Afraid of Before Roswell: The 1941 UFO Crash They Buried

SPEAKER_00 0:06

In a world where nothing is known, nothing is certain. Reality is not real. Be afraid. I'm Bob Hatsky, Robert. The host with the ghost.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

This is my podcast, based on my paranormal documentary, Afraid of Nothing. Each episode we talk to people who see life and the afterlife through a different lens. Join me.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Who is this large man?

SPEAKER_01 0:53

And what's he doing in our bedroom? As we lift the veil and open our minds to see beyond, our eyes lie. This is afraid of nothing. I am here with a guest that's been on the show a couple times. He's quite unique. He's a gentleman named Paul Blake Smith. And if Paul is interested in a topic and he can't find a book about it, he does the research himself and writes the books. And he's done just that. One book he wrote was The UFL Bombshell Before Roswell. And he Paul was on, I don't know, maybe three, four years ago talking about that. But since that time, he has some updated information and he's re-released it. So we're going to be talking about that tonight. Paul, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Ah, it's always a pleasure. I um one I gave a little introduction, but why don't you just give the audience, in case they haven't seen the other two episodes we did, who you are and how you came into doing this writing stuff because you've had a lot of visibility the past couple years, I think, in terms of from when you first started.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Right. Um, I've been writing books now for a little over ten years. My first one was on the Cape Charter UFO crash for Argus Publishing. They didn't give me any help whatsoever. I didn't even work with an editor. I just submitted what I had, and it had some mistakes in it, uh, I began to find. Uh, and they published it at the time. So I'm very pleased that 10 years later I'm able to revise and update that book uh through Llewellyn Publishing. Argus went defunct. And uh right now uh it follows on the heels of my most two recent books, President Eisenhower's Close Encounters and the Nixon Gleason Alien Encounter. Those came out from Foundations, and they're both on audio from Tantor, and both of them have been signed up by Hollywood movie producers to hopefully be turned into motion pictures someday. And I'm trying to interest uh these producers and anyone. Uh in my 1941 UFO crash in my hometown of Cape Girardeo, that's where I was born and raised and educated. I spent four years at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. Uh I was a mass communications major with an English minor. There was kind of a burly African-American gentleman in a couple of my classes from St. Louis. His name was said. You know him better as Cedric the Entertainer. So there's a little name dropping for you. And uh that was long ago. We're pretty old now. I don't think he would uh remember me. But I do.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

What about let me let me drop another name, uh Rush Limbaugh. What about him? Wasn't he like an umpire when you were in Little League or something?

SPEAKER_02 3:49

I've never met him as an adult, but I had a pretty good pitching arm when I was a kid. So they made me a pitcher in Little League, and one of our umpires was this big beefy guy named Rusty. He was on the airwaves in Cape Girardeau as Rusty Saw, and you know him better as Rush Limbaugh, the famous broadcaster who had to leave Cape Girardeau to find fame and fortune national league. But uh, I never got a chance to meet him. I wrote to him about the Cape Girardeau affair, uh, and I never got anything back, but I was told by someone who claimed to have known him that Rush said that he first heard the UFO crash when he was in 1965 or so, the mid-60s when he was in high school in Cape Girardeau. So uh they once called him in 2007 on the air and said, Rush, what's up with this UFO crash in your hometown? And he said, There's more to this story than you might think. And he just moved on to the next caller. He didn't want to discuss it, but instead of just saying, Oh, it's a bunch of junk, don't listen to that, you know, get out of here with that garbage, he didn't say that at all. So it gives me a little boost of confidence that the story is, you know, quite real and credible.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

So before we get into the the book, The UFL Bombshell Before Roswell, let's talk about the two movie deals. How do they come about? How do they, the, the, the Jackie, you know, the Eisenhower encounter and the Jackie Gleason one. How did someone just reach out to you out of the blue, or did you pitch it?

