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The Final Episode on "Tunnel Vision"
340 Plays6 days ago
This is definitely the last time we'll talk about Martin Butler's book "Tunnel Vision" and the conspiracy theories it contains. We don't have a problem - we can stop any time we want! Or can we...?
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Transcript
Introduction & Host's Departure
00:00:01
Speaker
Coming up in this week's episode of the podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy. yeah listeners can go to hell. That's always been my official position. Oh, hold on. There's something at the door. I'll be back. What, as far as you know, is my own urine? Worse than a fish? Tell me about mustard gas.
00:00:18
Speaker
Oh, God, Grandma's on about the songs again. Somebody get a medicine. Christ.
Updates from Im
00:00:24
Speaker
Plus, Im updates us on their most recent work. I call upon thee, Satan, the curse reviewer bee. Tano koros irabari andos.
00:00:34
Speaker
But now, the theme music.
Meet the Hosts
00:01:04
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and in Guangzhou, China, they are Dr M Denteth. It's part three.
Book Review: Part Three
00:01:14
Speaker
Part three of a book review. There will not be a part four.
00:01:17
Speaker
and I'm saying that now. If we're taking too long, I'm just going to skip right to the end. You know I've pulled out surprises in the past. Who knows what surprise I might pull out at the end of this episode. yeah Whatever, it won't be what be enough.
00:01:33
Speaker
if it's If you try to stick a fourth a fourth episode of this on, there will be violence. Somehow. I know we're in different hemispheres of the planet right now, but I'll think of something.
00:01:45
Speaker
Well, and I mean, I might be in the same hemisphere as you. Oh, that's right. You might. It's not
Book Edition Confusions
00:01:52
Speaker
official yet in the sense that I haven't seen plane tickets, but it's pretty much official.
00:01:57
Speaker
I'm spending half of July, the latter half, And the first half of August, because they they connect. That's how it's how calendars work. The end of July merges with the beginning of August to form a kind of unified timeline. But I'm going be down in Otago in Dunedin of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:02:19
Speaker
spending a month as a visiting fellow at the University of Otago, but which means that Charles Pigden and and i will be hanging out and at this stage I'll be helping him co-teach a class on conspiracy theories. So it's all rather exciting and it does mean that come the end of August, or at least as we're approaching the end end of August, I'm likely to pop up to Auckland for a few days and then Josh can slap me with a fish as is his want. Yes, yeah, obviously I was going to do that anyway, but if you try to chuck some more of this material at me, I'll slap you with something more worse than a fish.
00:02:59
Speaker
Two fish. Worse than a fish? Mm-hmm. um
Tunnel Vision & North Head Discussion
00:03:02
Speaker
I mean, no one's ever contemplated something worse than a fish before. This two-fish gambit, it's going somewhere. But that's for the future, and it's not the future, it's now.
00:03:12
Speaker
Funny how that works out. And now, we are once again going to talk about the book Tunnel Vision by Martin Butler and all its various guises and additions, just as soon as one of us plays chime.
00:03:31
Speaker
Right, so where were we? We were talking about the book Tunnel Vision, editions 1, 2, and by Martin Butler, who thinks there are hidden tunnels underneath North Head, the military base in North Head and Devonport in Auckland in New Zealand.
00:03:51
Speaker
He thinks inside these hidden tunnels there may be relics of New Zealand's early aviation history in the form of a couple of boeing yeah well disassembled Boeing aircraft and also thinks there might be unexploded ammunition sealed away there by the army for reasons unknown.
00:04:09
Speaker
He has previously gone over the history of aviation in New Zealand, the history of the military base at North Head. ah He's gone over the history of investigations looking for hidden tunnels in North Head. He's gone over the court case that resulted from one of these investigations and the investigation by the Department of Conservation that came out of that court case.
00:04:32
Speaker
He's gone through all of that. he's he's He's gone through a whole bunch of different witness statements that came up during that that investigation, which we spent a fair amount of time having a look at last week. And finally...
00:04:46
Speaker
Having exhausted Not last week, last fortnight. Last episode. And finally, having exhausted all all other avenues, he's basically gone back to doing his own research. Now, where we are in my copy of the book is up to chapter nine.
00:04:59
Speaker
But I believe in between what my one calls chapter nine and and what we just looked at, you have a couple of extra chapters in your and your magical later editions.
00:05:10
Speaker
Yes, so last episode we looked at my Chapter 9, which is the additional episode, ah additional episodes chapter, the additional evidence chapter, which is actually your Chapter 10.
00:05:25
Speaker
So basically when we get to your Chapter 10, we actually covered it in my Chapter 10, because my Chapter 10 is an expanded version of your Chapter 10, which makes it very confusing because we are still stuck all the way back in my chapter 10, which comes before your chapter 9. Now, are you following me, or do you need a a chart of something? I'm following you because I have a physical copy of this book directly next to me that I've spent a fair bit of time looking at. Listeners may be very confused. Our listeners can go to hell.
00:05:55
Speaker
yeah That's always been my official position. doesn't really exist in the earlier edition. So in the first editions, in editions two and three, because as discussed in the first episode of the series, editions two and three are basically identical right down to the pagination.
00:06:16
Speaker
Except for the existence of a mysterious section at the end called 16 Which I'm fairly sure is meant to be chapter 16, but isn't called a chapter And is also written in a way that doesn't really feel like a chapter It feels like an appendix of some kind But here we are, in editions 2 and 3, in chapter 10, subtitle World War 2 Which is obviously the sequel to World War 1 That was, yes, bigger budget as I recall. and and actually And actually, what are those few cases where the villain in the sequel really outclasses the villain in the prequel? Yes, now they did well for themselves.
00:06:59
Speaker
So I assume this isn't talking it's having made light of both the the First World War and the Second World War. Let's talk about the role of North Head in that conflict. Yeah, I assume and like like like World War II was not fought in New Zealand at any point, although, of course, our soldiers we even fought overseas.
00:07:18
Speaker
So what was happening then back in Devonport during World War two Well, this is where Butler thinks there's a mystery, because he finds that the official opinions of North Head differ depending on their sources when it comes to the role of that fort during the Second World War.
00:07:38
Speaker
Now, he takes it as a mystery. I think he's kind of overstating things because he's taking to be what he takes to be official opinions, ah in some cases, simply the way that people have told their own versions of the history of the fort on North Head during the Second World War.
00:08:01
Speaker
So he takes of that the Historic Places Trust, which looks after historic places in New Zealand, and I don't believe is a governmental entity.
00:08:12
Speaker
It's a non-governmental organisation that basically plays a role in preserving the history of historic places in Aotearoa, New Zealand, but acts independently of the government.
00:08:25
Speaker
Their view on North Head basically you can be summarized as North Head is the best. They talk about the importance of North Head during World War II.
00:08:36
Speaker
Now, the Department of Conservation, which of course did all of the archaeological investigations into North Head, and actually collated a lot of previously undiscovered or at least not really comprehensively understood historical material about North Head.
00:08:54
Speaker
When they talk about North Head, they go, well, look, North Head was okay. It was an important administrative center. During World War II, it played its part in the organisation of a potential defence of the country had the war ever got to this particular part of the South Pacific.
00:09:14
Speaker
But it wasn't the biggest and the best fort in the world. It was a ah fort built cheaply and had a surprising number of limitations given the role it was going to eventually play.
