From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, a fun romp into new grounds, anyone?
That's at least the acronym I assume fringe stands for.
And yes, we do need to spell the word anyone phonetically for that to work, so just play
along.
Here are your acronymtastic hosts, Taylor and Chelsea, here today to find out what happens
with John Lear.
Now, Chelsea, I'm sure you remember, for we just did this several minutes ago, but for
the rest of these people, it's probably either a week or, you know, just next in their playlist
if they wait some time.
So let's give them a refresher anyways.
John Lear, prodigal son of the Learjet family, fairly successful pilot, I guess is a good
way to put him, ends up getting involved in UFOs and basically creates his magnum opus
of a UFO document and ends up getting interviewed by George Knapp in 1988 because of it.
And that's where we're going to pick up.
I'm just going to show you a little excerpt from this first interview, just so that we're
on the same page and we can kind of see what he looks like, what he sounds like.
I will watch it begrudgingly.
Who's that?
Oh, John Lear.
For those of you who can't see it, mostly everybody but Taylor and Chelsea here.
It says John Lear, UFO researcher on the screen.
That's what George Knapp was.
Yeah.
It's crazy to see a young George Knapp.
I didn't think it existed, in fact.
No, me either.
One of the most gratifying UFO researchers lives right here in Las Vegas.
His name is John Lear and he is my guest today.
Mr. Lear, thanks for being here.
Okay, George.
I begin with you're a pilot, an airline pilot, captain.
You have held 17 different world speed records at one time or another.
You're a member of the famous Lear family that all Nevadans are pretty much familiar
with, a former state senate candidate.
You don't sound like the kind of guy who would get hooked up in something that a lot
of people would say is a bunch of nonsense.
No, it's just by coincidence that I got really interested.
This is about two years ago.
My father saw a UFO and my brother did.
They were very interested, but there was really no proof as far as I was concerned to really
look into it until about two years ago.
Your father and brother saw them.
Can you give details?
My brother saw one.
He was flying a P-38 from Phoenix to Los Angeles at night.
It just appeared in front of him.
He made two turns, 90 degree turns.
It stayed in front of him and then disappeared.
My father was flying at night.
I believe over the Arizona desert and saw one too.
So you started, you got an interest because of the other members of your family.
How did you start out?
I had an interest, but there was really nothing I could put my finger on.
Like I say, two years ago, a friend of mine came through town.
We had flown in the Southeast Asia together and he was retiring from the Air Force.
He came over and we started talking about where he had been for the last 15 years.
He mentioned that he had been stationed at Bentwaters.
I said, oh, Bentwaters.
That's where the flying saucer supposedly was in 1980.
He said, no, John, not supposedly it was.
He said, I don't care if you believe me or not.
It landed.
I didn't see it because we were confined to quarters, but I know people who did and I'll
give you the names and if you ever see them, tell them you know me and they'll tell you
the whole story.
Since then, I ran into one of the security police who was within 10 feet of the saucer
and actually saw the three aliens get out and go up to General Gordon Williams, who was
the wing commander at that time.
Now Chelsea, I'm not quite sure if you heard that, but it was basically him saying that
one of his old army friends told him that they were there when a UFO had landed at the
base.
And if you talk to anybody that was there at the time, tell them that I told you to talk
to them and they'll tell you the story, which really reminds me of the Bennewitt story.
Does it not?
Yeah.
If you get the key word, I sent this person to you.
You're going to feed them a story.
Yeah.
Just speculation on my end.
It just reminds me so much of the Bennewitt story.
No, that makes sense.
And did he just name a person that was not involved in Enwaters?
Did I catch that?
He said Williams.
I don't think it matters too much for this.
So that is George Knapp's first UFO interview.
If you watch the whole thing, he gives no pushback.
It's just questions and it's not asking for sources.
It's literally just questions.
I'm a little disappointed.
I always thought a little bit better of George Knapp compared to everybody else.
I listened to a podcast that George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell did together, specifically
about John Lear, and they were talking about, oh, we're not actually going to tell you whether
or not we thought he was lying.
We're just going to give you the story and everything he said.
And I'm like, oh, George, aren't you a journalist?
I hate that.
Yeah.
I was just going to say, well, I guess you got to start somewhere.
But if that's still the take that he has on it, that is going against everything that
we know to be fair.
I'll touch on this at the end a bit.
They're doing this for a very specific reason this episode of their podcast, but it'll come
up at the end of this.
Also at the very end of this, Jeremy Corbell, who hasn't come up a lot on the show, but
he's fairly big name now in the UFO community.
He does documentary.
His entire introduction to UFOs as well is through John Lear.
Really?
