I agree with that last guy. He died of a mysterious heart attack.
- [125:22]
Brian
Ben, sometimes strings of people die of heart attacks.
- [125:25]
Ben
That's so true.
- [125:26]
Brian
One after the other, they're communicable.
- [125:27]
Ben
Some people are also good at just, like, reading the room. And so the next judge that came in and took their place, he saw all the same evidence, and he was like, oh, there's two judges dead right next to me. And, yeah, I think actually this is fine. I don't think there's any evidence that we need to look at.
- [125:45]
Brian
We don't need a new trial.
- [125:45]
Ben
The FBI patten a thousand baby.
- [125:48]
Brian
He was like, absolutely. So then a year after this, Alfred, one of the brothers of Martin Luther King Jr. He started looking into the case. And later, you remember the case. King family.
- [125:58]
Ben
Ultimately, Alfred King.
- [125:59]
Brian
Alfred King. My son's name is Alfred Kingsley.
- [126:02]
Ben
Yeah.
- [126:02]
Brian
So they. So he starts looking into it. And remember, the King family is the family that. That ultimately brought the civil suit where the. The. The jurors decided in favor of the King family that Martin Luther King Jr. Had been killed via government conspiracy.
- [126:19]
Ben
Via the government.
- [126:20]
Brian
Right.
- [126:20]
Ben
Yeah.
- [126:21]
Brian
Alfred is then found dead in his own swimming pool.
- [126:25]
Ben
Wait, wait, so did he drown?
- [126:27]
Brian
Well, here's the thing. He was in his underwear, and he was a strong swimmer. Everyone's like, he's a good swimmer, and he didn't have any water in his lungs. What he did have was strange bruising around his knuckle region, his neck. So the police investigated, and they said this is a clear accidental drowning.
- [126:50]
Ben
You know what I do love, though?
- [126:52]
Brian
What?
- [126:52]
Ben
I love true crime stuff like this. When someone has a mysterious death, like, they drown, and it doesn't matter who it is. Dude, the podcaster is like, they were known for being a great swimmer. Yeah.
- [127:04]
Brian
Like, it could be like, yeah, he.
- [127:06]
Ben
Fell off a building. Like, they were known for being afraid of heights. They would never get close to the edge of a building.
- [127:11]
Brian
He had great balance. Yeah. Like they always say. It's like, yeah. So, okay, then, not too Long after this, 1971, a reporter named Bill Sater. And I'm not sure of the pronunciation or the spelling of this, but Bill.
- [127:24]
Ben
Sater probably S a T, Y, R.
- [127:26]
Brian
Yeah, I don't like the Seder. Like, the. Like the mythical being. So mythical being.
- [127:31]
Ben
Yeah.
- [127:32]
Brian
Tune in on how it costs.
- [127:33]
Ben
Mythical is myth is just history.
- [127:35]
Brian
So he starts investigating this gets into. It is like, known as. He's, like, digging stuff up. And then he's in Waco, Texas, and someone, as happens I mean, if I had a nickel for every time this happened to reporters, I know he was poisoned mysteriously and died.
- [127:52]
Ben
Who among us hasn't been poisoned?
- [127:54]
Brian
We've all.
- [127:54]
Ben
I mean, Monsanto chemtrails.
- [127:57]
Brian
Fast forward six years.
- [127:59]
Ben
There's chlorine in the water.
- [128:00]
Brian
Chlorine in the water. Fast forward six years and you have a really important event hitting the intelligence scene where the US population, this popular cry begins to sort of rise up and say we need to investigate the intelligence community in the US because there are these strange assassinations happening. Stuff is coming out at this point where they're knowing. They're starting to learn about illegal surveillance operations on US citizens. And so there's a House Select Committee called. Which is just a group of legislators are called into a committee. They form a small group of. And they're supposed to investigate and hear evidence on something and come to a ruling or conclusions. This one was the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And it was going to look at JFK, MLK, RFK, all these different things. So in 1977, the FBI Assistant Director of Intelligence, high position, his name's William Sullivan, he was about to testify and it was known that he was going to testify against J. Edgar Hoover, who.
