Fourth Reich Archaeology - #107 - She Harvey Oswald, Part 9, Side B

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

We are back this week with Side B of our ninth installment of She Harvey Oswald. And as we laid out in Side A, from here on out our series-within-a-series on the two would-be female assassins who set their sites on President Gerald Ford is going to get increasingly and precipitously weirder. In Side B we pick up just as Sara Jane’s marriage to her suss ass second husband–a Captain in the U.S. Air Force with connections to the psy-war Sydney Lewis Manning–was on the rocks. We continue connecting dots that others who’ve covered the assassination attempt didn’t even see.            Before signing off on this one we read into the record excerpts from the 1979 prison interview (on file with the hosts), which offer the only record evidence of Sara Jane addressing the issue of her early life and marriages. Her answers may lead much to be desired in factual content, but they may give insights into how her mind works. We think you will really enjoy this one, and humbly submit it as one of our most eye opening episodes to date. Let’s get digging. www.patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology Email: [e-mail]: @fourthreichpod

But that is not the reason I'm here. You see, this man is, he just has a soul sickness, his brain is damage from the use of this toxic and most terrible substance. Nonetheless, the reason I am here is I feel that I may have certain qualities that would qualify me to perhaps come over to your side to surrender and come to the side of law enforcement in general I would like an employment application. Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are.

In 1945, we began to acquire information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds vendors the more easy victims of a big lie than a small. For example, we're the CIA. Now he has a mile. I didn't know so long as I'm afraid to never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not what the CIA. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. My co-host, Don, is out this week. He is out in Canaw County, West Virginia, interviewing for position as a probation officer in the county juvenile court. This week, we are coming at you with Side B of episode nine of our ongoing series within a series, She, Harvey Oswald, our exploration into the two women,

who in September 1975 pointed their pistols at President Gerald R. Ford, and in the case of our current main character of this series, Sarah Jane Moore, well, she actually pulled the trigger. And we have been focusing on Sarah Jane Moore in the last three episodes, I believe, on this mini-series, the series within a series. I don't even know what to call it anymore. I think it's probably a series within a series within a series. series. Anyway, inside A of this episode, we set the scene with Project Bluebird, that 1950 CIA

operation in which the CIA would explore things like hypnosis and mind control through psychiatry and through the use of LSD. And this is important to our story about Sarah Jane Moore because this memorandum that the CIA was internally circulating in April 1950 that sort of explained the urgency for kicking off such a program, such a mind control program, while that scene setting was crucial because when we turn to our character of the day, when we turned to Sarah Jane Moore, we would reveal that she was in Washington, D.C. at that same time receiving treatment at none other than Walter Reed Hospital for a fainting spell she had at the White House. And so to put it bluntly at the time this memo was circulating in the CIA, she was in

the belly of the beast. We followed Sarah Jane through the early 1950s and her switchout from husband number one, Wally Anderson, to husband number two, Sid Manning, a fellow who raises eyebrows to say the least. Now here's a guy who was an Air Force captain and a psychometrist. Now go back to side A of this episode to figure out what that one really is but this guy straddled the public private sector of the military industrial complex in the Cold War era so much so like all of these other guys that we have been covering in the Jerry World series and this guy was doing psychometry. Seriously, like, this is the stuff that was in very high demand in the 1950s, if you're

talking about the intelligence community. We also talked about the relationship between Manning and Sarah Jane, and it's one where from the outside, at least, there was a serious power dynamic in play. Manning being the psychiatrist, right, and Sarah Jane being a patient, this person who was succumbing to these feigning spells. Now inside B today we start to really connect the dots and boy does it get spookier and spookier. We pick up with Sarah Jane and with Sid Manning in southern California when things are starting to get on the rocks and while Manning is working as a military government contractor. That's right. The couple is in Southern California and the story goes is that this is where the to spread apart, they drifted apart, and Sarah Jane, who was living her life very much as this

suburban housewife, she was getting fed up. And this ultimately led to their divorce, of course. And it is funny. I was listening back to Side A in preparation of this episode. And you'll see that we make this comparison, we draw this comparison with Betty Ford and how much so the lives of these women in the post-war era in the sort of upper middle-class suburban lifestyle, how their lives were so similar. And we draw some connections between Betty Ford and Sarajean Moore. It's one of the things I love about this show is that we are always bringing it back to the main timeline in the Jerry World Cinematic Universe.