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Or that's correct. Uh they contacted my agent, got my um email and uh LinkedIn information, and contacted me and said, We love your book. We want to um uh I think the first one was the Eisenhower story that came out in 2020, and they said, This is a great book, so I'm handing it out to my co-producers and my writing staff, and I thought, oh, this sounds good. They're all buying copies, and they love it. And they said, we got to turn this into a movie. And I'm saying, go, go, go. It sounds good to me. And it's passed through all of these different stages to be produced, it hasn't been totally finalized, and anything can go wrong, so I'm trying not to uh get my hopes up too much, but it looks really good, and uh this there's a studio involved and a streaming network involved. They've already sent it to a director, and it's got a uh the writer has produced a screenplay everyone seems to like. So when that happens, I'll get paid a little more, and I may get paid a lot more, but uh the Nixon Gleason story was a completely separate Hollywood producer who again contacted me through my agent and uh said, I really love this story. I want to sign an exclusive deal to turn it into a movie. And I says, That sounds good to me. So we uh went back and forth for about six months on uh the contours and uh the paragraphs and the wording of a contract, and I signed it. I got a little more money up front, and I get a lot more if it is turned into an actual movie. So uh they are uh things creep along slowly in Hollywood, and I wish it would go faster, but you know, you gotta be patient. I was told by my agent there's never been a time slower than this to turn a, you know, like a book to a screenplay to a movie and get it produced and maybe in theaters or off to a streaming channel and have everyone sign off on it. But uh, you know, I've got my foot in the door and it looks promising for both. And UFO movies are hot right now. Thank you, Steven Spielberg.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Yeah, actually, you know, Paul, my uh co-host that's who's sometimes on the show, his name's Kyle Carvin. He's a uh he's an actor. He had a small scene in Disclosure Day with Emily Blunt. He wasn't sure if it was going to make the final cut, but it did apparently, so I have to go out and watch the movie. But yeah, he's uh so yeah, I think the timing is great. And the timing's good for looking at the UFO bombshell before Roswell. You know, most people, most everybody knows about Roswell. How come they don't know about this story?

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Uh in the Roswell case, they started to release information and say, we finally captured a UFO, one of these flying saucers. And then higher ups came in and squashed that real fast and uh ordered them to change it to a weather balloon. It's a big nothing. And so that kind of got uh buried for a few decades and slowly uh started to come out like in the uh late 70s and early 80s. In Cape Girardeau's case, 1941, six years before Roswell, the military was there that night and said, you are not to speak of this ever again. And most people adhered to that uh policy because uh Cape Girardeau was a National Guard armory town, and there were a number of uh military citizens who were uh you know affiliated with the military in some sense. So you didn't want to blab, look unpatriotic. And if you were uh telling people and you told them the story that they ordered you to silence and swore you to secrecy, they would probably ask, well, then why are you talking about this? So uh that was pre-war. Uh we had not gone into World War II in our country. It was raging in the Pacific and the European theater, so that uh people wanted to do the patriotic right thing and obey the government. You didn't protest in those days.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

What was the exact date of the of the uh UFO sighting uh crash?

SPEAKER_02 9:13

No one was completely sure. I put clues in my book that seemed to point to Thursday night, April 24th, and the 25th was the day after, and that's when uh our newspaper ran a story in Cape Girardeau about a huge noisy bomber airplane that kept circling around and around over the city. And people thought, are we about to be bombed? What's going on? And uh it makes sense because the story said they found out the plane was sent from Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Air Force headquarters, in those days the Air Corps, and uh they just happened to send it to Cape Girardeau and do aerial surveillance and reconnaissance. That's a strong indication that was the morning after the first light of day, probably searching for any other debris or, you know, was it a collision, or did any other parts come down in any other parts of the city or the countryside?

SPEAKER_01 10:06

So, what first put you on the trail to writing this? Were you like, did someone tell you about it as a kid, but you could never find anything about it, or what kind of got you sniffing the ground and figuring and and how did you you research this story if they were hiding everything?

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Yeah, it was super tough to research. It's 85 years old now. Uh around the year 2000, it began to come out thanks to a letter from the granddaughter of a Cape Girardeau minister who said, I was there at the crash scene. They called me in to offer spiritual comfort, and we went out expecting an airplane crash. And so the granddaughter collected all the information she could and put it in a letter, and it made its way from one ufologist to the next. Uh uh let's say Ray Fowler, Leonard Stringfield, Ryan Wood, Stanton Friedman, uh Linda Moulton Howe, the famous uh journalist, was talking about it on the air, and that's when I heard it, and I began to perk up and say, Well, you know, I know all of these places, and I'm familiar with some of these names they're talking about. And I waited for over a decade, like, where is a book about this? No one had one. So I figured I'll write it myself, and I think I did okay, but I'm finding out I made some mistakes, and I really hate uh passing along any information that is not accurate, and I need to go back, and I believe I'm doing that and revising it, putting in citations and references and cramming in all the information I can to make it a worthwhile read for people. And I hope uh you enjoy uh what I found out.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

So I think you referenced that uh FDR and Truman both reportedly knew about this crash. Um talk about how you found out about that. And I think FDR was he a president at the time, and Truman was, I don't know, what was he a senator or a Congress or what at that time?

