Haunted Cosmos - MK Ultra: Did They Really Stop?

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Who really killed MLK?Where did Whitey Burger learn to be so sadistic?How was the Unabomber connected to the government’s forays into mind control?Find out in today’s episode: MK Ultra, Part II!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!This episode is sponsored by Backwards Planning Financial. Visit Joe's website here or give him a call (615-767-2555).This episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today.This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to get your first bag free!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully.This episode is also sponsored by Seraph Guard! Check them out here.This episode is sponsored by Rooted Pines Homestead. Visit their website here! Help further Christendom and get 10% off your next order when you use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS at checkout!This episode is also sponsored by the King's Ridge Elderberries! Check them out here and use code HAUNTED for 10% off your first order!This episode is also sponsored by Reformation Heritage Books! Learn more about the Puritan Treasures collection here and use code haunted for 10% off at checkout!Finally, this episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order.Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, backwards planning financial, new Dominion Design Co, rooted Pines homestead, gray-toed tallow, the Kings Ridge Elderberries, Reformation Heritage Books, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, and our supporters at patreon.com. The date was December 12, 1985. The place was somewhere along Howe Avenue on the east side of Sacramento, California. The man was named Hughes.

Scrutton. He was the owner of a small computer and technology rental company that had been doing quite well for a handful of years. Of course, that was not all this man was. He was also a good and trustworthy and affectionate boyfriend, a respectful son, a loving brother, and a good timing friend. Though he had traveled the world and climbed tall mountains, he was nonetheless known as a man of gentle meekness. Later, he would be remembered as one who epitomized the virtues of straightforward sincerity, fairness, and kindness to others. But on this day, Scrutton was merely leaving his shop in order to attend a trade show on the other side of town. The weather was fair, business was good, and the slight shift in daily rhythm, the kind that makes a man feel secure in the thing that

he's given his life to building, made everything feel more important than it probably had a right to feel. That is nothing against Scrutton. We all taste those small joys in the midst of our toils that seem magnified above their smallness, those moments of serendipity that sometimes break in on the vanity of life. While a true glory, these moments of joy can sometimes make us miss the forest of life's fragility in a cursed world for the trees of small triumphs here and there. Scrutton, looking contentedly at these trees of ordinary joy, thus walked calmly, swinging his keys around his finger

and whistling a tune he had heard on the radio that morning, down the cracked and dirty sidewalk that lined his store towards his car. But the gentle serenity of a good day suffered its first blow when he saw a strange pile of lumber sitting next to his parking spot. He did not remember seeing it there when he arrived that morning, but that didn't mean much to him. The pile was on the passenger side, and he wasn't in the habit of looking back at his car after he parked it.

He must have simply missed its presence earlier in the day. At any rate, it was a bit of a mess. Five old boards, haphazards, or at least stuck together with nails jutting out, sharp side up, in all directions. He thought it would be best to drag it out of the parking lot to ensure both he and other employees and owners of the strip mall would not accidentally run over it and puncture a tire. Scrutton upped his pace a little bit. This also meant he stopped whistling and twirling his keys.

He hopped to a slower jog over to the woodpile, grabbed a nail-free section of it with both hands, and started leaning back to pull it towards the corner curb next to the door. dumpsters. But all in a flash, the world changed. The gentle yellow light of a warm December sun in his eyes exploded into bleached white in an instant. Where he had moments before heard the cool city soundtrack of chirping birds, shipping trucks beeping as they reversed out of the loading docks on the next block, a flag whose wind-driven flapping sent its carabiner clinging into the galvanized pole like a gong, and distant police sirens echoing through alleyways far away. He now heard a splitting cacophony. His eardrums seemed ready to explode and pour their liquid from his head.

His skin, which moments before had been a thing almost unnoticeable to him, now screamed with stinging pain and total confusion. The senses protested, and Scrutton's mind rebelled the sudden multiplication of inputs. The fire enveloped him and promised a quick death. The blinded eyes began to feel less and less solid, threatening to melt right out of his face. They caught small pieces of gravel and metal that flew towards him with shrapnel quickness. The ringing ears grew black with char and heat. They started to crack, sliced and grated by yet more flinging shrapnel. The skin went all hot and red and around his chest tore away at the intensity of the

exploding blowtorch which preceded the jagged projectiles. Scrutton had looked right into the center of the pile. He had not thought, not for a single second, that the small piece of pipe inside was actually. a bomb. The attack was over as fast that it had begun, and Scrutton found himself flung back onto the ground. His head slammed into the pavement next to his own car's pyre. He choked on the spittle and flesh-filled blood that rose in his mouth from some destroyed pit down inside of him. Blinded, his eyelids nonetheless did not close, but forced him to stare up directly into the burning sun above. Two U.S. airmen who had been walking on the other side of the same parking lot as

grutton, leapt to his aid when they realized what had happened. The loud bang, the man laying flat on the ground, it all came together quickly for them and, on their short journey over to see the damage, prepared themselves for the worst. The worst is what they found. Though clearly still alive, the constant choking up of blood and slight twitching squirms betrayed what the two men had most feared. Nothing at all could be done for this stranger. His chest had a gaping hole in it. His ribs were exposed to the sky like some sacrifice to Zeus, and behind his ribs, they could glimpse his heart racing, desperately trying to sustain a life already slipping away. CPR was obviously impossible. Instead, they did what they could. They offered the fallen man comforting words as they waited

for the ambulance to arrive. In agonizing 20 minutes that stretched into a year later, the man was dead. Years later, the man responsible for the horrific murder, came to light. Being a prolific journaler, it was discovered that he had recorded his thoughts after seeing the success of his crime. Here's what he wrote. Experiment 97, December 11, 1985. I planted a bomb disguised to look like a scrap of lumber behind Rentech computer store in Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, December 20, the operator of the store was killed, blown to bits on December 12. Excellent. Humane way to eliminate something. somebody. He probably never felt a thing. $25,000 reward offered, rather flattering.

In 1952, a 10-year-old boy named Theodore sat down at his school teacher's instruction to take a test. The boy was excited in the way a shy but very bright pupil gets excited to prove to others that despite his awkwardness and ineptitude at making friends, he was not good for nothing. Only later did he find out just how important this particular test was. He almost sensed it in the moment. After all, no other students were taking it with him. But he didn't totally understand the full weight of what he was doing. And so he simply took up his pencil and leaned down to dial in and work away.

And work he did. He did an excellent job on the test, which turned out to be an IQ test. He scored a 167, far higher than even the school had expected of him, though they had predicted an above-average outcome. This score cleared away any and all doubt they may have had about what to do next. Now it was clear. Theodore needed to skip a grade. The awkward boy therefore bid farewell to the class of almost six graders he knew and went right along to the seventh grade.

The jump proved difficult for the boy, and at many moments, his parents and the school wondered if they had made the right choice. Mind you, this regret was not because of the academic rigor. Theodore had absolutely no trouble adjusting to the more advanced work, but he did far worse socially than they had all hoped. They predicted that since Theodore would be on a more equal intellectual footing with his new classmates, he would have a smoother time connecting with some of them on a personal level, but he didn't. He really didn't care, but everyone else seemed to. Despite this, they kept the arrangement the way it was. After all, the boy wanted to stay in the higher grade.

He was loving the work. For a few years he excelled in school and tried to put more effort into making friends, but that particular skill never grew any easier for him. Finally, in the tenth grade, he tested again and both school and parents decided that Theodore needed to skip yet another grade, the 11th. Of course, this second leap proved just as easy academically for the boy to make, but socially it was even more difficult for him than the earlier leave. He grew more and more shy and awkward, more and more reclusive. But he seemed content nonetheless. So at 16 years old, the intellectual prodigy graduated high school two years

early and true to his reputation up to that point, packed up his things, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Theodore, you see, had been accepted into Harvard. Naturally, Theodore's parents, self-made working class folks, were thrilled with the brilliance. and academic prowess of their son. His father especially was eager to send him off into the great adventure of the intellectual world, excited to see what kind of name his son might make for himself, and what kind of honor he might bestow upon his loving parents.

His mother, though proud of her son, was more hesitant about his going away at such a young age. After all, he was just learning how to drive, and his age contemporaries were barely surviving advanced algebra, the nerves of asking a girl to homecoming, and the drama of teenage school politics. Genius as he was, was her son really ready to leapfrog that entire stage of societal development and start his driving years off with financial aid forms, strict professor office hours, and collegiate courses in linear systems and mechanical vibration.

But in voicing these concerns to her husband, the lamentation of youth and trepidation for the future fell on deaf ears. their boy could go to Harvard, and therefore he would go. Ah, the dichotomy of father and mother. Theodore's arrival at Harvard was clumsy to say the least. As with any other freshmen, he had no real idea as to what he was doing. Finding a place to live ended up being far easier for him somehow than finding the room where his first classes were actually held. This, of course, is completely normal, but his age was not. Though he was academically mature enough for the next challenge, he was not nearly socially mature enough for it. He could not relate to his classmates in the slightest. Where they had company and their proverbial misery, he had only misery. Lucky for him,

Harvard was no stranger to the young savant and was prepared to do their part to help this young man adjust as best he could, hence my saying that he had no trouble in finding a place to live. for you see, Theodore was actually one of 10 16-year-olds admitted to the school his freshman year. The school, again being used to this sort of thing, decided to house all 10 of these freshmen together in the same house. But even with this forced community, Theodore's habit of shyness and reclusiveness came back with force. In a small group of segregated young students, the other nine tenants of the house often forgot the tenth in their ranks was ever there. It was rare for Theodore to come out of his room for anything other than class. Thus, he lived out his days of his first year in the Ivy League.

Of course, the academic work posed very little, if any, real challenge for Theodore. He excelled in all of his studies and routinely impressed professors with his writing and test scores, before ultimately leaving them feeling a bit disappointed when they actually met this student one-on-one and found that he could barely carry on a conversation. But it's not as if they could grade on social aptitude, and Theodore was undeniably smart. So his freshman year came and went, and when it was time to move out of his more sheltered freshman housing, he found himself tossed headlong into a massive dormitory on campus, the Elliott house.

It was in this house, holed away in his tiny and cheap dorm room, that Theodore gained a reputation as not just a loner, but a sort of disgusting one. Students would routinely plug their noses when passing by his door, which was always shut, due to the smell of spoiled milk and boiled eggs seeping out from behind it. Theodore never ate in the massive dining hall of the house. Instead, he always took his food back to his tiny room and ate in his bed or at the small desk. Maybe it was this especially odd behavior, or maybe it was something entirely different. But one way or another, the now 17-year-old Theodore eventually found himself the recipient

of a letter of admittance into a very exclusive psychological study that Harvard was hosting. The man in charge of this great experiment was named Dr. Henry Murray, and he was a man who, among the students of Harvard, needed no introduction. In World War II, the U.S. had hired Murray to produce a psychological profile of the world's greatest enemy, Adolf Hitler. His profile was so useful to the Allied cause that the government immediately hired him on to the CIA's crack team of researchers and clinical psychiatrists tasked with assessing the psychological fitness of their secret agents. Of course, Murray flourished. When the war was over,

Murray had the clout and the credentials to do essentially whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was cutting edge and groundbreaking, even boundary-stretching research. He found just such an opportunity at Harvard. The stated goal of this experiment, which saw the Theodore joined a team of 21 other students was to study the effects of severe stress on the human psyche, particularly one under demand. So the experiment proceeded for each student as follows. First, the student was to write an essay for the review board of the clinicians, an exhaustive description and apologetic for the entire worldview of each student.

They detailed their personal beliefs, convictions, philosophies on topics that ranged far and from general ethics to their own family. They confessed and defended their most dearly held hopes and distinctive views of the world and how it should all work. The students were encouraged to put their own pathos in vibrant display on the paper. The testers wanted to see what these kids really believed was true. Upon reception of an essay,

the testers studied it privately until they were confident they knew the arguments and views of the student front to back. From there, the student was asked to return to the facility. This began the second phase of the experiment. We will use Theodore as the example for what happened next. Upon arriving back at the same room where he had written the essay, Theodore immediately sensed that the mood had shifted.

Not only was he now alone in the bright fluorescent room, where before he had written his paper in the company of the other participants, but he also heard an aggressive and demanding tone coming from the clinicians. He might have even called it demeaning. He took his seat on the salmon-colored plastic chair that was on one side of the single wooden desk in the room's center. There was no chair on the other side. On the desk was a spotlight lamp clamp clamped on to the wooden flange that ran the perimeter of the top. A copy of his essay and a notebook sat on top of the desk.

The notebook, he quickly learned, belonged to the proctor of the experiment. Theodore had no idea what was happening or what to explain. expect to happen next. Everyone in the room left apart from Theodore and the Proctor. The lights were dimmed, transforming the uncomfortably large and bright room into one uncomfortably small feeling and dark. What commenced next can only be described as a vitriolic and prolonged personal attack on Theodore from the Proctor. He had read the essay and was now come to launch a vehement, exhaustive, and degrading and abusive verbal attack upon the young college student who had written it. Theodore sat, trying to remain stoic, as everything he held true and dear

about the world and his life was torn to utter shreds by a man he never met and would never see again. He suffered this attempted course to mental breakdown for multiple hours, before the Proctor finally ceased his diatribe, and Theodore was unceremoniously commanded. to leave. Of course, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Theodore, awkward, unsettled, immature, and out of his depth Theodore, returned over and over and over again. He spent a total of 200 hours in that cursed room, getting verbally vexected by people he did not know, but whom he knew for whatever reason hated him with as much passion as he had felt when writing his essay. He found himself drawn back again and again, strangely attracted to the challenge.

He wanted to prove to himself that he had the mental fortitude to stand, without any objection, up to these slanderous and violent attacks from nameless people. Whether or not he proved himself in this regard remains up for debate. Theodore asserts that he succeeded in maintaining himself in his own mind. Others are slow to accept his assertions. It's worth noting that these experiments were disavowed as entirely unethical and dangerous by Harvard soon after their completion. Murray, as an aide to the CIA, was trying to develop methods of mental breakdown of subjects that the government could use in the interrogation of the state's enemies.

But in using college minors as the subject of his study, he betrayed the carelessness of methodology that stood behind it all. Or maybe it wasn't careless at all. Maybe a better word would be nefarious, malicious. Murray, of course, was in deep with the CIA and had already well proven himself as a fruitful tool for them in World War II. Could it be that a man of his psychiatric caliber was left out of the loop of the infamous M.K. Ultra? It appears the answer ought to be no. A large swath of the students used in his Harvard experiment went on to a psychological transmogrification spiraling into complete psychological disaster. They forgot who they were, became paranoid, and devolved into a sort of degeneracy that cost some of them their livelihoods and, for all intents and purposes, their

lives. Murray, in this experiment, had proven that he could wipe a mind completely clean, leave it broken and leave it yearning for the warm embrace of some secure authority to build it back up again, an authority that Murray himself would offer to the mind. This, of course, exactly follows the stated goal of M.K. Ultra. It's brainwashing. And so this Harvard experiment has long been considered a side project of the ultimate masterminds behind the CIA's Pet Shadow operations. It is worth noting, however, that Theodore himself did not.

have such a dramatic conclusion of his time under Murray's interrogations. He writes off the whole thing as exaggerated, and not really all that bad. In fact, Theodore would later write in an autobiography of his that he remembered his time at Harvard fondly, stating that it was very good for him. But now we come to it. The question arises, who is this Theodore? Why did he write an autobiography? And why do we care about his takeaway from the Murray experiment at Harvard? We care about Theodore for the reason that he was the very one who fashioned and planted the bomb that killed Hugh Scrutton on that December morning in 1985. And what's more, this was not Theodore's only homicide.

