The Strange Machine

We've covered an awful lot of UFO material this year as we've worked from the 1940s up to the 1980s, and we thought a bit of review might be useful before we get to the 1990s. So here's a quick summary of what we've covered so far, as well as a bit of new content about the Maury Island UFO crash in 1947.

In summer of 2023, a former intelligence official named David Grusch testified under oath in a Congressional hearing. In his testimony, he claimed that the American government has recovered crashed extraterrestrial craft, and even has some alien bodies in the freezer. What are we to make of these claims? Lee and Nathan dive into the murky waters to find out...

In July 0f 2023, there was a Congressional hearing on UAPs (aka UFOs). Two of the witnesses were Navy pilots who had first-hand encounters with flying objects. Is this the moment we've been waiting for? Is the American government finally taking UFOs seriously? Nathan and Lee examine the testimony and the footage, and look back at the troubling history between the American government and UFO witnesses.

We hear dozens of conspiracy theories every week - a few have some truth to them, some are accidental nonsense, and some are deliberate and dangerous lies. How can we sort through all of them? On this episode, Lee and Nathan talk about some of the red flags that they encounter on the regular that make them suspicious that a conspiracy theory might not be accurate.

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person to escape the Earth's atmosphere into space. In 1968, he was killed in a tragic and suspicious plane crash. Why would the Soviet government have wanted Gagarin dead? And were they somehow responsible for the crash? Lee and Nathan also discuss the tragic Soyuz 1 incident, in case listeners weren't already sad enough.

In 1961, the USSR placed a man named Yuri Gagarin into a tiny capsule on the tip of a massive rocket and shot him into space. This is the story of that moment, and Lee spends the episode teetering back and forth between being inspired by the humanity of the story and being discouraged by the systems and structures the humans are stuck in.

For more information on this topic, check out "Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin" by Doran and Bizony

In 1983, the entire world was on the brink of disaster. The slightest mistake or miscalculation could have resulted in a nuclear armageddon that would have wiped entire countries off the map. And in the middle of all of that, some ominous blips showed up on an early warning system. Were we all killed? Listen to find out...

Many claims are made about the advanced technology developed by Germany during WWII. Is any of it accurate? Nathan and Lee go back to the 1940s to look at some of the so-called "Wunderwaffen", and Lee has to spend another episode listening to Nathan talk about airplanes. Then, near the end of the episode, there's an alarming revelation about pumpkins.

On this episode, Lee and Nathan open up the junk drawer and pull out segments on an urban legend about Phil Collins* from the 1980s, a recent example of the use of hiphop tracks for state propaganda, and the evil dangers that lurk in Lee's childhood toys.

* not the drummer from The Police

On this episode, Lee takes a close look at a British documentary from the 1970s that claimed that there was a secret Soviet/American space program to sneak people off the Earth to try to colonize Mars.