And one of the things we didn't talk about, which I'm thinking about, out now is the fact that both Sarah Jane and Betty were active in the performance arts, right? Sarah Jane was a performer and actor. Don't forget that Betty Ford herself was into modern dance. She was a, you know, someone in the scene in New York at the time when it was hot. And actually in one way or another, this is what Side B is really all about is we take all of the weird stuff that we saw inside A and we add some more weird stuff and weird connections and we start to synthesize this case theory of ours by pointing out all of these strange spooky facts about all the people in Sarah Jane's life in her orbit and we start to build our case that

perhaps not all is what it seems and certainly not what we've been told. So without further ado, let's get digging. The definition of insanity is, no, do you? Yes, it's the inability to relate to another human being. It's the inability to love. Do you ever get any indication at all that she was a person of a violent turn that something like this might come about? Absolutely not.

She is the total antithesis of that. And it was more, I think, in her mind. You had never any indication that what she was thinking would be translated into action. He's not that kind of person or it didn't seem so. You kind of mentioned it, but this is the time when the CIA is getting deeply, deeply involved with the psychiatric profession. And so, you know, whatever old Sid Manning was up to at USC, there is at least a non-zero possibility that some of that work intersected with some of these MK Ultra projects that were getting kicked off the ground around this time. And it's a little bit, it's a little bit unclear exactly what he was up to. And the timelines don't quite match up.

Like a lot of the MK Ultra projects that I found researching this question that were housed in UCLA and USC really pick up in the late 50s. So this would be after the divorce of Sidney Manning and Sarah Jane Moore. But needless to say, any place where the psychiatric profession, is active, any place, especially at like a graduate university with access to a hospital, as USC did have, the, I think it's the LA County USC hospital, has been affiliated with the university dating back to that time. There's always the possibility of some crossover there, of some intersection. And I'd also note, like you said, about treating these airmen, this was also the time when the Air Force was sort of the locus of a lot of attention about mind control, because it was

Air Force airmen who offered up these confessions in Korea to committing war crimes to dropping chemical and biological weapons. And of course, the official narrative here stateside was, obviously they didn't actually do those horrible things, and they were brainwashed into making these false confessions. This is the bread and butter research of Friend of the Pod, Jeffrey Kay. Please check out his substack called Hidden Histories, where he publishes his excellent work on

that subject, but it is intriguing to say the least that we have a psychologist who's kind of straddling the line between the Air Force, private industry, and the psychological profession, and is involved with Sarah Jane Moore. Unfortunately, though, we've not been able to locate any specific records detailing exactly what Manning was up to. So we'll just have to put out there sort of the information we do have and the contextual information that we're aware of and allow the listener to draw your own inferences, your own conclusions, but while it certainly does not appear that Sidney Manning was some major M.K. Ultra researcher,

like his name doesn't appear on these lists of guys that we see alongside our enemy of the pod Jolly West and his ilk. It doesn't mean that he couldn't have played some other auxiliary role. And we'll keep on tracking that possibility as we discuss Sidney Manning, at, you know, whether it was as a handler or as a groomer of sorts to Sarah Moore. He was a little bit older. We don't want to do too much age gap discourse here, but he was 17 years, her senior. Hey, age ain't nothing but a number. Yeah.

But the important thing there is, like, by the time they met, she was only 20 years old. Exactly. Like, the number of difference is not that important. And what's important is how young she was at the time. Yeah. Yes. And you can't deny the sort of influence or power that an older man, more established man, would have over someone, especially at this time. Right.

Yeah. And Dr. Patient. And Dr. Patient. Of course. And so just one last point in Sid, right? Like he was also in sort of military adjacent stuff at this point, right? He was working as a contractor. He was.

So a lot of his work could have just been done. in that capacity, right, as someone who is not a part of any sort of official government work, but is in the periphery either as a contractor or even just someone who is consulting on something from the private sector. So, you know, you point out, you know, make your own inferences, listener. And of course, if anyone out there has any extra or any new or insightful info on this guy, Sid Manning, please do send us. us an email because we'd love to hear from you. So we're not done with him yet though. We're not done with them yet. But let's turn back to Sarah Jane Moore. She's now 25. She's a single mother with three

kids under the age of six. And this is a time, you know, just a little bit more sympathy for our main character here because I think that it is deserved in this respect because she's 25. She is now divorced for the second time. And she's now divorced for a second time. And this is a time when single mothers were a rarity, right? That usually meant you're a widow. And divorces were very rare. And divorced women were stigmatized. And those longtime listeners who are familiar with Jerry World will know all of this full well because of the story of Betty Blumer because you know who else was a divorcee? Of course, she was remarried in 1956, but in 1956, Betty Ford also had three children and was living with her husband, her second husband,

