Speaker 1: I want you to picture something, the most impossible locked
room mystery you can think of. But it's not a room.
It's a fortress. A fortress on a rock, surrounded by
you know, freezing, deadly water.
Speaker 2: The end of the line, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen sixty two, it's early morning. A guard is
doing his rounds at Alcatraz, the place they send you,
and you're literally too dangerous for anywhere else. He stops
at a cell he sees a man sleeping or what
looks like a man's sleeping, right, and he reaches through
the bars with his nightstick to wake him up for
roll call. He gives the pillow a little tap, and
the prisoner's head just rolls off.
Speaker 2: It literally falls onto the floor. He cracks open. I mean,
can you imagine being that guard.
Speaker 1: For a split second, you must be thinking you've just
witnessed the most gruesome decapitation in history. But it's not blood,
it's it's soap, it's dust, it's paper. The prisoner is
just gone.
Speaker 2: It's a moment that just shatters the entire reality of
a place like Alcatraz. It's not supposed to happen.
Speaker 1: It's impossible, or okay, let's jump back fifty years. You're
the captain of the Titanic, the unsinkable ship. You get
a piece of paper, a wireless message that says, in
no uncertain terms, there is a monster made of ice
directly ahead of you.
Speaker 2: A literal field of them, not just one.
Speaker 1: And you do the right thing. You hand this critical
warning to your boss, the chairman of the whole shipping line.
And he doesn't call a meeting, he doesn't order the
ship to slow down. He just puts it in his pocket.
Speaker 2: Like it's a receipt for a sandwich.
Speaker 1: Or something exactly. And that one tiny action, yeah, it
might be the single moment upon which fifteen hundred lives depend.
Speaker 2: It's chilling.
Speaker 1: Or one more for you, picture a metal detector, a
really advanced one, just screaming its head off over a
patch of desert in the West Bank. The readings indicate
there are literally tons, thirty tons of gold sitting just
a few feet under the dirt.
Speaker 2: And you can see the spot, you know exactly where
it is.
Speaker 1: But because of politics, because of borders and treaties and
you know, ancient conflicts, nobody is allowed to pick up
a shovel.
Speaker 2: And that is just a maddening thing about history, isn't it.
Sometimes the X on the map is right there, it
to is staring you right in the face, but you
just can't dig.
Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to thrilling threads today. We aren't just telling stories.
We are pulling at the loose ends of history, the
threads that have been just sort of dangling for decades,
sometimes centuries.
Speaker 2: In some of these threads, well, we're going to tie
them up pretty neatly using modern science, modern forensics and others.
Speaker 1: They might just unravel everything we thought we knew.
Speaker 2: We're covering a lot of ground today. Our sources are well,
they're pretty incredible. We've got the declassified forensic reports from
that nineteen sixty two Alcatraz escape. We've got transcripts from
the official British inquiry into the Titanic disaster.
Speaker 1: We also have the DNA results which were sealed for
years from the investigation into the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
It's an amazing collection of material, it really is. And
I have to say, looking at this first story, it
just reads like a heist movie script. Good one. I
find myself, you know, almost rooting for these guys, even
though I know I probably shouldn't.
Speaker 2: It definitely has that cinematic beat, the system quality, which
is why I'm here. I have to be the buzz
gil voice of reason, the voice of reason. Yeah, I'm
bringing the cold hard facts, the cold water, you could say,
because while the story the escape is romantic, the logistics,
the reality of it, it's just brutal.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into it. Let's set the scene Alcatraz,
the night of June eleventh, leading into the morning of
June twelfth, nineteen sixty two. The main players here, these
weren't just your average criminals, were they.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. You have Frank Morris, who is
absolutely the brains of this operation. His IQ was reportedly
around one thirty three, which is, you know, in the
superior or a gifted range. So a genius, a criminal
genius for sure. He'd been in and out of the
system since he was a kid. He was a foster
child who bounced around a lot, eventually started robbing banks.
But the key thing about him he was a known
escape artist long before he ever got to the rock.
Speaker 1: And he wasn't alone the muscle, right, He.
Speaker 2: Had the Anglin brothers, John and Clarence. There are a
pair of bank robbers from Georgia grew up in the
swamps of Florida, so they were tough and they were inseparable.
In fact, they kept trying to break out of other
federal prisons like Levenworth.
Speaker 1: So the prison system's solution was to put them all together.
Speaker 2: It's that of incredible when you think about it. They
basically put the three most escape prone, escape obsessed men
in the entire federal system into adjacent cells in what
was supposed to be the most secure prison on earth.
Speaker 1: It's a huge management error in hindsight. But there was
a fourth man, Alan West. He's the one who gets
left behind, right.
Speaker 2: And Alan West is maybe the most important character in
this story for us, the historians, because without him we
probably wouldn't know half of these incredible details.
Speaker 1: It's the snitch.
