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Oct. 28, 2015 - Art Bell

02:23:44

Art Bell MITD - Joel Martin Bill Birnes The Amityville Horror Hoax

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46:01

joel martin

48:54

william j birnes

26:33

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		That'll be the extent of my comment on the debate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Um, Midnight in the Desert.
		I'm Mike Bill.
		And yes, I did watch the entire CNBC debate and have absolutely nothing further to say about it.
		All right.
		We're going to do an interesting program tonight, more interesting than I thought originally, with Bill Burns and Joel Martin.
		And Joel Martin will be up first with something that needs doing.
		First, a couple of comments on a little bit of news of the day.
		I don't know if you woke up, well, I wake up midday.
		It's embarrassing, huh?
		Midday.
		You have to when you do a show like this.
		This cannot be at the end of the day.
		It's got to be, you know, right at the beginning, frankly.
		Oh, I do have to read the rules.
		No bad language, one call per show.
		And so I woke up to this gigantic surveillance blimp, which was flying through the air at the time at about 16,000 feet.
		And they were frantic.
		I mean, this was a big, big blimp.
		One of my listeners actually caught video of it coming down, about to crash into the tree.
		Unfortunately, he stopped taking the video just before it hit the tree.
		Anyway, it did finally come down in a remote part of Pennsylvania.
		I do think it's my opinion that they were able to remotely deflate it and bring it down slowly.
		And when they saw the weather pushing it out toward Pennsylvania, they decided, let it go until it gets out into rural Pennsylvania, and we'll bring that sucker down.
		And I think that's exactly what they did.
		You remember the deputy who helped my daughter spell?
		The one who flipped a disruptive student out of her desk and tossed her across her math class floor.
		Right?
		Well, that deputy is now not working.
		He was given his walking papers.
		His actions were deemed unacceptable.
		So in the next 72 hours or so, according to Andrew Stimian, a scientist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, two bigger, more sensitive telescopes will be commandeered to observe the star we're all waiting for news on.
		These additional telescopes will be trained on my favorite star.
		I wish it had a name.
		We really should come up with a name for this star, KIC 8462852.
		Kind of not much of a name to attach to something, you know, might have little green guys crawling around on it.
		Anyway, the big telescopes all around the world will be trained there, and for 72 hours they're going to listen like crazy.
		And here is hoping they hear something.
		And then this thing that this is such a crazy story that I don't know how to tell it.
		But it's true.
		An unknown man-made object is screeching toward Earth right now.
		They say an unknown man-made object is headed for Earth.
		Now, this is not something in orbit that's decaying and going to burn up back in the atmosphere.
		This is not something that they hadn't accounted for, you know, an old bolt or a glove or whatever coming down.
		This is something streaking toward Earth.
		So the following story doesn't make much sense to me, but the name of the object, see, they've even given this a name, but not the star.
		They've named it on the internet WTF.
		It's apt, all right.
		The object will make its appearance on November 14th, entering, they say, our atmosphere to burn up harmlessly, they say, over the Indian Ocean.
		Or, said anomalous.com, to launch an alien attack on us and end all life as we know it on Earth.
		Could go either way.
		A joke, of course, but I hope.
		But I mean, look, here is something coming to Earth, as I mentioned, not in orbit, not ready to burn up and disintegrate itself upon re-entering and making pretty skies.
		This is something streaking toward Earth.
		Now, my first question is, how do they know it's man-made?
		How can they possibly know at this distance?
		And it's still got to be pretty far away, right?
		I mean, have they looked up and saw the sickle and hammer or USA on the side of it?
		How do they know it's man-made?
		This is coming from, hello, my Canadian friends, out there.
		And so, okay, it could be man-made.
		Maybe it circled the moon, increased its speed as a result, aimed right back at us.
		Maybe it circled some other planet, did the same thing.
		And it's coming back to us.
		But it's pretty weird.
	And its name is indeed fitting.
	All right.
	So we're going to do Two guests tonight, and they'll be on together and in the beginning separately.
	Joel Martin and Bill Burns.
	Now, these two gentlemen have written a book, actually the original of the series, I believe, called The Haunting of America.
	And as we near Halloween and Dead Air, we will increasingly be talking about this kind of thing.
	Let me tell you a little bit about Joel Martin and why I want to talk to him first.
	Joel Martin is a nationally recognized paranormal expert and best-selling author.
	Since the early 1970s, Joel has been a radio talk show host.
	During his career as a TV host, he won the Cable Ace Award.
	He's a network TV consultant on the paranormal, has appeared on numerous TV shows.
	Joel is the author and co-author of more than 15 books, including the best-selling We Don't Die.
	That in itself will make a good question, won't it?
	We Don't Die.
	He is also a former teacher.
	So let's first go to Joel.
	And I well, no, let me, just before I punch the button, let me say something.
	One of the best known paranormal stories in the world, I guess because of the book and the movie, is the Amityville horror.
	Right?
	Wouldn't you say, along with what happened in Snowflake, Arizona, what happened purportedly in 1947, Amityville would have to be right up there, right?
	And years ago, I had the opportunity before his passing to interview George Lutz about what went on at that house.
	And I am now to have learned, or I guess I'm about to learn, and you're about to learn, that the Amityville horror was a hoax.
	Now, I feel a duty, more than a duty, you know, I could have skipped this, but I feel more than a duty to reveal something like this as a hoax, if that's what it really is.
	I mean, it's a giant story.
	There's almost nobody who doesn't know about Amityville and the supposed horrors that went on there.
	And there were some real horrors, of course.
	But the supernatural horrors that went on there, according to my coming guest, all made up baloney.
	And if that's the case, I sure as hell want to get it on the air.
	So, in a moment, we're going to bring on Joel, and he's going to tell us how it is so.
	Joel Martin coming up.
	Bill Burns standing by.
	And this is Midnight in the Desert on Halloween week.
	What a night to bust Amityville wide open, but that is what we must do.
unidentified		There are those happy days, they seem so hard to find.
		I tried to reach for you, but you have close to mine.
		Whatever happened to our love?
		I wish I could.
		But I couldn't find the way.
		So I've got a fault once in me to believe in you.
		Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.
		Take a walk on the wild side of midnight from the Kingdom of Nigh.
		This is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
		Please call the show at 1-952-225-5278.
		That's 1-952.
		Call Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, please, but not just yet.
		Let us get underway.
		I can't think of anything more important than to straighten out something that is pure BS, if that's what it is.
		So, Joel, welcome to Midnight in the Desert.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, Art.
		Thank you very much.
		Good to be with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good to have you.
		So, here we go, Joel.
		You're going to need to make the case to me.
		I interviewed George, myself, George Lutz, about what had gone on at the house.
		A very strong, very long interview.
		I think it was on five hours probably with me.
		Four anyway, four or five.
		And he went through everything in great detail, and we even had some other people on the phone and stuff like that.
		And there was the movie and the book and all that.
		So you're here telling me tonight that Amityville is a complete hoax.
		Is that right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm telling you that the Amityville horror, as George Lutz told it, is a complete hoax.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, wait a minute, as George Lutz told it.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		As George Lutz told it, my immediate perception once it first came to my attention was that it was a complete hoax, period.
		It was a complete hoax.
		It is a complete hoax.
		But there are, well, how can I say this?
		There is negativity.
		If there's good, there's bad.
		If there's good, there's evil.
		And evil equals negativity, obviously.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, but that's true of people in general.
		There's good people and bad people, right?
		Here we're talking about carefully laid out details in the book, in the movie, about what happened at Amityville.
		And you're saying, let's be straight.
		That's a complete hoax.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It's a hoax.
		That's all.
		I'm telling you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, how do you know it's a hoax?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		For one thing, when this happened, the paranormal doesn't work quite the way George Lutz, may he rest in peace, suggested it does.
		You don't get 15 or 20 different phenomena flying around the house the way you saw in the motion picture.
		I mean, there was a demon cat.
		There were doors flying off their hinges.
		There was blood in a room.
		There was some kind of ooze that came out of the walls.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The paranormal issue.
		Let's not forget the flies.
		There were flies.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so all of that was in the movie.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It's all too much.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, I know that.
		I know that.
		Look, any author who's ever had a story turned into a movie knows that they're going to slaughter his book and what he wrote.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That was in the book.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		All I'm describing is in the book.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, I'm with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But in other words, movies always over-dramatize and add stuff.
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's just what they do.
		But you're not saying this is a case of that.
		You're saying this is an outright from the beginning hoax.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It is an outright from the beginning hoax.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so two people were murdered in that house, right?
		Or six, yeah.
		That's right.
		Shocking.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		The mother, the father, two boys, two girls.
		Six members of the DeFeo family were murdered.
		Right.
		The sole surviving son.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then the first tenant in there was George?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Was George Lutz.
		That's right.
		George and Kathy Lutz and their kids.
		And George was not in good financial shape, frankly.
		And George got a great deal on the house.
		I mean, he really did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I bet he did.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		The house is gorgeous.
		I was in it several times.
		And it's in a beautiful, beautiful area.
		And I was there the night of the murders.
		And it was a terrible, terrible, terrible situation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where were you the night of the murders?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At the house, you mean?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What in the world?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I was at the radio station where I was news director.
		And when United Press International called me, the wire service, they asked me to please go as quickly as I could to Ocean Avenue in Amityville.
		This is the 1970s.
		Remember, it's 1974 before they had the satellite and the electronic news gathering and computers, so forth.
		So the way to gather news was to do it the way they did it in 1874.
		You ran down to the location.
		And we ran down to Ocean Avenue in Amityville.
		And there were people standing across the street, so quiet, it was surreal.
		The whole thing seemed surreal.
		There were police and police photographers and medical examiner staff people there.
		It was just a terrible, eerie thing to see.
		I got closer to the house than I probably was supposed to or than some would have liked, but I knew many of the police officers because I had already been on the radio on Long Island since I was a teenager, which was just a couple of years earlier.
		And so by going there then, I recognized some cops and they recognized me, and I kind of inched closer.
		I inched close enough that I saw them carry out one of the children, one of the dead children, with a bullet hole in him.
		And it was not something that you want to see, frankly.
		And that's the way the story started, in November of 1974.
		Go up a month now, go to December of 1974, January 75, around that time.
		Just go up several weeks right past the holidays that year.
		And I get a call from Stephen Kaplan, who you may remember was a vampirologist and a parapsychologist.
		He too passed away.
		And Steve said, Martin, which is his nickname for me, I don't know why he didn't call me by my first name, but notwithstanding that, Martin, I need to do a show about an unhaunted house.
		I said, that's good, Steve.
unidentified		We'll do a beauty pageant with the ugliest guys we find.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		What's the matter with you, you idiot?
		How am I supposed to do a show about an unhappy house?
		Yeah, it makes no sense.
		He said, no, this is different.
		This house purports to be haunted, but it isn't.
		It's a fake.
		I said, how the heck do you know that so quickly?
		He said, I'll tell you if you let me come on the air.
		I said, all right, come on the air.
		Shows over to everybody.
		What the heck.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He didn't tell you what it was?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, not at first, not until he got to the radio station.
		He had called me, and I said, all right, all right, genius.
		Tell me now what this is about, please.
		And then he told me about the story.
		And everybody on Long Island knew about the story.
		In 1974, there were not quite the number of murders and the violence that we see today.
		And so when six people in one family in an excellent neighborhood in a quiet community get murdered, it was noticed.
		You know, there's no question, frankly.
		He said, something's fishy.
		I called them, and I offered my services as a parapsychologist to see exactly what was in that house.
		And they told me, well, we'll get back to you.
		I said, okay, fine.
		But they got back and they didn't want my services.
		I said, so a big deal.
		I mean, you know, a lot of girls said that to me in high school and college, and they hung up on me.
		What the heck is so shocking about that?
		You know, at that pretty.
		He said, no, no, no, no.
		Listen to me.
		I offered him free.
		I don't want any money.
		I just wanted to know what the heck was going on.
		He said, my first suspicion that something was amiss, something was phony, was that they said, no, we don't need your help.
		We don't want your services.
		Now, why wouldn't you want me to come in there if I'm a legitimate parapsychologist, which he really was, and I'm willing to investigate?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, Joe, I've got to be honest with you.
		If I lived in a house, even if I knew something evil had happened in it, if somebody called up and said, look, I'm a parapsychologist.
		I want to come by and check for ghosts, I honestly don't think I'd go that way.
		I might go to a priest, but I'd be very leery of somebody coming at me on the phone like that.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I would, too.
		I think, frankly, they may have known him, or he may have known them.
		No, I can't argue with that.
		But they did say no.