SPEAKER_02 11:55

Uh quite correct. FDR was the commander-in-chief of all armed forces as president of the United States in late April 41. Nervous about the Nazis in Europe and the idea that we might have to go to war. So I think that adds to the need for immediate secrecy. Uh, you probably would have had a few phone calls up the chain of command that very night. What do we do with this? Uh there was a uh a Captain Charles Root Charles Burton Root, I think his name was, from Sykeston, about 35 miles south of Cape Girarde. He had come directly from Washington in the days before the Pentagon. And uh his unit was notified, I believe, that night. And uh it just took a few phone calls to get some directives, probably from the War Department, and FDR was likely notified as this extraordinary, even frightening, you know, information like, are we being invaded? Is this the first clue? So people were probably on edge. And there are existing documents, you can see them at uh majesticdocuments.com from President Roosevelt in his Oval Office dictating uh references to these celestial wonders that have come to us and the non-terrestrial science and technology, and uh a few other uh references that uh pretty strongly indicate the Cape Girardeau spaceship from another world that he couldn't spell out to even his secretary. It was considered above top secret national security secret type stuff. So I'm sure FDR was either notified that night or the like the next day. And Harry Truman was the grandmaster Freemason of Missouri, and he was our senator in 1940 and 41. Harry Truman was not even supported by FDR in the 1940 Senate race. Roosevelt wanted somebody else. And Truman won anyway, and yet uh just a few years later, FDR hands-picked uh Truman, selected him to be the vice presidential running mate, knowing he was very ill, that Roosevelt was not likely gonna finish his term. And of course, that happened even further or closer to the uh start of their uh fourth term in 1944 and 45 than anyone first thought. And Harry Truman vaulted his way to the presidency. Uh, you gotta wonder if his knowledge of the crash was a contributing factor. He didn't need to be briefed. I think he was told probably within days of what happened because uh the FDR administration was just full of Freemasons. The director of the FBI was a Freemason, the vice president Henry Wallace was a Freemason, FDR was hardcore Freemason, and the mayor of Cape Girardeau had three different audiences with Harry Truman over the next few years, and the mayor of Cape was a Knights Templar Freemason.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Wow, a lot of connections there. Now you've interviewed, you've done research on a lot of presidents, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon. Which of all the presidents you think um do you think handled it the best? You know, handled this situation the best.

SPEAKER_02 15:06

Yeah, I don't blame Roosevelt or Truman for keeping this lid on and muzzling this while we had our top scientific brains uh scrutinize probably both the bodies and the metallic uh disc or craft, and to see what uh propelled them, what was their propulsion system, their energy, and uh how they uh managed to kind of defy our laws of gravity once they got here. So uh they kept the lid on, and so did Eisenhower. He was a military man and knew how to keep secrets because loose lips sink ships. So I think every president from FDR up to George H. W. Bush was pretty informed how much they wanted to tell the public, but couldn't, and thought we need to keep the lid on this a little longer, a little longer from every presidency. You know, a president is just a temporary passing official, you know. They're here for a few years and then they're gone. At the most, they're there for eight years. So if you're in the military or in the scientific community, you might even say, well, why should we bother telling you? It seems a bit arrogant, but the president, the less the people know about this, the less the secrets get out.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

