WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp - The Godfather Of Conspiracy - John Lear
Episode Date: August 28, 2023When aviator John Lear died in 2022, he left behind a colorful legacy filled with wild claims about hostile aliens, secret bases, global conspiracies, and government cabals. Lear was more than famili...ar with the dark secrets and shady dealings of the Black World. He grew up in that environment. As the son of aviation legend Bill Lear, John piloted just about every aircraft of his day, mingled with high-ranking defense officials and aerospace bigshots, flew secret cargo missions for the CIA, and learned first-hand about excessive secrecy and disinformation. Lear became obsessed with the UFO mystery and in the 1980s, emerged as a harsh critic of what he described as a massive coverup operation. As he grew older, Lear's claims became more grandiose. Some of his allegations were far fetched. However, a few turned out to be true. For both George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, Lear played a pivotal role in their own interest in UFO matters. In this episode, learn about Lear's colorful life, grandiose claims, and his lasting impact on the subject. Learn more at https://ExtraordinaryBeliefs.com/immaculate-deception ••• GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at WeaponizedPodcast@Proton.me For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media. Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at https://WeaponizedPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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I'm John Lear. Today is my birthday. I'm 71 years old.
And everything you think you know is an immaculate deception.
Flying saucers, flying discs that are out there of extraterrestrial origin.
John Lear, son of the famed aviation pioneer and a world-class pilot in his own right.
As many of you may know, though, Lear the Sun is best known for his research into UFOs.
A phenomenon described by some as a worldwide hoax, described by others as the
most important issue of our time.
I was approached by a government theoretical physicists employed by the government who works
on the saucers up at Grum Lake. He has seen the aliens. He is tired of the cover up.
The problem is not only just the fact that there are five to do, five and as many as ten
different civilizations visiting us. Apparently, and this is from the research that I've
done, at least 90% of them are hostile.
Spending time with him, I just wanted to get to know him and try to suss out.
What is true? What is not true? Really, is any of this Bob Lazarque madness? Is any of that true?
That's something I wanted to know.
All I can tell you is that when you find out the truth, a month from now, a year from now, two years from now,
you'll look back and they'll say, my God, the son of a gun was right.
Secrets, cover-ups, and strange phenomena.
UFOs and ideas that challenge reality itself.
All these mysteries, all this time.
Are we ever going to get to the bottom of these?
My name is George Knapp.
I dig into news stories that others can't or won't.
I'm Jeremy Corbell, and for some reason, people tell me things they probably shouldn't.
And this is weaponized.
Here we are weaponized, and today we're going to do a little exercise in time travel of sorts.
We're going to go back through the midst of time to explain the evolution of a guy who became a major figure in euphology
and who was, in essence, the gateway drug for both you and I into UFO world, John Lear.
Yeah, man, I am so excited to do this episode because I spent so many years filming with him,
a movie that never came out.
People are so curious about this.
So John Lear, the godfather of conspiracy, he loved hearing that.
You love that title.
You bequeathed that to him, right?
Yeah, one time we were doing a talk, and I just said, and he started cracking up with a laugh
that only John Lear has.
I don't know if people know who he is though.
So we have to kind of tell people explain who he is,
who is John Lear.
So it's possible to cover him, mention him,
explain his history without necessarily endorsing
everything or anything that he said.
One of the most iconic images of John Lear
that really to me describes his personality
is there he is, kicking back on the floor by a couch,
and he's reading a playboy, but it's upside down.
Remember, Lazar gave that photo to us, I think, to be released after John's passing.
Yeah.
So John Lear had so many, I mean, I didn't give him the term Godfather of conspiracy for nothing.
He was this ominous figure in this world of UFOs.
And some of the stuff he said was just sound absolute lunatic style, right?
However, there were things that he said that ended up being true.
So it was just kind of this guy you got to take in both hands, right and left hand,
and try to figure out the truth about John Lear.
Well, people view him with considerable skepticism today, and that is appropriate because
some of the things he said are completely outrageous.
And as we learned over the years, sometimes he would make claims that seem to be designed
to provoke a reaction as opposed to making a cogent argument.
Yeah, sometimes I think he would tell me stuff just to see if I would buy it, you know,
and how far he could take it.
So it was really, you know, with him, it was really sifting, you know, what is true.
It's like mining for gold, man.
You know, you're trying to figure out what is true, what is not true.
And maybe he was doing the same in his life.
Well, I've told the story before on Weaponized and in other interviews, how he came into my world, is that in 1987, he walked into the TV station with a stack of UFO documents and dropped them on the desk of my managing editor, my mentor, Ned Day.
And he said, Ned, this is the biggest story in history.
You've got to take a look at this.
It's about the UFO cover up.
Read this.
It'll be the biggest story in your life.
and Ned looked at the documents, read a couple of pages.
A lot of them were UFO documents squeezed out of the government through FOIA.
He pushes the pile back across the desk and says, this can't be true.
If it was, I'd already know about it.
And I was eavesdropping, as I've said before.
I said, hey, John Lear, let me take a look at this stuff.
And that was my entry point to the UFO topic.
John had credibility with KLAS, with my boss, Bob Stodall, and with Ned Day,
because who he was and what he had done before.
his father, Bill Lear, had developed the Lear Jet, the eight-track tape. He was a brilliant man and
industrialist who was incredibly well-connected in military industrial circles, had researched
anti-gravity technology for a lot of years. Yes. And John himself was an incredibly talented
pilot. If you, you know, we both walked around into his study in his home before he passed
away a year or so ago, and the photos on the walls are incredible. What an amazing life he had.
He flew basically everything. As a young man, there's a photo of him recovering from a crash.
He just about died flying a plane that he probably should not have been behind the wheel of at age 17,
something like that? Yeah, I think it was, yeah, maybe 16 years old, 17, and he has a photo of
that plane crash, and he broke almost every bone in his body. That was his first out-of-body
experience. He crashes his plane and miraculously, in John Lear fashion, survives, you know,
but every bone in his body was basically broken. I think he wanted to carve out his own path
separate from his famous father. So he became an aviator and he flew everything. He eventually
was flying planes for the CIA during the Vietnam era. I think he continued to fly secret missions
for various government entities for years, which of course made UFO people suspicious of his ultimate
motives, but in the mid to late 80s, he developed what's known as the Lear hypothesis.