		For some reason, that aroused the suspicion.
		And they did, at some point, get a priest in, allegedly, the Lutzes, that is, to perform some kind of an exorcism, supposedly.
		But Steve never did.
		He was never able to get into their confidence to do anything about that house or investigating the house, not with the Lutzes in it.
		Steve and his wife went to many, many houses.
		He was willing to give his credentials.
		He was willing to give My credentials, but Lutz didn't want it, and I agree with you.
		Not everybody wants that kind of attention.
		I would not either.
		He proceeded to investigate by talking to as many people as he could find about the house, about what went on in there.
		And he said the paranormal just doesn't act that way.
		And when he talked about the different people that Lutz had talked to, different people in the area who were involved in the paranormal, they were of mixed opinion.
		Some said off the record, I don't know.
		Some said on the record, yeah, maybe.
		And there was just no way to know.
		So he continued for 20 years to finally track down the one person of the two who would know whether it was genuine or not.
		And those two people would be, of course, George Lutz and Juanita Feo, who was the convicted murderer of his family, his attorney.
		And his attorney...
		Because Ronnie DeFeo's attorney, Bill Weber, William Weber, and I'll tell you this part of the story where Bill was on the radio show with me.
		William Weber and George Lutz created this fantasy, and Bill Weber admitted it.
		It was not a secret once Bill Weber went on the radio with me, and it was not a secret once Bill Weber talked to a reporter named Pat Milton at the Associated Press.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What specifically did he say?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Weber said that the first thought that he had was to plead insanity.
		I mean, what do you say about a 22-year-old who, I think who's 22 or 23, who kills his entire family?
		You know, we're going to plead that he's an orphan?
		I mean, that's ridiculous.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		He had no idea.
		No, no, no, no, no.
		I understand the defense.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		The defense was insanity.
		But then they got a better idea.
		The heck with that.
		That wasn't going to work.
		It's almost impossible in New York State to get an insanity plea through.
		Very, very hard.
		In any event, they decided they had a better idea.
		And the better idea was to say that the place was haunted and Ronnie was possessed, etc.
		And so they created a hoax.
		They sat down over several bottles of champagne or wine.
		I've heard two versions.
		Bill Weber told me it was champagne.
		Somebody else told me it was wine.
		But whatever.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, wine.
		Wine is, you know, nothing.
		Champagne is bubbly wine.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Bubbly wine.
		So they sat down with their alcohol and they started to create a story.
		So, for example, you know, the more tipsy you get, the more fun some things become.
		Silly things, things that you shouldn't do, like drive a car.
		But here they were sitting, and they remembered that Ronnie always complained about the neighbor's cat.
		And because the neighbor's cat annoyed him, I'll clean up the language.
		Ronnie always called him that blinkety-blankety demon cat or demon pig.
		And so with an expletive attached, he would refer to it as the demon pig.
		It was really a cat.
		The business of the walls oozing black.
		Well, when you washed the walls after the police were there, the fingerprint powder, they did not have DNA in those years, the fingerprint powder just came right off of that ooze, became a kind of a goo or a liquid from what was at one time powder.
		When they talked about a room oozing blood, I went in that room and I took my daughter in that room.
		She was just a little girl at the time.
		She was maybe 10 at the time.
		And we went in that room and it was a crawled space under the stairs that went down to the basement, to the rec room basement.
		And it was the paint that was chipping.
		So the paint that was chipping became a red room oozing blood.
		There was no blood.
		I even took a couple of chips of the paint.
		It since has been repainted.
		I wanted that for some kind of evidence to show I was not nuts myself.
		And they said there was green slime coming up out of the toilet bowl.
		It was the police materials.
		It was the forensic materials they used that they flushed.
		And it didn't flush entirely at one time.
		So back up some of that powder they used came.
		So each of these things, there was no door that flew off the hinges.
		There was no gate that flew off the hinges.
		They made things up outright.
		The flies were another thing they made up.
		And they were very, very precise with flies.
		They said flies were all over the house, particularly in the room of one of the girls, Dawn was her name, D-A-W-N, one of the Fayo girls who was killed, one of Ronnie's two sisters.
		And if you looked and checked the details, you found out that her room was in a very, very warm part of this house that is a beautiful three-story house at the time, Dutch colonial.
		And what happened was it was very warm, and please forgive me for being dramatic, or maybe nauseating at this hour, but still, it was the maggots because she had been left there too long, and she had gone through her time of month, and there was blood there, and there were insects there.
		They decided to make that, of all things, into a room and a window covered with flies.
		And to add to the misery, George Lutz said that his little boy, they show it in the movie, his hand clamped down on the window.
		In other words, his hand was on the windowsill and the little boy's hand got cut and smashed because it was on the windowsill and the window came down where the flies had been.
		Well, they supposedly took the kid to the local hospital, which has long since been out of business, but that hospital, Brunswick, was there then.
		Brunswick Hospital was the name.
		And when Steve Kaplan checked the records, there was no record of that kid ever going to hospital for an emergency room or for anything else for that matter.
		So each thing that Steve looked at just didn't check out, didn't add up.
		They had a priest in there, and the priest did do an exorcism.
		But a priest will do that for you.
		That doesn't mean that anything is wrong just because the priest does it.
		Steve and I differed greatly on religion.
		I tend to be.
		He tended not to be.
		But that didn't change the fact that something was definitely amiss.
unidentified		And I continued to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold on.
		We're at a break point.
		So hold tight.
		Marbell.
		this is Midnight in the Desert, Amityville.
		Didn't happen.
		Not as they say.
unidentified		I can see you lying back in your satin dress In a room where you do what you don't confess Someday I'll learn you better take care Time to change and never forget back But the people don't catch you when the bitch gets back Oh, oh, oh, oh Midnight Matter can be explored on Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
		If using Skype from your computer, please be sure to use a headset mic and call MITD51.
		That's MITD51.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		I guess I've been involved in most major paranormal happenings in the last many, many, many years, and I certainly was involved in Amityville in the sense that I interviewed George Lutz.
		A very extensive interview, which you can hear, by the way, and probably should hear.
		It's in the archives, and it will be interesting in view of what you're about to hear, what you are hearing right now.
		There's one aspect of this that I really want to cover with Joel before we proceed, and it's this, Joel.
		In the book and the movie, Lutz was portrayed as going, I don't know how to put it, steadily downhill, beginning to sort of lose his mind, you know, coming apart, I guess in the way DeFeo was, you know, portrayed, you know, sort of a it's happening again scenario, right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, okay.
		So that had to be part of the overall plan, as it were.
		So you're telling me that the lawyer, Weber, right, and George Lutz sat down and cooked up the book and the movie and the details based on the stuff you just said.
		Is that about right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's about right.
		I mean, that is right.
		It's not about.
		It is.
		That's accurate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		What is there to say?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they made up a story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, there is more to say.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For example.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		When you said George was going downhill...
		Well, he was portrayed that way, but people who knew him well suggested that he was in emotional trouble because, frankly, they were having some difficulties emotionally as a result of economics.
		There was a problem economically, as well as whatever fear they might have had from being in that house.
		I wouldn't have lived in that house right after six people were murdered.
		Call me superstitious, call me childish, whatever.
		I don't think I would do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm with you.
		I wouldn't either.
		So George was exhibiting emotional, I don't know, trauma of some sort.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, sure, he was worried about money.
		Some people said he was worried about the house.
		He was probably worried about Kathy because Kathy was afraid of being there, several people told me.
		There are so many different versions, you see, but they all come down to one thing.
		There was a need for them to do something about their economic situation.
		That was not an expensive house by today's standards.
		But $80,000 in 1974 was or 75 was an expensive house.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let me back up for historical accuracy and for the audience here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did the DeFeo trial based on haunting work out?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Based on haunting, it didn't work out at all.
		What they simply had to do was plead him guilty.
		There was nothing they could do.
		And so he was sentenced to six lifetimes.
		And he's still in prison.
		And he'll be there, we hope, for the rest of his life.
		And frankly, he has given so many different versions of what has happened that it's almost impossible to pin down any one version as being the entire truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did DeFeo actually claim external influence in his deeds?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that even mental illness could bring that on.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's a very good question.
		And the answer is no.
		You would think he would.
		You would think he would.
		Yeah, never went along with that insanity business.
		And the result was that there was never any reason to even discuss it, as far as he was concerned.
		And he just took his punishment and went off to jail for killing all six of them.
		He and his father did not get along.
		It was not complicated where they were concerned.
		The DeFeos were a story that the whole neighborhood knew.
		It's a fairly close-knit neighborhood, and people know each other pretty well.
		Very small-town atmosphere in Amityville.
		And Ronnie and his father did not get along at all.
		There was just terrible stress and strife and abuse physically and emotionally.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so then you're telling me there was a meeting between Weber and Lutz.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They sat down at lunch, was it?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		They sat down at some mealtime, lunch or early dinner, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And they cooked all this up.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And forward went the hoax, the story, the book, and then eventually the movie.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Frankly, that's exactly right.
		They cooked it up, and the idea was they were going to split whatever came from a book because there was more money in a book than there was in calling Ronnie insane, when in fact it was going to be almost impossible to prove that.
		So here's what happens.
		They make up this arrangement where they're going to have a handshake deal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was it a handshake deal?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, a handshake deal.
unidentified		Yeah.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		So you and I shake hands.
		And then, you know, it's kind of ridiculous if one of us is a lawyer.
		I mean, you know, I mean, he skipped out Lutz.
		He just took off to the West Coast.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The book and the movie probably had a lot of separation in between them, right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		There was about two years' separation, yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Two years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's quite a long time.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It is.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, okay, so the book comes out, and the royalties from the royalties, I'm trying to get this straight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The royalties from the book come in.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And George Lutz, you're telling me, holds on to him, doesn't give a penny to his partner in makeup, Weber?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No.
		He does not give any money to Weber.
		And if he did, it's just been a very closely held secret because nobody, not even Weber, ever suggested that George Lutz gave him a penny.
		They thought about it.
		They discussed it.
		They talked about it.
		Lutz apparently stalled him.
		The movie came out in 1979.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Had to sell him for a couple of years.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's right.
		That's exactly right.
		The movie came out in 1979.
		I was in a preview of it.
		I got to see that.
		But that's why I remember the year very, very specifically.
		And there's somebody in my family, actually, who was the director of the film.
		So that's just a bizarre coincidence, I'm sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That is bizarre.
		All right, so George Lutz got all the money from the book, presumably all the money from, unless it was already signed over from the movie as well.
		He had all the money, period.
		And then you said he took off.
		What do you mean he took off with the money?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		He and Kathy moved.
		They moved to the West Coast.
		They later got divorced.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's not exactly, well, fine, but that's not exactly out of reach, the West Coast.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, no, not out of reach, but out of reach as far as Weber was concerned, because with nothing in writing, go prove you and I made a deal tonight, you know.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I mean, go ahead.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so gotcha.
		I'm with you.
		So Weber, at this point, is really ticked off.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's a good expression.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The best I can do on this show.
		All right, so it's really ticked off.
		And he does what?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Weber goes to court.
		Weber is going to bring a lawsuit.
		Weber wants his cut of the money.
		He wants his share of what was his part of the creation in the 1930s.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But wait a minute.
		If Weber does this, I'm just looking at people's motives here.
		If Weber does this, he exposes himself to being disbarred.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I asked him that question, and I'm sure you did too.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I didn't.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		But you asked George Lutz, I'm sure you asked Lutz the question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I didn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not about disbarment of Weber, no.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I asked Bill Weber that, and he said, well, it was a chance I had to take.
		He said, I didn't feel I did anything wrong, and he said I didn't fear that at all.
		And so I wanted what was mine.
		And what was mine was that he and I wrote a book.
		Well, actually, he wrote the book.
		I consulted on the book, is the way he worded it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's like getting popped for an ounce of marijuana and going down to the police station to get it back.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's right.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		And there are people who do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know there are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So he's going to sue to get his portion of the loot from the hoax.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Because not the hoax per se, but the hoax that went into becoming a book and a film.
		And now he wants to make it possible to do so by putting it on the public records.
		Somehow, he gets in touch with Steve Kaplan.
		Actually, I think Steve Kaplan called him.
		And they get together.
		And Steve and Steve's wife and Bill Weber get together and they talk.
		And Steve wants to help.
		Remember, there are people who said it was true.
		I'm not saying that there aren't people who, to this day, will tell you it all happened, you know.
		But this is Bill Weber we're talking about now.
		We're talking about the attorney for Ronnie DeFlaze.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got it.
		I understand.
		So, you know, he files a lawsuit.