00:09:27
Speaker
And his third official opinion is the judgment of Justice Sean Elias, who, of course, was the person who went through and was the judge in the court case between John Earnshaw and the Crown about the aborted military investigation of North Head that occurred before the Department of Conservation investigation.
00:09:50
Speaker
And in the judgment of Justice Elias, North Head was basically just an administrative center during World War II and not much else. So you have the historic places try to go, look, North Head is great.
00:10:04
Speaker
The Department of Conservation going, well, you know, North Head's pretty okay. And then Justice Elias going, well, you know, North Head, it was nothing special. And
Eyewitness Credibility & Military Practices
00:10:12
Speaker
he takes it that these are official opinions, and given that they are official opinions and they're in contention with one another,
00:10:21
Speaker
then that means that someone is trying to skew the history of North Head and thus in that skewing possibly cloud or occlude exactly what was happening at North Head at that time. Right, so we're just doing the thing again, are we, of pointing out inconsistencies as though to suggest something weird is going on or something has been covered up, but but he doesn't sound like he's actually offering much like if evidence. Yeah.
00:10:50
Speaker
of of anything much at this point. I mean, but he does he does bring another argument to bear here. And this is actually quite an interesting argument.
00:11:01
Speaker
So... The first half of the chapter, which is 17 pages in length, is a potted overview of the role that North Head played in World War So it talks about the different commanders that were there, the different jurisdictions those commanders had. And this leads to Butler making the claim that, look, what we can see on North Head, and ato and that's what we can see now,
00:11:32
Speaker
and including what we could see on North Head from the official photos of the time, means that the facilities that were visible and people were able to describe as part of the official record don't appear to be up to the tasks required for the different commanders who were doing their jobs on North hat Head at the time.
00:11:55
Speaker
So he goes, it's just inconceivable that that a command structure that's been used for one element of command, which was quite small, would be shared by an additional commander, let alone a third. just go look There isn't you aren't enough structures to fit the number of people doing the kind of jobs they're meant to do.
00:12:16
Speaker
And he goes, and here's my smoking gun. We have official manuals that were produced by the War Office at the time, which describes how facilities should be built, and North Head doesn't match the kind of facility that should have been built if people were building a facility according to the official regulations.
00:12:42
Speaker
but So again, that doesn't sound like a lot to go on Simply, we have this manual and what's at North Head doesn't look like what they say to do in the manual. But I mean, does that mean anything? is it is it inconceivable that people wouldn't have followed the instructions in this manual?
00:13:02
Speaker
Well, if you recall going all the way back to our first episode, Butler finds it inconceivable that people wouldn't follow the chain of command. So when he talks about things being burnt or things being destroyed on beaches, he goes, well, it's inconceivable that a Lieutenant like Salt would do something without getting written permission from his superiors.
00:13:27
Speaker
And the fact there is no evidence of that permission indicates that Salt couldn't have done the thing that he said to have done. And so he's applying the same kind of argument here, which is if the manual says you build a fort in this particular way, then you build that fort in that particular way. Let me give you a quote.
00:13:48
Speaker
ah So here he's talking about the situation on North Head. According to the experts, the 9th Heavy Coast Regiment headquarters was located above ground and without any supporting infrastructure or a dedicated communications facility.
00:14:04
Speaker
This situation was contrary to the accepted military practice during World War II and unbelievable when considering the strategic importance of North Head.
00:14:16
Speaker
Wherever possible, New Zealand complied with the structures and configuration of defence as outlined in the manuals of the British Commonwealth.
00:14:26
Speaker
These documents describe the requirements for coastal fortification against attack. It is noteworthy that the requirement for the fortress plotting room was as follows. The building will normally be underground, will be supplied with filtered air as a protection against gas, and will be proof against 16-inch shell attack or the equivalent.
00:14:50
Speaker
Right, so normally underground. But the other thing which sticks out, which is wherever possible. Yes, that does seem to be doing a bit of work there. Yes, and herein lies issue. One thing which doesn't get discussed in this book at all is the fact that the fort on North Head...
00:15:10
Speaker
was built on the cheap. I mean, we know quite a lot about the building of the fort, the architect of the fort, and the processes by which the building materials were brought to Devonport and then used to build the fort.
00:15:27
Speaker
So we know that it wasn't a particularly expensive fortification. The reason why they did cut and cover, as opposed to digging tunnels into the welded scoria of Monoica, is for the sheer fact that they were trying to build the fort as cheaply as possible.
00:15:45
Speaker
And this isn't discussed here. So Butler is just ignoring the fact that there is historical discussion and about why this fort doesn't fit the requirements at the time.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose it could make sense that things weren't done as scrupulously as possible all the way over on the other side of the planet. The arse end of the Commonwealth. Yeah, I mean, for us, it's an important country and for the politicians people, of course, very important, but to the British.
00:16:13
Speaker
We were the arse end of the world. I mean, we've talked about the Kaskawiski incident on this podcast before. they the And for listeners who aren't aware of this, a hoax story which appeared an Auckland newspaper at the end of the nineteenth century,
00:16:34
Speaker
where it was implied that a Russian ironclad had sailed into the Waitemata, the harbour in the centre of Auckland, and held the Auckland Council to ransom.
00:16:49
Speaker
This hoax story was basically written to
Conspiracy Theories Explored
00:16:52
Speaker
show to the people of Auckland that the city council didn't have their best interests at heart, but also was written to point out that if such an event was ever to occur, there was no defense to come from the United Kingdom, which was in charge of the country at the time, because there was no British naval presence in the South Pacific at that time.
00:17:16
Speaker
The British ordered the New Zealand government to fortify the country in the build-up to the Prussian scare, World War I and World War II. But they weren't particularly interested in doing anything to ensure that we fortified properly.
00:17:32
Speaker
And we've always been low-income economy since year dot, basically, compared to our... Supposed neighbors in the north.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yes, the fact that he doesn't seem to consider um okay so so where does he go from there? Well without citing sources he estimates that around about 300 people worked at the fort. So he just keeps on adding in things to go the structures on North Head don't match how North Head should have been provided for as an active military fort.
00:18:09
Speaker
So he goes, look, he estimates 300 people worked at the fort. He doesn't cite his sources here, so it's just a number which appears. And he goes, about 140 of those were working on defensive like equipment.
00:18:22
Speaker
He goes, well, look, if there are 300 people working at the fort, there's not enough cover or protection for all of them. if the surface structures are where they're meant to take cover in terms of an attack.
00:18:38
Speaker
So once again, that is very suggestive. That may be, that well, not maybe, there must have been other structures for these people to be able to go into should the fort come into attack.
00:18:52
Speaker
So his entire argument basically is North Head doesn't follow the manual for a command center. It doesn't have enough facilities for the number of people estimated to work there.
00:19:04
Speaker
And thus it is inconceivable that the structures on North Head as we know them today, and according to the photographic record we have, is sufficient for the role North Head played in World War II.
00:19:21
Speaker
Okay, and I mean, are we just supposed to infer from that that because there don't seem to be enough above-ground structures, that means there must have been a whole bunch more underground that we don't know about?
00:19:34
Speaker
is that like is that where he's going? Well, so here and so because we're now talking about a version of the book which is kind of ducking and diving away from the version of the book that you have read, he does bring up the ammunition stuff in this chapter. Okay.
00:19:50
Speaker
Because his other argument here is that, look, North Head would have been an ideal underground ammunition depot. Now, some of his arguments here aren't bad.