He got into the UFO subject and started digging in.
He used all of his military contacts and developed a pretty outrageous hypothesis.
And I remember putting him on the air after I got that stack of documents where he had been
in the TV station, putting him on the air in a program called On the Record and just let him go.
And I look back at those clips thinking, I can see the wheels turn in him.
my head, what the hell have I done here? As Lear spews out this incredible conspiracy theory,
we could take a little piece of it and give us our audience a sense of what he was saying.
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Flying saucers, extraterrestrials, monsters from outer space, the government has been telling us for years
that they're not real. They're weather balloons or swamp gas or reflections from the sun or
the ravings of lunatics. But serious UFO researchers say a breakthrough may be very close.
You're a pilot, an airline pilot, captain. You have held 17 different world speed records at
one time or another. You're a member of the famous Lear family that all Nevadans are pretty
much familiar with, a former state senate candidate. You don't sound like the kind of guy
who would get hooked up in something that a lot of people would say is a bunch of nonsense.
No, it's just by coincidence that I got really interested this about two years ago.
My father saw a UFO and my brother did.
And they were very interested, but there was really no proof as far as I was concerned to really look into it until about two years ago.
Your father and brother saw them.
Can you give details?
My brother saw one.
He was flying a P-38 from Phoenix to Los Angeles at night.
It just appeared in front of him.
He made two turns, 90-degree turns.
it stayed in front of him and then disappeared.
And my father was flying at night, I believe, over the Arizona desert and saw one too.
So you started, you got an interest because of the other members of your family.
How did you start out?
I had an interest, but there was really nothing I could put my finger on.
And like I say, two years ago, a friend of mine came through town.
We had flown in Southeast Asia together, and he was retiring from the Air Force.
He came over, and we started talking about where he had been for the last 15 years.
and he mentioned that he had been stationed at Bentwaters.
And I said, oh, Bentwaters, that's where the flying saucers supposedly was in 1980.
He said, no, John, not supposedly, it was.
He said, I don't care if you believe me or not.
It landed.
I didn't see it because we were confined to quarters, but I know people who did,
and I'll give you the names.
And if you ever see them, tell them you know me, and they'll tell you the whole story.
Since then, I ran into one of the security police who was within 10 feet of the saucer
and actually saw the three aliens get out and go up to General Gordon Williams, who was the wing commander at that time.
Now, there was quite a bit of documentation regarding this Bent Warner incident.
Why don't you go into that a little bit?
There's the Colonel Halt memo that came out under the Freedom of Information Act,
and it told about the mysterious lights and beaming down and everything that happened in the forest,
except the actual aid landings.
That wasn't in the memo.
And there was also the tape, Colonel Halt,
forest tape, that he made over a period of eight hours.
And there's a 20-minute segment that we've been able to get a hold of
that you can hear him running through the forest
and being worried saying the thing's after us.
The Air Force has made an art form of ridiculing people
who have talked about this thing.
They've done an excellent job of covering it up for the last 40 years.
George, basically what we're dealing with here is,
I'll give you the bottom line.
Okay.
I want to hear your thesis.
I'm not trying to sell a book.
I'm not trying to promote a lecture.
This is based on what I've come across after intense research in the last year.
And I have found out that the government has retrieved between 10 and 15 factual flying saucers,
three of which have been in perfect condition, one of which they tried to fly.
They have between 30 and 50 alien bodies in cryogenic storage.
We even have the name of the person whose job it is to show these bodies to the heads of state and the people who are authorized to see them.
They represent at least five different civilizations.
There's at least 9,000 cattle mutilations.
Now, the government said that the mutilations were normal.
Your desert predator did these.
But they weren't.
The mutilations, they cut.
I think we have a picture of these somewhere.
Maybe we can see that as you're talking.
Well, that's the next picture.
There we are.
This is the mutilation.
New Mexico State Police did the research or the investigation on it, and they cut out
certain parts with a, and the cut was made with a laser beam far sharper than anything
we have.
As a matter of fact, they were able to determine that they cut between the cells and didn't
cut the cells themselves.
We presently don't have this kind of technology.
Well, if we don't know that we have this kind of technology, or you know that we have this kind
technology or you and I don't know that we don't, but that doesn't prove necessarily that it's
E.T.
No, except that there's usually a visual sighting of a flying saucer or a light, strange
light at each one of these sightings.
Now the picture that we have of the big head that the Air Force describes, this picture
was drawn by an Army surgeon.
These are one of the bodies that was recovered in the famous Roswell incident of 1947.
us about that?
It was the first flying saucer that crashed and was recovered by the Army.
It was covered up.
There has been several books about it.
They recovered four beams.
And one of the surgeons that was responsible for the autopsy drew that picture and came up with
some of these interesting things in the autopsy.
I'll just read a couple three and a half to four and a half feet tall, two round-office.
round eyes without pupils, no earlobes, nose is vague, neck described as being thin, arms
is described long and thin reaching down to the knee section.
You can see that there's a web portion in the hands, no teeth, no apparent reproductive organs,
brain is capacity unknown, colorless liquid prevalent in the body without red cells, no lymphocytes.
And there's more in that particular report.
This is an autopsy report.
And you said the government goes to great lengths, the Air Force in particular, to
to discredit this kind of stuff.
Where did this come from?
How did you get this?
That came from the private collection of Leonard Stringfield,
who was one of the premier researchers.
He worked for the Air Force in the early 50s
in a secret project reporting UFOs.
Then as a civilian, he continued his private research,
and this is out of his collection.
Why does the government want to hide this?
Why doesn't the Air Force just come forward?
Why don't they level with us, if this is all true?
Well, there's not really much they could say based on what I've been able to find out.
George, they're really, you know, what could they say about it?
They've been researching it for many, many years, and based on my information, let's say that the president decided to make an announcement.
This is, if he made it today, this is what I think that he would say.
My fellow Americans, I come to you before you tonight with an announcement of great importance.
Despite all our denials, flying saucers do in fact exist.
Where are they come from, we do not know.
Who is in them, we do not know.
Where they are from, we do not know.
Nor do we know how they got here or what they want.
We are unable to duplicate any of the metals found on the several craft we have recovered,
nor are we able to figure out how they are propelled.
We have hidden these facts from you over the past 40 years in hopes that we could give you more answers.
