If History And Hollywood Can Be Edited Then What Else Is

You can walk through downtown Denver and never realize you’re standing on top of a different city. We get into the Denver Underground beneath Larimer Street, the buried storefronts and bricked-up corridors, and the official 1864 flood story that says the streets were raised over time. Then we lean into what still doesn’t quite sit right for a lot of curious people: the scale of the engineering, the quality of the brickwork, and why the documentation feels thinner than you’d expect for a project that big. We talk through the Tartaria angle too not as a “gotcha,” but as a real example of what happens when physical evidence and official records don’t line up cleanly.

From there, we pivot back to life above ground in modern Denver. We react to street-level chaos, homelessness, squatters in abandoned houses, the fentanyl and meth grind, rising car theft, and how people get desensitized when sirens and instability become normal. It’s a raw look at what residents notice when a city changes fast, and what it does to trust, empathy, and basic safety.

We also dig into claims about media manipulation and propaganda, including alleged CIA and Pentagon influence in Hollywood, how narratives get repeated until they feel like truth, and why that matters when the topic is war, torture, and public consent. And we close with a true crime story that stuck with us: the Phoenix “Zombie Hunter” case, where investigative genetic genealogy and a single restaurant glass finally helped investigators identify Brian Patrick Miller after decades.

If you like conversations that mix hidden history, Denver tunnels lore, true crime, and media skepticism, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review with your take: which part hit you the hardest?

Check out the video version of this episode and more on our YouTube channel!

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@justinStudio105

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Transcript

Cold Concert Night In Colorado

SPEAKER_28 1:07

And she podcasts, Justin and Eric.

SPEAKER_16 1:18

What's up, everybody?

SPEAKER_17 1:19

What's happening, everybody? Thank you once again for coming back and joining us and watching our wonderful podcast. All right. Right on, man. What up to you guys? Another day in the hood. Another day in the hood. So how's life been three years?

SPEAKER_16 1:39

It's been good, man. How about you?

SPEAKER_17 1:41

It was good, man. I went to go see that show last night at Red Rocks and Frost got butt off.

SPEAKER_16 1:45

Sublime.

SPEAKER_17 1:46

Yeah, it was a good show, but man, the coldest show I've ever been to.

SPEAKER_16 1:49

A freaked snowstorm in April in Colorado. We don't ever oh wait. We always have those. Yeah. Wait.

SPEAKER_17 1:56

Keep the guessing though.

SPEAKER_16 1:58

Everybody was like, hell yeah, we're having a warm spring. It's gonna be great. And then all of a sudden they're like, wait, smack on it right in the face.

SPEAKER_17 2:05

Dude, it's too that that's you know, Denver and Colorado for you.

SPEAKER_16 2:08

That's cool. It was a good show.

The Idea Of Denver’s Hidden Tunnels

SPEAKER_17 2:10

Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Denver, we got uh we got something to talk about. Denver here, don't we?

SPEAKER_16 2:14

Yeah, man. You know, you got Red Rocks, you got all these awesome things, the buildings, the highways, you know, all these stadiums and everything, farms, blah, blah, blah. Outside the town, you got the the airport. It's great. Everything looks cool. But have you ever thought about what's below it?

SPEAKER_17 2:30

You know, I I just you know, most cities you don't think there's really anything below the city.

SPEAKER_16 2:35

Seriously. Well, we actually looked into that. We found a video about the tunnels that are below downtown Denver, I guess. It's not the whole city, but downtown Denver, and we'll kind of talk about that.

A Satirical Take On Iran War

SPEAKER_16 2:46

But first, we'll let you see what JP and JP have to say about Israel and Iran. I mean the war in Iran.

SPEAKER_17 2:54

Right, right. So something like that.

SPEAKER_31 3:02

What the hell?

SPEAKER_04 3:03

This war with Iran is confusing me. Bro, the war is over. It's done. Nope. Israel just pulled us back into it. Never mind. Yeah, what's going on? We're getting all these conflicting messages. I can't even track what's happening. Dude, I've listened to everything. It's pretty straightforward. Explain it to me. And start with why'd we get into this war in the first place? So, in late March, us and Israel, so mostly us, started attacking Iran to eliminate their nuclear capabilities. Wait, what was that Operation Midnight Hammer thing about last June? That was strikes to eliminate Iran's nuclear capabilities, and that was a great success after Trump declared Iran's nuclear capabilities are 100% gone. Okay, and then we started an all-out war in March to do the same thing we already did. Like that already doesn't make any sense. Well, yes, but the strikes in March killed Iran's supreme leader. We knew that if you kill their leader, then you win the war. So total victory case closed. All right. Then what happened? Well, Iran started retaliating for some reason. Maybe because their leader was killed? Maybe. So the war didn't end again like we thought it would. Like, of course they would retaliate. Yeah, nobody saw it coming. But then, and get this, Iran escalated things by closing the Strait of Hormuz. That was a big deal. Then everybody around the world started freaking out about oil prices. Yeah. So at this point, we're just really in the war. Can't stop, even if we wanted to. That's awful. But here's the good news on March 15th, Trump announced we have won. It's a total victory. Well, that's good. And then what happened? The war continued. Oh, but he said total victory. It's more about the journey than the destination. It sounds misleading. But don't worry, because at that time, Iran was negotiating with us on a ceasefire. What came of that? Israel killed Iran's negotiators. So negotiations failed somehow and uh fighting continued. Why would Israel do that? But as the war went on by late March, Iran's military was so weakened that Trump said, and I quote, they have nothing left. We've knocked out their missiles. At this point, they're basically shooting at our great pilots with BB guns. No match for our beautiful brand new F-35s and F-15s. Well, that's good news. Then what? Iran shot down two of our aircrafts. Ironically, an F-35 and an F-15. Did they use BB guns? No, shoulder fire missiles. But Trump said they luckily we rescued all the pilots, though. But if Israel didn't kill the negotiators. Well, I'll tell you who's been a good negotiator in this Trump, art of the deal kind of aura, he's got. How so? Well, in early April, Trump said that if Iran doesn't reopen the Strait of Hermuz, he's gonna knock them back to the Stone Age. What Iran do. Yeah, get this. They did not reopen the Strait of Hermuz. Great. But then Trump turned up the negotiating heat on Iran, trying to get them to agree to a ceasefire deal when he said, A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Game set match right there. God, that's genocide. Nope. He was just saying it. Oh, that's a threat of genocide. It's a negotiation tactic commonly used. I've used it. One time I was at a car dealership, they weren't coming down on the price, and I said, if you don't give me $5,000 off this car, I am killing everyone in this dealership. Did you get the car? No, I got arrested. So it didn't work. Work for Trump because he got a ceasefire deal out of it, and Iran reopened the Strait of Hermuz. We won. Great. So the fighting's over? No. Israel immediately broke the ceasefire deal and pulled us back into the war. What the f is wrong with Israel? So the fighting resumed immediately. What the f is wrong with us for being allies with Israel? Yeah, our greatest ally. And Iran reclosed the Strait of Hermuz. How will this war ever end? Well, basically, when we can get Iran to reopen the Strait of Hermuz, the war's over. Complete and total victory. Was the Strait of Hermuz open before the war started? Yes. And the reason they closed it was because the war started? Yeah. And the reason we're still in this war is because we need to get the Strait of Hermuz opened. Yeah. Well, what the f? Yeah, you get it now. I'm glad I could help clarify. Well, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go pay my taxes to help fund Israel. Life is good. Are we just supposed to be this dumb? Yeah. Heads up on the dog poop right there.

SPEAKER_27 7:57

I will never give you um straight up.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

Can

Reacting To Propaganda And Absurdity

SPEAKER_03 9:04

you believe? Oh, the choice is not fine.

SPEAKER_17 9:14

Oh my goodness, man. What the hell? What did you find?

SPEAKER_16 9:17

Some of that stuff is just it's fun. You know, you look for it, you find stuff that's funny, and it's just like, dude, I gotta use that somewhere.

SPEAKER_17 9:25

Oh, I mean, it's it's it's awesome.

SPEAKER_16 9:27

And that's the thing, like, Iran made that video about Trump. You know, and I was like, dude, good job, guys. That's what cracks me up. Because actually, the first time I saw it, you know, I just thought somebody was trolling Trump, and I missed the part that it said that Iran made the video, and when he said blue cod, blow cod, I was like, no way, dude.

SPEAKER_17 9:49

It probably blew up in Iran.

SPEAKER_16 9:52

I mean, I mean that's what they do though with the propaganda videos and everything, like the whole surrender it's beneath me thing. Oh, dude, that's just safe. You know, and then the medication thing, I just saw that, and I was like, that's pretty much America right there. I got no medication, right? Oh fuck time to be alive. Oh, yeah, like JP Stairs, man. You know, shout out to that guy. He's he's a champion when it comes to those like telling you a story uh from a two-person perspective with the same person, it's just like that's a skill, man.

SPEAKER_17 10:30

It is awesome. I I I give it up to him and I like watching his stuff. And he and he's on point with with what he's talking about as well. I mean, it's not point every time. It's not something that just BS. It's look at it, man. You know, open your eyes and it's just like, yeah, that's pretty much it.

SPEAKER_16 10:46

Well, he's like, do we have to be or are we supposed to be this stupid? He's like, yep. Watch out for that dog poop. We're not that stupid, I guess. Like at least he's not stepping in the dog poop. Holy crap, man.

SPEAKER_17 11:02

But seriously, I mean reminds me of that uh Chich and Chong joke where uh John he's like, uh uh he's like hey guys, look what I almost stepped in. He's holding a freaking pile of dog shit. He's like, man, yeah. Don't eat or the yellow snow. Definitely don't eat yellow snow, man.

SPEAKER_16 11:24

Ever. That's my greatest tip. For sure. It's yellow, don't eat it.

SPEAKER_36 11:31

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_16 11:32

Yeah, it's crazy.

The Denver Underground Story Begins

SPEAKER_16 11:33

But hey, we were talking about the tunnels below Denver, so let's go ahead and let's get to it and we'll show you what it's all about.