Speaker 2: He's the informant. Yes, he got stuck in his cell
on the night of the escape. His vent grille was
still concreted in too tightly. So when the FBI comes
asking questions, he tells them everything in exchange for you know,
not getting Punnis for his role.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about the plan, because this is the
part that blows my mind. This wasn't a smash and grab.
This was engineering. How do you possibly drill through reinforced
concrete in a prison cell without anyone hearing you?
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing is you don't use a drill,
at least not at first. You use a.
Speaker 1: Spoon, a spoon from the cafeteria.
Speaker 2: Dozens of them, stolen over months, They filed down the handles,
sharpened them into these little makeshift chisels. But the real genius,
and this is a detail that often gets overlooked, was
the motor.
Speaker 1: Wait, they had a motor, a power tool they did.
Speaker 2: They managed to steal a small motor from a vacuum cleaner.
Some sources say it might have been a fan motor
from the workshop and they rigged it up, probably with
the battery, to create this very crude power drill. As incredible,
but mostly it was just backbreaking, manual labor. They would
work during the PRISM's designated music hour, ah.
Speaker 1: So the sound of accordions and guitars would cover the
scraping precisely.
Speaker 2: They would just pick away at the concrete around the
air events at the back of their cells, night.
Speaker 1: After night, and the prison itself, the building actually helped them,
didn't it I read that the salt air was a
massive factor.
Speaker 2: A huge factor. You have to remember, Alcatraz is an
island in the middle of a saltwater bay. It's constantly
being battered by salt spray and fog. The metal in
the walls, the rebar, the ventilation shafts, everything was corroded.
The concrete was getting old and crumbly.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't like shipping through solid rock.
Speaker 2: Not at all. If this had been a brand new
facility in say the Arizona Desert, this plan fails on
day one. But the very infrastructure of Alcatraz was in
a way rotting from the inside out.
Speaker 1: So okay, they're widening the holes night after night, But
how do you hide a giant hole in your wall
in a place where guards are walking by constantly doing counts.
Speaker 2: This is where the artistry comes in, the real con
man genius. They made fake grill covers out of what cardboard,
Just painted cardboard. Alan West, the fourth Man. He managed
to steal some paint from a work detail, specifically the
same shade of green as the cell walls. So they'd
work all night chipping away, and then right before the
morning count they'd slot this fake painted cardboard grill into.
Speaker 1: Place, and the guards never noticed, never noticed.
Speaker 2: It's a testament to how routine the checks must have become.
You see what you expect.
Speaker 1: To see, which brings us back to the heads, the
dummy heads in the beds.
Speaker 2: The decoy heads. This is the detail that just it
gets under your skin. They use that mixture we talked about, soap,
toilet paper and the concrete dust they had been chipping away.
They made a kind of homemade stucco.
Speaker 1: And sculpted them into faces.
Speaker 2: Sculpted them, painted them with flesh tones from the prison hobbykit,
put them on the pillows.
Speaker 1: But the hair, the hair is the part that really
creeps me out.
Speaker 2: It shows you the level of obsession, the meticulous planning.
Clarence Anglin worked in the prison barbershop. He was a sweeper.
Oh yes, he pocketed real human hair from the floor,
snuck it back to the cell block and they paints
stakingly gluted onto these dummy heads.
Speaker 1: Why I mean that seems like overkill.
Speaker 2: Think about it. It's the middle of the night. A
guard is walking in the tier. He shines his flashlight
into the cell. What's he going to see? He's going
to see the faint glint of light off of real
hair on a pillow. It sells the whole illusion. It's
absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 1: Deeply unsettling, but you're right, it's brilliant. So the night
comes June eleventh, they put the decoy heads in the beds.
They squeeze through the holes they've made. They're in the
utility corridor behind the cells.
Speaker 2: What now, Now it's a vertical climb. They have to
scale the plumbing pipes three stories straight up in the dark,
in this narrow, dusty.
Speaker 1: Shaft and at the top.
Speaker 2: At the top is a roof. But to get there
they have to get through a ventilator shaft which is
bolted shut from the outside. They've been working on this
for weeks too. During that same music hour, they'd been
up there filing the way at the bolts.
Speaker 1: So they get the vent open, they're on the roof.
They scramble across and then down a drain pipe on
the side of the building, and now they're at the
water's edge. This has to be the critical failure point
for any escape from Alcatraz.
Speaker 2: This is where every other attempt failed. The San Francisco
Bay is not a swimming pool, The water temperature is
maybe fifty to fifty four degrees fahrenheit year round.
Speaker 1: That's cold enough to induce hypothermia in less than half
an hour.
Speaker 2: Twenty minutes maybe less. And the currents, the currents are
just ripping through there at about six knots. It's a
conveyor belt straight out of the Pacific Ocean. If you
fall in, you were gone.
Speaker 1: But they didn't plan to swim.
Speaker 2: They had a raft, the famous raincoat raft.
Speaker 1: This part is just as ingenious as the rest. How
did they build a boat in a prison cell.
Speaker 2: They stole over fifty rubberized raincoats from the prison factory.