Now, what you're feeling with the current president and the current uh, you know, the current buzz about disclosure and I mean look there, and I'm gonna ask you about your thoughts about what you think it is after you answer that.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Uh February 19th, uh President Trump issued a uh uh kind of a proclamation. I'm ordering our intelligence services to open up all UFO and ET files. I don't think they're too thrilled with that, and from what I keep reading and hearing from people who are looking into this, is that they're balking. They don't want to give away information. So far, the videos they've been releasing have been most unremarkable and unexciting. And one source says that's because they don't really want to tell us their secrets, and another source tells me uh they're going to do this very gradually and break us in sort of psychologically for more important things that are coming next year. Uh we'll see about that. Uh it's the anniversary date of 80 years from Roswell next year. I wish people would focus more on Cape Girardo, and I'm doing what I can, but I really do feel that was the first crash, and that if the government is going to open some files, they really should start there and expose what FDR knew and did, and what were those alien bodies all about, and what did we do with the craft and its uh metal makeup, so that uh they could start from there and move on to Roswell and some other stories. One thing that disturbed me pretty bad was recently the CIA went in to the Department of Homeland Security and nearly held them up and took, I guess, kind of by force, these boxes of top secret documents that are being uh described as related to UFOs. They went in or robbed another agency to keep the lid on the story, which doesn't make me too uh optimistic that we're gonna get the full truth anytime soon.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

So going back to um Cape Girardot and the year that this happened, do you believe that reverse engineering really started then? And I think you'd mentioned there might be a connection between Albert Einstein and his guilt over the atomic bomb. So do you think there was any knowledge they learned from that first craft that they applied?

SPEAKER_02 19:33

I don't know. There are bits and pieces that point to Einstein being appointed to an office of naval uh scientific scrutiny in the uh years after the Cape Turbo crash, and that he did co-write this document on the possibility of other life coming to our world and how we should handle it, along co-authored with uh Robert Oppenheimer. So I think he knew some. His secretary came forward in the like late 1980s or early 90s and said that Einstein was informed. He was uh flown to uh Roswell to look at the crash recoveries. I don't know if we can believe that story, but it sounds fairly plausible. You would want your best brains to look into this, and who is brainier than Einstein? So uh there are documents from this Majestic Documents.com that show that our top leading scientists like James B. Conant and uh Dr. Venever Bush and uh maybe Einstein have been uh looking at these uh materials collected in the 1940s. And uh I put some of that in the book, and it's interesting to note on that uh April 25th, what I feel is the day after the crash, James B. Conant, the scientist from uh Harvard, uh a master chemist, was called into FDR's Oval Office for a little private conference during lunchtime. And I'm thinking, coincidence? I don't think so. I think FDR wanted to consult with someone he could trust on handling this big government state secret and what made it tick.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Now, besides the uh, I think you said it was a priest in your hometown, were there other key witnesses, or was it most of it from documents that you surfaced and did research on for uh this book?

SPEAKER_02 21:19

Yeah, the first and key witness was Reverend uh William G. Huffman of the Baptist Church downtown. And he said that uh when he got home that night, all shook up and pale and uh, you know, visibly shaken, that his family asked him, you know, what's going on? Where have you been? Why are you all shook up, as Elvis might say? Well, uh he said, you know, that phone call I got earlier this evening, that was someone from the uh affiliated with the police department, and he showed up in an unmarked car and took me to what we thought was going to be an airplane crash outside of town. And when we got there, the fire department was fighting a blaze in this farm field around a circular metal disc. And it had cracked open maybe on impact, maybe just before. And there were these three small bodies. There were no human bodies on the ground, and uh there were no uh wings or propellers or propulsion system visible, no exhaust pipe, just a silver round disc. And the three beings were identical and strangely uninjured. They didn't show any injuries, but they had big bulbous heads, big black eyes, your typical gray creatures, four feet tall at the most. And they were stretched out on their backs, he said, when I got there, uh, face up, and one was still breathing. Sir Reverend Huffman told his family that he picked one up by the wrist and it was like a limp rag doll. Just blah, and it died right in front of it. It had been breathing very lightly and then it stopped. So evidently all three were dead. And while he was saying his prayers, a local photographer uh whipped out a small brownie box camera. And two men held up one of the dead aliens under the arm and posed him for a photograph. And there was the one shot they took of it, and then the photographer walked around the site and was apparently from the uh newspaper taking photos with a big speed graphic news camera and taking some notes. So uh a few weeks after the crash, that photographer showed up at Reverend Huffman's door and said, I have a copy of this photograph. I want you to have a copy. And he handed it over, that picture of the alien being propped up under the arms. So Reverend Huffman wasn't too thrilled to have this, and he gave the picture eventually to his son for safekeeping. And the son moved to a small town in Kansas, where Reverend Hufferman's granddaughter, uh his son's daughter, uh, got a look at that photo about a dozen times, she says, at family uh get-togethers, dinner parties, and she said it creeped me out every time, this nasty-looking alien with the big black eyes being propped up, a couple of trees on a farm setting in the background, and that uh she kept asking, what is this all about, and they wouldn't tell her. So when her grandmother, before I get to that, uh, a friend came over in the early 50s to the uh Huffman home and said, Oh, that's an interesting photograph. I know plenty about photography, and I got a friend involved in biology and zoology. I'll take this photo for you and get some uh opinions on what this could be. So they let him have the photo, and the guy took off that week, moved away, and the photo never returned, and neither did the uh the guy who stole it essentially, conned his way out of uh uh you know uh responsibility and just took off and they never saw it again. So that uh the granddaughter uh started asking her grandmother all about the crash. Reverend Huffman died in 59, but his widow died in 84, stage four cancer. But before she died, uh she told the story of what William told the family. And they she the granddaughter put everything in a letter and sent it to Ray Fowler, and then other these uh uh UFO investigators got involved and they looked into it, and none of them came back and said, This is a lot of junk, there's nothing there. Each one feels like that there was something very substantial, that this was a real event six years again before Roswell.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