SPEAKER_34 11:39

Yeah, man. There is a city underneath Denver. Not a utility tunnel, not a sewer system, a city. With storefronts, with doors that open inward as if someone just stepped through them, with windows at what should be ceiling level. The official story says this happened because of a flood in 1864 and a decision to raise the streets. That story raises more questions than it answers. Walk down Larimer Street in Denver today, and you are walking on top of something. The ground beneath your feet is not natural earth, it is not the original grade of the land, it is a constructed surface laid over a previous city that did not simply cease to exist when the new one was built above it. The storefronts of the original Denver are still there underneath. Their facades face streets that are now buried, their doors still have handles, their windows, which once looked out onto a bustling commercial district, now look out onto nothing. Sealed brick tunnels that tourists with flashlights occasionally shuffle through on guided underground tours. The official explanation for how this happened is contained in a fairly short paragraph in most Denver history books. In 1864, a flood on Cherry Creek and the South Platte River devastated the original settlement. The city, recognizing that the low-lying original streets would flood again, decided to raise the street grade. The process took decades. As new buildings were constructed, they were built to the new higher street level. The original ground floors of existing buildings became basements. The original basements became sub-basements. And the original street level, with all its intact commercial architecture, simply disappeared below the new surface. This is the official story. It is plausible. It is partially documented and it leaves open a set of questions that the documentation does not answer. The first question is physical. When you raise a street grade, you do not simply porfill over an existing city and walk away. You create an engineering problem of significant complexity. The existing buildings have to be connected to the new grade. Utilities have to be routed, water drainage has to be redesigned, storefronts have to be reconfigured. This is not a small undertaking. And it requires the kind of organized municipal engineering capacity that Denver in the 1860s and 1870s was not obviously equipped to provide. Denver was incorporated as a city in 1861. Three years later, the flood occurred. Three years after that, the street raising project was supposedly underway. This is an extraordinarily young city undertaking an extraordinarily ambitious infrastructure transformation. The labour, the materials, the engineering expertise, and the municipal financial capacity required to raise an entire city's street grade by 8 to 12 feet over a multi-block area in the 1860s and 1870s represents a level of organized capability that historians of the period have not fully interrogated. When you walk through the Denver underground today, and the tours that take you through what they call the lower level of Laramie Street are real, the spaces are real. You can book them and go. You notice things that the official explanation does not address. The architecture of the underground level is not primitive frontier construction. It is not the rough hewn improvised building of a settlement that had existed for only a few years before the flood. The brickwork is sophisticated. The archways are properly keystone arched. The storefronts have decorative cornices. The proportions of the spaces are generous and well considered. This is architecture that takes time to develop. It represents not a three-rolled frontier settlement, but an established commercial district with real architectural tradition behind it. The second question is documentary. If the street raising project was the organized municipal undertaking that the official history describes, there should be extensive documentation of it. Engineering drawings, municipal contracts, newspaper coverage of the project as it progressed. Property records showing the transition from ground floor commercial use to basement use as the new grade was established. Some of this documentation exists. Newspaper accounts from the 1870s and 1880s reference the change street level and the inconvenience it created for businesses whose entrances were now below grade. Property records show transitions in the use of spaces. This partial documentation is what gives the official story its plausibility. But the engineering documentation that would exist for a project of this scale, the surveys of the original grade, the engineering plans for the fill operation, the contracts with the construction firms that carried out the work is thin. But significantly thinner than you would expect for an operation of this magnitude conducted by an established municipal government. Tartaria researchers and alternative historians who have examined the Denver underground make a specific argument about this documentary thinness. Their argument is not that the documentation was destroyed in some deliberate cover-up. Their argument is simpler and in some ways more unsettling. T The documentation is thin, because the street raising story is a retroactive explanation applied to a situation that was not actually the result of deliberate street raising. In this alternative reading, the Lower Denver was not built first and then buried under a raised grade. The Lower Denver was already below grade when the surface Denver was being built. The city that is now underground was not the precursor to the city above it. It was a different city, or a different layer of the same location, that predated the settlement that history records as Denver's founding. This is the claim that requires the most careful examination, because it is the most extraordinary. It requires that there was a prior urban settlement at the location of Denver before the events of 1858 and 1859, when the original prospectors and settlers arrived and established the communities that would eventually be incorporated as Denver. It requires that this prior settlement was buried in a way that left its architecture intact. And it requires that the settlers who arrived in the late 1850s either found this buried city and built on top of it without ever adequately documenting what they found, or arrived after it was already buried and simply built over it. The Tartaria framework provides a specific mechanism for how this could have happened. In the Tartaria hypothesis, a global civilization existed before the historical period we have been given, and that civilization was destroyed or buried by a catastrophic event involving massive flooding and sediment deposition sometime in the early to mid-19th century. The survivors of this event, or the populations that moved into the affected areas afterward, either could not or did not document the prior civilization they encountered because the institutional knowledge required to understand what they were looking at had been lost in the catastrophe. Denver, in this reading, Chowb was a location that already had urban development before the 1858 Gold Rush that the official history identifies as the city's founding moment. The structures that are now the Denver Underground are not the early buildings of a frontier settlement subsequently buried by deliberate street raising. They are the remnants of that prior civilization, incorporated into the developing nineteenth century city in a way that the settlers explained to themselves and to posterity with the most available narrative. We raised the streets after a flood. The flood itself is worth examining more closely. The flood of 1864 was real. It killed people, destroyed property, and caused significant damage to the young settlement. This is documented in multiple sources, including eyewitness accounts and newspaper coverage of the time. The flood is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the flood was the cause of the street raising, or whether the street raising explanation was imposed on a situation that the flood happened to make convenient to explain. In other words, did people look at the existing subsurface structures that were already below grade at the time of the flood, and decide that the flood gave them a ready-made explanation for why those structures were below grade? Was the flood the cause, or was it the cover story? This is not a distinction that can be resolved with the available documentary evidence, because the documentary evidence itself is what is being questioned. But the physical evidence, the sophistication of the underground architecture, the intact nature of the spaces, the decorative elements that suggest an established rather than a nascent commercial culture, continues to suggest that what is underground is older and more substantial than a frontier settlement of three to five years duration would typically produce. The specific architectural details of the Denver underground are the physical evidence that Tartaria researchers find most compelling, and they deserve examination on their own terms, separate from the larger theoretical framework. The arched corridors that connect the underground spaces are built with the full brick construction of established 19th century commercial architecture. The keystones are properly set, the brick courses are regular and carefully laid. The mortar joints suggest work done by experienced masons rather than frontier builders, working quickly with whatever materials were available. The decorative elements on the storefront facades, the cornices, the pilasters, the carved brick details, represent an investment of craft labour that would have been extraordinary for a settlement of Denver's documented age. Compare this with the architecture of other frontier settlements of the same era. Virginia City, Nevada, established during the Comstock Load Silver Rush of 1859, produced a commercial district within its first decade that was substantial, but clearly the work of rapidly deployed labor using available materials. Deadwood, South Dakota, established in 1876, too shows the rough and ready construction of a mining camp that grew explosively without adequate planning or craft resources. The underground Denver, by contrast, shows the architectural character of an established city with a mature building tradition. This discrepancy does not prove the Tartare hypothesis. There are conventional explanations for it. Denver attracted early capital investment that other frontier settlements did not, partly because of its position as a supply hub for the broader Colorado mining region. That capital investment may have funded more sophisticated construction than the settlement's age would normally predict. The presence of skilled European immigrant craftsmen in the labour force might explain the quality of the brickwork. These are real possibilities. But the discrepancy exists. It is observable to anyone who takes the underground tour, and it has not been adequately explained by the conventional historical account. The economic dimensions of the Denver Underground story are worth considering alongside the architectural and historical questions. The underground spaces are currently used primarily as a tourist attraction. Tours operate regularly, bringing paying visitors through the tunnels beneath Laramus Street. The spaces have been cleaned up, lit, and made navigable for the tourist experience, which necessarily involves some modification of what was originally there. This is not a conspiracy. It is how historic preservation works in a commercial context. You make the space accessible, you add lighting and safety infrastructure, and you present the history in the most coherent narrative available. The narrative available is the official one frontier settlement, flood, street raising, buried city. It is a good story. It draws tourists. It is probably mostly true. What the tourist presentation does not address is the anomalies. The guides who take you through the underground are not misleading you when they tell you the official story. They are telling you what they know, which is the official story. The anomalies, the architectural sophistication, the documentary thinness, the scale of the engineering project supposedly conducted by a three-year-old municipal government are not part of the tour script because they are not part of the official historical record that the tour is designed to present. The people who own and operate the underground tour are not suppressing anything. The anomalies are simply not part of their story. Because their story is the official one, and the official story does not include the anomalies. The practical implication of the Tartaria reading of the Denver Underground is not primarily historical. It is epistemological. It is a question about how we know what we know about the past, and specifically how we know what we know about the founding of American cities in the nineteenth century. The official history of Denver's founding is built on documentary evidence taken as primary authority. Newspapers, land records, municipal records, personal diaries. The physical evidence is interpreted in light of those documents. What the Tartaria analysis does is invert this relationship. It takes the physical evidence as primary and asks whether the documentary record adequately explains it. When the answer is no, the Tartaria framework offers an alternative that better fits the physical evidence, even if it extends beyond what the documents record. The doors in the Denver underground still open. The windows still have their frames, the cornices are still intact above storefronts on streets that no one walks anymore. Whatever explanation is correct for how they got there, they are there. And they will keep asking the question that the official story has not fully answered, and that is the lower Denver, intact storefronts below streets that the official record says were raised after a flood, built with the craftsmanship of an established city that a three-year-old frontier settlement should not have been able to produce. The doors are still there, the windows are still there. The cornices and the keystone arches and the decorated facades are all still there. Exactly where they were when the street rose.

SPEAKER_16 26:58

I mean

Would Old Buildings Hold A City

SPEAKER_16 26:59

and then build on top of it. That sounds a little suspect in the way of building something that tall and something. A rickety old building from the 1800s. Right? We got the mailbox building standing on top of it. I don't think so.

SPEAKER_17 27:18

Well, right. I mean, that has to hold a lot of weight. You know, all the city. So like last night, you know, I took the bus to go to Sublime and uh I was you know, I was like, Do you think the tunnels are under here? Because we're right in front of Union Station. They are like well, right. That's the thing, is like those buildings are aren't that big. You know, they're like three stories. So yeah, I can see how that would hold it, uh, you know.

SPEAKER_16 27:48

Uh but yeah, it's a lot of well and and uh even Union Station is built into the ground. Right. Like there's so much stuff under the ground. Like I was talking to him about it earlier that when we were teenagers, we used to go to the missile silos out there, like just east of Aurora, uh, Colorado. And you know, those things went on for miles and miles and miles. And you know, the last time we went out there they were starting to close them down. They were probably getting them ready to use, but uh you know, it's it's insane because all on top, you're driving out on these like county roads that are just dirt roads and nothing but pasture on each side of the road. You know, don't get caught in one of their fields. They might shoot you. Right, yeah, they don't know those kind of things. But we used to go down there when we were kids all the time, and it was insane how far the city under a couple of things are. How we ever made our way out of there is insane. Right?

SPEAKER_17 28:40

I mean, well, I I never got the I never went, but I know that a lot of you guys did, and I know I I heard the stories and I remember the bottle rocket wars down there.

SPEAKER_16 28:50

That's crazy. We had some crazy stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17 28:52

Well, I r I remember when I first moved up here, uh, a kid had fallen in one of them because you know somebody was around. Tom fell in. Uh huh.

SPEAKER_16 28:59

Well, he didn't fall in the uh nobody fell in the missile silo when we were going, but uh somebody fell down some stairs when we were having that rocket rocket warrior.

SPEAKER_17 29:08

Try to dodge a ball.

