[A TACKY, MYSTERY THEME, FULL OF SYNTH-Y THERAMIN]
[CELIA and GEORGIE are recording remotely, badly]
GEORGIE
Hello listeners and welcome to Sheeple Chase, the podcast that puts the “eerie” in “conspEERacy theory.” I’m Georgie Barker…
[Buh Dum Tss]
CELIA
And I’m appalled by that intro.
GEORGIE
Everyone’s a critic.
CELIA
Well, I’m Celia Ripley, and I’m ready to hear more about your latest dating escapade you were just telling me about.
GEORGIE
So it’s like that, is it?
CELIA
It’s like that.
GEORGIE
Oof. Alright. Well, I think I mentioned a couple episodes ago, that I was going for dinner with this guy I met on a dating app, right?
CELIA
The serial killer, yes.
[Excessively spooky sting]
GEORGIE
Well, it was actually nice! We talked about work, hobbies, deepest fears. You know, basic first date stuff.
CELIA
Sure. And, out of curiosity, what did you say is your biggest fear?
GEORGIE
I mean, it’s tough to choose just one, you know, they’re all great, but it’s probably heights. Or snakes. ‘Course I don’t like needles either. Also, not a big fan of clowns. Kind of claustrophobic. Weirdly, chill with spiders, but absolutely no moths. Oh, puppets really freak me out –
CELIA
– but you had a nice time at the dinner?
GEORGIE
Oh, er, yeah. We had a nice night and we decided to see each other again.
[Beat]
[Captain Barker, the dog, gets up and scurries off]
CELIA
And…
GEORGIE
(furious) And he took me bungee jumping. Bungee jumping! I told him my biggest fear was heights and he arranged for me to jump off a 200ft high wobbly box!
CELIA
(laughing) Why would anyone think that’s a good idea?
GEORGIE
He said he thought it would be “extra exciting for me”.
CELIA
(still laughing) That is deranged.
GEORGIE
Yes! It is!
CELIA
Did you jump?
GEORGIE
Of course not! I had a panic attack 10 feet off the ground, then they tried to lower me back down, but the crane got stuck and I had to spend an hour trapped in this windy metal box on my literal nightmare date.
CELIA
And you with your claustrophobia too!
GEORGIE
I know!
CELIA
(pulling it back) No third date, then?
GEORGIE
Absolutely not.
[Beat]
CELIA
Georgie?
GEORGIE
I may, however, be seeing the jump instructor for a coffee next week. On the ground.
CELIA
(laughing) Just don’t ask them about their work!
GEORGIE
Oh, ha, ha. Just do the read, you big bully.
[jingle]
CELIA
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[ad outro jingle]
CELIA
So, Georgie, it’s your week. What madness have you got for us this time?
GEORGIE
It’s a good one, I promise! Okay.
(narrating) For thousands of years, humanity has assumed we are alone in the universe –
[CELIA groans]
GEORGIE
(louder) – but are we being watched? Have we already made contact with an alien race? Is the truth not only out there, but also down here?
[Spooky alien sounds]
[Beat]
CELIA
Georgie, no.
GEORGIE
Yes! You can choose something boring like New Coke next week, but today:
(singing) Let’s talk about space, baby. Do the government know E.T? Let’s talk about space. Let’s talk about space!
CELIA
Eurgh, fine. But you don’t get to do them again for the rest of the year.
GEORGIE
Deal! So, I think we can all agree that alien life does exist somewhere in the universe –
CELIA
We can?
GEORGIE
Oh yeah, the universe is massive so there’s bound to be something somewhere. Maybe not little green men, but a fungus or something!
CELIA
If you say so…
GEORGIE
I do! So, that means we can skip straight to asking whether intelligent life has ever made it to Earth, and whether governments or other agencies have been hiding evidence of their visit.
CELIA
Fine…
GEORGIE
So let’s start at the beginning. In Aztec, New Mexico –
CELIA
You can’t be serious. We’re not starting with the racist pyramid thing –
GEORGIE
– Aztec, New Mexico, 1948.
CELIA
Oh… All right then.
GEORGIE
So obviously aliens didn’t build the pyramids or the Mayan temples or the Easter Island heads or whatever. In fact, sidebar, we already know how people built the pyramids! They literally drew pictures. They practically left us an IKEA manual!
