Joel Martin and Bill Birnes expose the Amityville Horror as a 1974 hoax fabricated by lawyer William Weber, allegedly over alcohol, to profit from book and film deals—though George Lutz kept all royalties. Martin’s personal trauma (his wife killed that same night) and unexplained deaths among case figures, including CIA-linked priest Malachi Martin (who died in Paris in 1999 under suspicious circumstances), deepen skepticism. While neighbors’ silence on shotgun blasts and paranormal claims persist, the episode reveals how hoaxes thrive in America’s open society, even among political figures like the Clintons, and hints at shadowy government ties to occult research. A night of unsettling truths about fabrication, cover-ups, and the blurred line between myth and covert operations. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They just light because you don't want to hear that voice over the air.
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.
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.
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'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?
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.
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.
And so they had their reasons for saying, oh, well, it's all true.
As I mentioned, having covered that in detail, as I did years ago, interviewed George, very long interview.
Wow.
The whole thing a hoax.
All right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I've heard nothing that would change that yet.
unidentified
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?
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like reverse CIA operatives on your line right now.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hello.
unidentified
Can you hear me?
I do.
Mr. Arbell, I'm so glad you're back on the radio.
Thank you.
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.
And he claims that she committed suicide after the shooting.
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.
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.