The St. Clair Incident

Bob welcomes his “new best friend” and fellow podcaster, Jeff Ponder, host of The Pondcast: Conversations That Go Nowhere. After a quick chat about Jeff’s background in St. Louis sports broadcasting and his show’s unique premise—which uses a random topic generator to force guests to think quickly on their feet—the duo dives into Bob’s preferred domain: the unexplained. Jeff opts to take a blind trivia challenge regarding the episode’s central topic, performing respectably by leaning on his St. Louis roots and intuition.

The core of the discussion focuses on the infamous January 5, 2000, St. Clair Triangle UFO incident, where a massive, silent, triangular craft was sighted by multiple on-duty police officers across several Illinois suburbs just east of St. Louis. Bob and Jeff debate whether the football-field-sized object was a highly classified military prototype from the nearby Scott Air Force Base or genuine extraterrestrial technology. Given that 26 years have passed without any similar technology being publicly declassified by the military, both men ultimately land on “Team Alien,” concluding that the event remains one of the most compelling and unresolved multi-jurisdictional sightings in American history.

The Pondcast

https://youtube.com/live/gIw0O4qRhGY

UFO Witness Game (Click Graphic to Start)

Transcript (AI transcription)

Hey, Pounder, how much does it cost to be Bob’s new best friend? Well, I charge by the hour, so it’s costing Bob a lot. Oh, no. Mondo Rico. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this edition of Mondo Rico. I’ve got Jeff Ponder with me. And Jeff’s my new best friend. If you haven’t noticed on the screen. Yep. We are definitely best friends. We’ve done one show together already, so that makes us best friends. Exactly. Yeah. What do they call that? Fast friends? Best friends? What do they call that? Fast friends, I think, is correct. Let’s go with that. So tell them about the Ponder cast. We’ll just get the plug in right away. How about that? Yeah, that works for me. So, yeah, I’m running something called, first of all, I’ve got a large background in podcasting. I don’t know if your audience is global or if they’re kind of central to St. Louis, but I’ve been podcasting about the St. Louis Blues for years.
Oh, my goodness. Since 2011. Bob, I think you were let’s see, you were 65 in 2011. That’s right. I was somewhere in that range. Exactly. Yeah. So but yeah, I started I decided after a while because we kind of ran the show like a radio show. I’m like, man, the best conversations are just when it’s kind of spur of the moment. So I decided to come up with my own kind of interview slash show. conversational podcast, and it’s called The Pondcast, Conversations That Go Nowhere. Did I say Pondcast? I’m sorry. You did. That’s okay. I’m docking your pay for that. Well, I just looked at your last name. I know it’s part of his last name. I know it’s something like that. I toyed around with Pondercast just because it does fit the last name perfect, but I’m like podcast, Pondcast, and my logo, my idea, it actually was most people, I’ve had a couple people guess it, but the logo for the show is literally a car in the middle of a lake, and I got the idea from the office.
For anyone who watches that, Michael Scott drives his car. He laked it, as they say. Right. He was listening to the GPS voice. Right. And so my thought was, you know, the, the second part of the show is called conversations that go nowhere. So it’s a car that went nowhere. So that’s kind of the whole idea. So I thought stick with podcast that works. That’s better than who was that lady that drove her kids into the water. Anyway, it’s better than that. Don’t go on. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sorry. But yeah, we use a topic, a random topic generator is the whole idea on the show. And we literally in the middle of the moment, just hit enter. Boom, it gives us a topic. Bob, you came on, and ours was, was it impulse buying? I think it was, where do your socks go in the dryer? Right next to the Braunschweiger. Yeah, no, it was impulse buying. You’re correct. Okay, yeah, yeah. So we had a fun time with that, and we’re only about 13 episodes in now, and it’s been a blast. So I’m enjoying it. It’s going to be around for a while. I don’t care if I get five downloads an episode. It’s been fun. There you go.
That’s the way to be. Are you looking for guests in case anybody’s listening to say, hey, I could be a guest on the podcast. So my one stipulation with having a guest and yes, anyone is welcome to contact me is that you just have to be quick on your feet. And so obviously, Bob, you know, like that, that impulse buying came across and it’s like, okay, this is what we’re talking about. You can’t have the, all right, can you give me about 10 minutes to prep with that? No, we’re going right into it. You have to have your own AI mind to get these answers very quickly. You can’t type it in. There’s no time for typing. When I did a couple kind of promo shows, what was it called? Pilots. I did a couple of pilot episodes, and I had a friend come on, someone I knew since high school. And so I picked her because I was like, you’re a witty person. You’re going to be good at this. And so she’d never done a podcast before. And so when it came up with her topic, she literally goes,
okay, let me type this into AI on what to say. And then she kind of like started acting like she was typing. She’s going, and I go, Jen, that’s not the point of the show. She’s like, I’m just messing with you. And I was like, oh, you got me. Well, we have a somewhat random topic today. You did influence the topic because normally here on Mundo Frico, we do things that are cryptids, paranormal, supernatural, or UFOs. And then I asked you, I was like, well, what area would you like? And I think hopefully you said UFO because that’s what I’ve got for you today. I told you that I would be glad with any of those. If it’s just random, that’s fine. But I said the area that I’m most interested in is probably UFO. All right. So we got to go. And now I give the guest a choice. So we always do a quiz on the show.
And I give the guests the choice to do the quiz before they find out more about what it is or after they know what it is. So I’ll let you know what’s going to happen if you do the quiz early. You may already know something about this. And we’ll find out. It’s kind of like find out what you know. If you do it after what I’ll tell you about the to...