Speaker 1: Six fifty seven Boulevard has been the subject of my
family for decades.
Speaker 2: It's now my time.
Speaker 3: Just hearing you read that. It sets off this like
primal alarm bell in your head, doesn't it. It's so calm,
and that makes it so much worse.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely visceral, and it goes on. I have
been in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming.
Speaker 3: It sounds like, you know, the opening narration to some
gothic horror film, something out of Shirley Jackson. But this,
this is in fiction. This was a real letter entered
into police evidence in New.
Speaker 1: Jersey, frighteningly real. Welcome everyone to Thrilling Threads today. We
are not just you know, telling spooky stories around a campfire.
We are pulling at some very real, very loose threads
of reality. We got a stack of case files here,
ten specific American mysteries from just the last decade that
don't just lack answers. They seem to defy the very
logic we use to make sense of the world.
Speaker 3: And I think it's important to frame why we've picked
these ten. When we say they defy explanation, we don't
just mean they're creepy, though, they are certainly that we
mean that these cases point to these genuine, quantifiable gaps
in our understanding, gaps in forensic science, huge blind spots
in our so called surveillance state. And well, by the
time we get to the end of this potential gaps
in our understanding of physics.
Speaker 1: Itself, exactly, this isn't the greatest hits of the seventies.
These are modern mysteries happening in a world with cameras
and GPS everywhere. So we structured this as a journey.
We're going to start very close to home, with domestic terrors.
Speaker 3: Right inside the four walls of your house.
Speaker 1: Then we're going to move out into the wider city infrastructure,
looking at these impossible disappearances from hotels and nightclubs. From
there we scale up. We're talking high stakes global conspiracies.
Speaker 3: Governments, corporations that level, and then finally we're going into
what some people call high strangeness, the files that suggest
well that we might not be the only ones doing
the watching.
Speaker 1: It's a roadmap from the intimate to the infinite. So
let's get into it. Let's open thread one, the sancty
home and the unknown intruder, because really Is there anything
more terrifying than the violation of the one place you're
supposed to be safe.
Speaker 3: It's the absolute bedrock of security, isn't it. If you
will feel safe in your own home, you can't feel
safe anywhere. The psychological damage of an unseen intruder, it's
often so much worse than a physical confrontation because it
just poisons your peace of mind forever.
Speaker 1: Which brings us right to our first case, The Watcherhouse, Westfield,
New Jersey. This all kicks off in June of twenty fourteen, and.
Speaker 3: You have to understand Westfield. This isn't some rough neighborhood.
It's an affluent, idyllic suburb. You know, perfect lawns, great schools,
with the safest towns in America. It's the place you
moved to to escape crime.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what Maria and Derek brought us. Thought
they were doing. They buy their dream home, six hundred
and fifty seven Boulevard. They are over the moon, they've
got three kids, they're starting renovations, living the American dream.
And then three days after closing, three days the first
letter shows up.
Speaker 3: Before they've even moved to single box at.
Speaker 1: Not a single box. And this isn't you know, junk
mail or a welcome note from a neighbor. This is
where that quote from the beginning comes in. The writer
who signs off only as the watcher claims, this generational
guardianship over the house.
Speaker 3: My grandfather watched in the nineteen twenties, my father in
the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: Is now my time.
Speaker 3: See that's the detail that elevates this from just a
creepy crank to genuine psychological warfare. It implies this legacy,
this entitlement, I have been in charge. It basically says,
you might have the deed, mister Broadus, but this house
belongs to my family history. It's an incredible power play.
Speaker 1: And it gets predatory so fast. The letter asks, and
I'm quoting again, do you need to fill the house
with the young blood?
Speaker 3: I requested young blood? I mean, what a phrase. It's
so ghoulish, so vampiric. It turns their children into a
commodity for the house. It's completely dehumanizing.
Speaker 1: And then it gets even more specific. The watcher writes,
you have children. I have seen them so far. I
think there are three that I have counted counted.
Speaker 3: That word choice is so chillingly clinical. It's not I
saw your kids playing, it's I have counted them. It's
the language of a scientist studying lab rats or a
predator taking inventory. It confirms active close surveillance.
