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May 13, 2013 - Project Camelot
45:25
PROJECT CAMELOT: LT. COL. FRENCH - INTERVIEW AT CITIZEN HEARING
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I know it's really loud in here, but can you say that again?
So they took some of the craft, say the two places they took the craft.
Well, most of them were taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and turned over to Colonel Paul Sleeper, who was head of the Foreign Technology Division.
And there was a massive majority of them.
Some of the live ones, not all of them, but some of the live ones were taken to Area 51.
And there's talk that they were used to back-engineer UFO.
Amen.
There were seven alive ones that were taken to another place and that's when I forget the name of it.
Oh yeah?
Do you remember what state it was in?
What?
What state?
If I remember correctly, it's one of the northwestern states and I just don't honestly, it drives me nuts that I've been trying to think of it for two days now.
Northwestern.
Well, didn't you tell me something about McCord?
Yeah, well McCord is where I was stationed with the OSI. Right.
But none of that stuff was taken to McCord.
How about Dugway?
What?
Dugway?
That's in Utah.
Yeah, Dugway, Utah.
That's a better possibility, but I still don't think it's there.
What about, did you know anything about Sandia?
Bingo.
Yeah?
Yeah, I think it was Sandia.
It's the height of human arrogance to think that we are the only sentient human beings in the galaxies of the world that can think.
That's human arrogance at its worst.
What I'm struck with, with the testimony of all four of you, and of course the readings that we had in preparing for this hearing, is the fact of secrecy itself.
Why do we need this secrecy?
And I'm asking this question to all four of you.
What threats do you think exist to the national security that warrants this kind of security, this kind of an approach?
Okay, hold on one second here.
Hi, this is Carrie Cassidy from Project Camelot, and I am here with, is it, your last name is French?
Yes.
So what do I call you, Dr.
French?
Yeah, Dr.
is fine.
I'm a dick, I don't care.
OK, so Dr.
French and he's just given testimony here at the National Press Club, the citizens hearing for disclosure.
Well, I think just knowing Stephen Bassett and what the plans were for the whole situation here that they're pushing the envelope already on the first day.
Yeah.
Going out beyond the bounds of where they thought they would be and that's very exciting from Project Camelot's point of view and very interesting as well.
So, already today has been quite interesting.
Were you able to listen to the Bentwaters testimony so far?
Yes, I was.
The problem with the way the Bentwaters testimony is going is because there's such an overlap of regulations.
There's regulations that pertain to the Privacy Act.
There are regulations that pertain to nuclear weapons and the people, you know, they were talking about things that in a couple of cases I would have thought they would know more about military munitions and what kind of, like for instance,
I had For more than 15 years I was pulling nuclear alert and I've been exposed to radiation a great deal simply because some of the The weapons systems that were on airplanes I was flying, they had what we call an in-flight insertion.
What you're actually done, you're running the core of an atomic bomb right out so it's sitting there about a foot in front of you.
And it's part of the pre-flight inspection of an airplane that carries nuclear bombs.
Okay, but...
If you're sort of inspecting, right?
What?
You're an inspector at that point?
No, no.
I'm simply the pilot of the airplane.
I'm pre-flighting an airplane.
I intend to fly or at least pull alert in.
Okay.
And it's just the nature of the beast.
That's the way these atomic bombs, that's the way they're manufactured.
Okay, well, let's back up because we finally got some quiet here.
So I'm going to sort of ask you to introduce yourself.
Explain what your exact background in the military was comprised of before we go into getting some of your reactions.
Well, I have 27 and a half years in the Air Force and I've been held Well, most of my time I was an operations officer.
And I got that job for the first time.
And at 12 years of service, which made me, at the time, I was the youngest operations officer in the United States Air Force.
And what year was this?
Oh, that would have been early 70s.
Okay.
And where were you based?
Well, I've been, at the time I first took over that, I was the ops officer of the 8th Attack Fighter Squadron in Spandau, Germany.
Okay.
Okay.
But you were a pilot, I mean, you say, right?
Yes.
So you're flying, I think you said in testimony, if I recall yesterday, that you flew some incredible number of missions, is that right?