00:20:03
Speaker
There is some weird slash missing history with respect to what ammunition depots we had during World War II and where the ammunition was kept.
00:20:15
Speaker
So there's a kind of lacuna here as to exactly how many depots were in action, where were they were located, etc etc., etc., which once again I think speaks to the fact that there's some really bad record-keeping by the military here, which Butler seems to find inconceivable when it comes to North Head-related stuff, but is willing to accept when it comes to non-North Head-related military records.
00:20:43
Speaker
And he also points out it would make sense to have separate facilities for ammunition storage just for redundancy, say. You don't want to keep all your ammunition in one particular location because if that gets shelled, that's a really, really bad situation.
00:20:59
Speaker
So you want to have more than one depot. But this all seems like an argument which is designed to make sense of the eyewitness testimony he's already provided rather than an argument that works to kind of give independent reason for believing the eyewitness testimony to be true.
00:21:18
Speaker
So because the eyewitnesses talk about ammunition being inside the head, he needs to find an argument show, a look, there's a reason why it would be there, as opposed to finding an independent reason to go, oh, this this by chance also supports the eyewitness testimony.
00:21:35
Speaker
Right. ah Is that it then? is it just a no No. No, there are there are theres two minor points that need to be talked about. The first is one of those things where, as I said, he's he's happy for military history to be incomplete in non-North Head cases.
00:21:56
Speaker
but is very concerned about incomplete military history in the North Head case. so So he's really fixated on the idea that records have been destroyed or not kept, or possibly in some cases records were never made in the first place.
00:22:12
Speaker
There's no discussion as to whether this is weird or not, which is to say there's no discussion ah about whether the military history of north Head history being incomplete is somehow different for other fortifications in Aotearoa New Zealand at the time.
00:22:31
Speaker
Because if it turns out the North Head case is unique, that everywhere else has a complete historical record with no gaps, then the North Head case looks weird. But if the North Head case is kind of consistent with other military fortifications in Aotearoa at the same time,
00:22:49
Speaker
then maybe it's not as unusual as Butler wants to make it out. And if that's the case, then his insistence on people should be following the chain of command, they should be following the official manual, also begins to kind of collapse there.
00:23:06
Speaker
So that's one point I think that he kind of doesn't realize he's kind of accidentally making here. The other point is that, as we saw in previous chapters, he makes a really big thing about the idea. There's a period of time before World War II where convicts could have built a tunnel structure.
00:23:29
Speaker
inside north head in this chapter he talks about how the us s forces arrive in auckland after the bombing of pearl harbor and how they have mining expertise so in this chapter he now seems to think that it's miners in 1939 who are building the tunnel structure as opposed to the convicts he heavily suggested were responsible for building the the hidden tunnel complex in earlier chapters so he seems not to have it both ways the convicts built it and if they didn't build it the mining expertise that arose in 1939 with american troops being on the ground here that gives them the expertise to build this tunnel structure instead
00:24:17
Speaker
Right, so just coming up with a bunch of possibilities, which has seems to have been the theme a little bit all the way through. It's always been it's possible that this could have happened, or it's possible that it might have gone down like this.
00:24:30
Speaker
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more. So we then go on to what is my chapter 9, what I assume is your chapter 11, Return to the Torpedo Yard? Is that how it goes for you? I mean, yeah, kind of. Sort of. It gets very confusing at at this point because we'll be going to going back to chapter...
00:24:50
Speaker
Chapter 12. Let's just say the next chapter, whatever it is. So the next chapter for me is Return to the Torpedo Yard. And this will, this does cover some of the stuff that you've already talked about and in these extra ones. So we we can skip over some of it quickly. But basically at this point in the first book, he said there's been not all these investigations that haven't found any hidden tunnels at North Head.
00:25:10
Speaker
um and But there still has his doubts that maybe these investigations didn't quite do things properly. But he says there haven't really been investigations of Torpedo Yard. So maybe there would be an you could find an entrance to these tunnels there.
00:25:22
Speaker
This was the chapter where I noticed him starting to become like overtly conspiratorial. he's He's talked about the idea that you know maybe maybe stuff has been covered up here in the past, but he really does start saying things like... um If a tunnel system does exist under North Head, the witnesses say that the physical evidence was obliterated in the 1970s, and by inference, the camouflaging of the entry points was conducted in such a thorough manner that no evidence remains today.
00:25:48
Speaker
However, no cover cover-up can be that thorough. And a little bit later, in fact, he also says the fact that there have been five investigations that failed to find a single tunnel entrance also signifies that either they do not exist, or there has been a conspiracy to hide them.
00:26:02
Speaker
This idea of camouflaging the entry points is is quite, he he he just kind of drops the word in really, but the idea that not only did they close up these tunnels, they didn't brick them up or or block the entrances, but that they then somehow reconstructed them so as to make them look like natural rock face instead of being something, you know, to make it look like there was never a tunnel there in the first place. That's quite an elaborate idea.
00:26:27
Speaker
thing to do, and of course a very deliberate thing you'd want to do if you were hiding a secret, basically. And yet several of the eyewitness statements we saw in that earlier chapter kind of ridicule this idea of, look, then we we could even see a case where there are train tracks running into a wall.
00:26:48
Speaker
So on one hand, he wants to go, well, look, they're quite good at hiding things. the entrances to these tunnels.
Review of Book's Conspiracy Claims
00:26:55
Speaker
On the ah other hand, they seem to have done a really slapdash job of at least one obvious prospective tunnel entrance on North Head.
00:27:05
Speaker
Once again, trying to have it both ways. Yeah, gets a bit more confusing later too. I mean, the the next bit in this chapter is stuff that we've already spoken about where he talks about how there could have been, there was there was this time in history when it was possible to use this convict labor force to have built these trees. That time history, Josh, being 1888 1914.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yes, which is if you recall, as he it directly contradicts what Judge Elias found in the ruling, where there was never a point when there was both an available labor force and a need for more works.
00:27:40
Speaker
Although I guess you could round that by saying no official need for more works, but there was a secret need for the most. Yeah, the hidden tunnel complex. You to tell the public about your hidden tunnel complex. So he goes there, which you've already talked about. He goes about the sewer tunnel that you mentioned last episode as being the fact that the sewer tunnel exists going underneath North Head and was built around that time shows that there was you know there was at least...
00:28:02
Speaker
the expertise, or if you're going to say it was it was impossible to have done a tunnel like that at this time, you can say, well, no, it was possible because they did the sewer tunnel, even though there isn't evidence that we're written there were any other ones.
00:28:14
Speaker
Again, he suggests that a lack of archival records are around from around this time means there was document documentation at one point, but it quote-unquote went missing.
00:28:26
Speaker
ah But then he talks about these, get look look, gets ah more witness accounts. He looks at these um statements about tunnels going from Torpedo Bay up into North Head. And according to the witness statements, he talks that there were two entrances, one from a cavern and one from the Torpedo Bay Depot.
00:28:44
Speaker
um One of these witness statements, again, talks about the idea that this tunnel entrance from a cavern has since been blocked off and camouflaged so that it now looks like an ordinary cliff face. I don't even know how you do that.
00:28:55
Speaker
like Well, i mean I mean, Josh, if I were doing it, I would i would concrete over the tunnel in entrance and then cause a small explosion to cause the cliff face to kind of collapse over the top. You've seen enough action films. It happens all the time. i supposed Anyway...