It was not even his only bombing. You may know Theodore by another name, his abbreviated name, Ted. Ted Kaczynski. Or you may know him by his macabre title, the Unabomber. That's right. One of America's most infamous mass murderers. A man whose manifesto against technology continues to influence our thought today was a genius social outcast who had been taken into a psychological study at Harvard, a study with virtually undeniable links to the shadowy backrooms of M.K. Ultra. All of it leaves one wondering, just how deep does this rabbit hole go?

Everybody. Hey, okay. What the heck, dude. You just read. I get to do this. the wall. What the heck? Fine. I think it's, do the welcome. I think it's safe to say, welcome back to season four episode two of haunted cosmos. I think it's safe to say we are so back. We are so back. We've never been more so back than we are so back. Did we have wallpaper last? No, well, hey, this is the first episode of the wallpaper. Everyone wave hello to the wallpaper if you're watching this on YouTube. Hello. If you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple, there's This woodland creatures prancing behind us and a mansion and some greenery. It's very lovely.

Guys, big announcement, big announcement before we talk about Ted Kaczynski and man-made horrors beyond comprehension. I just want to say, like, haunted cosmos is growing, and it's because of you guys. We've got, you know, obviously Ben's been working full-time in addition to lots of other things at the church and things like that for Honodic Cosmos, but we've been, I'm not going to say yet who. but we've hired video and audio production help. That's right. As you can see, the last episode, it clearly looks way better now. Compared to us just making it up.

Yeah. So thank you, and we will continue to invest in making this show the best possible show that we can with your help. So thank you to our patrons. Yeah, we hope that you guys are enjoying the show.

We're certainly still having a great time writing it and saying it, I guess. So we're just glad to be here. Hope you guys stick around. One of my favorite genres of review, of bad review. Like, read my one-star reviews. Yeah, yeah. Are people who, they've commented this on YouTube,

on the Apple podcast reviews, et cetera. Like, oh, this show, like, they have ads and they, they just care about their patrons. Like, they, and I'm like, yeah, we express that by releasing all of our main show for absolutely free for you to listen to. Yeah, that's right. You don't support the show at all. So, yeah, I just want to say to our one.

star reviewers, those who don't like, you know, that we talk about our Patreon and those that don't like our ad partners and those that, you know, don't like that Ben and I are not feminists, all of the genre of one star reviewers. I'd just like to say that we did take it in a careful consideration and we decided that we were going to become worse. We're going to become much worse. Yeah. And hey, keep it up. We like the one star reviews. And I mean unironically. We, because they only want five or one star reviews. Yeah, they boost the algorithm. So if you you really want to stick it to us, leave like a two or three star. So those are, those really kill your rating.

That's brutal. That's brutal. So anyway, shout out to the one stars. Speaking of supporters, what are we doing for patrons? Yeah. So for our existing patrons, they'll find out about that on Patreon. Yeah. So sign up.

We'll do it. But for the new patrons that sign up the day of this episode's release, we will put you into a sweepstakes and you could have the chance to win a copy of this amazing coffee table style like style book. that's the big book of conspiracy theories. Who doesn't want that on the top? I mean, we're going to give away five of them to new patrons that sign up today.

It really, like, it looks really cool and fun. Honestly, a great bedtime read with the kids. You know, there's pictures of people. And now kids, we're going to talk about JFK. They have like the spirals in the eyes when they're getting brainwashed. Which, by the way, spirals. And then, yeah, for existing patrons,

be on the lookout for something that we're going to be announcing on Patreon. on. But then also just pretty cool opportunity, Brian and I wrote a book, which was a really cool opportunity for the two of us. Your opportunity is that you could buy it if you want to. Unreal. Yeah, stay tuned for later in this episode. You'll see an ad that we do with the book. Don't skip it. If you skip it on, though. I promise it will be funny, okay? If you skip it on now. Like you have my word, if you skip it, you're going to skip out on some laughs. Dude, if you skip it, the blackhead kids will find you. That's right. If you skip it the mothman,

to wherever he took the German chambre. We're just conjuring evils. We're like actually threatening people with demonic. Okay, never mind, never mind. None of that. Like the Lord's on your side. Jesus loves you. You don't have to buy the book.

You're still our friend. Dude, thanks for backing me down from that. But anyway, so yeah, if you're interested in that big book of conspiracy theories, fully illustrated, really cool, then sign up to become a patron today and get access to, man, at the time of this episode dropping, close to a hundred episodes of the Dusty Tomb. As of today, I'm on episode 76.

That's crazy. Yeah, pretty crazy. Stoked. I'm excited to keep going. We'll do a handful of those, so not just one, but got to sign up today, the day this drops, and you'll be in that drawing. That's right. Any other housekeeping before we talk about manmade horrors beyond comprehension?

Maybe illegal with demonic powers? I mean, I guess just as a segue into it, like if you want to really cover all your bases and be sure that you don't get abducted by a demoniac government agents who want to brainwash you make you forget that you ever existed, or even the concept of existence at all, you should use soap that doesn't have seed oils in it. 100%. And so consider our sponsor Indigo Sundry soap. They not only love the Lord, but they hate seed oils just as much. And that really says a lot. They hate seed oils like the devil loves righteousness. That's right. That, wait, I mean, let me, let me say it again. They hate seed oils

the way that demons hate righteousness. There you go. You saw a cut there, not because I got it wrong the first time and said demons love. He said something almost like really bad. It was an accident. Okay. So yeah, you know, sign up, Indigo Sundries and subscribe for regular deliveries of whatever you need for your house, 10% off automatically. So yeah, check them out. And I think on that note, let's get into the scope of this episode. Let's talk about what's happening in this episode, where we're going, following our last one. And yeah. So last episode, we talked about the origins. Right. Of some of these government mind control programs that are really honestly, they sound like fictional stories.

They're so crazy. Just what we know is so crazy. Yeah. So we talked about, you know, MK Ultra, what were some of the roots that we talked about there with MK Ultra? Project Artichoke.

Yep. Project Artichoke was sort of like the, well, and it used to be Project Bluebird, then Artacho. Yeah, then Artichoke. And it was kind of the brainchild that blossomed in MK Ultra, which was this intentional government,

you know, trial and finding a way to brainwash and totally mind control someone. Insane. So, you know, when you read the Manchrian candidate or you see the movie with Denza Washington, by the way, great movie, then you're looking at something that's not fictional.

It's historical fiction, which is to say, like, it's their own story, but it's based on something that completely happened. And the government was still, and I would argue, is still doing and trying to do, trying to get better at. And it involves everything from eliciting information from prisoners that you're interrogating via truth serum and all these manipulative tactics, up to and including making an assessment.

who has like a trigger word that he can hear over the phone that wipes his memory of everything that he knows and he becomes like a robot that will follow orders to the T. And then at the end of whatever assassination or crime that he's committing at the behest of whatever state is behind him, he hears the word again and he forgets that he ever did any of it. Yeah. So it's like this perfect patsy and then also if he does a good job, it's the perfect way to get away with a crime. Yep. Because he literally has no memory of it ever. happening. Yeah, insane. Yeah, so last episode was much more concerned with what we absolutely, without any doubt, no for sure happened with MK. Ultra. We did Japanese and Soviet, and German,

yeah. And German parallels. Korean. All these other countries. It's sort of like an arms race for mind control. Yeah. And that's even what Alan Dulles, the CIA director at the time, was saying that America's falling behind in brain warfare. And so he started with Cindy. Goltlieb started MK Ultra to try and catch up. Yeah. And I think that they succeeded in catching up and potentially even surpassing some of our enemies. Yep. So that was sort of what we know for sure.

We ended last episode with the story of Charles Manson, which is also something that we all know for sure. But it opens the door into asking like, what else did this touch? Yeah. Like how big is this umbrella? And so this episode is going to be a little bit more speculative. I think you'll see that we do our... We're trying to do our homework. We're doing in this episode is weaving together facts, eyewitness testimony, which aren't the same thing.

You have people who are claiming to know something or have seen something or heard something, along with historical data. And attempting to show that on the one hand, the government hasn't admitted everything that they did with the MK Ultra program. And it's spinoffs. Even during the period, we know it existed. They haven't told us everything. But secondly, that there's this question, did it continue? Yeah, did it continue? Did it really stop or did they just perfect it?

And I think one question worth asking to get into the stories behind that is, if it did continue, why? Hey, Ben, I just read that our great-grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant? Maybe it's grandma's butter recipe or maybe it's Grato Tallow. Their tallow products are 100% organic and naturally contain the good stuff your skin craves. No mystery there. So say Sianara, Sammy, to kitchen experiments and say hello to healthier skin. Gratode tallow, trusted by skin, envied by Great Grandma's butter recipe.

For more information and to get a sample pack, check out graytoed tallow.com. Don't forget to use the code Cosmos 15. That's all caps. Cosmos 1.5. for 15% off your order. Ben, do you know what's weird? The fact that Gobeckley Teppi contains advanced technology far beyond the time period in which it was made.

Okay, nerd. I was thinking more in the vein of health and wellness in this cold and flu season. Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elder berries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and antiviral compounds. and antiviral compounds that our bodies crave?

And that Trevor and Autumn at the King's Ridge grow and produce the freshest elderberries and elderberry syrup known to mankind? Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that. But did you also know that they're running a special for haunted cosmonauts? That's right. If you use code haunted, all caps haunted,

you can get 10% off your first order at tkrfarm.com. Dude, absolutely the best. news I've heard today. Want to start reading the Puritans but don't know where to begin. Puritan treasures for today from Reformation Heritage Books makes the riches of these godly writers of old accessible for the modern reader. With updated language and helpful introductions, these classic works from John Owen,

Jeremiah Burroughs, and more are the perfect starting point for the curious reader. Learn more about the Puritan treasures for today at heritagebooks.org slash Puritan treasure. that's in title case, Puritan Treasures, and make sure you use the code haunted for 10% off your order. Don't let unwanted fairies bearing quote-unquote gifts from far away countries come down your chimney this Christmas. Rest assured, with no monsters under your bed, that when you buy toys from Routed Pines homestead,

they'll be made on the motherland with American hands from the Jarrett family, coated with delicious coconut oil and beeswax. This Christian family economy makes toys safe enough for the mouth of babes to last a thousand generations. Help further Christendom and get 10% off your next order when you use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout. That's all caps, one word, haunted cosmos, for 10% off at checkout. Or check the link in the description below. How many demons, ghosts, or vampires do you have in your investment portfolio? Well, if you've invested in the S&P 500, it's probably more than you think, since it's full of companies who actively support causes that go against your faith.

Stonecrop Wealth Advisors is here to help. Stonecrop offers faith-based portfolios to help you direct your hard-earned investment dollars away from those kinds of companies and towards companies that are having a positive impact on society. They also offer comprehensive financial planning to help give you peace of mind about your future that these investment dollars support. Get the demons out of your portfolio and instead invest in God's kingdom while you grow your wealth. Contact Stonecrop Wealth Advisors today by visiting stonecroppadvisors.com slash haunted cosmos. That's stonecropper advisors.com slash haunted cosmos or just click the link in the description below. Investment advisory services offered through StoneCrop Wealth Advisors LLC,

a registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. What's the end game here? Like, why would a government step into this role of being so malevolent to its constituents that it's actually just using them as pure pawns to achieve their ends? Aren't governments supposed to act for the common good of the people that they're over? And how do we get this so twisted? Yeah. So do you have any thoughts on that?

Like, I want to get into sort of a cosmology of how a government could get to this point. Yeah, we talked about it last time, but there's, um, there are, multiple vectors of, you know, justification where people will justify doing evil things. Governments will justify doing evil things. Sometimes we're mistaken. We simply make the wrong call. We think that something we're going to do is going to be righteous and turn out righteously or truly help in the cause of good. Even well-meaning people who genuinely are, you know, Christians or righteous men or women can make that mistake because we're sinful and fallen people. However, there's an even more nefarious pathway where people become convinced that they are doing something in service of ultimate good, and they become so convinced of the ultimate good of their conception of the good, that they will justify the most insanely evil means to accomplish that end possible.

And that can go wrong, obviously, in two directions. That can go wrong in even if you have the end correct. Let's say that you're a Christian or you understand that all things exist for the glory of God. And you're genuinely aiming for the glory of God in your life or in your work or in something like that. You can begin to justify sinful activities all over the place in the name of, well, I'm seeking to glorify God. The ends are going to justify the means. I'm going to do this thing. but the even worse version of that,

and this is where I think we're going with MK Ultra and what we see in the government programs, is that they substitute the good and the divine for their own false idols and their own false standards of what the good is and who God is. Ultimately, man ends up often in his folly making the state into a God. Yeah.

And this is what stateism is. When he elevates, he essentially asks the question, like once he falls short of worshiping the creator and he lands his worship and veneration on the creature, what more tempting creature is there to worship than man? And what greater expression of man's power and glory is there than the government, than a state, than a nation, then all of the powers of the collective good and capabilities and what can we put our hand to and accomplish? what rival is there, at least historically, to a nation state. Right. A people with a king or a senator, a senate, and a president and glories and huge, vast amounts of wealth and treasure and armies. And we're tempted to look at these things.

It's why the scripture is often worn against putting your trust in horses and chariots and kings. And, well, because they're very tempting objects of worship. Yeah. Now, of course, we should love and honor the civil magistrate. and he has a glory. In the Psalms, it talks about the glory of a righteous king is like the dew falling upon the grass.

Righteous civil government is a good thing. We're not anarchists as Christians. We believe that God established the civil magistrate as a servant, a deacon of his good, of the good. Romans 13. Peter talks about this as well. And so these are all good things. However, we have to be wary of this instinct

to worship the state as God, man personified in his glory, begin to worship him. And once you make that step, then whatever the God says must be good and must be right. Yeah. And so there's some historical mechanics that are happening that is sort of behind all of those things. So and some of this goes back to stuff that many people have talked about. But I always remember the way that C.S. Lewis phrased it and First Loves, where he would say that if you have two positive goods, like I believe that the civil government is a positive good. Yeah, absolutely.

but you misorder it in the order of goods and things that you should love, then not only will you lose the thing that you replaced it with, but you'll lose that as well. So for example, if you love your marriage more than God, that's always the best example. You'll lose both God and your marriage. But if you love God first, you'll gain the Lord and your marriage, and it'll be fruitful and it'll be good.

And so something that happened around this time, right? actually, I mean, it was part of the catalyst that started all this was World War II, the Treaty of Versailles, and then the Cold War. And something that was happening, especially during and at the end of World War II, was the death of the Christian West. It was, you know, things leading up to World War II was, of course, heavily contributing to this. But it was sort of a process of the West apostatizing at a large scale. And so at the end of it, you had this enemy in fascism that was a legitimate enemy that was not good, but it was seen as so bad that all of these other forces had to band together to fight against it, including republicanism and communism. And so the U.S. teamed up with Russia to defeat fascism. And we, there's no way we could have been privy to the full effects of what we did when we did that. But one of the things that it meant was that communism gained a lot of power.

and sway. If you want a really good article on this, it has nothing to do with anything spooky. Ben Crenshaw at American Reformer wrote an article on the post-war consensus. Right. So you can, it's, what Ben's talking about is the post-war consensus. The idea that we needed like a supra state, a super state to combat the dangers of the extreme loves of particularity and nationalism. Yeah. So if you want to go read like a deep dive, go go check out that article. Or Reno's book, R-E-N-O is the author. the return of the strong gods. Return of the strong gods,

which is a great book. Pat Buchanan's Unnecessary War is also. That's a great book. Very amazing. But one of the things that happens with the post-war consensus is that we lose respect

in monarchy, but we also gain respect for things like religious pluralism and democratic liberalism. Yeah. Which are ideas that are inherently left-word, left-leaning, and that inevitably lead

given enough time to something like communism. communism is like the fully fledged, you know, sapling that comes from the seed of religious pluralism and democratic liberalism. They're all, all of these ideas, communism, religious pluralism, even democracy as a universal ideal. One of the things you find running through all of these is that they're totalizing views. Right. All of them claim to be the perfect or the ideal governmental system for all peoples everywhere. Right.