And this wasn't just you know, tying them together. They
got their hands on contact cement, probably from one of
the workshops. They stitched the seams, and then they did
something amazing.
Speaker 1: What's up.
Speaker 2: They laid the glued seams against the hot steam pipes
that ran through the cell block. They used the heat
to vulcanize the rubber, to melt the glo and the
rubber together to create a waterproof seal.
Speaker 1: They essentially build a professional grade inflatable raft, a Zodiac
boat in.
Speaker 2: Their prison cells. Yes, they even made life veests out
of the leftover material and for inflation. This is my
favorite part. They took a musical instrument, a concertina, which
is like a small.
Speaker 1: Accordion, and turned it into a pump, turned it.
Speaker 2: Into a bellows to pump air into the raft once
they got to the shore.
Speaker 1: It's just the level of forethought is staggering. So they
launched sometime around ten zero zero pm and they paddle
off into the fog and they.
Speaker 2: Just vanish, gone into the night.
Speaker 1: Okay, So for years the official story was pretty cut
and dried. The FBI investigated and they closed their case
in nineteen seventy nine. Their conclusion was presumed drowned.
Speaker 2: And to be fair, there's some pretty compelling evidence for
that theory, like what well, a few weeks after the escape,
a Norwegian freighter spotted a body floating in the ocean.
It was about twenty miles past the Golden Gate Bridge.
The description of the clothing matched the prison blues the
escapees would have been wearing. They couldn't retrieve the body.
Speaker 1: Though, and there was the packet of photos.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's maybe the biggest piece of evidence for the
drowning theory. A waterproof pouch containing personal photos and letters
belonging to the England Brothers was found floating in the bay.
The logic is, you know, if you've made it safely
to shore, you don't accidentally drop your most precious personal
possessions into the water.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. But and this is a huge butt,
the US Marshall Service never closed the case. They inherited
it from the FBI and they kept it open.
Speaker 2: They did, and that's because new information kept trickling in
over the years.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the big break, the thing that really
shifted the narrative. It came in two thousand and three
from a US marshal named Michael Dike.
Speaker 2: Dike was obsessed with this case. He went back through
all the old files, all the teletypes and reports from
nineteen sixty two, and he found something the FBI had
either missed or just ignored.
Speaker 1: A police report, two.
Speaker 2: Of them, actually, yeah. The first was from the Marine
County Police Department, filed on the night of the escape,
and it said it was a report of a stolen car,
a nineteen fifty five blue Chevrolet. It was stolen from
a neighborhood in Marine County, which is exactly where Alan
West the informant told the FBI the plan was to land.
Speaker 1: Okay, I have to play Devil's advocate here for a second.
It's nineteen sixty two, a Blue Chevy. That's got to
be one of the most common cars on the road.
It's like saying a silver Honda Civic was stolen today.
Is that really proof of anything.
Speaker 2: On its own? No? Yeah, you're right, it's circumstantial. It's
a single data point. But then you look at the
next report Tyke found. Okay, this one came from a
little bit later that night, or maybe early the next morning.
A motorist in Stockton, California, which is about an hour
and a half drive east of Marin, reported being run
off the road by a speeding car.
Speaker 1: Let me guess a blue Chevy, a.
Speaker 2: Blue Chevrolet, and the motorists description of the occupants three men.
Speaker 1: Okay, Now that that tightens it up. Three men, blue Chevy,
speeding east away from the Bay Area on a logical
route if you were trying to get out of the state.
Speaker 2: It fits the timeline west laid out perfectly. Land on
Angel Island or in Marin, steal a car and then
head east towards the Sierra's maybe down to Mexico.
Speaker 1: Stockton is right on that path, and weren't their family
rumors for years the England family specifically oh constantly.
Speaker 2: The family has always maintained the boys survived. They claimed
they received unsigned Christmas cards for a few years after
the escape. Their mother supposedly received flowers at her funeral
delivered with no card, which.
Speaker 1: Is again, it's circumstantial. You can't prove any of that.
Speaker 2: It's all circumstantial. But when you add it all up,
you take the incredible survival skills of these men. Remember
England's grew up in the Florida swamps. They knew how
to handle themselves in water. And you combine it with
those police reports, the probability starts to shift. It moves
from impossible to well.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's the thread that just won't break. You can't
prove they died because there are no bodies, and you
can't prove they lived. It's the perfect miss Street And.
Speaker 2: As long as there are no bodies, the file stays open.
The US Marshalls have a policy they'll keep the warrant
active until each of the men turns one hundred years.
Speaker 1: Old, which would be well Frank Morris would be over
ninety now, John and Clarence Englin would be right around
that age two. So the clock is ticking. It is indeed,
all right, let's pull our next thread. We're actually going
to stay with the water theme. We're moving from the
freezing fast currents of the San Francisco Bay to the
eerily calm, freezing waters of the North.
Speaker 2: Atlantic, a very different kind of water disaster, a.
