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This is not "The RFK Tapes"
40 Plays5 years ago
Over the Xmas and New year break Josh was entreated by M to listen to the podcast series The RFK Tapes (http://rfktapes.com). In this episode of The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy Josh and M talk not so much about the death of Robert Kennedy but more about the way in which the narrative of The RFK Tapes unfolds, looking at how a collaboration between someone who isn't sure what happened on that day back in 1968, and someone who is sure Sirhan Sirhan was a Manchurian Candidate, unfolds over the course of some ten or more episodes.
(Obviously this episode will make more sense if you listen to The RFK Tapes first...)
Watch M’s series “Conspiracism” here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJEp7xTcFU3hc2W0kfdSvAQ
and learn more about their academic work at:
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You can contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Is Dr. Dentith a secret Brazilian Hitler clone?
00:00:00
Speaker
Why Dr. Dentith? Is that a book in your lap or do you have a horribliness, shape and groin? Why can't it be both? But you're right, it is a book and it's my very own. Is it? Is it Mein Kampf? Why would it be Mein Kampf? I don't know. This is your way of telling us you're a secret Brazilian Hitler clone and you always have been.
00:00:22
Speaker
There is so, so much wrong with that statement.
Introducing 'Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously'
00:00:26
Speaker
No, this is the book. This is taking conspiracy theory seriously. A book that we have devoted a large amount of verbiage to in time on this podcast and features as its editor and occasional contributor... Secret Hitler Klein?
00:00:43
Speaker
Me, myself, yours truly, Dr. MRX Denteth, editor and contributor to Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously. Well, that's good, I guess. All that Nazi talk was starting to make me worried here.
00:01:02
Speaker
You were the one making all of that Nazi talk. Frankly, I think it says a lot more about you than it says about me. They're beginning
New Year, New Podcast: The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy
00:01:14
Speaker
to suspect. Roll the theme. Roll the theme!
00:01:29
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It's a new year. It's almost a new episode because it's the second one of the year, not the first, but you get what I'm talking about. I, of course, as you may suspect, am Josh Addison. And sitting next to me, as you also might suspect, is Secret Hitlerklon. Secret Hitlerklon, a.k.a. Dr. M. R. X. Denteth.
00:01:58
Speaker
Seacale mmm, maybe you shouldn't say that. YouTube is now going to be cutting down on conspiracy theory related videos So I've probably just ruined us for all time. Oh, well, he can't can't be helped So we we've been talking about this for a while now Here's a book and but it exists.
Australia's Heatwave and Dr. Dentith's Book Launch
00:02:19
Speaker
It's an actual thing a physical entity and Josh is yet to hold it Can I
00:02:25
Speaker
Can I? Don't tease me. Don't tease me. I can't take any more of this. Ah. Well, there we go.
00:02:32
Speaker
Let's just get a fit for the podcast listeners. Bit of the old page riffling. If you can do that all episode long, it's a bit sweltering at the moment, so it would be quite good. Yes, Australia is basically on fire from what I get. And the thing about Australia is that gum trees literally explode in high heat Australia. So it's not just on fire. Australia is exploding whilst being on fire. But more importantly, the Australian heat, I believe, is headed our way. Starting pretty much today.
00:03:00
Speaker
It does so badly in Auckland because we've got nice coastal breezes. It's the middle of the North Island which is going to suffer due to Australia's heatwave. Yes, but enough talk about the weather. Your book is here. It's real. It's a thing. It's now presumably available for purchase.
00:03:17
Speaker
it is on all good online bookstores and who knows maybe even your local bookstore in some country may even be stocking it but if you do want to copy Roman and Littlefield are the publisher and Roman and Littlefield have a website where you can order the book for
00:03:35
Speaker
29 pounds or so. That's a fairly decent price for a book. And you get a lot of chapters and a lot of mail. And an awful lot of mail. So there you go. That name again, taking conspiracy theories seriously. Look for it now.
Congo Election Results: Fact or Fiction?
00:03:49
Speaker
But before we get into the episode, if you're listening last week, we're trialing a few extra sections, one of them being one on updates and retractions, which we said, oh, we won't need to do that one too often, but we do have some more updates and retractions. So let's get straight into those then. Indeed. Updates and retractions.
00:04:14
Speaker
Right, so last week, it was last week, wasn't it? We talked about the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which at the time that they were being called into question, and yet the verdict, the result is the word I'm looking for, has been upheld, I understand.
00:04:34
Speaker
Yes, it's been held by the judicial system in the Congo. It's being doubted by the African Union, France, Belgium, a whole bunch of other European countries who are going, we think there's a problem with the vote and the vote count. But at this stage, the leader of
00:04:53
Speaker
What was formally the opposition is now the head of government and the person who is suspected to have won the election, the third party candidate, is not. Are these the sort of things where international pressure has an effect?
00:05:09
Speaker
Hard to tell in situations like the Democratic Republic of the Conga.
00:05:39
Speaker
natural resources that is on the congo, which unfortunately no longer has natural resources because of colonialism and taking those resources away.
Skripal Poisoning: A Military Nurse's Conspiracy?