		He files a lawsuit.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		He files a lawsuit, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what happens with that?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		The lawsuit is sitting there, and they're going to go to court, but he wants to put it on the record.
		And he's allowed to legally do it, notwithstanding whatever chance he takes, because somebody might say, listen, you created a hoax and you're an attorney.
		I did ask him that, and he said, no, that wouldn't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would think his motive, not that I should think about what he thinks, but really, I would think his motive would be, okay, file the lawsuit.
		Maybe it gets picked up.
		Maybe it doesn't get picked up by the press.
		And maybe it causes George Lutz to settle.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		You got it.
		That's exactly right.
		Yes, you do.
		Yes, you do.
		That's exactly right.
		And what he needed to do was find a forum.
		He needed an outlet for exactly what you just suggested.
		So he went to all of the major network affiliate stations in New York to do that, to go on to NBC, CBS, ABC, whatever they were in the mid-70s.
		But what happens, mid- and late 70s, they didn't want to touch it.
		They thought legally it was too hot to touch it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It probably was.
		I probably wouldn't have touched it at that point either.
		Somebody's going to sue somebody for sure.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, sure.
		And I figured I would be the one who'd get sued when they asked me if I would do it.
		Kaplan says, Martin, you were there the night of the murders by coincidence or serendipity or synchronicity or whatever.
		Now, would you like to be part of seeing the big finish?
		I said, Steve, this is not a joke.
		He said, I'm not joking.
		I'm serious.
		He said, would you like to interview Bill Weber?
		And I said, sure, I'd like to interview Bill Weber.
		I knew Bill Weber was.
		It was in all the newspapers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean on the radio?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		On the radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, on the radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you say, sure, bring him on.
unidentified		Sure.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's what I said.
		I said, what they'll do is sue me, and they'll make me better known than I am.
		It's a regional show.
		It covers Long Island, Parks, and New York.
		What are you going to do with it?
		Well, that's my attitude.
		I didn't have a penny to my name anyway.
		I had nothing in my name.
unidentified		All right, all right.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you were suing proof?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I absolutely sue proof.
		My wife has whatever assets we had, and there weren't very many of those because I didn't work for the money.
		I was on the airport.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so you put Bill Weber on the air, and what does Weber say?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Weber says we sat down over several bottles of alcohol, made the whole cockamini story up.
		We just made it up, just like that.
		And he said, I have to put this on the record because if I don't put this on the record, then I have no basis to go to court, you know, and maybe this will embarrass him.
		Just as you said.
		And that's exactly what happened.
		He did make a settlement.
		He made a settlement for the simple reason that he didn't want to have it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're saying George Lutz made a settlement.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or accepted the settlement.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Accepted a settlement.
		Yeah, that's right.
		You said it exactly right.
		And I'm looking at the transcript now.
		Now, I've never listened to the program itself.
		I've read the transcript of the interview, but I never listened to it.
		And the reason I never listened to it, I'll tell you right now.
		And somebody's going to say, oh, you're making it up.
		If anybody wants to do that in my old neighborhood, meet me anywhere, you know?
		Because I have a lot of bad qualities.
		Lying is not one of them.
		I don't think the paranormal is something you fool around with.
		And I don't think that when you're talking to the public, you should, as you said at the opening, that you need to be unethical.
		If something is not genuine, you say so.
		That makes the things that are genuine all the more valid.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Simple as that.
		And I agree with you 1,000%.
		So here we are, Bill Weber and me.
		I'm waiting for Bill Weber to come to the studio.
		We're going to put the show on tape, live on tape, which means I wouldn't, you know what it means, but it means for anybody who doesn't know, it means that the show would be taped, but I wouldn't edit it.
		I would put it in a box.
		I'd leave it there until it was time to air, and that's that.
		I touch nothing.
		All right, fine.
		So I'm sitting there, and it was Thursday, I believe, August 2nd.
		The date was August 2nd, 1979.
		And I'm sitting there waiting for Bill Weber.
		I see a phone lighting.
		And radio stations, of course, as I know, they don't ring.
unidentified		They just light because you don't want to hear that voice over the air.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		So I see my private line ringing.
		I said, that's strange.
		There's only about three people, maybe six people in the world who have that line.
		Nobody has that number.
		I pick it up and I go, hello, Martin.
		And I hear my daughter's voice.
		It's a little girl.
		She was even younger than I said before.
		Well, at 79, she was 10.
		All right.
		So I pick it up and I say, hello.
		I said, Daddy?
		And then she says, this is her name.
		Mommy's dead.
		Mommy's been killed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My God.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Just like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your wife was dead?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		She was killed that night, hit by a car.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I am so sorry.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		The timing could not have been worse, more bizarre.
		I don't know.
		To this day, Art, I swear to God to you, it gives me the chills in places that you're not even supposed to get chills.
		The hair on my head just stands up.
		It was the eeriest thing.
		I went into shock immediately.
		I immediately went into a state of shock.
		And I didn't even know where the heck I was.
		Bill Weber comes in and he says, hello, how do you do?
		And I remember saying, hello, how are you?
		And he said, are you okay?
		I remember that.
		I said, no.
		He said, what's wrong?
		I said, my wife was just killed.
		He said, what?
		And my producer was there with me and other people who worked in the control room.
		And he said, do you want to do this another time?
		He said, I've never heard of anything like this.
		I said, no, let's sit down and do it since we schedule it.
		Art, I'm telling you, I was in shock.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How did you even do that?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I swear to God, I don't know.
		I really don't know.
		All I can think of is I was in a state of shock.
		My daughter, to this day, I've never really discussed it in public until now, but she's never forgiven me for it.
		She said, Daddy, how could you do that?
		How could you sit down and do what you did?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, a state of shock would explain it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The news was that your wife had been run over or hit by a car.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Run over, hit by a car.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		The guy driving was probably stoned, the police thought, but there was very little that could be done.
		And when she didn't come back to bring ice cream to my daughter, which is where she had gone, my daughter got concerned, went downstairs and saw her glasses and shoes and jewelry in the street.
		That's where the NYPD left.
		That's where the city police left her.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, no.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And so she saw it and she knew right away and she just went, and she, you know, gasped and cried and got hysterical.
		And the neighbors helped her and comforted her as best as they could.
		And from that point on, you know, your life takes a whole different direction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I was in shock for a very long time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Now, whether that's psychic or paranormal, I can't tell.
		Was it a coincidence?
		Again, is serendipity?
unidentified		I don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The shock that you go into is very normal.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes, the shock is normal, but it's not normal to sit down and wait for an interview.
		And five minutes before the interview, your wife is killed.
		You know, your daughter's mother is killed.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And Weber admits the whole thing.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		And that's why I looked eventually.
		A couple of years later, Steve Kaplan convinced me, Stephen Roxanne, his wife, they convinced me to read the transcript.
		And I read the transcript, and I was stunned because I don't remember speaking to Bill Weber.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you don't.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't.
		I really don't.
		I know he was there, and I remember him being a nice man, but if you ask me any details about the interview, no, I don't recall it.
		I think I may have just sat down and did the interview because I had been in broadcasting and related industry since I was a little boy, back to the golden age of TV, as they called it.
		And they would beat the heck out of us if we didn't do what we were supposed to do.
		And so I've got this obedience trait where you sit down and you do the show the heck with everything else.
		You can be on fire, but you'll still do the show.
		It's a strange kind of mentality.
		So I did it, and a lot of people wondered how, and I can't answer how.
		I really don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I actually managed to finish doing a show last week after somebody fired four shots outside my studio with a rifle.
		And I'm in a very Rural area, so it can be done.
		But anyway, I understand your situation.
		Listen, there were, I am told, a number of other very, very strange deaths associated with nearly everybody close to this whole thing.
		Yes?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I'll give you some of the, I'll go very quickly and give you some of the names.
		The night of the murders, I came home just drained.
		I was so tired because I had worked all day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't want to, hold on, I don't want to break this up because we've got a break coming up, and I want to get the whole story.
		The Amityville hoax.
		Now, what comes after, I think starting with the interview that Joel did with Weber, continues in a very bizarre way.
		And we'll get to that.
		Believe me, we'll get to that.
		Then we'll get down to biz.
		This is Midnight in the Desert.
		I'm Mark Bell.
unidentified		Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise.
		And in the shadows.
		Don't bring me down.
		No, no, no, no, no.
		I'll tell you what's wrong before I get up the floor.
		Don't bring me down.
		the Night in the Desert spans the woods.
		To call us from outside the U.S. and Canada only, use Skype with a headset mic if on a computer and call MITD55.
		That's MITD55.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, once again, back to my guest.
		I'm calling the shots on the way this interview is coming down and have completely gone in a different direction because of this news.
		You know, if I didn't tell you, if I didn't go through this with you, then I wouldn't be worth being on the air, in my opinion.
		I mean, if Amityville, one of the biggest things that happened in American paranormal history is B.S., and I don't air that, then I'm B.S. That's just the way I feel.
		So, Joel, welcome back.
		I do want to tie this up, but there were other deaths that occurred very quickly and very weirdly also associated with this after all this happened, right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		The night of the murders, we came home finally, and I was exhausted.
		It had been such a long and draining day.
		I'm used to a certain amount of tragedy from being a reporter and seeing horrible things, but it was still a very tragic day.
		And I come home, I pick up our kitten.
		We had a new cat, and I picked up the cat.
		I mean, it could be coincidence.
		I understand that.
		But I pick up the cat just to pet her.
		And she goes, makes a little sound from her throat and just dies in my hand.
		She died, so help me, God, she just died in my hand that night.
		I don't know why.
		Both of the lutters have passed on.
		Steve Kaplan worked 20 years to prove this was a hoax and died two weeks before his book, The Amityville Horror Conspiracy, came out.
		The ADA, who prosecuted the case against Ronnie DeFeo, Jerry Sullivan, he died young of a heart attack.
		One of the children of one of the families who lived there after the Lutzers moved out, he mysteriously died.
		The mayor of Amityville at the time, who I had interviewed, died a tragic death.
		He was gone.
		My wife, as I told you about at the time, was gone.
		The six DeFeos, a number of parapsychologists, which could have been attributed to age, Hans Holder, and that whole group.
		And you've got several other people as well, so that sort of tells you.
		And among the people who still say it's true is Lorraine Moore and her husband Ed has passed on.
		But they were the demonologists, you know, and they still insist that, no, or at least she insists, what happened happened.
		And I'm not so sure.
		And then I go to St. Charles Cemetery, which is a Catholic cemetery in the neighborhood, in this diocese, and I look at the headstones.
		I went there with Roxanne, with Steve Capel's wife, a couple of years ago.
		We went to pay our respects just because the real tragedy in this case, the real victims are the Defeos, the people who were murdered.
		So I go there and I pay my respects at the headstones.
		I turn to the right, and what do I see?
		I see a headstone, and what's on the headstone?
		The maiden name of my wife at the time when she was killed by the car, they had put her maiden name on it, not her married name, and the family's crypt is over there, and there's their name.
		It's a Germanic name.
		And there it was, just a couple of feet from where I was standing paying my respects to the Defeas.
		And I said, I got to get out of here.
		I mean, I just can't do any more of the story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's beginning to sound a little more like the Amityville curse.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it really does.
		And I started to change my opinion.
		I didn't change my opinion that Bill Weber and George Lutz created a hoax.
		There's no question about that.
		I didn't mean to suggest that maybe they were telling the truth.
		No, Bill Weber told me categorically, and then it was a hoax.
		Then they made an out-of-court settlement.
		What I began to think, or rethink, actually, was the idea that maybe something evil.
		I don't want to say demonic or satanic.
		I'm pausing for, but I'm not sure I want to use those words.
		But maybe something evil, negative, if you will, went on there, and I should at least give some quarter to that thought.
		At least give a couple of moments' thought to that possibility.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I get computer messages as I do the program through something called the Wormhole.
		Mark asks a simple question.
		If your guest is so adamant about this being a hoax, it's not just you, you've actually proven it.
		It's in the court records.
		And he had knowledge of it from the jump, i.e.
		the beginning, why wait decades to begin exposing it.
		After all, everybody's now dead, right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I didn't wait decades because I didn't know.
		I'm simply a reporter.
		I can only tell you what I've been told or what I can see, hear, and smell at that moment.
		Steve Kaplan had the suspicion that it was a hoax.
		I didn't have any such suspicion.
		I didn't give it a thought.
		I just felt terrible that six people were murdered by a mutant son.
		And, you know, let the criminal justice system work, hopefully, so that he would be incarcerated.
		But other than that, no, what the person writes is a good question, except that I didn't, if I had known back then, would I have let it be known then?
		Absolutely.