Which leads you to the conclusion, if you're a very powerful nation state and you believe that this is true, you will come to believe that it is good and just and right to at whatever cost impose this view on all of the world. Right. So anywhere you find nationalism or, you know, fascism, well, we need to go in. We need to drop some bombs for democracy. Yeah, exactly. We need to go blow people up for the, so that we can free them from totalitarianism.

We need to blow them up and, you know, impose a new leader and regime change. Like, hence a lot of the wars that America got into after World War II, was totally consumed with this idea of spreading the gospel of democracy across the world, which is a gospel that, like Brian said, it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. It's not good for everyone at all times and places to fit into this mold of American-style democracy. And so anyway, that's a little bit like downstream. But upstream from, I think what really helps us today is this idea of religious pluralism. What you get when a people, a nation, gives itself over to,

religious pluralism, which is the validity of all religions, more or less. You actually just get pantheism, and pantheism is just a fancy way of saying that people are God. And again, what is the best expression, a man-made institution that is the most strong, the most durable, the most glorious, the most impressive? Well, it's man-made governmental structures. Yeah. That are, again, they're not inherently bad. In fact, they're good. But if you think that they are God, which is what this leads to, then they can do no wrong. And therefore, whatever serves the end of that particular God is the ultimate good that anyone can ever do. So it makes you lose all love for the individual constituent that you're ruling over. And it effectively gives you free license to do whatever

you deem as the, you know, royal government. Whatever you deem necessary. for not their good, but you're good. Yeah. The state's good. And of course, I mean, using, you know, what is a few of your citizens' mental health, like, in comparison to your own health as a state? It's nothing.

There's no calculus to be done there. And let's say that some charismatic leader arises in the nation and begins to move people towards overt rejection and criticism of, let's say, your globalist war policy in a, given situation or your military industrial complex in a given situation. And they're swaying a lot of people. And we do live in a representative government on some level, however corrupted in the U.S. And so what might a government that is totally committed to the good of its project and that is totally committed to doing whatever it takes there for, whatever means are required to achieve this

glorious end, they'll do, what are they going to try to do to that leader if he begins to gain political or cultural power? Well, what if they might even go so far as to take a perfectly engineered by a weapon, a living brainwashed human? Yeah. And go and take them out. And use it to take out. And this is why this topic isn't purely material or just, yeah, we're taking a break from the supernatural stuff to just talk about something else weird, which is fine to do, by the way. But this actually, isn't that because we live in a world that's not just stuff. So when something sets itself up as God that is not God, it actually oftentimes finds that it summons things beyond its understanding and

comprehension. So true. This is like when someone is, you know, playing with a Ouija board and they think they're just having a good time. Next thing you know, there's actually evil powers that are at work behind that thing. That person's consent has no bearing on whatsoever. They don't care if they consent. If they're using the tool, they will be used by the tool. And statism is an example of that. Statism is demoniac pagan style worship. It just is. And one of the ways, and I actually stole this from Bovink, I think it's really interesting. Bovink says that every pagan religion has its own form of, you know, like being in the spirit, you know, prophesying theophony. Yeah. And things like that. And so I was like, oh, that's really interesting.

I wonder what, you know, the state's version, a statist version of Theophony or Prophecy would be. And he was saying, the demons have this, and it's really obvious, possession is their form of prophecy and Theophani both. It's like conglomerated into one. They're God appearing. Exactly.

They take total control over the person, and they then use them to do whatever they want. That's kind of both. And then I was like, oh, that's really funny. And then he said, the modern spiritualist version of this, possession is hypnosis. Interesting. So he was like, if you look at the side effects of hypnosis, it is possession.

Everything is there. You're putting your mind into another vessel. Your will is given to someone else. And their will is removed. They have now no ability to defy you. And if you're not beneficent, it will be to their utter ruin. Wow. And I was like, that's really interesting.

So what if we kind of bring all these ideas to bear on something as seemingly trivial as M.K. Ultra and say, what if it was the statist God's attempt? What if it is still the status God's attempt to demonically possess the people that are beneath it and that are either giving themselves up to it or trying to rebel against it? And they do it in the form of hypnosis, which is just brain control. That's really interesting. We know that they did hypnosis constantly with MK Ultra. Common, bavink, dub. I mean, that guy was so cool. It makes sense that any time you,

anytime the demons look out and they see man in his sin, establishing some sort of babble, establishing some sort of great golden statue of empire that they can worship, they will come down and they will attempt to, they'll say, yeah, let's get involved in this project, let's help. Absolutely. Because it's all in, there's only the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of God at the end of the end of the,

the day. So they will, they're in perpetual and constant mutual antagonism towards one another. And you will see that it might look different. Over here, you might have the alien demon thing. Over here, you might have, you know, some people doing something nefarious. And then over here, you might have what just looks like purely government conspiracy. But you're looking at demons all over. I mean, I'm convinced that the aliens are communing, are demons communing with, the government's communing with demons, thinking they're aliens, that the governments are doing all sorts of things, where demons are coming in and saying,

oh, an opportunity, wonderful. Yeah. We'll help. Exactly. Like, and people that don't expect that, I'm like, I think that you're maybe not paying attention. You definitely haven't read that hideous strength, which is nonfiction. Come on, guys.

It's basically non-fiction. Okay, so if we accept this premise, just for the sake of the show, if we accept the premise that it's a status god demonically acting and its own interest, and it's in defiance of both the living, true God, and the constituents that it is supposed to be acting in the good of, what happens when you start to go against that narrative, some of the mainstays of that government narrative? Well, let's get into some stories that talk about that. Yeah. And boy, have we got some stories about people you may have

heard of before. Yeah. In 1959, a young man named James wandered the streets of Missouri in early autumn, thinking of very little and contemplating, nothing much at all. He was an ex-con. In fact, he was already an ex-con many times over, and had only been released from prison for his third time a year earlier. Ray, Ray was James's surname, had never really been good with foresight. From his early high school years, years he never finished, he seemed to either not care about or be incapable of measuring the consequences of his actions ahead of time. And so by taking up random opportunities to earn a quick buck here and there, some of them schemes of questionable legality, he found himself well

acquainted with the American justice system. Maybe Ray would admit to having a bit of a chip on his shoulder. After all, he had served his country in World War II, volunteered for it even, since he hadn't wanted to finish high school. A part of him felt cheated by the country to which he had already given so much of his strength and goodwill. And this feeling of being slighted led him down the road of self-pity, a road which helped to justify his lawless deeds with every mile traveled. It also offered him a convenient excuse for not being able to get his life into order. How could he, when everyone, even his own homeland, was fighting against his success? To do well would be to kick against the goads of powers far beyond his own self, or so he thought.

While Ray walked down the bustling roads of St. Louis, he nursed these thoughts of bitter resentment in his heart. Their fruit was a longing to vindicate himself, to take revenge on the society that had done him so much wrong. In this stew of bitterness, he took up a pistol. He didn't know much about them, but he picked one up from somewhere and someone, and walked boldly into a downtown grocer. Ray pointed the pistol at the clerk and the customers, shouted them in nervous tones to give him all the cash they had, and made a hasty retreat with shaking hands and an extra $120 in his pockets. He was almost immediately found and arrested, now for the fourth time in his life.

Given his habitual sin and the increasingly aggressive nature of his crimes, this was his second armed robbery, though he never meant to hurt anyone. He was sentenced to 20 years in the Missouri State Prison at Jefferson City. Initially, Ray wanted to prove that he could do his time quietly. He hoped for leniency in upcoming parole hearings, and so for two years he became a nameless face in a crowd of convicts that surrounded him. But all the time, he kept his eyes peeled for some means of escape. After all, he wanted a good parole hearing,

but freedom outright would be a far better deal for him if he could get it quicker by other means. I know, I know, it all seemed straightforward to you and me, but Ray could never seem to think in a straight line. Maybe it was those voices in his head that he talked about. Maybe they were confusing him. He made his first escape attempt in 1961, but it was a dismal failure.

It became clear to every officer in the prison that the man they were dealing with was far from a criminal mastermind. They figured him to be the same sort of scared high school boy, in way over his head, harboring delusions of lawless grandeur for his life. He got some time in solitary for the attempt, but it didn't last long. The short time he spent in the hole did have a lasting effect on Ray, though. He met some kind of latent madness in that small room. Or maybe it was a madness he had always known. but never before labeled. Either way, James Earl Ray officially requested psychiatric care upon his return to the general prison population. His request was accepted. For session after session,

recounting his time in the European Theater of War got him all riled up with fright and excitement. The doctors would listen carefully before sedating him with drugs. Ray didn't know what the drugs were, but he was glad to find that they quieted the voices that haunted him. His next chance at escape came six long years later, when Ray was working in the prison bakery and had a genius idea. After successfully convincing an unnamed accomplice, Ray climbed inside one of the massive crates of bread that would be shipped out to local farms that same day. His helper placed a false bottom over top of him and piled bread as thick as he could on top of that.

Without any drama, and in a way most unfulfilling for a story, Ray rode off into the Midwestern sunset on that truck, and this time his escape stuck. It almost seems too easy, as if Ray was being guided by some unseen and beneficent hand. The only loose end, really, was the accomplice he had left behind, but that man never talked. There's good reason why.

In fact, it wasn't long before he couldn't talk at all. See, soon after Ray's escape, that man was found dead via hanging in his cell. Now, curious thing for a man found dead hanging in his cell, but both of his arms and legs also turned out to be broken as well. Now, who could have done that? What happened next was a strange series of movements all around the country at the behest of a friend Ray had made soon after his escape from prison, a man named Raul, who, in spite of his Hispanic-sounding name, had bright white skin and absolutely no apparent Hispanic or Spanish heritage. Raul met up with Ray soon after his escape and proved to be a very generous friend for apparently no reason at all. Ray was puzzled.

He'd never known this guy before and was uncertain as to how much good he had really brought into his life. But despite this doubt, Ray gladly took the money that Raul gave him to do what seemed like menial tasks. These, Raul said, would help him better smuggle guns to militant groups in foreign countries. Ray thought little of it. He had money and dozens of fake IDs and passport. to help him guarantee that he would never find himself behind a cell door again. Now remember, Ray was not a smart man. The older he got, the more aware he became of this.

Hence his confusion at the out-of-now-now-where partnership of this warlord named Raoul, a man who was always just exceedingly nice to Ray, despite having no history together at all. Now, one day, Raul approached Ray and told him about a new project they had. Some Cubans were going to be coming into Memphis in the next few weeks, and they wanted to buy hundreds of rifles from Rahul and Ray. With a delegation arriving in Alabama soon, Raul sent Ray into a local pawn shop with specific instructions on what to buy.

Ray needed to buy a Remington 760, chambered in 30-0.6. That was what the Cubans in Memphis wanted, and so he wanted to provide a sample to the advanced party coming in from Alabama. That's what Raul told Ray. Now, unfortunately, Simple Ray, the man who knew next to nothing about guns, despite time in the military and two armed robberies on his rap sheet, had to try and purchase this rifle twice, since the first time he didn't get the rifle chambered in the correct caliber.

A silly mistake, but not a big one. Ray had bought the gun in 243 and needed to get it in 30 out six, so he returned it and got the correct caliber, but all of this did create a paper trail. Now, Raul was quick to forgive, and the Cubans were ultimately happy with the product, and so the stage was set for the big arms deal. When it was only a few days away, Raul and Ray drove to Memphis in Ray's white Mustang, his prized car that Raul had bought for him and prepared for the meeting on the outskirts of town

next to a diner called Jim's Grill. To cover their tracks with obscurity in the event anyone grew suspicious, Raul told Ray to order a room in the house above Jim's Grill in his own name. He said that even if anyone saw Raul inside that room, they would find it registered to Ray, name and wouldn't be able to connect the dots with any suspicion. Of course, Ray agreed.

On the day of the deal, Ray was told to wait outside in his Mustang next to the boarding house. Raul would actually close the deal upstairs, but Ray would be ready in case anything went wrong and the pair needed to get away fast. Raul took the same 30-0-6, Remington 760 that Ray had bought a few weeks earlier, wrapped it in a sheet to make it appear less suspicious, and walked calmly into Jim's grill and up the stairs into the boarding house. Now suddenly, Ray heard a gunshot ring out in the Memphis sky. People gasped and started running to where the shot was fired. Ray waited patiently and longed for Raul to run out of the room so the two could flee together. He was sure the deal had gone south and he was praying his friend had not been wounded or killed. Just before he was about to

flee and save himself, Raul sprinted from the restaurant and threw himself into the passenger side window. Ray sped away at a breakneck pace and watched with bated breath as far in his rearview mirror now he saw the flashing blue and red lights of the police. The pair drove and drove without so much as a word passing between them. Finally, Raul told Ray to slow down a little bit on the freeway. Ray, thinking it was to avoid looking suspicious, obliged. In the next moment, Raul had thrown himself out of the car. He rolled on the dirt shoulder and sprinted into the woods lining the Alabama border with Georgia. Ray never saw Raul again.

For his part, Ray just kept driving towards Atlanta when eventually startling news came over the radio. Just that day, at a motel on the edge of Memphis, Tennessee, a shot had been fired from the area right near Jim's Grill, right where Ray had been, a shot which had killed none other than civil rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr. Ray grew confused.

but ultimately he did not know what to think, so he pushed on to Atlanta. There he met a big man with a thick accent who looked and walked like a mobster from the movies. The strange man stopped the nervous Ray and slapped a package full of money and fake IDs into his hands. With these gifts from the unlooked for hand, Ray continued to evade a massive manhunt through the U.S. and Canada for two months. Finally, on March 10th, as Ray sat in another hotel room, this one in London outside of the Heathrow Airport, police broke down his door and placed him under arrest. When he asked what crime he had committed, they informed him blankly for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

After the shot was fired, the police had arrived at the scene in a little over two minutes. Ignoring the police from eyewitnesses imploring them to search the bushes on the other side of the building housing Jim's Grill, the Memphis force split into two groups. One stormed up into the second-story boarding house and searched the communal bathroom that, were it not for tree branches blocking the way,

would have provided a perfect view of the Lorraine Motel across the street where MLK was shot. The second team charged around to the department store on the other side of the building and immediately found a strange bed sheet laying on the sidewalk in a sort of bundle. Inside this bundle were clothes and a Remington 760 chambered in 30-a-6.

The clothes belonged to James Earl Ray, and so did the fingerprints that covered the gun. During James Earl Ray's service in the Army, he worked in the newly minted office of strategic services, or OSS. The OSS was the wicked mother that would, right after the war, give birth to none other than the Central Intelligence Agency. Ray remained in the service of this agency for some time, indeed for long enough for the agency to actually take note of him.