Speaker 1: Very different kind. We're shifting from a story about three
men desperately trying to get out of a trap to
a story about fifteen hundred people who unknowingly sailed.
Speaker 2: Right into one The Titanic.
Speaker 1: We all know the basic story, the iceberg, the ship sinking,
the band playing on. But I want to focus on
one specific moment, one specific piece of paper that often
gets lost in the epic scale of the tragedy.
Speaker 2: I think I know where you're going. You're talking about
the Baltic message.
Speaker 1: That's the one. Let's set the scene. It's Sunday afternoon,
April fourteenth, nineteen twelve.
Speaker 2: The conditions out on the Atlantic are well, they're deceptive.
The ocean is described in the logs as being like
a mill pond, dead, calm, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Flat, which sounds good right, smooth sailing.
Speaker 2: You'd think so, But for spotting icebergs, it's a nightmare scenario.
Normally you'd have waves, even small ones, crashing against the
base of a berg that creates a line of white
foam that lookouts can spot from miles away.
Speaker 1: But with no waves.
Speaker 2: With no waves, a dark blue iceberg on a black,
moonless sea is effectively invisible. It's a ghost. You don't
see it until you're right on top of it.
Speaker 1: So the officers on the bridge, they're already on edge.
Speaker 2: They should have been. The wireless room was getting warnings
all day. At one point four two pm, the Titanic
receives a very specific message from another steamer, the Baltic.
It reports icebirds and large quantities of field ice directly
in the Titanic's path.
Speaker 1: A clear and present danger warning. Captain Smith receives this message.
He reads it, He understands there is a massive field
of ice ahead. What does he do next?
Speaker 2: This is the moment, This is the hinge. He doesn't
immediately post it on the bridge for the other officers.
He doesn't order a changing course or speed. He walks
out onto the promenade deck finds j Bruce Ismay and
just hands him the telegram.
Speaker 1: Is May, being the chairman of the White Star Line,
he's the owner for all intents and purposes. He's on
board as a passenger, but he's really he's the boss.
Speaker 2: He is the ultimate authority on that ship, even above
the captain in some ways. And according to the sworn
testimony given later at the British inquiry, which was led
by a man named Lord Mersey, is May glances at
this critical warning and it puts it in his pocket.
Speaker 1: Why, I mean, why would you pocket a direct navigational
warning about a mortal danger to the ship you own.
Speaker 2: This is the absolute crux of the negligence argument against
the White Star Line. Lord Mersey's personal journal, in the
notes from the Increase of just Ismy was treating it
as a piece.
Speaker 1: Of inter gossip, like a fun fact exactly.
Speaker 2: There's testimony that he was showing it off to other
wealthy passengers later that afternoon, sort of boasting, you know,
look how exciting we're sailing through the ice. It was
a display of arrogance.
Speaker 1: But it's more than just arrogance, right, there's corporate pressure
here too.
Speaker 2: That's the heavy implication. Yeah, Ismay had that telegram in
his pocket for hours. It wasn't until around seven point
pm that a very nervous Captain Smith had to actually
go and ask for it back so he could finally
post it in the chart room.
Speaker 1: For five hours, five critical hours. The officers on watch
on the bridge did not have that specific piece of
intelligence because the boss was carrying it round at his
tuxedo and.
Speaker 2: The unspoken reason. The theory is that Ismay wanted to
maintain speed. The Titanic was doing about twenty two knots,
which is very fast for those waters. They were trying
to beat the arrival time of their sister ship. They
wanted to get to New York on Tuesday night instead
of Wednesday morning, a.
Speaker 1: Big PR victory for the maiden voyage, a huge.
Speaker 2: PR victory, and slowing down for some pesky ice would
ruin the headline.
Speaker 1: So is May pockets the warning. The ship keeps plowing
ahead at full speed into the dark, and then eleven
three nine pm happens.
Speaker 2: Eleven three nine pm. Look out, Frederick Fleet up in
the crow's nest, spots a dark mass ahead. He rings
the warning bell three times. He picks up the phone
to the bridge and screams iceberg right ahead.
Speaker 1: How much time did they have from that moment to impact.
Speaker 2: The calculations done by the inquiry, based on the ship's
speed and the reaction times, suggests he had about thirty
seven seconds.
Speaker 1: Thirty seven seconds to turn a ship that weighs forty
six thousand tons.
Speaker 2: It's a problem of physics of momentum. It's physically impossible
a ship that size at that speed has a turning
circle of nearly a mile. Murdoch, the first officer on
the bridge, he did what he could. He ordered hard
a starboard and the engines full of stern.
Speaker 1: Well it enough.
Speaker 2: It may have even made it worse. Reversing the engines
like that actually makes the redder less effective because you
lose the powerful wash of water flowing over it. They
were doomed the moment fleet saw the berg.
Speaker 1: And the collision itself. The sources describe it not as
a big crash, but more of a grinding sound.
Speaker 2: The iceberg was estimated to weigh one point five million tons.