Jerry Ford. Of course, Betty is well into her 30s at this time. and her life takes a very different path from Sarah Jane Moore. All of this to say that Sarah at 25 is she is having a rough go at it. Yes. And I like that parallel with Betty Ford too because it's like the characters in this saga, right? They have their little parallels, their little commonalities. And yet, you know, at this time, obviously, know, no nothing.

of one another and are just on opposite coasts of the United States doing their thing, moving along, but we can draw something poetic from it. Yeah, I like to think of them because I like to think of Betty at this point in Sarah's life because it's like, you know, you think of their day to day and they're probably not in terms of child care, in terms of how they're, you know, running their home. probably not looking very different up until then, right? Like they were each very much, you know, living the lifestyle of like the Betty homemaker at the time.

And it's interesting to me to think of them on that level. Yeah, for sure. And of course, Betty Draper, another stand-in that we can also use as sort of a lens to view this whole era, including, right? Remember in Mad Men, there's the divorcee that moves into the neighborhood and you see the stigma playing out. Glenn's mother. Yeah, the weirdo kid, right? Yeah. Oh man, what a weird plot line. Okay, but let's get back to Sarah Jane. It's now, let's say it's 55, 56, and she is at her wits. and never one to just sit still and sit idly by with her lot,

Sarah Jane decides to act. And what does she do? This is a pretty fucked up little anecdote and episode in her life. And it's one that, you know, Jerry Speeler casts in a very judgmental light. And it's hard to say that it's unfair because this is, actually pretty fucked. So she calls her parents. She tells them that she is at the end of her rope. She can't take it anymore. That she is moving back home and that she's taking the kids with her so that they can avail themselves of some support from her family network. They're going back to Charleston.

So Ruth, you know, come to the airport, will be there on such and such a day. at such and such a time and we'll see you then. Ruth shows up and everybody gets off the plane, no sign of Sarah Jane. Then, once the passengers have deplained, out comes the what was then called a stewardess, accompanied by two little kids aged five and three, and carrying in her arms a tiny baby, about nine months old or so,

and that stewardess says to Ruth, like, are you Ruth Kahn? She says yes. She says, okay, here are your grandkids. She hands them off, and there's no sign of Sarah Jane anywhere. That's because she put her kids all beneath the age of six on a plane, including one baby, from California to West Virginia. Don't even know how that's possible, if I'm being honest, back in those days. Like, that is a long-ass flight.

And Ruth picks them up and takes them home. she tries to call Sarah, she doesn't get a hold, and, you know, eventually this becomes a big deal. Ruth is not like super old, right? Sarah Jane at this point in time is only 25, but she is like, you know, what's going on? What do I have to do with these kids? She tries eventually to get Sarah Jane arrested, she calls the police on her for neglect. she um

you know seeks whatever she can from Sarah Jane but Sarah Jane just kind of drops off the face of the earth vis-à-vis her three children sired by

Sydney Lewis Manning can I just say one thing this um this episode to me is like the perfect foil to what happened with young baby Leslie Lynch King Jr.

Right? At the turn of the century, what was it, like 1913, right? When his mom, Dorothy, yeah, finally decides to split. She takes young Jerry Babe in arms in her arms and goes back home. And so the start of this story with Sarah Jane, it sort of seems like it has that same flavor where she's getting out of what she believes to be a bad situation.

but really for Sarah Jane, the bad situation is the entirety of the family life. It's not just her husband. It's the kids. It's being bogged down in this sort of what she'll call like this suburban lifestyle, this prison that she's made for herself. And to me, it's sort of the perfect sort of commentary on where America was heading and where things were heading with the craziness of the next couple of decades, where you have this stark contrast in how these two mothers are behaving towards their children.