He was young, unstable, directionless, seemingly witless, and disaffected with the culture that had formed him. They started to take him into special meetings wherein, according to Ray's own testimony, they brainwashed him and tortured his mind. They gave him drugs and told him strange things and kept him constantly confused and paranoid. He never knew the purpose of all of this, but he did know that he was the butt of some proverbial joke and that it must have meant something to his superiors. All those years later, as he sat in a cell for a crime he didn't commit, he thought he'd figured it out.

had James Earl Ray been an experiment of the M.K. Ultra program? Had he been prepared to serve as a witless patsy for the unrestrained deep state to deploy at their discretion? Or does the conventional story told by the FBI and CIA? The one with James Earl Ray pulling the trigger on that 30-a6 from a bathroom window across the street from MLK Jr. Stand up to scrutiny. So, listeners, what you just heard is the story of, MLK's assassination from James Orl Ray's perspective. But obviously that's not the official story. No. Because James Oral Ray is the guy who died in prison for killing Martin Luther.

99 years prison sentence, died in prison, never exonerated. So why do we care about that? Why do we care about his version of the story? He's just a murderer. Well, maybe it's because of just how many holes there are in the official version of events. So maybe we should go through the official story and then, I don't know, start to just put questions at it. We'll go through the official story. This is what the FBI, this is what the government, to this day, if you try to Google this, it's really funny. I found a dichotomy. If you try to Google this and get information, you go right to like the NIH, all the government reports, things like that, the House Select Committee on Assassinations addressed it. FBI documents. We'll talk about.

that because by the way, the House Select Committee in like 1977 had an investigation on assassinations because mounting public pressure that the CIA was killing people in America. JFK, RFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, MLK. Okay, turns out that the guy giving them all of the information, they didn't know this, but he was a CIA agent. Okay, so the CIA provided information to investigate the CIA and determined that the CIA did nothing wrong. This is the Spider-Man meme,

where they're just all pointing each other. So we want to walk through the official account of what happened to MLK, and this was the court case that convicted him, and James Rowe, and then we will talk about some of the discrepancies, and listen, you can decide. Yeah.

This is not a part of the biblical canon. You can decide, like, these guys are crazy, they're just conspiracy nuts, whatever. Whatever. If you are adullered enough to decide that the FBI didn't kill MNNU. okay, Jr.? They're just batting a thousand on this.

Then, like, I don't know how to help you. You should listen to another podcast. You should listen to, like, blues clues. Or something like, I'm part of the problem. Maybe is Fauci doing a podcast? You could listen to Fauci's cast. See if Bill Gates is doing a podcast. You'd love that podcast.

You'd love CNN. CNN is for you. Stephen Colbert is your guy. Steven. So look, you're going to hear us laugh a lot. We're not laughing at someone dying. We're not laughing at Martin Luther King getting shot in the face.

But if you don't laugh, I'm going to be like, you're not a human being. Some of this is comically obvious. So, and the, including like how comically dumb James Earl Ray was. Like, he wasn't a criminal mastermind. No, this guy was not smart. No. And a lot of the story that he came up with that has all this strange external corroboration, like he's not smart enough to have come up with it.

No. Just trust me, James Royal Ray was not the sharpest tool. He's not like the joker. It's like genius level intellect who just hates humanity. No, he was like a petty criminal who, didn't, couldn't even get away with armed robbery. You know, like a grocery store? When Alfred says, some people just want to watch the will, but he's talking about the CIA.

Not James Earl Ray. That's who he's talking about. James Earl Ray just wanted like 120 bucks in his pocket to go in some cigarettes. Go vibe somewhere. Yeah. You know, like, anyway. So people kept showing up in James Roe Ray's life and handing him boxes of cash and IDs and being like, look, we just need you to buy this gun and be at this place at this time.

And like, maybe move to Canada for a while. And he was like, he's like, cool. Like, that sounds great to me. why not? So yeah, Google wouldn't tell you anything about it. Like you go in and it will just take you to the government sources, debunking all of the, you know, conspiracy theories and et cetera. I refuse to say debunking. What was funny, though, once we had finished researching this episode and we were about the morning that we started recording, because we've done it in several segments, hence Ben's new shirt. Right. Yeah. And my now full belly that's making me tired. This is making it's tired.

But I thought, I wonder if Chad GPT will tell me the red pill, like if it will tell me all the conspiracy. So I started asking it, like, what did James Earl Ray said happened? What about this? What about that? Dude, it said everything. That's crazy to me. And it knew, like, it added details to things that I had known about the general gist of,

but then I need a fact check this. So I chase it down. And there were a few points where it was like, it added things I'd never heard. So it made me think chat GPT's got. that access to some like Reddit threads deep in the internet or like some file. It's on like the tour browser or something. Yeah, it's going deep. Maybe they'll shut that down after this episode comes out.

Which by the way, everything that we're about to say is satire. It's all satire. We love the FBI, pro FBI. FBI's never done anything wrong ever in their life. And listen, here's the thing. I know this. I know this. And I love you.

Money, please. Here's the thing. If I ever end up in a boat, A boating accident. Okay, know that I'm not a big boating guy. If I ever end up drowning, know that I'm a pretty good swimmer. My mental health is very good. I'm cheerful. I'm really happy. Like I absolutely love my wife and my family. Love my job. No. So anyway, like I, you know, that's kind of- There's a guy that gets shot because he apparently was mistaken for a deer. You'll find out later,

like you know, look at Ben and I. Ben doesn't look like a deer. I don't have the Lissom nature of a deer. I don't look like a deer at all. No. I look more like that monster that was like the child of Loki from that movie, The Ritual on Netflix, that's just like, beast with folds of flesh. Dang. That's more my style. If someone mistake me for that, I'd be like, alright, pass. You're handsome.

Dude, I needed that. After that, Chipotle, I just ate. So bad. Okay, so. Why don't we talk about MLK? Like, this wasn't the first time he ran into threats of death. No, that's the thing. Like, the whole story of MLK is laced with death threats.

He was no stranger to people. I mean, and that makes sense. Look at what he did. In fact, in 1958, he was stabbed in the chest. Ouch. But it obviously didn't kill him. It wasn't until, though, 1963 when JFK was assassinated with similar, you know, kind of shady stuff surrounding that whole event, that MLK finally was like, that's going to happen to me. Yep.

That same thing is going to happen to me. What he meant by same thing? That's up for debate. but I think that subtext will tell us exactly what he meant by that. So let's talk about the official narrative. This is what the FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, ABC, NBA, CNN, EPA, EPA. EPA, this is what they say happened. They say that...

BMW, Globetrotters. They say that... I almost said Ben Garrett. They say that James Rule Ray. Dude, don't put that on me. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. They say that he was sort of a racist southerner

and that he was displeased with MLK civil rights activism, that there had been a circulating promise of monetary reward from the KKK for anybody who would kill Martin Luther King Jr. And so he was kind of in low IQ, little petty criminal. He was an escaped convict. He had escaped convict already. Down on his luck, he needed cash. He's also a racist.

And so he's like, whoa, this lines up perfectly with my situation. So he bought his Remington 760, chambered in 30 out six, accidentally bought a 243 first and then thought, well, I need a bigger gun because he didn't know a lot about guns. He barely qualified in the military with the rifle training. Yeah. Like he got the lowest possible score and still passing.

Right. So he wasn't a big gun guy. He got his 30 got six. He went to this, what is it, hotel over this gym's grill. And he knew that MLK was known to stay at this hotel, which he was, the Lorraine Motel. The Lorraine, yeah. They even named a room after him because he was.

he was well known to stay there. It was room 306. So he found out that he was there, and then he went to a communal bathroom because this was like a hostile hotel kind of thing where they'd have rooms down a hall, and then you'd go to the hallway, the end of the hallway, there'd be a bathroom

that everybody would use. And he opened the window. This was across the street. Martin Luther King Jr. comes out of the room, and he is looking over the balcony. He's on a second story or an upper story balcony. He looks over into the parking lot

to talk to Jesse Jackson, who is there in the parking lot, he aims his gun, he fires a single shot from his 30-0-6, strikes MLK Jr. in the face and neck area, which doesn't instantly kill him, but he falls to the ground, bleeding everywhere, people come and try to render assistance. Ultimately, he's taken to a hospital and declared dead.

Meanwhile, James Earl Ray, after pulling the trigger, immediately takes his gun. He doesn't eject the bullet. the shell casing from, because it's a bolt action rifle, so he doesn't eject the shell casing. He runs to the room where he was staying, throws the rifle onto a bed sheet, along with the strangest collection of stuff.

Yeah, a bunch of like personal items, clothes. A bobby pins. Yeah, and also just to interrupt. Yeah. You were talking about how, like, he actually did the shooting. And I wanted to interrupt and interject so bad and say like a shot rang out in the Memphis sky.

I know. Free at last. They took your life, but they couldn't take your pride in the name of love. I knew that that was ringing in your heart. So anyway, the bed sheet. So he throws the gun on the bed sheet. He wraps it up.

He flees down the stairs, down through the hotel, out on the street. He ends up dropping the bundle because he's scared. He hears police sirens or something. He's got this rifle-shaped sheet. So he drops it in front of a department store there along the street. Get in his white Mustang and drives out of there like a bat out of H.E. double hockey stick. out of Hades.

Yeah, exactly. But here's the weird thing. I want to make sure people get this. Yeah. So he did the bed sheet thing. He walks out of Jim's Grill because it's at the bottom of this boarding house. And let's say he's coming out of the door of Jim's Grill with his bed sheet. He takes a left.

Yep. Just for the sake of spatial awareness. He takes a left. He walks some yards, you know, 20, 50 yards down the sidewalk, puts the bed sheet in front of the store that's in the same building, by the way. Literally the same building. Jim's Grill. He's not hiding. And it's in the sidewalk. There's bushes. There's bushes right there. Yeah. He puts it on the side. He turns around and goes back the other way, passing the front door of Jim's Grill again, as if he had gone to the right. That's where his car is, gets in the car, speeds off. And all of this happened from the moment he pulled the trigger until he speeds off, allegedly, in two minutes or less. Because that was when the police got there and he was already gone. I mean, they descended en masse. And he was already gone in his white, Mustang. Yep. He had fled the scene. His new white Mustang. So he, he fires the bullet. He goes,

puts the gun into the bed sheet, wraps up the bed sheet, leaves the room, walks down, you know, it's on the second story, walks down to the first floor, leaves the building, goes left, walks a while. And by the way, like, walking calmly. Yeah. Yeah. All this in less than two minutes. And then walks all the way back, gets in his car, gets away in less than two minutes. And then not only that, he drives away and he successfully evades the police across multiple nations for several months until he's arrested in close to Heathrow in London. So several months he evades him. He has tons of cash and multiple fake identification documents that are convincing enough to get away with this for months and months before he's caught in spite of a huge manhunt. looking for someone with his description and ultimately knowing who he was even from the gun.

Because see, the gun, there were multiple lines of evidence that ultimately convicted James Earl Ray. One of them was the gun, which they know he purchased. He really did purchase this gun. Yep. Interviewed the clerks at the SOAR where he purchased the 243 of the Remington, didn't make a mistake, went back and said, I actually needed. Which, by the way, the whole idea that he was like, he needed a bigger gun, a 243 is a deer rifle. Yeah, my grandfather. My grandfather hunted deer with the 243.

Right. We'll get into maybe why he went back. Yeah. In a minute. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it was a 70 or 80 yard shot. 243 would have been plenty.

But anyway, they interviewed him. They had the whole exchange where he paper trail and everything where he bought the 243. Next day comes back. This was just a few days before the shooting. Successfully got the 30-0-6. So that gun had his fingerprints all over it and they know that it was his gun. Yeah. The clothing in the bed sheet.

his clothing. The room was registered in his name. In his name. He really had reserved that room. So that's, those are the

multi, big evidences. And then another line of evidence was the eyewitness who saw him fleeing. Right. Guy named Charles, Charles Stevens. Who said,

and his was their star witness placed James Earl Ray at the scene fleeing with the gun and everything. And then, um, he goes to jail.

So he was, he was put in jail for 99 years as we, we've already said, and he ultimately died in prison. Right. He died some years ago. But that is a little too easy. It's just a little too easy, guys. So why don't we start poking some holes in the story?

And I would like to say, just to fire us off, if I may. James Oral Ray had a black girlfriend. I rest my case. Yeah, he had had a black girlfriend. He wasn't like the KKK-loving, you know, grand dragon. He wasn't known as like a Cleegel of the whatever. He didn't do his Kegels or whatever it is. I'm sorry, what?

Never mind. He also, the whole reward thing from the KKK, the people who had even put that award out turned out they had been dead for a long time before that this whole all happened. Like, there's just not a reasonable expectation that he could have collected this reward. It's kind of a strange motive. Yeah. He was not that smart. No.

The way that he had escaped prison before was basically like, oh, this bread barrel happens to be empty. I know. I'll get in it in full daylight, like with my accomplice. Yes. And I'll use that as a means of escape. It somehow works. And by the way, the guy who helped him was like found dead later in the jail. Yeah.

And then he just happens to meet Raul. In the story that I read, you know, the guy that helped him escape, get into, he got in a crate, they put a false bottom in it filled it with bread. They load the thing on the truck and he escapes. That guy was found hanging in his cell with his arms and legs broken. With the arms and both arms, both legs broken. And they were like clear suicide. There's multiple of those in this in this story. But the real reason that like that it became mainstream to kind of question this narrative in particular is because all of the details that we're about to go through and tell you and they are quite funny culminate in the King family being fully convinced that James Earl Ray did not.

Was a Patsy, that he was innocent. That he was a Patsy. He was fully innocent of the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. So much so that they actually took it to trial. Yep. They filed a civil suit for wrongful death against Martin Luther King Jr. Well, alleging that against the government alleging. Yes.

And they won. They won. And they went through this whole civil suit. They asked for damages of $100. Yep. Because they didn't want anybody to think they were doing it for the money. And not only did they win the case was, did the court find that there was government collusion in the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

But they decided so unanimously. Right. The jury delivered a unanimous verdict and sided with them and gave them their $100. And so given that, it might behoove us to look back at these details and be like, all right, okay, he had a black girlfriend, but that's kind of circumstantial. That doesn't mean anything. Could have changed his mind later. Well, what about some more concrete stuff?

Let's talk about first. Maybe you would think, but I know that James Earl Ray pled guilty. Right. And you'd go, that's true. He did. He did plead guilty initially at the instruction of his lawyer who said, you're going to be put to death if you don't plead guilty. Yep.

The only thing you can do, this case is open and shut, is you can plead guilty and they will take the death penalty off of the table. And not only did he do that, but the lawyer. lawyer representing him, said that heavily implied, if you don't take the guilty plea, I'm probably not going to try very hard. I'm not going to do very good. Oh, and by the way, if you don't plead guilty, your brother might get in trouble for that thing that he did recently. We think they're going to arrest your brother, too, and try to stick stuff to him. So he pled guilty. Then he changed his mind, and he fired that lawyer. Yeah. James Royal Ray fired that lawyer like three days into the

proceedings and he ended up going with a different lawyer. He was still convicted and all of that, but he basically took back and said, I don't want, I want to reverse my guilty plea. So the Kings fought all along for a retrial for him and they brought in that trial that we mentioned. They brought 70 witnesses, transcripts, an extraordinary number of documents. And the issue is that James Earl Ray died from prison fight related, a prison riot related. injuries before they could end up. They were attempting after that to try and get him a new trial. Yeah.