00:05:55
Speaker
On one level's really minor story, in that it turns out the first responder to the Scrapiles was the daughter of one of the UK's top military nurses. Now that in itself doesn't sound particularly interesting,
00:06:11
Speaker
But the people who are concerned that the Western response to the Skripal poisoning, which is to blame Russia, people who are concerned about it are going, what? Isn't it interesting that the first responder is the daughter to one of the UK's top military nurses? Doesn't that make you think the whole port and downs thing? The chemical creation and testing site near Tisalsbury, which confirmed the presence of Novichok as the poisoning.
00:06:41
Speaker
Don't you think it's a bit suspicious? It's a military nurse involved here? So the story is rumbling away with people going, oh, this kind of bolsters the claim that maybe the UK is pretending it was Novichok to blame the Russians for some other event. Oh, well, we'll see. Yes, I mean, it seems like a bit of a reach, as you say, in and of itself. But I suppose if you're already thinking along those lines, then this does seem a little bit suspicious.
00:07:12
Speaker
And finally, in our last week, in our updates and retraction section, we were forced to confront the fact that we actually cocked up our episode numbering. See, we weren't considering the fact that we cocked up the episode numbering. We were facing the fact that numbers don't work like they used to. Yes, so due to some strange fluctuation in the space-time continuum, what we thought at the end of last year was episode 200 was actually episode 201.
00:07:37
Speaker
And at the time, we'd been sort of noting down all the episodes and found the numbering discrepancy. Unfortunately, Em, you were just a little bit too efficient, weren't you? And we're correcting the numbering as you went. So when it came to look back to find out where the numbering actually went wrong, it wasn't immediately obvious. But I understand we found it, and I understand in what should come as no surprise to any listener of this episode that it's essentially all David Eichsfeld.
00:07:59
Speaker
It's true. You see, we did an interview with David Icke around episode 100 or so, which turned out to be episode 101. No, sorry, it ended up... 110 turned out to be 111? Yeah, yeah. So basically, we had two 110s at the same time, and the confusion occurred precisely when we interviewed David Icke, which
00:08:22
Speaker
I must admit, we were both fairly giddy after that, so probably could be forgiven for... I still blame calculus. Well, yes, no, it's all gone downhill since that. Bloody Newton or... Leibniz. Leibniz has ruined life for everyone. Thanks, Leibniz. But that's all we have now in the way of updates and retraction, so that's okay. So I believe now it is time to head on to the main part of the episode. Yes, let's rush head forth.
00:08:51
Speaker
Head first. Head backwards. Head long. Sorry, is that a subway reference? No, it's a word in the English language which we are speaking right now. Are we? Interesting.
RFK Assassination: Unpacking the Theories
00:09:04
Speaker
Let's go to the content.
00:09:09
Speaker
The weird and some would say mysterious death of aspiring US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy or RFK at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan is not a topic we've covered on this podcast, despite the fact that it is at least as mired in conspiracy as the death of his brother JFK. According to the official story, on June the 5th 1968, RFK was shot by Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It was a lone assassin motivated by hatred of RFK's support of Israel over Palestine.
00:09:39
Speaker
And yet, the official story for some does not add up. People claim there are too many bullets for it to have been the work of just one person, and the entry wounds on Kennedy are said to not match the respected positions of both Sirhan and RFK at the time of shooting.
00:09:53
Speaker
Now truth be told, I've never been all that interested in the Kennedy assassinations, plural. But at the end of last year, I listened to a very interesting podcast on the death of RFK, entitled The RFK Types, which features two hosts, Zach Stuart-Pontier and Bill Kleber.
00:10:12
Speaker
Now what made the podcast so fascinating was the fact that Kleber wrote Shadowplay, the unsolved murder of Robert Kennedy, and is a fully fledged conspiracy theorist about the death of RFK. As such, the 10 or so episodes of the RFK tapes end up
00:10:30
Speaker
not being just a discussion about the death of RFK, but as the series winds down, a debate between someone who thinks Sihan did it and someone who believes Sihan was simply a patsy. So in this episode,
00:10:45
Speaker
of the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, we're going to talk about our reactions to the series, in the way in which Stuart Pontier and Cleber talk about the kinds of evidence which ground their respective views. While it certainly would be helpful if you've already listened to the episodes, we're going to do our best to summarise their views in our discussion. After all, the RFK tapes doesn't say anything new or novel about the death of RFK. What's really interesting about it is the collaboration between two people with very different views as to what really happened that evening in 1968.
00:11:14
Speaker
So where to begin? I guess we should summarize what we know or don't know. So Josh, what do you know about the death of RFK? When did you first hear about the death of RFK? Did you shoot the bullets? That's what I'm asking. Did you kill RFK? I am not the assassination of RFK.
00:11:29
Speaker
You're not the assassination of RFK. Nor am I the assassin. But no, no, not in any way conceptual sense am I the assassin. Although in a sense aren't we all the assassination of RFK? I'm glad you went there. All right, so tell me what do you know about the event you apparently didn't cause or the embodiment of. Indeed. So, I mean, I'm sure, I'm sure we've mentioned it in passing. Well, I mean, we would have mentioned it when we talked about JFK.
00:11:55
Speaker
So, I mean, I knew Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. I knew the assassin's name was Sirhan Sirhan because that's a bit weird. Actually, that's probably a bit racist of you to say, isn't it? It's a type of name for another part of the world. But anyway, it sticks out to one. It's a memorable name.