Right. And the role of technology. Because obviously Dorothy Gardner, Jerry's mother, did not have the opportunity to put young Jerry on a plane. She had to convey him in her arms. Whereas here, Sarah Jane, Khan, Anderson, Manning is able to just drop them on a cross-country flight. And I believe, based on the reporting around this, that this happened before their divorce was finalized,

but I would assume that they were at least no longer cohabiting by this point. Needless to say, it's May 1956 when finally the divorce agreement is finalized. filed with the court in Los Angeles, California. And this is where things start to get very weird. If that was even possible. Okay, so hope everyone's seated and I'd like to get your undivided attention for this next little bit. So Sarah Jane is in California, presumably in California. And she's just dumped her kids on her parents in West Virginia.

And now it's 1957. And now it's November 1957. And Sydney Manning moves to Kanawa County, West Virginia. Dick. It's Kanaw. Canal. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

All right, right, right. Okay, yeah, that's right. How could I mess that up? Canal County, West Virginia. That is the same county that his children are living in, that Ruth and Olaf are living in, Sarah Jane's parents. And it is in that county that Sid is appointed a probation officer of the county juvenile court. his appointment to this office was announced in the Charleston Gazette so we do have a historical record of this and if you've put it together already and if you haven't I'm about to tell you this guy Sid is now involved in the very juvenile court that has jurisdiction over his own kids who have been living with his estranged wife's parents of course the Gazette article doesn't really go into all of that and mention Sarah Jane or

the cons or any of that, it just says that he was introduced to West Virginia when he was stationed at Fort Lee in Virginia. Regular Virginia. Right, in regular Virginia, right, in regular Virginia, not West Virginia, in East Virginia. And this article, it goes on and talks about his experience treating teens in the military as a psychologist, but it doesn't really talk about the fact that he is a father of three, let alone that he is a father of three children in the county. And it even has a picture. And the picture in the paper is the only picture of Sidney Manning that we could find to date.

Yeah. And to be clear, listener, there's zero ambiguity that this is the same guy. It says Sidney Lewis Manning. So again, we're dealing with three names here. Right. It has his picture. He was in Fort Lee. Says Fort Lee, says the Air Force stuff.

And he's a psychologist, right, all of that stuff. Like, imagine Olaf and Ruth, they pick up their copy of the Charleston Gazette that they read every morning. And they see this picture of their goofy-ass son-in-law. being put in a position of authority by county officials. And it still gets weirder than that, because four months later, in March of 1958, the Gazette publishes another article, somewhat similar in tone and subject matter

to the one that came out in November 57 announcing Sidney Lewis Manning, 's arrival in Canaw County, except this one announces his departure from Canaw County. After just four months, he was resigning the position to accept a job for an aircraft company in Southern California and was replaced by some other guy as probation officer for the juvenile court. So like, what the fuck? What is this about? Yeah. This guy, Sydney, he presumably knows that Sarah Jane's family is out in Knawa and presumably knows that his children are there too.

And he shows up for four months between late 1957 and early 1958 and he just chills there without any explanation, really. he goes, you know, he goes back to California. And then this is where the trail of Sidney Lewis Manning really tails off, right? We don't really hear much from him after this. His name does appear in the local paper again, but only as an abandoned father. Because in 1963, Ruth and Olaf Khan post in the local paper the hearing, information for the adoption of their grandchildren, which they eventually, you know, they adopt these kids legally in 63 until that they're just like caretaking or whatever. But in 1963,

they go through the formal process of asserting parental abandonment as to their grandchildren and adopting them as their own children. And the, That's the last that we ever hear of Sidney Lewis Manning. There is a genealogy website where I believe it's the daughter of Sid's half-sister has posted a little bit of a family tree on this website. And according to her, Sydney Manning died in Missoula, Montana in 1978. He never responded. There's a couple of articles from 1970.

that mention Sarah Jane's marriage to Sidney Manning, but to a one, all those articles articulate that he was not responsive to any attempted outreach. So in other words, right, he is getting all these calls from the media after his ex-wife tried to kill the president, and he does not pick up the phone. He does not offer any comment. he does not come out of the woodwork. And there's also not much to be found on the Manning children, is there, Dick? No, there is not.

