Speaker 1: March sixteenth, nineteen fifty seven. It's eight o'clock in the morning.
I want you to just picture the scene for a second. Okay,
you're in Alexandria, Virginia. It's a crisp, maybe a little
bit chilly Saturday morning, and you're a local police officer,
just you know, starting your shift. You're sipping your coffee.
It's probably a little stale, and you're just expecting to
the usual.
Speaker 2: The standard beat a traffic ticket, maybe.
Speaker 1: Exactly, you know, a noise, complain, a cat up a tree,
something simple, and then you either get the call or
maybe you just look up and see it yourself.
Speaker 2: And it's not something you can just ignore, impossible to ignore.
Speaker 1: In a field right there in Alexandria is a spacecraft.
And look, we are not talking about some weather balloon
or you know, a reflection.
Speaker 2: No, this is a physical object, a.
Speaker 1: Three hundred foot long silver saucer, which is.
Speaker 2: I mean for scale, that's an entire football field just
parked in the grass.
Speaker 1: Right, So you got to put yourself in that officer's shoes.
You rush to the seam, you and your partner, you
probably pull your service weapons because let's remember the context.
It's nineteen fifty.
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, the Cold War is at its peak. Paranoia
is just it's the air.
Speaker 1: You breathe, and a giant, unidentified metal disc just landed
in your town. You're terrified, you're probably shaking. You're watching
this thing, and a door it.
Speaker 2: Just hisses open, and you're expecting what little green men,
a laser.
Speaker 1: Beam, an invasion force, right, but that is not what happens,
not even close outwalks a man. He looks well, he
looks perfectly human, tall, maybe six feet, has this wavy
brown hair, just a normal guy. He smiles, waves at
the officers like he's seeing a neighbor, and then he
speaks in flawless clear English, and his first line isn't
take me to your leader.
Speaker 2: No menacing robot voice.
Speaker 1: No, it's a polite, almost like a bureaucratic request. He
just says, I need to see the president.
Speaker 2: And just like that, the strangest morning in Alexandria's history
kicks off this chain of events that, if you believe
the sources, involves the Pentagon, President Eisenhower and a three
year diplomatic mission, and that could have completely changed the
course of human history.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. I'm your host, and today we
are going to pull on the loose strings of one
of the wildest tapestries in modern American folklore.
Speaker 2: And I'm here with you to see if the whole
thing just unravels or if it actually weaves together into
something well believable. We've got a huge stack of articles, transcripts,
reports here, and we're going to comb through all of it.
Speaker 1: Today we're tackling a legend that is it's a lot.
We are digging into the story of the Stranger at
the Pentagon, and.
Speaker 2: This is one of the most persistent, most detailed, and
honestly one of the most cinematic UFO legends out there.
It's not just a quick flash of light in.
Speaker 1: The sky or a blurry photo.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. This is a whole narrative about
a specific person, a man named Valiant Thor, who allegedly
lived at the Pentagon for.
Speaker 1: Three years as a guest of the government.
Speaker 2: I guess of the government. Yeah, an advisor to President
Eisenhower and a visitor from the.
Speaker 1: Planet Venus, just a casual visitor from the planet. Next store.
But before everyone listening kind of rolls their eyes and
says Okay, aliens, here we go. We need to talk
about why this story actually matters. Why are we even
talking about.
Speaker 2: This, because it's not just a campfire story when you
look at the timeline it's laid out in these sources.
This whole narrative is tangled up with the founding of NASA,
the absolute peak of Cold War fear, and the birth
of what Eisenhower himself would later call the military industrial complex.
Speaker 1: Right, So, even if you don't believe the alien part exactly.
Speaker 2: Even if you don't, the story itself is a perfect
mirror of what America was afraid of and what it
was hoping for in the late nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Plus the evidence that's in these files, Yeah, it's just
great stuff. We're talking indestructible jumpsuits, We've got secret photos
of aliens who look like they shop at jcpenny, and
a whole conspiracy about why we have velcro.
Speaker 2: We absolutely have to talk about the velcrow. That's a
huge part of this whole lore.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's unpack it to really understand why a
man walking out of a spaceship in nineteen fifty seve
was such a huge deal. We have to remember what
the world felt like right then. It wasn't exactly a
happy time.
Speaker 2: No, it was a time of deep, deep, existential fear.