SPEAKER_16 29:09

There was like this giant ballroom in there. Like a giant ballroom had these big arched ceilings, you know, these paintings on the ceilings, um black and white checkered floor and everything. It was definitely like a ballroom and it was underneath the house above the ground. Yeah. Like who knows how far down because you just keep going and you just keep walking down tunnels or whatever. But that's awesome. Yeah, and then so this thing here, you could tell you know, they were bringing up the Tartarian or like architecture style and with the arches and how things used to be built. And like I said, you know, yeah, everything nowadays is more modern and more contemporary and stuff like that, and I get why people do that, but they also uh lack structural ability for some of these buildings. Like you see you know, these shows that they have on like the weather channel or whatever that show like disasters that happen, like instant disasters where a building is sitting there and it is falling down or stuff.

SPEAKER_17 30:11

Well it's like, well, dude, they didn't build it right.

SPEAKER_16 30:13

They wanted it to look cool, they just didn't build it right. You know, and so these are when they have the same tunnels in different places, it does make you think that there was something else going on or not just a flood or I don't think I don't think it was just for a flood.

SPEAKER_17 30:27

You know, and that might be a partial reason, but I don't think it was all of it. Because I I I'm pretty sure those tunnels go for for quite some ways, don't they? I I do believe.

SPEAKER_16 30:37

Under the city. Yeah. I'm not sure. Yeah. We're gonna go check them out.

SPEAKER_17 30:40

We will have to check that out just. We are checking them out. Yes, we are gonna check them out.

SPEAKER_16 30:45

Yeah, somewhere we got this on our plan.

SPEAKER_17 30:47

So we're gonna we wanted to do a spooky tour, but we're at least gonna go check out these tunnels for you.

SPEAKER_16 30:53

It could be spooky anyway. You never know. Studio spooky.

SPEAKER_17 30:57

Right, yeah. I know we keep talking about it because it is.

SPEAKER_16 31:00

Every time I come in here, I just say, What's up, man? Or whatever.

SPEAKER_17 31:07

I came in today and I kind of pop my light on. No, it wasn't, dude. I would have like, bro. I would have called you, man. I'd be like, man, I don't know if somebody met.

SPEAKER_16 31:21

Well, I thought about doing it because I came over here the other day with the boat.

SPEAKER_17 31:24

Uh that that would have been funny. Maybe I should put a light on there.

SPEAKER_16 31:29

And I thought, no, I don't want to do that, because if there is, if that's the communication skill that the ghost that's in here, the entity has, then I'm gonna let him do it, right?

SPEAKER_17 31:39

Hey man, you know, I but yeah, well, it would I would have caught dude, I was gonna I would have called you, man, like, bro, uh fricking I was like, ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah, you would have let that go on for a while. Just like must do in here by myself.

SPEAKER_16 31:54

Right on guys, or you know, Denver is a little bit sort of of a different place now than it was back in the 1800s. Um, you know, when it started, it was a gambling, um, alcohol, prostitution hub for the miners, you know, so that the miners had somewhere to go and stash their whatevers. Um stash. Or get some pills to clear their whatevers. But whatever ails them.

SPEAKER_17 32:21

Whatever was going down.

SPEAKER_16 32:23

But nowadays it's a little bit different, so check it out.

SPEAKER_26 32:30

Don't

Downtown Chaos And Street Survival

SPEAKER_26 32:31

come down here at the devil playground, Harry Bear Mace.

SPEAKER_24 32:42

If you wanted to see live, they'll take you in, I promise you. Let's suck you in to you either day, ready for life, or worse.

SPEAKER_22 33:22

So it's just like that all the time.

SPEAKER_26 33:24

All the time. Like I said, every time every year it's worse, it's worse.

SPEAKER_22 33:30

And what are the calls they're going to? Is that like an overdose?

SPEAKER_26 33:34

This is all chaos.

SPEAKER_22 33:38

When was the last crime here? I don't know. Recently last night, probably. Maybe maybe 30 seconds ago. So there's a lot of theft happening.

SPEAKER_26 33:46

Aha, yeah. I mean, you can't control it. It's out of control.

SPEAKER_22 33:50

And what do they steal for the most part?

SPEAKER_26 33:52

Uh they steal ice cream, anything that's most expensive.

SPEAKER_22 33:55

Ice cream?

SPEAKER_26 33:56

Candy? Candy house are always empty. We don't remember something that much candy to anybody, you know?

unknown 34:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_22 34:03

No sure, she was right.

SPEAKER_24 34:05

People just stop caring. Everybody has that that shit apple on the on the on the tree stem, you know? I mean, it used to be you had to take a trap, you don't just rip the whole pairs down. Everybody gets the show.

SPEAKER_21 34:29

You can change so much over time that you're never your person you were. That doesn't necessarily make you evil, but in my opinion, yes, the evil will overcome you one day because it falls in between the cracks, and if you never seek reconciliation, you're gonna become evil.

SPEAKER_24 34:44

So I'm Jesse. Some nickname me as Bam Bam.

SPEAKER_22 34:48

Bam Bam?

SPEAKER_24 34:48

Like Flintstones.

SPEAKER_22 34:50

Oh, we gotta pose. Look at this. Do you want to join in?

SPEAKER_14 34:55

Uh I'm good. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_22 34:58

Yeah, not showing, dude. What are you asking? Oh, we're doing a documentary on Denver.

SPEAKER_14 35:04

Went downtown. I had a free ticket to go to the Rockies, and you know, just didn't want to be there around those people. So I went to a spot in Denver that I've never been to before, and in the midst of all the skulls and crossbones and 666 pentagram symbols, I seen in ink real small. I had to get up close to see it, and it says, I have come to a very weird and shitty place that you should never ever trust. Uh Denver International looks like a bunch of circus teeth or Satan's ass clowns.

SPEAKER_15 35:31

Satan works under the guise of thought here.

SPEAKER_22 35:34

Is there a bunch of satanic elites that live here that like are eating children on the new.

SPEAKER_25 35:42

I mean, there's too many people, so I guess if they eat some children, that's fine, you know.

SPEAKER_05 35:46

You know about Blucifer, all right?

SPEAKER_11 35:48

We have breaking news this morning.

Airport Rumors And Blucifer Talk

SPEAKER_21 35:50

Blucifer, the iconic blue Mustang at Denver International Airport, has been vandalized. I came across a scalp of somebody's head in a trash can. I came across body parts, I came across a dog dead dog, like fresh dead dog, which really, really it was just sadder to find the dog than the other stuff though. It's really weird.

SPEAKER_22 36:10

So is there like a lot of like Satanist stuff in Denver?

SPEAKER_18 36:14

Uh I've never even heard of it. Yeah, I know I got invited to join a Pentecostal church the other day when I was at King Supers, and I'm just like walking, I'm like, look at all my piercings, and I'm gay, and I'm like, what what about this scream? Like, come to my Pentecostal church, but I like again the inviting this.

SPEAKER_05 36:31

So if we're in nuclear war, we're gonna get new first here. So short word. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18 36:35

Denver is sunny. Denver is friendly.

SPEAKER_21 36:39

There's people that are evil as fuck.

SPEAKER_15 36:40

It's cool to visit, but it's probably not somewhere to live in. People see, oh, they see marijuana or they see the mountains, but they don't see the paint that Colorado goes through. Love is gone from Colorado.

SPEAKER_18 37:15

Everything's fake. Nothing matters. Trust no one. Oh no. Time isn't real.

SPEAKER_21 37:21

And time does not fucking matter. I fell asleep and woke up in like Jurassic Park, dude.

SPEAKER_22 37:43

Is there a lot of that in Denver?

Squatters Bandos And Housing Costs

SPEAKER_24 37:45

There's quite a few.

SPEAKER_23 37:47

What are squatter rights? Squatters or unauthorized occupants are usually a person or a group of people that are residing in a property that do not own or pay rent on that property.

SPEAKER_22 37:57

If I wanted to like hang out with somebody that was in an abandoned house, how would I go up? Can I just knock on the door and be like, hey, what's up?

SPEAKER_24 38:05

I'd call out. Chances are there's a chance you might get shot or something worse. I mean, it's just a camp safety rule pretty much to anybody going in a spot they don't know, call out.

SPEAKER_32 38:14

I can uh do you know if these houses have any squatters or you've had any problems?

SPEAKER_19 38:46

The first orange house, there was some in there.

SPEAKER_22 38:49

Dang, really?

SPEAKER_19 38:51

That used to be my mom's house.

unknown 39:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_19 39:04

You know, people come by busting the windows out of their cars and stuff, like the car was you know, park that piece of shit over you and take that back over there.

SPEAKER_22 39:13

Did you ever talk to the people that were in the talk to people like that? That must have been a pain seeing it after it was in your family, you know.

SPEAKER_19 39:23

Gosh.

SPEAKER_22 39:35

What is the story with this one right now? Do you know?

SPEAKER_10 39:39

Um, that house, the people who rented it were running some sort of trafficking operation out of it. And actually, SWAT raided that house twice.

SPEAKER_24 39:49

My abandon just got hit the other day, or today. Sleeping like four toss and come out. If you want to not go to jail, I said, Oh shit. I didn't think you put in my bag and started going out real fast out the door. Smack daddy in the top. He said, That's a good way to get shot right there. But those squatters won't leave.

SPEAKER_41 40:08

Only KODO News Channel 13's Emily Allen confronted the squatters.

SPEAKER_03 40:13

James and Heather, the squatters were supposed to clear out by noon today, but they made it very clear they do plan to stay. Ask you a few questions. They park in the garage, they play in the backyard, and they even get packages delivered.

SPEAKER_19 40:28

They're like cockroaches. They've gone into this house and they're not gonna get out.

SPEAKER_24 40:32

Becomes a bando once the bank takes it over because no payments. Or let's say it's a ran-down place and it's a health issue at some point. There's another bando.

SPEAKER_03 40:41

We'd like to ask you a few questions. Oh, are you guys gonna be out by noon today? Um, I don't think those rolling your concern. So, why do you guys feel privileged to stay at this house?

SPEAKER_24 40:55

Renovations are a good example, especially with hotels and apartments and stuff. Nobody's ever there past 10 o'clock at night. As long as you're out before six, you're good.

SPEAKER_22 41:03

How many people do you think are squatting in abandoned buildings in Denver?

SPEAKER_24 41:07

Quite a few. If you're smart, I mean back where I'm from, you don't go out in the open like that, you go to a bando.

SPEAKER_03 41:14

How could we know better when we would never even think of such a thing?

SPEAKER_18 41:17

A lot of our sheds get broken into. People are looking for housing, people are looking for shelter.

SPEAKER_10 41:22

Because if you're living in an abandoned structure, then you're not paying rent or mortgage or whatever.

SPEAKER_22 41:27

So what's a rent price right now for like a one bedroom?

SPEAKER_18 41:30

I pay $1,500. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 41:32

Some of the houses on our street are going for what seems like outrageous amounts of money.

SPEAKER_22 41:37

What does it cost for a house on the street?