And to try it again. So let's start maybe one of my favorite elements of this story is that there was a tree. Okay. I got dibs on Charles Stevens. Okay. You get Charles Stevens. I'll do the tree. There was a tree that grew, because remember James Earl Ray supposedly shot out of this

upper story bathroom window 80, 70 yards. over to the balcony, killed him. Across the street. And it was from up there. So there's a couple things with that. First of all, the bullet trajectory from that height doesn't make sense with the scene. Martin Luther King Jr. was leaning down, looking over, down the balcony. And the trajectory of the bullet would indicate that it came from below, traveling

upward, not level or above him traveling downward. Now, you might go, well, that could be, his head was just in a different position, blah, blah, blah. Okay, but there was a tree. there was a tree that grew right in front of the window from this bathroom. And when we say right in front of, there was a branch. It's right in front of the room. Where ever, multiple people from the scene who knew the place, who looked at it, they said, hey, you can't, that is impossible.

It couldn't have come from that window because like I can draw a line. You'd have to shoot through a whole tree to get there. It's just not possible. So you might ask, like, how did this not come up in court? Well, we'll tell you how it didn't come up in court. It's because the very night of the shooting, like the shooting happened and then that night fell. The Memphis Police Department, along with another city works department, ordered the immediate

removal of the tree. Yeah. Supposedly to help with the crime scene. With the investigation. They cut down the whole tree. Yeah. And the thing is, when the police arrived on. on scene. The first thing that they did was run up the stairs of the boarding house into the communal bathroom and said, this is where the shot was fired from. They failing to apparently

look out the open window and see that it was covered by a massive chunk of wood. And guess what never appeared in the trial? The many witnesses who saw shooters, which we'll get into, in the bushes below the building from the correct trajectory. Right. Several, many witnesses, multiple that will bring up, said the shooting came from outside of the building. Right. I heard it out my window. It was, okay, so actually, this gets into Charles Stevens.

Yeah, let's talk about Charles Stevens. So Charles Stevens, lead witness for the U.S. against James Earl Ray. Lead witness. His wife was staying in the boarding house. Okay. her story was she looked into the communal bathroom, saw no one was in there, heard a gunshot from outside, and then ran outside to see what had happened. So she was where the shots allegedly came from?

Yes. So maybe one reason why she did that and Charles did something a little different is because she was sober at the time. Charles had what you call, what doctors call a drinking problem. He had a bit of a drinking problem. And so he's like sloshing himself around. he sees who he believes is James Earl Ray, the shooter. Okay, this is the witness.

You can literally look up the video, Ben's about to describe it. It is the funniest video you'll ever see. Okay, he's sitting down with like ABC or something, some news reporter who's doing an expose on the case, and they have the lead witness, Charles Stevens, and they show Charles Stevens a picture of James Earl Ray. And the lady or the guy says, so this is what he looked like on the day of the shooting, too.

And Charles Stevens goes, that is not the same guy. That's not the guy. He's like, who is that? Who is that? He said, who is that? Who's that? And the reporter goes, this is James and Earl Ray. He's like, oh, that's not who I saw.

He's like, that is not the same guy. He doesn't have the same face. His face is much less full. Yeah. He's got too much hair. Yeah, especially in a profile that, like, that wasn't him at all. The profile's all wrong. So the point is someone did, we'll get to this.

Someone did go through the area. with a gun. Yes. By the way. But Charles Stevens, not only was he a drunk and didn't even identify James Earl Ray later

with a clear picture, he had already been arrested more than 150 times, mostly for drunk and disorderly. He was a career petty criminal. But isn't that just the funniest thing? He's like, yeah, that was actually not the same guy.

Now, the biggest piece of like hard evidence... Yeah, I mean... It just ends the... Irrefutably means that James Earl Ray, or at least it wasn't the gun that they said was that the gun that James Earl Ray had his fingerprints all over

that Remington 760 30 out 6 had a different rate of twist on the rifling inside the barrel than the gun that had fired the bullet that killed MLK. This is a thing that like it is like fingerprints. If it's different, there's no question

as to whether or not it's like maybe that was a bad test, maybe this, maybe that. No, if it's a different rate of twist on the rifling in the barrel, it is a different firearm. If you're unfamiliar rifling, they're grooves that are bored, sometimes four, sometimes six,

depending on the rifle, they're bored into the bore of the rifle or the barrel of the rifle. They spin as they go down and they spin the bullet when it's going down the barrel so that it's spinning in flight and shoots straight

unlike a musket ball or something. And they're very similar across multiple of the same model of gun, but between the mechanical action of firing the bullet, what's striking the primer, to the grooves in the barrel, where the groove starts and how it ends. They are all so different that they're like a fingerprint. The gun that fired the bullet, best we can say, that was recovered from MLK, had a one and 11.11. So every 11 and a half inches that the bullet would travel down the barrel, it would turn

once. A full single turn. Yeah. The gun that James Earl Ray allegedly put in the sheet that they have had a 10-inch rifling for every... Every 10-inch would turn at once. So 1 to 10 versus 1 in 11.5. Additionally, there's a manufacturing defect, which is not like a defect that made the gun not work, but, you know, a little imperfection here, a pitting in the barrel, or some kind of... It will mark the bullet as it passes through. There's a manufacturing defect in the rifle.

that James Roll Ray, that was recovered, that was not present in the bullet. Right. And so if you go and you look at the debunkers today, they will now claim that it's inconclusive. I'll be like, oh, because this is such damning evidence that if this is true, it is open and shut, James Earl Ray did not shoot Martin Luther King, Jr., period.

It was his gun wasn't used, and not only that, but his gun was clearly planted with the intention of framing him because it's got a spent cartridge in the, I mean, all of that. Yeah. So they'll now claim that it's inconclusive, but at the minimum we can say that it's strongly likely

that the gun that they recovered simply was not the gun. Now remember in James Earl Ray's story, he said that Raoul, this mysterious white Hispanic man that gave him guns, lots of money and IDs and told him this whole story about why he needed, was insistent that he get a 30-0-6, Remington 760. Yep. And was insistent on all these details

that he would have needed to know, to plant the gun or to use the same gun as James Rowe that they were going to play. If James Rorye comes back with a Remington 760 chambered in 243, well, yeah, it's a big enough

calder to, you know, it can kill a man, no doubt, but it's not a 30 out six. And they need it to match the caliber. And that's too much to cover. Exactly. And at this time, by the way, they didn't have ballistics advanced enough to do this kind of analysis.

And the problem is that now James are all raised gun, the gun, the more you fire it, it changes the characteristics as you clean it or get it dirty. So there's a huge debate over whether they could clean the gun to continue testing it because the buildup was making it less and less conclusive. And they were never able to get a clear. They thought, well, cleaning it would probably compromise it enough again that we wouldn't be able to match it anyway. Yeah. So needless to say, this piece of evidence today wouldn't stand up in the court of law, be tossed out. Yep, absolutely. But no jury would be convinced or no reasonable jury would be convinced by this piece of evidence. Part of where we're so confident that the rifle was planted

and that James Orwell-Ray did not actually put it in that bed sheet is because his fingerprints were really found on the rifle. All over. 100%. It really was his rifle. But his fingerprints were found nowhere in the bathroom, the communal bathroom in the boarding house, or in the room that was rented in his name. So the argument would have to be that James Oral Ray, criminal mastermind, what completely wiped clean. The bathroom, the room that he had stayed in, the bathroom that he had used multiple times in the night that he had stayed there.

But he failed to wipe clean the rifle that he used to actually commit the murder that he then just ditched on the side of the road. With clear obvious that he was the one who bought it. Yeah. But that does accord with his story, which is that he actually didn't go in

to that building at all. He rented the room ahead of time because Raul had told him, hey, if anything goes wrong, I need you to have a room here so that it can't be tied to me. And also so that you have a getaway, you need to be right outside. And so he had been waiting outside and waiting outside. And then he was about to leave thinking something got wrong after the gunshot went off,

thinking, oh, they killed Raoul. Yeah. This gun deal went wrong. Then Raoul runs out, gets in the car. It makes perfect sense how he was able to flee the scene in under two minutes. Yeah. Because James Earl Ray wasn't in that bathroom, didn't have to run all the way to the room, pack up his things, come all the way down.

go hide it around the corner, run back the other way, get in his car, turn it on, drive away, which by the way, you'd have to be like an Olympic sprinter. And by the way, James Oral Ray was not the one to put the bed sheet in front of Guy Canopies's store. We know that without a doubt. Let's talk about that. Maybe it was Raul, maybe it was somebody else. But the guy who owns the store, Guy Canopay, Guy Canopy, whatever. I don't know how to pronounce it.

His name is funny. He came forward and he said, okay, this is what I witnessed. I was standing behind the counter of my store. I can see outside the glass pane front door. I'm not an idiot. What I saw was a man wearing a hat very calmly walk up with a bed sheet full of stuff. And he just put it down very calmly. Again, very calmly right outside my front door turned around, walked away.

I was like, that's kind of weird. Maybe he'll come back for it. A few minutes later, instead of the guy coming back for it, he hears a gunshot ring out in the Memphis sky. MLK is dead. So the gunshot that killed MLK happened after the bed sheet filled with the Rimmington rifle had been placed in front of Guy Canopy's store. Surely this man was put on the stand as a witness in the case.

You'd think. You'd think. Surely the drunk guy's wife was put on the stand in the case, right? No. And in fact, even Charles Stevens, the drunk guy, he only, I forgot about this. He only came forward once the FBI released a reward. Oh, come on. with James Orrace's face saying, can you identify this man?

And Charles Stevens was like, yeah, I was there on that day. I'll take that money. Yeah, that I saw him. A couple of bottles of vodka that I can get completely soused on every day. That'd be nice. That'd be wonderful. Now, yeah, I was going to say, you remember the guy who owned Jim's Grill? Brian, I got bad news.

The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself. And I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals?

They're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to indigo sundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool or a men six pack because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King.

And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps. Discount code, Haunted Cosmos, no spaces. Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant normie, it's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to Indie.

I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified. We are living in the beginning of a new reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate. Art, businesses, publications, ministries, and a thousand other mediums are acting as agents to get us out of our current anti-Christian world. And all of these mediums are going to need marketing to help them get more eyes and ears on them.

New Dominion Design Co is ready to provide that help. Unashamedly Christian, New Dominion Design Co exists to labor alongside fellow members of the body of Christ as we engage in this great work of Reformation. With over 15 years of design and marketing experience spanning across multiple industries, New Dominion Design Co was launched in 2024 to help like-minded businesses, ministries, institutions, publishing houses, and other content creators around the globe raise the bar of excellence in our Christian culture. If you're ready to build, New Dominion Design Co is ready to work with you. Visit New Dominion Designco.com.

That's New Dominion Designco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs. And as always, that link will be in the description. If you have a young family like me, then you work hard every day to ensure that you care properly for them. Providing for a young family is challenging with rising costs, and it doesn't look like things are going to change in the near future. Maybe you've thought like I have that I wish I had started investing years ago. Maybe then my family would be in a better financial position. Well, like they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, but the second best time is today. Don't let the benefit of time go to waste on your financial planning for retirement or inheritance for your children.

Joe Garrison, with Backwards Planning Financial, works hard to help families achieve their goals. He's a Christian who works with one of the largest and most trusted financial service companies in the world. Whether you have millions in assets or are just starting to invest, Joe Garrison can help you reach your goals to grow the kingdom and leave a good legacy for your generations. visit backwards planning financial.n.m.com. That's backwards planningfinancial. dot nm.com. Or call Joe at 615-767-25-2555 to prepare for the future.

The testimonials presented may not be representative of the experience of other clients and are not a guarantee of future performance or success. Are you a Christian struggling to find companies that align with your values and beliefs? Well, Squirrely Joe's has you covered for at least all of your coffee needs. All of their coffee is hand-selected and roasted fresh every day by a family of fellow believers.

Try them out and you'll savor exceptional coffee while knowing that your investment supports a company committed to following God's teachings and upholding truth and righteousness, ensuring your hard-earned money contributes to the growth of God's kingdom. So stop giving that hard-earned money to pagans who support evil. instead buy Christian. And right now, Squirley Joe's has a fantastic offer for our listeners.

You get your first bag of coffee for free. What? All you have to do is cover shipping. Are you kidding? What? So head over to Squirleyjoos.com slash haunted cosmos. That's Squirleyjo's.com slash haunted cosmos to claim your free bag of coffee. Let's flip and go.

Link in the description below. I'm a poet. Didn't even know it. Should we start getting in this? name is Lloyd. Yeah. But do you remember what he did with a rifle? Oh, I do, yes. On the day of the shooting?

Would you like to tell the fine people? Well, Lloyd, remind me, Lloyd, what's his name? Lloyd Jowers. Lloyd Jowers. That's right. He showed off his 30-0-6 the day after the shooting, and a waitress also saw him with muddy pants and a stained shirt.

Seconds after the shooting, running into the shooting. store to hide something behind the counter beneath the counter of Jim's grill, which is pretty interesting that he had a 30 I-6 he'd hidden under the counter after running from the direction where with muddy boots and a stained shirt happened and then was boasting about the now now Jowers didn't shoot Martin Luther King Jr. That's so true. We're going to we're going to get to who did probably. Oh, definitely definitely. We have names. But yeah, so he's the owner of the grill. Now, enough of this stuff started to percolate up

through the media that many years afterward, people kept calling, hey, we need to get Lloyd Jowers story. He's got to come clean. He's got to tell us what he did. In 1993, Jowers went on ABC, and he explained what happened. And the story he told was that he was, paid $100,000 to help facilitate in MLK's murder and to coordinate between hitman, like the

person who was actually going to do the shooting. He was paid by known mobster Frank Liberto. Frank Liberto. Frank Liberto. And what Jowers was to do was allegedly he was going to provide his place. They would meet in his store. He would help organize certain aspects of the details. But then he would take the rifle immediately after the shooting because he was placed very conveniently.

He would hide it right after the shooting so that the other gun could be placed. The Patsy could be framed. And then eventually, so like within a few days later, he, after boasting and the waitress, seeing him showing off the 30 out six, because these are all dumb guys. Yeah. At the end of the day, that someone else then disposed of the real murder weapon by throwing it off a bridge. Yeah.

This brings us to a guy named Frank Liberto. Frank Laberto is a very interesting guy. Super important character. Frank Laverto is a guy in the area in Memphis. who's connected with organized crime. So like the mafia. Yeah. He is an owner of just like most organized crime folks.

He's an owner of legitimate businesses. Packing plants, produce packing plants, well known to hate Martin Luther King Jr. And hate the civil rights movement, partly because in Memphis it was really disrupting the social order and like hiring of factory workers who were black and there was all this like talk of communism. And this was at the high school.

of the Red Scare. Yeah. And Martin Luther King Jr. was proposing things that most people were thinking like, hey, that's communism. Yeah. And so there's these workers' revolution.