Let's just set the scene a little bit. It's the
fall of nineteen fifty seven. The United States feels pretty
secure in its technology. You know, we won the war,
we have the bomb, the economy's booming, We're on top
of the world, we think we are. And then the
Soviet Union just completely shocks everyone. They launched Sputnik one,
and then right after that it's Beetnik two, the first
man made satellites ever.
Speaker 1: And for the average person at home looking up at
the night sky and seeing that little dot go by,
that wasn't a cool science thing. That was a threat.
Speaker 2: It was terrifying. You have to understand the military implication.
If the Soviets have a rocket that is powerful enough
to put a metal ball in orbit over your house.
Speaker 1: They have a rocket powerful enough to put a nuclear
bomb over your house.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The check and public was genuinely terrified. The whole
narrative shifted overnight. Suddenly the Russians had better teck, the
US had fallen behind, and we were completely vulnerable to
an attack from.
Speaker 1: Space, and our response to Sputnik. Was I mean, embarrassing
is probably the kindest word for.
Speaker 2: It, to put it mildly. Yeah. So, January thirty first,
nineteen fifty eight, the US tries to launch its own satellite,
the Vanguard, to show the world we're still in the game.
It gets about four feet off the launch pad and
then just explodes in this massive fireball on national telephone.
Speaker 1: Oh, I remember the headlines.
Speaker 2: They call it Kaputnik, Kuputnik, flopnik, state putnik. It was
a complete and total national humiliation. It's hard to overstate
how damaging that was to the American ego.
Speaker 1: So, okay, the nation is in a panic. The space
race feels like it's already lost. We look completely incompetent,
and then all of a sudden, everything just changes.
Speaker 2: It pivots on a dime. In July of nineteen fifty eight,
just a few months after the Vanguard disaster, the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA is created, and almost immediately
the US doesn't just catch up, We start taking these
massive leaps forward.
Speaker 1: The technological acceleration is just.
Speaker 2: It's off the charts, unprecedented.
Speaker 1: And this is where that first thread gets really interesting
to pull on. We go from exploding rockets to you know,
planning Moon missions in a ridiculously short amount of time.
And if you look at the list of inventions that
suddenly come out of NASA research in the years right
after fifty seven to fifty eight, it's just staggering.
Speaker 2: It gets a huge list. We're talking about things that
are in your house right now, things like velcrow, freeze,
drawing for food, memory foam mattresses.
Speaker 1: Right, memory phone yep.
Speaker 2: Major advancements in solar cells, the tiny little cameras that
are now in every single smartphone.
Speaker 1: So my iPhone camera is alien tech. I knew it.
Speaker 2: Oh. According to this theory, even the bowflex machine traces
its origins back to NASA research from this era.
Speaker 1: But boflex, of course, the aliens just wanted us to
have better looking abs.
Speaker 2: I mean, you need good core strength for space travel, right.
But the point the source material really hammers home is
the speed. NASA holds over twenty six hundred patents, it's
credited with over two thousand commercial products.
Speaker 1: And the conspiracy theory or the legend, I guess it
suggests we didn't figure all of this out by ourselves
in such a short period.
Speaker 2: The suggestion is that we got a cheat.
Speaker 1: Sheet, someone gave us the answer key exactly.
Speaker 2: The correlation that these documents draw is that this massive
explosion of technology happens right after the alleged arrival of
Valiant Thor. The implication is this wasn't just human ingenuity,
this was a technology transfer from an off world visitor.
It asks you to just look at the timing.
Speaker 1: We're failing valorives and suddenly we're winning.
Speaker 2: It's convenient, very convenient.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's get back to this visitor. We've set
the scene, panic, sputnik, a desperate need for a win. Now,
let's go to the Pentagon. Who's the person on the
inside who has to deal with this?
Speaker 2: According to the lore, our man on the inside is
a guy named Harley Andrew Byrd. He's working at the Pentagon,
and he specifically assigned a Project blue Book.
Speaker 1: Project blue Book, of course, the Air Force's official study
on UFOs very same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Harley isn't just you know, some random guy.
The story makes a point of saying that he is
the nephew of the legendary Admiral Richard Bird.
Speaker 1: Admiral Bird, the famous polar explorer. That's a huge name.
Speaker 2: It's a massive name. Connecting the character to Admiral Bird
immediately gives the story this air.
Speaker 1: Of credibility, right grounds it a little bit.
Speaker 2: It does. So Harley is in his office about eight
thirty in the morning on that day in March and
he gets a frantic call from the Alexandria Police. They
just say, we're coming in and we have a visitor.