There is not much about the Manning children. In fact, so Olaf, he apparently could not handle the stress of having three little kid, three little Rugrats running around in his twilight years. And so he passed away shortly after this adoption that happened in 1963. and just around that time, Ruth took the children herself and moved to Cincinnati. And there are some reports that she remarried to a fella by the name of C.E. Bailey. And that's where that thread sort of trails off. Right. Although, to be clear, Sydney Jr., the eldest child of,

this combination did respond to certain media outreach in 1975. And at the time, he had become a furrier, a purveyor of fine furs in Cincinnati, Ohio, and participated in some of these press inquiries. And at first, he said, there's no way this could be my mother, the age. The age of the don't line up. I deny that this is my mother. My mother, for all intents and purposes, is Ruth, and she adopted me, and that's that. And at the same time, of course, as the listener will be familiar from the audio clip that started, I believe, our last episode, Ruth Khan, likewise in 1975 denied or at least cast doubt on her parentage of the alleged attempted assassin Sarah Jane Moore in 1975. And there was even a press conference where Sid Jr. and Ruth appeared together stating

that they would need more proof before they acknowledged any relationship to this woman whose face was all over the news. He has broken all ties with the family until I have definite proof such as fingerprints or a statement from her, I cannot say that Sarah Jane Moore is my daughter. Even though the circumstances seem to indicate that she is my daughter, as the mother of Sarah Jane Con, I must be sure. I haven't seen her in some months. She's called me a few times, and I haven't had a chance to talk to her because you get busy.

And thinking about it now, I wish very much I had talked to about. She'd seen the other people. She'd been around the street, talked to people she'd never known before, various social classes, minorities, about things she'd never talked about before with anyone. They were eventually satisfied that it was their Sarah Jane Con. like it's very vague how it's reported but there's like allusions to the fact that later on ruth kind of confirmed that indeed it was but nevertheless right like yeah it's very weird sarah jane did not go to she did not go to olaf's funeral in 1964 she did not have any

contact with the kids. The kids all said, or Sid Jr., you know, presumably speaking on behalf of the kids, that she had no role whatsoever in their life and he had no memory of her. So like, she is not present at all. There's no reporting on any DNA test or anything like that. And as we will get to at the end of the episode, Sarah Jane, likewise, does not acknowledge the exact. existence of these three biological children of hers, nor of her marriage to Sidney Manning, ever. So it's like a mystery wrapped in an enigma to quote Joe Pesci playing David Ferry, Civil Air Patrol Commander in the Oliver Stone JFK movie. Civil Air Patrol Commander and amateur cancer researcher.

Let's not forget all of those. little mice that he had. Yeah, yeah, and and child molester and child molester and alopecia sufferer. Speaking of child molesters. Look, so this next part, so Sarah Jane's youngest Christopher, quite tragic sort of a dark turn for this guy in 1977, then 21-year-old Christopher, who recall he was just a baby when Sarah Jane put him on that plane and where he was shipped to the East Coast to West Virginia. In 1977, 21-year-old Christopher was convicted in Anarundle County, Maryland for molesting a six-year-old in Jessup, Maryland and was sentenced to 10 years prison time. so that is where Christopher was at the time you know all of this was coming out in the wake of the day of the deed but before we go any further I think this is a good point to pause and reflect and take stock of

everything that we have in the record so far what do you say don let's do it yeah you want to start us off Yeah, so let's start off from the beginning, from the early years. You have Sarah Jane Kahn, who is this gifted student, right? She excels in the language art. She is a star performer, an actress, right? She is, she's got chops for mathematics and science and all of that. But also, she's kind of a weirdo loner, so she never really excels socially like the other kids. So that's, let's put that at point. Point number one. Point number two, another weird little fact of her childhood in upbringing years, right? Recall that there was another Sarah Jane in West Virginia at this time, right?

In her hometown. Named Sarah Jane Moore. Exactly. So this goes to that point that you were making earlier, right? These names that lend themselves to confusion, these sort of vague and general, nondescript names that are easily, picked up by anyone and everyone who wants them. Yeah, and maybe on that score, if I could just read into the record real quickly, and then I'll turn it back over to you to keep listing down these points.

But this is a excerpt from a CIA document that is cited in a Senate report that is in turn cited in Mary Haver-Stick's book, A Woman I Know, that we've referred to in this series. and it's about the assumed identity of undercover agents. So this is talking about best practices for how to craft an assumed identity for undercover government agents. And it says, quote, a fictitious background and history for the new character of the undercover investigator should be prepared. The investigator's background story should seldom, if ever, be wholly fictitious. The undercover investigator should assume an identity in keeping with his

personality traits and in keeping with his own background and characteristics. And there's other sources that Haverstick cites, including the congressional testimony of David Atley-Philips, right? One of the guys that was running operations with anti-Castro-Cubans, where he also talks about, among other things, selecting pseudonyms that are based on the names of his high school classmates and things like that. And just all of this process for creating a false identity, a pseudonym, an alias, and a backstory. And there is a lot there that bears consideration. in conjunction with Sarah Jane, Khan, Manning that we're talking about here.