You mentioned before that when the Reverend was there, he kind of saw the last breaths of the alien. Did they breathe? Did they have to breathe our any idea about that?

SPEAKER_02 25:48

It's a strange thing. Uh Philip Corso, Colonel Corso, wrote a book the day after Roswell, and he described aliens very much the same way from the Roswell craft. And he said, our scientists scrutinized these creatures very carefully and felt they were bio-robots. They were like flesh of a sort and biological creatures created and programmed almost like lackeys or stooges of a higher race. And that's why they were all like punched out of the same mold in a factory, practically. And that's an identical description of what Reverend Huffman said he saw. So uh we can kind of look at this as not mechanized, but kind of maybe pre-programmed or manipulated by remote control creatures and their little craft. And when they crashed, uh apparently a higher race felt like, well, why should we bother? Humans have gotten a hold of this real quick. We'll just go back to the factory and get some more. Disposable, you know. Uh there was a Cape Gironde fireman who was also dying of stage four cancer uh in the uh late 90s, and he said, You know that story about Reverend Huffman, the minister who went to this crash site? He says, I want to tell you, that story is entirely true. I was there on the firefighting force putting out that blaze. The craft uh went up uh in a fireball, or at least the impact caused a fireball, and it set this field on fire. So we were fighting that. He says, I saw these three identical bodies and I saw this circular craft. Reverend Huffman's story is true. And he says, uh, before the military got there, I picked up a piece of debris and looked it over and stuck it in my pocket. Well, the military arrived and they saw him do this. And they chewed him out, he said, and forced him to hand over that piece, and then they booted him from the crash site. And he said, in the aftermath, I felt like I was being watched or observed around town and that my phone was tapped. So uh in 1941, I looked into it and it says, uh J. Hooper, what's crazy about phone taps? And there was an FBI agent said to have been at the scene of the crash by Reverend Huffman, and the FBI had opened a field office in March, one month before the crash. So it kind of hangs together that uh he could have been tailed in his phone tap to make sure he wasn't gonna cause any trouble because he was chewed out in front of all of his uh friends and people who had gathered at the crash site and were being sworn to secrecy. So again, there's little bits and pieces of confirmation of the story.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

Yeah, I think you kind of answered one question I was gonna ask, which was such a small town where everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everything. How come it kept such a secret? And I think you just mentioned it's because of the, you know, it's right around World War II or right before it, and there was a lot of respect and trust in the government and in the military. It was a military town, so you kept your mouth shut if you were told to do it. People are a lot different nowadays. Um, the craft and the three aliens, it almost seems like it was kind of it came from a bigger mother ship or something. Do you any thought about that? Did it come by its own there? Or did it was it just kind of doing some reconnaissance for a bigger mother ship? Because it seems weird to have just three aliens and a little ship come all the way here. I don't know. I it just seems odd.

