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Okay, this is just something extra
for you, a seven minute bonus broadcast

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from my second show, True Stories
with Seth Andrews. If you like what

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you hear, you can subscribe on
all major podcast apps like and Share and

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help me get the word out there. Today's True Story runs about seven minutes

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True Stories with Seth Andrews. Enjoy. I'm Seth Andrews and what you're about

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to hear is a true story.
The year was nineteen eighty nine. There

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was a farmer, his name was
Robert Reid, and he was outside working

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his land. This was just outside
of Burr Oak, Michigan, and he

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looked up into the sky and he
saw something strange. There was a circular

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group of floating objects over his farmland. It turned out to be a cluster

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of weather balloons, and attached to
those balloons was a super eight film camera.

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Well, Robert wasn't sure what to
make of all of this, but

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he was concerned because local farmers had
been getting into trouble with the police because

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marijuana had been growing around the edges
of some of their crops, and the

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police took a very dim view of
that. Were these law enforcements surveillance balloons

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looking for weed. Well, whatever
was happening, Robert decided the right thing

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to do was to go ahead and
turn everything over to the local police.

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And they took the super eight camera
and they had the film developed, and

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what they saw was sobering. The
footage showed two men dressed in black and

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they were standing over a body.
The two standing men had a crest on

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their jackets the life this man's face
covered with a mysterious substance, the skin

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obviously blemished with something. The camera
swirled back and forth, up and down

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until finally it began to ascend,
revealing a third man who was running away

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from the scene as fast as he
could run. The camera continued to drift

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upward into the sky, revealing warehouses
and parking garages. This was obviously somewhere

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in Chicago. The wide overhead vantage
even revealed the lights of the elevated Chicago

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trains, and detectives finally pinned down
the location as an alley somewhere in the

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Fulton River district, and so they
contacted local police. They said, hey,

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have you received any homicide reports in
that area? But no records or

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reports were found. Michigan police were
looking at this strange, disturbing snuff film,

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and they surmised it was some kind
of a gang murder, maybe a

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cult killing, and with resources played
out, they handed all the footage over

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to the FBI, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, where federal pathologists revealed another

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disturbing detail that dead body was long
dead, it was already rotting. This

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murder case went on and on and
on. One month turned into three,

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turned into six months, then a
year, two years, and the dead

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man had still not been identified,
the killers had not been identified, the

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case becoming a cold case, and
so, with all other options exhausted and

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desperate for leads, the FBI distributed
flyers, and those flyers had stills from

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this soup or eight film, and
they passed these out throughout the city of

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Chicago, specifically focusing in the region
that they had pinpointed, and some of

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those flyer distribution locations included schools,
and inside one of those schools there was

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an art student and he saw the
image and he had a flash of recognition.

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He knew what this was, and
he called a number on the flyer.

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He contacted the police and said,
I've seen this place, I've seen

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these men I know what happened while
that super eight film footage that had accidentally

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gotten away from its handlers, that
floated far into the sky and ultimately landed

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in that Michigan farmer's field. It
was not a snuff film. It was

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not documented murder. It was a
music video. Oh, the footage looked

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suspicious. It was grainy and desaturated
and blurry, some might say even sloppy,

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certainly hard to focus on. But
you could see that man, black

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jacket, black pants, white shirt, splayed out upon the concrete as that

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overhead camera came up and down and
up and down and spun around. The

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man certainly looked dead, but he
wasn't dead. He wasn't a victim.

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He was a lead singer. And
his face was not rotten. It wasn't

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covered in decay. He was covered
with cornstarch and chocolate syrup. This whole

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thing was a filmed artistic exercise by
a rock band in the decade of the

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music video. This was the era
of MTV, and every band with a

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new song had to have a new
music video. This was theater that just

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happened to look like murder, which
resulted in a lot of men and women

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in badges, also wearing red faces. While the film crew had once been

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chasing a rogue weather balloon, law
enforcement had been chasing its own tale.

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The band had gotten another camera and
they shot that scene again with new equipment.

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And when that scene was done,
when this music video was done and

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released on MTV in nineteen eighty nine, this artist went back to his art,

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performing for audiences worldwide, returning to
the studio to record more albums.

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The man who today is a household
name and a rock legend. The man

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investigated for two years by the Michigan
Police and the FBI as a murder victim,

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was Trent Resner of nine inch Nails. Oh Yeah, that is a

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true story. True Stories podcast dot
com