CELIA
Noted. Now, you were talking about Aztec in 1948? Was it like a Roswell thing?
GEORGIE
No, that was in Roswell and happened in 1947, but also didn’t really happen until the 70s.
CELIA
What?
GEORGIE
We’ll get there. So, 1948, a flying saucer crashes in the city of Aztec, loaded with extra-terrestrial gadgets named “doodlebugs.” The incident stays surprisingly quiet until local journalist Frank Scully publishes a story about the crash, and the two men who’d told him about it. Men who just so happened to be selling these “doodlebugs”, which they claimed used alien technology to locate gas, oil and gold.
CELIA
Ah, the American Dream. Hitting it big in oil with a dowsing rod you stole from a dead alien.
GEORGIE
Yeah, even I recognise it was a pretty blatant hoax. Scully did no fact-checking and just printed everything his sources, Newton and Gebauer, told him, and shockingly, those two were eventually convicted for fraud.
CELIA
Honestly, I actually am surprised anyone even bothered.
GEORGIE
So nobody thinks it’s legit, but it did have a big effect on UFO-hunting as a whole.
CELIA
How so?
GEORGIE
Well, before this, most people thought of UFOs as military rather than alien.
CELIA
I mean, it was the 40s. You see something explode in your back garden then, yeah, your first thought’s gonna be war.
GEORGIE
But Scully’s article said this UFO came from Venus and included all sorts of details that are now really familiar: the craft was saucer shaped; it worked on magnetic principles; it was made of a superstrong and super-light metal not found on earth; and it was piloted by small humanoids he described as “king-sized Lilliputians.”
CELIA
…King-sized Lilliputians? So… just average sized people?
GEORGIE
Nope. “King-sized Lilliputians” that were, like, 3 feet tall. So, short-king sized. And, when Scully published a book about his experience in 1950, militaries around the world were thrilled to have found a new threat to worry about.
CELIA
Was the book that popular?
GEORGIE
Apparently! Most countries started collecting files, and some even set up covert agencies, like Canada’s “Project Magnet,” or the UK’s more prosaically named “Flying Saucer Working Group.”
CELIA
This is why everyone likes Canada better than us.
GEORGIE
Can I tell you about my favourite government agency?
CELIA
(sighing) Yes, because that is a totally normal thing to have. Proceed.
GEORGIE
Great! So in 2010, the British Ministry of Defence released loads of previously classified documents about UFO encounters, and The Sydney Morning Herald thought, “Hey, we should get our government to do the same,” so they put in an official Freedom of Information request to the Australian UFO Research Association. They asked for every single file the Australian government collected on UFOs over 50 years and the government’s response was, “We’d love to, but we’ve just found out all but two of them were destroyed six years ago, we don’t know by whom or why – and we’ve just lost another one down the back of a sofa. Anyway, here’s one file.”
CELIA
Was it a good one, at least?
GEORGIE
It’s wonderful! It’s a crayon drawing of a flying saucer, scribbled on a napkin by some official, who watched the thing for 20 minutes before going, “Actually, lads, I think it’s a snow cloud!”
CELIA
Sounds about right…
GEORGIE
Then in 1956, two books are published in the US: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt, and They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by Gray Barker – no relation. The first one was meant to debunk the idea of UFOs as alien spacecraft, but it was so unconvincing, people instead believed the book was part of a cover-up!
And the other one, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, is both a cracking read, and the printed reference to the Men in Black.
CELIA
What, like the films?
GEORGIE
(deflated) Yes. Like the films. But the films are based on the comics, which are based on real stories about the real Men in Black –
CELIA
Ahem.
GEORGIE
Okay, the allegedly real Men in Black who dress in black suits and coerce UFO witnesses into silence on behalf of the government.
CELIA
And I assume we’re talking about the US government again?
GEORGIE
Of course! It seems like what Mesopotamia was to agriculture, the US is to conspiracies.
CELIA
So is this just going to be another chemtrails or flat Earth, where it all falls apart as soon as you realise other countries exist?
GEORGIE
I mean, when you say it like that it sounds stupid!
CELIA
Uh-huh…
GEORGIE
So anyway, both Barker and Ruppelt’s books are about the Maury Island incident, when US pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine shining discs flying over the Washington mountains. He was so sure they were alien spacecraft that he started investigating with two journalists from the Oregon Journal, the US Air Force, and the FBI.