So turn it back over to you for ticking down the rest of the list here of all of these factoids that make up sort of where we are right now. Absolutely. So getting back to this list that we have on the record, these facts that we have on the record so far, right? So you have this gifted student,

this weird fact that there is a Sarah Jane Moore in her hometown growing up and this fact that Sarah Jane who's the main character in our story suffers from these feigning spells so when she was a teenager she disappears for three whole days and nobody knows where she went and what she did and she just shows back up seemingly totally fine but then in 1950 Sarah Jane is in the whack and she leaves after this bizarre amnesia episode at the White House, which leads to her shortly thereafter. She divorces her small-time her husband

and marries a guy who, we posit, was her army assigned psychologist. She has three kids with this guy while he's working for the Air Force during the Korean War, then moves with him to Southern California, dumps their kids with her parents in West Virginia, divorces him, then he moves to her hometown without her. For a period of four months,

gets a municipal bureaucratic job with access to records, including juvenile records, and yet has no apparent relationship with his children at that time, even though they were living there, right? And even though he's there for, you know, albeit just a short period. It's still, he's there for four months, right? You could go see your kids.

And I think, Don, I'll hand it off to you because you talked, you chatted with Jeff K about this, right? Yeah, I was, you know, always tried to obtain a little bit of insight from some of the experts in the field here. And, you know, Jeff opined that the likely role of military psychologists, the by and large, these types of guys were just treating patients, right, as is his sort of cover. And occasionally there would be one that's involved in research, but it's hard to say. Like, he just, he doesn't pop up anywhere else that we can see. And it's, it's hard to place him in that role. But even assuming that he's just a run of the mill sort of psychologist in the army,

you know, there's the possibility that he is playing some other role in Sarah Jane's life, whether that is sort of a handler, a guide through the labyrinthine sort of intricacies of the intelligence world. And I mean, what really, and this is not from Jeff Kay, this is just my opinion here, but what really stinks, what really raises a red flag is this move to Charleston. Imagine, right, he's appointed to a county court. Imagine like some paper pusher in Knaw County Juvenile Court. It's like, hey, you know what? We need to replace the probation officer for the juvenile court.

Anybody you know might fit the bill. And then like, well, not around here, but I hear California way they've got some real nice folks out there. Like, give me a break. Totally. It's, yeah, it's weird. And then I think the other thing that we should just point here just as like another fact, it's more of a contextual background fact, is this project Bluebird, right? This idea that the intelligence community at this time, the intelligence brass was very much into this. feel, this idea of meddling into people's minds through hypnosis and through drugs and through

mind control. And so when you look at all of that together, I think we are starting to develop a pretty nice case that there is something more than meets the eye. Right. Especially recall listener in the portions of the 79 prison interview that we read into the record in the last episode, there's all this discussion that Sarah Jane is reflecting upon how her records, the records from her childhood, from her schooling, have all seemingly disappeared and are unavailable to her as of 1975. And so, of course, in his very short-lived role in Knaw County, Sidney Manning had the means and the opportunity to fuck around with these records, right?

He is in a position of public trust with access. And the question is, what is the motive? That is a much harder question to figure. out, but the mere fact that she has exhibited these characteristics of fainting and amnesia, which if I'm a mind control researcher, like, that is the subject that I'm looking for for my experiments, right? Like somebody who loses their memory of events after they happen, that's a perfect person for anything from a courier role to wetworks, as they call assassinations.

So, you know, just putting it out there. So now we're at a point where Sarah Jane and Sarah Jane is basically abandoned her kids. They're now with Ruth. And we believe that Ruth and Sarah never saw each other again from this era onwards. So I think recall that Ruth was pretty tick-dog. that Sarah just left her with the kids and was doing everything she could to get her reined in. So I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that they didn't really have any contact again after this era. So at this point you may be wondering what Sarah Jane herself had to say about all of this, if anything at all.