SPEAKER_10 41:39

The one a couple houses down was almost uh, I want to say it was around $600,000. Yeah, I know. I'm like right across from the SWAT house. I mean, but that's Denver. Like you're paying for the location.

Car Theft And Easy Tech Exploits

SPEAKER_18 42:31

Colorado leads the country when it comes to stolen vehicles.

SPEAKER_35 42:34

The theft is so bad right now, some drivers have had both a stolen vehicle and a stolen catalytic converter in a matter of hours.

SPEAKER_24 42:42

And did you know that there is an app on your phone if you have Google Play that I can override any one of the car's alarms, locks, and anything else? 2003 and up. It's called Digital Car Key, and you and it's under Find My Car. Literally, it's all the alarm stuff we leave, it's pointless. I can take it from locked, alarmed, and literally parked to unalarmed, unlocked, and driving off.

SPEAKER_12 43:06

My guess is it was either a Kia or a Hyundai.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Commander Mike Greenwell says it's one of the top five cars targeted.

SPEAKER_09 43:12

Car theft and catalytic converter theft is happening and it's on the rise, and there's nothing we can do about it. As a normal citizen, it's it's frustrating.

SPEAKER_05 43:20

If your car gets stolen in Denver, it doesn't matter. Nobody cares. Yeah. My buddy had his car stolen and uh called the police and they ended up showing up on barefoot.

SPEAKER_24 43:31

It's just it's some one thing or the next. And it's usually all over the feminine of drugs and whatever else.

SPEAKER_15 43:37

Kids are being high on drugs. And really?

SPEAKER_23 43:40

I think it's fentanyls to be honest. I think that's the main one.

Fentanyl Meth And The Vortex

SPEAKER_24 43:53

I see a lot of people fall into things that shouldn't be fallen to.

SPEAKER_22 43:56

Like what?

SPEAKER_24 43:57

Fentanyl, uh temptation. You name it.

SPEAKER_40 44:17

I just bit for you on the highway.

SPEAKER_31 44:29

Is this for like fan?

SPEAKER_20 44:33

Everybody's doing it because nine years ago? They gave us fanal. He thought it was trying to white. It wasn't. It was fan on. We didn't know that. It lasts like 15-20 minutes.

SPEAKER_22 44:50

And all these people are just kind of dupedy doing walking line.

SPEAKER_20 44:56

Why am I making business more?

SPEAKER_24 45:01

Real easy to get stuck. Don't get on the drugs because I'll stick you even harder. Yep. And the drug scene? Don't trust it for shit. If you think you want your high, make sure you know exactly what you want because it'll stick you in that vortex when you're not ready to come out.

SPEAKER_21 45:15

I'm still I'm still struggling with drugs and stuff like that kind of.

SPEAKER_22 45:22

And like meth or something?

SPEAKER_24 45:24

Yeah. I worked for UPS when I first got out in February. My boss did methamphetamine. It was fucking hilarious.

SPEAKER_18 45:30

I feel like some people don't recognize that they're coming across a little strong sometimes and then it comes off weird.

SPEAKER_20 45:36

I'm telling you, for Sam, I've been dealing drugs in this in trade in dealing uh said less substances and whatnot. Uh uh, because you know, I like it, it's fun. I'm a dating issues. Uh uh sounds 12 years old, bro.

SPEAKER_22 45:52

What's the your least expensive habit right now?

SPEAKER_28 45:59

He's dead that it's one of the wicked. But he was still I can't say much because I know we're all the same.

SPEAKER_36 46:57

Oh, yes, we all still gotta satisfy that we still see it, you know what's happening, you know. Give it an inside, you know, look into it. We'll pretty much survive and you should survive. Well at least, you know, now I'm at it, you know. I had onto it.

SPEAKER_21 47:17

Piles of gold, dude. Piles of gold, platinum, every single type of freaking sapphire and rude uh, every single type of gem you can find is right below us, like four or five feet down below us.

SPEAKER_22 47:29

Under Denver.

SPEAKER_21 47:30

If you could go to one of these vents, specifically there's a one oh I don't see that. I don't want to put that on black because then it'll never be there.

SPEAKER_24 47:37

You'd be surprised how many people find diamond rings on the ground. Just not even like a normal bat pat, but like a dangerous bag. Unattended with uh tar cheese and everything else. Oh my what the fuck?

SPEAKER_22 47:49

So you're telling me if people are watching this from around the country, they can come to Denver to find mystery boxes of cash and bags.

SPEAKER_24 47:57

Literally, especially towards like 2-3 in the morning. That's crazy. One time fucking had uh it was an ammo box, a pistol, and uh extra magic. Start looking down, don't look up.

SPEAKER_21 48:19

So I'm feeling like I don't really call it malice anymore, it'd be more like venom. I would call it venom because I'm around a bunch of creatures, but it is malice.

SPEAKER_25 48:27

We don't want to get harmed, we don't want to, you know, harass them or you know, talk to them in the wrong way, or we don't know what we're dealing with.

SPEAKER_24 48:35

This would be the tenth bag that I've had to replace.

SPEAKER_22 48:40

Tenth?

SPEAKER_24 48:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_22 48:41

How much

Demon Stories And Dark Spiritual Claims

SPEAKER_22 48:42

stuff was inside of those bags?

SPEAKER_24 48:43

One of those bags had about $34,000 worth of jewelry. Where I'm from, we ain't got none of just stealing shit. You know.

SPEAKER_15 48:50

Just go into a skate park. Like there'll be sometimes people smoking math. There'll be sometimes people are trying to jump other people.

SPEAKER_21 48:58

Evil is just a complete inability to care about anyone but yourself and what you need physically. Spirit doesn't exist to any old person. Only thing that exists is hunger, pain, and relief. My penance was to bind four of the most vile demons to my flesh in order to serve as reconc reconciliation. Because they use my body as a sacrament in the Mason temples and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_22 49:33

How so as a sacrament?

SPEAKER_21 49:35

Huh?

SPEAKER_22 49:35

How would they use your body as a sacrament?

SPEAKER_21 49:37

They just do prayers and stuff like that and ask for it to happen. It just happens. These people that did this, they're evil as fuck. They're not even people, dude. They're stretched out skins of the people that once were that are hollows, that are filled with thousands of demons inside their flesh. They're like a bunch of different cra creatures smushed together with less human flesh. As they try to get human flesh to stick, it doesn't.

SPEAKER_22 50:07

Is that why demons try to possess people? Because they want the body. They just want to do stuff.

SPEAKER_21 50:13

They just want to have stuff, do stuff, get hot.

SPEAKER_29 50:15

I see violence. Kids be constantly, but demons aren't biding. Creepy singing to me, you're making me tight in Tidney for the tree. I divided. Still back to the must be the titan. Just the queen to be just holding me as silent. Then to the tree that we said.

SPEAKER_31 51:06

No, I'm a beast of revelation.

Denver’s Change Homelessness And Sobriety

SPEAKER_31 51:13

Yeah, man.

SPEAKER_16 51:14

Denver is definitely a little different than it was when we were growing up.

SPEAKER_17 51:18

I mean I know you moved here from Arizona, but when you were here young enough, you realize I've seen, you know, a lot of change in in Denver, you know, as it grew and all that stuff. Man, this is this is looking out of control, man.

SPEAKER_16 51:32

I mean, we used to see a homeless person or maybe a couple um that are you know just posted up on the street because most people had somewhere to go, like they had a mission and stuff like that when we were younger. And then it just blew up. All of a sudden they're everywhere.

SPEAKER_17 51:49

They were just moving into people's front yards and in alleyways and all that interesting to say.

SPEAKER_16 51:56

It was moving to the suburbs and and now it is in the suburbs where it's like you know, no matter where you're at, you're gonna see people that are homeless and and drug addicted and whatever. You know, and it's like you you try to to think in your heart you're gonna help somebody out by giving them some money or something, but it's just like you said, man, all these people know is getting out of pain. You know, and if the first thing about getting out of pain when you're an alcoholic or speaking from experiences of getting that alcohol in your system so you can feel like a normal person again. That's gonna overtake anything about trying to get your life back on track. So it's like it makes it difficult to just give people money when they're addicted to something or if they're homeless and stuff like that. For me, you know, because I know I I was actually homeless for a couple years when I lived in Kansas and it was it was terrible. You know what I mean? It's but on the flip side of that coin is I got sober and I changed my life. So that's you know, that's why we're here today. That's why we have anything that we have here today is because we made that decision. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17 53:05

And and there are you know, and there are programs and and all that kind of good stuff that that are out there that aren't helping people that really want them to help themselves. And that's what the programs are for, you know, to help uh help them help themselves.

SPEAKER_16 53:17

So yeah, the you know, like the sirens on Colorado Boulevard, that's literally just a couple blocks away from here where we're at recording this right now.

SPEAKER_17 53:25

Yeah, it's like you know even across from where I live, they just open up uh um a transitional housing and man.

SPEAKER_16 53:32

I hear I hear sirens all night long from Well, and that's the thing, like we've grown up in this stuff now to the point where we're kind of desensitized. Like him and I go to concerts downtown Denver on Colfax or whatever. We're we're never really afraid that you know, anything's gonna pop off or anything like that. It's not like we're in Chicago. You know what I mean? It's not like a drive-by central. But at the same time, this isn't the same city that we grew up in, you know, it's it's just constantly getting worse, and a lot of it is the drugs it's being infiltrated, it's being brought in here by the powers that we um the way people's minds have shifted, you know, like all we were just talking about and we have a segment here about the movies that we've grown up watching. You know, that we've never even actually seen a movie that hasn't been carefully edited by the CIA. And that's pretty sad to say. But you want to prove we're gonna show you right here.

Claims Of CIA Control In Films

SPEAKER_38 54:32

There's a version of your favorite films and TV shows that you weren't allowed to see. Scripts were rewritten, scenes were cut, endings were changed, and characters were altered.

SPEAKER_13 54:43

They had stamped top secret on the top and the bottom and the sides in the margins of every single page. And I said, guys, this is not top secret. This is a Hollywood movie. It's already on video, it's done.

SPEAKER_38 54:57

I'm talking children's animations with rewritten endings, comedy films you've never heard of with deleted scenes, superhero franchises built in secretive contracts, and a screenwriter who tried to tell the wrong story and was found dead with both hands missing.

SPEAKER_13 55:12

It's not an accident that every Hollywood movie about the CIA is pro CIA.

SPEAKER_38 55:18

This has been running since the 1940s. What started with Walt Disney producing propaganda shorts for the military has now evolved into a formal permanent operation. One that now reaches into the biggest franchises on the planet, and it hasn't stopped expanding from there. When John Kiriyaku, a CE whistleblower who went to prison for exposing the torture program, was asked on the diary of a CEO how the agency would hypothetically design an influence campaign, this was his answer.