There's all this like fomenting stuff that's disrupting his business and organized crime. And so Frank Liberto allegedly paid Lloyd Jowers to help conceal this. And actually, interestingly, John McFerrin, who's a black businessman

and civil rights activist who worked in one of Liberto's produce plants, said that he was working in one of his plants on April 4th, 1968, when he heard Liberto answer the phone. Cue a telephone ring there, Mr. Sound Design guy. Not actually here right now. That one, thank you. And he said, quote,

I told you not to call me here, shoot the son of a blank, when he comes on the balcony. So just one guy, I mean, I don't know if he's telling the truth, but he said that. Laberto also over the years is claimed to have boasted more than once in drunken states to like a lover, a woman, and then another man at a different point, that he's the one who had that SOB Martin Luther King Jr. killed. And guess who else was really good friends with Frank LaB

who, a guy by the name of Percy Foreman. Percy Foreman, who had Percy Jackson? No. Percy Foreman was the first lawyer that was assigned to James Earl Ray's case that told him, I'm going to throw the case. And by the way, they're going to arrest your brother. And also, you got to plead guilty today. Oh, he was good friends with Frank Roberto. Good friends with Frank Laverto. There's even talk that Laverto is the one who then met because, so James Rorway drives away. He says, Raoul said, stop the car. Raoul gets out of the car, runs into the woods. He didn't stop the car. He like slowed down. He was like, hey, man, slow down the car. He's sitting in the back seat. He opens the door and jumps out of the car. Rolls. First of all, I love how

James Royal Ray does not stop. He's like, yeah, all right, cool man. By, Roel. Dude, I trust you. You know what you're doing. So then at this point, James Earl Ray didn't even know about the assassination. It was later, he's like, all right, maybe Raoul's up to something. I don't know what he's got to do.

I'm going, and then he hears on the radio that there was a shooting in Martin Luther King, Jr. And then he gets more details. And eventually he hears, they're looking for a man in a white Mustang. And that's what made him start running. Yeah. He was like, oh, no. And so he goes. But he meets a guy.

He meets a guy in Atlanta, you know, big guy, kind of mysterious, right? And he knows that he's friends with Raul. And this big guy gives him a bunch of money and a bunch of passwords. More fake identification. And basically this guy's Frank LaBerdo. Like, that's the whole idea. Okay. I want to back up before we continue into who actually, we think, killed him and some more details.

But there was also a detective of the Memphis Police Department. This is one of the best details. It's so overlooked. He's assigned to Martin Luther King, basically. And he was, like, basically to protect him and help keep Martin Luther King safe and that sort of thing. Guy named Edward Reddit. Which is a hilarious name. Yeah, Reddit.

It's pre-reddit.com, but Edward Reddit. So Edward Reddit, though, if you read the story, he wasn't there the day of the shooting, which is kind of the time when you'd really want your police protection to be there to prevent you from being shot. Where was he? Oh, he was hiding at home. Why would he be hiding at home, Ben? Oh, it's because he received a threat on his life. Okay.

And so they said, hey, Reddit, you go stay at home so that you don't get killed. So we send someone to protect you. Yeah, exactly. And then they were like, well, who made the call to put in the tip about his life being threatened? Oh, it was the FBI. The FBI did. They didn't even use a different phone. And then later they said that was a false tip.

Yeah. Oh, and by the way, before King was shot, most of the Memphis, police department was diverted into other locations. What was a bomb threat? Yeah, there were some bomb threats. Totally unrelated. And, you know, they ended up all being false. Look, that if I had to count a number of times that a bomb threat has happened very close

but conveniently drawing off all of the law enforcement from an area where the government totally isn't assassinating a political figure. Like, it happens, man. If I had a nickel. It happens. Hey, now here's another really funny, a funny one. There was a hobo. Okay, the hobo's name.

Oh, this is so good. The hobo's name was cornbread. Cornbread. That was his Christian name. Cornbread. And cornbread at 6 p.m. on April 4th was drinking in some bushes outside of the boarding house. Just enjoy, I mean, honestly, just enjoying himself. Sounds like he was having a good old time.

And next thing you know, he hears a gunshot, and it's really close to him, scares him. He rolls over, sees a man in a white shot. shirt running past him with a rifle in hand. Right. Clearly, he didn't just take that shot. The shot came from the bathroom, the communal bathroom above him. I often clean my deer rifles in the bushes below a hospital. Now look, this is a hobo named cornbread who was drinking at the time.

Do we know that he's reliable? No. Yes. But if Charles Stevens is reliable as the star witness, then come on. Then maybe we should give cornbread the benefit of the doubt. The biggest thing is that just that none of these people were ever called, the lawyers phoned it in, none of this was ever called. So you might be asking if he didn't take the shot, if James Earl Ray didn't take the shot, who did? Right.

And there's good evidence to believe that it was a team based on eyewitnesses that was a team of two shooters, a primary and a backup shooter, that were both in the similar location in these bushes, down at the foot of the hotel, you know, where below the window where he was allegedly shot from. People saw potential shooters running in two directions. Lots of eyewitnesses saw this. One ran around the building one direction, and then the other one ran another direction and had to hop down a wall and then go the other way. So there were two men who are allegedly involved in this shooting. And this is according to Lloyd Jowers.

Again, the guy he was supposed to take the gun from that Frank Liberto helped via the mafia, higher. And one is Earl Clark of the Memphis Police Department. Lieutenant Clark had already allegedly been accused many times of taking bribes from organized crime and being associated with Frank Liberto. He was also known as one of the best marksmen on the Memphis PD. Jowers claimed that once the shot was taken, Clark ran down the hill from where he'd taken the shot, handed the rifle to Jowers so that he could hide it and dispose of it. And then Clark then, escaped in another white Mustang, one of two at the scene that day, the other belonging to James Earl Ray, which had, by the way, been purchased, we keep seeing by the way, but it's true, by the way.

That new white Mustang had been purchased because Raul said, take some money, go buy a car, tell me what car you buy, basically, and buy something non-discreet, white Mustang, it'll blend in. So they had another white Mustang prepared with the shooter to confuse things as well. And then there was a backup shooter from the PD as well, a guy named Strauss. Now, Strauss, there's eyewitness testimony that says that Strauss spent the whole day before the shooting at the police range, practicing, shooting his 30-0-6. So, look, so either one of them could have taken shot Strauss or Earl Clark. But that's what Lloyd Jowers said. Absolutely amazing.

Okay. And now maybe we should get into. why was King assassinated? Yeah. Why now? Why would they kill the guy? Why April 4th, 1968? Well, you know, going back to what we talked about after the cold open, I'll just put it very simply. Later in his career, King started to harp on something that he hadn't really been touching on as much earlier on. He became vocally and forcefully critical of what's called the American military industrial complex.

Right. He started to go vitriolic against America's proclivity to go into these smaller countries and basically set up a puppet state by their military force in order to enact their own version of American democracy. King hated this and he saw an example of it, a really prominent example of it, in the Vietnam War. And so it came out as a really high-level opponent of the Vietnam War. And I think maybe it's as simple as that. Yeah. And so this was, again, height of Red Scare, communism, anti-communism, communist agents are everywhere. Communism is really bad, by the way, and not all of that was bad.

But when you combine some of the civil rights activism along with the anti-war stuff, you start to see a through line where JFK was in a similar stuff. He was saying, we need to take care, we need to be careful of the military industrial complex. We need to investigate the CIA, and so it would be very convenient for Martin Luther King to be taken out. Additionally, a lot of the local politics of Memphis come into play as well. Yeah. The head of the Memphis police was a 25-year veteran of the FBI. And a lot of the people involved are related to Memphis politics and Memphis, like, local issues that were related to civil rights. activism kind of being a problem.

Just as one little side note, as some of this percolated through the media and people were putting together, hey, there were these eyewitnesses and this stuff doesn't really fit together. Harry Avery, who was the Tennessee State Commissioner at the time, he tried to do his own investigation, not necessarily trying to prove that MLK Jr. was a CIA cover-up, but just asking the question of like, how did James Earl Ray get all this money and fake IDs in this stuff, which he was like sophisticated stuff? And immediately, when he started this investigation, the governor, Ellington, fired Harry Avery from his position as state commissioner.

And there's a lot of like weird kind of cloak and dagger stuff like that. Like, for example, before staying at that hotel, the motel or the motel or rain, yeah, this is strange. King actually wanted to change rooms. He had normally stayed in that room 306, but he actually wanted to go to room 202, particularly because he was worried it could put him at risk of being harmed. By staying in the same room over and over again, he would be too predictable. So we wanted to change to room 202.

But when he got there, he thought like, okay, I'm going to go to room 202. That's my reservation. The hotel informed him that someone from his team had called them earlier that day asking to switch to room. Can't cancel the change. Yeah, cancel the change. No, keep it at room 306. and King and all of his team were like, no, none of us did that. When they got there, there was like, no, we didn't make it change.

No, none of us did that. But at that point, again, according to the motel manager, all of the rooms were already taken up. And so they had no choice but to stay in room 306. And there's still nobody knows who did that, who actually changed that room. Couldn't have been the FBI. Yeah. They definitely, they don't have the resources for that. In this so far, we've got James Earl Ray's story of Raoul, this mysterious guy who,

was using a fake name clearly, he wasn't really named Raul. He was like a white guy. Yeah, absolutely no chance. And he had financed him, convinced him of this story that perfectly conveniently placed him with the same type of weapon used to kill Martin Luther King Jr. At the right place in his hands with his fingerprints on it, have him placed at the scene with a room booked in his name and all of that sort of arranged perfectly. It's not necessarily obvious that they wanted James Royal Ray to be caught. They set him up so he might escape. But if he was caught, he would just be a patsy. He'd be easy patsy.

Wouldn't be a big deal, kind of low IQ guy, and so they're like, well, that'll be fine. So you might say, well, how to, what about the confidence? There's some eyewitnesses, there's all this, Jower said some things, but it's not just from these random eyewitnesses and maybe people lying and mafia-connected stuff. Daniel Ellsberg, who is the guy behind the 1971 Pentagon Papers release,

which is a whole different thing we won't get into. It's kind of like a leak of classified documents that was exposing nefarious activities of the government. I think he ended up being exonerated in the trial, and they didn't actually convict him for that, Daniel Ellsberg. But he swore in an affidavit that Agent Brady Tyson of the FBI told him in confidence that J. Edgar Hoover, who's the director of the FBI at the time, had had Martin Luther King Jr. killed. and that Hoover was well known for using this kind of hatchet man named Clyde Tolson to carry out his dirty work. And Clyde Tolson would allegedly, again, use things like organized crime connections. The way the CIA and a lot of government conspiracy works is that they don't necessarily have a stable of elite assassins all the time in their hire. That's sort of movie stuff.

but what they will do is in different countries, they will fund local guerrillas or they will fund someone who will do something or they will work with criminals like organized crime, street informants. It's a common tactic in law enforcement generally to actually carry out the activities. So Clyde Tolson would have been perfectly positioned

to know Frank Liberto and other mafia-related people who would then know low lives, they would have corruption, influence, again, via the mafia, they had connections with the Memphis PD, who would be paid off in bribes to look the other way with this mafia-related activity. So there's this whole pipeline that on an affidavit, the agent says, yeah, that's exactly what happened. And not only that, but he alleges that Tolson paid off the warden at the prison where

James Earl Ray was incarcerated and allowing him this convenient escape through the breadbox. And here's the whole tie-in of this episode. The whole point is that James Earl Ray, in his military career, worked with the OSS, the early CIA. And he told his brother that they would give him drugs. He told him that the OSS later the CIA. It was like the mafia that once you got in, you were never really out. So they had sort of identified him

and prepped him to be one of their Patsies via something like MK Ultra. Yeah, and he's the perfect mark because he's not an intelligent man. Yeah. He really isn't. And so it makes total sense. me that this would be the kind of guy that he gets in, you know, he's trying to do the right thing,

trying to maybe turn his life around. I don't know. Maybe he wasn't. But he gets him with OSS. And he's sworn up and down. Like, yeah, they gave me drugs. And I mean, our next story is going to show you that, yeah, when people say that about the CIA and the MK Ultra time, maybe we should believe him because it's most of the time true. And so who's to say what all that entailed? Like when he says, yeah, they gave me drugs. He doesn't even remember. He doesn't remember, that could have been anything. And that was at the time that OSS was just dipping their toe into this whole brain warfare idea. I mean, James O'Role was like an ace in their back pocket that they could use at any time. The other thing that's kind of interesting, this is like more

circumstantial, these names, Raoul, LaBerto, they pop up in connection with another really high-level assassination, and that's that of JFK. I think that that's just worth, there's a lot of, like, prominent players in the JFK assassination with similar or identical names. There's a few more tying some of these things together. There's a few more discrepancies to point out with the MLK shooting. One of them is that just the very day of the shooting, the FBI immediately took over the investigation. And if not illegal, this is certainly abnormal.

It goes totally against protocol. The FBI, law enforcement has certain protocol for who has jurisdiction. You know, for example, any attempt on the president's life is a jurisdiction of the Secret Service and then the FBI. Terrorism is the FBI. If there's a crime that crosses state lines, FBI can jump in. They can be invited by local law enforcement. But this was just a local, I mean, it was high profile. But for all intents and purposes, this was a local murder in Memphis, Tennessee that with no reason to believe that it was federal in nature, but immediately they took over. And then all of a sudden, the chopping of the tree, these

shady sorts of things, they never performed an autopsy on MLK's body. Yep. A nurse at the hospital actually said that when MLK, okay, let me back up a second because this is another interesting connection. There's a picture of MLK right after he's been shot. He's laying down, he's bleeding. It's a horrible picture. And someone's like administering aid to him

or trying to check for signs of life. And I can't remember, I think it's McCollum or something like that, his exact name, but it was not known who that was for a long time until later they were able to identify him. That guy was, an ex-CIA agent who had gotten into the Martin Luther King inner circle and is widely believed to be the means via which they, for years, surveilled and wiretapped Martin Luther King

wherever he went. There was a long-term CIA FBI. It was called Cointel. It was an illegal government surveillance operation. I believe the government either even later ruled that they had violated its civil rights with Cointel. So that guy administers aid, whatever. He's right there.

He ran up the stairs right away. The ex-CIA guy who happens to be right there. And he's like checking if he's alive. Who's surveilling MLK? He gets in the ambulance. They take him to the hospital. This nurse says they bring MLK and they're working on him. He's still alive.

They say he's got a pulse. He's still alive. When all of a sudden, multiple men in suits. Black-eyed or black men in black. I almost just said black men, children. And they say, step away from the body. And so they all back away and only one doctor is allowed to kind of be there. And then later that doctor's the one who declares the time of death. And the nurse says it was that he declared the time of death as earlier than they had even

worked on him while he was still alive. And so they removed the, and she even says they've removed life saving equipment from him. Yeah. Yeah. They were like, we're going to make sure that this guy dies. It's honestly really dark. Some of the coin tell pro stuff is important because we know, part of why we know that that happened is because we know that some of these like seedier parts of MLK's life are potentially true. Things like his, him being unfaithful to his wife, etc. The reason that we know that in the first place is because they were putting bugs in MLK's room, hotel rooms, home, all that. So that they could get intel on them, on him. And as they did this, they also got kind of like blackmail, personal blackmail that they could use to sully his character.

Now, of course, they could be lying about that. But they're basically saying, like, no, the reason that it's common knowledge that MLK was an adulterer is because of CoinTel Pro. They, if you remember the last episode, I said, I have this theory that whenever someone who's like a problem politician gets in office, the first day they sit down their desk after the election, they get a minimal envelope full of, hey, we know what you've done. did, whether true or fake pictures or real stuff, they did that with MLK. They wrote an alleged letter, we have this. I would read it, but I don't have it in front of me, from, you know, allegedly some black man who was against him and threatened. Basically, the gist of the letter was Martin Luther King, you should kill yourself. We know about all your abnormal behavior, all this stuff, your adulteries, you know, you're not a king, you're not a reverend, I won't call you this. The only thing

you're like is King Henry the 8th, an adulterer and all this stuff. Well, it turns out the people who sent that letter, their name has three letters in it. And it starts an F and ends with an eye. Oh, no way. Yeah. The FVI. The FBI. FBI.