Yeah, well, I had several tours.
I had three flying tours in Korea and about six or seven in Vietnam.
Wow.
And therefore, I have a lot of shorties.
I have over 680 combat missions.
I think that's more than twice as many as anyone else has.
That's just incredible.
So do you get a medal or anything like that when you've done something like that?
Yeah.
Actually, I've got 121 American and foreign decorations.
Really?
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
More than a medal.
I look like MacArthur if I put everything on.
Oh, wow.
That's fascinating.
Okay.
Well, you should have dressed up for the, you know, the Congress, the ex-Congress people over there.
That would have been very impressive to have you on film like that.
But it's sufficient to hear your testimony, certainly.
So, yesterday, you really talked about how you were part of, for all intents and purposes, what I would call kind of a cover-up.
Yeah, well...
I was with the Air Force Office for Special Investigations.
And they handle normal criminal affairs that occur, but they also, they're the ones that do, they are responsible for UFO investigation.
And so what I did, as I said, for about, what, 12, 13 years, I spent a great deal of time investigating UFOs.
And I've talked about some of them, the one of them that I mentioned yesterday, and it's of interest to a lot of people.
What happened is, you know where the Hanford Atomic Energy Plant is?
No.
Well, anyway, it's near the Columbia River.
It's east of Spokane, a place called Moses Lake is where it's actually located.
But what happened is these two F-86Ds got launched on a UFO It started toward the Hanford Atomic Energy Plant, and it's a prohibited zone.
If anyone goes in there, you get clearance to fire, you'll shoot them down.
So anyway, that's exactly what happened.
You got clearance to fire, and the F-86D's got two and a half inch around.
It has 36 of them that are in a pod.
Well, what happens when you get clearance to fire?
You know, you actually just hit the trigger switch and this pod drops and all of the rockets fire, all of them at once.
Well, that didn't happen in his case.
When the pod dropped, his airplane blew up.
Now, they drugged the The Columbia River, about more than 60 to 70 miles downstream, used a circular pattern, a search pattern.
They never found even the most tiny piece of the airplane.
So the airplane blew up, then disappeared?
Yeah.
The explosion, or the...
We don't know what they used, but it is really strange.
Now, they've had two or three accidents with the F-86D that were caused by a fuel control malfunction.
But every time, you know, you get that fuel control malfunction and you're not close enough to an airfield to land, then it's an automatic bailout.
Right.
They never had a case under those circumstances where they had any trouble finding the airplane.
Sure.
That's what makes that one so unique.
Well, obviously I guess the pilot died, right?
Or disappeared?
Disappeared.
Never heard from again in any way.
Okay.
So what year was this?
Do you remember?
No, not exactly.
But that was...
Well, was it in the 70s?
I mean, when did you work for...
No, it was in the 50s.
That would have been in 1954.
1954.
Okay, so what did you call yourself?
What was your actual job title at that point?
I was an OSI agent originally.
Oh, this is before you became...
No, I said I had been an OSI agent and I had just gotten out of that and gotten into flying as a pilot.
Gone through pilot training and did become a pilot, but I was not an active pilot at that time.
I see.
So did you witness this?
No, I didn't.
You investigated it.
Investigated it.
I see.
So you went to the scene, I assume, like days later?
No, I have helped with this aerial search and I helped with the ground search.
Oh, you did?
As I say, but we didn't find anything.
I understand.
So as part of OSI, though, you were...
Where did the swamp gas car come in?
There's a...
The area around, and it's near the panhandle of Florida.
There's an area that they used to have UFO show up there almost every evening.
And I went down there and spent a week just, you know, trying to get pictures of them, which sometimes was successful and sometimes wasn't.
But they were very consistent.
And virtually every night they'd show up and put in an appearance and then disappear and go somewhere.
Okay.
And the thing that I found a little strange is there are certain areas that...
They have much more frequent attention from UFOs than in normal places.
And surprisingly to me, like, you know, where Mont Blanc is in France, they go down inside of the crater there.
Really?
Yeah.