Speaker 1: He was watching them in the yard. And then comes
the direct threat. Once I know their names, I will
call them and draw them to me.
Speaker 3: And that's it. That's the kill shot. You can't live
there after that, Yeah, just can't.
Speaker 2: No parent on earth would.
Speaker 1: How could you let your kids play outside?
Speaker 2: How could you sleep at night?
Speaker 3: Let's just pause and analyze the intent here. This is
a masterclass in terror. The writer never breaks a window,
never even sets foot on the property, but they make
the house completely uninhabitable. The goal was clearly displacement. They
wanted the family gone. They wanted to reclaim the house
without any physical confrontation, and it worked.
Speaker 1: The broadest family was terrified. They never moved in. They
tried to sue the previous owners, the Woods family, right.
Speaker 3: And that's the first major investigative twist. The Woods had
lived there for twenty three years, twenty three years of
apparently total peace.
Speaker 1: And quiet until the very end. They admitted that just
days before they moved out, they got one strange letter,
but they just brushed it off as a prank.
Speaker 3: So something about the sale, about the transfer of ownership
was the trigger. The watcher was either dormant or didn't
care about the Woods family, but the Broadest family, with
their young blood set them off.
Speaker 2: So what are the theories here? I mean, who does this?
Speaker 3: Well? The most logical theory is a neighbor, someone who
felt they had a claim to the house. Maybe someone
who lost a bidding war and was trying to scare
the new owners out to drive the price down. Or
perhaps someone who just hated the idea of a family
with young kids and construction noise moving in.
Speaker 1: The police looked into all that, right, They ran DNA
on the envelope, but it didn't match anyone in the system.
They investigated the neighbors. One family was a bit eccentric,
but there was no proof.
Speaker 3: They even for a while considered the possibility that the
Broadest family faked the letters themselves to get out of
a house purchase. They regretted, but.
Speaker 1: That makes zero sense. They lost a fortune on the sale,
they went through years of hell.
Speaker 3: That theory is just cruel, it is it's classic victim
blaming In the end, they sold the house at a
huge financial loss and the identity of the watcher remains
a complete mystery. It's a total failure of modern investigation.
This person used the oldest tech we have, the postal
service and became a ghost.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying think that voice is still out there, maybe
watching the new family.
Speaker 2: Which.
Speaker 1: Speaking of unseen threats, let's move to our next case.
This one is the complete opposite. We don't have a voice,
we have a crystal clear image of the killer, and
we still know nothing. Case two, the murder of Missy Bevers.
Speaker 3: This case just haunts you. The Watcher is all about
the unseen terror. In words, Missy Beverers is about the
uncanny visual horror of seeing a killer on camera and
being no closer to knowing who they are.
Speaker 1: The facts are just gut wrenching. It's April eighteenth, twenty sixteen,
in Lothian, Texas. It's pre dawn, still dark out. Missy Bevers,
forty five, your old fitness instructor, is heading into the
Creek Side Church of Christ. She's there to set up
for her early morning workout class.
Speaker 3: Totally normal routine morning a church, a fitness class. These
are safe spaces, you're not on high alert.
Speaker 1: But the church's internal motion activated cameras had already picked
someone up, a figure wandering the empty hallways, and the
way they're dressed is just bizarre.
Speaker 3: They're in full police tactical gear, like a swat team uniform,
heavy vest, helmet, with a faciel, gloves, the whole nine yards.
But if you look closely, the fit is off. It's baggy,
a little clumsy. It almost looks like a costume.
Speaker 1: That's what I was thinking. It's like they're playing dress up.
And the behavior is what creates this deep sense of unease.
This what do they call it the uncanny Valley?
Speaker 3: Exactly. You see the uniform of authority, of order, but
the actions are pure chaos. The figure is walking with
this really strained git, kind of a duck walk, with
their feet pointed out. Yeah, and they're just roaming, prying
open doors, smashing windows with a hammer.
Speaker 1: Oh apparent reason right, And that's the central mystery of
the behavior. If you're there to rob the place, you'd
be quiet, you'd be efficient, you wouldn't smash glass and
make a ton of noise before you've even taken anything.