So surrounding Martin Luther King's death and its investigation, you also find a series of mysterious deaths. Yeah. Like, for example, there was. this cab driver named Lewis Ward. And he was talking to another cab driver, buddy of his, named Buddy. Buddy the elf. Which I mean, Buddy the cab driver

is one of the most comic book things that I've ever heard in my life. Oh, my name is a body. I love how back in that time, like, it used to be real. Like, they were like, oh, yeah, look at this rifle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I just came over from the bushes.

A guy, a hombo named Cornbread was watching me shoot MLK. I got it off a whole one named Cornbread. See? Shane. Anyway, so... All true. This guy, Lewis Ward,

is talking to his cab driver buddy named Buddy. And Buddy says that right at the time that MLK was shot, he was in that area and he was going to pick somebody up to give them a ride. And he just kind of happened to see, like, in the hustle and bustle of it all, a guy running out from the bushes with a gun. And this buddy, he's like, there's your shooter. He even said he was looking,

because, I mean, Martin Luther King and his entourage were over there. Yeah. that he had looked up, seen Martin Luther King Jr. shot. Yeah. And he was like, oh. And he turned and sees a guy running with the gun from the bushes. He gets into a nearby vehicle and then just zoom in on my face.

Zoom in on my face. What the heck, guys? Okay, so then a few days later. And Buddy certainly was called on trial as a witness, right, Ben? No, and here's why. What? Because a few days later, Lewis Ward, that guy whose buddy's name was Buddy, He showed up at the cab agency and he's like, hey, where's buddy?

I haven't seen him in a few days. Yeah. And the guys like, or the other guys, the other cabbies, they're like, oh, yeah, buddy, he jumped out of a moving car at high speed. He was immediately run over and killed. He was suicidal. Before his death, he was trying to tell everyone about the shooter that fled the scene. Buddy, I'm sorry. Buddy, you were astray.

He's not alone. You caught astray for the CIA. Godly. Another mob connection. strange death. Early on in the process, Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer, Jimmy Hoff, a totally different story. Where is he? If anybody knows, call us. Barry, dude, under that football field. The myth busters figured it out. The lawyer's name was ZT. Osborne. He said that he was going to take the trial because he noticed some of these discrepancies. He's like, I can get you a new trial. This is ridiculous.

So he said, James Earl Ray, I'll take the case. Three months later, Z.T. Osborne has found dad of an apparent suicide. His wife swears up and down. He would never commit suicide. He was not depressed. There were no signs of that. He just all of a sudden, supposedly. And she, for her life, said, nope, Osborne would never do that. Mm-mm. Okay, so then a judge looks at that, looks at the evidence. And he's like, no, no, no, there should be a new trial. There's some discrepancies here. He mysteriously died of a sudden heart attack. He died of a heart attack. I mean, and judges die of heart judges die apart it. They got a stressful job. Okay, but then another judge. Don't be a conspiracy theory. Then another judge was like, no, that other judge was right. The next judge that took his place.

Right. We should actually look at this. I agree with that last guy. He died of a mysterious heart attack. Ben, sometimes strings of people die of heart attacks. It's so true. One after the other. They're communicable. Some people are also good at just like reading the room. And so the next judge that came in and took their place, he saw all the same evidence. And he was like, no, there's two judges dead. right next to me. And yeah, I think actually this is fine. I don't think there's any evidence that we need to look at it anymore. We don't need a new trial. The FBI, Patton, a thousand, baby.

He was like absolutely. So then a year after this, Alfred, one of the brothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., he started looking into the case. And later, you remember, the King family ultimately. Alfred King. Alfred King. My son's name is Alfred Kings Lee. Yeah.

So he starts looking into it and remember, the King family is the family that that ultimately brought the civil suit where the jurors decided in favor of the King family that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed via government conspiracy and awarded a hundred via the government, right? Yeah. Alfred is then found dead in his own swimming pool. Wait, wait. So did he drown? Well, here's the thing. He was in his underwear and he was a strong swimmer. Everyone was like, he's a good swimmer.

And he didn't have any water in his lungs. What he did have was strange bruising around his neck hole region. Nah. His neck. So the police investigated, and they said this is a clear accidental drowning. You know what I do love, though?

What? I love in true crime stuff like this when someone has a mysterious death. Like, they drown. And it doesn't matter who it is, dude. The podcaster's like, they were known for being a great swimmer. Yeah, like, it could be like,

yeah, he fell off a building. Like, they were known. known for being afraid of heights. They would never get close to the edge of a building. He had great balance. Like they always say. He's like, yeah. So, okay, then, uh, not too long after this 1971, a reporter named Bill Sater.

And I'm not sure of the pronunciation or the spelling of this, but Bill Sater. Probably Satt, Y, R. Yeah, I don't like the Sater. Like the, like the, like the mythical. Yes. So mythical being? Yeah. Uh, well, I mean, mythical is, myth is just history.

So he starts investigating in this. This gets into it as known as he's like digging stuff up. And then he's in Waco, Texas and someone, as happens, I mean, if I had a nickel for every time this happened, to reporters I know, he was poisoned mysteriously and died. Who among us hasn't been poisoned? We've all, I mean, we've all. I mean, Monsanto, Kim Trails.

Fast forward six years. There's chlorine in the water. Floreen in the water. Fast forward six years. And you have a really important event hitting the intelligence scene, where the U.S. population, this popular cry begins to sort of rise up and say, we need to investigate the intelligence community in the U.S. Because there are these strange assassinations happening.

Stuff is coming out at this point where they're starting to learn about illegal surveillance operations on U.S. citizens. And so there's a House Select Committee called, which is just a group of legislators or called into a committee. They form a small group of, and they're supposed to investigate and hear evidence on something and come to a ruling or conclusions. This one was the House Select Committee on assassinations. And it was going to look at JFK, MLK, RFK, all these different things. So in 1977, the FBI assistant director of intelligence, high position, his name's William Sullivan, he was about to testify. And it was known that he was going to testify against, against Jay Edgar Hoover.

Who's the head of the FBI? And it's a committee about assassinations, and he's going to testify against Hoover. What is he going to be talking about? You do the math. Like, what's he going to be doing? Okay. So then Sullivan's like, I'm a little stressed.

You know, I got to go do this. I'm going to go get some time out in the woods. I'm going to breathe the fresh air. I'm going to touch grass. Great idea, right? He's out in the woods and is in a tragic accident, which was totally accidental. he was shot and killed by a hunter who mistook him for a deer.

And now we come full circle. To the liaison. Listeners, I don't look like a deer. Ben? If they try to tell you. If I had to describe you as an animal, I would say a falcon. Dude, I would describe you as like. A hippogriff?

Like Aslan. Dang. The Jesus lion. Just one out. Wow. Additionally, I mentioned this at the beginning, but just to tie this together with a bow, the liaison to the select committee. Because the select committee doesn't go find all, they're not like out, gum shoe reporters on the, like the congressmen aren't going out and investigating. They appoint people and they say, hey, we want this information, this information, and go, go query the FBI and get these files and go get the data from the CIA on the MLK thing.

And a lot of stuff's come out from this where the CIA, the FBI have admitted, like they're, they were trying to, destroy MLK. They were wiretapping him all this stuff. Well, the liaison that was bringing them the information. Really trustworthy guy. He was a CIA agent. Guys, if you think that the CIA is your friend, oh my. You are wrong. And hey, I'm actually, I'm going to echo my palindigoon. We're actually not pals, but I wish we were. I wish we were. And say, if you think, no, that's horrible. The government would never do that. Yes, they would. In fact, on Wendigoon, you should go check out his YouTube channel. He did an episode on MLK Jr. His Riz is insane. With whiteboard. He whiteboarded out some of the stuff we talked about. I cannot emphasize to you enough, two things, that you should go watch

that video. And secondly, Wendigoon, knowing that you are watching, since we are such close friends. Yeah. Brothers in Christ and interested in some similar things. How much you should come onto our podcast so that we can help boost your small channel. Yeah, like we would love to do you that favor. We'd love to help boost you up, my guy, because I know that you have just a few subscribers and I think we could help you. We're real like kingmakers over here. We see you, like, you're a real like princelet, and we think that you have what it takes. We think you have potential. Okay. The last thing that I'll say is kind of more stuff on that surveillance. So the 9002nd Military Intelligence Group, which is a CIA monitoring.

group that was assigned to Martin Luther King. These are things that we absolutely know. They had been surveilling King. They had been getting all that coin tell pro type stuff that I talked about earlier. And they had allegedly taken pictures from the day of the assassination. Now, the story is that some of the pictures they had taken that like some whistleblowers saw included pictures of Jowers, Lloyd Jowers, fleeing the scene of the shooting to Jim's Grill. Lloyd Jowers would never do that. Lloyd Jowers, the guy who took the guy... He said he did.

The waitress is like, yeah, Lloyd came in, he had the rifle, he was covered in mud, he put it under the counter, and then, you know, some time later it got thrown into the river or whatever. Okay, so apparently there's pictures of all this, too. We don't just have to take the waitress's word. But when the select committee, this House Select Committee, asked for those pictures, that CIA surveillance, group came back and said, oopsies, we actually, we actually lost them. In a boating accident. Dang. Man, we would have given them to you, but we would have.

We literally, I'm going to be sick that day. I think they even said, we got rid of them. Yeah, they said, like, we got rid of them. I mean, what I mean is we lost them. Who would have needed those? Oh, so. So that's MLK Jr. Anyway, your government hits you and they want to kill you.

Just to reiterate, I feel great. love my life, my family. If the FBI at any point watches this and feels like we are attacking them, I want you to know, we're on your team. We're doing this. You can only pick on a guy

that you really respect. You know what I mean? So, we love you. Keep it. I mean, hey, wow. Just in terms of, this was hard work that you guys did here. You worked really hard

in killing Martin Luther King Jr. And I think that you, you stayed above board the whole time. And everybody knows that hard work deserves just, you know, game recognizes game. So no need to do anything negative to any of us at any time. And I think that really in terms of this episode, this just shows that the U.S. government with the best intentions, like, yeah, doing nothing wrong at all and has never done anything wrong.

They do occasionally mind control people via hallucinogenic drugs and massive doses of them and psychological torture in nefarious ways so that they can create Patsis to implement their illegal and extremely immoral activities, both domestically and globally, in service of their totalitarian aims. Yeah. And that this is all good. But yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, like devil's advocate, you know, like, who among us hasn't?

Who among us hasn't? Hasn't done something like that. Yeah, I would like all those hypocritic naysayers out there to take a line out of the FBI's book and start being honest with themselves. Yeah. And now we're going to go into a story. This one was a little bit more lighthearted. MLK.

I mean, he died. That's not cool. But it was a lighthearted narrative. It was so ridiculous that it was at least comical for us now. Right. But now we're going to talk about, okay, what if they do something like this to a guy who is a criminal mastermind? What might that look like?

So I'm going to tell the story of James Whitey Bulger. The subject was brought into the state. room. It was 9 a.m. on Tuesday. For the next 24 hours, he belonged to the researchers camped out in the basement of this bona fide hellscape. He wondered aloud why he was even there. They didn't answer. In a sudden rush, two of the masked researchers grabbed his arm and stretched it out as far as they could. He resisted instinctually, but relaxed after a moment's heavy breathing and confused looks around the room. Everyone was so calm. This was supposed to happen. They administered the drugs. Massive amounts of LSD-25 shot like a bullet into

his bloodstream. All at once the world began to change around him. Where once the walls were white, they sank into a crimson shade. Where once the roof was only eight feet over him, it shot up into the stars and his small room became a prison the size of heaven itself. He put his head down, felt the sweat beating on his forehead grow to drops that fell like rain into his lap and breathed deep. His eyes strained and went from clear to fuzzy then back to clear again, clearer than clear. He could hear his heart beat and see his blood rushing through his smoky lungs. His mouth gaped open from all the senses flooding his mind at once. He looked up, people shrinking to periods at the light that met him.

In this moment, he studied the thing that sat propped just in front of him. Before, he could have sworn to the core. It had just been a camera. Now it flopped, with the ears and fur of a dog, excited to see its owner come home after a day at work. The subject let a soft smile and giggle loose from his lips. And then came the horror. The dog started to shift and change shape. Where gentle ears had fallen to the side and flopped over onto themselves, spikes of sharpened watchfulness. rose up in their place. Or a fat hound's neck had gingerly swung and tightened chest of muscle and black hide came into its own. The face moved through a mist of darkness and shadow, from lowly into vicious. The white fangs were too long and too sharp. The thick tongue was too long.

The lips were too far curled back. The eyes were lifeless and burning with rage. Karkaroth, Cerberus around the gates of hell, stared back at him like he was a pitiful soul in the shores of Acheron. His heart rate quickened and everything else in the universe drifted away. Only he in this demonic dog's head was left. In a rush, the head jumped from the camera stand that still held it and snatched his head off. Then he was on to the next nightmare. James Bulger Jr. was born to first-generation Irish immigrants in 1929. He'd go on to be the eldest of six children, a man in the house despite being a child in the same.

His hardworking father depended on his firstborn to help keep things in line, to see to his mother's safety, and to help her and he in raising up the kids beneath him. Soon, these responsibilities doubled down on him. Does not life ask so much of so many? When his father lost his arm in a work accident, the family was reduced to utter poverty just in time for America's Great Depression. Driven by desperate need, the young Bulger took to the roughs. streets of South Boston, and through the network of other bare-knuckled boxers the teenage

Bolger ran with, joined a gang of miscreants. At 14 years old, Bolger was arrested and charged with larceny. Soon after this, he'd be charged with assault, forgery, and armed robbery. The small shops in this rough part of Boston started to fear the sham rocks. That was the gang's name, and this gave Bolger a confidence he didn't know was possible. But with more and more testing of his luck came more and more run-ins with the law. Finally, Boulger was sentenced to Juvie for these repeated offenses. After release, in fearing a relapse into his old ways that had gotten him only lost time, Bolger immediately joined the Air Force. While he served, he earned his high school diploma and trained as a mechanic. He thought himself truly reformed. But the temptation

to greed and aggression and pride proved too strong for the young man. He committed a number of assaults while in the Air Force, and was even arrested by Air Force police at one point for going absent without leave. Bolger knew what was coming for him, a life of crime. So when he got out of the military, he started looking for opportunities he could use to get really good at this calling of his. More theft, more larceny, more forgery, more gangs, more street fights. It all honed Bulger into a master of organized crime. In 1956, at just 27 years old, Bolger had his next major run-in with police when he was charged with armed assault and truck hijacking. For this, he was sent to federal prison, the Atlanta penitentiary, and it's here where he learned the true ways of fear and

madness. From this prison, he would eventually become the feared and violent mob boss, Whitey Bulger. A crime lord known for his brutality and lack of care for anything in the world, apart from animals, for which he claimed a soft spot. What happened at that penitentiary to flip the switch? Why did it serve as the catalyst for new degrees of violent chaos in the young man's life? Well, about a year into his stay, he was approached with a deal. A team of psychiatrists had come in, eager to try out some tests on the prisoners. They said they were just from Emory University. They said they were just led by a man named Dr. Carl Fyfer.