00:12:12
Speaker
Like JFK is the one you think about when you think about conspiracy theories. It's the granddaddy of conspiracy theories before 9-11 came along. It was probably the biggest one out there. So RFK has sort of been in its shadow somewhat. So I didn't really know... I was not surprised to learn there were conspiracy theories around its death, but I didn't know the details of them at all. So it was interesting to hear the overview of that, which we should probably give now, I suppose. Well, let me give my background to my...
00:12:40
Speaker
I've always known about the assassination of RFK and the conspiracy theories around it because the crew I ran with back at school and then early days in uni were the kind of people who went yeah I think Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK but that Sirhan Sirhan thing that's really weird some sort of some sort of conspiracy theory hipsterism basically into the conspiracy the obscure ones you probably haven't
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, I'm into the more obscure conspiracy, the Moscow show trials, the Gulf of Tonkin, don't talk to me about Watergate or JFK, I mean. So yes, I was always amongst people who went, yeah, the Suhan Suhan was meant to be in one location, but the powder burns are in the wrong part of the body, and there were too many bullets for the gun, he was meant to be
00:13:30
Speaker
firing and then he acts really weirdly after the event. There's something really suspicious about it. But JFK's never really fascinated me because it's a very well-traded conspiracy
Why Listen to 'The RFK Tapes'?
00:13:44
Speaker
theory.
00:13:47
Speaker
And RFK actually isn't particularly important historically. That's not to say there wasn't a conspiracy to kill him. But people who don't even become president who get assassinated are in any way near as interesting as president who get assassinated. And given I'm not that interested in the JFK conspiracy theory because not my president, literally not an American citizen,
00:14:13
Speaker
I wasn't really that interested in RFK, but this podcast actually makes for a compelling listen. So if we haven't made this clear, you really should go out and listen to the RFK tapes. It's only 10 episodes long, plus a few bonus ones, and it's a genuinely interesting thing to listen to.
00:14:33
Speaker
So just to sort of lay things out, the conspiracy theory version of the assassination of RFK is that Sirhan Sirhan probably didn't act alone and probably was some sort of patsy to the point of the suggestion that he was actually some sort of activated Manchurian candidate type who'd been given some sort of post-hypnotic suggestion and wasn't even aware of his own actions when he shot it at RFK.
00:15:02
Speaker
The main evidence is around, the main physical evidence, I guess, is around bullets, as it was with the JFK assassination, really. He was firing a revolver that I think had eight shots, and they could account for all eight bullets ended up in either RFK or the other people who were hit in the crossfire. So they extracted eight bullets from the people who were shot.
00:15:28
Speaker
and yet there are still supposedly bullet holes in the scene. Some of them potentially, there were bullet holes in the ceiling which they said could have been accounted for if a shot went wild, went through the ceiling, hit some of the superstructure behind it, ricocheted back down and hit a person. Those could be accounted for and yet there were other ones in a doorframe.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, and the door frame's a major part of the story. So it suggested there were more shots fired than Suhan could have fired. There was also, and we'll talk about this a little bit in detail, I think, audio tape analysis. Yeah, because he was on the presidential trail, the whole thing was recorded. And so there's been analysis of audio tapes with the event that claim to be able to identify more than eight shots. And then there were the interviews with Suhan Suhan. Now, this was one thing that I was not clear on and was not clear up for you by the podcast.
00:16:19
Speaker
There's some quite interesting interviews where Sirhan was hypnotised by a police psychologist or someone and gives a bunch of very strange responses when asked why he did it and so on. Was that just a procedure to interview someone under hypnosis? Why would they have been hypnotising him in the first place? That's a good question, because there's no satisfactory answer in it.
00:16:44
Speaker
I mean in the 60s the whole notion of mind control and hypnotic suggestion and things are a much stronger prevalent force in trying to account for evidence I mean this is point in time we're looking at mind control experiments being committed by the American and Russian government at the time experiments
Mind Control and Sirhan: Fact or Fiction?
00:17:04
Speaker
that didn't
00:17:04
Speaker
actually result in much at all, but it was a serious contender, and I have to imagine at some particular point.
00:17:15
Speaker
someone says, well, you know, his actions are weird. Oh, you know, actually, no, no, I think about I was going to go for a nice conspiratorial one. They think he's a Manchurian candidate. Of course, he claimed not to remember the event. So you would use hypnotic regression to try and get them back to that point. And then of course, you get Sir Hans Sir Hans
00:17:37
Speaker
rather interesting responses which are read as some as being simply normal responses hypnotic regression and other people saying no that's evidence of hypno programming. Now one of the things they say right I think in the first episode right near the beginning of the podcast
00:17:56
Speaker
is that because this had happened, this was after the assassination of JFK, and there were already conspiracy theories going around about JFK's assassination. And so the authorities, there was a real effort by the authorities to sort of do the investigation of this right. They didn't want to leave any sort of room for people to come in and say, oh, but what about this? What about this? You know, they didn't want to warrant commission style response.