Speaker 1: I just love that the police decided to drive the
alien to the Pentagon's so casual, like, well, this is
probably a federal issue. Hop in the back, buddy.
Speaker 2: No quarantine, no hazmat suits, Just into the squad car.
But they pull up to the Pentagon and apparently waiting
for them is the Secretary of Defense himself, Charles Wilson,
along with a half dozen other high level staff members.
They knew something big was happening.
Speaker 1: And out of the car steps our guy, Valiant thor So,
let's get a good visual on him. What is a
Venusian diplomat actually look like.
Speaker 2: The sources all describe him as well, strikingly normal but
also kind of perfect. He's tall, brown hair, has a
very easy going demeanor. The original source material actually compared
him to Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll, wearing
a one piece gold and silver jumpsuit.
Speaker 1: Okay, so Elvis in his vegus era, but in nineteen
fifty seven, got it. That's a look.
Speaker 2: It's definitely a look. Yeah, But despite the jumpsuit, he's
apparently very charming. He gets ushered into a private elevator,
taken deep down into the basement of the Pentagon and then,
and his detail is just fascinating me. They get on
an underground train.
Speaker 1: A train in the Pentagon basement, an.
Speaker 2: Underground train that goes directly from the Pentagon to the
White House.
Speaker 1: Wait, is that a real thing? Does that actually exist?
That sounds like something straight out of a James Bond movie.
Speaker 2: Well, there are certainly secure tunnels, and you know, transit
systems in DC that the public doesn't know about. There's
a subway that connects the Capitol to the Senate office buildings.
But a direct, high speed, secret express train from the
Pentagon basement to the White House. That's a matter of debate,
but in the story, it adds to that feeling of
deep secret infrastructure. It implies the government is ready for
exactly this kind of scenario.
Speaker 1: So they get to the White House, they walk into
the Oval Office and there he is Ike, President Dwight D.
Speaker 2: Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe,
a man who has seen everything, or so he.
Speaker 1: Thinks, can you just imagine that meeting. Ike looks at
this guy in the shiny gold jumpsuit and asks what
is your name? And the guy says, my name is Valiant,
but you can call me Val so friendly. And then
comes the big one. Where are you from?
Speaker 2: And Val drops the bombshell. He says, I come from
the planet your Bible calls the Morning and Evening Star Venus. Venus.
Speaker 1: Now, look, scientifically, we know Venus is a sulfuric acid hellscape,
got crushing atmospheric pressure. It's about nine hundred degrees fahrenheit
on the surface. But yeah, this is nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2: That's a very important point. We didn't know all of
that then. The romance of Venus as this mysterious cloud
covered sister planet was still very much alive, especially in science.
Speaker 1: Fiction, so it wasn't as crazy of a claim then
as it is now.
Speaker 2: Not nearly, and val explains that his people live there,
maybe underground or maybe in a different dimension, sources a
little vague on the physics to get around the whole
nine hundred degree thing, and he says he represents something
called the High Council.
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds very star Trek, but the Federation.
Speaker 2: It's very much a Star Trek concept years before Star
Trek existed. He describes this intercalactic govering body that spans
many planets and solar systems, and he says they've been
watching Earth for thousands of years, just observing, right. They
have a strict non interference policy, but something happened that
made them break their own rule.
Speaker 1: We started playing with matches.
Speaker 2: We started playing with atomic bombs. Val explicitly tells Eisenhower
that the invention and use of nuclear weapons made the
entire galaxy very, very nervous. We had reached a point
where we could not only destroy ourselves, but we could
potentially damage the fab of space time or disrupt the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: So this is basically an intervention. The neighbors are coming
over because our party got way too loud, and now
the garage is on fire.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect analogy. And Val says, we can help you.
We can solve all your problems.
Speaker 1: And the offer he makes is I mean, it's unbelievable.
He tells Eisenhower. I can eliminate all disease. I can
solve world hunger. I can end all war on Earth forever.
Speaker 2: Imagine being the President of the United States and hearing
that it's the answer to every single problem that keeps
you up at night.
Speaker 1: But there's a catch. There's always a catch.
Speaker 2: The cash is huge, yeah, nuclear disarmament. Val says that
for the High Council to share this this utopian technology,
the United States and by extension, the rest of the world,
must destroy every single nuclear weapon total disarmament, total, no exceptions.