00:29:10
Speaker
um So he says the other entrance is supposedly where the Carpenter's Shop building is now, and suggesting that that building is hiding the entrance. And he says that the 1980 investigation that looked around here didn't look at this particular wall.
00:29:25
Speaker
So again, there's room for stuff to go on. He talks about ah report from 1988 that... which mentioned a quote-unquote cavern, and that this cavern wasn't mentioned in the in the DOC report in 1992 to 1994, which did not make any sense to me at all. if he wants to that That's implying that there was a cavern in 1988 and that wasn't then there in 1992, suggesting that some sort of cover-up had happened between those points, but the cover-up was meant to have happened back in the nineteen seventy s so i don't...
00:29:57
Speaker
I really, he kind of lost me a little bit there. He's just sort of saying, pointing out discrepancies again. this This thing said a thing is here and then this other thing said it wasn't. but doesn't... um Yeah, he he' he he thinks he's found a contradiction, but even if it's true, it doesn't seem to make sense.
00:30:15
Speaker
So, to my mind, the tunnel at Torpedo Bay, or tor Torpedo Yard, the military installation at Torpedo Bay, is the most plausible part of the story here, in that there does seem to be quite a lot of independent witness statements from serving military personnel, saying, look, there was...
00:30:37
Speaker
a tunnel or cavern cut into the hill or available, it may have been a natural cavern that was accessible to the people at Torpedo Yard, which doesn't appear to be there now.
00:30:53
Speaker
And it might be one of those things which has been lost with time, maybe it was bricked up, maybe it collapsed and it was kind of landscaped to make the hillside look nice again. But he can't help himself because...
00:31:06
Speaker
Because this cavern is described in multiple ways, he kind of replicates it. He takes different descriptions to indicate that it must be two caverns, not one.
00:31:18
Speaker
When the more plausible interpretation is, well, there was... There was cavern in the hillside, which is not available now. It gets described by different people at different times in slightly different ways.
00:31:32
Speaker
But the more plausible theory is there's one cavern which has gone missing, as opposed to, no, the military's hiding multiple caverns in Torpedo Yard.
00:31:43
Speaker
So, once again, something which is plausible, he can't help but picket the evidence to make it look bigger and grander. Well, that's that's my that's my chapter nine.
00:31:58
Speaker
Shall we move on to my chapter 10? Yes, which we kind of covered last week with My Chapter 9. Yes, I was going to say. It's the same title, The Additional Evidence. I just had additional, additional evidence in mind.
00:32:14
Speaker
Yes, so My Chapter 10 is the same story we talked about last week where Mr Butler was looking for another possible tunnel the entrance, which was the the observation post that would have been there back when They had the plan to string mines across the Waitematฤ harbour.
00:32:31
Speaker
he He works out where it is. He talks to the owners of the property, we he thinks it should be, and they say that, yes, there was when they were when they were looking to build on it. They did find a concrete structure that they thought was a water tank, and it's since been destroyed. Now, it didn't have โ when you talked about this last time โ you made there There was some comment around the fact that they had actually spoken to Doc or someone like that who said, no, no, no, it's fine, you can destroy it.
00:33:00
Speaker
Whereas in the first edition, he simply says it had been destroyed. So I guess he didn't have that angle on it at that point. yeah I mean, he may not have known about the communication between the Department of Conservation or knew there was communication with the Department of Conservation, um but didn't have the full detail. Because as you'll recall, when I discussed that in the last episode, he doesn't mention Dave Wirt's name. He simply says the chief ah the chief archaeologist, who I believe at the time was Dave Wirt.
00:33:33
Speaker
So that certainly makes it sound a little more um more conspiratorial when you have that extra little nugget to go with it. ah But then, yes, he talks a bit again talks a bit more about the carpenter's shop. Supposedly radar scans showed a space behind the carpenter's shop, but no one's ever looked into it.
00:33:50
Speaker
But he leaves that there because he's going to be talking about radar scans later. ah The main impression I got from this chapter and the one before it is that, if you recall, at the end, when when he finished talking about the investigation and Judge Elias' ruling and everything, he said he had at the time, quote, unquantifiable misgivings about the DOC investigation, which to me basically read like, well, it didn't come up with the answer the answers I wanted, so therefore there must be something wrong with it.
00:34:18
Speaker
but he couldn't put his finger on it. By the end of this one, he seems to have managed to put his finger on what he thinks was wrong about the Dock investigation, and it seems to be largely that they didn't look around torpedo yard and around the carpenter's shop, which he seems to think is the best spot to find the entrance to a hidden tunnel.
00:34:34
Speaker
now Does your book have a chapter called the Conspiracy? My book has a chapter called A Cover-Up? Yes, because my next chapter is called The Conspiracy. So you you talk about your one. I'm interested to see. i suspect I suspect they're going to overlap at this point. Well, yes, my next chapter is The is a and is the Conspiracy.
00:34:58
Speaker
But first we get cover-up, then a conspiracy. Right. Well, so you give me the cover-up and then I'll look at The Conspiracy. Well, we'll both look at the conspiracy together. Let's let's let's ah let'sot let's not leave me out of the conspiracy, Josh. I mean, I wrote an entire degree on these things.
00:35:14
Speaker
So, yeah, chapter 12 in the second and third edition is called a cover-up question mark, which you'd know from a New Zealand accent because we just went, a cover-up, but also we'd simply say a cover-up with an exclamation mark in the same way. So, frankly, it's very confusing.
00:35:30
Speaker
So this is a case of... Butler going, look, there are lots of credible witnesses who say that there are additional tunnels under the North Head.
00:35:41
Speaker
And some of those witnesses were serving personnel on North Head during the time it was under military control and also serving personnel at the time it was transitioning to becoming a ah park in the public domain.
00:35:58
Speaker
And this is, I mean, we've kind of talked about this in previous episodes, but there is this interesting hypothesis here, which is how does Butler judge someone to be a credible witness?
00:36:10
Speaker
Certainly, he thinks that great men, in in quotation marks, must be credible witnesses because they're they're famous in besmirching their character must be a bad idea, as we see with Leonard Izzett, Richard Bolt, et cetera, et cetera.
00:36:28
Speaker
And also, it seems fairly clear that Butler judges someone to be a credible witness when they agree with him. So when they are the kind of person who puts forward testimony that there is a hidden tunnel complex under North Head, he takes them to be credible.
00:36:46
Speaker
And that's why I think he includes... the two old dears who go on the pensioners' trip to North Head and see a massive tunnel complex within it, because he does take them to be credible witnesses, despite the fact that if we take their story seriously...
00:37:07
Speaker
then the conspiracy was blown wide open sometime in the late 1980s because multiple groups of pensioners were being shown through a hidden tunnel complex. Although now I'm thinking about it, that's the perfect way to keep the secret. Show it to old people who are going to die.
00:37:26
Speaker
Who's going to believe them? one's going to listen to them anyway. I was checking through a hidden tunnel complex. Yes, yes, Grandma. Yes, we've all heard your story about the tunnels. Grandma's on about the tunnels again. Somebody get a medicine. Jesus Christ. And when the unicorn looked at me, it made me feel special and inside.
00:37:47
Speaker
And so on. yeah Yeah. So there is something weird here about who's taken to be a credible witness versus who is not taken to be a credible witness. And I have to say, applause to us both for that wonderful Shakespearean piece. It's quite the tableau we constructed there. Quite
Earnshaw's Investigation
00:38:05
Speaker
extemporaneously.