- [129:09]
Ben
Was the head of the FBI on.
- [129:10]
Brian
And it's a commit. It's a committee about assassinations and he's going to testify against Hoover. What is he going to be talking about?
- [129:16]
Ben
You do the math.
- [129:17]
Brian
Like, what's he going to be doing? Okay, so then Sullivan's like, I'm a little stressed. You know, I got to go do this. I'm going to go get some time out in the woods and breathe the fresh air. I'm going to touch grass. Great idea, right? He's out in the woods and is in a tragic accident which was totally accidental. He was shot and killed by a hunter who mistook him for a deer.
- [129:41]
Ben
And now we come full circle to the liaison listeners. I don't look like a deer. Ben, if they try to tell you.
- [129:49]
Brian
If I had to describe you as an animal, I would say a falcon, dude.
- [129:54]
Ben
I would describe you as hippogriff, like Aslan dang.
- [129:59]
Brian
The Jesus lion.
- [130:01]
Ben
Just one up.
- [130:02]
Brian
Wow. Additionally, I mentioned this at the beginning, but just to tie this together with a bow, the liaison to the Select Committee because the Select Committee doesn't go find all. They're not like out gumshoe reporters on the like, the congressmen aren't going out and investigating. They appoint people and they say, hey, we want this information, this information and go Go query the FBI and get these files and go get the data from the CIA on the MLK thing. And a lot of stuff's come out from this where the CIA, the FBI, have admitted, like they're. They were trying to destroy mlk. They were wiretapping him. All this stuff. Well, the liaison that was bringing them.
- [130:38]
Ben
The information, really trustworthy guy.
- [130:40]
Brian
He was. He was a CIA agent.
- [130:43]
Ben
Guys, if you think that the CIA is your friend, oh, my. You are wrong. And hey, I'm actually. I'm going to echo my pal Windigoon. We're actually not pals, but I wish we were. I wish we were. And say if you think, no, that's horrible. The government would never do that. Yes, they would.
- [131:00]
Brian
In fact, on Wendigoon, you should go check out his YouTube channel. He did. He did an episode on MLK Jr.
- [131:07]
Ben
His rizz is with whiteboard.
- [131:09]
Brian
He whiteboarded out some of the stuff we talked about. I cannot emphasize to you enough two things that you should go watch that video. And secondly, Wendigo knowing that you are watching. Since we are such close friends.
- [131:21]
Ben
Yeah.
- [131:21]
Brian
Brothers in Christ and interested in some similar things. How much. You should come onto our podcast so that we can help boost your small channel.
- [131:31]
Ben
Yeah, like, we would love to do you that favor.
- [131:34]
Brian
We'd love to help boost you up, my guy, because I know that you have just a few subscribers. And, yeah, I think we could help you.
- [131:40]
Ben
We're real, like King makers over here. We see you like, you're. You're real, like Prince lit. And we think that you have what.
- [131:46]
Brian
We think you have potential. Okay.
- [131:48]
Ben
The last thing that I'll say is kind of more stuff on that surveillance. So the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, which is a CIA monitoring group that was assigned to Martin Luther King, these are things that we absolutely know. They had been surveilling King. They had been getting all that cointelpro type stuff that I talked about earlier, and they had allegedly taken pictures from the day of the assassination. Now, the story is that some of the pictures they had taken that, like, some whistleblowers saw included pictures of Jowers, Lloyd Jowers, fleeing the scene of the shooting to Jim's Grill.
- [132:27]
Brian
Lloyd Jowers would never do that.