Speaker 3: And if you're there to assassinate someone, which the end
result suggests this was you would hide, you would wait
an ambush, You wouldn't wander the halls like a lost tourist.
It looks like a staged burglary, like someone was trying
very hard to look like a burglar.
Speaker 2: But they didn't steal a thing.
Speaker 3: Nothing of value was taken, which suggests then lism was
a performance. It was a disguise for the real purpose.
The goal was to make this look like a random
robbery that went horribly wrong when Missy stumbled upon it.
Speaker 1: But when she did walk in, the violence was immediate,
it was personal. She was found minutes later with multiple
puncture wounds to her head and chest.
Speaker 3: And because of that tactical gear, investigators are completely in
the dark. The helmet hides the face, the baggy suit
hides the body type. They can't definitively determine the killer's height, weight, race.
They can't even be one hundred percent sure of the gender.
Speaker 2: Even with that distinctive walk.
Speaker 3: Well, that's been analyzed to death. Is it a natural limp,
Is it someone wearing boots that are too big? Is
it a woman trying to imitate a masculine walk or
a man with a particular injury. The gear is the
perfect camouflage. It projects power while completely erasing identity.
Speaker 1: And here's the detail that makes me think this was
anything but random. The exterior security cameras at the church.
Speaker 2: They were mysteriously not.
Speaker 3: Working that morning, which is just too convenient, isn't it
The points to premeditation. It implies the killer knew the
layout of the church, knew the security system's blind spots,
and knew how to disable or avoid the external cameras.
This was planned.
Speaker 1: Thousands of tips poured in, there's one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars reward, But that figure in the swat gear
just walked into a church, committed murder on camera, and
walked out, vanishing completely.
Speaker 3: It just underscores is incredibly frustrating modern paradox. We have
more video evidence than ever before in history, but Missy
Beerver's killer proves you can be perfectly captured on high
definition video and still be a total ghost. Seeing is
not the same as solving.
Speaker 1: That is a deeply unsettling thought, it really is, and
it's a perfect transition to our next thread. We're moving
from intruders in the home to people who seem to
be swallowed whole by the very infrastructure of our cities.
Speaker 3: This is s thread too, vanishing into the infrastructure. These
are the cases where the environment itself, a hotel, a freezer,
seems to become an active participant in the tragedy.
Speaker 1: And we have to start with a case that basically
broke the internet.
Speaker 2: Case three, Alisa Lamb.
Speaker 3: Well, this is probably the most famous and most debated
Internet age mystery, and for good reason. It's this tragic
death combined with that piece of video evidence that is
just impossible to look away from.
Speaker 1: Okay, So January twenty thirteen, Alisa Lamb. She's a twenty
one year old Canadian student traveling alone. She checks into
the Cecil hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: And we have to mention the Cecil itself. It has
a notoriously dark history. It's where serial killers like Richard
Ramirez stay. It's been the site of numerous suicides and
unsolved deaths. In the public imagination, it's already a bad place.
Speaker 1: Alisa goes missing on February first. A huge search is launched,
but she's not found for nearly three weeks until February nineteenth,
and the way she was found is it's pure horror.
Speaker 3: It wasn't the police we found her. It was the
hotel guests. They started complaining.
Speaker 2: They said the water pressure in their rooms was really low.
Speaker 1: They said the water was coming out black, and that
it had a strange, sweet, disgusting caste.
Speaker 3: Just sit with that from him. People were drinking that water,
brushing their teeth with it, yes, showering in it for days.
The retroactive horror of that realization, it's sickening.
Speaker 1: So a maintenance worker goes up to the roof to
check the four large water cisterns that supply the hotel.
He opens the lid on one of them, and he
finds Alisa Lamb's body. She was floating naked inside the tank.
Speaker 3: The official coroner's ruling was accidental drowning, with her bipolar
disorder listed as a significant contributing factor. But this is
where the accident theory just collides with basic physics for
a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the tank itself. The lid on that
thing wasn't like the top of a cookie jar. It
was a heavy metal disk. It weighed about twenty pounds.
Speaker 3: And it was on top of a ten foot tall tank,
so to get in, a person would have to get
onto the roof, which required bypassing a locked and alarm door,
though the alarm might have been faulty, then climb a
ladder up the side of the tank, then somehow lift
that twenty pound lid off by themselves.