Jeremy Corbell was trained by, was it John Lear?
He took over for somebody.
Jeremy Corbell, I don't know.
This is an episode to do this on.
Yeah.
He will have his own episode.
Not to disparage him in any way.
I can't stand listening to him.
He is a very whiny sounding individual.
I hate a whiny voice.
Yeah.
And that's what he's got.
And it's nothing to say about what he's saying.
It's just, it's voice.
I do apologize, Jeremy.
You can't do anything about it.
We'll touch more on your actual facts in your episode.
So that's how that starts off.
And this is really how he becomes to be a major name in the UFO community.
And now we're going to talk about some of the people he gets involved with.
First and foremost, Lear was posting his wow conspiracies on a website called Paranet in
the summer of 88 when who should talk to him but a UFO witness by the name of Bill Cooper
made his first public comment in Paranet Polit and Board System.
According to Cooper's first post in 66, he was serving aboard the USS T-Roo when he and
fellow Navy personnel witnessed a metal craft larger than a football field reportedly enter
and exit the water.
Cooper claimed he was instructed by superiors to never speak about the incident.
Bill Cooper declared that he could confirm 150% of Lear's hypothesis, a paper by John
Lear.
And in October of 88, Lear sent Cooper copies of all his research into UFOs, including communications
with Val Valerian, aka John Grace, an Air Force MCO on active duty who had a keen interest
in UFOs and the Dallas revisited a videotape made by Lars Hansen exploring the theory
that John F. Kennedy had been fatally shot by his driver.
Hansen had sent it to Lear in the hopes that Lear might help finance his JFK research,
asking Lear not to pass it on to anyone.
Chelsea, have you ever heard the name Bill Cooper?
It sounds familiar.
We haven't talked a lot about him.
He is the prototype like proto Alex Jones before Alex Jones existed.
He started in the UFO community, ends up taking a swing, getting his own radio show,
and just being the Alex Jones of the early 90s.
We're going to talk more about him now.
Okay, I'm ready.
In 89, the pair Cooper and Lear issued an indictment demanding the US cease aiding and
embedding and concealing this alien nation which exists within our borders.
Now, Cooper, a little bit about him, his sketchiest claim to fame was the videotape, the truth
betrayed Dallas revisited, which presented evidence that JFK had been killed by the driver
of the presidential limousine, a secret service agent by the name of William Greer, with
an electrically operated gas powered assassination pistol built by the CIA containing a shellfish
toxin dart.
Bill Cooper, Chelsea, this is probably actually where you know him from.
He wrote a book famously called Behold a Pale Horse.
Never heard of it?
I don't think that's a winner.
No.
I need to talk a bit about this videotape that they're talking about, this JFK video,
of him being shot by his driver.
This is an article called Behold a Pale of Horse Shit, the truth behind William Cooper's
influential conspiracy theories by Adam Gorightly.
This videotape was intended to serve only as a preliminary research tool to spur potential
investors to underwrite a thorough professional investigation into the theory that the driver
of the presidential limousine, William Greer, actually turned around and fired the fatal
shot at JFK.
It was never intended at any time to be considered a final statement on the issue, much less
to be shown publicly or to be distributed as such.
This is a quote from the actual producer of the video, Lars Hansen.
Hansen approached John Lear, assuming he had deep pockets because his dad is the Lear
Jet guy, and shared a copy of Dallas Revisited in the prospect of getting him to invest in
this research.
Little did Hansen know, but by this time Lear had fallen out in favor with his father, Bill
Lear, losing access to those deep family pockets.
After getting his mitts on Dallas Revisited, Lear began showing the film at his lectures
and passed it along to Bill Cooper, who not only afterward trotted it out like his own,
but also started selling copies of it at his speaking gigs.
When Hansen caught wind of these escapades, a shitstorm soon erupted between Cooper and
Lear.
According to Hansen, this is his statement.
Cooper's supporters told me a couple of months after my visit to his home that Cooper
had a copy of the tape and was showing it publicly.
At that time, in October of 89, I confronted him over the phone about his dishonesty regarding
his use and sale of the videotape, and have since done so publicly in print on television
and on the radio.
When he chickened out of appearing on the TV program Inside Report, which was taped in
April and aired in May of 1990, after learning that I would also be appearing to counter
him.
The producers deliberately left out half my statement.
I had made it clear on their videotape that at that time I threw the rough video together.
I believe that there was sufficient supporting evidence to warrant a complete investigation.
However, after seeing a much clearer version of the Zapruder film, discussing the issue
with a number of other respected researchers and combing through the evidence at hand more
closely, I had decided by November of 88 that the theory no longer was tenable.