SPEAKER_02 29:11

I I quite agree, and we could speculate till the cows come home, but the key word might be cows because Cape Girardeau and the countryside was dairy country. And what do little greys do? Supposedly, they abduct and mutilate cattle. So that's one possibility. Another is that it got hit by a stray shot from World War II in Europe, and it just sputtered to a halt all the way across, you know, the Atlantic in the middle of our continent, and it just happened to come to a halt in the soil of a Missouri farm. It could have been mechanical error, could have been pilot error, uh, could have been weather-related uh somewhere uh as it was buzzing around uh planet Earth. Uh you just we just don't know. Could it have come from a mothership? I would think so. It was a small thing, I don't think it was super tiny, but no one described it as this huge ship that uh loomed over us. So I think it was just kind of your typical flying saucer, and you would think it came from a larger mothership of a uh a race that was monitoring humanity. Speculation, yes, but I think reasonably so.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Those movies on your other two um books, are they documentaries or are they going to be like narrative features, do you know?

SPEAKER_02 30:25

They will be feature films that'll be slight one will be slightly fictionalized, the Nixon Gleason story. And I've been told that the one that's advancing on Eisenhower is being turned into an action adventure, almost kind of a buddy movie. And I'm a little skeptical. That's not what I put in my book, but I signed the deal. So, you know, it's traditional in Hollywood to not tell the writer too much, you signed the deal, now you go away now because they don't want too much input from me to protest like I didn't say that. You know, they're gonna get creative with it, and that's okay as long as it's not gross or x-rated or disgusting, you know. They're gonna make it kind of a fun adventure movie, and that sounds okay with me.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Have you ever reached out to James Fox or Darcy Weir? Those are two guys, James Fox is the more notable, I guess, about turning this book into a documentary, or is it because it seems like this would definitely be a documentary. It's got that angle, you know, the crash nobody heard of before Roswell.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

That sounds like a mighty fine idea to me. I'm glad I thought of that. Yeah. Okay, well, good.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

Because I I don't know. I think it would be a great documentary. I think it's worth pitching. So this is just my thought. Where they took the evidence is a great hook. Um, can you say, you know, where does the trail lead? Did it just I guess you brought this up like was it 50, 60 years after the fact? Did anybody knock on your door and say, hey, Paul Blake Smith, be quiet. This is something we don't want you to talk about. Or did you pretty much have free reign and everybody left you alone?

SPEAKER_02 31:53

Uh no one has bothered me, but I could pass along a quick story from my own high school classmate. He said around 2000, 2001, some of these big-time UFO investigators came to Cape. And so he thought, I'll get involved and I'll be their chauffeur and show them around town and tell them anything they want to know. And he started to uh read more about UFOs and he got public library books. And one day he went into the public library, and the librarian said, you know, there were two guys in here, government men in suits, asking questions about you, what books you've been reading, and you know, it was like, he was uh a little nervous after that. And that was as the story was starting to break nationally. Now there's so many tales out there, thanks to the internet and people uh literally recording UFOs with their cell phones and such and putting them on TV shows on travel, discovery, history, you know. I think the genie is kind of out of the bottle and they can't cork it anymore.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Now, it's been 10 years since you updated this book, since you first released it. Has your mindset changed? Has there been a special aha moment in the edits and the update that you had? You know, of course we want people to buy the book and read the book, but has anything changed, or do you just find more evidence that made you feel more convinced that this is something that definitely happened that was hidden?

SPEAKER_02 33:13

I I find more bits and pieces. Uh the story uh has uh little bits of confirmation. One would be a uh a government agent who said, I worked for the uh counterintelligence corps in the 1940s, and uh we did research into UFOs as part of our intelligence division. And he said, uh, I'm dying. Here's the same story. Said he had cancer, didn't expect to live long around the year 1999. And he said the first thing in his uh typed out uh confession that uh there was an air, a lenticular aerodyne that crashed in Missouri in 1941. One of the first things he wanted to tell you was there was this UFO crash, and it was not well known at the time. And he wanted to say uh this really did happen. The government kind of reverse-engineered it, copied the technology, and we had these craft that they tried to operate, uh run by uh male pirates, pilots in uh New Mexico, and he said they all crashed, they were flops. Uh they call them the S craft, I guess for secret or something, and that uh the first forays in trying to copy this to use maybe in battle or to drop a bomb or something, uh it was a terrible flop. So that was another piece of confirmation. I was pleased to get it. Uh there was a um a woman I spoke to who said uh I was a little girl in a farm community just south of the farm crash site in 41. She says I was 11 years old, and I remember distinctly the adults standing around talking to me about the little spacemen in their little spaceship that had crashed on a farm nearby. And she thought, wow, that's interesting. Uh she wished she could remember more when she was 11, but she distinctly remembers this, and she said, we didn't have any terms like UFOs or flying saucers. Nobody said anything like that. They were just little spacemen. So I thought that's another uh realistic slice. She didn't claim to have seen anything or interacted with aliens, just that the adults did talk about this in farm and farm country that you couldn't keep the lid on completely.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

So assuming, and I believe it, you know, I've had you on three times that this was the actual first instance of a UFO. Why do you think Roswell got all the uh got all the attention? Why do you think that happened? Why why was that suddenly the one that people were willing to go against the government about?