Speaker 1: And then get inside. But here's the impossible part. The
maintenance worker found the lid.
Speaker 3: Close exactly if you're inside that tank treading water in
the dark, the water level is several feet below the rim.
How do you possibly reach up, grab that heavy lid
from the outside and pull it perfectly shut over your
own head. It just doesn't seem physically possible.
Speaker 1: It feels like it would require another person, which leads
us to the elevator video, the last known footage of
her alive.
Speaker 3: That footage is one of the most unsettling things I've
ever seen.
Speaker 1: She gets in the elevator, she presses a whole column
of buttons, but the doors don't close. She peeks out
into the hallway like she's hiding from someone, then jumps
back in. Then she steps out and starts making these
strange fluid movements with her hands, almost like she's talking
to someone or something that we can't see on the camera.
Speaker 3: Her behavior is erratic and clearly distressed. The initial theory
online was, of course, drugs, that she was hallucinating on something.
Speaker 1: But the toxicology report from the autopsy came back clean.
No alcohol, no illegal drugs, only her prescribed medication for
her bipolar disorder. But at therapeutic levels she wasn't high.
Speaker 3: So you have a sober but possibly manic, young woman
seemingly hiding from an invisible person in a hallway, who
then somehow manages to get onto a locked roof, climb
a ten foot tank, and seal herself inside under a
heavy lid. The accident ruling just leaves so many gaping holes.
Speaker 2: It leaves you with these two awful possibilities.
Speaker 1: Right, Either she had a psychotic episode so profound that
it gave her the strength and agility to perform this
near impossible feat, or she wasn't alone up.
Speaker 3: There, And if she wasn't alone, who closed the lid?
That transforms it from a tragedy into a murder. And
it makes that water situation not just grows, but a
deliberate Desecrationugh, The.
Speaker 1: Idea of the lid being closed on her. Is just
the darkest thing. It's so similar in a way to
our next case. Another young woman, another hotel, another place
she should not have been able to get into. Case four,
Kanika Jenkins.
Speaker 3: Yes, another incredibly tragic case that hinges on a failure
of infrastructure. Ye, frankly a failure of community.
Speaker 1: This one is from Chicago, September twenty seventeen. Kanika Jenkins
was only nineteen years old. She goes to a party
in a room at the Crown Plaza hotel near O'Hare Airport.
She's seen on social media videos with friends having good time,
and then she disappears.
Speaker 3: Her family is frantic, They call it friends. They go
to the hotel immediately, begging the staff to check the
security footage. Yeah, but there's this bureaucratic delay. It takes
almost a full day before she's finally feed.
Speaker 1: And the location is again just baffling. She was found
in a walk in freezer, but not in the main
active hotel kitchen. She was in a freezer in a
completely separate, unused kitchen that was under construction.
Speaker 3: The official ruling was again an accident hypothermia with alcohol
and a prescription drug for migraines being contributing factors. The
police theory is that she was intoxicated, she wandered away
from her friends, got lost in these deserted hallways, and
stumbled into the freezer with a door latched behind her.
Speaker 1: But the questions they just pile up. How does a
guest gain access to a restricted, off limits construction area
of a hotel? There should have been locked doors signs something, And.
Speaker 3: The biggest question for me, why was a walk in
freezer in an abandoned, non operational kitchen even running? And
why was it unlocked? That is a colossal safety hazard.
Those things are supposed to be padlocked or powered down
specifically to prevent this kind of tragedy. It's a massive
failure on the hotel's part.
Speaker 1: There's surveillance footage of hert just before she disappears. She's
clearly disoriented, stumbling, bumping into walls, but she walks right
past other people in the hotel and nobody stops to
help her.
Speaker 3: It's a heartbreaking example of the bystander effect. People probably
saw a young woman who looked drunk and just thought,
not my problem. But the most painful part of this
mystery for many is the role of her friends.
Speaker 1: Why did they leave her? They said they couldn't find
her and left, but her mother was calling them frantic.
Why didn't they stay and insist on a search.