SPEAKER_13 55:46

You would have to have a goal that would be specific enough that you could actually track the progress to it. It has to be a message. You've got to be able to get a specific, well-honed message out there. And the message can be anything. It could be, you know, love the CIA, we're the good guys. It could be support the overthrow of the Iranian government. It could be, you know, any criticism of Benjamin Atanyah, who is anti-Semitism. It could be anything you want it to be.

SPEAKER_38 56:18

You just have to make sure that it's repeated enough. He mentions a couple of things there that are highly relevant right now. Take Argo, an Oscar-winning film that almost everyone has heard of. The plot follows a CIA officer who poses as a Hollywood producer to smuggle six American diplomats out of Iran, all during the 1979 hostage crisis. As you can imagine, the CIA is unambiguously the hero. There's barely a single mention of the CIA's overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government, or the installing of a dictator who ruled with a secret police force trained by the CIA. And given the current conflict in Iran, you could reasonably argue that the public's understanding of who Iran is and how he got there was influenced in part by films exactly like this. During filming, Affleck visited CIA headquarters multiple times, sat in roundtables in the director's conference room, and even emailed the agency promising to do the agency proud. The CIA had actually been promoting the Argo operation as a suggested movie plot on their own website years before the film was made, and even thanked Affleck publicly on Twitter for the film. Affleck said this when interviewed as part of the press tour.

SPEAKER_01 57:24

Are there many actors in Hollywood who also moonlight as agents, do you think?

SPEAKER_38 57:27

I think there are probably quite a few, yes. I think probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents, and we just don't know it. But Argo's only the surface, and you'll be shocked about where exactly the strategy operates in Hollywood, the films it touches, and how smart it truly is. Take the original script for the Hulk. The canon storyline as per the comic involved Bruce Banner being transformed after a US military program gone wrong. It also included dialogue referencing Operation Ranch Hand, a real program that sprayed roughly 20 million gallons of chemical herbicides, including Agent Orange over Southeast Asia, poisoning a possible 4 million people. Both details were removed purposefully by CIA advisors. This is according to lead files seen by the conversation. They then changed the origin story to a lab experiment gone wrong instead because they couldn't risk anti-government sentiments in a franchise of this size. In the Transformers films, a Pentagon liaison inserted specific dialogue instead of removing it. In one scene just after American troops had been attacked by a deception robot, he added the line Bring Him Home to reinforce US military values. Numerous superhero films, including practically the entire Marvel cinematic universe, which is the single biggest franchise in history, were all built on this from the ground up. Captain Marvel was granted full Air Force support. The Air Force was advertising the film on social media before Marvel had even started marketing it. Captain Marvel and Black Panther were both used directly in recruitment campaigns. The result was a documented spike in female applicants to the Air Force Academy. They literally called it the Captain Marvel Effect. On Iron Man, which was massively supported by the Pentagon with $1 billion worth of equipment, there were literally fights on set between the directors and the agency. A Pentagon liaison, Phil Strubb, objected to a line in which a military character says people would kill themselves for the opportunities I have. The director John pushed back, and soon they were standing on the flight lines at Edwards Air Force Base with 200 crew watching. They eventually settled on they'd walk

Script Changes In Blockbusters

SPEAKER_38 59:25

over hot coals, but even then, that didn't make the final cut. But a much weirder example is Meet the Parents when Ben Stiller's character walks into Robert De Niro's workplace. In the original script, he finds CIA torture manuals. That was rewritten. Now he finds photos of De Niro meeting Bill Clinton. IMDB credits Chase Brandon as a technical advisor and Milt Bearden as Consultant CIA on the film which you can see here. These examples just cover what we know for certain from a league of 60,000 pages of documents, which confirmed the CIA has been involved in more than 2,500 productions in total. The Pentagon runs something called the Entertainment Media Office, a formal liaison operation that works directly with Hollywood Studios. They support studios financially, offer advice on sensitive topics, and lend them specialist equipment and prime filming locations. In exchange for permissions, the CIA get to read and approve the script before a single frame is shot. They also have complete veto power and directors are obliged to follow their word. One Pentagon Minder said on record, if they don't do what I say, I take my toys and go away. A declassified CIA document released in 2019 all but confirms that, logging dozens of meetings between the CIA's Office of Public Affairs and executives from NBC Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Paramount, and CIA. The document covers just two years from 2014 to 2016. It includes lunches, development deals on campus filming approvals, and meetings to develop CIA-themed TV shows. The CIA has always claimed it merely answers requests on an as-needed basis. The document shows active outreach, the agency is going to the studios, not the other way around. But you have to stretch back much further to find out when this all began, because when one of George Orwell's most important works was adapted into a movie, the CIA had the final say over its closing moments. That film is Animal Farm, a classic anti-establishment story about rebelling against power. After Orwell died, the film's rights to Animal Farm were purchased by two men, and both were undercover CIA agents. This was in 1954, the height of the Cold War and the Red Scare, when the fear of communism was at its peak. The CIA funded the entire animation. They hired British animators, deliberately avoiding American studios to create distance, and because the agency distrusted Hollywood animators during the Red Scare, and they rewrote the ending. In Orwell's book, the animals look through the farmhouse window and can't tell the pigs from the humans. The line

Animal Farm And Propaganda Roots

SPEAKER_38 1:01:52

says, quote, the creatures outside looked from pig to man and from pig to man and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which. This is the whole point. Revolution replaces one set of oppressors with another. Capitalism and communism are equally corrupt. The CIA couldn't have that message going out, so their version ends with the animals triumphantly overthrowing the pigs in a second revolution. Communism bad, rebellion good, America wins by implication. See, watch how they storm the building and how it doesn't imply the same message as the book at all. It's subtle, but the new version reinforces the division between good and bad. It creates a moral precedent that corrupt systems can be overthrown and replaced with something better. Which is a really comforting thought, unless you realize it's exactly the story the CIA tells every time it topples a government. All Wells ending says the opposite, that power corrupts regardless of who holds it, and that revolution just replaces one set of oppressors with another. The director Joy Batchelor strongly opposed the change. So, the CIA threatened to pool financing. The intelligence officer E. Howard Hunt, who later became involved in the Watergate scandal, said the film was, quote, carefully tweaked to heighten the anti-communist message. Although it was originally aimed at adults, Animal Fun found its primary audience in school over the US and Europe. By then the state and media were already deeply intertwined. Governments had correctly identified that the media was the best way to access the minds of the public. Generations of children were shown a CIA-funded film with a CIA rewritten ending, as if this was a faithful adaptation of Orwell. So you may not be surprised to learn that Disney was the testing ground for how effective propaganda could be. While it might be hard to believe today, Disney was actually going broke, and the government offered it a deal. They accepted, and within two years, over 90% of Disney's output, mostly propaganda, was government content. Disney characters found their way into all sorts of government materials, including 1,200 military insignia. Walt Disney even personally designed this terrifying Mickey Mouse gas mask in order to make children less afraid during air raids. If you look at Disney films through the ages, like Snow White, The Incredibles and Frozen, they're often said to carry some level of deliberate messaging. In a conversation between Theo Vaughn and Robert Green, the guy who wrote the 48 Laws of Power, Green said they offer a singular worldview that runs through most Western mainstream media. While modern society came to describe this phenomena as woke, the more important aspect is the consent it manufactures.

SPEAKER_08 1:04:25

And what angered me about Hollywood. You know, people pretending to be these liberal, wonderful people in favor of all the best causes out there to create art. What bullshit? They wanted power. They they loved having the power over people. You know, they would drop the woke stuff tomorrow if they could make more money doing something else. It's just about what's gonna bring the bugs in.

SPEAKER_38 1:04:47

Someone upstream decides what the acceptable worldview is, and the media is passed accordingly. The Pentagon did it with military values, the CIA did it with anti-communism, Hollywood does it now with whatever sells. The product always looks like entertainment and not ideology. These are films watched by billions, not just in the West but worldwide. So this is also a matter of the image the world's superpowers want to project. Soft power has always mattered enormously to the West. Huge military, invincible superheroes, perfect moral values, intelligence agencies that can do anything they please and always win. Now you might be wondering what happens if someone breaks ranks and goes against the grain. Whether it's possible to subvert the CIA and inform the public of the truth. Well, there has been at least one occasion when someone tried to do exactly that. He was Gary DeVore, a Hollywood screenwriter with major credits on Schwarzenegger's raw deal, Christopher Watkins, The Dog of War, and backwards with Tommy Lee Jones and Sally Field. He was deep into a script idea that even his own wife didn't fully understand until after he was gone.

SPEAKER_41 1:05:56

Just take their name down and their number and don't be worried about it. The first four years, there were two calls. And then, not too long before he actually disappeared, there were several from the CIA at Langley.

SPEAKER_38 1:06:12

It was called The Big Steel, set during the US invasion of Panama. A friend of his, Hollywood director John Irvin, had lunch with Gary a few weeks before he disappeared. He could tell that something was off. He was troubled.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:24

Something was was bothering him. He was um he wasn't really in the conversation. He was having trouble with the script he was writing. Which he talked about more about not the script,

A Screenwriter Vanishes After A Script

SPEAKER_07 1:06:36

but about a government very, very sensitive inconvenient truth. He was speaking more as a journalist than he was as a screenwriter. He was talking as an investigator.

SPEAKER_38 1:06:48

A researcher who later investigated the case called Dr. Matthew Alfred eventually uncovered what Gary had found, and it's really dark.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:56

The dictator of Panama, Manuel Noriega, made secret recordings in wired rooms of senior US officials having sex with unaged prostitutes, male and female. One British newspaper commented on this, and the story was buried. And the guy who wrote it got shot by an anonymous sniper.

SPEAKER_38 1:07:20

Gary planned to put that in a Hollywood film. He was driving home through the desert, and then that was the last anyone heard from him.

SPEAKER_41 1:07:27

And he said, I'll see you later. I never heard from him again.

SPEAKER_38 1:07:30

It's like Gary DeVore simply vanished into thin air. There was a massive search, foot patrols, helicopters, a hundred thousand dollar reward, but zero leads and no witnesses. He was missing for 374 days. But then his Ford Explorer was found beneath 15 feet of muddy water at the bottom of the California Aqueduct. Despite the aqueduct having been searched extensively, his laptop containing the script was missing, his gun was missing, and his hands were missing.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:00

Why were his hands off?

SPEAKER_41 1:08:06

Listen, the man had his fingers removed. Why? Why? In my own mind, I feel that there is crime here. I do not feel that my husband drove off of this bridge.

SPEAKER_38 1:08:18

Within a week of his disappearance, agents from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DOD arrived at the family home. After an official went into his office, his computer was wiped. And here's an unlikely connection to meet the parents in other films years later. It was Chase Brandon, the CIA's entertainment industry liaison officer, who was among those at the scene. When Alfred started digging into the case years later, he received a warning to stop what he was doing and leave while alone.

SPEAKER_37 1:08:47

You know, of course, you've received an informal or semi-formal warning. From a CIA and DOD contractor who said to you, back off the CIA, you're going to you're going too far with this now. These people can and will ruin your life and come knocking on mine on your doors.