SPEAKER_02 35:50

Uh yeah, uh first they were the ones, the government, or at least uh some military people at Roswell started to release the story, we've got a flying saucer. They put it in the newspaper and it got syndicated nationally, and they talked about it on the radio in Roswell. And like a day or two later, that got squashed real flat, and they held a press conference and claimed it's nothing but a weather balloon, which means our military were complete idiots who couldn't tell a flying metal disc of some substance from a flimsy weather balloon. And of course, that was their cover story, and that kind of uh dampened uh the story for decades. But uh, some of the people involved started speaking out. They were getting late in life. Uh, I forget the gentleman's name, but one of the key people who looked into it initially gave an interview and he went uh in this documentary and he's on unsolved mysteries and said, uh, you know, this was not a weather balloon. This was a craft from another world with dead alien bodies. And he described them, and it sounded so much like Cape Girardeau. Uh what exactly happened to the Roswell crash recoveries, I don't know. But one story is that they were flown in a bomber airplane to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. What does that remind us of? The story from Cape Girarde, where a bomber plane came down and was seen at a Sykeston airfield. It dwarfed all the little training program uh planes they had in the Sykston uh aerial training program at their airport. And uh there was an armed guard around it reportedly, and they were there to pick up something, and then they took off. So uh we don't know absolutely that was the Cape Girardeau crash, but uh that had been recovered by the Sykston aerial program that night and trucked on down the road to the Sykeston airport, but it sure sounds like that kind of conjecture fits together logically.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

Now, was Roswell similar to two Cape uh Oh my god, Gerardo? Uh was it like three aliens all dead, similar sized craft, or was it what was different about Roswell versus in your town?

SPEAKER_02 38:02

Uh I think there were more bodies for Roswell, and that one of them was still alive and tried to communicate and was taken into custody, supposedly. Pretty wild story. But I have heard this a number of times that uh he lived in uh protective custody at Los Alamos National Labs, and he managed to communicate somehow. And uh you kind of wonder, was it mentally? Did he uh transmit thoughts or did he learn to speak English? Or was there some sort of communication device he would use? I don't know. But uh there was apparently no communication in the Cape Girardeau story, and that's another reason why it just kind of fades in the distance. Once World War II happened in Cape Girardeau, so many men in town, including the mayor and the chief of police, went off to war. And the chief of police lost his life in the Pacific. He didn't come back. So when the war ended a few years later and you had to find a job and keep your mouth shut about any spaceship if you wanted to start a life for yourself, again, that helps the story just creep further and further into the background.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

Now, is there another book that you haven't written yet that you'd love to do that's maybe a little more recent? Maybe it's the 70s, maybe it's the 80s. Has there been any other story that's kind of intrigued you that you haven't found the information that satisfies you that you want to write that book?

SPEAKER_02 39:25

I'm glad you asked that. I just finished writing President Reagan's Close Encounters, in which he Oh, wonderful! Yeah, craft in the 50s, uh in the 70s, and possibly when he was president. Uh, I had to do a lot of research, and again, no one's talking, and almost everyone's dead, even from the 70s and 80s. So it's a top secret subject, and uh boy, it's tough to research. I wish the government would just open the files and admit, yeah, we're being watched, we're being visited, go about your business, but here's what happened. Uh so we citizen sleuths have to piece it together ourselves, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Um, how many years have you been writing that book? How long has it taken you?

SPEAKER_02 40:09

Uh, the past about two and a half years. It usually takes two and a half to three years to do this right and to get everything put together.

SPEAKER_01 40:17

And so are you going to release it in this year or 2027?