And while her 1979 prison interview probably raises more questions than it provides answers, we would be remiss to leave it out of this discussion. And, you know, spoiler alert, for the most part, Sarah Jane refuses entirely to talk about her past, ducking and dodging and denying throughout the interview, but there are some passages that are worth turning our attention to. Yeah, yeah, I think we should. And just by way of a little bit of setup here, you know,

One of the topics that comes up in the interview are questions that sort of go to her background, to her upbringing. And she gets real tight-lipped as you preview Dick, but there's some interesting components going on. So the first one is when she is asked the following question. How did you evolve? How did your political ideas evolve over the years? When you started working for the FBI, you said you didn't have any political ideas. I did, but I didn't know, okay?

I'm not from a working class background, and I'm as much an elitist as anyone else. And as a person of mixed blood, I have taken the trouble to be three times as white as anybody else. You've got a, look at me. You're so scared. Half of it's kind of, pugh. Now, as I say, that was one of the things that my husband did for me. He made me proud of the thing that my grandparents were ashamed of. The thing that I tried to hide then came with him to be a sense of pride. But a lot of people have done that. It has come over the years. He may have been the thing that turned it. It was wasn't meeting him. It had been going on over the years. Nevertheless, I was working in progressive movements. I was working in civil rights, farm workers in California, the anti-war movement,

and any other upper-class or lower upper class or elitist intellectual white liberal. But the questions I had were always there. And so, I don't know if you caught it, listener, but tucked into that statement, she makes a reference to being mixed blood and to passing by being three times as white as anybody else. And this reflects, you know, an apparent belief, in her mind at least, that she was biracial. And it's not clear if she was, like there's not enough data certainly for us to make a determination about that i think it's fairly safe to say that olaf con coming from like german immigrant stock as a first generation american is very unlikely biracial but we don't know the racial background of ruth moore's parentage so it's it's possible

And of course, there's also these family legends that are very typical, especially in the American South, right? Like, you'll hear it all the time where white passing people will make reference to having Indian blood or something like that. So, you know, it could be that it's a family legend. It could be that indeed there's some black ancestry in her family, but certainly in her mind she identified as biracial and another, shout out to Jeff Kay, that, you know, he pointed this out as well, that this perception, this identity crisis can create a real issue as to how she sort of views herself and her role in the world. And of course, later on, as we all know, she gets involved in the Black liberation movement

in Northern California, and that is what brings her into contact with the FBI. There's another quote from elsewhere in the interview where she says, You must begin by saying, I'm of mixed blood and my husband is black. You know, I've passed all my life. I had plastic surgery on my nose because I thought it didn't look right. I straighten my hair. I went through the whole trip. I passed with a vengeance.

I could have anyway. So there you have it again, where this ostensibly white woman is talking about being white passing, quote unquote, mixed blood. So another aspect that will throw into the mix here, without saying like what exactly does it mean, I think the important thing is what does it mean for her psychological profile, for her sense of herself, right?

Right. This next one is about what she basically repeatedly denies ever having been married to Sid or to anyone else before what will be her third marriage to Hollywood legend and Oscar winner John Alberg, a fellow she calls Big John. And we'll cover him in the next episode. but we should go through this passage because it really shows that she is hiding her marriage with Sid. You have only been married twice? Yeah, contrary to what you may have read.

I wish I had led that kind of... If I had led that kind of life, I never have time to do anything. I mean, the way they have me, a career. You know there's a report even saying that I was once a prostitute? Oh, God. I've even said that to somebody in prison. I said, but I was a hooker. She said, you're not telling that.

I said, I can copy it down from my jacket. I'm reading it. I mean, I'm learning. I'm reading this on my prison jacket. I'm alleged to have made my living in prostitution. Oh, God, where, when, how? Tell me. And we'll get into all of that in our next installment.

But for now, this is, you know, her in the late 70s basically saying she's only been married twice. And her first husband was this movie man, John. And more generally in this interview, she's extremely cagey about her past and extremely reticent to discuss it. She is aware that her records have disappeared, but she does not offer any verbal explanation to fill in all the many gaps in her life story. She seems to be deliberately cultivating a legend of sorts, but making it mysterious on purpose. For example, late in the interview, we see the following exchange. What other records of yours have disappeared besides birth certificates and school records? employment records, college records, almost any record that I've asked for doesn't exist anymore.

I don't know. I was beginning to think that I was being wiped out. I said that if the assassination attempt had been put off six months, I wouldn't have existed anywhere. I'd have disappeared. Mike Ray said that when I asked her, this is referring back to that original story about the you picked you up with amnesia in 1950. The original story said that they couldn't find your army records at the time. Mike said that later on your records were found. Is that correct?