Speaker 1: And this is where the fantasy story slams right into
the brick wall of reality. Because Eisenhower, the practical five
star general, the man who led D Day, he has
to make a.
Speaker 2: Choice, and he refuses. He politely declines the offer.
Speaker 1: He says no to ending all disease in war.
Speaker 2: He says no. And his reasoning, according to the story,
is that the world just isn't ready. The chaotic economic
and political structures of Earth couldn't handle that kind of
drastic change. He is if you remove the military industrial base,
if you take away the threat of mutually assured destruction
that's keeping the Cold War cold, the global economy collapses,
chaos ensues.
Speaker 1: He basically says, we're not spiritually or socially evolved enough
for what you're offering.
Speaker 2: That's the essence of it. It's the classic trope from
the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. We have
the technology to annihilate each other, but we don't have
the morality to live in peace.
Speaker 1: So it paints Eisenhemer not as a bad guy, but
as a realist. He's trapped in a system that's bigger.
Speaker 2: Than him exactly. The story portrays him as sympathetic. He
wants to say yes, but he knows Congress, the military,
the Soviets, nobody would go for it. He's looking at
the global chess board and seeing an impossible miss.
Speaker 1: So Ike says no to the big deal. But he
doesn't just kick Val out on the street.
Speaker 2: No, he asks him to stay. Val has given VIP
status and becomes a guest to the Pentagon. He gets
his own suite of rooms, and this is where the
story shifts from this high stakes diplomatic meeting to this
weird kind of sci fi slice of life story huh,
Val just starts hanging out.
Speaker 1: He starts hanging out, and the military becomes obsessed.
Speaker 2: With his clothes, the miracle garment.
Speaker 1: Yes, I love this part of the story. You have
a guy who just offered to cure cancer and the
generals are like, yeah, but tell us about your pants.
Speaker 2: Well, from a military research and development perspective, that suit
is the holy grail. The source material describes it as
a one piece jumpsuit that can fit a six foot man,
but weighs only six ounces.
Speaker 1: Six ounces for the whole thing included the boots. That's
lighter than a cotton T shirt.
Speaker 2: That's insane, and it was indestructible. The story goes into
incredible detail about the tests they ran on this poor jumpsuit.
They took it to a firing range and they shot
it with high caliber rifles. Nothing happened, not a mark.
Speaker 1: They didn't stop there though.
Speaker 2: Oh no. They doused it in acid. Nothing. They tried
to burn it with the most powerful lasers they had
at the time, couldn't even scorch it.
Speaker 1: Didn't they try to drill it?
Speaker 2: They did. They used a diamond tipped drill, the hardest
substance they had to try and get just a single
thread for analysis. They couldn't even make a scratch. The
drill bit broke.
Speaker 1: It's just hilarious to picture these four star generals and
PhD scientists in a lab throwing everything they have at
a pair of space pants and just failing. Sir, the
pants are winning.
Speaker 2: It's a great narrative device to show the sheer scale
of the technology gap. We couldn't even understand his laundry,
let alone his ship's propulsion system. It shows just how
far behind we really were.
Speaker 1: So vals living at the Pentagon, his suit is invincible,
and he starts, you know, attending meetings. There's a specific
event that the source mentions called the Highbridge Gathering, right.
Speaker 2: This supposedly takes place at the home of a man
named Howard Manger in High New Jerseyminger was a very
well known figure in the UFO community back then. He
was what they called a contact tee.
Speaker 1: A contact tee so someone who claimed to be in
regular contact with aliens.
Speaker 2: Friendly aliens. Yes, So this meeting at his house is
this mix of UFO researchers and some scientists who are
allegedly advising the president on this whole situation.
Speaker 1: And Valve shows up, but not alone. He brings his crew.
Speaker 2: He brings his crew, and this is where the details
get just wonderfully beautifully mundane. He introduces his team members
from Venus. Their names are Don, Jill and Tanya.
Speaker 1: Don, Jill and Tanya from the planet Venus.
Speaker 2: Not Zorgan or Zylar. Don and Jill.
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Don from Venus. This is my colleague Jill.
It's so terrestrial it almost feels like a joke, or
like the perfect cover.
Speaker 2: It does. And the source notes that they all look
like normal people, dressed in regular nineteen fifties clothes. They
blended in perfectly. But there's a really crucial element to
this highbridge meeting. There was a photographer there, August Roberts.