- [132:29]
Ben
Lloyd Jowers, the guy who took the guy, again, the waitress, is like, yeah. Lloyd came in, he had the rifle. He was covered in mud. He put it under the counter, and then, you know, sometime later, it got thrown into the river or whatever. Okay. So apparently there's pictures of all this Too. We don't just have to take the waitress's word. But when the select committee, this House select committee, asked for those pictures, that CIA surveillance group came back and said, oopsies. We actually. We actually lost them in a boating accident. Dang, man. We would have given them to you, but we literally. I'm going to be sick. That day.
- [133:08]
Brian
I think they even said we got rid of them.
- [133:11]
Ben
Yeah, they said, like, we got rid of them. I mean, what I mean is them.
- [133:15]
Brian
Who would have needed those?
- [133:17]
Ben
Oh, so.
- [133:18]
Brian
So that's MLK Jr.
- [133:20]
Ben
Anyway, your government reiterates you and they want to kill you.
- [133:22]
Brian
Just to reiterate. I feel great. Love my life, my family. If the FBI at any point watches this and feels like we are attacking them, I want you to know we're on your team.
- [133:37]
Ben
We're doing this. You can only pick on a guy that you really respect, that you really respect. You know what I mean? So we love you.
- [133:45]
Brian
Keep it. I mean, hey, wow. Just in terms of. This was hard work that you guys did here. You worked really hard in killing Martin Luther King Jr. And I think that.
- [133:55]
Ben
You stayed above board the whole time.
- [133:57]
Brian
And everybody knows that hard work deserves. Just game recognized, this game. So no need to do anything negative to any of us at any time. And I think that really, in terms of this episode, this just shows that the US Government, with the best intentions, doing nothing wrong at all and has never done anything wrong. They do occasionally mind control people via hallucinogenic drugs and massive doses of them, and psychological torture. Torture in nefarious ways so that they can create patsies to implement their illegal and extremely immoral activities both domestically and globally in service of their totalitarian aims. And that this is all good.
- [134:40]
Ben
But, yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, like, devil's advocate, you know, like, who among us hasn't. Who among us hasn't done something like that? Yeah. I would like all those hypocritic naysayers out there to take a line out of the FBI's book and start being honest with themselves.
- [134:55]
Brian
Yeah.
- [134:56]
Ben
And now we're gonna go into a story. This one was a little bit more lighthearted. Mlk. I mean, he died. That's not cool. But it was a lighthearted narrative.
- [135:05]
Brian
It was so ridiculous that it was at least comical for us now.
- [135:09]
Ben
But now we're gonna talk about, okay, what if they do something like this to a guy who is a criminal mastermind? What might that look like? So I'm going to tell the story of James Whitey Bulger can't wait. The subject was brought into the sterile room. It was 9am on Tuesday. For the next 24 hours, he belonged to the researchers camped out in the basement of this bonafide hellscape. He wondered aloud why he was even there. They didn't answer. In a sudden rush, two of the masked researchers grabbed his arm and stretched it out as far as they could. He resisted instinctually, but relaxed after a moment's heavy breathing and confused looks around the room. Everyone was so calm. This was supposed to happen. They administered the drugs. Massive amounts of LSD 25 shot like a bullet into his bloodstream. All at once the world began to change around him. Where once the walls were white, they sank into a crimson shade. Where once the roof was only eight feet over him, it shot up into the stars and his small room became a prison the size of heaven itself. He put his head down, felt the sweet sweat beating on his forehead grow to drops that fell like rain into his lap and breathed deep. His eyes strained and went from clear to fuzzy, then back to clear again, clearer then clear. He could hear his heartbeat and see his blood rushing through his smoky lungs. His mouth gaped open from all the senses flooding his mind at once. He looked up, pupils shrinking to periods at the light that met him in this moment. He studied the thing that sat propped just in front of him. Before, he could have sworn to the core it had just been a camera. Now it flopped with the ears and fur of a dog, excited to see its owner come home after a day at work. The subject let a soft smile and giggle loose from his lips. And then came the horror. The dog started to shift and change shape where gentle ears had fallen to the side and flopped over onto themselves. Spikes of sharpened watchfulness rose up in their place, or a fat hound's neck had gingerly swung. A tightened chest of muscle and black hide came into its own. The face moved through a mist of darkness