I have no idea. When were you a whack? I have never said that I was. Oh, because this was the original story that you were a whack. I have never said that I was. Were you? never said. There are questions that I'm not going to answer, you know. Will that be in your book? I don't know. I think one of the problems about writing the book is to what extent can I write the

book and not say things that I won't. Part of my reluctance to say things is that I'm mixed blood with a family with a past and there is just simply no way I am going to do that to anybody else. I'm going to force them to... So part of the concerns have nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the assassination, haven't anything to do with anything like that, but simply have to do with protecting other people. I guess I'm a little confused as far as if you were in the army or not.

Well, I have made a policy not to talk about my personal life, and I won't answer questions to the police, and I won't answer questions to the press, and I won't answer questions of my friends. And if I won't answer questions, I won't answer questions. As to whether or not an individual question is important or not, you know, I have made a stated policy of not discussing my personal background, for whatever reasons, and there are many.

And if I made that decision, I made that decision. And, you know, maybe nobody can understand what, answering this. And it may not make a difference at all, except that I've made a decision, and I will not talk about my personal background. And that decision began when I realized how little the government knew about me. I thought, oh my God, this is fascinating. Okay, I'm not going to help them. I help them too much anyway. I'm not going to help them. And, you know, part of it is just that. You know, you're stuck with your fiction. You're stuck with it. And a lot of it's fiction, and a lot of it is mistaken identity, and there's a lot of other things,

and part of it is just... I already knew that. I just didn't know that you considered that part of your personal life, so I apologize for that. No, I won't talk about any... Nobody, you know, I talk about my house in Danville, my 20-room house, you know, beyond a certain point. I won't tell you anything. May I clarify this one point, because this is how it appeared in the newspaper? A lot of things have appeared in the newspapers.

Clarify. Well, I won't clarify most of it. Most of it. Well, some of it I will. Some of it I won't. Depends on what they have to do with. In a couple of newspaper reports, Manning was listed as your first husband.

Is that correct? I have never. That's again. Into parts of my life, you know, I won't either confirm or deny any of that. You might as well understand that I will neither confirm or deny any alleged relationship of anyone to me.

Okay. Period. Okay. And so there you have it in her own words in this never before brought to public attention, I think is a safe way to say it. Never before publicly disclosed interview, prison interview that Sarah Jane gave in 1979, where she is effectively denying. any sort of relationship with Sid Manning, where she is basically implying, I guess I should say, expressly stating that she is biracial. She has some black ancestry or perhaps Native American

ancestry that she is calling out here. And then she's also just generally very cagey about her past, right, to a point where it's like she won't even confirm whether she's been in the whack or not. And that, to me, is all together, you know, on top of all of the other stuff, we spoke into the record earlier in this episode. It raises some eyebrows, right? Oh, 100%. I mean, you really couldn't, like, if we wanted to write some dialogue in her words, I don't think we could do any better than, quote, you're stuck with your fiction. You're stuck with it, and a lot of it's fiction, and a lot of it is mistaken identity. Like, this hypothesis that we are building up and offering out here, it certainly finds support in those words, and I think that it will find

support in the next episode where we are going to explore yet another marriage to yet another intelligence-connected fed with a deep background in foreign policy establishment, in high technology of the day, and in that beautiful factory of images, of spectacle, Hollywood. when she gets married to Big John Allberg in the City of Angels. Listener, at no point will this story get any less weird. And we are more than thrilled to keep on bringing you that hot off the press's first time reporting that you won't find anywhere else. Until next time, I am Don.

and I am Dick saying farewell and keep on digging Come on babe let me control your brain I've seen you and I want you to prove that you're insane

and I'll numb all of you babe right back here again is my midnight climate I want to watch you through the glare I'd connections and high finance and we can put you on your ass have you shooting an H-hand smoking craig

and we throw you in the tray LSD and PCP Alcohol and THC Deprive you of the sensory I'm after you but they are after me Because it's all about total control So scratch the search will show My project monarch

Like a flower where you'll find your flap your wings and make it die Like a human pesticide You better run because you'll never hide And if you dare discuss the matter Nobody believe in the world Because we can make the newsroom shatter just like a mockingbird yeah will make you sound absurd so best not to stray out from the earth because it's so just scratch the surface and we'll show you go how far we'll go