August Roberts, and he allegedly takes several photos of val Don, Jill,
and Tanya, and these photos are a huge part of
the lore. You can find them online right now. They
just show a group of attractive, normal looking people standing around.
Speaker 1: Which is either the greatest disguise of.
Speaker 2: All time or it's just a picture of some people
standing around. Right.
Speaker 1: We'll get to the skepticism later, but in the context
of the story, these photos are presented as the smoking gun,
physical proof that val and his crew were here interacting
with humans.
Speaker 2: They are the centerpiece of the physical evidence.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have the arrival, the meeting with Ike,
the rejection of the deal, and him just hanging out
with Don and Jill in New Jersey. But this entire
story really finds its voice and gets out to the
public through one specific person, the messenger.
Speaker 2: You absolutely cannot tell the story of Valiant Thor without
talking about doctor Frank Strangers. He is the primary source
for almost everything we know. The entire legend basically rests
on his shoulders.
Speaker 1: So who was this guy?
Speaker 2: Frank was a really fascinating character. His resume listed him
as a theologian, a psychologist, a criminologist, and a very
dedicated UFO researcher. He was also deeply religious, an evangelist preacher.
Speaker 1: And the story goes that Frank gets pulled into this
whole thing because of those photos that August Roberts took.
Speaker 2: That's right, Frank gets a copy of the photos. He's
mesmerized by them, and he starts using them in his
public lectures about UFOs, And one day, after a lecture
he gives in Washington, DC. A woman comes up to him.
Her name is Nancy Warren.
Speaker 1: And she's got the Golden ticket.
Speaker 2: She flashes a Pentagon security ID and asks him, would
you like to meet the man in those pictures?
Speaker 1: I mean, who says no to that?
Speaker 2: Certainly not Frank. So the next morning he's picked up,
he's whisked into the Pentagon. He's taken to VAL's private quarters.
The door opens, Val smiles, extends his hand, and his
first words are Hello, Frank. He knows his name already,
he knows everything about him. And this is the moment
where the story takes a very sharp turn away from
pure sci fi and veers into theology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's unpack this religious angle, because it's probably the
weirdest part of the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Val doesn't want to just talk about spaceships. He wants
to talk about God.
Speaker 2: This is absolutely critical to understanding the specific flavor of
this legend. This isn't just an alien story, It's a
religious one. Val tells Frank that he was specifically chosen
for this meeting because he has an open mind, but
most importantly, because he is a minister of the Gospel.
Speaker 1: So Val the alien from Venus is specifically interested in
the Christian Gospel.
Speaker 2: In the worldview that Frank Strange has preached and what
he claimed Val taught him, there is absolutely no conflict
between the Bible and extraterrestrials. In fact, they are one
in the same story. Frank's theology was that Jesus and
the angels were essentially aliens.
Speaker 1: So when the Bible talks about the Star of Bethlehem in.
Speaker 2: This worldview, that's the UFO. When angels descend from the heavens,
they are visitors like Val. So VAL's mission, he tells Frank,
wasn't just technological, it was spiritual. He says, his primary
goal is to help mankind return to God.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating because usually in these kinds of stories, science
and religion are pitted against each other. Here, the super
advanced alien is the ultimate evangelist.
Speaker 2: It completely merges them. Val confirms to Frank that there
is intelligent life on every planet, that the entire universe
is teeming with God's creation, and he asks Frank to
be his messenger on Earth to help him spread this
combined message of faith and space travel.
Speaker 1: And in return for being his messenger, Val shows Frank
some of the cool stuff.
Speaker 2: He shows them the toys. Yeah Vow reveals that they
have these holographic communication devices hidden around the world.
Speaker 1: The source says there are ones in Reno, San Diego
and Geneva.
Speaker 2: The Frank claims he actually saw one in action. He
describes this device where when you're talking to someone on it,
they appear as a full three dimensional hologram in the
room with you.
Speaker 1: He's basically describing a high end zoom call with a three.
Speaker 2: D filter in the nineteen sixties, long before any of
that technology was even conceivable to the public.
Speaker 1: And then the Vegas reveal of all the ship Victor one.
Speaker 2: Victor one Valt takes Frank on a little trip. They
go down to a beach in San Felipe, Mexico, and
there it is the three hundred foot saucer, just hovering
silently above the water.
Speaker 1: And Frank gets to go inside. And I love the
description he gives of the interior. It doesn't sound like
a military vessel at all.