and shadow, from lowly into vicious. The white fangs were too long and too sharp. The thick tongue was too long. The lips were too far curled back. The eyes were lifeless and burning with rage. Carcharoth Cerberus, around the gates of Hell, stared back at him like he was a pitiful soul on the shores of Acheron. His heart rate quickened and everything else in the universe drifted away. Only he and this demonic dog's head was left in a rush. The head jumped from the camera stand that still held it and snatched his head off. Then he was on to the next nightmare. James Bulger Jr. Was born to first generation Irish immigrants in 1929, he'd go on to be the eldest of six children. A man in the house despite being a child. And the same. His hard working father depended on his firstborn to help keep things in line, to see to his mother's safety, and to help her and he in raising up the kids beneath him. Soon these responsibilities doubled down on him. Does not life ask so much of so many? When his father lost his arm in a work accident, the family was reduced to utter poverty. Just in time for America's great depression. Driven by desperate need, the young Bulger took to the rough streets of south Boston. And through the network of other bare knuckled boxers the teenage Bulger ran with with joined a gang of miscreants. At 14 years old, Bulger was arrested and charged with larceny. Soon after this, he'd be charged with assault, forgery, and armed robbery. The small shops in this rough part of Boston started to fear the Shamrocks. That was the gang's name. And this gave Bulger a confidence he didn't know was possible. But with more and more testing of his luck came more and more run ins with the law. Finally, Bulger was sentenced to juvie for these repeated offenses. After release, and fearing a relapse into his old ways that had gotten him only lost time, Bulger immediately joined the Air force. While he served, he earned his high school diploma and trained as a mechanic. He thought himself truly reformed. But the temptation to greed and aggression and pride proved too strong for the young man. He committed an number of assaults while in the Air force and was even arrested by air Force police at one point for going absent without leave. Bulger knew what was coming for him. A life of crime. So when he got out of the military, he started looking for opportunities he could use to get really good at this calling of his. More theft, more larceny, more forgery, more gangs, more street fights. It all honed Bulger into a master of organized crime. In 1956, at just 27 years old, Bulger had his next major run in with police when he was charged with armed assault and truck hijacking. For this, he was sent to federal prison, the Atlanta Penitentiary. And it's here where he learned the true ways of fear and madness. From this prison, he would eventually become the feared and violent mob boss, Whitey Bulger, a crime lord known for his brutality and lack of care for anything in the world apart from animals, for which he claimed a soft spot. But what happened at that penitentiary to flip the switch? Why did it serve as the catalyst for new degrees of violent chaos in the young man's life? Well, about a year into his stay, he was approached with a deal. A team of psychiatrists had come in, eager to try out some tests on the prisoners. They said they were just from Emory University. They said they were just led by a man named Dr. Carl Pfeiffer. They said they just wanted to find a treatment for schizophrenia. They said that cooperation could mean reduced sentences for any of the criminals willing to participate. Obviously, the young Bulger jumped at the opportunity, and he'd soon live trust regret that for two years, Bulger and 18 other inmates would enter that cursed room. They'd stay in there for 24 hours each week, receiving massive dose after massive dose of lsd. Once each man was tripping beyond what he previously thought possible, the experiments would really begin. Men would be interrogated with pointed questions regarding their past violent crimes. Did you ever kill anyone? Would you ever kill anyone? Why would you do it? How would you do it? The researchers would put groups of the inmates together to see how they reacted socially while hallucinating. Eight men, driven to madness by the drugs, shoved into a small and dark room together. Bolger saw men rapidly decay into skeletons in front of him before resurrecting in the nastiest and most unnatural of ways. He watched blood pour out from the walls and threatened to drown him. For 24 hours each week, he lived one long waking nightmare. Two of the men went insane almost immediately. They had to be ripped from underneath their beds to go back for more testing. They would bark at the researchers and foam at the mouth, desperate to get away and never return. Eventually, the doctors put those men into a padded cell at the end of the research hall. Bulger never saw them