00:38:07
Speaker
Now, a big feature of this chapter is Butler talking about how the army got in the way of John Earnshaw's initial investigation.
00:38:19
Speaker
into locating supposed structures within North Head. And I'm sympathetic to the idea the army did get in the way of the Earnshaw investigation.
00:38:32
Speaker
But there's a question here as to whether ah they got in the way because they were engaging in a cover-up or they got in the way because they didn't really like the imposition of a civilian coming onto their land and telling them what to do.
00:38:49
Speaker
So a kind of... What's the... A balance of power situation thing is how dare the civilian tell us what to do, which is kind of reflected by the fact that Earnshaw arrives and the military just do what they want to do because they're in charge.
00:39:05
Speaker
And, of course, the other option is... They were obliged to do it because they were told by the Crown, you've got to help this person with their investigation. And so the military just do as little as possible.
00:39:20
Speaker
So there are three options here. There's the cover-up hypothesis, which Butler is enamored with. There's the balance of power situation where you've got conflicting or thought authority.
00:39:32
Speaker
And then there's simply the, you know, we've been told to do something we don't really see the point of, so we're just going to do as little as possible to enact it.
00:39:42
Speaker
But Butler is very squarely in the camp that there was deliberate obstruction and that deliberate obstruction was the purpose of cover-up.
00:39:53
Speaker
To quote... and this is where he's talking about one of his eyewitnesses. Being in charge of the Naval Training School at the summit of North Head, Steve Ebray was in an ideal position to state what was going on behind the scenes during the 1988 military investigation.
00:40:10
Speaker
His evidence, which is that there was... there There was something untoward going on. With the erection of the barbed wire and the abandonment of the Earnshaw investigation after the appearance of the secret witness indicates that the military high command knew that tunnels would be found if the 1988 investigation continued.
00:40:33
Speaker
The up-to-the-minute monitoring of Earnshaw's investigation by senior officers implies that it was deliberately stage-managed to ensure tunnel entry happened. did not occur.
00:40:44
Speaker
yes so that's quite explicitly conspiratorial, I suppose. Now, have we talked about the Secret Witness? I think it got mentioned briefly. It mentioned. That was actually, that i think I noted it later on in a later chapter.
00:40:58
Speaker
The secret witness was mentioned to begin with that that that during the Earnshaw investigation, there was been like day 9 of 10, the last day before they abandoned the investigation, a secret witness comes forward that Earnshaw is not allowed to communicate with.
00:41:15
Speaker
Yeah, and then following what they saw, the investigation gets shut down a day later. And I always thought it was weird that they they sort of drop it there and then I'm sure the secret witness is mentioned a bit later on. And Butler never really seems to look into that at all as to who the secret witness might have been or anything anything about them. Well, there are two possibilities here.
00:41:38
Speaker
Either... He knows who the secret witness is but is obliged to keep that witness secret in order to be able to publish a book. So there might be a situation where identifies who the witness is, but there is actually some rationale for the secrecy.
00:41:56
Speaker
Or B, has never been able to find out who the secret witness is. Now, my suspicion here given that there's some discussion here about the GCSB, the Government Communication Security Bureau, and the fact that they had some kind of installation or role on North Head, that the secret witness is actually a spook of some kind who came and went, look, you...
00:42:22
Speaker
Can't poke around here because we're doing we're doing in intelligence work here. And if you dig through k cables or something, that's going to be very, very bad. So stop now.
00:42:34
Speaker
So my suspicion is the secret witness is not a witness to do with hidden tunnels or knowing anything about Boeing seaplanes. but actually being a member of the security services going, look, you can't say anything about this, but there's security stuff going on here, so please stop now.
00:42:53
Speaker
But yes, the secret witness is a ah really big thing here. The other thing which Butler is concerned with is the weird relationship between Paul Titchener and Lieutenant Commander Dennerley during the terms and times of the Earnshaw investigation.
00:43:16
Speaker
We talked about Paul Titchener briefly in a previous episode, did we not? Yes,
Government Responses & Official Statements
00:43:20
Speaker
he was the historian who produced a report for them prior to one of the investigations, who seemed to be... seemed to to to in fact, I'm pretty sure he claimed to have gone into tunnels. He seemed to be... He's a person who...
00:43:33
Speaker
writes the article in the North Shore Times advertiser that strongly implies that he and another person went into a tunnel, and then that's called into question because the eyewitness statement seems to predate Titchener, and Titchener eventually recants his tunnel hypothesis. Yes, and eventually changes sides.
00:43:53
Speaker
Throw... the Hidden Tunnel Complex are going, no, actually, it probably isn't true. i I vaguely knew Paul Titchener as a child because my mother worked at the bookstore that he ran in Devonport. So he was a he was a local character and local historian in the sense of he was an amateur historian who was writing stuff about the borough of Devonport as it was at the time.
00:44:20
Speaker
And there does seem to be communication between Titchener and Denley, which Butler and Earnshaw took to be evidence of some kind of collusion or something going on behind the scenes.
00:44:34
Speaker
My suspicion, and it is just a suspicion, I'm i'm speculating here, is that Denley being resident in Devonport and Paul Titchener being a... local celebrity there. I think he was mayor at what at one point. It kind of makes sense that the commander of a military installation in Devonport might be talking to the person who's taken to be the local historian, going, well, look, there's all this stuff going on here.
00:45:00
Speaker
What do you think about it? But Butler and Earnshaw quite clearly think that this relationship was inappropriate and that in some respects this either led to Denley being obstructive or Denley was obstructive from the outset and then communicating the reasons for that obstruction to Titchener but not to Earnshaw.
00:45:23
Speaker
That being said, There is something curious curious here. Butler claims, and it would be great to get verification of this, that some of the files around the Earnshaw investigation will remain under lock and key until 2054.
00:45:43
Speaker
I don't know how time works, but I think that's 29 years away. It is. And if this is stuff from 1984, that's, what, 70 years?
00:45:54
Speaker
Yeah, which I think um is kind standard for official secret stuff. Now, that's interesting. It doesn't necessarily represent the cover-up. Once again, you'd need to actually look at other secrecy clauses around things the military have asked for for other types of investigations, see whether this is unusual or usual.
00:46:17
Speaker
But it's still, it is interesting that some of the details about the Earnshore investigation will be available to us in our late 70s and probably at a time when martin butler will be dead so you can see that being very frustrating for an investigator going well i'm never going to see these particular files unless i can petition someone in the government to be able to release these things He's also really fixated on a line that comes out of the Parks Board, who were the people who were responsible for looking after North Head when it initially became a public park. The Parks Board doesn't exist anymore, but it was a feature back in the 1980s.
00:47:07
Speaker
And they're talking about the North Head structures, and they talk about how tunnels apparently exist. And Butler reads that as the park board admitting the tunnels do exist...
00:47:24
Speaker
I read it as a reaction to the claims of Earnshaw. Earnshaw at that time is making the claim there are hidden tunnels under North Head, a place that the Parks Board is about to take responsibility for.
00:47:36
Speaker
The Parks Board makes a response about this, about the apparent existence of those tunnels. Obviously, in relationship to someone who's making claims, there are more structures inside North Head than are publicly available.
00:47:51
Speaker
Butler reads that line as being an admittance by the park boards that the tunnels do exist, which seems like a fairly weird reading of the word, apparently, but it's yet another case of him very selectively reading things to find evidence that supports his particular hypothesis.
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, he doesn't have a great opinion, I think, of a lot of these opinions.