Speaker 3: That abandonment is what fuels so many of the alternative
theories online. Was there foul play, was she deliberately led
to that freezer? Or was it simply a tragic case
of teenage negligence. We don't know, but it's a story
about how you can be surrounded by people and still
be completely alone and vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Another person who vanish after being surrounded by people. That
takes us to our next case. This one is about
what can happen when you do the right thing. Case
five Mike McClelland.
Speaker 3: This story just gives me chills because of how fast
it turns from a normal night out to a life
or death situation in like minutes.
Speaker 1: It's April twentieth, twenty nineteen, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Mike
is at a place called the Tropical Lounge nightclub.
Speaker 2: It's late.
Speaker 1: A fight breaks out between two women. He knows one
of them, so he does what you'd hope a good
person would do. He steps in to break it up.
Speaker 3: He's the good samaritan. He intervenes to de escalate the situation.
Speaker 1: The police show up to break up the larger crowd
that is formed. In all the chaos, Mike's friends loose
sight of him. It's around two point zero am. A
short time later, Mike makes a phone call. It's not
to nine to one one. It's not to his friends.
Speaker 3: It's to his boss, which is such a strange specific choice.
You call your boss at two in the morning only
if you're in very, very serious trouble.
Speaker 2: And his words on that call are just terrifying. He
says they're after me, more than one after me.
Speaker 1: His boss, obviously alarmed, tries to call him right back.
Speaker 2: No answer.
Speaker 1: The police are able to get a final ping from
his cell phone at a nearby McDonald's, and.
Speaker 2: Then nothing, total silence. Mike McClellan has never been seen
or heard from again.
Speaker 3: His credit cards were never used. Yeah, his bank accounts
were never touched. He just evaporated.
Speaker 1: That phrase more than one implies it was a group.
It suggests that his act of breaking up that fight
wasn't the end of it. It made him a target.
Somebody was angry that he interfered and.
Speaker 3: They were organized enough and ruthless enough to make him
disappear off a city street without a single witness coming forward.
No body, no evidence, just a final desperate phone call.
It shows how quickly a good deed can put you
in the crosshairs.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely horrifying.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we've explored the terror that can invade our
homes and the ways people can vanish inside our cities.
Now we need to zoom out because sometimes the mystery
is bigger than one person or one building. It involves
governments and weapons we can't see.
Speaker 3: We're moving into thread three, high stakes and global conspiracies.
The scale is about to get.
Speaker 1: A lot bigger, and we have to start with Case six,
Havana syndrome.
Speaker 3: This one reads like a worse By novel, but the
medical evidence is undeniable. This isn't just a story, It's
a documented medical phenomenon affecting dozens of government officials.
Speaker 1: It all begins in late twenty sixteen in Havana, Cuba.
A CIA officer working undercover at the US embassy goes
to the embassy doctor. He is reporting intense nausea, dizziness,
terrible headaches, and hearing a strange noise.
Speaker 3: The symptoms of a severe concussion, but with no impact,
no fall, no accident, and then within weeks it starts spreading.
Other CIA agents, diplomats, and their family members start reporting
the exact same cluster of symptoms.
Speaker 1: By twenty eighteen, the number grows to twenty six Americans
and fourteen Canadians, and the symptoms get worse for some
permanent hearing loss, traumatic brain injuries, memory.
Speaker 3: Problems, and the one common thread was this experience. They
would be in their homes or hotel rooms and suddenly
they'd hear this bizarre, localized sound. Some described it as
a high pitched ringing, others as a grinding noise or
a pulsing pressure. But it was directional. They could walk
out of the beam of sound and it would stop.
Speaker 1: This leads to the terrifying theory of a sonic weapon,
or more likely, a directed energy weapon using pulsed microwaves.
The theory is that this device can project a beam
of microwave energy through walls that interacts with the fluid
in your inner ear, causing nerve damage and the sensation
of sound.
Speaker 3: It's a weapon. You can't see, you can't hear unless
you're the target, and it leaves no evidence behind except
for a damaged brain. The diplomatic fallout was immediate. The
US accused Cuba of either carrying out the attacks or
allowing another country like Russia to do it on their soil.
Speaker 1: But then in May of twenty eighteen, it went global.
A US diplomat in Guangzhou, China was diagnosed with the
same brain injury after reporting the same symptoms.