Unfortunately, we are no closer to answers today than we were 40 years ago.
God bless you all.
In other words, you find it highly unlikely that the president would ever make a statement, anything like that.
No, it's just, it's too big.
The problem is not only just the fact that there are five to do,
five and as many as 10 different civilizations visiting us.
Apparently, and this is from the research that I've done, at least,
least 90% of them are hostile. And when I say hostile, if not hostile, they have a completely
different set of morals than we do. You think 90% of these visitors are hostile. What makes
you think that? Well, it doesn't fit with what we think of as E.T. You know? If you'll read
several of these books that are on the newsstands, one is called intruders, one is called
communion. They apparently come down. And when I say,
apparently this is taken from 300 hypnosis cases.
A friend of mine has done 140 of them.
And the people are abducted.
They're taken up into a saucer.
Usually lasts about an hour.
They do all kinds of experiments.
They give them shots.
They poke them.
They cut them.
They do all kinds of things.
Then wipe out their memory and send them back.
Only after several months of some psychological problems,
do they end up?
up going to a psychiatrist. And the psychiatrist on trying to find out what the problem
is, and the use of hypnosis finds out that this person has been abducted.
What's the reason for that? What are they trying to learn?
There's three things that they're trying to do with these abductions. The first thing
is they're trying to monitor us. It started in the early 40s, and they'd put a little unit,
very small, BB-type object way up in the back side of the brain, and they'd leave it there
for about 18 years. They'd pick them up and put it in about four years old. About 12 years old,
they would pick them up and monitor it. Then about 18, they'd take it out. The second thing they
did is they put a post-hypnotic suggestion. According to many of the people that have
been hypnotized and we found out what they've told them, apparently within the next two to five
years there is going to be a big event. Something enormous is going to happen. And these
people have been abducted and there's probably over 100,000 of them have been given some place
to go and something to do. But under our best hypnotic techniques, we cannot find out what it is.
So how do we know that that's true? Because they said they're going to do something.
They know that they're going to do something, but under the hypnosis, they can't find out exactly
what it is. And the third thing that they do is,
experiments. They've been crossbreeding. There's a very good book out now called
Intruders, written by Bud Hopkins, and it's about a cross-breeding experiment with a girl
in Indianapolis. And they actually, the big head, what we call the big head in research,
a little three and a half foot tall with a big head, they crossbreed that with this girl in
Indianapolis, and there were seven children. And just last fall, before the book was published,
brought the oldest and the youngest to show to her, and they let her name all seven.
Now, this book has been thoroughly researched by Bunn Hopkins, and although it sounds strange,
believe me when I tell you, you may not find out in a month, a year, five years or ten years,
but you'll look back at what I'm telling you now, and you'll say to yourself, my gosh,
the son of a gun was right.
Well, where's this girl now?
She's just living on a farm.
She was in Indianapolis?
She got, no, she lives in town.
or just outside of town. She just got married. Bud went to her wedding. We all know who she is. She gets along, you know, just fine. It doesn't mean, just because she was adopted and gave him children doesn't mean it was the end of the world. It was just a part of her life.
Why don't we see a lot of photographic evidence as many cameras and video gear? Why don't we see a lot of that?
There are a lot of it. Before you go on, I know the pictures that we showed in the beginning of this program, you say they're baloney, they're phonies.
That's right. The picture.
as you showed at the beginning, we're the, called the Myers incident. It's called the visitor,
the visitors from Pleiades. And any eophologist worth of salt knows, and who has researched that
case, knows that he cannot back it up with the negatives and the essential information to prove
this, that something like that happened. So we look at that as suspect. So in other words,
you run into your share of phonies as well in your research. Absolutely. There's
Not that many, but there are a few out there.
There's so many people that have real stories to tell
that we're just so busy with those.
The main Air Force sightings were in 1975,
and the UFOs descended on
every strategic air command base guarding the perimeter
of the northern United States.
And they hovered over the nuclear weapon storage area,
and they stayed there with impunity
for up to two and three hours over a period of three days.
a period of three days.
And nobody heard about it.
Well, there was a few reports, but you really don't.
I have a report 150 pages long of the F-106s that were sent out to chase them and the
helicopters and notifying the Canadian authorities and the security patrolmen that were sent
down to actually see what was going on and they'd come up on these things and they'd say,
I'm not going any further.
You think maybe it's a top secret area if the Air Force
actually does have them. Maybe they got him here.
I'm certainly they do. Up at the test site, there's a report that of the three that they got
in perfectly good condition, at least one is up at the test side and has flown, and one was
being flown as of 1981. By us? By us, yeah.
Yeah, so man, that clip of you interviewing Lear, and he just starts talking about UFOs and going
through that, that went far and wide. This little show you had, people went bonkers over it.
Like, is any of this true? I want to come back, though, a little bit to kind of the type of person,
John was, so people kind of understand. So over all those years I filmed with him, seven years in
total, from, you know, first clip to the last time he let me film him. One of the things that you
notice, like you go through his house, he had a picture where he summited the Matterhorn. He was the
youngest person in history ever to do this. It's like he had something to prove his dad was so famous.
His dad also started a little company you might have heard of. It ended up being called Motraola,
right? So kind of like big shoes to fill, but his dad never liked the fact that he was a pilot.
He goes, oh, you want to be a bus driver, you know? So he really had this contention,
this contentious relationship with his dad. I mean, at one point, he was telling me a story.
He was around all these people at Lear Jet, and his dad knocked him out.
His dad punched him and knocked him out.
I'm sorry, I probably messed that up.
It was somebody else in front of his dad, but it was like he just got a smirk from his dad.
So they had this contentious relationship to the point where when they got to like the Will,
the Lear family Will, John read me, the Will.
And every line after so-and-so gets this, John Lear gets nothing.
John, except for John Lear, over and over and over.
He was like the black sheep?
Yeah, he was the black sheep, man.
Yeah.
There's a lot of other family politics and history that we probably don't need to go into
that made his relationship with his mom and his dad pretty complicated that you learned about.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, I think the point of this is that he was always this kind of black sheep, this outsider.
It seemed like to me from what he explained, I think at the end, he got a can of dog food
was what was left to him.
I mean, that's a message.
So he had a lot to kind of prove in his life.
And boy, did he do it.
How many records did he get?
I mean, he got so many aviation records.
He got so many.