Speaker 2: No, not cold and metallic. Frank describes it as feeling
like a luxury resort. He says, there's a library at
gym media rooms, but it's the sensory details that really
stand out. He says, there are no right angles anywhere.
Everything is curved organic.
Speaker 1: And the floor that was the craziest part.
Speaker 2: The floor, he says, it feels like you're walking on
a thick cloud. It conforms perfectly to your foot when
you step down. Yeah, and then it bounces right back up.
Speaker 1: I want cloud floors. That sounds incredibly comfortable.
Speaker 2: It paints this picture of technology that has moved beyond
just function and into this realm of comfort and art.
It's a true utopia inside that ship.
Speaker 1: So valves showing Frank this incredible future that we could have.
But meanwhile, back in Washington, d C. The present is
getting in the way. VAL's here for three years, right
from fifty seven to sixty. What is he actually doing
all that time.
Speaker 2: He's still trying to make that disarmament deal work. He's
advising Eisenhower, meeting with scientists and politicians. The source material
claims that on a few occasions Val actually convinced Ike
to go to the United Nations and reveal the truth.
Speaker 1: To just tell the world, hey, we're not alone. Here's Val.
Let's join the galactic community exactly.
Speaker 2: To just lay all the cards on the table.
Speaker 1: But Obviously that never happens, so why not.
Speaker 2: The villains of the story intervene the CIA and the
Department of Defense. The so called men in black have
powers that be the powers it be. The story goes
that every time Eisenhower got close to pulling the trigger
on disclosure, they shut him down. Their argument was simple
and from their perspective logical, which was, if we reveal
this and if the world accepts VAL's message of peace
and disarmament, the military loses its power. The American economy,
which is heavily built on defense contracts, collapses. They were
afraid that VAL's message of peace and love would cause
the public to stop listening to the government and start
listening to the space hippie in the gold jumpsuit. They
were afraid of losing control, complete loss of control. And
this leads to a really profound connection to actual verifiable history.
The Force material claims that Eisenhower's famous farewell address in
nineteen sixty one was a direct result of his frustration
over this.
Speaker 1: I remember that speech from history class. In the councils
of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.
Speaker 2: It's one of the most famous and chilling warnings in
presidential history, and in the context of the Valiant Thor legend,
that speech takes on a whole new layer of meaning.
Speaker 1: He's not just speaking theoretically.
Speaker 2: According to this story, No, he's speaking from direct personal experience.
He's essentially saying, I try to help from a peaceful
Venusian to save the world, and this very complex I'm
warning you about wouldn't let me do it.
Speaker 1: Wow. So he's basically sending a coded message to the
American people.
Speaker 2: That's the interpretation. The core sentiment is, we cannot allow
weapons in war to become a profitable business. Ike knew
according to the story, that prophet was the one barrier
standing between humanity and the stars.
Speaker 1: So the mission ultimately fails.
Speaker 2: Valleys, the mission fails. Ye valdeparts on March sixteen, nineteen sixty,
exactly three years to the day after he.
Speaker 1: Arrived, but Frank Stranger stays behind. And this is where
the story gets really wild because it turns into a
straight up action movie. Apparently the bad guys were not
happy that Frank knew the truth.
Speaker 2: Frank becomes a target. The source details a series of
assassination attempts on his life that are just They're like
something out of a spy novel.
Speaker 1: Okay, give us the highlights.
Speaker 2: Right. So he's in Germany giving a lecture and his
food is poisoned. He gets violently ill, he's about to die,
and then suddenly Val appears even though he supposedly left Earth,
and gives Frank an.
Speaker 1: Antidote a literal dios ex muck nu literally.
Speaker 2: Then another time, Frank is kidnapped, shoved into a car,
driven out to the desert, and beaten severely by government thugs.
He's left for dead and let me guess, vallin good
old Dawns show up out of nowhere and save him.
Speaker 1: One he's back.
Speaker 2: But the most dramatic one, according to Frank, is when
he and his wife are on their honeymoon, a mysterious
black car runs them off a mountain road. Frank suffers
a broken neck and multiple broken hips. He's in the hospital.
Doctor say he'll never walk again, if he even survives.
Val just walks into the hospital room, places his hand
on Frank, and heals him instantly and completely. Frank gets
up and walks out of the hospital. That same day,
perfectly fine.
Speaker 1: So this completely changes Vow's role in the story. He's
not just a diplomat or and advisor anymore. He's a
guardian angel. He has power over life and death.