Speaker 3: And that changed everything. If it's just in Cuba, you
can blame a single rogue state, but Cuba and China
that suggests a far more sophisticated actor is deploying this
technology on a global scale.
Speaker 1: The scariest part is its invisibility. How do you defend
against an attack you can't even detect until your brain
is already being cooked.
Speaker 2: It's a ghost weapon.
Speaker 3: It is, and while some government reports have tried to
downplay it as mass psychogenic illness, the number of people
with medically confirmed brain injuries makes that hard to swallow.
It represents a new terrifying frontier in covert warfare.
Speaker 1: From ghost weapons to ghost planes. There's no way we
can talk about global mysteries without talking about Case seven.
The disappearance of MH three seventy.
Speaker 3: It's the defining aviation mystery of our time. The fact
that in the twenty first century, a massive Boeing seven
seventy seven with two hundred and thirty nine people on
board can simply cease to exist. It's a profound failure
of technology and a source of endless fascination and grief.
Speaker 1: So March eight, twenty fourteen, Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy
takes off from Kuala Wumpur bound for Beijing. It's a
routine red eye flight. Everything is normal for the first
forty minutes. The pilot signs off with Malaysian Air Traffic
Control with a calm good night, Malaysian three seven zero.
Speaker 3: And that's the last normal communication. Moments later, as the
plane was supposed to check in with Vietnam These air
traffic control, its transponder went dark.
Speaker 2: And let's be very clear about this.
Speaker 1: The data shows it didn't just malfunction, it was manually
switched off.
Speaker 3: That is the critical point a system failure would likely
send out air signals. This was a deliberate act. Someone
in that cockpit wanted the plane to be invisible to
civilian radar.
Speaker 1: Immediately after the transponder goes off. Military radar shows the
plane making a sharp, non scheduled turn back to the west,
flying back over the Malaysian Peninsula. Then it turned south
towards the vast empty expanse of the southern Indian Ocean, and.
Speaker 3: It just kept flying. A satellite owned by a company
called Inmarsat continued to receive these automated hourly pings from
the plane. The last of these pings was received at
eight eleven AM, more than seven hours after it vanished
from radar.
Speaker 1: Seven hours just flying on autopilot into nowhere. The horror
of that is trying to imagine what was happening on
the plane where the passengers aware.
Speaker 3: The leading theory, particularly in the pilot's suicide scenario, is
that whoever was in control deliberately depressurized the cabin that
would have rendered the passengers and crew unconscious within minutes,
leaving the pilot to fly the ghost plane until it
ran out of fuel.
Speaker 1: The search was the largest and most expensive in aviation history.
Over one hundred and sixty million dollars spent searching millions
of square miles of ocean, and the result almost nothing.
Speaker 3: Over the years, pieces of debris have washed up on
the shores of Africa and islands in the Indian Ocean,
but out of twenty seven pieces found, only three have
been confirmed of one hundred percent certainty to be from
MH three to seventy a.
Speaker 1: Two hundred foot long jetliner, two hundred and thirty nine souls,
and all we have to show for is three pieces
of wreckage. It's a stark reminder that for all our technology,
the ocean is still a vast, deep wilderness that can
swallow our biggest machines without a trace.
Speaker 3: It's the silence that is so haunting. No distress call,
no final message, just a switch being flipped in a long,
silent flight into obluvion.
Speaker 1: Speaking of going and of silence, that leads us to
a much more recent case, Case eight, The Whistleblower.
Speaker 2: John.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this story is deeply troubling. It feels like something
straight out of a John Grisham novel. It's all about
corporate power and a timeline that is just incredibly suspicious.
Speaker 1: John Burnett wasn't some disgruntled employee. He was a thirty
year veteran of Boeing. He was a quality control manager.
His entire professional life was dedicated to making sure their
planes were safe.
Speaker 3: And he started blowing the whistle loudly. He raised serious
concerns about the production standards of this seven eighty seven Dreamliner.
He claimed that under pressure workers were fitting substandard parts,
that the emergency oxygen systems were faulty. He alleged that
when he raised these issues, he was retaliated against and harassed.