They said they just wanted to find a treatment for schizophrenia. They said that cooperation could mean reduced sentences for any of the criminals willing to participate. Obviously, the young Bulger jumped at the opportunity, and he'd soon lived to regret that. For two years, Bolger and 18 other inmates would enter that cursed room. They'd stay in there for 24 hours each week, receiving massive dose. after massive dose of LSD. Once each man was tripping beyond what he previously thought possible, the experiments would really begin.

Men would be interrogated with pointed questions regarding their past violent crimes. Did you ever kill anyone? Would you ever kill anyone? Why would you do it? How would you do it? The researchers would put groups of the inmates together to see how they reacted socially while hallucinating.

Eight men driven to madness by the drugs shoved into a small and dark room together. Bulger saw men rapidly decay into skeletons in front of him before resurrecting in the nastiest and most unnatural of ways. He watched blood pour out from the walls and threatened to drown him. For 24 hours each week, he lived one long waking nightmare. Two of the men went insane almost immediately. They had to be ripped from underneath their beds to go back for more testing.

They would bark at the researchers and foam at the, the mouth, desperate to get away and never return. Eventually the doctors put those men into a padded cell at the end of the research hall. Bulger never saw them again. He could only guess what became of the other men in his study group. He tried to quit the program a handful of times, but each time Dr. Fyfer would plead with him to stay, offering him the emotional appeal of Bolger being the best subject, of him giving them a real chance at curing schizophrenia forever. When Asked why he wanted to quit, he didn't say. He didn't tell them about how suicidal he had become, about his constant depression, about his

insomnia, about his night terrors that would fly at him right away any time he was unfortunate enough to fall asleep. He didn't want to be institutionalized like those other two men. The night terrors and insomnia, according to Bulger, never went away. He never slept good again for the rest of his life. madness can that drive a man to? One day, much later, Bulger picked up a book by a man named John Marks. He was a CIA whistleblower out to betray the corruption in America's intelligence forces. The book was called The Search for the Manchurian candidate. In it, Bulger learned about M.K. Ultra,

and he learned that he had been an unwitting part of it. The study at the Atlanta Penitentiary was cited in the book as one directly funded and sanctioned by the CIA. Bulger had been lied to. He had been forced, with the unkept promise of reduced sentences and powerful emotional appeals, to give his sanity to the whims of corruption and status desire for mind control. He later received a brain scan that revealed incontrovertible proof of lasting damage and scarring as a direct result of these experiments.

Whitey Bulger, unlike his accomplices who cut deals left and right once they finally got caught, was not allowed to cut any deals himself. He was tried to the full extent of the law for his crimes. That is all well and good, to be sure. And yet, one can't help but wonder if things could have been different for Bulger, if, say, he hadn't been administered CIA-sanctioned brain damage at such a young age. That is crazy. And what's crazy about it is that, like you said off the story this way, I thought was perfect, that in James Earl Ray, we have an example of a guy who was like a perfect Patsy in that he wasn't that smart.

He was just smart enough to be able to do what they needed him to. He was very controllable. They got him early through the military service with the OSS, that nascent CIA. But what we see with this whitey guy is what happens more when you take a, higher intellect who's already given to sociopathic and even, I think, maybe schizophrenic and some higher and deeper evils. Yeah. What kind of stuff can result?

Some of it, I'm sure, controlled, but also some of it just not even in the control of the CIA or of the government, but just evil. Yeah, they don't know what's going to be the outcome of these things. Like everyone, they're learning along with everybody else. Now they're privy to more of the methodology that works and stuff like that, but they have no clue the Pandora's box that they're opening. One of the things that really stuck out to me in that story, apart from the obvious, like, the question of what could have happened if James Bolger had not been brainwashed by the CIA? Would his crime reign been less severe? Because he was a horrible man, like absolutely a horrible beast of a human.

but was some of that kind of emphasized by the drugs that he was administered in the brainwashing therapy that he underwent? So that's like a whole thing. I think it's worth exploring, but as Aslan says, you know, no one has told what might have happened or what could have happened. But one of the things that goes overlooked is these two guys, they're two prisoners, they're in a study whose stated goal is to find a cure for schizophrenia. That's why they're there. and they end up seeming schizophrenic, like where after a couple sessions, maybe it was just one session,

they have to be pried out from under their beds to go back to the test chambers. Like they will not go. They're pried out. They're forced in. They're going insane. They're foaming at the mouth. They're barking.

And they end up being put in padded cells down the hall and no one ever sees them again. Maybe they go to the second floor and get a lobotomy or something like that. And it does make you wonder again about this connection between, hypnosis, sort of drugs, and then also demonic possession. I think that there's a thread that, you know,

maybe a better mind or maybe if we just had more time to speak on it, could link stuff from our season two, episode 10 on DMT and the Cheen elf type phenomenon. And then, you know, government hypnosis, MK Ultra, drugs, brainwashing, all that. And this idea of, that's the statist version of demonic possession. and then also linking that with like schizophrenia. A lot of people see, like, I think that there's a mistake, by the way.

A lot of people see schizophrenia and they're like, that's demonic possession. No, I don't think it's always... Just period in every case. Yeah, and I think that's ridiculous. I think that maybe sometimes it could be, but I certainly don't think it's just everyone that has schizophrenia is demonically possessed. That seems brutally deterministic and totally unfounded in scripture. But it is alarming how the symptoms often overlap.

Yeah. Like you have these schizophrenia. schizophrenic guys that were clearly in communion with demonic activity, if not demonic entities, with MK Ultra. And they suddenly start acting like, you know, Legion before he gets exercised. Like they're breaking chains. They're super strong. They're absolutely going crazy. And it takes many men to restrain them. I don't know. I think there's a connection there. And maybe sometime we'll explore it more. And I think it's important to note two season two episode 10 with ayahuasca and and hallucinogenic drugs and mushrooms and all of that, is that. So in that episode, I think we showed

pretty clear in Lewis Ungett's book is really good on this, that there's a connection and openness that happens, a portal of the soul that's opening up through these things that is genuinely connecting people to spiritual realities and not just physical processes in the brain. Now, the point it's important to see is that when the government starts meddling in these same sorts of things, they might not be trying to do the same thing that the Aztec priest or that the hippie going to the jungles to drink the ayahuasca brew is trying. They're really trying to contact spiritual realities. The CIA, the government, whether they're trying to or not, when they open people up this way, when they treat them in this way, I think the effect is still there, where these

things have the ability to open or put people under the influence of demonic powers or open them to these demonic powers or give them some sort of communion with them, such that there's going to be overlap between the two things that's at least important to note. Yeah, again, like, they're not waiting for your consent. There's a difference between being a witch. You're not going to accidentally become a witch. Yeah, right. And being, like, flippantly using a tool of the enemy to try to achieve your own ends,

and then being suddenly shocked when the enemy shows up. Like you've summoned Tash to Tash you will go. Here he is. You know, like I think that that's totally legit. Like, they're not waiting for your consent or your full faith in some supernatural thing

in order for them to be active. So I think that all of that is really worth thinking about. And I'll just kind of leave us with something as we go into the final story of the show unless you have anything else to... That's great. So James Bollger, this question that we posed, is like, what would have happened?

And I do think it's a question worth asking, but almost more fascinating than that is he didn't find out that he had been a part of MK. Ultra until decades after it had actually happened. And that really begs the question. Keeping in mind what we learned last episode, that they were doing these tests on random citizens in the street. Everything from that up to, you know,

institutionalized sex criminals or poor children who had special needs and they were in institutions. They did not care who they were doing it to. Right. And so the fact that it took Bulger so long to figure this out, and it actually was just by happenstance, he happened to pick up the book that mentioned it, it makes you wonder if there could be other victims of MK Ultra

who are lurking in our midst and who at an accidental tip of the hat could be triggered into doing something insane. It doesn't sound as crazy. as it would have before looking at all this stuff. Yeah. Before looking at all the stuff, I would have been like, yeah, that's kind of out there.

But the thing is, we say this a lot. It's not the stuff that we speculate about that scares me, where we make a distinction and say, we don't know this for sure, but maybe this could be. It's the things we know for sure. Right. When you say, we know they do this.

Yeah. We know they did this. Like they've admitted it. If they're going to admit this, what else have they done that they won't do? What are they hiding? Yeah. And so this last story is a speculative story.

We don't know if this is connected to MK.K. Ultra. But the signs are there that make you scratch your head and wonder, could it be? Yeah. We'll end this episode in much the same way as we ended the previous. By reflecting on the absurd notion that a corrupt U.S. government and military industrial complex would just up and stop all MK. Ultra and MK.K. ultra adjacent projects. The historical accounts seem quite clear. They had some level of success in what they sought to do.

Now, why would a government which, at its core, sees itself as God, give up the tool of control and manipulation so long sought under Sidney Gottlieb and other CIA officials? After all, the benefit of an amnesiac assassin or Patsy is nearly incalculable to such an entity. Someone to do the dirty work. Someone who is nothing and nobody in whom nobody will miss. surely the statist God can sacrifice such one on the altar of its own ends and not be considered evil, right? Surely the people can see that all of it is for the greater good, right? Death, like life, is a thing which rightly belongs in the hands of the living God.

He gives and he takes away. When his civil minister on the earth, the civil government, steps out of their boundaries and tries to order life and death by their own whims, evils follow of the most chaotic type. This is to say nothing about the government properly bearing the sword in order to punish evil. Of course, it must and should do that. It is good for a killer to lose his life in a just manner. But it is not good for supposed or predicted troublemakers to be at risk of death every day at the hand of an overreaching state that believes it ought to control everything, even outcomes.

But for now, that does describe the world in which we live. A network of Western nations given over to apostasy and yearning to find a God to worship and serve. In their yearning, these nations have settled on their chosen God, their own selves. And so they do the bidding of the state with blind faith and certainty, never thinking twice about their actions. After all, they're serving their God. How could their God lead them astray? It should therefore not surprise us when people view national events or national tragedies with a skeptical eye. They say that the difference between conspiracy theory and accepted history is only a matter of years. But with each passing year, the time gap seems to reduce. What has happened

at the deep state's bidding? Where have we been duped? Have we been duped at all? Well, perhaps not. And I do mean that. Perhaps there is no grand status deception at play when tragedy strikes or when plague sweeps the nation. I certainly hope not. I hope all the data that points to conspiracy is all just coincidence, just an honest mistake. But I just doubt it. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Apostasy rejects the light and embraces the dark. We live in an apostate nation, an apostate Western world at large, one that was built on the bedrock of Christian faithfulness and fruitfulness, but one which has forsaken the worship of the creator in favor of the creature. We ought not be shocked when dark things act in dark ways.

Don't be surprised when groups in the shadow draw more into their orbit. Don't scoff at the idea that a culture which hates God with vitriolic hatred might actually display that hatred of God in tangible ways. Near All Hallows Eve in the year 2023, a mother took her children to a popular playground in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park was a constant haunt of young families looking to give their children room to run and jump and climb and wrestle away from the guardrails, the furnished homes and the like. This October 28th afternoon was no different from other days either. The crisp fall air guaranteed an influx of people,

which further guaranteed hours of activity between parents and children, vitality in the lifeblood of civilization. But today would not be remembered for those good things. The aforementioned mother arrived at the park only to find the flashing lights of blue and white painting the air. Red and white-striped cars surrounded by paramedics and officers, some standing and talking, some walking here and there with crime scene tape,

and some running back and forth. The children watched from their car and booster seats while their mother shifted into park and climbed out to ask what had happened. The muffled noise of shouting and crying left the children confused. Dark clouds grew up through and over the sky, casting a shade onto the windshield

and dimming the sun's light which had just surrounded them. They watched their mom reel back in horror with her mouth covered. She briskly walked back to the driver door. She unbuckled her seatbelt without a word and turned to navigate the car in reverse back the way they had all come. When asked by the eldest why they couldn't say,

she just said that the park was closed. The reality was far more bleak. Earlier that day, as park employees did the rounds, opening everything up and checking that no vandalism had occurred on the previous night, a pair of them went to open and check the bathrooms. It had been cleaned as usual and stood ready for the day. The lights flicked on without pause

and the door was unlocked for customers of the private park. But on the way to the women's bathroom, the pair noticed something odd. The door was just ever so slightly ajar. Usually this didn't matter much. The teenagers on the night crews were about as reliable as the teenagers on the morning crew, which is to say that sometimes they did let a few things slip.

But the employees would later say that an undeniable sense of foreboding fell over both of them when they saw that narrow line of pitch black that peered out from the cracked door. They opened it slowly, and with their phone lights on, to illuminate anything that might be hiding just behind the door. But there was nothing there. They reached out to quickly hit the light switch.

It flickered on, and as usual, and to their relief, there were no sounds of shocked vagrants shuffling to get their things and make a break for it. In fact, there was no sound of any movement from inside at all. They breathed the sigh of relief, certain that it must have just been an oversight from the closers of the previous night. They thus entered the bathroom, relaxed, to check on the stock of soap and toilet paper. But what they saw instead made their stomachs lurch with illness. A young man, just 20 years old, was wearing combat gear and a plate carrier as well as a military-style helmet.

He had an assault rifle strapped over his shoulder and a sidearm strapped to his thigh. His vest was loaded with full magazines for each weapon. Around him were more magazines filled with yet more ammunition. Between the mags strewn about the floor were plastic explosives, seemingly in a state of half-finished assembly with detonators and chaotic wiring. The young man was dead. His body slouched and propped up between the toilet and the stall wall. His cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. His name was later discovered to be Diego Barajas Medina. He had no previous record with law enforcement. He was a high school graduate living and working part-time in the area, and former classmates described him as

a loner. Nobody could discover any motive for why he had set himself up to do these things, or why he had taken his own life in the end. But Medina did leave one thing behind, one strange clue to guide the investigators. On the bathroom wall, directly across from where his body lay, a message was scrawled in black marker. The phrase, printed in massive and clear letters, was set in a pair of quotations.

It said, I'm not a killer. I just wanted to get in the cave. What could that mean? Well, maybe nothing. maybe far more than any of us are comfortable admitting. After all, in a world filled with mass government corruption and a discourse on firearms and mass shootings,

growing more politically charged by the day, maybe it's not crazy to wonder if Medina had received any sort of push from outside. And so, faithful listeners, let us leave you with the final word. Do not despair. Does history not tell us this lesson over and over again, that God loves to reveal his marvelous light in moments of great, great and deep darkness? How else will we stubborn and so often hard-hearted people appreciate the light if we aren't reminded every now and then of the real darkness it saves us from the midst of?

Christ is on his throne. He's judging the nations with a rod of iron. His enemies are being made a footstool for his feet. He laughs at the schemes of the wicked. He holds them and their little plans in derision. Lift up your head and hear the good news. All they can ever do is threaten you with death. But that threat is empty. Our king has already shown us the way out of the grave. Follow him and be of good cheer. The shadow and lead weight of sins inflicting sorrow will someday pass like winter into spring. The end of time will be to the sound of wedding bells, and we will finally walk with new life on a world that reflects the truth already present in our souls, that of wrath ended and woes mended, of winter passed and guilt forgiven. Wait for the Lord and keep his way.

and he will exalt you to inherit the land. You will look on when the wicked are cut off. I have seen a wicked, ruthless man spreading himself like a green laurel tree, but he passed away and behold he was no more, though I sought him he could not be found. Mark the blameless and behold the upright, for there is a future for the man of peace, but transgressors shall be altogether destroyed.

The future of the wicked shall be cut off. Psalm 37, 34 to 38. Amen and amen. Want more Haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content, in regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself.

So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.