Now, knowing that, I've kind of, when I was going to different places, you know, and across countries and things like that, I checked out a whole bunch of other ones.
They're going down inside of Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii.
Really?
They go down inside of the Pinatubo, if you know where that is in the Philippines.
They go down inside of that one.
Well, so, I mean, you've seen this with your...
You know, I wondered.
I thought, well, that's really a crazy thing to do.
Then it was suggested to me, and this wasn't my conclusion.
It was something someone, you know, I was talking to him about.
He said, have you thought about the possibility that they may be trying to stabilize the volcanoes for us?
And I thought, well, now that at least would be a useful purpose for it.
I don't know whether they can or can't, but...
So are you saying that you saw these incidents with UFOs going into these volcanoes or where you saw them with your own eyes?
Absolutely.
Okay.
And back in those days, I mean, did you, in a sense, were you believing that these UFOs were coming from off-world or did you think that they were one of ours?
No, I never was under the impression that they were ours.
You never were?
No, I never.
Okay, but back in the days of OSI, were you briefed in the sense that you were prepared to see UFOs?
You believed that there were visitors?
We were trained to hunt for them, but our primary purpose was to debunk them, to come up with some of the logical explanations to dispense to the public, because when they do see them, quite often the public sees them.
Right.
So what we had to do, our mission then at that time was to come up with some logical BS that the public would believe.
So when you came up with this idea or explanation, how would you get it out there?
Would you publish it in writing or would you do a press conference?
How did you handle that?
We would report it publicly.
To a journalist?
Yeah, to newspapers or whatever.
And how would you report it?
Would you be talking to a journalist in person or would they call you on the phone?
Yeah, you'd go in and give it like a normal press release is handled.
You'd go in and talk to whoever was going to write the story and give them what you had.
I see.
And so you gave them an explanation that you kind of worked out with your superiors, I guess, ahead of time?
Yeah, often.
Okay.
And yet you knew that it was untrue, right?
Yes, we knew it was untrue.
So what was the rationale for not letting the public know that the UFO was a real UFO? Do you remember what they told you?
No, they...
They wanted us to come up with any kind of story, but this is my belief.
I think that, you know, have you ever heard of the magic report?
Oh, sure.
Well, I had a quick look at that.
I'm one of the few, in fact, I think I'm the only living person that ever has seen the inside of it and is still here on earth.
Well, anyway, when I looked at the magic report, I noticed the people that were at that meeting, when Truman called a meeting, that's the magic report.
The people that were there, in addition to Truman, were the chiefs of staff of all of the branches of the service.
Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, everybody.
And every one of them was the head of that service.
And they were the members of Magic.
They were the members of the...
Majestic is also...
Yeah, the Majestic Report.
And I think that the reason they did what they did, and I think it also is part of an explanation for all of the...
Useless security that they have attached to the program now.
And I think they were of the opinion, and this is why I'm guessing, but they were of the opinion that if they told the American public that such a thing existed, they'd scare them to death.
Because they realized that out there is a vehicle that we have no way of controlling.
We had no way of, no defense against it.
And they just thought it would scare the people to death.
I see.
And another thing, I think it had a very dramatic effect on religion.
Okay, well...
You say you saw the magic report and you've lived to tell the tale, right?
That's basically it.
I didn't see it for a long time.
I just got one quick look at it.
I was writing another report and there was a guy who was my agent trainee.
Anyway, he said those two appear similar, you know, and so he had me look at that one that was written for the magic report and look at one of the current ones or one of the past ones.
I see.
And so it was, what is this, a book, like a booklet full of reports or was it a binder?
Well, at that time, the blue book, it had a blue cover.
But it just contained all of these different stories.
Okay, but you're saying it had a blue cover and it was...
The official Air Force blue look.
It's the Air Force's official report on UFOs.
Okay, and this is the one that is classified, I assume?
Yes.
Okay.
But is this the one you're saying when you saw the magic report?
So are you calling the Air Force report the magic report?
No.
The magic report simply is that report that was put out by President Truman and the Chiefs of Staff for all the services.
I see.
But when you say, what kind of report, how did the report come out?