So first and foremost, he's working with Bill Cooper and just gives him these documents
and Bill Cooper decides that it's his own and starts selling it and saying like this
is his theory.
And this guy is very clear.
It is not his theory.
I made this video.
It's not true at all.
That was just my theory at the time.
So that's our first introduction to Bill Cooper.
He's going to come up in a bit.
I'm trying to somewhat keep it chronological at this point.
I can't fully, but it is what it is.
So next up, this is a excerpt from a book by Adam Gilwright Lee.
It's called Saucers, Spooks, and Cooke's, which specifically talks about this time.
And I need to buy it because from what I've read about the book and specific excerpts
from it, it seems fantastic.
Okay, let's hear it.
Although Paul Benowitz lit the initial Dulce-based fuse, it took the better part of a decade
for the story to go viral when John Lear burst onto the scene with his hair on fire.
Lear, who seemingly added some measure of credibility as a Dulce-based promoter, was
an airline captain and former CIA contract pilot as well as son of William Weir inventor.
On the June 11, 1994 edition of Don Ecker's UFO Tonight radio program, Bill Moore stated
that the bulk of John Lear's Dulce-based information came courtesy of Paul Benowitz,
including the term Graze, that first appeared in Benowitz's Project Beta report, describing
the aliens who had entered into a secret treaty with the US government, according to Moore,
quote, many people out there have heard these little aliens refer to as Graze.
That term was invented in the Benowitz-Pounter-Intelligence affair.
They made it up.
They dumped that in Benowitz's lap, and he repeated it to all kinds of people in the
UFO community, and today it's standard word of mouth, and it's crap, end of quote.
Did we know that?
I can't remember if we covered that or not.
I don't think we covered that at all.
Also Bill Moore is kind of a known liar, so who's to say if it's actually true or not.
Okay, yeah, I was just gonna say because wasn't the first mention of Graze, Benny and Bernie
Hill?
Yeah, it's a great question that we could possibly go and do an episode on.
We should probably do a Graze episode at some point, but yeah, I just wanted to report this.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
In early November 1987, a mini-conference comprised entirely of UFO researchers was organized
by Tom Adams and Helden Creston, Colorado, among those attending were John Lear, Linda
Moltenhau, Christian Lamrite, David Perkins, Gary Macy, Lockheed Engineer John Andrews,
and Jim Spicer, founder of the Peronet Bulletin Board, BBS.
It was at this Creston meeting of the minds, according to Bill Moore, that Dulce Bay Story
was fleshed out using Paul Benowitz as the primary source of information.
Or at least that was the scenario that Moore laid out in his interview with Don Eckert.
What Moore was most likely referring to as a Dulce Bay Story later evolved into the UFO
cover-up, a controversial seven-page document that Lear posted to Peronet in December of
87.
During the Creston conference, Lear suggested that the group put their heads together and
come up with a joint statement addressing the current state of ufology.
Initially everyone was receptive to this idea, and the second day they gathered in a meeting
room to come to a consensus as to what this group statement would say.
As the discussion progressed, everyone seemed in agreement that some form of unidentified
aerial phenomenon was involved with the cattle medallions, but John Lear wanted to take it
several steps further and definitively declare the earth was under attack from an alien race.
As David Perkins recalls, quote, I was horrified about where Lear wanted to take our statement,
but I was trying to play and I said, I can't quite get behind that one John, I'm not signing
my name to that.
And from there, this whole idea of putting out a statement quickly fell apart.
Lear got miffed, he thought he could come away from our conference with this Creston
manifesto and it didn't happen, so he was kind of pouty about it for the rest of the
day as I recall.
And then later that evening he and Linda Howe suddenly decided to take off and go on a road
trip together, leaving the conference early.
And I said to her, you can't leave now, we still have another day and she said, well,
we have to go right away to Roswell to see Clifford Stone, it seems important.
He has some information for us and that really seemed out of character for Linda and raised
a few eyebrows because she never left anything early.
She'd stayed at the bitter end if there was some sort of gathering happening and we thought
it must be really damned important whatever Cliff Stone had to tell her.
So end of quote, really weird situation there.
I don't know if this is the best place to ask it and just tell me if it's not.
But like, what is John Lear actually bringing to the table at all?
I think it's the air of believability that he brings with his background and his wealth
or his fame and fortune that people perceive him to have.
Is he not just talking about what everybody else is talking about though?
Yes, and he added his own stuff on top of it that he doesn't have anything to back up.
But the stuff that he's adding to the stuff that's already going around in the community
at the time is fucking like weird ass.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, I thought there might have been something I was gonna say.
No.