SPEAKER_02 40:21

Uh, I'm casting about which publishing company, and I'm first needing to do well with this Cape Gironde book, and then uh it'll generate more interest for the Reagan book. And of course, again, the Spielberg movie and its popularity sure doesn't hurt. It gets people thinking and talking and the government releasing these files. So I'm confident that in the next year or two I want everything published right away, but that's not how the publishing industry works, is it? Did you watch the movie? Did you see the movie Disclosure Dave? I have not. I keep getting these mixed reviews from people. They say some say they hated it, and others thought it was great. So I want to see it, and it's got a scene showing Nixon and Gleason briefly as part of um, you know, the scenery of uh uh just like in my book. And it makes me wonder did uh Spielberg get a copy of that book of mine?

SPEAKER_01 41:13

Yeah, and what about the James Fox documentary, Age of Disclosure? Were you did you ever see that?

SPEAKER_02 41:18

Yes, and I thought it was pretty well done, but there's not a whole lot in there that UFO people, I guess that includes me now, uh, that haven't heard before or read before.

SPEAKER_01 41:29

In closing, so you have the new book coming out. Where can people go? Is you have a website or would it be on Amazon? Where do people go to buy your books, whether it's audible or or or to the good old-fashioned hand in your paper-in-your-hand type versions?

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Uh, I always like that. Uh, the paperback version you can get from Llewellyn.com or Barnes Noble website or Amazon.com. You could probably go into most any uh bookstore and ask to order it, and it would be shipped to you. And uh this one has not gotten an audio deal, but my agent is working on that, uh, like my past two books, so that uh hopefully I can get some interest in some Hollywood people in it, even if, like you say, a documentary film would be most interesting, uh or just have someone take it and run with it a little bit, make it an action-adventure movie, as long as it the story gets out there, uh, you know, uh, and people enjoy reading facts. I don't print a bunch of wild, baseless conspiracy theories and and wacky uh ideas on this or that. I try to, you know, just do what Jack Webb said, just the facts, ma'am.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

Well, you know, Cedric the Entertainer has money. Maybe you could reach out to him. Maybe he would. Yeah, that's right. Uh remember me, Cedric? I'm sure he would. I'm sure he would. Oh, that's excellent. And what do you think? Your last question is a big philosophical one. People talk about, you know, even the disclosure, the uh disclosure day, that is kind of like at the end, it has that big finish where it's kind of listen, that's be a spoiler. I haven't seen it either. I read it. But basically, that's almost like these these entities are, you know, look looking for our best interests and to save the world. But there are other viewpoints that they're demons, or there's other viewpoints that there are extraterrestrials in our galaxy, other viewpoints that they're interterrestrial, which means they are come from other realms and come into here through whatever portal entry. What's your thought about it? And and also like there's four to eight to whatever, how many different variations of of ETs? What's what's as you do it and you've spent a good amount of time in this subject, what do you believe today?

SPEAKER_02 43:43

I live in an apartment building, and I can walk down the hall and meet all manner of personalities, some friendly, some not friendly, some very quiet and furtive or secretive. And I bet it's the same way with extraterrestrials coming here. We got a mixed bag. Some are friendly and want to chat with us, and others are just here to observe quietly, and others maybe not so friendly. I don't believe we're going to be invaded that uh if they were planning such a thing, they would not wait until now when we're all armed to the teeth and on edge in most parts of this country and around the world. We have nuclear weapons and chemical weapons, it would be a fiasco. If you wanted to invade uh uh any American state or any country, you would have done so like 150 years ago when we were living in nearly a log cabin state. Uh everything is accelerated and technology has grown by leaps and bounds ever since. But you have to wonder, do they come here from other dimensions? Do they use uh dimensional portals? Do they use wormholes? Do they come here through a Stargate or teleport or mentally transport themselves and their molecular structure? There could be a variety of methods and a variety of aliens. And if our government would just start cracking open some of the books and releasing this information as cautiously and carefully and uh thoughtfully as they can, I think we're ready to hear it. We were not in 1941, but today we are.

SPEAKER_01 45:12

Well, since they haven't, Ben, we have guys like you out there um shedding some light onto it, which is great. So again, let's close with your website, Paul, if you don't mind, and uh give us that, and then we'll we'll call it a night. But this is a great interview. I really appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

Okay, it's uh www.paulblakesmith.com. It'll describe the books that I write. And again, you can get them on Amazon or Barnes and Noble online. And I sure thank you and uh appreciate your support.

SPEAKER_01 45:58

Please subscribe and like us on Facebook. Until next time, stay scared.