It was a literal mountain of ancient compressed ice. It
didn't move. The ship, which was just a thin steel shell,
just scraped along its underwater spur, the steel plates buckled,
the rivets popped, and the Atlantic Ocean poured in.
Speaker 1: And if Ismay hadn't pocketed that note, if Captain Smith
had slowed the ship down at two PM when he
first got that warning, they.
Speaker 2: Would have arrived in New York a few hours late,
but fifteen hundred people would have arrived alive. That single
piece of folded paper in a man's pocket. It represents
the entire cascading failure of the command structure. It wasn't
just an accident, it wasn't just bad luck. It was
a chain of human arrogance and wilfully ignored data.
Speaker 1: That is a terrifying thought, the idea that valid life
saving information can be right there, but it's ignored because
it's inconvenient. Which actually that's a perfect brig to our
next thread, because we're moving to a story where valid information,
an ID card, a biological profile, hard evidence was ignored
or lost this time because of bureaucracy, and it led
to a case of mistaken identity that lasted for decades
and caused unimaginable pain for a family.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the Vietnam unknown soldier.
Speaker 1: This story is it's a tough one. It's about the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington. You know, we
grew up thinking of that tomb as a sacred, permanent void.
Here rests an honored, glory and American soldier known but
to God.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful symbol.
Speaker 1: It is. But in nineteen ninety eight we learned that
for fourteen years, one of those soldiers wasn't unknown at all.
He had a name, and he had a family that
was still looking for him.
Speaker 2: This is the story of Air Force First Lieutenant Michael Blassie.
Speaker 1: Tell us about him. Who was he?
Speaker 2: Michael Blassie was a classic American kid from Saint Louis,
went to the Air Force Academy. He was a career
officer type, you know, very dedicated, very disciplined. He flew
the A thirty seven Dragonfly, which is a attack aircraft,
and he was.
Speaker 1: In Vietnam in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: Yes, on May eleventh, nineteen seventy two, he was flying
a mission over a town called Anlock, which was the
site of a brutal, prolonged battle.
Speaker 1: A real meat grinder at that point in the war.
Speaker 2: Absolutely Blassi went and low to provide air support for
the troops on the ground. He was hit by a
volley of anti aircraft fire. His wingman saw the plane
get hit, flip over and explode on impact in enemy
held territory.
Speaker 1: And because the fighting was so intense, they couldn't get
a recovery team in.
Speaker 2: Not immediately, No, it was too hot. So he was
listed as missing in action, presumed killed.
Speaker 1: But and here's where this thread starts to get really tangled.
A South Vietamese Army patrol did find the crash site
about six months later.
Speaker 2: They did. They found the wreckage of the A thirty seven,
They found skeletal remains, and crucially, they found a wallet.
Inside that wallet was Michael Blassi's military ID card.
Speaker 1: So case closed. Yeah, they found him, They've identified him.
He's no longer Mia.
Speaker 2: It should have been that simple. The remains personal effects,
including the wallet, were turned over to the US military
and Saigon, but then they were packaged up to be
shipped to the Central Identification Lab in Hawaii Cilhi, and
somewhere in that transit between Saigon and Hawaii, the wallet
and the ID card vanished.
Speaker 1: They lost the ID just lost it.
Speaker 2: Lost or more likely stolen by someone along the way.
It was a common problem in the chaos of the war.
So what arise in the lab in Hawaii are a
set of bones designated only by a case number unknown
x twenty six.
Speaker 1: But they still have their remains. Can't they analyze them?
They know they came from Blassie's crash site.
Speaker 2: They tried, but this is where the science of the
nineteen seventies really failed them. The forensic anthropologists that the
lab analyzed the skeleton. They estimated the height and age
based on the bone structure, but their reference charts were
largely based on like WWII populations, So their conclusion was
that the remains belonged to a man who was younger
and shorter than Michael Blassi was.
Speaker 1: They ruled him out based on bad data, essentially.
Speaker 2: And there was another thing. They found a single human
hair in the flight suit that was recovered with the bones.
They casted the blood type of that hair follicle and
it came back as type. Oh, Michael Blasi's blood type
was A So they said, well, there you go. This
can't be Blassy.
Speaker 1: But a single hair on a flight suit in a
war zone that could be from anyone. The guy who
packed his parachute a mechanic who worked on the plane exactly.
Speaker 2: The concept of cross contamination just wasn't viewed with the
same kind of scientific scrutiny back then as it is today.
So for those reasons, X twenty six was officially declared unidentifiable,
and in nineteen eighty four, under immense political pressure to
have a Vietnam representative interred in the Tomb of the Unknowns,
the remains at X twenty six were selected.
Speaker 1: And President Reagan himself presided over the ceremony. It was
this huge, solemn national moment, and all the while, the
Blassie family is watching this on television, grieving their son,
who they believe is still missing somewhere in the uncle's Vietnam.
Speaker 2: That's the absolute tragedy of it. They were watching his
funeral and they had no idea.
Speaker 1: So how did this finally unravel? Who was the one
who pulled this thread and exposed the truth.