He had every FAA certification on the books.
The guy went for piloting and just took it over.
People would come into that house.
That was really crazy.
One of the first weekends I was with him, he's like,
they're doing something at the base for you, Jeremy.
I'm like, well, what do you mean?
They're doing something at the base.
Next thing I know, his house gets buzzed by a fighter plane.
they come, boom, and the windows start rattling.
I mean, so he had connections.
I mean, the guy called the basis that buzzed my house.
I want to impress this kid, you know.
It was pretty funny.
He was a dramatic guy, man.
I know that his entry point to the UFO topic was because of secret airplanes.
He was part of a small group of aviation watchers, along with Jim Goodall, and they would go
out in the desert to see what mysterious planes were flying around.
They would be outside of Area 51.
He took these incredible photos that we have.
made public before that I first put on the air in 1989,
but no one is ever going to get that close to Groom Lake again
to take those kind of shots.
That was incredible.
So it was in 1976 or 1977,
and they basically went to the gates of Air 51,
but there weren't gates at the time.
Their security was a chain link.
So in this photo that you published back in the day,
you can see this chain link.
So this is the way John told the story,
and I think it's important.
Because again, these are the best photos, a ground level of Area 51 the world has ever seen.
They were taken in 1976 or 1977, and here's what happened.
So he rolls up, he's kicking back on a cooler, drinking a beer, and he takes out his camera,
and he photographs a panorama of Area 51.
Snap, snap, snap, snap.
And then all of a sudden, he sees, you know, you can see out there in the desert when a car is coming,
you see this big plume of dirt coming.
He sees them coming.
And he goes, oh, fuck, I know they're going to take this footage.
So he was smart.
What did he do?
He put the footage and he rolled it up and he put it down into his ashtray, under his
ass tray, filled the camera back up, took an identical set of photos.
And when the security got up to him, they said, oh, we know what you're doing.
You got to give us the film.
And he goes, in the camera?
And they go, yeah, in the camera.
So he pops it out and gives it to him like as if the world would never see it.
But he got the imagery.
And he actually gave me a signed picture of Area 51.
and it says, it's groom like you moron.
Let's go Wednesday.
And we did.
It was his last trip out to Area 51.
He wanted his grandson, Damien, to see, you know, the black mailbox, the Rachel
Inn.
And, you know, we were going to go up to the gates.
That's a whole other story.
Why we didn't.
We got shaken down by Office of Naval Intelligence inside of the alien.
But anyway, we should tell the story.
But anyway, at that point, we have the best.
Images of Area 51 ever from John Lear.
Well, I mean, he did some great things.
The reason he got into KLAS in the first place and was able to talk to Ned and was able to have a conversation that I overheard is because he had credibility with us.
He and Jim Goodall would go out and sit in the desert near Groom Lake, near Tonapal test range to see what secret airplanes were flying around.
They are the ones who first saw this plane that was supposedly invisible to radar that turned out to be the F-117.
They gave that information to Ned and Bob Stoddall, and we broke that story.
It was the first reporting about what became the stealth fighter in the world.
Jim Goodall had talked about some of the adventures they had and how the security guys got used to seeing them outside the perimeter.
Yeah, they'd check his ID and they'd see this John Lear.
He was a known entity.
Oh, there's John Lear again, Area 51.
They're aware of John Lear at Area 51.
And again, that was in the 70s.
That's pretty crazy.
There's a clip that Jim Goodall gave.
us in an interview we'll play that now I was 18 years old the first time I saw
black people get goosebumps just thinking about it I was at 315 in the afternoon
of March 10th and I have 1964 I have never been the same it's love at first sight
yes Jim Goodalls got it bad he was smitten more than half a century ago and
this his 24th book is essentially a love letter written to a machine this is a
Buck Rogers Airplane that was developed in the 1950s and you look at it today.
If you knew nothing about the Blackbird and you saw one at Nellus or you saw one of their show,
I mean, you would be dumbfounded.
Goodall is well known in aviation circles.
For decades, he and his pals, including famed pilot John Lear, have proud the outskirts of once
obscure air bases, including Area 51 and Area 52, trying to catch a glimpse of the newest
and best technology under development. But nothing has ever come close. His book
chronicles how the engineers of Lockheed's legendary Skunkworks team developed the
three planes in the Blackbird family, the YF12, the A12, and the magnificent SR71. The first two
were both flown out of Groom Lake, aka Area 51. Included in the 710 photos in the book
are dozens which have never been published because of the secrecy surrounding the
the planes and the places they flew.
I've been collecting it for 50
stuff for 50 years.
I literally have interviewed everybody from
Kelly Johnson, Ben Rich, all the way through most of his
engineers or a lot of his engineers,
all the original test pilots, all the original
surviving Oxcart A12 pilots, and a lot of the
very early SR-71 pilots.
My ex-wives, I've had multiple of them, multiple them.
They said it's not a, it's not a, it's not a,
a hobby. It's not a passion. It's an obsession.
Skunkworks engineers had to design and build from scratch,
a spy plane that could cruise at 2,100 miles per hour,
up at 80 to 90,000 feet. They did it in a mere 32 months,
using slide rules instead of computers. The planes proved an invaluable
tool during the Cold War. Hostile adversaries tried to shoot them down,
but never did. Though Blackbird pilots knew the risks. Every time they'd
took off.
They built 50 blackbirds total.
And over that the 25, the 30 years that they were operational, they crashed 20 of them.
They crashed three blackbirds in 10 days in 1967.
Because it was a black program, the press and general public didn't know anything about it.
The SR 71 still holds many aviation records.
It flew from the west coast to the east coast in one hour and seven minutes.
that's in excess of 2,100 miles per hour.
There is likely a project flying around out there that could beat that record, but whatever
it is, it's still classified.
Jim Goodall managed to acquire NSR-71 himself, though.
Finagle might be a better word you can hear.
So it was while researching these secret planes and making contacts with people inside the military,
inside intelligence agencies that John Lear first got on the trail of UFOs.
And those documents that he had shared with KLS were enough to convince me to put him on the air.
and the response from the public, as I've said before, was outrageous.
It was totally unexpected that it touched the pulse of the public in a way that I did not understand.
So I started digging in.
And John was so instrumental and so helpful in guiding me through the strange world of uphology back in those days.
He had file after file documents, official documents and reports that, you know, I would never have been able to obtain on my own.