again. He could only guess what became of the other men in his study group. He tried to quit the program a handful of times, but each time Dr. Pfeiffer would plead with him to stay, offering him the emotional appeal of Bulger being the best subject of him, giving them a real chance at curing schizophrenia forever. When asked why he wanted to quit, he didn't say. He didn't tell them about how suicidal he had become, about his constant depression, about his insomnia, about his night terrors that would fly at him right away anytime he was unfortunate enough to fall asleep. He didn't want to be institutionalized like those other two men. The night terrors and insomnia, according to Bulger, never went away. He never slept good in again. For the rest of his Life. What madness can that drive a man to? One day, much later, Bulger picked up a book by a man named John Marks. He was a CIA whistleblower out to betray the corruption in America's intelligence forces. The book was called the Search for the Manchurian Candidate. In it, Bulger learned about MK Ultra, and he learned that he had been an unwitting part of it. The study at the Atlanta Penitentiary was cited in the book as one directly funded and sanctioned by the CIA. Bulger had been lied to. He had been forced, with the unkept promise of reduced sentences and powerful emotional appeals to give his sanity to the whims of corruption and status. Desire for mind control. He later received a brain scan that revealed incontrovertible proof of lasting damage and scarring. As a direct result of these experiments, Whitey Bulger, unlike his accomplices, who cut deals left and right once they finally got caught, was not allowed to cut any deals himself. He was tried to the full extent of the law for his crimes. That is all well and good, to be sure, and yet one can't help but wonder if things could have been different for Bulger if, say, he hadn't been administered CIA sanctioned brain damage at such a young age.
- [145:25]
Brian
Wow, that is crazy. And what's crazy about it is that, like, you set off the story this way. I thought it was perfect that in James Earl Ray we have an example of a guy who was like a perfect patsy in that he wasn't that smart. He was just smart enough to be able to do what they needed him to. He was very controllable. They got him early through the military service with the oss, that nascent CIA. But what we see with this whitey guy is. Whitey guy is what happens more when you take a higher intellect who's already given to sociopathic and even, I think, maybe schizophrenic and some higher and deeper evils. What kind of stuff can result? Some of it, I'm sure, controlled, but also some of it just not even in the control of the CIA or of the government, but just evil.
- [146:20]
Ben
Yeah. They don't know what's gonna be the outcome of these things. Like everyone, they're learning along with everybody else now. They're privy to more of the methodology that works and stuff like that, but they have no clue, the Pandora's box that they're opening. One of the things that really stuck out to me in that story, apart from the obvious, the question of what could have happened if James Bulger had not been brainwashed by the CIA. Would his crime reign been less severe? Because he was a horrible man. Absolutely. A horrible beast of a human. But was some of that kind of emphasized by the drugs that he was administered and the brainwashing therapy that he underwent? So that's like a whole thing. I think it's worth exploring. But as Aslan says, you know, no one is told what might have happened or what could have happened. But. But one of the things that goes overlooked is these two guys, they're two prisoners, they're in a study whose stated goal is to find a cure for schizophrenia. That's why they're there. And they end up seeming schizophrenic. Like where after a couple sessions, maybe it was just one session, they have to be pried out from under their beds to go back to the test chambers. Like they. They will not go. They're pried out, they're forced in, they're going insane, they're foaming at the mouth, they're barking, and they end up being put in padded cells down the hall and no one ever sees him again. Maybe they go to the second floor and get a lobotomy or something like that. And it does make you wonder again about this connection between hypnosis, sort of drugs and then also demonic possession. I think that there's a thread that maybe a better mind or maybe if we just had more time to speak on it, could link stuff from our Season 2 Episode 10 on DMT and the Machine elf type phenomenon. And then government hypnosis, MK Ultra drugs, brainwashing, all that. And this idea of that's the statist version of demonic possession. And then also linking that with schizophrenia. A lot of people see. I think that there's a mistake, by the way. A lot of people see schizophrenia and they're like, that's demonic possession. No, I don't think it's always.