		As soon as Kaplan said that he thought it might be a hoax, I said, come on then and talk about it.
		Fine.
		We'll have both sides.
		I had the Warrens on.
		They said it was not a hoax.
		Steve said it was a hoax.
		I just didn't know at the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the Warrens were basing their statement on what evidence?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		They based their statement on their investigation, they said, of the house, of a seance that was held in the house that was telecast on one of the local New York channels, Channel 5.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		And so they had their reasons for saying, oh, well, it's all true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Based on a seance?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		They had a seance, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I'm saying that is what proved to them that it was true, a seance.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Seance.
		Seance.
		And certain sights they saw, synchronicities in the house, nonsense like that.
		You know, to me, nonsense.
		This is not your opinion.
		This is just me.
		I didn't understand it.
		I always thought that Ed was very skeptical of it, and Lorraine was very, very sure of it.
		But, you know, what can I do?
		Again, I'm a reporter.
		I'm not there to rip them apart.
		I was there to question them and to ask them.
		And so I had both sides on.
		That was a fair thing to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		And speaking of both sides, hold on.
		Thank you for telling me all that, Joel.
		As I mentioned, having covered that in detail, as I did years ago, interviewed George, very long interview.
unidentified		Wow.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The whole thing a hoax.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is supposed to be a two-guy affair.
		The other guy is Bill Burns, who is a New York Times best-selling author, the creator, consulting producer, writer, and lead host of the History Channel's UFO Hunters.
		Bill is also one of the creators and guest experts on History Channel's Ancient Aliens, currently featured as a commentator on Discovery's Unsolved NASA files and the upcoming Reels TV Dr. Feelgood.
		Byrne's forthcoming books are The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney, or was in October, is in October now, I guess, huh?
		Psychiatric Criminology in January.
		UFO Hunter's book two in January.
		And Edison's last invention, The Spirit Phone, this coming spring.
		Did you know that?
		Edison's last invention was the spirit phone?
		Burns holds a Ph.D. and J.D. was a national endowment for the humanities fellow and is the co-host of the Dark Matter Digital Network's Future Theater, our very own.
		So here now are the both of them, Bill Burns and Joel Martin.
		Hi, Bill.
		Welcome, and thank you for being so patient.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Oh, thank you, Art.
		It's always a wonderful story.
		Joel was an eyewitness to all of this, a first-hand witness, and one of the few people who interviewed the principals in this story.
		And, of course, Steve Kaplan was the principal investigator into this whole story.
		And Steve Kaplan did, of course, put out the book on the Amityville horror hoax.
		So he really did expose it after the fact.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I sort of retired not very long after I interviewed George Lutz and didn't look real hard at the paranormal world.
		In fact, I was out of the country for a long time.
		So all of this hit me and hit me pretty hard.
		And I felt, you know what?
		I did that quite seriously on air and I have a responsibility to tell the real story to the audience.
		So we've done it.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		And you've also interviewed, and you also interviewed Malachi Martin, who was one of the people who consulted on this case.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		And Malachi Martin, I come to find out from a CIA officer, was actually working for the CIA at that time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
unidentified		Yep.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		He told a story.
		This person who shall go nameless.
		On UFO Hunters, we were shadowed, not shadowed, but our paths were intersected a lot by people who were working for the government.
		And they identified themselves.
		This is not some strange men-in-black thing.
		These were people who said, look, I'm with the NSA.
		I'm with the CIA.
		I just want to talk to you.
		And this particular case happened out on Long Island.
		And so we were talking about Malachi Martin, and this person who wanted to do his own life story but really couldn't because he'd have to get us at the Board of Review told the story of how his con, very briefly, his contact in an NGO,
		a non-government organization investigating UFOs, the person who came to retrieve a piece of UFO data technology actually was Malachi Martin.
unidentified		What?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I was interviewed recently, by the way, for a documentary on Malachi, a British documentary coming out, I'm not sure when, pretty soon.
		And I was happy to do it.
		Malachi was an amazing, amazing man, but you're telling me he was a CIA agent?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		He was a cooperating individual with the CIA.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, a lot of people do that.
		Do you have any knowledge?
		You can't name your source, right?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		I Cannot do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Do you have any knowledge what the nature of his involvement with the CIA was?
		In other words, what was he doing?
unidentified		Yes.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Okay, fire away.
		He was part of a group that was investigating all kinds of paranormal phenomena.
		It had to do with exorcism, had to do with out-of-body experiences.
		But this particular group was working.
		There were people from former administrations that were in this group.
		And they were basically a funding operation.
		They were channeling money to individuals or groups that would carry out investigations into the paranormal.
		And in this one case, there was some kind of college professor, a scholar who they had commissioned to go to Egypt because there was a story floating around.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can we slow down for one moment?
		I mean, you just said something that doesn't make sense to me.
		Why would the government, through the CIA or any other arm, funnel money to people investigating the paranormal?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		They did it with remote viewing.
unidentified		Well, they did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Yeah, they did.
		That's right.
		But otherwise, the government is not known to be a big contributor with funds to anything paranormal other than, as you point out, remote viewing.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		I'm including UFOs in the paranormal.
		I'm including human beings with abilities to manipulate things.
		I mean, Uri Geller, Joe can certainly talk to Uri Geller's involvement with American Intelligence Services.
		So they were investigating aspects of human behavior or human abilities that had to do with the paranormal.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That I can see.
unidentified		That I can see.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		And in this one particular case, there was a story floating around that there was not a computer disk, that would be a mischaracterization, but there was a device on which there was stored for thousands and thousands of years, and this was in Egypt, alien technology.
		And supposedly, this scholar who was commissioned found it, acquired it, and refused to turn it over to this group, to this government group.
		Refused to turn it over.
		He said, I'm going to sell it to the highest bidder.
		How much are you going to put up with?
		Or how much are you going to put up to get this back?
		And what this officer told me was that from time to time, various officers are given what are known as cowboy jobs or black bag jobs, literally off-the-books operations, go get something back, go find something, go terminate someone with extreme prejudice.
		They'll be handed these jobs.
		His job was to get a hold of this guy, to get his hands on this piece of technology, and to let them know he had it and wait for it until they sent a representative to pick it up.
		And that's exactly what he did.
		He found this guy.
		He made him an offer, an offer that was better than what the French had offered.
		They were in Paris, and rather than simply hand him the money, he basically knocked him out, anesthetized him.
		A group came in, took the guy's body.
		He doesn't know whatever happened to it.
		He presumes the guy was killed.
		And then the person who showed up to get that piece of technology in this hotel room was Malachi Martin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My goodness, Bill, you didn't give me any idea this was coming tonight, which is fine.
		I love surprises, but holy, holy dog poop.
		Oh my God.
		So a device, an ancient device that somehow, even though it's ancient, stores information, very, very important information.
		It's sort of put up for bid.
		We win.
		Malachi, acting for the CIA, collects it.
		All right?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
		The person went rogue.
		He would not turn it over.
		He said, I'm putting it up for the highest bidder.
		Supposedly the French won.
		He was meeting him in a hotel.
		He was meeting whatever bureau was handling this for the French in Paris.
		That's where this individual from the CIA crossed his path, offered him more.
		The guy basically said, sure, the highest bidder.
		They met in a hotel room, and this person dispatched him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why would they dispatch Malachi to retrieve this device?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Just curious.
		That's the key question.
		Because Malachi was one of the individuals who was, how can I put it, almost like the historian or the scholar or the expert for this group.
		He was vetting the kinds of applications or candidates that this group was examining.
		He was vetting them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It seems to me that the very existence, I mean, Malachi was a very, very conservative Catholic.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Yes, but he was a Catholic who was let out of his regular orders by his Pope.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I know.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		And one wonders, I mean, what was underneath that?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		My theory always was that Malachi was far more valuable as a secular priest than he was in regular orders.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I think that's fair.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know that the manner of his death is somewhat suspicious.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Turn that over to Joel.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Joel knows all about that one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
		I'm not even sure I want to ask, but ask, I shall.
		Joel, do you really know something about Malachi's death?
		What I heard is that he was kept out of communication by the sisters who were caring for him, that he fell down the steps, and that is the manner of his death.
		Now, there are people who have said, oh, there's some conspiracy here.
		He didn't fall down anything.
		He got pushed, at least.
		What do you know, Joel?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's a a a thread of truth that runs through all of those versions.
		He had a very beautiful apartment on the east side of Manhattan.
		He was living the way any of us live.
		You know, house, apartment, whatever.
		He was not living in a rectory or anything like that.
		He was living with a woman on the east side of Manhattan.
		He had a lady friend.
		And when he fell down, he was on a ladder looking for a book.
		He was one of those books, you know, those ladders you see in bookstores that roll back and forth.
		He was on one of those because he had an extensive library.
		I mean, a really extensive library.
		He was looking for something, and he either fell down or was pushed.
		That's exactly right.
		Now, there's a version that says he fell down a flight of stairs.
		Frankly, I don't know that that makes sense given where he lived, but it is more than likely he was pushed rather than he fell.
		Because Malachi, for all of his brilliance, and he really was, was still a man of the cloth in the sense that he was a deeply religious man.
		And don't you think?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That was my impression of him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No question about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not at all.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		And I think everything, listen, if Bill tells it to you, I don't even question it.
		But that's my own personal opinion of Bill's veracity, of the truth he always tells about these things.
		But there is nonetheless the fact that the government, and I've had my dealings with them too, they would rather see him go quietly than have to worry about if he says something publicly, given that he had a big platform, shall we say.
		Don't forget he wrote dozens of books.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, well, he had a rather regular platform with me, and he was very, very outspoken.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		I met him, and I interviewed him, but nowhere near to the extent you did.
		I don't even pretend to.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so do you honestly think that the CIA, for example, may have been concerned that he would begin opening up about some of what he had done with regard to everything you just talked about, this device, whatever it was.
		Yes.
		My God.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I certainly do.
		And there's no question that government intelligence agencies will approach people who they think can help them with information of the kind that Malachi Martin would have had access to.
		Just the kind of thing Bill told you about, the kind of scholarly research, the contacts that he would have had in the Vatican, in Rome, in his native Ireland, what he had in the United States.
		He was a world figure.
		He wasn't just, he wasn't your local, I'm not putting anybody down, but he wasn't, you know, your local parish priest.
		And if they thought your local parish priest knew anything, frankly, they'd be there too.
		I mean, they had come to visit us after certain programs.
		Why wouldn't, if we were local, why wouldn't they do that with somebody like Malachi Martin?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Okay.
		Let's go back to the incident, if you want to call it that, in Paris.
		What do we now know about this device, if anything?
		Where did it end up?
		was the knowledge retrieved?
		What was, I mean...
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		This was after this scholar's body, this person's body was removed.
		Malachi Martin shows up and basically takes possession.
		It was like, it's not a disk.
		It was an oddly shaped flat object that could be read by something.
		So whether we actually had the technology to read it, because he said you couldn't put it in a computer, and this was before floppy disk drives were that common.
		But it was like a disk, and he said that what the person told him, because he did have a conversation with this person before he gave him his injection, and what the person said was that there was data on that disk,
		mathematical data, was the best way he could explain it, mathematical symbols and equations and things like that that he didn't understand, but that he believed that there would be people to whom that would make sense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so Malachi was retrieving this not for the Vatican, not as a religious artifact, but for the CIA.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		But for a government group.
		And we know that the government outsources this stuff because in your travels, can you prove that Malachi was in Paris on that day?
		I only have this person's story that tells me that.
		This is all I have is the story from one person.
		And this was one of many stories.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't tell me, or don't tell me who the person is because you can't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But at least tell me how highly placed he was.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		He was highly placed enough that when we went to certain places in the area where we were filming, everyone knew him.
		He seemed to know details about the right kinds of people who would know certain kinds of secrets.
		He told me that his legend, legends basically is the cover story this has, that his legend was that he had been a very high-ranking consolieri to one of the top organized crime figures because that figure was getting intelligence on the drug trade from the Middle East.
		And so he was able to look over this person's shoulder and get some valuable intelligence about, for example, Hamas guarding drug shipments.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It seems to me, Bill, certain aspects of this story would be verifiable.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There was a death involved, right?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		There was a death involved, and I don't know the person's name who died.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, but there was a death involved on a certain day.
		And there would be a record of Malachi Martin either being or not being in Paris, in fact, France, on that day.
		So you could proceed to investigate some of this and try and verify at least the basic stuff, right?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		I could.
		The problem is this person's identity because he wanted to do a book.
		That was the whole point of this person's contacting me.