It was so helpful and really put me on the road to pursuing the paper trail, which is really,
really the slice of the topic that got me interested.
Didn't he run for political position?
Yeah, state senate.
He ran for state senate.
So he was a decorated pilot.
He'd worked for the CIA.
He had a great family name and had run for office.
So yeah, he was deemed a credible person in the eyes of the news media in those days.
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All those years hanging out with John sleeping on his dirty floor until they finally gave me a bedroom because I was there so much.
People would come from all around the world just to spend a moment with John.
And I didn't really understand why.
like, you know, people from Area 51, people from the stealth program, pilots, just to see the awards that he had, everything he'd done in his life.
So separate from UFOs, before any of that entered John Lear's life, he was this kind of legend in the aviation field, not just because of his father, not just because of Lear jet, but because of what he had achieved in aviation, which was so cool.
And then, you know, of course, along the lines, there were a lot of whistleblowers.
There are a lot of secrets.
There were a lot of people coming to him saying, I was in the room one time.
And someone was saying, I'm going to die soon.
I got like stage four cancer.
I'm going to die soon.
I just want you to know some things, John.
And they spilled the beans to what they had kind of witnessed or experienced out at the test site, out at Area 51.
So you imagine there's a guy sitting there hearing all these kind of deathbed confessions,
like right there at his epic desk with all of his monitors.
I mean, if you're talking about something that looks like conspiracy,
John Lear's layer, is what we used to call it,
just looked like the classic conspiracy theorist.
I mean, monitors after monitors, it was just such a wild environment.
He's such a kind of wild guy.
He became sort of like UFO Elvis in a sense.
People would make a pilgrimage to his home to tell him stories,
and John would absorb it all, but he didn't seem to have a filter.
I mean, you know, some of the stuff that he absorbed,
he spits right back out as if it's gospel.
And, you know, over the years,
as we knew him, the tales, the claims he would make became increasingly outrageous.
I remember, so the first time that I met Bob Lazard was it was not, you know, because I tried
to, I was just there filming at Johns. And John goes, Jeremy, Bob's coming over today. Get your cameras
ready. And I go, he talked like that. And I'm like, John, I think that's a little inappropriate.
I would like to, you know, hear from Bob. I'm going to put all the cameras away. And then we'll
talk, but what was so funny, Bob, let me turn the cameras on. That's how we got a little bit more
from Bob at that time. He was like, during that time that Bob was there with John, you could see
John was like provoking Bob, like there's a billion people living on the sun. I mean, he would
just say these crazy. 93 races, 93 different races, alien races living on the sun.
90-the- Alien races living on the sun. And there's Bob being like, holy shit, John, you can't
possibly believe this stuff. I mean, it was like John was trying to provoke Bob, you know.
That dynamic is pretty interesting. And I think the UFO public has a different understanding of
what it really was. People see Lear as the Spengali pulling the strings and controlling the
Lazar narrative, which is not exactly how it happened at all. I remember Lear had told me in late
1988 that he knew a guy who had just been hired out of Dary 51 and he expected to have more information
soon. And in May of May 15, 1989, we do this interview with the guy who eventually became Bob
Lazar, who was identified in that as Dennis, a suit on him. It had been arranged through Lear.
We'd called Lear. Hey, as your UFO guy from Area 51 is available to do an interview. And within an
hour and a half or so, we had it set up. It happened at Lear's house. We sent our live unit up there.
Lazar takes a seat. We black out his face in the live unit in front of Lear's house. And out comes
this story. People have asked the question, how in the world does Bob Lazar get a clearance or get
hired to work out at S4 near Area 51 if he knows John Lear? And that's a really interesting question.
I don't have the answer to. But Bob was asked about Lear at his initial interviews, as you recall.
Yeah, that's something that is really bizarre. So look, I understand the idea that people don't believe
Bob Lazare. Like, I totally get that. Like, if you don't, if you haven't lived it like you've lived it,
but you haven't been like in those rooms when the calls were being made and spent years doing that,
you could see this idea that John Lear, who's like a UFO guy, you know, manipulates the situation
to do this long con for what, like 35 plus years now. The thing is they can't coordinate when their,
you know, coffee pots, electric coffee pots are going to go off. Like if you really saw the situation,
there's no possible way that they could coordinate some kind of long con together.
They didn't always agree.
Everybody didn't always like each other in this little group of people that were experiencing
what you guys experienced with Bob.
So it's almost comical to me that Lear would be this mastermind of this modern-day UFO thing.
There have been a lot of things that have been misunderstood.
So, for example, let's talk about the krill paper.
I know this is really niche thing, but there was this paper that came out from O-M-Krill.
O-H-Krill.
Original hostage krill.
Original hostage krill.
And everybody still puts this out over the Internet, and they say, oh, look at this.
This is a description of what's going on with the aliens.
John Lear wrote that.
He admitted to writing that.
He said that was the best estimate, kind of of what is going on from his perspective.
But that was taken on the Internet as that gospel, some kind of leak.
And we know some people, some conspiracy people propagated that like Bill Cooper.
Bill Cooper.
So the second time, I interviewed Lear three times on this on the record program.
And each time I interviewed him, the response was even bigger.
The third time he came on, he brought this guy Bill Cooper with him, who was claimed to have
read certain UFO related documents while he was in the Navy.
He was going to go underground.
He was going to tell his story and disappear.
And of course, he didn't.
He became this huge UFO celebrity.
Suddenly, people are paying a hundred bucks ahead to have dinner with him.
He wrote a book called Beyond the Pale Horse.
Behold the Pale Horse, which a lot of people think should be titled, Behold a Pale of Hors shit, because it was so outrageous.
It is the most stolen book, I think, in America.
It's the most popular book in prisons in America.
And it's Bill Cooper's UFO conspiracy manifesto that became more outrageous.
He and Lear became sort of attached to the hip for a long time.
We'll talk about how that relationship dissolved over the years.
But they spoke together and they were on some interview program talking about O.H.
Crill, as you said, that Lear had made up.
And there's Bill Cooper saying, yeah, I read about this in the U.S. Navy.
I saw all these documents.
And Lear leans over to him and says, Bill, no, you didn't.
We made that up.
Don't you remember?
Oh, no, no, no.
It's completely real, which tells you a lot about Bill Cooper.