- [148:33]
Brian
Yeah, period. In every case.
- [148:34]
Ben
Yeah. And I think that's ridiculous. I think that maybe sometimes it could be. But I certainly don't think it's just everyone that has schizophrenia is demonically possessed. That seems brutally deterministic and totally unfounded in scripture. But it is alarming how the symptoms often overlap. Like you have these schizophrenic guys that were clearly in communion with demonic activity, if not demonic entities with MK Ultra, and they suddenly start acting like Legion before he gets exorcised. They're breaking chains, they're super strong, they're absolutely going crazy. And it takes many men to restrain them. I don't know. I Think there's a connection there, and maybe sometime we'll explore it more.
- [149:13]
Brian
And I think it's important to Note to Season 2, Episode 10, with ayahuasca and hallucinogenic drugs and mushrooms and all of that. Is that so? In that episode, I think we showed pretty clear, and Louis Ungut's book is really good on this, that there's a connection and openness that happens, a portal of the soul that's opening up through these things that is genuinely connecting people to spiritual realities and not just physical processes in the brain. Now, the point it's important to see is that when the government starts meddling in these same sorts of things, they might not be trying to do the same thing that the Aztec priest or that the hippie going to the jungles to drink the ayahuasca brew is trying. They're really trying to contact spiritual realities, the CIA, the government. Whether they're trying to or not, when they open people up this way, when they treat them in this way, I think the effect is still there, where these things have the ability to open or put people under the influence of demonic powers, or open them to these demonic powers, or give them some sort of communion with them, such that there's going to be overlap between the two things. That's at least important to note.
- [150:27]
Ben
Yeah, Again, like, they're not waiting for your consent. There's a difference between being a witch. You're not gonna accidentally become a witch.
- [150:36]
Brian
Yeah, right.
- [150:37]
Ben
And being, like, flippantly using a tool of the enemy to try to achieve your own ends, and then being suddenly shocked when the enemy shows up. Like, you've summoned Tash to Tash.
- [150:49]
Brian
You will go, here he is.
- [150:51]
Ben
You know, like, I think that that's totally legit. Like, they're not waiting for your consent or your full faith in some supernatural thing in order for them to be active. So I think that all of that is really worth thinking about. And I'll just kind of leave us with something as we go into the final story of the show. Unless you have anything else to.
- [151:09]
Brian
That's great.
- [151:10]
Ben
So, James Bolger, this question that we pose is, like, what would have happened? And I do think it's a question worth asking, but almost more fascinating than that is he didn't find out that he had been a part of MK Ultra until decades after it had actually happened. And that really begs the question, keeping in mind what we learned last episode, that they were doing these tests on random citizens in the street. Everything from that up to institutionalized sex criminals or poor children who had special needs and they were in institutions, they did not care who they were doing it to. Right. And so the fact that it took Bulger so long to figure this out, and it actually was just by happenstance he happened to pick up the book that mentioned it, it makes you wonder if there could be other victims of MKUltra who are lurking in our midst and who, at an accidental tip of the hat, could be triggered into doing something insane.
- [152:10]
Brian
It doesn't sound as crazy as it would have before looking at all this stuff.
- [152:15]
Ben
Yeah, yeah.
- [152:16]
Brian
Before looking into those stuff, I would have been like, yeah, that's kind of out there. But the thing is, we say this a lot. It's not the stuff that we speculate about that scares me. Where we make a distinction and say, we don't know this for sure, but maybe this could be. It's the things we know for sure.
- [152:32]
Ben
Right.