Speaker 1: He eventually retired and filed a whistleblo or lawsuit against
the company. Fast forward to March of twenty twenty four.
He's in Charleston, South Carolina for the legal depositions in
that very lawsuit. He's actively testifying against Boeing.
Speaker 3: He spends a full day giving his deposition. He scheduled
to return the next morning to be cross examined by
Boeing's lawyers.
Speaker 1: He never shows up. His lawyers try to contact him. Eventually,
he's found dead in his truck in the hotel parking lot.
Speaker 3: The official cause of death was ruled to be a
self inflicted gunshot wound suicide.
Speaker 1: But the timing, I mean to die by suicide in
the literal middle of the legal battle you've been fighting
for years.
Speaker 3: It's almost too perfect. Cinematically speaking, and his family and
friends immediately raised red flags. They said he was in
good spirits, looking forward to putting this chapter behind him.
A close family friend said he had warned her if
anything happens to me, it wasn't suicide.
Speaker 1: The family's wrongful death suit against Boeing didn't necessarily claim
he was murdered. Instead, they cited constructive discharge, arguing that
the years of harassment and pressure from the corporation caused
him such mental distress that it directly led to his.
Speaker 3: Death, and in twenty twenty five, Boeing settled that lawsuit
for a confidential amount, which means the case is closed.
We'll probably never know for sure what happened in that
hotel parking lot, or what bombshells he might have been
about to drop in his testimony that final day. It's
a very dark and murky story about the potential cost
of speaking truth to immense power.
Speaker 1: It really is, okay, from corporate power to well forces,
it might be beyond human power entirely.
Speaker 2: It's time to get weird.
Speaker 3: We're heading into thread four out of this world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have to go here because the last few
years have produced some incidents and data points that are
becoming harder and harder to just dismiss. Let's start with
case nine, the Las Vegas Aliens.
Speaker 3: This incident from April twenty twenty three is fascinating because
it's not just a lone witness claim. There is official,
corroborating evidence from law enforcement that makes it stand out.
Speaker 1: It starts with the Las Vegas police officer's body camera.
He's just on a normal patrol and his camera clearly
captures this bright green object streaking across the night sky
and appearing to land somewhere nearby.
Speaker 3: So right away we have a baseline fact an unidentified
object fell from the sky. This isn't just a story,
a physical event occurred.
Speaker 1: About forty minutes later, a nine to one one call
comes in from a house in the area where the
objects seem to have landed, and you can listen to
the audio of this call. The caller is audibly terrified.
He's out of breath, his voice is shaking. He tells
the dispatcher there's like an eight foot person beside it,
and another one is inside, and it has big eyes
and it's looking at us, and.
Speaker 3: He keeps repeating, they're one hundred percent not human.
Speaker 1: He describes them as being eight to ten feet tall, skinny,
with big mouths and huge, shiny eyes, and he says
they're in his backyard and they're looking right at him.
Speaker 3: An eight to ten foot tall creature is not an
animal you can misidentify. That's not a coyote or a
person in a costume. The scale of it is what
makes the claim so shocking.
Speaker 1: The police respond to the house, and normally you'd expect
them to be dismissive, but because they had just seen
that thing fall out of the sky themselves, they take
it seriously. You can hear it on their body cams
as they approach the house. One officer says to the other,
I have butterflies, bro Another says, I'm so nervous right now.
Speaker 3: That reaction, and from seasoned police officers, lends a huge
amount of credibility to the situation. They were spooked because
they believe something was there. They knew the call was
connected to the object they had seen, but.
Speaker 1: By the time they got into the backyard there was
nothing there. The family stuck to their story, absolutely terrified.
The police closed the case as unfounded, but the officers
on the scene were clearly rattled.
Speaker 3: It's the commendation of the visual from the body cam
and the raw visceral fear in the nine to one
one call that makes this one linger. It was a
fleeting event, but for a few minutes on an April night,
one family in Vegas was convinced we were not alone.
Speaker 1: Well, if aliens in the backyard are one thing, what
about under the water. This is our final case, case
ten underwater USOS.
Speaker 3: Everyone is familiar with the term UFO, but the new
frontier in this field is the USO Unidentified Submersible objects.