00:18:22
Speaker
But unfortunately, it seems like the method of doing this was kind of just to suppress anything that didn't fit nicely, which ends up when you start seeing some of this making things, making it look like they did have something to hide, although possibly it was simply that they wanted a nice tidy story, not that they were actively hiding the truth. But there are a few, the one that was really quite a
00:18:46
Speaker
Quite a sort of eye opener for us in the in the in the 20 teens. Very nearly 2020. Good God. There's one particular view now. Another another section of the theory that sort of comes up and is less concrete than some of the other stuff is the idea that there were people seen around talking about the assassination, especially in particular, a woman in a polka dot dress.
00:19:13
Speaker
We got him. Now there's one interview with a woman who claims to have seen this woman in the polka dot dress talking to a police officer about it and this being the 1960s we're
00:19:30
Speaker
sort of civil rights woman's lib was still very very somewhat embryonic and woman were kind of to be to be seen and not heard and so you basically have this male police officer essentially telling the woman what she saw and when she when she says I saw this woman in a polo dress he's essentially saying no you didn't yeah no we've spoken to other people they didn't see what you saw so just admit just stop being so
00:19:55
Speaker
So silly, just admit, you know, admit the truth. And it's really, you know, the idea that she could be telling the truth is not even clear to them because it doesn't. Could we have a recording of the police interview? Yeah. And it is brow beating a witness until such time they agree with your interpretation.
00:20:14
Speaker
So in fact, your interpretation is not based upon having been at the event was hers is, which is not to say that what she saw or heard is necessarily what occurred. I think this interesting thing about this woman in the polka polka dress
00:20:29
Speaker
who people claim was seen with Suhan Suhan at one particular point, is then seen running away from the building saying, we got him, we got him. We've got one witness who says, I saw the woman and I heard what she said. Now, of course, it's quite possible that she could have said something like he got him, which then gets misremembered as we got him.
00:20:53
Speaker
which then generates a whole conspiracy theory of there must have been patsies but it is interesting that the witness is brow beaten by the police that there's just no real investigation of this claim yeah and i think it's it
00:21:09
Speaker
It sort of comes across less as, here are the authorities trying to suppress evidence for some conspiratorial cover-up reason as much as, here's a witness who says something that's inconvenient in their story, but she's just a woman, and what the hell does a woman know? So let's, you know, let's tell her what the deal is. Just good old 1966-ism more than anything overly conspiratorial.
00:21:32
Speaker
Dang! But when it comes to the interplay between Stuart Pontier and Kleber, Stuart Pontier is the guy who's sort of running the podcast as it were, and Kleber's the guy he's called into. Yeah, and it's an interesting aspect. So in the first episode, which is basically just Stuart Pontier talking about his family history of being a democratic family,
00:21:55
Speaker
and the interest in RFK and listening to talk show or talk back host talking about it and so he talks about Bill Clabber and he goes so I go off and I see Bill Clabber to ask the question
00:22:12
Speaker
And then at the end of the first episode, it's revealed, actually, Bill Kleber's going to be involved in the rest of the show. It's simply not Zach Stewart-Pontier going off and I'm going to talk to this guy to find out his position. And then I'll do the rest of my investigation. He talks to this guy and then goes, hey.
00:22:29
Speaker
Why don't we do it together? And it was quite refreshing to go, so here's someone who doesn't have a settled view on the death of RFK with a fully fledged Suhan Suhan as a Manchurian candidate conspiracy theorist.
00:22:45
Speaker
working together to try to sort out fact from fiction. And if we're going to talk about sorting out fact from fiction, we should probably talk about Bill's thesis, The Manchurian Candidate Thesis. Now, for those of you who are young enough not to know what The Manchurian Candidate is a reference to, it's a film starring Frank Sinatra, who was remade more recently with Denzel Washington. Was it Denzel? I think.
00:23:13
Speaker
I think it was Denzel Washington. Is it Leif Schreiber, or am I thinking... Yeah, I think he was in it as well, but anyway... Yeah, I think Leif Schreiber was the villain as usual. Denzel was the poor Manchurian candidate, which is about a person who is hypnotised and brainwashed, I think, in the original. I think they do a much more techno solution version for the modern remake of the Manchurian candidate.
00:23:36
Speaker
so that they can have a trigger word at which point they will carry out a set of predescribed actions. So they're a sleeper agent without even knowing themselves that they are a sleeper agent. And so Bill Kleiber's hypothesis is that Sirhan Sirhan at some particular point in time
00:23:54
Speaker
was programmed to attack and kill RFK. And this thus explains why Sihan to this day, still alive in federal prison, denies knowing why he did it. So Sihan admits he did it. He admits he fired the shot he was in the room.
00:24:14
Speaker
But he doesn't remember anything about the event and claims that he does understand why he would have committed the event, which would lead to some people, like Kleiber, going, well, obviously, Manchurian candidate.
00:24:28
Speaker
Now Kleber, he's very evidence driven. Whenever he talks about it, he sort of says, you know, if you believe in the, if you want to believe the official version of it that Sirhan Sirhan acted alone, knew what he was doing, then you have to account for all this evidence. You have to account for the extra bullet holes. You have to account for the audio tapes. You have to account for... Oh.
00:24:57
Speaker
What's the other one? I completely lost my train of thought because I was thinking about what I was going to say next, but I forgot to say how to think how I was going to get from here to there. So you're not having access to your brain mates? I'm not quite sure what that third thing was you were thinking of. You've got the physical evidence, the bullet holes, the audio.