		And this was after the Corso book, and he said, look, I really want to do a book about my life and my involvement with strange black box, black book things about my life, because I really want the people around me to at least know my story that I can't tell.
		And so we talked about that for a while.
		We visited a couple of publishers.
		He couldn't do it as nonfiction, so he wanted to do it as fiction.
		And this particular publisher said, this will never fly as a novel.
		It really has to fly as nonfiction.
		And it fly as a true story.
		And he said, it'll never, never get through the review board.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so presumably even his life might be in danger should he come out with this, yes?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Yes, because of this and other stories where he did certain kinds of jobs for elements within the government that were off the books.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I was stunned to hear some of these stories.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So am I. I'm very stunned.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Not one shred of evidence that they're true.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Do you have any trust his words?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, do you have any separate evidence at all that Malachi Martin was involved with the CIA?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Anything beyond that man's word?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		It's that person's word, but among the stories he was telling about how deep and pervasive the CIA and our intelligence agencies are, it's not just the CIA, it's DPMA and other kinds of DIA and other kinds of three-letter agencies,
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		that he said that over the course of 60 years, that the pervasiveness of the intelligence community is such that people, you turn on the television and you see a news commentator whom you believe to be either a centrist or really a liberal person, that person's a listening post.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I know.
		Here's what I will say that will support a little bit what you're saying generally.
		I do know for a fact that scholars, people who lecture internationally, highly placed individuals in private society are indeed frequently approached by the CIA to do little jobs for them.
		If somebody's going into Burma, they might want to know the condition of an airport or a runway or some sort of infrastructure information.
		I know that these contacts are made by the CIA and these people are used in this way.
		So to that degree, I can verify that goes on.
		But that it went on with Malachi Martin, Father Malachi Martin?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Well, look at Valerie Plain's husband, who was an ambassador in Niger.
		I mean, here's a guy who was not in the CIA.
		He was in the State Department, literally tasked by the CIA, go to Niger, find out if Saddam Hussein is buying yellow tape to make nuclear weapons.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, boy, that's another show.
		All right, you two hold on.
		Hi, yeah, yeah.
		Dynamite.
		I'm Art Bell from the high desert, the great American Southwest.
		This is midnight in the desert.
unidentified		Hmm.
		This is midnight in the desert.
		Who's gonna tell you when?
		It's too late.
		Who's gonna tell you when?
		Piano from one play.
		On tomorrow, can yesterday Midnight in the Desert doesn't screen calls.
		We trust you, but remember, the NSA.
		Belle, you know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
		It's got to be right.
		Got to be right.
unidentified		Midnight in the Desert doesn't screen calls.
		We trust you, but remember, the NSA.
		Belle, you know.
		To call the show, please dial 1-952-225-5278.
		That's 1-952-CALLART.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I love that.
		Got to be something to cheer me up.
		Tonight's show thus far is like getting a double-ass punch in the gut.
		Oh, man.
		I've got Bill Burns and Joel Martin with me.
		And thus far, we've covered Amityville being a complete hoax with sort of a cautionary tale tagged on.
		And then Father Malachi Martin being a CIA agent with a story that goes along with that in Paris.
		Now, here's what I'd like to do.
		I'd like to open the phone lines and let you ask questions about this and or other things.
		So let me get out the numbers and do the talk.
		And then there are a couple of other things I want to cover here from their book, The Haunting of America, which actually, folks, when we set out to do the show tonight, was going to be the topic and had nothing to do with anything we've talked about thus far.
		Just so you know.
		So here's the way you call into the show.
		And if you have questions about what you've heard, and I bet you do, feel free.
		Our public number is area code 952-225-5278.
		You would dial a 1 first, and then area code 952-225-5278.
		Secondary way to get in, maybe the better way, if you're equipped, is Skype.
		Skype is really a cool deal because if you have a headset mic and or you use it on an iPhone 6 or something like that, you can sound really, really, really good.
		And your presence on the air adds to what you have to say.
		It gives you a sort of a command voice, if you will.
		So to reach us on Skype, download Skype to your computer or cell phone, whatever.
		It's free, right?
		Free.
		And then once you get Skype, learn a little bit about it.
		And what you do is go to the little plus sign on Skype as in add a contact.
		And we would be that contact.
		All right?
		So if you're in North America, America, or Canada, simply add us as a contact.
		And we are MITD51.
		As in midnight in the desert, 51.
		M-I-T-D.
		You don't have to spell it out.
		Just the initials.
		The case doesn't matter.
		M-I-T-D 5-1.
		Internationally or outside North America and Canada?
		M-I-T-D 5-5.
		That's M-I-T-D 5-5.
		And so there you are.
		Gentlemen, welcome back.
		I do have a couple more questions, but I wanted to set it up so we could begin to take questions because, boy, based on what you've said, there's going to be lots of questions.
		So let's see what to ask.
		Your book, The Haunting of America, does generate some interesting questions.
		And frankly, the last one I see listed here is the most interesting to me.
		You claim the government, the two of you claim, I guess, the government knows that the paranormal, what we call the paranormal, is normal.
		Is that right?
		Yes, that's correct.
		And you base this on?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Well, a number of things.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		For example, conversations I had with John Alexander, with Paul Smith.
unidentified		I know John well.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Basically, you know John well, of course.
		And he said that, he told me that what the government now knows, and they know it for a fact, they know it for a military fact, not just some kind of philosophical fact, that the paranormal is actually real.
		And the paranormal is, in fact, an aspect of normalcy.
		And they've known this.
		The government developed military policy around it.
		Jimmy Channon developed Earth Battalion 1, which was a paranormal-based military unit.
		And in order to create that unit, he was called in after his service in Vietnam when he was able to take troops that he believed had psychic abilities.
		And he was putting, this was when he was a lieutenant, and he was putting them on point.
		And when he did that, when he used troops with psychic abilities on point, his casualties, the ambushes went way down.
		Folks can find his story.
		There's an old UFO magazine in which he's on the cover.
		And he said, yeah, that the government, that the army asked him to investigate the paranormal, visit sites like Eslin and other sites, understand the whole New Age movement, and create a battalion, a military battalion, based on that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, actually, that makes sense to me, whether you call it paranormal ability, or you just call it good soldiering, or you call it a very intuitive individual.
		No matter how you phrase it, sure, having somebody like that on point would make sense and probably would work.
		So I get it.
		But, you know, there's quite a way from that to, well, that the government knows the paranormal is normal.
		I mean, that's a big statement.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		It's one of the things, there was a person, I mean, folks might remember this person's name.
		He was a naval commander, George Hoover.
		He's best known as the naval commander who was tasked by the Office of Naval Intelligence to investigate the Philadelphia experiment, the time travel experiment.
		It wasn't really a time travel experiment, but he was tasked to investigate it.
		Right about the time that we were wrapping up the Corso book, this was in California, with the production company that had purchased Corso's life story rights, we were sitting down with him.
		He lived in Pacific Palisades.
		We were sitting down with him.
		And one of the things he said was that he was kind of the Corso of the Navy.
		And he said that folks in high-ranking positions in the military, special access projects folks, and this would have been in NASA, in the military, and other government agencies, he said that they were well aware that he really confirmed what Edgar Mitchell had been talking about.
		That yes, they were extraterrestrials.
		Yes, we knew about them.
		Yes, we were working with them.
		And one of the things he said was that the high-ranking military officers weren't really afraid of it.
		That was not a matter of military concern to these people.
		He said the biggest concern, and he said this in kind of a weird way, he said the biggest concern was that these entities were really more humanoid than anybody thought.
		They were really more like human beings, and that human beings had some of the same exact abilities, call them paranormal abilities, but abilities that these creatures had.
		And that's what really panicked people in the military, saying that society absolutely wasn't ready for human beings to wield those kinds of powers.
		And that was one of the big concerns.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Just a couple others, and then we'll go to the phone because there have got to be questions about all of this.
		My God.
		So you're saying in your book, I Guess you make a claim that there was a curse placed on New Orleans.
		Now, gentlemen, besides the National Weather Service, what other curse was involved?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Have you been to New Orleans?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I have, actually.
		I don't mean to disparage anybody who lives there, but that city frightens me.
		I mean, it absolutely terrifies me.
		We did research very meticulously about New Orleans, about the old legends of ghosts and about horrible, horrible things that happened there involving people who were killed and people who were maimed and so forth, and about apparitions that were seen.
		But it apparently starts when you have New Orleans, don't forget, as the port of entry for the slave trade, way, way back at the early 1800s.
		And from that point on, that city has never known a moment's peace as far as the paranormal is concerned, as far as anything having to do with apparitional phenomena is concerned.
		You've got stories about when the hurricane happened there, cameramen, people from other cities, and we include one in the book from San Francisco, I believe, who saw something, which was an apparitional phenomenon, that he had never in his life expected to see or thought he would see.
		And why did it happen?
		Well, because it was a time of stress, and it was a time of terrible fright during the hurricane.
		And he reported it.
		Nobody wants to pick up these stories.
		There's nothing abnormal about them.
		It's just that the major media doesn't want to cover them unless they do it as a joke for Halloween.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not a joke.
		It's not a joke.
		Also, we just discussed Colonel Corso.
		There are some now, after his passing, saying that Colonel Corso was weaving a tale as well.
		I take it your view is contrary to that.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Phil Corso, I have all the guy's records, and I became very friendly with him over the course of the writing of the book.
		And my impression always was that, and I have this kind of documented, that one of the things Phil did, first of all, people forget the fact that Corso's entire life was in the intelligence service.
		From the time he first enlisted in the Army in World War II and he stepped forward when he said, when people asked who wants to join, be in the intelligence service, Corso stepped forward.
		So his job was always weaving tales and coming up with stories.
		So I think the base part of a story was always true.
		But he did tend to conflate.
		For example, I have all of his early records, all of his early manuscripts.
		And what would happen would be he'd be writing about someone, and I keep forgetting the names, but he'd be writing about someone who said something to a congressional committee way back when.
		Then that person dies.
		Then it's Corso who's saying something to that committee.
		So his memory did tend to conflate things.
		I know from what he gave me from General Trudeau's memoirs that there was in fact a project called Not Invented Here, that Arthur Trudeau, who had really earned the confidence of Senator Strom Thurmond, went to Strom Thurmond because he had, he said, a catch of materials that were not invented here.
		And this was in the wake of Harry Truman's, years earlier, obviously, Harry Truman's giving the lowest common denominator from the crash at Roswell to Western Electric.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so let's sum this up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You think there were nuggets of truth in what Corso said, but he had related it.
unidentified		Yeah, because Corso, because Artrudo confirmed the whole thing.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he wrote in his memoirs that he went to Strom Thurman.
		He had this material.
		It was not invented here.
		He said that he wanted money to develop this.
		And Strom Thurman said to him, the only way the Senate would give you money to develop this technology was that if you brought it to companies that were defense contractors, so we could trust them, that were already working on this technology, and this would give them a boost, that will be your budget.
		And that's what Corso became responsible for, first at the foreign technology desk, then as deputy director.
		So Corso really, when we first met at the outset, he really was the bagman for Arthur Trudeau.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		So we've just about debunked the world.
		You guys claim you can give scientific rationale for the existence of ghosts.
unidentified		If so, what would that be, please?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead, Joe.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		You want me to go ahead?
		Because they have been there for so long that you cannot call something anecdotal when it's been reported by millions of people.
		It fails the anecdotal test.
		I've had, in all my life, one experience with one apparition in Bonn, Germany.
		And anybody who says they see ghosts all the time makes me suspicious because the phenomena just doesn't work that way.
		The phenomena tends to be more selective.
		It tends to be rather discreet, and you tend to see not too many things.
		I saw an apparition of a nun in the basilica in Bonn, the church in Bonn, Germany.
		This is several years ago.
		But when you look at some place like the White House, which Bill and I have written about, the haunting of the White House, a haunting of the presidents, to be specific, the title of the book, you realize that these were men and women, the first families, who have no reason to lie, in fact, have more to lose than gain.
		So Harry Truman, who believed in none of this and called it bunk, has a page that Bill has from his diary, and the page says he hears something walking around at night on the second floor in the private quarters of the president, and it creeps him out, and he's disgusted with it, and he'll hear somebody banging on the door.
		He'll open the door.
		Nobody will be there.
		And it goes on and on like that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you can't use anecdotal, no matter in what Quantity to prove to a scientist, and if you have proven to a scientist, you might give me his name because they require repeatability, not anecdotally repeating stuff, but real repeating stuff that they can observe and test.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It stops being anecdotal when there are millions and millions of these cases, and we're talking in the millions.
		It's a good question that you ask, but it's not anecdotal when it happens so much that, for example, the near-death experience is an analogy.
