Okay, this is just something extra for you, a seven minute bonus broadcast
from my second show, True Stories with Seth Andrews. If you like what
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help me get the word out there. Today's True Story runs about seven minutes
True Stories with Seth Andrews. Enjoy. I'm Seth Andrews and what you're about
to hear is a true story. The year was nineteen eighty nine. There
was a farmer, his name was Robert Reid, and he was outside working
his land. This was just outside of Burr Oak, Michigan, and he
looked up into the sky and he saw something strange. There was a circular
group of floating objects over his farmland. It turned out to be a cluster
of weather balloons, and attached to those balloons was a super eight film camera.
Well, Robert wasn't sure what to make of all of this, but
he was concerned because local farmers had been getting into trouble with the police because
marijuana had been growing around the edges of some of their crops, and the
police took a very dim view of that. Were these law enforcements surveillance balloons
looking for weed. Well, whatever was happening, Robert decided the right thing
to do was to go ahead and turn everything over to the local police.
And they took the super eight camera and they had the film developed, and
what they saw was sobering. The footage showed two men dressed in black and
they were standing over a body. The two standing men had a crest on
their jackets the life this man's face covered with a mysterious substance, the skin
obviously blemished with something. The camera swirled back and forth, up and down
until finally it began to ascend, revealing a third man who was running away
from the scene as fast as he could run. The camera continued to drift
upward into the sky, revealing warehouses and parking garages. This was obviously somewhere
in Chicago. The wide overhead vantage even revealed the lights of the elevated Chicago
trains, and detectives finally pinned down the location as an alley somewhere in the
Fulton River district, and so they contacted local police. They said, hey,
have you received any homicide reports in that area? But no records or
reports were found. Michigan police were looking at this strange, disturbing snuff film,
and they surmised it was some kind of a gang murder, maybe a
cult killing, and with resources played out, they handed all the footage over
to the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where federal pathologists revealed another
disturbing detail that dead body was long dead, it was already rotting. This
murder case went on and on and on. One month turned into three,
turned into six months, then a year, two years, and the dead
man had still not been identified, the killers had not been identified, the
case becoming a cold case, and so, with all other options exhausted and
desperate for leads, the FBI distributed flyers, and those flyers had stills from
this soup or eight film, and they passed these out throughout the city of
Chicago, specifically focusing in the region that they had pinpointed, and some of
those flyer distribution locations included schools, and inside one of those schools there was
an art student and he saw the image and he had a flash of recognition.
He knew what this was, and he called a number on the flyer.
He contacted the police and said, I've seen this place, I've seen
these men I know what happened while that super eight film footage that had accidentally
gotten away from its handlers, that floated far into the sky and ultimately landed
in that Michigan farmer's field. It was not a snuff film. It was
not documented murder. It was a music video. Oh, the footage looked
suspicious. It was grainy and desaturated and blurry, some might say even sloppy,
certainly hard to focus on. But you could see that man, black
jacket, black pants, white shirt, splayed out upon the concrete as that
overhead camera came up and down and up and down and spun around. The
man certainly looked dead, but he wasn't dead. He wasn't a victim.
He was a lead singer. And his face was not rotten. It wasn't
covered in decay. He was covered with cornstarch and chocolate syrup. This whole
thing was a filmed artistic exercise by a rock band in the decade of the
music video. This was the era of MTV, and every band with a
new song had to have a new music video. This was theater that just
happened to look like murder, which resulted in a lot of men and women
in badges, also wearing red faces. While the film crew had once been
chasing a rogue weather balloon, law enforcement had been chasing its own tale.
The band had gotten another camera and they shot that scene again with new equipment.
And when that scene was done, when this music video was done and
released on MTV in nineteen eighty nine, this artist went back to his art,
performing for audiences worldwide, returning to the studio to record more albums.
The man who today is a household name and a rock legend. The man
investigated for two years by the Michigan Police and the FBI as a murder victim,
was Trent Resner of nine inch Nails. Oh Yeah, that is a
true story. True Stories podcast dot com