Okay, so it's just the same stuff going around like nothing original there but then he adds
like obviously stuff that he's just straight up making up.
Yeah.
Knowing what we know about Bill Moore and okay.
And I'll talk about that more at the end too but I'll continue on from this excerpt from
this book.
On the way to Roswell, Lear and Howe had to stop over at Albuquerque where they had dinner
with Colonel Ernie Edwards who kept track of Dr. Paul Benowitz for the Air Force and met
with Condor Robert Collins who showed us some transcripts regarding EBE3, one of the living
aliens sequestered from the Roswell crash.
One of the messages said EBE3 wants to see the ocean.
We have to ever comply or he'll disappear again.
Again.
Yep.
Lear and Howe's next stop was Roswell where they met up with another spooky ex-military
type, the aforementioned Sergeant Clifford Stone who claimed that as a child growing
up in Southern Ohio he had encountered extraterrestrials and that these encounters had come to the
attention of the US government who monitored Stone throughout his youth and into adulthood.
During the Vietnam era, Stone enlisted in the army and in short order he was whisked
away to a top secret movie screening room at Fort Belvoir and shown a film of a UFO
retrieval.
Then afterwards placed on a special military team assigned to crash retrievals during the
course of which Stone identified no less than 57 different alien races.
In the summer of 86, Stone had been in correspondence with Paul Benowitz receiving what could best
be described as two rather lengthy and rambling letters in which Benowitz went into exhaustive
detail about the different alien races at Dulce.
Perhaps comparing notes about the different aliens that Stone himself had allegedly encountered
during his crash retrieval assignments.
It was Stone's involvement with Benowitz that appears to have been at least one of the factors
that motivated Howe and Lear to skip out early from Creston to Rendezvous and Roswell with
Stone.
All of these preregrenations seem to have the singular focus in mind of finding out
more of what Benowitz knew about the ETs and alleged Dulce underground base.
Not long after his road trip with Howe, Lear returned to Albuquerque to meet with Benowitz.
According to Christian Lamrite, sometime in 87 or possibly 88, John Lear went to meet
Paul Benowitz at Paul's home.
I found out later that John spent several days there.
To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time they had met in person.
A few days after John's departure, I got a call from Paul.
He was extremely angry about something involving John and from the strong words he used, it
was very clear he did not care to see John again.
Following this interaction, Benowitz changed his phone number with Drew from the front
lines of Ufology and Lamrite suspects that this was the cause behind Benowitz's self-imposed
ufological exile that had something to do with the meeting with Lear.
Not to mention that by this time, Benowitz was teetering on the edge of a psychological
meltdown.
And basically, he's the last person to talk with Benowitz before he goes into the psych
ward.
What?
How didn't I know this?
Did Lear come up in my episode?
No, he didn't.
And you just wait for the next ones to come up.
We keep finding people who are involved in this.
What the heck?
So Benowitz goes and gets admitted to the mental hospital.
After meeting with Lear.
Eventually, he comes out.
And then I didn't find the actual quote from the book.
It's just somebody saying it's in this book, which I can't find the actual quote.
So take it with a grand song.
Apparently, Lear visits Benowitz again when he comes out of the hospital and he leaves
Benowitz's house with all of his UFO files and they're never seen again.
What?
I have no idea if that's true or not.
That is purely speculation on Reddit.
But it might actually be in the book.
I don't know for sure.
I want to get the book so I can read it.
Okay.
What's the book?
The Spooks one?
Yeah.
We might leave a reference for it.
It's called Saucers Spooks and Cooke's by Albert Goe rightly.
It's not the only quote we're going to be reading from that.
So next up, that's his Benowitz relationship.
So it seems like, does it come up more?
It seems like if he's one of the last people to see him, it seems like he may have been
getting equal information as more.
Everything prior to that alludes to all of his information either came from Benowitz
or was the information being fed to Benowitz?
Yeah.
So he's getting it from somewhere or why he even went over there to get UFO files.
He's involved in.
And I could not find anything from John Lear saying what happened in those days with Benowitz.
I mean, you don't really want to be tied to it.
No, you really don't.
So he may have essentially, because John Lear is still around.
Is he not?
We'll get to that at the end.
Okay.
It sounds like he may have came out from that unscathed somehow, but I also want to add
in before I forget that Linda Moulton-Haw was kind of sneaking around in these episodes
as well, which leads me to want to see what's going on there as well, because she might
have came out of this.
She's not unscathed.
She's not unscathed in a lot of stuff, but yeah.
So that's the Benowitz part.
Next up, Bob Lazar meets John Lear in mid-1988.
It's somewhere around March to April of 1988.