Speaker 2: It absolutely reinforces that religious subtext we were talking about.
Val becomes a christlike savior figure. He protects the faithful
Frank against the forces of earthly evil.
Speaker 1: So that is the legend. It's an incredible story. It
has everything. It has aliens, presidents, spies, indestructible clothes, religion,
cloud floors.
Speaker 2: It's got it all.
Speaker 1: But now now comes the part where we have to
turn on the bright lights and see what's really there.
Speaker 2: Now we have to pull on those threads and see
if they actually hold anyway.
Speaker 1: Right, this is the reality check.
Speaker 2: So let's start with the people involved. Harley Andrew Bird,
the supposed nephew of the Great Admiral Richard Byrd, the
guy who gave this story its initial credibility.
Speaker 1: Does he exist? Did the admiral have a nephew named Harley?
Speaker 2: Well, we checked the genealogy records. Admiral Bird had four nephews.
None of them were named Harley Andrew Out.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's a pretty big hole right at the start.
Speaker 2: It's a huge problem. Either the public genealogy records are
all wrong, or more likely, the man claiming to be
the admiral's nephew wasn't it. It just doesn't hold up
to scrutiny.
Speaker 1: Okay, but what about Laura Eisenho. She's great granddaughter, She's
a public figure, and she has gone on records saying
this story is true.
Speaker 2: She has She is a very vocal believer in Val
and other similar stories. She claims that she was recruited
for a secret mission to a Mars colony in two
thousand and six and that Val is absolutely real. However,
there's a sight there is. Her professional resume includes titles
like Global Alchemist and Cosmic.
Speaker 1: Mythologist, which are very interesting job titles.
Speaker 2: They're very colorful. But for a mainstream skeptical listener, relying
on her testimony might be difficult. If you don't already
subscribe to that specific cosmic world view, her confirmation might
not carry the weight for some that it would for others.
Speaker 1: Okay, And that brings us to the main man himself,
the source of it all, doctor Frank Strangers.
Speaker 2: And this is where the fabric of the story really
starts to tear. Frank claimed to have three PhDs. He
even listed the colleges he got them from on his books.
Speaker 1: So are they real?
Speaker 2: Well, one of the colleges he listed has never existed.
Speaker 1: Oh not a good time start.
Speaker 2: No another one exists, but a check of their records
shows they have never offered a PhD program in their
entire history. He also claims on his official bio to
be the deputy director of the California State Marshall Association.
Speaker 1: That sounds very official, very authoritative.
Speaker 2: It does, until you find out that no such organization
has ever existed.
Speaker 1: So his credentials were let's say, heavily embellished.
Speaker 2: To be charitable. Yes, But the biggest problem for me
is the timeline val supposedly left Earth in March of
nineteen sixty. Frank published his famous book Stranger at the
Pentagon in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: A seven year gap.
Speaker 2: A seven year gap, And in those seven years Frank
was not silent. He was very active. He wrote other
books about UFOs, he produced UFO documentaries, and.
Speaker 1: He never once mentioned.
Speaker 2: Valiant thor not one single time.
Speaker 1: That is the biggest red flag for me. If you
had met a man from Venus who lived in the
Pentagon for three years and was a friend of the president.
That is your lead story for the rest of your life.
That's your opening line at every part. Why would you
sit on the single biggest story in human history for
seven years?
Speaker 2: The skeptical explanation is that he hadn't invented the story yet,
that he was building his brand in the UFO world
and needed a blockbuster story to set himself apart.
Speaker 1: And there's one more thing, right the plot.
Speaker 2: The plot if you go back and watch the classic
nineteen fifty one science fiction movie The Day the Earth
Stood Still.
Speaker 1: An absolute masterpiece.
Speaker 2: The plot is a polite, human looking alien named Clatu
lands his saucer in Washington, DC. He asked to see
the world's leaders. He brings a warning about nuclear weapons.
He has a powerful robot Gort that is basically indestructible,
and his peaceful offer is ultimately rejected by a fearful,
militaristic government.
Speaker 1: It's the exact same story.
Speaker 2: It was almost a beat for beat retelling. The prevailing
theory is that Frank Strangers took the plot of a
very popular and beloved sci fi movie mixed it with
his brand of Christian evangelism to make it palatable to
a religious audience, and presented the whole thing as nonfiction.
Speaker 1: He created the perfect crossover event.
Speaker 2: He really did. It was a brilliant genre blend that
appealed to two huge, passionate and sometimes overlapping groups of people.