Speaker 2: It was a combination of people, but primarily a CBS
journalist named Vince Gonzalez and a determined Vietnam veteran named
Ted Sampley. In the early nineteen nineties, they started digging
into the old declassified paperwork and they found the original
field reports from that South Vietnamese patrol, the ones that
mentioned finding the wallet and the ID card, the very
ones they were able to connect the dots. They proved
that the remains labeled X twenty six originated from the
exact crash coordinates of Michael Blassie's plane. They published their findings.
The Blassie family read it and immediately said, that's our son,
that's Michael.
Speaker 1: In that tomb, and they demanded a DNA test.
Speaker 2: They demanded a DNA test. Now, this is nineteen ninety eight.
DNA technology has made incredible leaps, but you're still dealing
with bones that have been buried for fourteen years.
Speaker 1: So how did they do it?
Speaker 2: They used something called mitochondrial DNA or mt DNA. Unlike
nuclear DNA, which degrades pretty quickly, ntdnas passed down directly
from the mother to her children, and it's much more
resilient in old bone samples. They were able to extract
it from the remains and compare it to blood samples
from Michael Blassi's mother and his sister Patricia.
Speaker 1: And what was the result.
Speaker 2: It was a one hundred percent match, no doubt whatsoever.
Speaker 1: I just I can't imagine the feeling for that family.
Is it relief, is it anger at the decades of
not knowing?
Speaker 2: I think it was all of those things. His sister,
Pritricia Blassi, she fought so incredibly hard for this. When
the results came back, the Secretary of Defense, William Cohen,
ordered the tomb to be opened, which was completely unprecedented.
Speaker 1: They exhumed the unknown soldier.
Speaker 2: They did, They removed Michael's casket, flew him home to
Saint Louis, and he was finally buried under a headstone
bearing his own name, surrounded by his family.
Speaker 1: And Patricia Blassi had that incredible quote that just sums
it all up. He wasn't unidentifiable, he was just unidentified.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful distinction. In that case. It changed everything.
It forced the military to prioritise accurate scientific identification above
all else. Because of modern DNA technology, there will likely
never be another unknown soldier from an American conflict.
Speaker 1: Which is an amazing victory for science and for military families.
But it does, in a way, it closes a chapter
on a certain kind of national memorial.
Speaker 2: It does. It really does.
Speaker 1: All right, Let's let's take a breath. We've done a
prison break, a maritime disaster, a forensic military mystery. Now
I think it's time we go full Indiana Jones.
Speaker 2: I had a feeling this was where we were heading.
Speaker 1: We are going after the ark of the Covenant.
Speaker 2: The ultimate lost heart effect, the ultimate historical thread.
Speaker 1: But we're not talking about melting faces or you know,
Nazis in the desert. Well, we'll actually get to the
Nazis a little later. We are talking about a very
specific modern investigation led by a fascinating man named Jim Barfield,
and his whole quest revolves around one of the Dead
Sea scrolls.
Speaker 2: But not just any of the Dead Sea scrolls. This
one is completely unique.
Speaker 1: Tell us about the copper scroll.
Speaker 2: Okay, so in the nineteen forties and fifties, these ancient
scrolls were found in a series of caves near an
archaeological site called Cumran on the shore of the Dead Sea.
All of them are made of parchment or papyrus, you know,
animal skin or plant paper, and their religious texts the
Book of Isaiah, Psalms, things like that.
Speaker 1: But one scroll, found in a place called Cave three,
was different.
Speaker 2: He was made of metal, ninety nine percent pure copper,
rolled up into a sheet, and you just don't write
a religious text or a grocery list on solid copper.
You use copper for something you want to last forever,
something you need to survive, a fire, a flood, and invasion.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't scripture. It was an inventory.
Speaker 2: It was a treasure map, plain and simple. It's a
list of sixty four locations where the treasures of the
Temple of Jerusalem were supposedly hidden right before the Babylonians
sacked the city and destroyed the temple in five eighty
seven BC. And it lists staggering amounts of gold and silver.
Speaker 1: So enter Jim Barfield. He's a retired fire marshall, an
Arson investigator from Oklahoma, not your typical archaeologist.
Speaker 2: And that's his superpower in this story. He's not bogged
down by academic dogma. He reads a translation of this
copper scroll and he decides he's going to solve it.
He decides to treat it like a cold.
Speaker 1: Case, an Arson investigation exactly.
Speaker 2: He looks for points of origin, for physical landmarks, for
concrete descriptors, and he develops the theory that the scroll
isn't talking about sixty four vague locations all across ancient Israel.
He believes it's describing sixty four very specific hiding places
in and around the ruins of Kumran itself.
Speaker 1: Let's walk through some of his evidence, because a few
of these matches are they're just.
Speaker 2: Spooky, they really are. He focuses on the most specific descriptions.
For example, one entry on the scroll says, in the
ruin which is in the valley of Acre, under the
steps heading east, which are forty cubits long, a chest
of silver and his vessels.