- [152:32]
Brian
When you say, we know they do this, we know they did this, like, they've admitted it. If they're going to admit this, what else have they done that they won't?
- [152:41]
Ben
What are they hiding?
- [152:42]
Brian
What are they hiding?
- [152:43]
Ben
And so this last story, it is a speculative story. We don't know if this is connected to MK Ultra, but the signs are there that make you scratch your head and wonder, could it be?
- [152:53]
Brian
Yeah, we'll end this episode in much the same way as we ended the previous by referring, reflecting on the absurd notion that a corrupt U.S. government and military industrial complex would just up and stop all MK Ultra and MK Ultra adjacent projects. The historical accounts seem quite clear. They had some level of success in what they sought to do. Now, why would a government, which at its core sees itself as God, give up the tool of control and manipulation so long sought under Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA officials? After all, the benefit of an amnesiac assassin or patsy is nearly incalculable to such an entity. Someone to do the dirty work. Someone who is nothing and nobody and whom nobody will miss. Surely the statist God can sacrifice such a one on the altar of its own ends and not be considered evil. Right? Surely the people can see that all of it is for the greater good. Right? Death, like life, is a thing which rightly belongs in the hands of the living God. He gives and he takes away. When his civil minister on the earth, the civil government steps out of their boundaries and tries to order life and death by their own whims, evils follow of the most chaotic type. This is to say nothing about the government properly bearing the sword in order to punish evil, of course, it must and should do this, do that. It is good for a killer to lose his life in a just manner. But it is not good for supposed or predicted troublemakers to be at risk of death every day at the hand of an overreaching state that believes it ought to control everything, even outcomes. But for now, that does describe the world in which we live. A network of Western nations given over to apostasy and yearning to find a God to worship and serve. In their yearning, these nations have settled on their chosen God, their own selves. And so they do the bidding of the state with blind faith and certainty, never thinking twice about their actions. After all, they're serving their God. How could their God lead them astray? It should therefore not surprise us when people view national events or national tragedies with a skeptical eye. They say that the difference between conspiracy theory and acceptance history is only a matter of years. But with each passing year, the time gap seems to reduce. What has happened at the deep state's bidding? Where have we been duped? Have we been duped at all? Well, perhaps not. And I do mean that. Perhaps there is no grand status deception at play when tragedy strikes or when plague sweeps the nation. I certainly hope not. I hope all the data that points to conspiracy is all just coincidentally coincidence. Just an honest mistake, but I just doubt it. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Apostasy rejects the light and embraces the dark. We live in an apostate nation, an apostate Western world at large, one that was built on the bedrock of Christian faithfulness and fruitfulness, but one which has forsaken the worship of the Creator in favor of the creature. We ought not be shocked when dark things act in dark ways. Don't be surprised when groups in the shadow draw more into their orbit. Don't scoff at the idea that a culture which hates God with vitriolic hatred might actually display that hatred of God in tangible ways. Near All Hallows Eve in the year 2023, a mother took her children to a popular playground in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The Glenwood Cast Caverns Adventure park was a constant haunt of young families looking to give their children room to run and jump and climb and wrestle away from the guardrails of furnished homes and the like. This October 28th afternoon was no different from other days either. The crisp fall air guaranteed an influx of people, which further guaranteed hours of activity between parents and children. Vitality in the lifeblood of civilization. But Today would not be remembered for those good things. The aforementioned mother arrived at the park only to find the flashing lights of blue and white painting the air. Red and white striped cars surrounded by paramedics and officers, some standing and talking, some walking here and there with crime scene tape and some running back and forth. The children watched from their car and booster seats while their mother shifted into park and climbed out to ask what had happened. The muffled noise of shouting and crying left the children confused. Dark clouds grew up through and over the sky, casting a shade onto the windshield and dimming the sun's light which had just surrounded them. They watched their mom reel back in horror. With her mouth