00:25:15
Speaker
Oh, maybe I was just thinking of the Piper Godot dress thing which you've already talked about, but the point is he very much says, you know, here are these facts and these facts show that it can't, the official version can't be true. Oh, I suppose actually what you might have been thinking about was the audio testimony, the so-called RFK tapes of Sohan Sohan under hypnosis.
00:25:38
Speaker
acting in really weird ways. That's a bit more nebulous. He very much likes to point to the concrete hard physical evidence stuff. When the two of them have disagreements on the podcast itself, which they do, that's the one that he comes to. The bullet holes, too many bullets. Sorry, that's the one I was thinking of. The powder burns, the discrepancies between...
00:26:03
Speaker
standard versus where the entry points to the wounds. So that was, sorry, that was the other one that I forgot. The coroner's report on what happened talked about the fact that going by powder burns and so on, shots must have been fired from very close range from a certain angle. And witness reports tended to say that Sihan was further away than the autopsy results suggested and on a different angle from what the autopsy results suggested.
00:26:33
Speaker
And so he very much puts the burden of proof on Stuart Pontier all the time. He's always saying, no, you have to prove, you have to account for this evidence if you want to prove that the official version is true. But it never really gets turned around on him because he has to accept that post hypnotic suggestion mentoring candidate stuff is a thing. And that seems like much more of a... Yeah, that seems to be
00:26:57
Speaker
There seems to be the nub of the debate between Zach and Bill, which is Zach admits the evidence is tricky, because I'd say essentially for the first half to almost two thirds of the podcast,
Manchurian Candidate: Sirhan's Role in RFK's Assassination
00:27:12
Speaker
It does look like Stuart Pontier is going to end up agreeing. And then he starts to diverge. You'll get to the divergent quite soon. And also try to work out whether divergent is a real word. I would say divergence, but divergent. It sounds nice. It sounds like a podcaster's guide to the conspiracy words.
00:27:31
Speaker
So yeah, and it does get us into the whole Manchurian candidate hypothesis, which was a much more plausible thing to believe in the 60s, when it was an active research program going on in Russia and in the US, because both sides were basically trying to work out whether it was possible.
00:27:52
Speaker
Not because they necessarily believed it was possible, but they were concerned that, yeah, that the other side might be able to do it. So in the 60s, these kind of experiments were going on. We knew they were going on, as it was plausible to think, well, if they're going on, maybe they've achieved it. But of course, the consensus now, and maybe the consensus as part of the cover-up, is that these experiments were by and large
00:28:18
Speaker
failures, and that these things can't be done. And if they're going to be done, they're going to be done with implants now and even that people go, well, that's actually
00:28:28
Speaker
brains are much more complex thing than people make it out to be. So that's probably not possible as well. So there is this kind of sticking point in the debate that Bill is right. There is awkward evidence with respect to the assassination of RFK that people who accept the official story, which is that Sohan Sohan fired all of the bullets and only Sohan Sohan's gun caused any injuries.
00:28:55
Speaker
has to explain the fact that there appear to be too many bullets and the powder burns are in the wrong location. Although there is a rival hypothesis which is non-conspiratorial, or at least not as conspiratorial, which accounts for a lot of the stuff which we'll get into when the third character in our drama comes into play.
Did RFK's Bodyguards Accidentally Shoot Him?
00:29:16
Speaker
But yes, the mentoring candidate thing is tricky,
00:29:19
Speaker
because it's something which many people go, what's the evidence for the Manchurian candidate hypothesis? This physical evidence is awkward, but we need evidence that Manchurian candidates exist before we can start putting them into our stories. And there is, at one point there is, they play an interview where the hypnotist is talking to Sirhan and
00:29:43
Speaker
and demonstrates implanting a post-apoptotic suggestion and gets him to climb up the side of his cell or something like that. And that's sort of taken as, you know, so look, this is what you can do. You can make a person do anything. But again, that
00:30:02
Speaker
It's not very definite. And I mean, at this stage, if Sirhan Sirhan has already got it in his head that this is how he's going to defend himself, he's going to claim that he wasn't in control of his actions, well, then he'd play along with that. Yeah. And from what we know about hypnosis today, hypnotic states are not so much about being compelled
00:30:25
Speaker
It's a lot more about going along with... It's sort of relaxing you so that you feel more free to do stuff. Yeah. So being more likely to follow a short-term instruction, not so likely to be implanted within the structure. Otherwise, stage hypnotists would be some of the best serial killers of all time. Exactly.
00:30:48
Speaker
But anyway, so you've got these two viewpoints and it's just a bit of a shame really that he doesn't go harder on Kleber about how can you actually have a theory which is based on something that seems to be so almost sort of science fiction. So at this point he starts to, Stuart Pontier is like,
00:31:10
Speaker
I've got this, he makes a compelling case, but then it's a bit hard to know and starts looking for third parties. So the one thing is he looks into the audio evidence when he notes that Kleber claims, look, here's this guy, he's an audio engineer, he knows what he's doing and he's listened to the tapes and he's identified 13 gun shots. So that shows there had to have been a second killer. And then Stuart Pontier says, and here's the police guy who identified eight shots. He looks, well, okay, so hang on.