Speaker 1: And the number of reports has exploded recently. According to
some data, since late twenty twenty two, there have been
over nine thousand sightings reported primarily by military and commercial
plots and Navy personnel.
Speaker 3: Nine thousand. That's not a glitch or a few weather balloons.
That is a statistical pattern. That is a significant number
of unexplained observations.
Speaker 1: And the locations are key. They're clustered within about ten
miles of the US coastlines, especially off California and Florida.
Speaker 3: Witnesses described seeing glowing orbs or objects beneath the waves
moving its speeds that defy our understanding of hydrodynamics. But
the truly mind bending part, the detail that has physicists
scratching their heads is the transition.
Speaker 2: This is what they call trans medium travel.
Speaker 3: Right, think about it. Water is about eight hundred times
denser than air. When a plane or a meteor hits
the ocean at high speed, it's like hitting a wall
of concrete. It creates a massive splash and usually disintegrates.
Speaker 1: But these objects are observed flying at supersonic speeds in
the air, entering the water with no splash and no deceleration,
and continuing at high speed underwater, and vice versa. They
are seen shooting out of the ocean into the sky
without losing any momentum.
Speaker 3: We do not possess any public technology they can do that.
Our submarines are slow, our aircraft can't operate underwater. We
don't have propulsion systems that work in both mediums, let
alone materials that can withstand the stress of that transition.
Speaker 1: So the big question is what are they Is this
some top secret, black budget military program generations ahead of
what we know.
Speaker 3: That's one possibility, but the sheer number of sightings and
the fact that they've been reported for decades makes some
people think it's not our own secret tech. It suggests
that something else might be using the one part of
our planet. We barely explore the deep oceans as a
base of operations, a hiding place.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly humbling thought. We've mapped almost every inch
of dry land, but over eighty percent of our ocean
is unmapped and unexplored.
Speaker 3: We're living on the surface level. We have no idea
what's really in the basement.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, let's just take a breath for a second.
We have gone from a creaky letter in a quiet
suburb to potential alien bases in the deep sea.
Speaker 3: It's a heavy, heavy life list of unknowns.
Speaker 1: We started with the watcher counting children in New Jersey.
We walked the halls of a Texas church with a
killer who looked like a cop. We stared into the
black water of a Los Angeles hotel.
Speaker 3: We followed a ghost plane into the Indian Ocean. We
listened for the invisible weapons of Havana Syndrome. We saw
whistleblowers silenced, and we stood in a backyard with ten
foot tall creatures.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to take in.
Speaker 1: If you had to find one single thread that ties
all of these ten mysteries together, what would it be
for me?
Speaker 3: The thread is vulnerability. We build all these systems to
make ourselves feel safe. We have locks on our doors,
cameras on our streets, GPS and our planes, laws and
corporations to create order. But each of these ten stories
shows us just how porous those systems are, how fragile
that sense of security really is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that no matter what we build, people can still vanish,
planes can disappear, and things we don't understand can enter
our homes or our atmosphere without asking for permission.
Speaker 3: It's the humbling realization that for all our progress, the
world is still a deeply mysterious place. The map still
has huge blank spots on it.
Speaker 1: And so we have to turn this question over to
you listening. Right now, we've laid out ten loose threads
from the last decade. Which one is going to keep
you up tonight?
Speaker 3: Is it the intimate psychological horror of the watcher, the
idea that your own home is being coveted? Or is
it the vast impersonal horror of MH. Three seventy, of
being erased by the sheer scale of the ocean?
Speaker 1: Or do you go to the stranger stuff. What about
those lights under the water. Is it a top secret
Navy drone or are we sharing the planet with a
neighbor we've never been properly introduced to. What's your stand
on that Vegas sighting, a terrified family's overactive imagination or
genuine close encounter.
Speaker 3: These aren't just stories to scare you. They are real,
open questions about the limits of our knowledge, and we
want to hear your theories.
Speaker 1: Leave a comment, tell us what you think. Which case
gets under your skin the most. Let's keep pulling at
these threads.
Speaker 3: But maybe check your mailbox first, just in case.
Speaker 2: Oh come on, don't do that to everyone.
Speaker 3: Right at the end, you couldn't help myself.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Peace,