Gene Huff contacted John Lear and offered to appraise his home in exchange for a copy
of Lear's collection of UFO materials, including the Billy Meyer tapes as well as other documents.
Lear agreed and Huff brought with him a man by the name of Bob Lazar.
What?
Why?
He's appraising a home?
With him as an assistant to help him appraise the home.
Yes.
I'm sorry?
Are we sure?
This is how it does go.
This is the best information I can find.
It's agreed to in multiple places online that this is their first time they meet.
And most notably, it is about four months before Bob Lazar gets a job at Area 51 S4
in December of 1988.
Okay.
So before he starts working at Area 51, he's working as an assistant to appraise houses.
Yes.
And becomes friends with John Lear.
But it doesn't even seem that he's...
Oh, okay.
I see what you're...
And specifically, I've heard it brought up.
He actually gets questioned when he's going to get the job at Area 51 about his relationship
with John Lear.
Yeah.
It's not like they even got paid for this.
He did it in exchange for information.
Yeah.
Okay.
Bob Lazar.
So it might have just been like a hobby thing that he came along for whatever.
And in March of 1989, Lear journey to the outskirts of Area 51.
Chelsea, I need to just play this video for you now because this is the only way I can
really...
My mind is going crazy right now connecting all these things because Bob Lazar...
This is adding so much.
This first interview was actually with George Knapp.
And Chelsea, this is the backstory to that interview.
For those of you who don't know, Bob Lazar is known as like the Area 51 whistleblower.
The first person to really say everything that's going on here.
And he gives this interview to George Knapp, who there's a whole backstory to it.
We'll do it when we do it by either George Knapp or Bob Lazar episode.
But this is what I need you to see.
May 15th, 1989.
Seems like only yesterday.
Not really.
I was the co-anchor of the five o'clock news with Paula Francis and our newscast back then
featured a nightly interview segment.
The guest we had scheduled for that day bailed on us at the last minute, so I placed a call
to famed aviator John Lear because he'd been telling me he knew someone who'd been hired
to work at an ultra-secret military base near Groom Lake.
We had no idea the interview would still be of interest 30 years later.
There's really no way I can prove it without revealing my identity and getting myself into
more trouble than I have already.
Exactly what's going on up there.
So yeah, the whole reason that the Bob Lazar interview where he brings forth all that information
about Area 51 is because George Knapp had an interview fall through and he called John
Lear and said, hey, do you have anybody for me?
And Bob Lazar comes out.
George Knapp.
Why did you ruin him?
I love him.
This is not looking good.
Like another one.
Okay.
That's his relationship.
They had a relationship the entire time, like into like the current era.
Jeremy Corbell talks about the reason he met Bob Lazar is because he was friends with
John Lear and he would be over at his house when they were hanging out.
Next up, John Lear did get involved with Mufon in Nevada.
In fact, he was its head in 1989.
He served as a state director of Mutual UFO Network and he hosted their 1989 annual convention
in Las Vegas, Nevada on July 1st, 1989.
When the symposium was entitled, the UFO cover up a government conspiracy.
And I have a little excerpt that was written by Don Ecker who's involved in this.
And Chelsea, you might not be putting it together, but as I'm reading this, you're going to
put it together.
I'm putting a lot of things together right now.
By June of 1989, Lear's paper on the evil gray aliens, Bill Moore's MJ12 research and
Cooper's twist and spin on both subjects were causing shock waves throughout American
ufology as exemplified by the controversial 1989 symposium in Las Vegas organized by Mufon
during that year.
John Lear became Mufon's director for Nevada and had invited Bill Cooper, Bill English
and me to speak about our own research.
At the very last moment, Walt Andress, the international director of Mufon, objected
to the content of the papers by Lear, Cooper and English and canceled their presentation
scheduled for Sunday.
The Mufon membership reacted with open revolt.
Lear threatened to take his speakers down the street to another location and most of
the conference would have followed him had it not been for even more outrageous event.
Bill Moore's talk ran for over two hours in length and had the audience calling for
his blood.
And for those of you, this is an episode that we did in the past.
He admitted that he worked hand in fist with the military intelligence during the 80s in
an attempt to get on the inside of the military's knowledge on UFOs.
During this speech, he admitted participating in the disinforming of Paul Benowitz, a civilian
UFO investigator who had been hospitalized for severe mental health problems.
When Moore's talk was complete, he refused questions and rushed from the room, leaving
the proceedings in turmoil.
Lear seemed severely stressed and uncommunicative.
Later said Bill Cooper came to my house on Friday before the talk and was drinking heavily.
He demanded to know who I was working for.
He said he was afraid that either I or someone else was setting him up.
The more he drank the louder he became and started slamming his hands down on my desk.