Yeah, yeah.
That was a funny story because I had read that.
book, you know, it's a total conspiracy book, but I had read it when I was a kid, just
checking it out. When John told me that story, that's when he said he knew Bill Cooper kind
of drank the Kool-Aid, that he's a liar, was that he was sitting there in that interview,
like you said, and just was like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? We wrote that.
So that created so much confusion in the UFO world and the conspiracy world. How bizarre.
It caused a big fallout between those two. I mean, it was part of the reason. And then
Cooper drank a lot in those days, I guess, and became increasingly erratic.
And there was a falling out between he and John.
I remember hearing a threat that Cooper had left on his answer machine.
It was pretty serious, scary.
Yeah, yeah.
They were not friends at the end of that relationship, you know.
But, you know, with Lear, things were never simple.
They were always complicated.
I remember that the first time that I went to Lear's house,
I might have told this before, but I was there just trying to learn about UFOs.
And, you know, no one was really accessible.
And after some time, Lear got back to me.
So I jumped on a plane.
I flew out there.
And it was like for two days, he let me film with him.
And the first question I asked, I think I have this on camera.
First question is, what is the best evidence you have for UFOs?
Can you show it to me right now?
It's like super naive.
I thought this was like such a simple thing.
Show me the best evidence.
And he just kind of like looked at me through the best.
barrel of his cigar at his computer, and he just didn't say a word. And it was like that for two days.
He didn't talk to me. He just kind of would look at me and clear. And I don't know if he was testing
me. Is this kid for real? Is he really want to know or what? Obviously, there's no one piece of
best evidence with UFOs. But then he opened up, started spilling the beans on his life story.
That's what intrigued me so much to, I wanted to make a film about him. I wanted to document his life.
And was that your entry point when you get to stay with him for a couple of days? You're saying,
I want to make a film about you.
Yeah, kind of.
I mean, again, I didn't know how to use the camera.
It's arguably, I still don't know how to use a camera.
But it was, my pitch was this, man.
I want to know the truth, not just about Bob Lazar, but what you know.
I just want to know the truth.
This is the nexus point to the whole UFO mythology or story.
So I just wanted to know.
So I said, look, I'm not a filmmaker.
Actually, his business manager pulled me aside, which would be his wife.
merrily, right? And was like, what are you trying to do here? And I'm like, I just want to film,
document. I'm not going to twist anything. I'm not going to try to make them look crazy. I just want
to document it, make a film. I haven't made a film yet, but I intend to one day. And I think this is a
great place to start. You stayed at his house. I remember that was sort of how you got into talking
to me. That was part of the reason why I answered the phone calls, your persistent phone calls,
is because you were working on something with Lear. And it's, you know, it's less
that a mile from where I live, you know, in his home, and you're there all the time,
and you're not just filming, you're fixing plumbing, you're fixing his computer, you're doing
whatever he needed, right?
Yeah, well, okay, so part of the cost to my admission into the UFO world was that, yeah,
I think he used me to, like, smuggle him cigars and bad food and like, yeah, and I did fix
a toilet once, but it was like, yeah, I mean, look, he was already older at that point,
Like during our years of filming, he actually flatlined at one point.
So he was not in great health.
Maybe he just wanted a friend, but he really was spilling the beans.
He let me sleep on his floor at first for a while.
Then, you know, finally they let me actually stay in bed.
But it was like just I wanted to invest myself.
I went out every weekend for years.
Every weekend.
Can you imagine being my wife, be like, where are you going again?
Hanging out with my old friend, John Lear, the conspiracy guy.
I mean, I had to be a little crazy to do that.
But, yeah, spending time with him.
I just wanted to get to know him and try to suss out.
What is true?
What is not true?
It's just a hologram that we're living in.
We're really limited as to time travel.
We can't do it.
We're in a hologram.
This is just a, any, a space where we're learning how to navigate our soul.
Really, is any of this Bob Lazarque madness?
Is any of that true?
That's something I wanted to know.
On a personal level, tell me about Bob is a friend to you.
Yeah, Bob Lazar is my best friend.
He lives in Michigan now, but he used to live across town.
I met him in 1988, and we got to be good friends.
When I first met him, he wouldn't hear of any talk about flying saucers.
He knew for a fact that they did not exist because he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories,
And he had a cue clearance.
And if there had been something like that,
he would have known about it.
I think people get confused about the sequence of events
and how it happened that Lear was manipulating the situation
or creating the scenario, which isn't how it happened at all.
I mean, we put them on those shows on the record.
Little did I know that two guys named Bob Lazare
and Gene Huff had paid attention to it.
And when the time came for Lazare to come forward,
he came to me because of those interviews with Lear.
He had, I guess, Gene Huff, who was a real estate appraiser, had gone to Lear's home to do an appraisal
and got into a conversation about UFOs.
And that eventually led to an introduction to Bob, who was not a UFO guy, did not believe it,
didn't believe any of it at that time.
Let's really explain that.
Because, again, it's like if I hadn't spent years every weekend filming with Lear and getting
to know you and meeting everybody and hearing and being in the room when calls were made,
I would be like everybody else.
I would have this like different layer of skepticism about if like Lazar is telling the truth.
What you just said is so important.
And everybody in this small group of people, Bob Lazar thought UFOs was bullshit.
He thought he actually one time to our buddy, Jim Goodall.
Jim Goodall.
They're driving away from Lear's house.
And Bob says something to the effect of man, I really feel bad for Lear.
from such a prominent family, you know, he's an accomplished guy. And Jim Goodall's like,
what do you mean you feel bad for him? And he goes, well, he believes all that UFO bullshit.
So for me, that was like to really get to know people that were involved at that time,
to me that was like, oh, wow, like Bob was completely thought the UFO thing was nonsense.
And there he is, you know, kind of becoming friends with John Lear, who's this crazy conspiracy
theorist in some people's eyes, including Bob's at the time, right?
But boy, did that change.
Well, we told that story, told Lazar's story.
November, 1989, it comes out.
It explodes.
The whole world beats a path to Area 51's door.
I think John Lear enjoyed the attention.
He enjoyed the idea that people thought he was responsible for the whole thing spilling out.
He did a lot of interviews.
His profile was raised.
People would make the pilgrimage to his house to get the real inside story.
And he dug it.
And as time went on, though, as you know, his stories became wilder and wilder.