00:48:16
Speaker
official sources, I guess. Any official source that doesn't agree with him he has a low opinion of. the He also makes a really big deal out of the fact that the government seems to have made its mind up about the existence of Hidden Tunnels, because he writes to the Ministry of Defence.
00:48:38
Speaker
And who in there obviously their mind was set, despite the fact they say they would take six weeks to research his claims. which to my mind, i mean, maybe you might think six weeks isn't particularly long, but the fact they don't write back immediately saying, no, you're full of extraneous fecal matter, indicates they at least went, oh, we we will have a look at this.
00:49:00
Speaker
So he takes it that people have made their mind up, and once again, it's because the reaction he gets six weeks later is that they don't support his particular hypothesis.
00:49:11
Speaker
He also has weird thing where he thinks it's ridiculous that the Department of Conservation wouldn't spend... 8.4% of their allocated budget for the Auckland region in one year to do just a little bit of ground radar surveying. It's only 8.4% of the allocated budget for a year. And to my mind, if you spend 8.4% of your budget on something which you've already investigated a decade or more prior, then
00:49:47
Speaker
I would need to see some justification for that almost 10% of the Auckland budget for one year going into doing ground radar surveying of North Head.
00:49:59
Speaker
And I think this points to the other issue, and I've i've i've talked to Martin Butler about this. To Butler, the North Head case is a super important, necessary, ongoing investigation that needs constant pressure upon local council and government to get things done properly.
00:50:21
Speaker
to the local council, to the Department of Conservation, and to the government. These investigations were done in the 80s and ninety s and they have yet to see any evidence that's going to swing the needle away from we think we've done enough now.
00:50:38
Speaker
Butler says, oh, but you only need to spend 8.4% of your annual budget doing this investigation to assure me you're correct. And the Department of Conservation is simply going, yeah, but we've done enough.
00:50:51
Speaker
There's no new evidence here. We've done enough. Yes, we've we've we've we've done it. we're We've um satisfied ourselves. It isn't really our job to satisfy you. yeah Yeah, so this is not a dispassionate history.
00:51:06
Speaker
I can understand his passion. He really does think, as we're going to see with the ammunition theory, that there is serious danger to the people walking around north head and living in its surrounds but at the same time as far as i can see none of this evidence he's presenting now is in any way decisive such that it overrides the fact that we've had a fairly good investigation in the past that indicates there's not much if anything
00:51:44
Speaker
to the claim of there being missing or even hidden tunnels under North Head. You should say missing or evenve ah sorry hidden or even missing tunnels within or under North Head.
00:51:56
Speaker
Yes, so... this is This is starting to sound like it overlaps with the the next chapter of mine because he starts talking about chemical weapons and stuff. He does. We might as well move on to the actual conspiracy itself.
00:52:10
Speaker
Chapter 11, The Conspiracy. Right. So, yes, this is this this was this was my Chapter 11. And obviously, you know, as I said, he he appeared to have got...
00:52:21
Speaker
i'm explicitly conspiratorial before, but now he really starts spelling it out. So he reprints the statement of Doug Patterson. Who was Doug Patterson? That's a name I know but he doesn't... don't know if he says exactly who this person was, but he... Actually, this is the point where you're going, I should check that as well. ah Now, the question is...
00:52:43
Speaker
Oh, Doug Patterson was one of the people who worked for flying school. Right, that's right. Doug Patterson. yeah CEO of the National Airways Corporation in 1978.
00:52:55
Speaker
He and George Bolt had investigated the disappearance of the Boeing aircraft over a number of years. Here is his account of their investigations. Right, so yes that that's who I was. So Doug Patterson, but the point is...
00:53:07
Speaker
He talked to, at the time, Minister of Defence, Bob Tizard, about these tunnels. Now, according to Doug Patterson, Bob Tizard said that he had spoken to Defence Department officials who said that any planes had been destroyed,
00:53:24
Speaker
but work investigating the existence of tunnels was stopped when they detected unstable ammunition. So this is I think this is really where the conspiracy theory starts to pivot. and He started talking, you know all he wanted was to find out where these planes might be, but when he starts...
00:53:41
Speaker
gets into the idea that there may have been some sort of a cover-up, and when he starts looking at why there might have been some sort of a cover-up, the planes get shunted to the side, and it really starts to become all about these and all this ammunition. This is why this is why the the military was um and the government was motivated to cover up the existence of these tunnels. It's because of this unstable ammunition.
00:54:05
Speaker
Now, at the time, i thought, hang wasn't Bob Tizard the guy who said that Norm Kirk was assassinated by the CIA? Should we be listening to him? But then I went back and checked over our notes and know it was Bob Harvey said that Norm Kirk had been assassinated by the CIA and Bob Tizard was the guy who said that Bob Harvey was full of crap. So ah he he doesn't he he doesn't have a record of conspiracising there, I suppose.
00:54:25
Speaker
but So having having
Narrative Challenges & Conclusion
00:54:26
Speaker
made this claim, Butler says that Doug Patterson says that Bob Tizard says that the Department of Defence said that there were tunnels with ammunition under North Head. He also print ah reprints a North Shore Times article from the same from that period, which makes the same claims.
00:54:41
Speaker
Now, does your version of the book have the conversation between Tizard and Earnshaw? No, I don't recall that. Ah, all right. So this is probably relevant here. So not only does he talk about the Earnshaw thing, there's a phone recording between Tazad and Earnshaw where relevant parts of the recording are printed here. So let me read out that discussion.
00:55:06
Speaker
I won't do voices. I'll simply do Bob Tazad speaking. No, John Earnshaw. Bob Tazad. He, here he's referring to Lieutenant General John Mace, was chief, and i made the inquiry to him, as is the appropriate procedure, and he came back to me with the results of the inquiry as he had them.
00:55:24
Speaker
John Earnshaw. He, once again referring to Lieutenant General John Mace, was quite specific about the ammo, ammunition, or for some reason... Butler has put after ammo in square brackets, ammunition, as if we're not going to know what ammo is.
00:55:42
Speaker
ah So what's quite specific about the ammo, we know it's there from all the people that have, Bob Tizard interrupts. I don't think there's any argument about the deteriorating ammunition.
00:55:52
Speaker
Earnshaw responds with, yeah. Bob Tizard continues, that's why the place was sealed initially. They had the choice of methods of disposal and and they took the cheapest and they just sealed the tunnels.
00:56:03
Speaker
John Earnshaw replies with, yeah it is as you say in quite a hairy condition and of course as you know emmo and once again butler put in square bracket ammunition because we've changed pages now so maybe you've lost track of what emmo refers to ah as you know mmo just doesn't go away it becomes even more and unstable bob tisard yes Bob Tizard then continues, and for so this is obviously where there's an edit point in the recording, because it goes, Bob Tizard, yes.
00:56:31
Speaker
Next line, Bob Tizard. Well, the decision going back earlier than 1980 seems to have been that was dangerous to shift at the time. ah The... the Conversation continues with John Earnshaw saying, all he did, this is referring to someone called Dennis McLean, was sign the agreement on behalf of the Crown for the army to continue this investigation, which I provided him with aerial pictures of some of the entrances.
00:56:57
Speaker
And of course, was quite obvious at the time they were not intending to do this. Bob Tizard says, but think they take the attitude that is is exposing members of the armed services to unnecessary risks if they make a physical investigation further now i certainly would not order that but gave me what i thought was a valid opinion this stuff was dangerous if disturbed that's it Interesting. So that's yeah even more detail than I got in my one.