SPEAKER_38 1:09:12

A former White House official from the Reagan and George Bush administrations confirmed that DeVore harbored a deep-rooted relationship with the agency and conceded the case as the hallmarks of a cover-up. The CIA declined to comment on the entire situation and the case officially remains open. So that's the other side of the coin. What potentially happens when the CIA's veto isn't obeyed? We don't really know the truth of what happened, but it does show you that you should mess around with topics not sanctioned by the agency. As for the impacts this all has on society, Theo and Joe Rogan were very perceptive about how it can change public perception.

SPEAKER_40 1:09:48

So in World War I, one of the problems that they had was people didn't want to be over there killing people. And so people were shooting, but they weren't shooting at the actual enemy. And so then they realized, well, we've got to do something about that. And so after that they started creating all these really patriotic war movies where the guys are heroes, they go over and they shoot all the bad guys, and then they're awesome. So then the next group

Torture Myths And Media Persuasion

SPEAKER_40 1:10:12

of people that go to war are all going to be indoctrinated with these films.

SPEAKER_38 1:10:15

John Kiriaku thinks that nowhere has that indoctrination been more effective or more dangerous than in warming the population up to the idea of torture.

SPEAKER_13 1:10:23

One thing that bothers me the most is when Hollywood perpetuates the myth that torture prevented acts of terrorism or disrupted acts of terrorism. And to me, that myth is dangerous in that it affects public opinion. You can put whatever euphemism you want on it. You can call it enhanced interrogation techniques. I don't care what you call it. What we did to some of those people was just illegal.

SPEAKER_38 1:10:50

Kiriaku would know.

SPEAKER_13 1:10:56

I objected to the CIA's use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, which I believe to be torture. And I went public with that information in December of 2007. All this time, by the way, I'm waiting for somebody to come out and say something. And nobody said anything. As a result, I was prosecuted and served 30 months in prison. But I'm glad I did. Somebody had to do it.

SPEAKER_38 1:11:21

This is especially true in the film Zero Dark 30, which is about capturing Osama Bin Laden. John Kiriyaki thinks it's the strongest example of making the CIA look clean from every angle.

SPEAKER_13 1:11:32

Zero Dark 30. So Zero Dark 30, I think, is the most egregious example of CIA interference in Hollywood.

SPEAKER_38 1:11:41

The CIA gave the filmmakers classified briefings over a classified mock-up of the Bin Laden compound. The film essentially pushed that the torture program is what led them to bin Laden. Kiriaku says that's a complete lie.

SPEAKER_13 1:12:11

Okay, that's that's chargeable under the Espionage Act. The CIA just turned it over. Why? Because it made the CIA look good.

SPEAKER_38 1:12:20

In real life, intelligence work is edgy, gruesome, and morally ambiguous. Mainstream TV and cinema don't need to be accurate. They just need to feel right and not leave the audience with too many lingering questions or ambiguity. They pick up on this exact point in the podcast.

SPEAKER_39 1:12:35

Even though it they are torturing people. Now, entire population is so kind of almost like brainwashed into, but they are good guys, so torture is okay as long as good guys are doing. Well, that was the narrative. And they've got so desensitized towards doing bad shit, and if it's the CIA, or if it's Tom Cruise, or if it's like Mission Impossible, and they're doing bad shit and they're torturing people, that's okay. Like now the message is that's okay, you don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_38 1:13:02

So desensitization and controlling the narrative are central to this whole strategy. But there are deeper layers than promoting and suppressing films. The CIA's venture capital arm InQtel, literally named after Q from James Bond, has been funding tech companies since 1999. Google bought an InQtel funded mapping startup called Keyhole that became Google Earth. In Qtel and Google then jointly invested in a company that builds predictive analytics by mining web data. Palantir was one of their earliest investments. The CIA had established an entire directorate of digital innovation specifically to engage Silicon Valley. So it's all linked together and practically operates in plain sight. Theo Vaughn told Green a story about bumping into a construction worker at Century City Mall in LA.

SPEAKER_11 1:13:49

So I start talking to him and he's like, dude, guess what we're building? I'm like, I don't know, you know, I thought maybe it could have been like a Hardee's or something. He's like, we're building like a 20-story building, and 10 floors of it are the CIA, and the other 10 floors are a management company, Hollywood Management.

SPEAKER_38 1:14:09

Theo was mixing up the CIA and CAA, Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most powerful talent firm. But Green made it sound like the real thing was even worse.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:19

And you go to that building and they call it like the Death Star. There are like, you know, politicians who are being represented by CAA, athletes, tech bros, influencers. It's pretty frightening though when you go inside. It's almost like Scientology. Scientology. Hollywood's version of Scientology.

SPEAKER_38 1:14:39

He's describing high-level ongoing talks at the intersection of the media, government, and big tech. All in a building lovingly called the Death Star. So you can now see how this whole influence campaign is far bigger than cutting lines in

Big Tech Pipelines And Podcast Influence

SPEAKER_38 1:14:52

Marvel movies. It relies on cross-collaboration between multiple arms of state and private power. And the product hasn't stopped to the cinema. It's been actively following the audience, which means you, wherever you go, including online.

SPEAKER_13 1:15:04

Do you think the CIA are have a strategy for podcasters and for podcasting? I think yes, now they do. It took them a little while to get current, but just like they over time developed a strategy with Hollywood, sure, they're developing a strategy with podcasters.

SPEAKER_38 1:15:23

This strategy is consolidating as we speak, which will only make it easier for agencies like the CIA to wield greater control over the narratives. Larry Ellison, whose company Oracle now hosts TikTok US algorithm and controls its content moderation, just bought Paramount through his son David. And if their bid for Warner Bros. and Discovery goes through, you can add CNN, HBO, Warner Bros. Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon MTV, Comedy Central, Discovery, TLC, TBS, and TNT to that list. An internal memo obtained by MPR confirmed the Ellison-led entity will control what's allowed and what's not on the platform. Bernie Sanders called it oligarchy. And Oracle, which sits underneath all of this, has held government contracts with the CIA and the Department of Defense for decades. Whatever you call it, the media pipeline is now shorter than it's ever been, and in fewer hands. There's a through line from Donald Duck selling war bonds to Captain Marvel, selling Air Force recruitment to Google Earth, tracking your location has never been broken. The methods have evolved, direct propaganda, covert funding, script consultations, structural incentives, venture capital, and digital surveillance. The principle itself hasn't changed. Get the message right, make sure it's repeated enough, and eventually nobody questions this anymore. And if you've seen what happens when someone steps outside that system, a screenwriter at the bottom of a canal with no hands, a researcher warned to back off before they ruin his life, maybe then you understand why so few people ever try. It's not a theory about Hollywood, but a description of what 60,000 pages of declassified documents confirm has already happened, and is still happening, to the stories you grew up on. The truth is, we simply don't know how deep this rabbit hole really goes. How much of the information-rich world around us is real and how much is fake or manipulated just enough to maintain a thin veneer of authenticity. Like we saw in this recent video we did on the CIA compromising podcasts, the rabbit hole truly goes deep. In any case, the strategies employed by the CIA and the government to influence the media are not theoretical, and they don't spend millions on them for no reason. So ask yourself, when you're next watching your favorite films and TV shows, can you really take them at value? If you think you can, ask yourself for how much longer do you think this will be the case?

Our Take On Art Censorship

SPEAKER_16 1:17:42

I've talked about that book Chaos a hundred times, and they've even said it that there's agents in Hollywood, you know, that actors even were you know CIA certified.

SPEAKER_17 1:17:54

Right. And that I mean you know, and it always still makes me think back to the uh game show, the Gong Show game show host. He always, always said, you know, he was a government operative. You know, that's you know, that's how he got around throughout the world, is is you know, that was his cover as the game show host. Right. You know, people call him crazy, that's you know, that's all right.

SPEAKER_16 1:18:17

Like they say that they're in it, and then people are like, Well, and they think that because of these movies, the way they portray them, that they're some kind of like superhero people that are you know are just the really smart ones that are out for our own good. Right, yeah. It's like totally the opposite.

SPEAKER_17 1:18:32

Yeah, it you know, and that's just how they get us, you know, they they get our trust into them and they make us feel that they are they're good for the city. That's crazy, man.

SPEAKER_16 1:18:40

We're not just here to ban or bag on the CIA. That's not what we're doing. We're just totally not talking about like what's in the movies that we all grew up watching, right? Every movie. And I've talked about 1984 on this podcast for a bunch. And it even says that even the video that we've seen, the movies, all the stuff, the the book probably, all of it has been had minor tweaking done to it.

SPEAKER_17 1:19:05

Minor tweaking. That's all it is for a minor tweak. And in the whole animal fire thing as well, you know. I mean, it was my didn't want it to be done over here because, you know, uh, that's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_16 1:19:18

And and when you sit there and think about every movie you watch that has had some kind of complicity or to the CIA where it's like they were consulting on it and saying, Okay, well, instead of saying, you know, they killed themselves to be in this position, just say they walked over some hot coals or something. It's like I don't dude, it's nothing's art anymore. If you're not watching somebody's personal live performance, it's almost like you're not gonna get what you should be seeing. Like when we were kids, I was telling my stepson about this the other day. It was like we didn't have canceling people. We didn't have, you know, if you were gonna say something that people didn't like where they were just like, what did you hear? And now we're gonna have a whole movement about what this person heard what somebody said, you know, it was like none of this stuff was going on, and now that's way what it was all about. Like if you say Israel too many times, you'll get anti-semite blacklisted or whatever, and it's like, bro, this is America. We're supposed to have freedom of speech here. Right. You know what I mean? That's what the first amendment is that we can speak and say what we think and have our own opinion. And just like we've talked about before, there's people that say things that we do not like that does not mean that they don't have the right to say it. You know, and so when it comes to stuff like this, it's like we're not even getting uh a person that wrote the screenplay, we're not even getting his true art form. We're getting a government version of it. And we've always thought all of our lives that we're in this free country that you know, we're not like those other countries where they you know manipulate their movies and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_17 1:21:01

No, not at all. Apparently. Right. I mean you think about almost all the movies and TV shows that were just some kind of, you know, the things that they put in them to make us think certain ways and this is how life should be, and ah, this is how great life is.

SPEAKER_16 1:21:19

Well, and like I said, with that book about the hippie movement and the Black Panther Party and how they villainized the the hippie movement, you know, when they weren't useful anymore, they made Charles Manson a cult classic. Some people think he's a hero and all this stuff. It's like it's insane what his country's done. Just another pawn in the uh pawn in the game of chess or just you know, well, and then you know, all these mind control things that we have to go through on a daily basis. What whatever we read, whatever we look into, whatever we investigate has been cleared and declassified declassified by somebody. So it's like nothing is really just free anymore. You know, and so what happens is these kids that are growing up in this stuff are taught by teachers that have a certain agenda that they're supposed to teach, you know? And what's happening is all these kids are getting put on Adderall or whatever if they're not paying attention and not going along with the program, it's because they're free thinkers. You know? And so they start messing with these kids' minds. And we can see on our next story about a guy that thinks he was a zombie hunter where his mind kind of started and how it went. Check this out.