His girlfriend was there and I thought she might try to temper him down, but did nothing.
He then told me that anyone who tried to cross him would regret it.
I moved to the other side of my desk and not sure what he might do, finally his girlfriend
let him out.
That Sunday, July 2, 1989, was when the alternative Mufon event began.
Lear spoke first and then Cooper.
By this time, Cooper had refined his materials and for the most part stunned his audience
by claiming the US government had recovered dozens of crashes in alien pilots.
The aliens were abducting people and killing them.
He said that the US had a secret space program jointly with the Russians and the aliens with
bases on Mars and the moon.
Cooper even claimed that there were areas on the moon that were free-standing water and
vegetation.
Man can walk on the moon with just an air pack, Cooper confidently told the audience.
Finally he blurted out that President Kennedy was murdered by his secret service driver as
part of a huge conspiracy plot and that he had read about it in secret Navy documents.
Serious researchers in some media channels were now suspicious about Cooper's claims,
especially concerning the Kennedy assassination tape.
That is a whole part of that Bill Moore speech that I think we did not know that context.
We didn't know that, no.
This is like a creature that keeps like reaching its tentacles into ways that we didn't know
before touching all these individuals.
It's funny how when you look into the specific one, other people aren't named except for
maybe once and then we look into them and we're like whoa like they had a major hand
in this as well.
I'm scared to look into other people when it comes to this.
I get that.
Yet intrigued.
That's the 1989 symposium and Lear's involvement in it.
So fairly involved as well because he was ahead of Mufon at the time.
He put on the whole thing.
He had Bill Moore there to speak and in fact they were all going to get kicked out so they
threatened and brought it back.
Like man, that thing, just next up.
Let's talk about Bill Cooper a bit again.
Now for those of you who don't know, Behind the Bastards has an entire saga on Bill Cooper.
So you're only getting the Cole's Notes of that.
We're not going to do a Bill Cooper episode.
You're going to get the Cole's Notes here at the end though.
But this is a continuation of Bill Cooper and John Lear's relationship.
During his meteoric ascent into UFO stardom, Cooper was interviewed by the syndicated television
program PM Magazine and while chatting up the host of the show prior to taping, Cooper
mentioned something called the Krill Papers, an infamous euthelological document that
concerned a secret Human E.T. exchange program.
And as part of the secret program, an E.T. had been left behind on Earth identified as
Krill or OH Krill.
Cooper claimed that the initials OH meant original hostage and that the Krill Papers
were among the number of top secret briefing papers he smuggled out in his lunchbox in 1973
while serving in the Navy.
However, John Lear was right there as a bystander of the PM Magazine interview and he recalled,
the name Krill was an inside joke referring to a case in the late 1950s in which a Navy
investigator interviewed a woman who claimed to channel alien name Cyril.
Lear and Grace had made the initials OH out of thin air.
They were the writers of this document and not any way involved in the document couldn't
have existed when Cooper says he stole it.
So is Lear like Cooper because Lear seems to out this guy for like having fake footage
and like making documents a lot?
This is their following out.
Grace did not want his name involved in the paper and that's why they used the OH Krill
Papers.
They were just over a decade old at the time of this television program.
Cooper was claiming that they're from 72.
This is just not true.
Lear says, when I heard Bill tell the interviewer he saw the Krill Papers while he was in the
Navy I motioned him over and I asked him, what the hell are you doing?
What do you mean?
I said, Bill, John Grace and I did the Krill Papers.
We named them after a 50s case.
While Cooper insisted he saw them in the Navy and that is when I really began to wonder
about Cooper's credibility.
It wasn't when he stole the video that was supposed to be fake.
This is just an excerpt from that article I referenced earlier, Behold a Pale of Horse
Shit.
As to be expected, took exception with Lear setting him straight and then turns to tables
telling Lear that he was the one who was actually lying, which was Cooper's usual
comeback when presented with facts that didn't square with his version of reality.
And Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper claims that damn near anyone who ever disagreed with his
conspiratorial worldview was part of its sinister disinformation program, whom included in its
ranks such ufological stalwarts as Bob Lazar, Bud Hopkins, Stan Friedman, Bill Moore, Jamie
Chanderra, George Knapp, Linda Howe and Bruce McAbee.
Cooper also took aim at the editors of UFO magazine, Vicky Cooper and Don Ecker, referring
to them disparagingly as Don Pekker and Sticky Cooper.
Yeah, he was like a 5 year old.
Cooper later broke ranks with ET True Believers claiming he'd been duped about UFOs and alien
abductions which he'd come to realize were actually a government disinfo op designed
to conceal the New World Order agenda.