Speaker 1: Steps heading east forty cubits law. That is very very specific.
A cubit is what about eighteen.
Speaker 2: Inches roughly yees So we're talking about a stairca it's
about sixty feet long. So Barfield goes to the ruins
at Kumran. He finds a set of ancient excavated stairs
and he gets out of tape measure they're exactly forty
kep its long bleinch.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's one heck of a coincidence, but it's still
just one.
Speaker 2: So he moves to the next clue on the scroll.
It describes a location in the cave of the column
of two openings facing east. He uses the other clues
as a kind of geometric map, triangulates a position and
he finds a case at that spot with a natural
killer a column splitting its entrance into two openings.
Speaker 1: This is getting good, but the big one, the one
that really gets the pulse racing, is a place the
scroll calls the Hill of Culiff.
Speaker 2: This location is mentioned as the hiding place for a
massive amount of gold, and some scholars believe it could
be the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant itself. Barfield,
using his map, identifies this one particular mound near the
Kumran Ruins that just looks wrong. It doesn't match the
geology of the surrounding cliffs.
Speaker 1: He thinks it's man made.
Speaker 2: He suspects it is, so he gets permission to take
a small sample of the rock from the face of
this hill. He sent it to a lab and the
report comes back identifying the material not as natural limestone,
but as a form of ancient man made mortar.
Speaker 1: It's a plug. Someone sealed a cave entrance with it.
Speaker 2: It's a massive man made plug. So we have a
treasure map made of indestructible copper. We have a set
of stairs that perfectly matches the ancient measurements. We have
a cave with a column, and now we have another
cave that's been deliberately sealed. Why hasn't somebody just blown
the door off this thing. Well, this is where it
gets both exciting and incredibly frustrating. Barfield knew he needed
more proof. In twenty fourteen, he brought in a team
with a very advanced piece of equipment, a type of
molecular frequency.
Speaker 1: Scanner, a deep penetrating metal detector, basically a.
Speaker 2: Very very sophisticated one. It can be tuned to detect
this specific atomic resonance of different elements like gold or
silver deep underground. But first he had to calibrate it.
Speaker 1: How do you do that?
Speaker 2: This is great. He actually buried thirty pounds of silver
bars in his own backyard in Oklahoma to establish a
baseline to see what a known quantity of precious metal
look like to the machine.
Speaker 1: That's brilliant. So he takes the calibrated machine to Kumaran.
Speaker 2: He takes it to the hill of Koulith. He runs
the scanner over the spot where he believes the sealed
cave entrances, and the machine signal goes completely off the scale.
The operator said it indicated a massive quantity of non
ferrous metal gold or silver estimated in the She's tones plural.
Speaker 1: So the map says it's there, the geology says it's there,
the high tech spanner says it's there.
Speaker 2: The government says stop. Kumaran is in the West Bank.
It is politically one of the most sensitive pieces of
real estate on the planet. It's disputed territory. Can you
imagine the geopolitical explosion if you start digging there and
you actually find the arc of the covenanty oh, my god?
Speaker 1: Who owns it? The israelis the Palestinians, Does Jordan have
a claim? It would be it would be a political ball.
Speaker 2: A bomb doesn't even begin to describe it. So the
Israel Antiquaries authority, they listened to Barfield. They were intrigued
by his evidence, but ultimately the permit to excavate was denied.
The thread is just it's dangling right there. We can
see it, we can almost touch it, but we can't
pull it.
Speaker 1: That is just agonizing to think that the answer to
a two and a half thousand year old mystery could
be sitting right there, just behind a few feet of
ancient mortar.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate historical cliffhanger, So close, yet so far.
Speaker 1: Speaking of mysteries involving bunkers and bad guys, we have
one last thread to pull today and it is definitely
the darkest one.
Speaker 2: I think I know where we're going. We're heading to
a bunker in Berlin, April nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1: The death of Adolph Hitler.
Speaker 2: Or as the Internet would have you believe, the death
of Adolf Hitler. The conspiracy theory that absolutely will not die.
Speaker 1: And I get why it doesn't die, I really do.
At the core of it is one simple fact. We
never saw a body. The official story is that he
shot himself. Eva Braun took Cyanide and their loyal staff
carried the bodies outside, doused them in petrol and burn
them in a shell crater.
Speaker 2: And that lack of a corpse, that empty space, it's
a vacuum that conspiracy theories just loved to fill. If
there's nobody, there's no proof.
Speaker 1: Plus, and this is the part that really fuels the fire.
The Russians lied about it for years. Stalin's forces got
to the bunker first, and Stalin, for his own political reasons,
told Truman and Churchill at the Potsdam conference that Hitler
had escaped.
Speaker 2: Stalin was playing a game of four D chess. He
knew Hitler was dead, but it served his purposes to
keep the Nazi threat alive. It justified a massive Soviet
military presence in Eastern Europe, ostensibly to hunt down fugitive fascists.