00:57:26
Speaker
Now, i have to I have to admit, I kind of tapped out of this chapter eventually. I found in in the first edition, this chapter was not really very well organized. It was just a collection of points one after the other of here's a weird thing I found out or here's a suspicious thing I found out.
00:57:43
Speaker
and I just couldn't follow a thread of it. But he talks about all sorts of things. He talks about, he brings up what's what's what's an interesting point, to that all of these eyewitness accounts, now Judge Elias, did one of the things that she thought counted against them was the fact that they were all at least 30 years old at the time.
00:58:01
Speaker
They all were sort of from the 70s or earlier. Butner points out, though, that that's kind of what you'd expect if the tunnels had been hidden in the nineteen seventy s wouldn't you? if if if If that's when they'd hit it, then then you'd stop getting eyewitness accounts.
00:58:15
Speaker
um If people were just making stuff up, there's no reason why they would have stopped making stuff up or all or stopped misremembering things after a certain point in time.
00:58:26
Speaker
and So he he takes the fact that there's sort of a point at which these eyewitness accounts seem to dry up as as actually the evidence in their favour, which I thought was an interesting argument, although, again, doesn't actually actually prove anything.
00:58:40
Speaker
He talks, he he gets more more witness in the statements, another one, I don't know why this wasn't included earlier in the book, but he has the statement of one Captain Ravage who says that in 1980 he saw old plans for North Head that showed tunnels connecting the gun emplacements and an old photograph showing a large entrance with rails going into it at Torpedo Bay.
00:58:58
Speaker
He thought the investigations that were done were very superficial and was quite surprised that they found nothing. He assumed, oh, yes, they're doing these investigations. they but they they'll They'll surely find tunnels, and yet they didn't. He just sort of drops that in there.
00:59:10
Speaker
He talks about the fact that the military did have plans for North Head, um even though apparently they other investigations had found that they were supposedly destroyed. In this chapter, he in this edition, this is where he brings up the fact that um that that Paul Titchener had this relationship with the um but the the head of the military there at the time.
00:59:31
Speaker
It would also, though, while he was talking about the fact that they were the military were good buddies with Paul Titchener, it also said that there was correspondence that basically said they had a very poor opinion of Mr. Earnshaw and thought he was a bit of an idiot, which is always something we had suspected when we were talking about this right back at the beginning. Were they acting under orders to cover up the thing, stuff that Mr. Renshaw wanted investigated, or did they just think he was a bit of an old fool and you know it wasn't worth their time and effort to investigate his stuff? So again, that point that he brings up, I don't know if it supports his arguments or actually acts against them.
01:00:09
Speaker
ah He talks about how he went looking for documentation or plans about North Head, but whenever he found stuff, he found it was restricted. And then he brings up the GCSB. um So this is the first edition. This is where the the the Government Communications Security Bureau first shows up. Well, not and and no not when they first show up. they first They were mentioned briefly in, I think, David Wirtz, one of his reports,
01:00:35
Speaker
And they never really looked into at the time the But now here in Chapter 11, he points out the fact that the GCSB were there. They were around when the 1988 investigation was going on, ah the one that John Inshaw wasn't happy about.
01:00:48
Speaker
um And they were apparently using ground radar there. And so Butler's like, okay, so what was the GCSB doing there? He says that he put in an Official Information Act request for information about the investigation and any data they may have gathered.
01:01:03
Speaker
And the response he got back was the GCSB says there isn't any, there there is no data from that investigation. We didn't keep any. He then says that apparently there is a Department of Conservation request from 1992 when were starting investigation.
01:01:19
Speaker
asking for the same stuff. And the GCSB in that case, rather than saying there isn't any information, they said there is information, but we can't share it for security reasons. And so again, he's sort of darkly hinting at things there. Why is there different? Why is there this this difference, these discrepancies?
01:01:36
Speaker
And that that was kind of the point where i just I just lost interest in the whole chapter, to be honest. so It had jumped from so many we so many times to jump from one disconnected point to another that I was like, what the hell is going on here?
01:01:50
Speaker
Skip to the end, which is what I did. But perhaps I shouldn't have, because I did notice that as I went through, he then started talking about the idea that there were chemical weapons, in particular mustard gas, stored alongside this unexploded ammunition.
01:02:02
Speaker
So you had more to say about the chemical weapons? whereas you the I want to go back to the Tissar stuff and then let's move on to the chemical whit weapon stuff. So a lot of hinges in the version of the chapter in the second and third edition.
01:02:17
Speaker
about the Bob Tazard letter, which you talked about, and the conversation between John Earnshaw and Bob Tazard, where it seems to be quite clear, Bob Tazard, who was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, has been advised by the military that there are not only sealed-up tunnels on North Head or in North Head, but these tunnels contain ammunition.
01:02:45
Speaker
Now, Butler also has to square a circle here because it's quite clear that if Tizad believed this, nothing was done about it. He was Deputy Prime Minister and was a Minister of Defence.
01:02:58
Speaker
So he does admit that maybe successive governments didn't think much of Tizad's claims, which raises a few questions. One,
01:03:09
Speaker
is Tazad accurately reporting what he heard from the military? So maybe Tazad was told something and then misinterprets it in such a way that it ends up agreeing with Earnshaw, and thus they have this conversation.
01:03:27
Speaker
But after the fact, when actually Tazad goes back to his notes or checks with officials, finds that actually they didn't quite say what he thought they said, which would explain why governments have done nothing subsequently.
01:03:39
Speaker
Or is it the case that, as we kind of intimated before, other members of the Labour Party, because Tezad was a Labour deputy prime minister, didn't really think much of Tezad as an intellect. He was considered to be...
01:03:56
Speaker
a bit of a fool and thus maybe he misinterpreted something which was said in jest as being a set serious thing but a lot of this chapter is hinged upon the fact that Tizard makes this claim and therefore it is a claim that must be taken seriously Because ah it is the claim of a government minister.
01:04:18
Speaker
And on one level, that seems right. If a government minister tells a private citizen there are sealed tunnels on or in North Head that contain decaying ammunition...
01:04:32
Speaker
That's, in theory, a very credible source, especially when they're not just Deputy Prime Minister, they are the Minister of Defence. They should know about these things. The only thing which mitigates the taking the source seriously is that no subsequent Minister of Defence has taken the Tzad claim seriously, including Ministers of Defence who had heard the recording. And as we're going to find out in a latter part of the second and third edition of the book, this recording is played to another minister of defense who doesn't seem to take much note of it at all.
01:05:14
Speaker
Although, of course, that could be it's all been covered up. Well, yes. Yeah, I mean, if everything here can be explained, I guess, either by cover-up or by something a little more prosaic.
01:05:27
Speaker
um but but But you want to know about that mustard gas? Yeah, was going to say, the hell of prosaic. Tell me about mustard gas. So, Aotearoa New Zealand had mustard gas during the Second World War.
01:05:41
Speaker
In fact, actually, this is with an interesting aspect of going to the University of Auckland. You know where AUSA House is at the University of Auckland? Oh, vaguely.
01:05:53
Speaker
I mean, you you you used to you to you to literally deliver your cartoons to the Krakow offices there. Yeah, yeah. So, yes, you know where AUSA... Josh used to be a cartoonist.
01:06:05
Speaker
i he's actually been He's actually had several different careers as cartoonists oh over the years, but we're going to into that right now. So where AUSA House is is also where the Kate Edgard Commons was built.