I mean, the 93 different alien races living on the sun.
That was a pretty good one.
The secret tunnel from the Luxor Hotel to Area 51 and all through the southwest, that was another one.
The secret base near Wendover, he said one of the last interviews I did with them.
There's a secret base out there, and when you approach it, fly in at night, it opens up like a zipper,
and then you land, and then they zip it back up and it disappears again.
I'd see people come in and tell John's stories, right?
And like you said, he kind of had no filter at that point.
I guess once you've seen or experienced the extraordinary, maybe you just get rid of that filter.
But I think you're right.
There was a point with John Lear where, to me, it appeared like he just didn't have a filter for the conspiracy.
He was like, well, if that's true, everything else is true.
I don't know.
So he believed a lot of things that for me there's no evidence for.
But again, he was right there at each moment and certain things.
ended up being true. And that's what's so amazing about his story. It's true. I mean, you know,
the F-117 and other planes that he first acquired evidence about and then made public. He and Jim
Goodall and a couple of others. The story about Bob Lazar and the craft that were flying out there
on Wednesday night, he went out there three times in a row with Lazar to see it. John Lear went out there
and I actually have footage from one of their excursions where, you know,
John's just messing around and it's just they're out by the car.
But he went out there to see the craft that Bob Lazar said would be flying over Papuus Lake,
not over Area 51.
I mean, nobody knew about this back then.
Ready?
Yeah.
Good evening.
This is John Lear.
And today is March 22nd, 1989.
We're standing just about eight miles due east of Groom Lake, Nevada, the super government
secret test site. And just a few minutes ago we saw one of the government extraterrestrial
UFOs fly over there. We all watched it for about seven or eight minutes. Right here I have
my celestial scope. It's eight inches. And I had it focused in for about 15 seconds and
saw for myself that in fact it was a disk. We're going to stay here for another couple
hours here to see if we can show you folks an actual extraterrestrial flying saucer being flown
by the government. So if you just stand by and we'll be looking over that mountain, which is where
they are, they also come over here, which is over at Ball Mountain. There's some lights over there,
which you can't see, but there are a number of trucks. We don't know whether they're looking
down here or what they're doing up there, but we managed to get in here. We're standing
on public land. It's completely legal where we are. And if you'd like to come here,
in the show we'll tell you exactly how to get you.
Well, you can mention who's with you, John.
We have Bob Lazard,
and we have Jackie Lizarre,
Bob's wife, and we have Gene Huff.
And this mission was organized tonight
by Bob Lazzar,
who is a theoretical physicist,
who works at Crew Light.
And is also a dead man at this.
All right.
I'm happy.
You want your name on there.
Yeah.
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Takes out John Lear and they see it.
And in fact, there's this really kind of famous clip now
where right after they see this craft,
they're kind of joking and they're out there.
But they see a UFO right where Bob Lazar said they would
and it was zipping around and doing all this stuff.
And there's John doing a stand-up in the middle of the desert at night,
you know, kind of with his buddies being like,
oh, Bobby Lazar is going to jail.
You know, it was kind of funny.
And that same night after they filmed the UFO
and after John does that kind of,
to stand up in the dark of night in the desert, they got stopped. Do you want to tell that story?
They go out of it. No, go ahead. That's amazing. So the way that everybody's described it to me is they think
everything's cool. They're in the middle of the desert. We got away with it. We were there.
We filmed. And all of a sudden, they hear something fall and start to roll in its little green light.
What it was was like they were surrounded by people in darkness. And that was a night vision
that dropped and rolled. They had no idea. All these people were around.
them. And so they got held at gunpoint. What are you guys doing out here? All this stuff. And that's when
Bob had to give his name. So Bob gave his name. And oh, man, like, that was bad. That was like the next day
Bob gets called out by Dennis Mariani. And he gets, which base do they go to?
It's Papoose. Oh, no, Indian Springs. Indian Springs. Indian Springs. He's called them, Creech.
Yeah. Indian Springs then now Creech. But that's when Bob got taken in and basically
poked in his chest and screamed that you don't know what you've just done because he showed people
the test flights that actually happened that happened and that's what people don't really understand
you're not going to take some nobody who's making stuff up take him to a military base and do that
so everybody thought at that point that was the turning point yeah that was march of 1989
and bob became worried that he was going to be killed so two months later when i just happened
to reach out and say hey would that UFO guy do an interview the timing was
right for him. And I don't care anymore whether people believe Lazar or not. I certainly don't
care whether they believe Lear or not because Lear made some outrageous claims. But we're just
reviewing a life of a really interesting character. You spent seven years going to his house
almost every weekend shooting and video and recording interviews and you got better at it. Some of that
stuff that you shot toward the end of his life is really beautiful. You're going to make a film.
And people ask, where is it? So where is it?
God, I'm going to cry.
It's like a bittersweet episode.
It's hard for me to do this episode, actually.
I loved John Lear.
I did.
I cared about him a lot.
And I actually even made like a trailer for this movie.
I put out a short, like episode number one of, of the John Lear experience, maybe 20 minutes.
What happened is really this, man.
I wasn't a real filmmaker.
I don't know what that means.
We had an agreement.
And the agreement was I would invest all this time and this money doing this,
you know, mainly my time.
And we would do this.
And with his life story, bang, I'd put it out.
But I think it got too tempting or something when they saw like, damn, he's actually making a movie.
So what actually ended up happening is, I'll just put it this way.
His life rights were not given to me by that point.
So it was kind of like I felt like I was being held hostage.
I can't make this movie now because somebody else has been signed over to maybe on a napkin or something,
the life rights.
Is it just one somebody or multiple somebody's that he gave life rights to?
You know, your guess is as good as mine, but it was just, it was weird.
It was like a self-sabotage because I know he wanted me to make a movie about him.
I know he wanted that.
At the core, he wanted that.
But I think it was too tempting to see if they could,
extort me. I don't know. I don't want to say it in a bad way, but I felt extorted.
Well, I see it in a bad way in the sense of you spent that much time, shot all that video.
John wanted a movie made. In the end, you could not make it because other people claim the
rights. They would claim ownership of whatever you produced. And then that led to a split with
you and Lear, right? I mean, at the end of his life, you guys were not in a good place.