In the early 1990s, Cooper aligned himself with the Second Continental Army of the Republic
of militia group and told the IRS to fold it 5 times and stick it where the sun don't
shine.
That taxation was unconstitutional and if they wanted to take away his guns, they could try.
During our of the time broadcast, Cooper claimed that he had been targeted by the Illuminati
Socialist President of the United States William Jefferson Clinton.
In 1998, Cooper was charged with tax evasion and bank fraud.
Federal Marshals, aware that Cooper was always locked and loaded, took measured approach,
realizing any type of competition might escalate into violence and by the fall of 2000s, Marshals
had been unable to serve a warrant and Cooper was listed as a federal fugitive.
In the meantime, Cooper had a number of confrontations with locals in the Egoray, Arizona.
The straw that broke the camel's back occurred in July of 2001 when a firearm wheeled in
Cooper chased off a local man with a parcel on his parcel near his home.
This incident triggered a response from the Apache County Sheriff's Office that led
to Cooper's ultimate undoing.
Even during a raid on his home, he went out and a blaze of bullets shot dead at age 58
on November 26, 2001.
What the fuck?
Yeah.
Okay, I mean I haven't been expecting this whole episode Billy.
It just keeps taking turns.
Twists and turns.
Yeah, that's one of the people John Lear got involved with.
Obviously there was a set bring of the relationship at some point with this very crazy man.
Again, prototype Alex Jones.
Alex Jones even has mentioned him.
He was in a recent episode of Knowledge Fight, so it's very funny that this came up in this
research.
And then the last thing I wanted to talk about with this guy is this is just a quote from
Lars Hansen.
He wrote this article called Lear and Loathing.
Good pun.
I'm just going to read it direct.
This is the guy again.
Remember, it's from the JFK videos that he gave them the Lear.
Oh, this is the guy.
Okay.
Yeah, this is the guy.
It kind of starts abruptly, but let's just go with it.
Once we had moved through the obligatory anecdotes, I was discussing the October surprise
weapon deals and the sleaze bags who took part in that despicable scenario in late 1980.
When Out of the Blue, Lear began to brag to me about his participation as a pilot in
the illegal weapon flight in Iran in early 1981 sanctioned by the Reagan-Bush administration.
He claims he was flying planes for Iran Contra, like the weapons into Iran.
Okay.
Well, that has come up in an episode before.
Yeah.
I think.
Like the cocaine ones.
Yeah.
Drugs.
Yeah.
They were just being from the Contras.
Or sorry.
Yeah.
Selling cocaine to the Contras or buying it.
I forget how it works.
There was guns in the game.
Yeah, it was something like.
And I ran in the Contras.
Yeah, exactly.
In the 80s, there was Cold War drama.
We bought the copies inside Nicaragua.
Our friends were the Contras.
Freedom was their mantra.
So we sent them lots of money for guns and landmines.
But Congress stopped the Contra money flow.
Just cause they moved a teeny bit of blow.
But then a hero came for it.
His name was Oliver North.
Ian Reagan went around the Sissy Congress.
Holy North.
You see, North secretly sold missiles to a harmless country called Iran that would
always be a grateful ally.
Then he gave the profits to the Contras.
Genius.
But the sales were uncovered by the press.
Reagan and North began to stress because what they did was technically high treason.
These were conducted as part of the payoff for the Iranians rule in the Reagan Bush campaign
team.
Secret deals with the Ayatollah Omani regime to delay the release of 51 American hostages
until after the 1980 elections in order to prevent Jimmy Carter from being re-elected.
Very much to my surprise, since I knew that several of the team players in the operation
had either died mysteriously or currently under indictment for their role in those operations,
he openly boasted about his participation in the flights.
Despite my obvious disgust in this revelation, Lear Crowed that everybody knocks the agency
for not being able to keep any secrets.
We kept that one secret for seven years.
And then we let it out.
Yes, he made a point of showing me numerous news clippings about them and that he had
collected from the Middle Eastern press.
They made a rather grand display of showing me his beautiful oak map cabinet and taking
out his navigation map of that area.
The route flown by his flight crew from Tel Aviv over Turkey to Iran was clearly distinctly
marked on it.
He explained that Turkey had insisted that in return for allowing the planes to overfly
Turkish airspace, every other load of weapons had to be left there.
He then pointed proudly to a picture of him and his cronies taken in Tehran in 1981, which
was hanging on the wall.
I was frankly quite amazed that he would be so open to a virtual stranger about such
operations for which numerous participants were still under federal indictment and or
the subject of continuing criminal investigations.
Also, by 1988, a number of key participants in the affair had already succumbed to mysterious
ailments or other life-ending circumstances.