00:31:40
Speaker
The guy who the police hired had been told there were eight shots, so he was looking for eight shots and found them. The other guy had been told there were more than, you know, had been brought in by conspiracy theorists, had been told to look for more than eight shots and found more than eight shots. They were both
00:31:56
Speaker
you know, looking for a certain thing and ended up finding what they were looking for. So he goes to another guy he knows, an audio engineer who doesn't know anything about the RFK assassination, says, look, here's a tape. How many shots can you find on it? And the guy comes back and says, I found about six and maybe another two.
00:32:13
Speaker
So Stuart Pontier, there is one instance where he goes off looking for something maybe a bit more objective. But then the main thing, he goes and talks to this third party. Dan Moldaya. He is a conspiracy theorist, a contemporary of Bill Clabers.
00:32:32
Speaker
who looked into the RFK. Was quite convinced that there was something very suspicious about the assassination. He was a reporter, was he? I think. Yeah. But in the end, he actually changed his mind. And what's interesting is that he chases down the third option.
00:32:54
Speaker
So the option that Maudea looks at is that Kennedy's bodyguard was armed and in the room.
Dan Moldaya Challenges RFK Conspiracy Theories
00:33:03
Speaker
And so Maudea goes, well, look, if we've got too many bullets, we know there are two people with guns in the room. And we are also in a situation where we know that if someone was firing at the person you're hired to protect, then you're likely to fire back.
00:33:20
Speaker
And he goes, well, this person's standing behind RFK, which means they're in the position where they could have accidentally fired shots into RFK's body. And then, of course, you'd have a cover-up of some kind to cover up the fact that actually wasn't Sihan Sahanu who committed the facial shots, or if he did, there was help accidentally. So maybe the real story here
00:33:46
Speaker
is not a conspiracy to make Suhan Tuhan look like the assassin because he's a patsy for a Manchurian candidate style thing. Maybe the real story here is that actually the bodyguard aided the death
00:34:03
Speaker
And then somehow they covered that particular bit up. And he also looks into some of the other evidence, in particular the bullet holes in the door frame, which people pointed out. A, it's a problem because it appears to show there weren't enough shots in Suhan's gun to have also generated bullet holes in the door frame.
00:34:25
Speaker
But he goes and says, hang on, how do we know? Oh, sorry. And another important thing is they destroyed the door frames. They didn't keep them. They took them. They physically removed them from the room.
00:34:40
Speaker
put them into evidence, but then later destroyed them because they weren't needed or something. And as people have said, you don't do that. You shouldn't just destroy evidence. Evidence gets destroyed all the time once you think you've got a conviction. But the point is, he went and looked into that a bit further and was like, OK, so how do we know there were bullet holes there? Because the police officer says, oh, so it was someone, it was like a forensic
00:35:03
Speaker
person came and did a crime scene, you know, investigation and found these x-runs and he eventually found out that the person who identified these bullet holes was just a regular police officer who happened to be there at the time. With no friends. With no friends at training whatsoever. So saw pock marks and holes in a door frame attributed to them to gunshot impacts
00:35:27
Speaker
And of course, because we don't have the doorframe, we actually now don't know whether those were good identifications or not. The thing is, he also, he goes and interviews the bodyguard. Oh, sorry, I thought you were going to say so hard, but you also don't, but it's the bodyguard. And to interviews the bodyguard, and he presses the bodyguard about his hypothesis, and he becomes convinced the bodyguard isn't lying.
00:35:53
Speaker
and that the bodyguard had nothing to do with the event at all, and then goes, well, because we are no longer sure how many gunshots there actually were, because the doorframe analysis is not good. And I have spoken to this individual, and I find them to be a trustworthy witness in this case.
00:36:15
Speaker
I have to assume that once that's taken off the table, it's quite clear he doesn't have a Manchurian candidate hypothesis as a backup. The only person in the room who could have committed the crime was Sirhan Sirhan. And so he went and he managed to get an interview with Sirhan Sirhan and it's interesting that while Dan Moldaya does change his mind and decide that Sirhan Sirhan did it, the main thing that seemed to convince him is just his sort of personal impression of Sirhan himself and also the bodyguard.
Sirhan's Guilt: Dan Moldea's Perspective
00:36:46
Speaker
Because Sirhan, he always portrayed himself, he always sort of very sort of soft-spoken, polite, sort of gentle basically kind of person who doesn't seem like a sort of a psycho killer. But there were, for instance, letters that he's written that have been found where he quite aggressively threatens people who have been saying things about him suggesting that he was just a murderer basically.
00:37:11
Speaker
And then supposedly when Dan Moldea interviewed Suhan and pressed him a bunch, eventually Suhan became quite aggressive towards him and started swearing at him and telling him, you know, telling him to shut up and stop talking about this stuff. And so it was at that point he just said, okay, no, this guy's a killer. I believe he did it.
00:37:28
Speaker
And of course, Kleiber is aware of this and sort of viewed him as a little bit of a traitor, a little bit of a seller. He just sort of seemed disappointed, I guess. Yeah. In the same way, he becomes disappointed with Zach Stuart and Pontier for not siding with him in this particular debate.
00:37:46
Speaker
So I think that's most of the interplay there. Once again, I really recommend you do go and listen to these. And listen to the extra episodes as well, because there's one which is a debate between Dan Moldaya and Bill Clyber, which is really quite fascinating to listen to. There's one where Clyber goes through the evidence he feels they didn't talk about properly.