covered, she briskly walked back to the driver door. She unbuckled her seatbelt without a word and turned to navigate the car in reverse back the way they had all come. When asked by the eldest why, they couldn't say. She just said that the park was closed. The reality was far more bleak. Earlier that day, as park employees did the rounds, opening everything up and checking that no vandalism had occurred on the previous night, a pair of them went to open and check the bathrooms. It had been cleaned as usual and stood ready for the day. The lights flicked on without pause and the door was unlocked for customers of the private park. But on the way to the women's bathroom, the pair noticed something odd. The door was just ever so slightly ajar. Usually this didn't matter much. The teenagers on the night cruise were about as reliable as the teenagers on the morning crew, which is to say that sometimes they did let a few things slip. But the employees would later say that an undeniable sense of foreboding fell over both of them when they saw that narrow line of pitch black that peered out from the cracked door. They opened it slowly and with their phone lights on to illuminate anything that might be hiding just behind the door. But there was nothing there. They reached out to quickly hit the light switch. It flickered on and as usual and to their relief, there were no sounds of shocked vagrants shuffling to get their things and make a break for it. In fact, there was no sound of any movement from inside at all. They breathed a sigh of relief, certain that it must have just been an oversight from the closers of the previous night. They thus entered the bathroom, remaining relaxed to check on the stock of soap and toilet paper. But what they saw instead made their stomachs lurch with illness. A young man, just 20 years old, was wearing combat gear and a plate carrier as well as a military style helmet he had an assault rifle strapped over his shoulder and a sidearm strapped to his thigh. His vest was loaded with full magazines for each weapon. Around him were more magazines filled with with yet more ammunition. Between the mags strewn about the floor were plastic explosives, seemingly in a state of half finished assembly with detonators and chaotic wiring. The young man was dead, his body slouched and propped up between the toilet and the stall wall. His cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. His name was later discovered to be Diego Barajas Medina. He had no previous record with law enforcement. He was a high school graduate living and working part time in the area, and former classmates described him as a loner. Nobody could discover any motive for why he had set himself up to do these things or why he had taken his own life in the end. But Medina did leave one thing behind, one strange clue to guide the investigators. On the bathroom wall, directly across from where his body lay, a message was scrawled in black marker. The phrase, printed in massive and clear letters, was set in a pair of quotations. It said, I'm not a killer. I just wanted to get in the cave. What could that mean? Well, maybe nothing. Maybe far more than any of us are comfortable admitting. After all, in a world filled with mass government corruption and a discourse on firearms and mass shootings growing more politically charged by the day, maybe it's not crazy to wonder if Medina had received any sort of push from outside. And so, faithful listeners, let us leave you with a final word. Do not despair. Does history not tell us this lesson over and over again that God loves to reveal his marvelous light in moments of great and deep darkness? How else will we stubborn and so often hard hearted people appreciate the light if we aren't reminded every now and then of the real darkness, it saves us from the midst of Christ is on his throne. He's judging the nations with a rod of iron. His enemies are being made a footstool for his feet. He laughs at the schemes of the wicked. He holds them and their little plans in derision. Lift up your head and hear the good news. All they can ever do is threaten you with death. But that threat is empty. Our king has already shown us the way out of the grave. Follow him and be of good cheer. The shadow and lead weight of sins inflicting sorrow will someday pass like winter into spring. The end of time will be to the sound of wedding bells and we will finally walk with new life on a world that reflects the truth already present in our souls, that of wrath ended, and woes mended of winter past, and guilt forgiven. Wait for the Lord and keep his way, and he will exalt you to inherit the land you will look on when the wicked are cut off. I have seen a wicked, ruthless man spreading himself like a green laurel tree. But he passed away, and behold, he was no more. Though I sought him, he could not be found. Mark the blameless, and behold the upright, for there is a future for the man of peace. But transgressors shall be altogether destroyed. The future of the wicked shall be cut off. Psalm 37, 34, 38. Amen. And amen.
- [163:00]
Ben
It.