CELIA
All well known for their transparency when it comes to their sources.
GEORGIE
Now, Barker was writing about it as evidence that aliens had visited Earth, whilst Ruppelt wanted to discredit the whole thing as a hoax. The problem was, no one had heard of the incident, so the more he told people it wasn’t true –
CELIA
The more people ended up learning about it?
GEORGIE
Yup. It massively boosted its profile, and at the same time, a bunch of weird stuff started happening.
CELIA
Weird as in “easily explicable coincidences blown way out of proportion” or…
GEORGIE
So, the two journalists from the Oregon Journal never publish, and at the same time the investigating air force officers both die on their way back from visiting the crash site, when their plane spontaneously caught fire –
CELIA
Coincidence.
GEORGIE
They were both skilled pilots…
CELIA
Look, I’m no airforce pilot, but I suspect that once your plane is already on fire there’s not a lot you can do about it. And the journalists just didn’t publish anything because “man wrong about sky” isn’t exactly headline news.
GEORGIE
Ah but the really weird thing is how much the details matched the Aztec hoax in 1948.
CELIA
Is that weird? You said the Aztec hoax was influential.
GEORGIE
Aha! Except, the Maury Island Incident actually took place…in June 1947! Before the Aztec story occurred.
CELIA
But the books were published in 1956. Which is after 1948.
GEORGIE
But both writers match up almost perfectly on the details even though there’s no evidence they knew anything about each other.
CELIA
“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” but whatever. What are the details?
GEORGIE
Disc-shaped crafts, a little smaller than human planes, shedding a white metal so light, Arnold initially thought they were dropping newspapers.
CELIA
You found the missing Oregon Journal articles then?
GEORGIE
Except that they found the metal!
CELIA
Let me guess, tin foil for hats?
GEORGIE
Okay it was officially recorded as being ordinary aluminium, but –
CELIA
There it is!
GEORGIE
But it was only ever investigated by the air force pilots, whose plane crashed on their way back to base!
CELIA
I still think it’s a coincidence, but it is at least an interesting one.
GEORGIE
Good enough. Now, moving on to the 1960s, there’s –
CELIA
Moving on to the 60s? Don’t tell me we’re going through 80 years of UFO hunting chronologically? How far through your notes are you?
GEORGIE
Well, I’m on page three of fifteen, but –
CELIA
Fifteen!
GEORGIE
But I can go faster!
CELIA
Georgie, you can lose some of those pages or you can lose me for the day, because I do not have the time for fifteen pages.
[Beat.]
CELIA
Georgie!
GEORGIE
All right, all right! We’ll have an ad break and I’ll try to cut some stuff.
[JINGLE]
[Door bell rings]
[The door opens, and CELIA cries out (unconvincingly) as she is buried in a flood of cardboard boxes]
GEORGIE
Sorry, Celia! It’s all this packaging from my monthly delivery of doomsday supplies. I just don’t know how to get rid of it!
CELIA
That’s alright. I used to have the same problem, before I switched to Ecopocalypse.
GEORGIE
Ecopocalypse? What’s that?
CELIA
Ecopocalypse offers greener emergency rations with entirely vegan ingredients and 100% recyclable packaging. Once you’ve eaten their long-life meal packs, just send the tins straight back for recycling, using whatever postal service has managed to survive the collapse of civilisation.
GEORGIE
That sounds expensive?
CELIA
It does cost a little more than the next cheapest brand, but with their smaller, anti-food waste ration pack sizes, you might find you save money!
GEORGIE
Well I’m sold! Thanks Celia. I’m going to switch to Ecopocalypse for all my post-delivered doomsday prepping needs.
[ad outro music]
GEORGIE
Okay so now, we’re gonna skip ahead to 1978. The big one. In an interview with UFO-logist Stanton Friedman, retired Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Marcel reveals that a government story about a crashed weather balloon in Roswell, New Mexico, had been nothing more than a flimsy cover story to distract the public from the crash landing of a potentially extra-terrestrial spacecraft.
[Spooky alien sounds]
CELIA
When you say “reveals,” you mean alleges, don’t you?
GEORGIE
Alright, but given he was the officer in charge of investigating the crash, that technically makes him a witness and his testimony would hold up in court.