The Zombie Hunter Serial Killer Case

SPEAKER_06 1:22:49

Every town has a dark side. The following story is one that genuinely got under my skin. Because the man we're talking about today wasn't a killer who ever hid in fear. He was never hiding or laying low. In fact, he was the exact opposite. He was out in public, showing up at parades, composing for photos with cops, and even signing autographs for fans. He had a costume, a custom car, and a whole identity that people in Phoenix loved him for. The entire time, for over 20 years, he was one of the most brutal killers this city had ever seen. Thanks for tuning into Every Town where today we have a real crazy one for you. So if you haven't heard of this guy, you're in for a ride. Let's head on over to Arizona now and check out Brian Miller, aka the zombie hunter. To really understand what Brian Miller became, you have to go back to before anyone was watching. Before the costume, before those fans, before the police cars lined up to take photos with them. You have to go back to 1989 when he was just a 16-year-old kid on a Phoenix City bus. A 24-year-old woman named Celeste Bentley got off at the same stop as Miller that May morning. And she was headed to her job at a department store near Paradise Valley Mall, just another Tuesday. And she noticed the teen, the way you notice anybody sharing the same sidewalk. Briefly, no reason for concern, and then she moved on. But a moment later, he ran past her and she felt what she thought was a hard shove to her back. She turned around to yell at him, and then she reached back, and her hand came away covered in blood. The Miller had driven a knife into her upper back and then kept on running. A doctor who treated her later said the blade had narrowly missed her spine and her organs. Another inch in either direction, and Celeste doesn't walk out of that hospital, and she might not have walked again at all. Miller was caught nearby shortly after. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sent to juvie detention until he turned 18. And look, that alone is serious. 16-year-old kid randomly stabbing a woman on her way to work. And that's not a kid making a bad choice, it's something much darker and deep-rooted. But here's the thing. What came next? Well, that's what should have changed everything. And somehow, it didn't. While Miller was locked up, his mother Ellen went through his room at home, and what she found made her stomach drop. It was a handwritten document titled simply Plan. She took it straight to the police because what was in it wasn't an angry scribbling of a troubled kid. It was organized, specific, and methodical. It laid out step by step exactly how Brian Miller intended to find a young woman, abduct her, restrain her, essay her, kill her, and then dismember her. As a reminder, he was just 16 years old.

SPEAKER_35 1:26:32

When he was younger, he wrote this letter describing what he was going to do or what he was fantasizing about doing to what he said was the 17-year-old girl in the letter.

The Plan Note And Early Warning Signs

SPEAKER_06 1:26:48

Things about decapitation and what he wanted to do afterward, later match almost exactly what was done to the first woman he murdered. He had written it all down years before he ever did it. His mom was so terrified by what she found that when Brian was released, she refused to let him come home. She told the police directly, I am scared of my own son. And then Brian Patrick Miller walked out of juvie detention at 18 years old, moved into a halfway house run by the Mennonite Outreach Ministry in North Phoenix. That note, it went into a file, and two years passed by. The girly one between the two of them, always trying to keep up with Kristen, who was outdoors and climbing trees, even though it wasn't really her style. You see, Brandy was developmentally delayed, emotionally closer to a nine or ten year old. She was trusting, eager, and she saw the good in people, the way kids like that do, openly and without suspicion. As she headed out that evening with her clipboard and her purpose, as she was last seen less than 70 feet from the building where Brian lived, walking in the direction of his door, and she was never seen again. Police came through hard in the days that followed. Canine units, door-to-door knocks, and officers digging through trash bins, looking for anything. Miller was reportedly at work when they came to his building, and in the end, no suspect emerged because no body was ever found. And like so many missing persons cases, with nothing concrete to hold on to, it went cold. What investigators wouldn't piece together until decades later was something that the people in the Mennonite community hadn't forgotten. Around that same time, a terrible smell had been coming from Miller's apartment. Persistent enough that a group of neighbors eventually got together and did something about it. They organized an informal cleanup of the space while Miller was gone. They went in, scrubbed surfaces, and threw things out without looking too closely at what they were throwing away, and then they left. They had no idea what they had walked into, and no clue what they had just cleaned up. That was the fall of 92, several months after Brandy Myers vanished. And it wouldn't mean anything to anyone for a very long time. Six months after Brandy disappeared, Angela Brasso went out for an evening bike ride. She was a 22-year-old tech worker who moved to Phoenix to build something. A career, some independence, a life that was just starting to find its shape. She loved those night rides along the canal paths after the heat had died down. It was her thing, her way of unwinding. Her boyfriend Joe encouraged her to go as he stayed back to prepare some gifts and get her cake ready. But then he waited, and she didn't return. Enough time had passed to make Joe grab his bike and go out looking. He was worried she might have fell and hurt herself, but he couldn't find her. After that, he called her friends and called her mother back in Pennsylvania, and eventually he called the police. The following morning, authorities went searching and they fanned out from the canal and onto the neighboring properties. And it was in one of those fields that they made the grisly discovery. Angela hadn't just been stabbed and assaulted, she'd been decapitated. Her bicycle was nowhere to be found, and the same went for her head. A week and a half later, a fisherman would end up pulling it from the canal. It was found two miles from where her body lay in that field. But the detail that really stood out here was that there was almost no decomposition after nearly two weeks. The belief was that whoever did this had kept it refrigerated before putting it in the water, which tells you something about who you're dealing with. This was someone who was doing exactly what they wanted to do with a body, and it was organized, deliberate, and sadistic. The persons of interest list eventually grew to over 600 names, but the DNA matched nothing in any database. Without that one piece, the investigation had a ceiling it couldn't push through. Then came September of 93, 10 months after Angela's murder. Melanie Burness was a 17-year-old high school student who had dipped out for a bike ride on the night of September 21st while her mother was out in town having dinner. When her mom came home and found her gone, she started calling Melanie's friends, but no one knew anything. As the hours ticked by, the worry that had started as a low hum turned into something she couldn't ignore anymore. Early the following morning, a woman riding along the canal with her young daughter, strapped in the bike seat behind her, rode through what looked like a puddle coming out from one of the tunnels beneath the interstate. But something about it bothered her enough to turn around and loop back for a second look. This puddle, it was red, and there were drag marks beside it, leading from the path towards the water. Police were called, and it didn't take long

Canal Murders And A Cold Trail

SPEAKER_06 1:33:28

for them to find Melanie laying face down in that canal, where she too had been stabbed several times and essayed, but this scene was different from Angela's in ways that told investigators something important. Melanie's own clothes had been removed and she'd been dressed up in a teal bodysuit that wasn't hers. And furthermore, the letters WSC had been carved into her chest. The killer had stayed and taken his time. There was nothing frantic or impulsive about any of it. He enjoyed what he was doing. When the DNA from Melanie's scene came back from the lab, well it matched the DNA from Angela's murder. Same man, both women, and he had simply walked away from it. Twice. Phoenix PD escalated everything they had. Undercover officers worked the canal paths at night. DNA samples were pulled from persons of interest across multiple states. The unknown profile was then uploaded to CODIS, the National Criminal DNA database. No match. Years passed by, and the canal murders settled into Phoenix's collective memory the way the worst unsolved cases do, as something unresolved, but always still there, just under the surface. The kind of thing that parents who lived through it still brought up when explaining why they didn't let their kids go out after dark. Then in 2011, a detective named Troy Hillman took over the cold case unit and went back through everything from the beginning. He later described reading those original files as one of the most disturbing things he'd encounter in his entire career. The kind of details, he said, that don't leave you. Because of that, he became obsessed. His unit flew across the country collecting additional DNA samples to rule people out. And they brought in forensic experts to build a profile of whoever had done this. And what that profile kept pointing to was someone local, someone drawn to acting out violent fantasies, someone who was very likely already hiding somewhere inside those case files. By 2014, a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick had been developing something that didn't really exist before. Through her company, Identifinders International, she had built software that could do something the criminal justice system had never had access

Genetic Genealogy Changes Everything

SPEAKER_06 1:36:08

to. Instead of searching for a direct hit in a law enforcement database, well, they could mine public genealogy websites, the kind people use to trace their ancestry for partial DNA matches. That means that every person who submits their DNA to find out if they're 12% Scandinavian or whatever is actually now a possible solver of crimes. If a relative of a killer is curious enough about where they came from, well, Fitzpatrick's software can take a killer's DNA and find that partial match online, build out a family tree from there, and work backward through the bloodline until it found its way to the killer himself. The science was brand new at the time, completely untested in a real criminal case. When Hillman brought the idea to department leadership, it took him three months just to get approval to fund it. Nobody knew if it would work because it had never been tried before. But it was more than the investigation had produced in over 20 years. Hillman went back to his master list and pulled every person named Miller from those 600-plus files. And six names came up and he started working through them one by one. And there, part way down the list, was a name that had been sitting in those files since the early 90s. Brian Patrick Miller, 42 years old with a Phoenix address. Shortly after the murders, an anonymous caller had tipped police that a teenager named Brian Miller had access to a teal bodysuit, similar to the one Melanie Burness was found wearing. That tip had been looked at and then quietly set aside. He was too young, they thought, and they moved on. Now, Hillman pulled the full file and started reading. That was when he saw the 1989 stabbing of Celeste Bentley. He saw the note marked Plan and what a teenage Miller had written he wanted to do to a young woman. He saw the proximity to where Brandy Myers was last seen in 1992. He saw a man with a documented history of violence against women who had been in Phoenix for both murders, whose last name had just been flagged by a genetic genealogy search for the very first time in history. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up. What Hillman didn't know yet was what Miller had been doing with himself for the past 20 years. Detective Clark Schwartzkopf began the surveillance, watching Miller on his breaks at the Amazon warehouse. He did the same routine every single day. Miller clocked out, walked to the parking lot, sat in his car, and proceeded to blast music loud enough to hear from across the lot. When he was done expelling whatever release the music gave him, he just went back inside, predictable as a clock. You could say perhaps that's ordinary, but the car he was sitting in was anything but. A full-size zombie mannequin was strapped in the back seat behind bars like a trophy, and custom graphics across the back that read, Zombie Hunter. This wasn't just a car, it was a whole identity. For years, Miller had been showing up at Phoenix comic conventions, parades, and car shows. He was always in full costume consisting of a long trench coat, goggles, hard hat, fabricated Gatling gun, and people, they loved him for it. Fans came specifically looking for him, lines formed for autographs. And for those who knew this guy, well, they described him as a harmless marshmallow. Gentle, unassuming, a good single dad who brought his 15-year-old daughter everywhere he went and seemed genuinely incapable of making anyone uncomfortable. And cops posed with him. Actual uniformed police officers, smiling arm in arm with Brian Miller, completely unaware of what they were standing next to. When investigators obtained a search warrant and then gained access to his house, what they found painted a very different picture than what people thought of this guy. The front door couldn't be opened. Belongings were stacked floor to ceiling throughout the house, with narrow paths carved through the piles just to reach the bathroom and the kitchen. And on the outside of his refrigerator, not hidden away or tucked in a drawer, but right there where anyone walking into the kitchen could see it, was a photograph of an actual decapitated human head, taped up like a piece of art, reminiscent of what had happened to Angela. His teenage daughter, well, she saw it every single day. To make an arrest, though, they needed his DNA, and Schwarzkopf had an idea.