		Nobody considers the near-death experience anecdotal anymore.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't want to be on the wrong side of this argument because I sort of agree with these things and investigate them, look into them myself, but I'm not ready to jump to scientific evidence.
		That's a bar that we haven't reached.
		I don't care how many anecdotal stories you've got.
unidentified		But scientific, but it misdefines science.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Science is not defined properly when somebody says, well, if it doesn't meet the test of the scientific method, then it can't be.
		Well, there are a lot of sciences that we really cannot understand and don't understand.
		And that goes from earthquake predictions to meteorology to human psychology.
		What do we do?
		We bring a psychiatrist into the courtroom after somebody's murdered six people in his family?
		I mean, there are a number of cases that are considered scientific, a number of areas of science that simply don't fly with the scientific method.
		Yet, we consider them scientific.
		Call it the study of, if it makes you happy, fine.
		Call it the study of apparitions, I don't care.
		But something is clearly there.
		Too many people witness it.
		Too many similarities.
		You talk to somebody in Paris.
		You talk to somebody in Germany, in Los Angeles, in New York, wherever, in the Midwest, Chicago, they'll tell you the same thing.
		Gee, I saw this thing go by.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I know.
		I know.
		Me of all people, I take nothing but calls all the time.
		So I'm absolutely fascinated by this field of study, guys.
		But scientific proof, I think that bar, we just haven't made that bar yet.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I don't think we said proof.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I think we said evidence.
unidentified		Okay, science is a difference itself.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Evidence that amounts to proof.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		But what if science itself is stacked against it?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		What if the whole point of science is not just repeatability and not just scientific testing, but the bar that science sets doesn't allow for things that doesn't fit into that square box of science?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		All right.
		Look, I want to let some people in on this conversation.
		If I don't do it, they're going to scalp me.
		So, Eric, where are you, Eric?
		Hello, I'm scratching.
unidentified		Good morning, Eric.
unidentified		I'm from Ottawa, Canada, and actually, it's 2 o'clock in the morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Eric, you know what?
unidentified		Hold it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Eric, you're on the wrong line.
unidentified		Oh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You need to be on the North American line.
		I'm terribly sorry.
		That's MITD 51.
		The line you're on is for International Beyond North America.
		So we'll go to John.
		Hello, John, on Skype.
		Well, now we're almost out of time.
		John, are you there?
unidentified		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		John, can you hold on?
		I don't want you to get started and then cut off.
		So I'm going to hold you through this two-minute break, and we'll come back and let you ask your question, all right?
unidentified		That'll be great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Yeah, terribly sorry.
		You know, I don't want somebody to get 10 words out and then cut them off.
		So what we're going to do is take our break now, the scheduled break that I must take, actually, and then we'll come back.
		And if you want to talk to these gentlemen either phone or Skype, we're here.
		Come and ask.
		After what you've heard, can't blame you.
		There's an awful lot of questions.
unidentified		The End
		The End To initiate a dialogue sequence with Art Bell, please coordinate your Valanges and call 1-952-225-5278.
		That's 1-952-Call Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are two guests here.
		I'm Art Bell.
		Bill Burns is one, and Joel Martin is the other.
		It's been a big double punch, to be sure.
		The revelation that Amity Bill was total fake.
		And that Malachi Martin was acting for the CIA.
		If you have questions along these lines, feel free to join us.
		Gentlemen, you're back, and so is John.
		Thank you for waiting.
		John, fire away.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
unidentified		Art Bell, I'm about a 20-year listener to the Art Bell Show from the old days.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		And I wanted to tell you that tonight is an historic night for you and for the listeners of the Art Bell show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would say.
unidentified		And I just want to know, Art Bell, when are you going to come out of the closet about your connections to the CIA?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I did that years ago.
		People used to call me up all the time and say, you're in the CIA, and I got sick of it, so I just started saying, yep.
		So?
unidentified		Yes.
		Okay.
		That was my question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Same answer then.
		Thank you very much for the call, John, and take care.
		Yeah, after a while, it just gets annoying.
		And so I found that when people call up and say, Art, you're in the CIA, right?
		Yeah, actually, I am.
		And then there's just long silence on the line.
		They say, okay, thank you.
		Go away.
		All right, to the phones.
		Redondo, I think, something or another in California.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hey, Art, how's it going?
		I was a friend of George Lutz for the last few years of his life, and I run a website, a pretty popular website, about Amityville.
		I got some serious questions about, not questions, some serious problems about the William Weber thing.
		George gave me a contract proposal that William Weber kind of made up for the book deal that they were going to do, not the Amityville horror book deal, but this is like a book deal that Weber was planning about the murders.
		And the whole thing was the Letz's tale was supposed to be the last part of the book, just kind of like a footnote in the whole murder thing.
		So anyways, the contract that Weber signed, that Weber dreamed up, it has a clause in there that says the Letzes were going to take a polygraph test, and if they failed this polygraph test, they were going to lose all payments, all interest in the story.
		The story with the book and everything would become totally Weber's property, and the Letzes lose out on everything.
		So if this was all a fake, how would that make sense?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		It would make sense because either A, they never planned to take the polygraph test, or B, he thought he could cheat or fool the polygraph.
		And there are people who can.
		I know somebody very well known who was able to fool the polygraph and did.
		And it was a big international story, the Clifford Irving story, about the Howard Hughes hoax in 1972.
		And he was able to fool the polygraph, and he told me how, by controlling his breathing, by controlling his mind, a certain self-mind control.
		That's the only two plausible explanations.
		But you raise a good point.
unidentified		This is a private document, though.
		It's not for the public.
		It was a private contract between Letz and Weber, so the public wouldn't know about the polygraph test.
		It was solely in the contract.
		It just makes no sense.
		It's like if I call Stephen King and say, hey, Stephen King, I want you to write this fake book about ghosts.
		And he says, okay, and I say, and then I want you to do a polygraph test claiming the story is real.
		And if you fail the polygraph test, which we all know you will because we're making the story up, then you lose out on all the money.
		How about that?
		Doesn't make sense.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, it doesn't.
		But nothing in the story makes sense, frankly.
		Very little makes sense.
		There's no reason to doubt Bill Weber either.
		I mean, you can go either way with it.
		The truth is you can't.
		You know, it's left-hand or right-hand.
		You know, which way do you want to go, left or right?
		I mean, I can't argue with you.
		George Lutz, I know, was caught in a number of mistruths over the years.
		That doesn't mean that the whole thing is a fraud, but it was.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Also, George Lutz, also, just to the caller, George Lutz breached the contract.
		He simply sold the book rights.
		He sold the book rights out under Bill Weber.
		So that was a fact.
		Weber had to sue to get a settlement.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		So you're saying they had no contract?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, nobody said they did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you would never have a contract outlining a fraud.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, it's word of mouth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You'd have a handshake deal at best.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Handshake, that's right.
		That's right.
		They never said they had a contract.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, Colin.
unidentified		Why did Weber take so long before he came up to it?
		You even said in that interview, which I read in Kaplan's book, you asked him, why sue now?
		Why didn't you sue at the beginning?
		And Weber's answer was, well, they didn't have money back then.
		I'm suing now because I can get money now.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		That makes sense.
unidentified		It always sounds like Weber.
		Does that really sound like the money?
		Well, is that very well, or is that just him, is that a confession by Weber that he was in on the hoax?
		Or is it him just wanting money and pretending there was a hoax?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no.
		There was a hoax, but he wanted the money.
		There's nothing wrong.
		You want the money from a hoax.
		I mean, why does a woman sue a husband who's very, very wealthy as opposed to one who doesn't sue the husband because he has no money?
		I mean, it's the same thing.
		You know, hey, listen, you just made a million dollars.
		I think I'll sue you for some of it.
		That's all.
		He admitted it.
		I was surprised myself when I read the transcript because I never heard the interview.
		But when I read the transcript, it was very interesting to hear him say, he didn't have any money, then what was I going to sue?
unidentified		Oh, come on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's usually the first thing lawyers think about.
		Is it a good suit?
		Yeah.
		Well, if we win, do we make anything?
		If not, it's not worth it.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's correct.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		So that's not surprising.
unidentified		Weber also had a few different things.
unidentified		When he said, when Weber said he came up with the slime story that was in Anson's book, first he said the slime was just the fingerprint powder.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		That was, I think, in your interview.
unidentified		Then later on in 1988, he said it was the slime came from spaghetti sauce that the DeFeos spilled against the wall.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		What's the difference?
unidentified		What's the difference is it shows that he can't remember the truth.
		I mean, if he came up with a story, he's coming up with two different versions of how he came up with it.
		I mean, what's the truth?
		You got to look at them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's the trouble with lies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You've got to remember them accurately.
unidentified		Exactly.
		What you just said, that's the trouble with lies.
		And this is showing that Weber's lying, doesn't it?
		So who are you going to believe?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's up to you because, frankly, I told you the Warrens, Lorraine and Ed Warren, believed that the story was true.
		Steve Kaplan did not.
		William Weber confessed that it wasn't true.
unidentified		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you said the Warrens believed that based on a seance.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sorry, but that casts a little bit.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Based on a seance, that's correct.
		Based on a seance, and what they said was, quote, their investigation.
		They said they'd been in the house more than once, and between that and the seance, they believed it was true.
		Now, where they got that information from otherwise, how can I say?
		I can only tell you that William Weber was able to talk on the air with me, and then he went to court, and he had to swear under oath.
		I assume that he swore under oath that he was telling the truth because they made an out-of-court settlement.
		Beyond that, how can I say what happened?
		I'm a reporter.
		I can tell you the story.
		I had the only interview with Bill Weber, except for the woman from the Associated Press, and he told us both the same thing separately.
		That's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What I don't get out of all of this is how Weber escaped the bar through all this.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, when you consider.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Because this wasn't a part of his legal practice, because he was defending DeFeo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I get that.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Right, and so George Lutz comes to him and basically says, Look, I can't afford this house.
		I'm going to lose this house.
		I overpaid.
		This is the end for me.
		So together, they cook up this story that the house is haunted because what they're going to do is sell the story.
		So it does two things.
		Theoretically, he can say, well, DeFeo, the devil made me do it.
		And for Lutz, they're selling a book and Weber and Lutz are going to split the proceeds of that book.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, and I'm not an expert on bar rules, but I really think that a lawyer concocting a story with somebody involved in a case he was a representative in, seems to me that that's you're out of here kind of stuff.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was his defense.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		What Bill just said was exactly the way he defended himself, because I had talked to him privately as well.
unidentified		Really?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		He wasn't saying it in the context of the legal case or the courtroom.
		He was doing this above and beyond, somewhere on the side.
		So there was no problem until there was money.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		This was a book deal.
		This is really all it was was a book deal.
		Nothing more than that.
unidentified		A book deal that Weber never said that the Letzes Weber never claimed that the Letzes said about their mortgage or anything like that.
		In fact, in your interview, Joel, Weber says that the Letzes came to them first and said, we're having problems with this house, and we think it might affect your client.
		So they never came to him and said, look, we can't afford the house.
		Let's make up a good ghost story.
		He never said that.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Who said he did?
		He just couldn't afford the house.
		You just said he had economic problems.
		He had troubles paying that house at $80,000 now would not be expensive for a beautiful house on the water.
		In those years, that was a lot of money because $20,000 and $30,000 got you a good house.
		Yeah, so you're saying the same thing I'm saying, I think.
unidentified		Yeah, sorry, Joe, it's not you.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		The other guy said that he went up to Bill Weber and said, Lutz was having economic difficulties.
		He was having problems.
		That's what we're saying.
		And he needed an answer.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you go up to Weber and I was just sent a very nice gift, actually, from somebody.
		It's a gavel, and everybody was just going at it.
		So order in the studio.
		One at a time.
		That's actually a gavel.
		Thank you, by the way, James Tim Cheney, for sending it to me.
		Sounded pretty good, right?
unidentified		I just wanted to make that quick point.
unidentified		I just wanted to make that quick point that he didn't actually say that, and that Weber didn't claim that in the interview that Joel did.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for the call.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for the call.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's worth the opinion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It was a good one, actually.
		All right.
		Let's go to Skype and Eric.
		Hello, Eric.
		You're on the air.
unidentified		Hi, Eric.
		I'm from Ottawa.
		And I was curious, you were talking on both the father, how he passed away.
		Was he pushed or did he fall from his library?
		I heard the two stories, and then I had to leave the room, so I never did hear the whole request.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
		Okay, good one.
		Actually, I don't know the answer to it, Father Malachi Martin.
		I heard fell down steps.