CELIA
Would it though? Really?
GEORGIE
His son corroborates it, claiming his dad showed him alien debris from Roswell when he was 10.
CELIA
Again, I’m not sure I’d trust a 10 year old to tell the difference between an alien spaceship and a weather balloon…
GEORGIE
Ah, but what about the timing? Although nobody noticed it at the time, the original crash occurred in 1947, just a few days after the Maury Island incident…
CELIA
Right.
GEORGIE
See! It all fits together!
CELIA
If by “all” you mean a couple of coincidental dates, then sure, why not?
GEORGIE
Fair, but I think you have to admit that whether you think it’s aliens or not, there’s clearly some sort of cover-up going on. The military have put out multiple competing stories about what they found at Roswell: first it’s a weather balloon, then it’s a kite, then it’s part of a top-secret project monitoring Soviet nuclear weapons. Not to mention how Marcel was promoted to lieutenant colonel suspiciously quickly after the Roswell incident.
CELIA
Ah yes, because if there’s one thing the US military is known for, it’s rewarding whistleblowers.
GEORGIE
Also fair, but UFO hunters started putting in Freedom of Information requests to the FBI and it turns out they have over 800 reports on UFO sightings in the summer of 1947 alone, many of which are still classified. Why would they do that if they didn’t at least believe – there was something to them?
CELIA
Better safe than sorry?
GEORGIE
And what about all the other people who have gone public with their own stories about Roswell later, including Glenn Dennis, a mortician working for the Air Force in Roswell, who claimed to have worked with a nurse who’d performed an autopsy on a small, humanoid alien in 1947?
CELIA
Ah yes, the “my sister’s friend’s hairdresser’s dog’s pathologist once dissected an extraterrestrial” defence.
GEORGIE
You say that, but there has been some really interesting testimony coming out of the most recent US hearings which –
[CELIA gives a small warning noise]
GEORGIE
– which we’ll have to cover in another episode because we’re out of time today.
CELIA
So what do you think? You sound pretty convinced.
GEORGIE
Sort of, but not really. I doubt the US Air Force has a secret alien graveyard, but there was definitely a cover-up. All those coincidences taking place at the same time in the same part of the world and the US government actively trying to keep it quiet? That’s weird.
CELIA
Sure, but if Roswell really was a – what was it they said – a nuclear surveillance thing? They would absolutely keep it hush-hush.
GEORGIE
You can’t really believe they were spying on Russian nuclear weapons with a balloon in 1940s New Mexico?
CELIA
I think it’s more likely than aliens visiting Earth just to freak out some rural North Americans.
GEORGIE
Okay, but what if instead there was some more plausible cover-up, like human experimentation, or something that had an effect on the population to make them more prone to believe in conspiracy theories…
CELIA
What? Like a conspiracy conspiracy?
GEORGIE
(enthused) Why not!? The US government could be deliberately fuelling UFO rumours with the Aztec hoax and people like Kenneth Arnold are acting on orders to make people believe there were aliens and then if people dig too deep they send out Glenn Dennis to make it all ridiculous again –
CELIA
Have you ever been to New Mexico?
GEORGIE
No, but I’d love to go. They have a UFO museum.
CELIA
You should. I think you’d fit right in.
[Beat]
Well if that’s all on little aluminium men…
GEORGIE
Yeah, I think that about wraps it up for now.
CELIA
Great –
GEORGIE
At least until we dive deeper in parts two through seven!
CELIA
…great. Can’t wait.
GEORGIE
Me neither! Bye everyone!
CELIA
Yeah, bye…
[tacky theme tune]
ANNOUNCER
Sheeple Chase and The Magnus Protocol are podcasts distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share-alike 4.0 International License.
Sheeple Chase was created by Sasha Sienna, directed by April Sumner, and based on the works of Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall.
This episode was written by Sasha Sienna and edited with additional materials by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall, with audio edits by Nico Vettese, mastering by Meg McKellar, and music by Nico Vettese.
It featured Sasha Sienna as Georgie Barker and Lowri Ann Davies as Celia Ripley.
To subscribe, explore exclusive extras, and enjoy early access, adfree episodes, visit members.rustyquill.com or join our Patreon. Rate and review us online, follow us on social media or email us at mail@rustyquill.com.
Thanks for listening.