SPEAKER_16 1:42:03

So I came up with an idea that I would recruit Mr.

SPEAKER_37 1:42:07

Miller as a security person, and I told him that we were out there doing security on that particular um office complex warehouse, and that there had been some thefts from it.

SPEAKER_06 1:42:19

Miller was interested, and they arranged to meet properly and go over the details. Which is how this killer ended up sitting across from a cold case detective at a Chili's restaurant in Phoenix on January 2nd, 2015. Schwarzkopf

The Chili’s Glass DNA Sting

SPEAKER_06 1:42:37

had coordinated everything in advance. Undercover detectives were already inside. They had personally pulled a clean glass straight from the dishwasher and moved it to a specific booth away from other customers. Nothing contaminated, nothing left to chance. Every single thing Miller touched at that table was going to be collected the second he walked out that door. What Schwarzkopf hadn't planned on was for Miller showing up with his daughter. She sat with him through the entire meal while Miller ordered a burger and a water. He ate that burger in about five bites and didn't use any silverware. And then he didn't touch his drink, just let it sit there. Schwarzkopf kept the conversation going and asked Miller if he wanted something else, all while running through scenarios in his head about how this whole thing was about to fall apart because of one untouched glass of water. And then Brian finally picked it up and drank. Schwarzkopf had what he needed. After the meal, Miller gave him a quick tour of the zombie Hunter car and they parted ways like two guys who just had a perfectly normal lunch. The moment Miller was gone, those undercover detectives moved in and secured the glass. But as Schwartzkopf drove away from that chilies, well, he was genuinely not convinced they had their man. Because he had just spent an hour watching Brian Miller with his daughter, how natural he was with her, how easy and how completely ordinary he was. And he could not make that person fit the violence on those canal paths in 92 and 93. His gut was telling him they were about to clear Brian Miller and move on. Eleven days later, though, they got the results back. It was a match.

SPEAKER_35 1:44:45

After that meeting, they took Miller's glass, and it was the DNA from that glass that led to his arrest.

SPEAKER_06 1:44:54

The DNA from that glass was the same DNA that had been sitting in those case files for over two decades, collected from the bodies of Angela Brasso and Melanie Burness. Miller was arrested that same day in the interrogation room when detectives told him his DNA had been matched to both victims. He said he didn't see how that was possible. When they pushed harder, he said he couldn't remember everything he'd done back then, but that he knew he hadn't killed anyone. The trial didn't begin until October of 2022, more than seven years after his arrest. Competency hearings,

Trial Strategy And Final Verdict

SPEAKER_06 1:45:32

lengthy delays, and ultimately a decision by Miller to waive his right to a jury trial entirely. So just him and a judge. His defense team stood up in that courtroom and did something unexpected. And they conceded everything. The DNA, the murders, all of it. Brian Miller killed those women, they said. He just shouldn't be held responsible because he didn't have the mental capacity to understand what he was doing at the time. They built their entire case around his childhood. A mother documented as deeply abusive, who had used her law enforcement belt on him as discipline, starting when he was five years old, who neighbors described as someone who openly resented her own son.

SPEAKER_35 1:46:18

In the defense, they're going to try to establish that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and one of the requirements there is that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. So getting sort of two different views of the same scene there.

SPEAKER_06 1:46:34

A defense psychologist testified that Miller had developed dissociative amnesia from that trauma, that he had carried out the murders in a dissociative state and had no memory of them afterward. And Miller himself, well, he rejected all of it. From prison, he maintained consistently that he didn't have dissociative amnesia. He just knew he hadn't committed the murders at all. But the prosecutors, well, they had a simple answer to all that. He remembered stabbing Celeste Bentley in 1989, and he remembered a 2002 stabbing in Washington state, clearly enough, to mount a self-defense case and get acquitted. His memory, they argued, was selective in a way that mapped perfectly onto his legal exposure. After six months of testimony and 36 witnesses, O'Miller was found guilty on all counts, and he was sentenced to death. About how the media took a costume he put on a few times a year and built an entire monster around it that had nothing to do with who he actually was. He writes about his daughter, from whom he's been largely estranged since his arrest, and says he isn't gonna push her, and he knows she'll reach out when she's ready. He says he's always been against it. What he doesn't write about, not really, is Angela Brasso or Melanie Burness, and not Brandy Myers either, whose case is still officially open and whose body has never been found. But here's what the case has left behind beyond the conviction. It was the first cold case in history solved through investigative genetic genealogy. The method Colleen Fitzpatrick helped developed, the Troy Hillman fought for three months just to get funded. That nobody was sure would even work, but it did. And since then, the same approach has been used to crack hundreds of cold cases all across the country. It changed forensic investigation permanently. Which means that somewhere out there right now, there's a detective sitting with a case file that's been cold for 20 years. Because of what happened along the Arizona Canal in 92 and 93, because of Angela and Melanie. Well, they have a tool that didn't exist before, and soon enough, another killer will get caught.

How Could No One Notice

SPEAKER_16 1:49:39

Zombie hunter, huh?

SPEAKER_17 1:49:41

Right. I mean, that just uh with cops right under their nose. Right?

SPEAKER_16 1:49:47

And just like Najla, nothing nothing happening how a kid who gets away with stabbing somebody in the back and then just getting out after a couple years is insane that they're just like let free from a juvenile center and nothing after that just no big deal and then the afraid of Rome.

SPEAKER_17 1:50:06

It's so weird that the fact that you know his mom was a cop and you know she's like, I'm afraid of uh of my son and yet, you know, he just you know finishing.

SPEAKER_16 1:50:16

And then the defense people are trying to use that like she was some terrible right. I mean she's a cop and she's afraid of her kid.

SPEAKER_17 1:50:24

Yeah she's letting the system know that the this guy is not right. I you know my my kid is not good. And uh you know plenty of people have gone you know to been abused and you know didn't turn in to be uh weird crazy serial killers and then just nonchalantly go through life with uh uh like nothing ever happened. Right. And then have you know it was weird to that he had you know a daughter and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_16 1:50:50

And well like I was saying kind of before we watched this video was a lot of the serial killers it seems to turn out where they have like one human being that they hold precious to them whether that person's alive or dead like think about like psycho the movie. Yeah you know like his mom was a was his god you know right things like that. So it doesn't surprise me that his little girl was like completely safe although she was being raised in a place where you have beheaded or you know decapitated heads up on the wall is art. Frickin nuts man and oh it's it's Halloween stuff babe it's no big deal.

SPEAKER_17 1:51:32

Where's the mom?

SPEAKER_16 1:51:34

And that's the thing like they never said it like I was thinking that same thing like whatever happened to the mom of that little girl like she just appeared like where did she come from dude for real like did she kidnap her?

SPEAKER_17 1:51:47

Right. I mean I mean he just said that he had that's a weird and interesting uh very weird things that you know maybe there's a CIA operative in on this one too and they made sure that we couldn't see anything about it.

unknown 1:52:02

I don't know.

SPEAKER_17 1:52:02

Maybe I don't know that I would just it just was like as we were watching I'm like and they got towards the end I was like what happened to the mom right they didn't see it but I don't know that's a good question man. That's something to dig into I guess maybe the next one.

SPEAKER_16 1:52:18

But when you've got stuff like this there's a behavior pattern that's going on that it was completely overlooked and that's crazy about the whole DNA thing too I thought DNA was around a little bit before that. I know it wasn't around forever but I don't well it it depends on when because they didn't get his DNA until um well I'm saying when that was the first study that actually was that caught somebody oh that that that way that's that was the very first study that caught somebody so that's why I'm saying I thought it had already been around catching people before that. Oh okay yeah so that's why that we have it now is because of that. So that's pretty crazy man.

Mike The Headless Chicken Story

SPEAKER_17 1:52:54

I mean for in cases like that I mean you know that that's obviously all because of taking a drink out of a cup. Right?

SPEAKER_16 1:53:00

It's insane man You're up to no good man don't trust nobody don't accept meetings don't drink out of cups and always take your cigarette butts or just don't be up to no good right well yeah you can just do that too you know don't don't keep your hands off people and you'll be all right yeah don't go murdering people drink fat you may have never known yeah yeah how you like that liked it right on so I got a good one in 1945 a farmer named Lloyd Olsen tried to chop off a chicken's head for dinner he missed the jugular vein and left the brain stem intact the chicken Mike I guess that's what they named him didn't die he shook it off and started pecking the ground Lloyd was shocked Lloyd was shocked and decided to keep him he fed Mike with an eye driper uh directly into his esophagus uh Mike became a national celebrity touring sideshows and earning forty five hundred dollars a month in 1945 he lived uh for 18 months at as a headless wonder before choking on a kernel of corn in a motel room how crazy is that man so hold on man a chicken with his head cut off named Mike lived yeah for 18 months until he choked of all things on a kernel of corn in a motel I mean I was he alone in the motel room and that's how he choked or they just didn't know how to give uh the Heimlich maneuver to the chicken or well you know what maybe they didn't even have the Heimlich back then maybe in 1945 I don't know I don't know hold on man let's back up a little bit let's go get a chicken the chicken lives chicken lives is he still hungry that's a good question too I mean what did he have for dinner he's like wait I'm just gonna wait on eating I'm gonna wait what's going on with this chicken I'm I'm waiting for it to die that's crazy man did carnivals and stuff with it right dude but in in in in that amount of money $4500 uh just like wow man that's just dude how lucky are you man you found a chicken that wouldn't die just chopped its head off well I mean that's crazy man yeah I mean yeah I mean Mike Mike the chicken and it was from Lamar or something like that right Colorado it was in Colorado somewhere I I do believe that it was it is a uh Colorado it was a Colorado uh chicken that you know so how crazy

Like Share Subscribe And Wrap Up

SPEAKER_16 1:55:58

good old Colorado right keeps you guessing keeps you guessing you know from snowstorms to chickens yeah four seasons in one day chickens that don't die he he choked the chicken with a kirdle terrible I don't know I just popped in my head choked the chicken this is Eric's last week on the show sorry guys all right everybody well thanks again for joining us we hope you enjoyed the show don't forget to like share subscribe we're everywhere we're on Spotify Apple blah blah blah everywhere you want to look thumbs up thumbs down definitely check us out we still got stickers we got shirts on the way so definitely comment share like tell us what you like tell us what you don't like for sure you know you can always reach us on Studio 105 productions on Facebook yep um be glad to hear from y'all yeah it'd be awesome so you guys have a great week we'll see you guys next time thank you