00:38:12
Speaker
During the series and speaking as someone who is interested in evidence into play Actually quite a first thing to see what he takes to be good evidence versus bad and then of course there's an episode where's actually at Pontier and his co-host from a previous podcast
00:38:32
Speaker
who was the producer for this particular podcast, talk about the things which they didn't get to go into, which they found fascinating. So it's quite a fascinating story because they also delve into what wasn't covered in the main series itself. Yeah, so we hardly recommend it. Any closing thoughts?
00:38:54
Speaker
I just thought it was really fascinating to have two people with, at the end, quite divergent viewpoints. But going in with a kind of spirit of enquiry and working together,
00:39:08
Speaker
to find out what really happened there. I think it is interesting you point out that Stewart Pointier doesn't really ever push back on Bill Clyber. And I think that's in part because initially, Zach goes in, going, I want to find out what's going on here. Here's my expert guide. I'll be guided by them. And as soon as there is a little bit of pushback there,
00:39:34
Speaker
Bill Club is not happy, not happy at all, with there being resistance to the way he wants the story to be told. I mean, even if you're not interested in assassinations and assassination conspiracy theoreals, although while you're listening to this podcast.
Hosts' Interplay and Conspiratorial Evidence Impact
00:39:52
Speaker
Yeah, that job, you must really love the banter.
00:39:56
Speaker
Even if you're not interested in that sort of thing, just the interplay between a conspiracy theorist and a person who sort of goes in with an open mind and possibly becomes more sceptical and just the journey because I mean, you know, we've sort of summarised the
00:40:11
Speaker
the details there, but as this, just listening to the whole series as it progresses and as he, as you say, firstly, defers to Claber as an expert, but then the more he finds out himself, the more he comes to doubt this expert. And so things become, you know, they're never nasty, but they do get noticeably more tense as it goes. So just sort of in terms of interplay between two interesting human beings. It was a very interesting thing to listen to. I have one more thing. Too much advertising.
00:40:38
Speaker
Every episode was brought to you by five minutes worth of advertising. This episode brought to you by Blue Apron, which is also brought to you by Harry's Raisers. They like their raisers so much, they bought the factory. And here's a personal loan thing. And are you thinking about trading stocks? There's an app on your phone, which allows you to get a free Apple stock. And it's just... Yes. Unfortunately, I think that's the world we live in. We don't like to pay for our information, so we have to pay for it.
00:41:06
Speaker
We just have a very small number of patrons who give us just enough to cover costs. Yes, which is nice. Although if you do want to give us more money, I'm not saying to the patrons, thank you patrons. If you want to become a patron and help give money so that we aren't sponsored by Blue Apron or a mattress company or a razor blade factory in Germany, which presumably is working on some kind of weird labor thing, give us some money. Yeah.
00:41:35
Speaker
We'll stay ad free for you. And also because we like it this way. Well, yes, it is a lot nicer. But anyway, that is the RFK tapes. That is the end of the main content of this episode. So I believe it is on to the news. Yes, let's footlong our way into the news. Breaking, breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:42:01
Speaker
Now I'm not sure we've ever really talked about Max Spears, maybe only in passing. But his death on July the 16th, 2016 led to a number of conspiracy theories. Spears was a UK conspiracy theorist who, among other things, believed he'd been altered as a child to become a super soldier with supernatural powers. In July of 2016, he was visiting Warsaw. On the 16th, he collapsed on a sofa and could not be revived medically.
00:42:30
Speaker
His death was not reported to the authorities until August, at which point his body had already been returned to the UK. As such, Polish authorities could not perform an autopsy to ascertain the cause of death. As you can imagine, a conspiracy theorist dying in strange circumstances in a foreign place with no associated autopsy led to questions about whether he had been killed, and what didn't the authorities want people to find out?
00:42:59
Speaker
These questions so concern the British authorities that they opened an inquest, which produced its findings on the 7th of January this year. The conclusion? Spears died of an overdose and due to complications due to pneumonia. So a tragic but seemingly unconspiratorial end, or I guess that's what they want you to think.
00:43:23
Speaker
Indeed. Thoughts on that? Is that the same guy who died and was supposedly sort of vomiting up black stuff and something overseas? Oh yeah, there was some talk at the time. No, I'm fairly sure that was Max Beers, because it's a UFO-related thing. Yeah, so we've mentioned it, but yeah, nice to see you. But only really in passing.
00:43:46
Speaker
Moving on, back in episode 165, which was really episode 166, we talked about the US Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was their UFO hunting program that ran from 2007 to 2012.
00:44:04
Speaker
Well now, a more recent Freedom of Information query has revealed an interesting list of other research projects that the DoD has funded. With titles like Inertial Electrostatic Confinement Fusion, Positron Aerospace Propulsion, Invisibility Cloking, and Traversable Wormholes, Stargates and Negative Energy, it certainly seems like the Pentagon is keen to investigate all sorts of science fiction sounding concepts, if only to ensure that their competitors don't get an advantage over them. Sort of the...