So he deliberately spread rumors that Hitler was in Spain
or Argentina, or living on a secret U boat base
in Antarctica.
Speaker 1: But let's look at the actual forensic evidence that was collected.
Because the Soviets did find remains in that garden.
Speaker 2: They did. In early May of nineteen forty five, a
Soviet counterintelligence unit smirsh which means death despise. They sifted
through the dirt in that shell crater. They found a
job bone and part of a skull. The bodies were
almost completely incinerated, but teeth. Teeth are incredibly resilient to fire, and.
Speaker 1: Dental records are as good as a fingerprint.
Speaker 2: In some cases, they're even better. The esnirage agents tracked
down a woman named kath Heyserman. She was the dental
assistant to Hitler's personal dentist, a man named doctor Blashka.
Speaker 1: And she had the records, the X rays.
Speaker 2: She did one better. The records had been destroyed, but
she drew a detailed diagram of Hitler's teeth from memory.
And Hitler had terrible teeth. He had a very distinctive,
very complicated bridge on his right jaw, yet abscess his
gum disease. It was a mess. Her drawing from memory
was a perfect one to one match with the jawbone.
The Soviets, it dug out of the dirt. They knew
in May nineteen forty five that they had him, They
just didn't tell the rest of the world the full
story for another decade.
Speaker 1: So Forensically it's a slam dunk, but people still love
the Argentina theory, the gray wolf idea that he escaped
on a U boat and lived out his days as
a wealthy.
Speaker 2: Rancher, or the monk theory. That's another popular one. There
was a famous claim by a Spanish stonemason that he
personally saw Hitler living as a monk at the Seamost
Monastery in Spain in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about that for a second, because
beyond the forensics, you have a very strong opinion on
the psychology of that idea.
Speaker 2: I do look. Most conspiracy theories rely on the subject
acting rationally to save their own life. But Adolf Hitler
was not a rational actor in that sense. He was
a narcissist on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend.
He didn't just lead Germany. In his mind, he was Germany.
Speaker 1: So the idea of him living quietly, as you know,
Senor Schmidt on a farm in Argentina, it would have.
Speaker 2: Been a fate worse than death for him to be anonymous,
to be powerless, to have to hide who he was
and watch him a distance as the world rebuilt itself
without him. It's preposterous. His entire psychological profile screams that
he wanted a Agnerian ending, a good Er Dameron, the
Twilight of the Gods. He wanted to go down in
flames with the Reich.
Speaker 1: Suicide wasn't an escape, it was the final act of control.
Speaker 2: Precisely he had seen what happened to Mussolini. Just days
before Mussolini was captured, executed, and his body was hung
upside down from a meat hook and a gas station
plaza in Milan. People threw rocks at it. Hitler was
absolutely terrified of that kind of public humiliation. He gave explicit,
repeated orders for his body to be burned to ash
so that he could not be made a trophy. Running
away is an act of cowardice that his monumental ego
could simply never sustain.
Speaker 1: So the forensic evidence says he died, the psychological profile
says he died. The only thing keeping him alive is
our own deep seated distrust of the official narrative, and
I think.
Speaker 2: Our desire for a different kind of justice. We wanted
to see the villain caught and punished in a courtroom.
Suicide feels like he cheated, he got away with it,
So we invent these elaborate stories where he is eventually
hunted down and brought to justice because it's a more
satisfying ending. Wow.
Speaker 1: We have pulled on a lot of different threads today.
We've gone from the paper machet heads of Alcatraz to
the pocketed telegram on the deck of the Titanic, from
the last a d card of Michael Blassy to the
copper treasure map of the Arc, and finally to the
burnt jawbone in a Berlin garden.
Speaker 2: And if there's a single theme that connects all of them,
it's that history isn't this solid, monolithic block of stone
we imagine it to be. It's fragile, It's contingent. It
turns on the smallest, most human details. A rusty ventilation grill,
a lost wallet, a piece of paper in a pocket.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder, you know what threads are
dangling around us right now? What small details are happening
today that historians fifty years from now will point to
as the moment everything changed.
Speaker 2: That's the thrill of what we do. The threads are
always there if you know where to look.
Speaker 1: Before we go, I want to pose a question to
everyone listening. We talked about two huge potential discoveries today,
two places where a shovel could potentially change the world.
You have the sealed cave at Kumran that might hold
the ark of the Covenant.
Speaker 2: And you have the grounds of the Samos Monastery in Spain,
where some people believe you might find the of Adolf Hitler.
Speaker 1: So here's the question for you. If you personally have
the authority to sign one and only one excavation permit
to force one dig which one do you choose? Do
you want to uncover the sacred biblical treasure or do
you want to definitively hunt the Nazi ghost?
Speaker 2: Which truth do you actually want to know more?
Speaker 1: It's a tough one. Let us know your answer in
the comments, we read all of them.
Speaker 2: A really tough choice, the sacred or the profane?
Speaker 1: It is. Thank you all for joining us on thrilling
threads and keep pulling.