		Now, again, go ahead and fill him in, Joel or Bill.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Bill would, I guess, say what I say.
		He either fell down steps or was pushed from steps.
		He either fell off a ladder or was pushed from the ladder.
		That's the problem.
		We don't really know because nobody was apparently in that apartment except his lady friend and himself that day, and there was nothing inappropriate about that.
		And he was looking for a book on a high shelf.
		Now, did he go off a ladder?
		Did he go down the stairs?
		I have heard both versions.
		It's one or the other.
		And do I believe that he was working in league or somehow connected to the government and looking for material for them?
		Sure.
		I have no doubt about that at all.
		That's the other part of it.
		I don't question that for a moment.
		Not after talking to him and not after the things I've researched.
		But as far as his death is concerned, unfortunately, we will never know.
unidentified		Living in Canada, we have a Dr. Hamilton that used to live in Winnipeg back in the 20s and 30s, and they did a lot of paranormal research.
		And in Winnipeg, it's a really big thing out there.
		And then in Toronto, there was hosted to the Phillip experiment, two really cool stories in Canadian history about the Philip experiment.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I know a lot about that.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I know the man who set up the Philip experiment.
unidentified		I worked for him for several years until his death.
unidentified		Oh, well, it's a very interesting story, too.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
		That was Mr. Ben Webster, who was the creator of the Phillip experiment.
		And it was created under the Toronto Society for Psychical Research.
		And what they did is they created a ghost that didn't exist, and then they asked the ghost to do things, and the ghost actually was able to function and move furniture around and actually affect change.
		So it proved there were no such things as ghosts, except as you conjured them in your own mind.
		It's a very complex and fascinating story.
unidentified		It is, and it's very difficult to find information on the subject.
		One more question, Art, please.
		Do you have anything coming up with the GIS, or do you work with that society anymore?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The answer is wait till the end of the week.
unidentified		Okay, thank you guys.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so you're later.
		All right, that was a good call.
		Fishing for information, nevertheless, a good call.
		All right, so let's go again to the phones.
		Hello there.
		Wherever you are, you're on the air.
		Hello?
		Going once.
		Going twice.
		You're going to miss your chance.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, see?
		So what did you do?
		Put us on the speakerphone, walk away, right?
unidentified		No, no, no, no, no.
		I'm sorry.
		I had you on mute, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		So proceed.
unidentified		I'm calling to verify about Father Malachi Martin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my.
unidentified		I have been on the other side back in the day.
		I'm retired now.
		But what they're saying is very true.
		Bill and I have crossed paths before.
		Joel, never, but Bill and I have.
		And it is very, I just want to substantiate that it is true.
		I've been associated with a couple of those three letters.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's be clear.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're saying that Father Malachi Martin, and you know this from personal, you know this firsthand, you're saying, right?
unidentified		Yes, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That Father Malachi Martin was doing work for the CIA.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
		Any questions for him, Bill?
		Well, Bill, I mean, I belong to an organization, and it's a three-letter organization of retired spooks, so to speak.
		We meet in Washington, D.C. every September.
		And the founder of the organization passed away about two, three years ago.
		GW was his initials.
		So if Bill can recollect that, and if he knows Andy Grimes, he can put two and two together.
		But it's definitely true, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What a night.
unidentified		Bill, you know what?
unidentified		We're talking about, I used to listen to you in the mid-90s when you were interviewing him and had suspicions back then, but just couldn't put two and two together.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it probably would have been one of my last guesses for part-time work for the father.
unidentified		Well, no different than Al Sharpton and a lot of other political figures.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, didn't you have movie stars during World War II who were working in secret for the government that way?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		And who was the TV cook who was doing it also?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Julia Child.
		To the trial?
		I mean, who was, who was?
unidentified		Yeah.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Sure, that's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I actually interviewed him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And he made that claim, I know.
unidentified		Yeah, he did.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So it's not unheard of.
		I don't even know why it should shock us anymore, but it does.
unidentified		I have some distant relatives who were involved in the OSS back in the 40s, which got me involved only because of my relations with them.
		So one thing leads to another.
		It's sort of like when you belong to a certain union, they hand down to generation to generation.
		So you get passed on some stories, and you can either believe them or not believe them.
		But I just want to, all right, I'm just saying, I'm just one more figure.
		And before I get coordinated, which I'm sure they already triangulated me, I'm going to go let you guys do your thing.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Thank you very much for the call.
		Before we go to another call, this one catches my interest a little bit.
		You guys have both apparently researched what Edison did.
		And I think one of the last things he did was invent the spirit phone, right?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's the book we're doing.
		That's the book that's coming out this spring 2016.
		That's the one we're writing now.
unidentified		Good.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can at least touch on something that's contemporary, your new book.
		So tell us, Edison thought that...
		Did Edison suddenly hear something that was to him suspicious from the other side?
		Or how did it happen?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		We're looking at this from three possibilities.
		I mean, Joel can certainly talk about the history of this thing.
		Edison was, after the Chicago World's Fair, after Tesla showed that his theory of alternating current was the superior theory.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Still argued.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		And then after Edison and Tesla butted heads at the outset of World War I over Tesla's plans for a robotic missile, a homing torpedo, things like that.
		Tesla was way ahead of his time.
		So Edison deep-sixed all that stuff.
		Finally, in the last decade of his life, around 1920, this is after the great age of spiritualism that Joel is the expert on, Edison saw the potential that he thought that if human beings were simply collections of subatomic particles, if that's what we were, he was very influenced by Max Planck.
		He felt that if we were simply collections of those, maybe a constellation of those particles would have some form of consciousness, some form of sentience.
unidentified		So his idea was...
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		His idea, yes, but his idea was that he would fire a particle beam against a target.
		And if something, if some collection of subatomic particles crossed that particle beam, that would register on a meter.
		And if he could prove that this thing was some kind of a constellation of particles, maybe he could get that thing to respond to yes or no questions.
		So he conducted this experiment in which he had a number of transchannelers and mediums.
		And he had this device built.
		We kind of have in the book we'll have a picture of that device.
		He had this device built.
		And he basically conducted, and for Edison, who debunked this thing, Edison said this whole thing was a bunch of hoo-wee.
		Didn't believe it, thought the paranormal was false.
		Yet here he is building this machine.
		So he conducts a seance with the idea that these channelers will bring the spirits into the room.
		They'd cross the particle beam.
		He'd get a register on the meter.
		That would prove that we did not die.
		That was the experiment.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And did he prove it?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Nope, we don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So here is something finally we don't know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's go to Solverdale, Washington on the phone.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
silverdale in washington ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Martin.
silverdale in washington ▲ ● ▼		I wanted to say I have One of your tapes from one of your interviews with Malachi Martin, and it was just amazing.
silverdale in washington ▲ ● ▼		I cherished that tape that I've got.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Listen, let me say right now that whether or not Malachi was doing work for the CIA on the side, that does not in any way lessen the spiritual man that we heard on that program.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard nothing that would change that yet.
silverdale in washington ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't either.
		I just want, I did not, I wasn't listening close enough, apparently, to understand.
		Are they saying that Malachi had someone or that the CIA had someone else come in and give the man a shot, or that Malachi did that?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		No, Malachi did not do that.
		Malachi was not involved in any violence whatsoever.
		What happened was that this individual who was tasked by this special access projects group, he mentioned some of the names in that group.
		Again, I don't even want to go near that.
		And he was contracted by them to put in a bid for this particular piece of technology, this particular data source, get the guy into a hotel room, drug the guy.
		The guy would be bagged and driven away.
		And then he was to hold that particular device until someone from that special access group showed up to retrieve it.
		The person who showed up to retrieve it was Malachi Martin.
silverdale in washington ▲ ● ▼		Very interesting.
		Well, that helps me a lot.
		I was disturbed until I made the call because I was like, I can't let this go until I hear that again.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I fully understand, believe me.
		Again, our public number, folks, is area code 952-225-5278.
		And if I could, Joel, when you're not speaking, you're kind of breathing into the mic.
		So just when you're not talking, Joel, just hold it away from your mouth a little bit.
silverdale in washington ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Good.
		So you claim, and again, this goes to your new book, and I think it's a very important question, so I want to get it out.
		Why is America, you say, the most haunted country on the face of the earth?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, the United States and England both have reputations as being incredibly haunted, possibly because we're open societies, we're more democratic societies, and because we allow the kind of research that in many countries they simply keep hidden.
		For example, the old Soviet Union did tremendous amounts of this research, but you had some job getting it.
		I'm sure you interviewed those women who wrote Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain years ago.
		And it was true in other countries, too.
		It was the government that proceeded to find out what was going on.
		Therefore, they didn't have to do anything with it.
		In this country, we were able to do it on our own, meaning the people who were the parapsychologists, the psychic community.
		And so we were able to release whatever we were able to discover.
		And is there any question that the government was involved?
		No.
		I mean, there's enough evidence to do a 10-hour show on that.
		Bill can tell you from his perspective, and I know from what I went through.
		There's not a question about that part, but you just have to accept that on our honesty and faith right now.
		But, I mean, what did you say?
		Yes, of course they knew, and they didn't want to release it.
		So you have more information here that gets out, so to speak.
		It's a free and open society.
		It's that simple.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		And you have presidents from George Washington, who had this UFO sighting at Valley Forge.
		Actually, he had two sightings.
		He turns up as a ghost at the Battle of Gettysburg.
		He berates General McClellan because he was asleep at his post when he was planning for the defense of Washington.
		You have Abraham Lincoln, whose ghost supposedly shows up at the White House.
		In Harry Truman's diary, he says he's seen the ghost of Franklin Pierce, and he hears the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln walking in the halls when Julie Nixon was on Colbert, the old Colbert show, back when it was on the comedy channel.
		I couldn't believe Julie Nixon, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, talking about ghosts in the White House.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It does seem there's been a lot of talk of paranormal activity around the White House, right?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it has.
		Yes, it has.
		And around the first family and even the second family.
		If you watch the interview with Biden, the vice president, if you watch the interview with Joe Biden on just this past Sunday night, I forget who interviewed him.
		I don't know the name of the interviewer.
		But he talked about how his son Bo had passed away, of course, died of brain cancer.
		And he was talking about his little granddaughter.
		And his little granddaughter says, Grandpa, Grandpa, I see Daddy.
		I see daddy all the time.
		Now, that would not have made it onto the 60 Minutes cut.
		I know, because I had more hell from 60 Minutes than I care to describe years ago.
		But now it went on.
		No question asked.
		It's an after-death communication.
		You want to call it anecdotal if you're Jim Randy?
		Fine.
		But nonetheless, it was there because that little girl saw something that she could not otherwise describe except her father.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm with you, but I still say it's anecdotal.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Look at Hillary Clinton.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would rather believe it than not believe it, but I'm just not raising it to the level of, you know, settled science.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Look at the Hillary Clinton story.
		Look at the Hillary Clinton story.
		During Bill Clinton's term, Hillary asks Gene Houston, who's a channeler, to come to the White House and channel the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.
		A modern first lady conducting something short of a seance at the White House to channel into her the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, little Trump gets hold of that.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Well, we could figure out why.
		Here's Roosevelt, who himself was the victim of a vast conspiracy, right?
		There was an attempted coup in 1933.
		There was an assassination attempt.
		They hated Roosevelt.
		And so it was Eleanor Roosevelt who really propped up FDR.
		And the same thing he always said was happening to Bill Clinton.
		And so she thought that Eleanor Roosevelt, and watch in this campaign, you will see her championing a lot of Eleanor Roosevelt's ideas.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		And there's another story or a second part to the story Bill just told you about the sculptress, you may know Penny, whose last name I can't remember, who we have it in the book, it's in Haunting of America, was commissioned to do a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt and could not do it.
		She absolutely could not configure how to, she couldn't figure out how to make Eleanor Roosevelt's face and how to make it look like her for a statue of the park.
		Long story short, she had a dream one night of Eleanor Roosevelt and there it was giving it to her all the information she needed to make that sculpture.
		And so it's more than one person who has had that experience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Got it, got it, got it.
unidentified		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We've got it.
		Hold it.
		We're going to do a break.
		We'll be right back.
		If you want to join in the mayhem, national number, 952-225-5278 and or Skype.
		Yay, what a night.
		Years of broadcasting.
unidentified		What a night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, what a night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Get there.
unidentified		Want to take a ride from the high desert and the great American Southwest?
		This is Midnight in the Desert, exclusively on the Dark Matter Digital Network.
		To call the show, dial 1-952-CALLART.
		That's 1-952-225-5278.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Such an easy number to remember.
		1-952-Call ART.
		I like it.
		Also, Skype, of course, either nationally or internationally.