UFO enthusiasts and evangelical Christians.
Speaker 1: Wow, and the photos. What about the photos of Don,
Jill and Val, the supposed smoking gun.
Speaker 2: The backyard barbecue photos. We've looked at them a lot,
and they look like nice, well dressed people. From the
nineteen fifties to this day. Nobody has ever come forward
to identify them. But on the flip side, nobody's ever
definitively proven they aren't aliens.
Speaker 1: They just exist in this perfect limbo of plausibility. They
could be intergalactic travelers, or they could just be Frank's
neighbors who came over for a burger that day.
Speaker 2: Joe, stand over there by the tree and try to
look venusian.
Speaker 1: Don put on your best I'm thinking about galactic peace
expression exactly. But here's the thing. Even if Frank made
it all up, even if Harley Bird wasn't a real bird,
even if Val is just a character based on a
movie protagonist. The story itself just will not die.
Speaker 2: No, it won't. Crank Strange has passed away in two
thousand and eight, but the legend of Valiant Thor has
completely outlived him. It's taken on a life of its own.
The source material we have claims that Val is.
Speaker 1: Still here, still here where.
Speaker 2: The current claim is that his ship victor Ie is
parked and cloaked on the shores of Lake Mead just
east of Las Vegas.
Speaker 1: Lake Mead with all the boats and jetsys, I feel
like someone would have bumped into a three hundred foot
cloaked saucer by now, you'd think so.
Speaker 2: But the story claims there's a community of about two
thousand people in the know who are in contact with him,
and that around two thousand government employees are also aware
of his continued presence.
Speaker 1: That is a lot of people to keep a very
big secret.
Speaker 2: It is, But I think the endurance of this story
speaks to something deeper. It's not about the details anymore.
Speaker 1: It's about the message, right Because Val didn't come here
to conquer us or give us gadgets. He came here
to preach.
Speaker 2: At the end of the day, what was VAL's ultimate advice.
He didn't leave us the blueprints for the warp drive,
he didn't give us the formula for cold fusion. He
told Frank Strangers that the most important thing humanity can
do is just be kind to one another, because serve others,
treat people as you would like to be treated, the
golden rule. The irony is just it's so thick. You
have this incredibly elaborate story about a spaceship and acid
proof jumpsuits and Pentagon conspiracies and secret underground trains, and
the ultimate takeaway is the simplest, most fundamental ethical lesson
in all of human history.
Speaker 1: Whether he came from Venus or whether he came from
the mind of Frank Strangers, the advice is solid.
Speaker 2: It absolutely is. And the narrator in our source material
said something that really stuck with me. He said, the
more you ridicule Valiant thor, it turns out, the more
you need him.
Speaker 1: That's powerful.
Speaker 2: We want to believe that someone out there, someone smarter, wiser,
more advanced, is looking out for us and just wants
us to put down the weapons and be decent to
each other.
Speaker 1: It's a really comforting thought. Isn't it the idea that
the universe isn't just a cold, dark empty for us,
but maybe a community that's just waiting for us to
grow up and join the.
Speaker 2: Party, waiting for us to finally be ready.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to the end of this particular thread.
But before we sign off, I want to throw a
question out to you listening right now.
Speaker 2: This is the big one.
Speaker 1: Let's just assume for a minute the story is true,
or let's just say it happens tomorrow. A ship lance,
a polite human looking person walks out. They offer to
cure all disease and world hunger and clean up our
polluted environment. The price for all of this is total
and complete nuclear disarmament. No more bombs, no more deterrence,
no more leverage.
Speaker 2: Do you think the world leaders of today would take
that deal?
Speaker 1: Or would we do exactly what Ike allegedly did. Would
we say, sorry, we can't risk the economy, we can't
risk looking vulnerable. Thanks for the offer, but we're going
to hang on to our missiles.
Speaker 2: It's a question of fear versus hope, isn't it. Do
we value our power more than we value a potential paradise.
Speaker 1: We really want to hear your take. Would we as
a species take the deal? Let us know in the comments.
We read them all and we genuinely want to know
what you think.
Speaker 2: It's been a real pleasure unraveling this one, so many
strange and wonderful knots.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on thrilling threads. Keep pulling the strings,
and remember, if you see a friendly looking guy in
a gold jumpsuit, maybe say hello.
Speaker 2: You might just have some good advice.
Speaker 1: See next time.