When I admonished him that this was actually part of one of the biggest cover-ups in international
criminality in American history and that he was obligated to come forth publicly on this
issue, he sloughed it off as having been sanctioned by the Reagan administration and insisted
it was of minor importance in comparison to the growing threat of occupation of the planet
by extraterrestrials.
I couldn't believe my ears.
Despite the numerous reports I had already seen concerning thousands of UFO sightings
and encounters with aliens, I suspected strongly that his acknowledged ties to the intelligence
community had been persuaded to promote the UFO issue to distract public attention from
being focused on the many crimes of Iran-Contra scandals perpetrators.
Despite my apprehension, I decided to maintain the contact with him in order to persuade
him to disclose the participants in the flights publicly.
So yeah, this guy believes that the whole reason that John Lear got involved with this,
and was so public, is because they were trying to take heat off Iran-Contra.
Full circle.
We've covered this, right?
We didn't cover it in full, but yes, we have covered it.
No, not in full.
It was kind of like a byproduct of the drugs episode.
But what the f-
This guy has his fingers in so many different things.
That I wasn't even expecting that.
Yeah.
And Chelsea, unfortunately, the story does end with John Lear dying in his sleep on March
29, 2022.
He was 79 years old at the time.
Oh, that's not that long ago.
He was still in the UFO community.
Like I said, Jormer Corbelle, the whole reason he's in the UFO community is because of John Lear.
Well, apparently, the whole reason a lot of people are doing this is because of John Lear.
And I still can't find a good reason as to why.
Like, what information did he have?
Any first hand information.
He collected it and he bought it from books.
I mean, the first hand information would have been like the weird stuff he was making up
in between, but that to me doesn't seem good enough.
That's not first hand information.
That's speculation.
Yeah.
But yeah, the whole reason like Jormer Corbelle and George Knapp did that episode of their
podcast on John Lear was because it was a year after his death.
So they were reminiscing on it.
So I get why they don't want to say bad things about him.
At the same time, George, I like you a lot.
But you need to be critical of information.
You can't just say, look, I'm not here to say whether or not things he was saying were lies or not.
And he specifically says that in the episode, which is something that I like about George Knapp.
Not that he said that, that he is actually critical of things.
I wonder if he has made any comments on it that weren't specifically on that episode.
But I couldn't find anything where George Knapp is negative.
They do talk about his more outlandish lies in that episode.
Like that there's 73 alien races living on the sun.
But also there's a ton I didn't talk about.
These are just how it connects to their episodes.
He had a theory that 9-11 was a hologram.
He has very outlandish views a lot of the time.
This leaves me confused because everybody else has directly had a hand in this, but he kind of...
Well, and that's why I wonder that last little speculation that he started to get heavily involved in the UFO community
to have other information coming out, make Iran Contra not as public.
It's interesting. I don't know if I endorse it or not, but it definitely gives you at least a reason why he's doing this.
Oh, it's true. And I'm looking for a reason right now.
So, okay, I can get behind that, I guess, because I need a reason.
Other than that, there's seemingly no reason.
And this episode, are we done?
Yeah, that's the end of my episode.
And I feel like we had more people tied into this, making it in even larger branches extending out.
And I knew that the was largely involved with like the George Knapp gang.
I just love how many different events we got to see from another angle because of this.
No matter how much we cover this, I'm still always disappointed that this is the UFO community.
Because so much... I say it every episode, I think I've even said it this episode.
So much of the core ideas of the UFO community even today come out of this.
Everything from these few episodes where we're talking about it and still to this day ends up going back to Doty and Moore.
Yeah, just think it's crazy. He's not even directly tied to them. It doesn't seem like...
Yes, somehow it would...
Well, I could not find anything where they possible about each other, except for, you know, Dillmore said that Lear's stuff came from Benowich, which was fed through him.
But weirdly enough, they're both involved in Nevada Mofon and like I can't find actual interactions between the two of them other than him setting up the speed.
It's weird. I will say that much. It is weird. And why else would he be spending time with Benowich?
He spent several days and pissed him off somehow.
So there's something that seems to be still there underneath like more to the story somehow.
But yeah, that's where I have this one left off. I was happy to shine a light on this guy because I've always vaguely heard the name.
No, I quite...
Very common guest on Coast to Coast.
Very, yeah.
Yeah, that's the story.
This is why I couldn't quite please him because he doesn't seem to have any for me.
He doesn't have a role, really. He really does.
He distinctly pleases him.
It's not distinct, but I've heard the name. As always, this leaves me feeling...
Underwhelmed.
And with that, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea. We are Journey to the Fringe. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Bye.
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