01:06:20
Speaker
Now, what most students at the University of Auckland don't know is that that particular complex on the union University of Auckland was at one stage occupied as barracks and a kind of general location for US soldiers when they were stationed in Auckland during World War two And they were keeping chemical weapons in the basement there at one point, or at least that is what is assumed.
01:06:48
Speaker
So when they dug out the area to build the Cape Eddicommons, they had to do soil testing to make sure that whatever had been stored there during World War II hadn't leached into the soil because otherwise people were going to die.
01:07:04
Speaker
So we did have mustard gas, and this is... a bit of a problem here. The amount of mustard gas that we disposed ah of by basically putting it out to sea after World War II doesn't match the amount that we claimed we had.
01:07:23
Speaker
So there's a discrepancy here where not enough was disposed of versus the amount that we had at the time. Now, some people think this is because there's a accounting error with the amount we had.
01:07:38
Speaker
So it turns out we over-counter the amount of mustard gas we had and we disposed of all of it during at the end of World War two Other people are going, well, no, there is an accounting error here, and we had some of it and some of it has gone missing. We don't know where it is.
01:07:56
Speaker
And so Butler has this theory here that what if the missing mustard gas was put into that ammunition depot that I postulated existed within the bowels of North Head?
01:08:10
Speaker
That would be a really good rationale to make sure that nobody gets in because the mustard gas would have been stored in containers. Those containers will have now degraded. so not only have you got to worry here about explosives in the hill that might go up if you hit them too hard, but if you open the chambers, what is this whole bunch of mustard gas there that kills you?
01:08:34
Speaker
Food for thought. It is. So, but yes, um but by that point, my eyes had glazed over a little bit and I just went skip to the end because at the end of chapter 11, does he does sort of lay everything out we where he's at in his thinking at this time. He thinks that the investigations into North Head all had what he calls shortfalls and flaws.
01:08:58
Speaker
And he puts forward this this scenario that the military either deliberately or by mistake left ammunition stored underneath North Head. that in the late 1970s they decided they needed to cover this up.
01:09:13
Speaker
His theory is that that first investigation back in 1980 gained access to these tunnels and verified the presence of this ammunition, and Bob Tisard was told about it.
01:09:24
Speaker
And this meant that the 1988 investigation done with John Earnshaw was always intended to find nothing. So he's going full cover up there. um He appeals to various statements of evidence he presented in that chapter to to to to show that.
01:09:39
Speaker
He lists a bunch of things that he thinks the DOC investigation got wrong, and the fact that they stuck to their findings of, as he puts it no tunnels, no airplanes, and no ammunition under North Head makes him worry that the Department of Conservation had, he suggests, darkly another agenda.
01:09:59
Speaker
Dun, dun, dun. Actually, hold on.
01:10:05
Speaker
And also...
01:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. So he says, the way forward is therefore evident. Finding just one tunnel may lead to another tunnel, and in turn to the ultimate reason why I started this whole tortuous process, to find out what happened to the first Boeing aircraft ever made. Only now this objective has become secondary to ensuring that there is nothing more sinister lurking inside North Head.
01:10:32
Speaker
So he's
Episode Wrap-up & Future Plans
01:10:33
Speaker
really sort of pivoted to that to the ammunition side of things over the airplane side of things at this point. So Josh, i I think we have to go for an episode four. I think we've pervericated so much that there's still four more chapter or chapterettes to go. I think it's going to be a four episode saga, no matter what twist I might have at the end.
01:10:58
Speaker
Well, all I can say is there's a pair of fish coming your way the next time you're in New Zealand. Right, but Josh, this is partially of your own design. If you're going to slap me with a fish, I think you need to slap yourself with a fish at the same time. It needs to be the rare double self-slap.
01:11:16
Speaker
Well, yes, I don't know. Maybe we just need to take fewer notes when we do this sort of thing. But yes, no, you're right. We've been at this for quite a while, and there's still there's still more to go Because basically, so so where we're at, he he's going to do his own ground radar survey.
01:11:34
Speaker
He's going to talk about that a bit. Then he's going to sum everything up. And that's where it pretty much ends for me, but then you've got a bunch of extra stuff to Yeah, because my vision is post-the-ground radar survey.
01:11:49
Speaker
So it's talking about what was found beneath the ground. And then the book ends with a series of updates saying, look, I found all these things.
01:12:01
Speaker
Nobody seems to be taking what I've found particularly seriously. What's going on there? So yeah you're going to find you're, we're going to see you go, oh there's going a ground radar survey. And I'm going, Josh,
01:12:15
Speaker
That happened 10 years ago. It happened 10 years ago. Yes. Okay. Well, then, yep, fine, because we we both have lives to live and we um have to go off and record a bonus episode for our patrons.
01:12:27
Speaker
We'd best call things a day for now. But that bonus episode... We've got a couple of updates, updates on older stories, and then we thought maybe we could do a, not a deep dive, but a a look, take a look at an old case, which was which was mentioned in the news recently, and which old timers like us remember from at the time, but which which the more youthful and vibrant of our audience might not recall at all. That's true, because I have not heard the name Menendez in a long time.
01:13:03
Speaker
No, well, that's because you didn't watch the new show on late Netflix. But anyway, so we're going to talk about a bunch of that sort of stuff. And if you want to listen to us talk about a bunch of that sort of stuff, you need to be a patron. And if you're a patron, then then then but your're both your work and our work here is done.
01:13:19
Speaker
If you're not a patron, just go to Patreon.com and um look for the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy. Because if you're not a patron, then your work has yet to commence. No, yep. You still have important things left in your life.
01:13:32
Speaker
So i think i guess we're done. We're putting a line in it. It's for the time being. It's for the time being. But the other thing, and so this happened the last episode as well.
01:13:44
Speaker
There was hiccup in the first 20 minutes of the recording. So if Josh sounds particularly disinterested in anything I'm saying, it's because we actually lost the first 20 minutes of the recording.
01:13:59
Speaker
We think we've recovered it. But we actually won't know until such time we actually press stop on this recording and look at the recording. So the first 20 minutes may be me talking away and Josh putting in soundbites of, aha, yes, that is interesting. No, you are right. That does prove the point.
01:14:19
Speaker
Yes, I am insane. Yes, and so on and so forth. But until until such time as we stop recording and and start the the gruelling editing process, it is time for me to come up with another catchphrase to go out on. And I had a good one earlier this week, and it's just it's I've lost it completely.
01:14:43
Speaker
i i swear it was it was a real pearler. It would have turned this podcast around. Ah, but it was not to be. So instead I'm just going to say, make mine conspiracy.
01:14:55
Speaker
And I'm off to grill a gorilla. That's just awful. I can't ah, what the hell was the old one? It was good. It was genuinely good. And it's gone. It'll never come back.
01:15:06
Speaker
Yeah, we might might bring it back. Good old fish slap to the face. Yep, oh well. I'll see you in June. No, August. August. Same thing. Goodbye.
01:15:19
Speaker
Goodbye.
01:15:26
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy features Josh Addison and associate professor M.R. Extenteth. Our producers are a mysterious cabal of conspirators known as Tom, Philip, and another who was so mysterious that they remain anonymous.
01:15:40
Speaker
You can contact us electronically via podcastconspiracy at gmail.com or join our Patreon and get access to our Discord server. Or don't, I'm not your mum.
01:16:08
Speaker
And remember... these!