00:44:34
Speaker
The Russia mind control thing. Yeah, the mind control stuff we talked about in the main part. People are willing to investigate all sorts of stuff just in case it turns out to be real so that their adversaries don't get one up on them. And actually something we didn't mention when we were talking about the RFK tapes in the mind control experiments. So people were useless as evidence of, well look, they were investigating these things, they were pouring money into it, ipso facto, there must be something to it.
00:44:59
Speaker
When you actually look at the amount of money the Americans spent on things like mind control experiments, the Stargate program and the like, actually feely small budgets. So they're going, we're taking apart because there's a possibility something will come out of this.
00:45:17
Speaker
But we're not going to spend the money we would spend, say, on a fighter jet. So you get to do a project on doing remote viewing out at a ranch in Arizona. You're not going to be funded much. But we're going to give you a bit of money, because if there's some promise, we'll fund more. But they didn't actually spend that much money on these things, as I think is also true with this stuff. They're not pouring billions in. They're pouring tens of thousands. Well, I think it was a little bit
00:45:44
Speaker
There's a little bit more than that. I mean, small beans for the Defense Department are still insane. It wasn't at the Pentagon last year who had failed to account for like billions of dollars there. There are operating expenses, which the Pentagon can't explain. Yes. But the article in which I read this 10 to 1000 is probably may low
00:46:05
Speaker
bawling it, because we live in Attaro, New Zealand, where we don't even spend billions on our military forces, let alone tens of billions or trillions. In the article that I first read this, there was sort of the comment that this does sort of show that you can get money out of the Defense Department for just about anything. And they seem to think that it was irrational to be spending, I guess, any amount of money. But anyway, yes.
00:46:32
Speaker
Pop culture news time. Though they may have found Glenn Miller's plane. Glenn Miller, for those of you not up to date on your big bang music, was a band leader in the 40s who disappeared heading from the UK to Europe during the war.
00:46:50
Speaker
His plane was never found, and like many missing celebrities, people have tried to find his remains while speculating on what really happened that fateful night. Well, now they have an idea of where the plane crashed into the ocean because, in shape of our MH370 story from last week, someone was out fishing at the time and said they saw the plane come down. They even noted down the coordinates at the time. So that's exciting.
00:47:19
Speaker
However, the part that concerns us is the claims about Miller's disappearance being kept deliberately quiet and the search stopped because it was thought that the plane was brought down by friendly fire or possibly even hit by unused bombs dropped by Allied planes returning from bombing runs over Germany.
00:47:41
Speaker
And not just that, even the Nazis were conspiracy theorising about the disappearance of Glenn Miller. They at one time claimed he'd made it to Paris and died there due to a heart attack whilst he was visiting a prostitute in a Parisian bordello. The crash the Nazis said was just a cover story.
00:48:03
Speaker
Well, I do like a good bit of celebrity disappearance conspiracy theory. With a Nazi tinge. With a Nazi tinge in Parisian bordello is all the better. Yeah. But yes, unfortunately, 40s big band music is not my jam. So Glenn Miller is not something I know much about. But I mean, the whole friendly fire thing is something we've seen before, hasn't it? It tends to suggestions that things were covering up friendly fire incidents. And what was the one? What was the big ship?
00:48:32
Speaker
the Louisiana, that's the one. Yeah, which was that, that wasn't suggested it was friendly fire, but suggested that they allowed it to be targeted by the Germans. Well, I think the normal story was, because it was a passenger liner, the same story was it was misidentified as a military ship. But yes, there is a theory going around that they quite deliberately let the Germans make that attack as a pretense for the Americans after the war.
00:49:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:03
Speaker
So many conspiracy theories about pretenses to get the Americans. Why are the Americans just so disinclined? I mean, these days they go into wars willy and nilly. I mean, they're going to invade Venezuela next. But in the 40s, so disinclined to get involved in a war. What's changed, America? What has changed? Used to be cool, America. Damn, America's still cool. That's where all the pop culture comes from. Like all the pop culture. What about Dr. Who? Except for Olivia Colman and Dr. Who, yes.
00:49:33
Speaker
But anyway, I believe we've reached the end of an episode. We have. Of course, there is patron bonus content coming up. For those of you who give us a dollar a month or so, you'll be hearing about Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson's new Get Rich scheme. You'll find out why Nazis love NASA, and you'll also find out about the curious connection between Alice Walker and David Icke.
00:49:59
Speaker
But for the rest of you, here is where we part ways until next week. This episode will probably be reaching you slightly later than usual episodes. Because we're recording it slightly later than usual episodes, so it will be reaching you slightly later. There's no maybe about it. On account of my head cold, taking out my voice for a good three days or so. Actually, it's still just a little bit...
00:50:23
Speaker
A little bit correctly now, but prior to this, on our usual recording day, it was basically a Billy Audible crook.
00:50:33
Speaker
which would have actually made adjusting the levels on this thing really, really awkward. So next week's episode, unless one of us is struck down by something else, who knows what, maybe your will instead be the one who's all hoarse, probably on account of screaming, you fool, you fool, you've killed us all at me or anyone else in your vicinity.
00:50:54
Speaker
It's true, I do scream that a lot. It does. But until then, I guess it is merely time to say adieu, as the fridge say. And la riva dire, as my Romanian colleagues would say. And goodbye, I guess. See you in hell.
00:51:18
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:52:19
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December was a night.