A bad split. And it makes me sad. He was so kind of angry at me that I didn't make this.
movie and then to put you know icing on the cake there i ended up making the babazar movie i think that
and and i tried i tried to include him but i think that that split was just too much and you know i
kind of feel like he was half joking like if i really got in a room with him after all that it's like
john you motherfucker you know he might have just busted out one of his big ass laughs but and he kind of said
it to me because this is what we're up against when he showed me that somebody else was in control of
his life rights at the point this is what we're up against
So he was kind of still with me, but I think it was just too much at that time.
He wanted his story to be told.
I wanted to tell it, but I was unable, and I am unable at this point to put that together.
I know him for 36 years, 35, 36 years, and spent some time with him the last couple of years of his life,
not talking about UFOs, but talking about his health challenges.
He had some, you know, there were a lot of injuries from aircraft accidents, but other health issues that developed.
He was in bad shape over those years.
And the insurance companies were giving him a bad time.
He had financial problems.
It was a sad story toward the end, you know.
Mentally, he was there.
He was always so sharp.
That's the thing about John.
He was always so sharp, man.
But yeah, I think the physicality of what was going on with him,
yeah, he was just, yeah, he still had the greatest sense of humor, though, man.
I'll tell you a story that I heard.
So he and Bob had this, like, little riff.
They're doing, like, pranks on each other at one point.
And at one point, he did something to Bob that was like a really bad, really bad prank.
So I think Bob went to his pool and threw in some sort of die pack to turn the entire pool yellow.
Marily started packing her gun.
She said, I'm going to kill that motherfucker.
So they had this like really fun relationship.
John always maintained this just hilarious.
I've never laughed so much as those years that I hung out with Lear.
He had a great sense of humor man.
Well, he had a great life, interesting life.
He accomplished a lot.
He became the godfather of conspiracy.
You know, looking back at it, you can't take him seriously, can't take him at his word for some of the claims that he made.
But he did influence the evolution of modern UFO world in the sense of the pivotal role he played in the Lazar story, Area 51 and others.
You know, and I think, again, not to beat a dead horse here, but the idea that Lear created this whole thing, that he was the,
the mastermind behind it that he created it is just simply not true.
John Lair couldn't mastermind a sandwich.
Like, you know, it's so funny, man.
It's just, you know, another funny story is, you know, when you're into this UFO thing
and you got loved ones around you, sometimes I think you might be stepping over the precipice.
So there were times in John Lier's life where merrily, his wife was like, that's it,
no more of this nonsense.
I am taking all your files, we're locking them up, that's it.
And she's told me about that.
That all changed one day when Marilee saw a UFO for herself.
She gives them back.
Everything says, okay.
I saw it.
I actually have that on camera.
It's really cool of Marily, you know, talking about her UFO experience.
I was here working in the Rose Garden, and my eight-year-old daughter comes through that back gate and says, what is that, mom, a UFO?
And she's pointing this way.
And I look up and there's a...
U of all coming right over the mountain.
You could see the top of Sunrise Mountain behind.
And as I looked up, there was another one,
which she hadn't seen, because she was running in
with her friend.
There was another one coming in behind it.
And traveling with the unbelievable speed.
I would say, see the two palm trees here?
I would say it would have been as big from here
between those two palm trees.
Our guys were, had to be flying those things.
There was no purpose of them flying over a populated area.
As many as they have up at the Area 51,
of course our guys are gonna try, you know,
try them out, fly them.
I know Lazare was developing a name
for the fuel that they use and did.
I believe it's called something 15,
but you know, that's not in my area.
That's in John's area.
But like I said, it's really, really been interesting marriage to this man.
I miss John.
He passed away more than a year ago.
We recently, there was an event that was scheduled for the Las Vegas area, an attempt
to appropriately disperse his ashes.
It didn't happen, but it's going to happen at some point.
Yeah, for sure.
So that was cool.
So we got to go to Vegas, and we got to meet up with John.
We were going to blow up John, sorry, we got to go meet up with Bob and we were going to blow up John Lear's ashes.
That would be on a dry lake, but that would be an appropriate sendoff for a man like him.
Yeah, look, in this field, John Lear is a legend for a reason, which is that whether or not the things he said were true or untrue, what he brought to that attention, you know, to the world's attention.
He was the guy that I first kind of heard about, like, that was really looking into this.
So I really respect what he did.
Again, half of what he said or more, you got to kind of put to the side.
I think the lasting image from your time with him is him smoking a cigar in his den in his office.
My lasting image in my head is John Lear sort of commanding the troops out at the dry lakebed during
desert blast.
These outlaw fireworks shows that somehow got organized out there.
I know he was involved in creating the fireworks, and then he would be like the commander on the scene
of this incredible three-day orgy of explosives. That's the image that sticks in my head.
Right. So Desert Blast was this big kind of, I don't know what you call it. It was Burning Man before
Burning Man, but a lot more guns, liquor, and women than like a normal Burning Man, I think.
But yeah, so John Lear would be in Bob Lazar's garage, like making illegal fireworks to take out.
And normally they'd bust them, but a lot of ATF agents were like, would go to the event,
So that was called Desert Blast, and that was something that Babazar put on.
So, yeah, Lear, I've got images of him like shooting guns out there and doing all that.
Just wild, just wild, man, just a wild person, wild times.
Yeah, so we're talking about it.
It's not, we're not endorsing the claims that he made.
We're explaining what an interesting character he was.
That's what we're going to do occasionally and weaponize is go back through UFO history
and tell people who they were.
And how critical he was to kind of exposing the very beginning of the document.
trail and all this stuff and getting you involved into the UFO thing.
So he did a big service to kind of bring this information out, whether we have to sift it or not,
which we do.
He really, John Lear is pivotal to the public consciousness of Area 51 from the first
photos that he ever took at Area 51, that it still remain historic to this day.
Man, he lives on just through what a character he was.
Yeah, we miss him, but it's great, great memory.
I mean, it's great to recall these memories about him.
Yeah, yeah.
Totally missed the guy.
He was a son of a bitch, but he was our friend, the son of a bitch.
John Lear.
So he would love the fact we're talking about him.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Thank you, man.
Never has so few, has so much to tell, but could say so little.
Following this into weaponized, presentation of Jeremy Corbelle, George Knapp,
Dark Course Entertainment, and Cadence 13 Studios.
Available now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your shows.
Thank you.