		Now, coming Friday, it's what I call Get Air Night.
		There are going to be some modifications.
		And we're not going to do, we're going to do the cream de la creme of the ghost stories, a few of them only, and then we're going to mix it up with something else this year.
		It's going to be really dead.
		Little tease for you based on a caller I had a little while ago.
		All right, so my guests now are Bill Burns and Joel Martin, and they've been a disruptive group indeed.
		Let's go to Hawaii, Wailuku, Hawaii, I believe.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How are you?
		How am I?
		In a little shock, but otherwise okay.
unidentified		That's my sentiment exactly.
		I actually phoned to make more of a statement than a question.
		I think that it's a shame.
		It's a shame that these two gentlemen have been able to tarnish Malachi Martin's name so terribly.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they haven't.
		Wait, wait, wait, wait.
		They have not necessarily tarnished his name at all.
		That he may have had communication with the CIA or even done something for them doesn't tarnish the spiritual side of Malachi, not in my opinion, anyway.
unidentified		Oh, not at all.
unidentified		Sounds like reverse CIA operatives on your line right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That could be.
		I don't rule it out.
		I think Bill sounds a little CIA, frankly.
unidentified		It's nice to have you back online and on air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		I've enjoyed you for years.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Aloha.
		Okay.
		Aloha, Art.
		Take it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so Bill, how about it?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm not in the CIA.
		I did work for the Department of Justice a million years ago.
		I was part of a team.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're not in the CIA?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		No.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're going to have to prove that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you prove it?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Can you prove a negative?
		But I did work for the Department of Justice as a data analyst examining how local police departments and municipal police departments used the computer technology that the Justice Administration gave them to track serial killers.
		That was about 20 odd years ago.
		And I worked with the DEA in training banks in anti-money laundering.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So there you are.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're not exactly unfamiliar with three-letter agencies.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		No, I am not.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		On Skype, you're on the air with these two guys.
unidentified		Mr. Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mr. Caller.
unidentified		Good evening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I hear you.
		Actually, you're a little loud.
		You're really loud, so back away a little bit.
unidentified		Sorry about that.
		Using the village computer, it's still all new to me.
		I had a question for the caller in regards to Father Martin.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you're the caller.
unidentified		The one about the cow the other day, I'd rather not talk about that one just yet.
		Needless to say, she still won't get off the barn, but tonight's topic about Father Martin.
		If he's a religious fellow, if he's such a spiritual fellow, why would the CIA send him to pick up alien technology?
		It just seems a little bit silly to me that they would send a Catholic spiritualist to go pick up something that could possibly shatter his faith.
		I was wondering what the two guests might have to say about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Others might say the perfect cover.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Well, first of all, our theory is, and this is what this one person did intimate to me, that one of the reasons that Malachi Martin left regular orders is that he was recruited.
		And that the CIA isn't just a bunch of people that this person on television played by Claire Danes.
		They have their links into far more organizations, far more governments, even the papacy, Than most people realize.
		I mean, and it's not just the CIA.
		The Russians have it, so do the British.
		There is a, I hate to use the word huge, but there is a huge network of interconnected intelligence gathering agencies.
		I met another person who I forget whose brother he was, but he also worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
		And one of the things that he said to me was that we were talking about Malachi Martin, but he said that the network of interconnected intelligence agencies is vast.
		It's like a neural network.
		And the papacy is involved, the monarchs are involved, and the church is involved.
		And he said it's just not that insular as you think it is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		To Colorado Springs.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi.
		Good evening, Art.
		I just wanted to make a comment.
		I so appreciate you, Bill Burns, and Joel Martin, because each in your own way are searching for the truth.
		And you've done it on other shows, Art.
		I've heard Bill do it, and I've heard Joel.
		And I just really appreciate a talk show host in the paranormal world that seeks out truth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you.
		On behalf of Bill, both of us, thank you very much.
		I don't, you know, if you're not looking for truth, then what the hell are you doing?
		Al on Dipe, you're on the air.
		Hi there.
		Hi.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		So basically, my question is about the Amnieville case.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		I saw a documentary years ago, and can you still hear me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
unidentified		Okay.
		Sorry, I heard an echo.
		Okay, so I saw this documentary, and basically, so the family was murdered in their beds, right?
		Yes.
		And now, if that's the case, one would think that maybe they were drugged.
		And certainly after the first shot went off, you know, there would have been panic.
		When the coroner did their analysis, they didn't find anything in their systems, in the bodies.
		And also, in the neighborhood, not one neighbor heard the shotgun going off multiple times.
		And it's just really weird.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's see what Bill has to say.
		He was actually there.
		It does not make sense that you could take a shotgun into room after room after room, firing without the rest of the family getting involved and, I don't know, hiding, running, something, right?
		Bill?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Joe, how did that happen?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		You were there.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was there.
		There are several answers to that.
		For one thing, people in the neighborhood, they did not hear a gunshot.
		Nobody did.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm talking about in the house.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		No, in the house?
		No.
		The answer is that it's been one of the great mysteries about the Amityville case has been why nobody woke up and why they were all tucked away for the night and nobody was able to get up.
		The only possible explanation is that maybe Juani did not act alone because there were tests done to see if there was poison.
		And there has been some supposition.
		There's one gentleman who's written extensively about the fact that maybe Wani had help from his sister and his sister didn't think he would hurt her, but that she was the last one to be killed.
		And so that would be a possibility.
		She holds a gun on the others while Ronnie kills them.
		So there's any number of theories, but that's a very good question, and it remains probably one of the biggest mysteries of all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm a heavy sleeper, but not that heavy, not even close.
unidentified		How come the neighbors couldn't hear anything, though?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Well, because the size of the house, the houses, I should say, in that neighborhood are pretty substantial.
		And they probably didn't hear anything because it was the middle of the night, and they weren't sure, as Art just said, if you're a heavy sleeper, you probably wouldn't be paying attention.
		What the neighbors did hear, the people next door, because I spoke to neighbors, they heard the DeFeo's dog, which was a hunting dog, like a bay hound, you know, the kind that cries, it doesn't bark like, that sort of sad cry.
		They heard that somewhere between 3 and 3.30 in the morning.
		They did hear the dog, but they didn't pay much mind to it.
		The dog was outside in the yard.
		It was November, but it was not bitter cold.
		And that's where the dog was.
		As a matter of fact, the idiots who made the movie were actually so foolish, and Jay, who's also passed on, who wrote the book, Jay Anson, actually wrote the Amateur Horror.
		And I spoke to him about it.
		He said he just worked from Notes from the Lutzes.
		But he said that he just took the information from what they said, that 3 to 3.30 in the morning, there was that cry from the dog.
		And so that was what they put into the film and the book, that at 3.15 a.m., George Lutz would jump up out of his bed because he heard something spooky or something scared him.
		That's where they got the 3.15 from.
		They got it from the report I filed the next day for United Press.
		And it was just totally erroneous because medical examiners, as Art knows and thousands of people know, or millions, medical examiners don't give you an exact minute time of death.
		Very rarely will that ever happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Despite what TV tells you, that is true.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Outside the country, very quickly, Michael, you're on air.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
		Hello.
		Using Malikai Martin as his CIA asset in regard to taking up this artifact makes absolute sense.
		He was an ancient language specialist for a start.
		He's also a British history specialist.
		And these intelligence agencies use specialists very, very well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're not surprised at all, huh?
unidentified		But also, he was a Jesuit, And he was also effectively an occult specialist, too.
		So, if there's any breedover into this area, he was a perfect man to not just go out and pick it up and move it.
		He wasn't just being a courier, he would have verified what he was picking up when he picked it up.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where are you, by the way?
unidentified		I'm in Newcastle, England.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, thank you for the call.
		And yes, it's a good point.
		I mean, really, in a lot of ways, if you think about it, he would be the perfect person that you would never in a zillion years expect.
		So I guess I'm not surprised by that.
		Going to the phones, Cheshire, Connecticut.
		Is that right?
unidentified		Art is my idol.
unidentified		My idol.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Thank you.
unidentified		I want to help clarify some of the details surrounding Malachi Martin's death.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
unidentified		I met Malachi at Eden Lorraine Warren's house.
		We went to a diner either the next day or that night, and he did fall down the stairs there.
		I don't know if there was confusion about that one.
		I had, I don't know if you mentioned the movie that's coming out, Hostage to the Devil.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm in it.
unidentified		The same crew came to my house.
		I'm in it also.
		So we're connected, right?
		Anyway, I had the producer and the man that was friends with Malachi for the last 10 years of his life and personal driver on the show.
		And he admitted for the first time anywhere that Malachi was reaching for a book.
		That's the story that's believed.
		He was on a stool, and he felt he was pushed off the stool.
		And he confided, he called his friend and confided in him that said, I was pushed off the stool.
		Old Scratch finally got me.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How would he know this first person since the only person there, according to Bill and company, is the female that he was associated with?
unidentified		According to my friend, who I'm not sure if I want to give out his name, I'll give it to Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no, don't give me his name.
unidentified		But he works for a place with three letters in it, and I'm not sure if he wants me to give his name, but he was his personal driver, and that's all he did for him, as far as I know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		But according, again, to the gentleman that I have as guests right now, the only person present was the female that Malachi was associated with.
		Is that right, Bill?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		That's what Joel said, yeah.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Or Joel, either one of them.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he was alone in the apartment with a friend of his who was a lady.
unidentified		And the phone call he made was to my friend from the apartment.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And that was after he fell?
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		That's the story I have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Well, thank you for giving it to us.
		I don't know what to make of it, but there you go.
		Sean, on Skype, you're on the air.
unidentified		Thank you for taking my call.
unidentified		I appreciate it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
unidentified		You have a very interesting guest.
		However, I have a question.
		Are you familiar with a temple called Gobeklek?
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		A Gobeki Tempe?
unidentified		Sure.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		The one over in Turkey.
unidentified		Yeah, it's actually in a Kurdish region of Turkey, in eastern Turkey.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, we're very short on time, caller.
unidentified		Would you consider doing a show dedicated to that Sumerian region?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would consider that, yes.
		But again, that doesn't exactly relate to what we're talking about right now.
		I'm sorry.
		Back to the phones.
		You're on air.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		My name's Tom.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Pardon me?
unidentified		Tom.
unidentified		Tom.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		From San Jose.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
unidentified		Okay.
		Thanks very much for my call.
		Okay.
		I only have one point.
		I like to say that, well, I hope that a lot of people buy this man's book.
		And then remember, being fascinated by the talk show is one good part of the nighttime audience, but it's important to also read out loud the book because the book's going to prove that the listener is also truly involved in the understanding of whatever speculation regarding any theories out there.
		It's just important to read the book too because the book's going to entertain in a different way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure they hope that everybody will buy the book indeed.
		Red Oak, Texas.
		Hello, you're on the air.
		I think you're on the air.
		Let me make sure of that.
		Red Oak, Texas, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		Can you hear me?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I do.
unidentified		Mr. Arbell, I'm so glad you're back on the radio.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		I was just calling about, I saw a documentary with Ronnie DeFeo, and he claimed that his sister did help him, and that's how everyone was killed in their beds.
unidentified		And he claims that she committed suicide after the shooting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gentlemen, are you aware of this?
unidentified		The documentary?
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		I'm not aware of the documentary, but I'm aware of that theory from somebody who told it to me that Dawn, his sister, did help him, and that she may have taken her own life.
		Or if Ronnie didn't kill her, she did it to herself.
		It's a matter of opinion.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		The trick would be to look at the medical examiner's report of his sister's death because if she had powder burns on her hands, then it would be likely that she committed suicide by gunshot.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, call her, so maybe something to it.
unidentified		Yep.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		There were lots of theories.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I don't know what to say to you guys.
		What a night.
		Oh, man.
		What a night.
		I need recovery time.
		So your book is The Haunting of America.
		And as a caller suggested just a moment ago, you might want to buy that and be entertained by how very haunted we are.
		Anything else you guys want to get on the air very quickly?
		Because we're out of time.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Very quickly, look for our Tom Edison book in the spring and the Haunting of America series, Haunting of the Presidents.
		And just remember, when you're dealing with the paranormal, it doesn't matter which road you take, there are many.
		As long as you're looking for the truth, as you say, Art, the idea is to just search for the truth.
		And there could be many different roads and many different opinions.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
william j birnes ▲ ● ▼		And UFO Hunters Book 2 comes out in January.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Joel and Bill, thank you both for a shocking night.
joel martin ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Good night.
unidentified		Thank you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This one.
		This one I won't soon forget.
		From the high desert and the great American Southwest in all 25 time zones.
		Thank you all.

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