Because you say you saw it, so was it a document or you saw a film?
It was a document.
It was a document?
Yeah.
The first time I saw the copy that I saw, I don't think it even had a cover.
It was just about, it looked like about 12 pages, typewritten pages.
And what year was that?
It was about 1947.
I see.
So he got together magic or this group of people we call Majestic 12.
Yeah.
That's what they were known as, at least as far as I know.
Yeah.
And they've continued to this day.
Isn't that right?
Yeah.
That organization.
Yeah.
So at that point you were not around.
You weren't part of that group, were you?
No.
The Truman Group.
So, but you saw a report from the group?
That's right.
Okay.
And so how long after the group was, you know, put together and the reports started to come out?
I'm assuming more than one report.
Do you know how often they would report?
Well, there were only two of us in the detachment, both at See, when it started, I was stationed at McCord.
McCord?
McCord.
M-C-H-O-R-D. I see.
Where's that?
That was my first assignment when I first was assigned in the U.S.I. It's here in the United States, but what state?
Washington.
Washington, the state of Washington, because we're in Washington, D.C., so just clear.
Yeah, it's the state of Washington.
I see.
Okay, so you were at McCord.
That's quite an active air base even to this day, isn't it?
Yes, it's very active, but McCord and Fort Lewis, they kind of run together.
They have a joint housing area and like that, but there's actually more than 12,000 in the military station at McCord.
McCord and Fort Lewis.
So, when you're saying you saw it back in those days, this had to be...
If they were put together in 1947, did you see it a few years later, the report that you saw?
Well, I made submissions to it periodically.
Oh, yeah?
Every time.
Every time?
Yeah, every time that I had finished...
Looking at one or doing whatever, you know.
When I had completed the study of a given UFO incident, then I'd write it up and put it in the book.
Okay.
And do you know, like, when you started doing that, like, that job, did you, you know...
Immediately after I got to my board.
Who was president when you were serving in OSI? You were actually based at McCord during the time when Majestic was getting together and the Truman administration was running the country.
I stayed in the OSI through the administration of Eisenhower.
So basically you were really...
Heavily involved in what might be called sort of the early days of the intelligence community, right?
Yes.
Because OSI is before it became, after that it became, didn't it become CIA? No, the CIA, that was actually, that was started way back under the, you ever heard of Wild Bill Donovan?
He was one of Roosevelt's very close friends.
Right.
Anyway, the OSI, actually the CIA and the OSI, and there are several offshoot agencies that come from that same start, credit Waldo Donovan.
Okay.
So, okay, so you're saying CIA didn't necessarily come from OSI, but a couple different agencies.
Yeah.
Do you know what other agencies came from OSI? Are we talking NSA, NRO? The CIA for sure.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, that was a separate one.
The Security Services, there's a whole bunch of intelligence organizations.
So did you have a rank when you were an OSI officer?
Yeah, our rank was actually a classified item.
Really?
Yeah.
Civilian clothes and a drop of badge in their nose.
I see.
You had to be quite a young man at that point, right?
Yeah, I was.
I had just graduated from college.
Alright, so those were your early days.
Just out of curiosity, was your father in the military?
My dad, I'm adopted, see, and I didn't really know my real father, but I was adopted by my natural mother's older brother.
I see.
So technically it was my uncle's that adopted me.
Okay.
But were they in the military?
He was in World War I. I see.
So there was a military affiliation?
Yeah, to that degree, yes there was.
So, when you, back in those days, and you were kind of debunking UFOs, right?
Yeah.
Did you consider that you were doing it under the, sort of, the authority of the Truman administration and MAGIC, where they, in other words, your orders came from them?
Yeah, I did feel that way.
Okay.
And did you know personally any of those members of MAGIC? No.
No?
No.
Okay.
But you know they've changed over the years, right?
Yes, I did.
Okay.
But they're still in operation.
Would you say that you understood the fact that you thought back then they thought it was going to be too frightening for Americans to know the truth about the UFOs, even though you knew the truth, right?
Yeah.
Were you frightened?
No, not really.
Okay.
But it seemed perfectly logical to me that the higher-ups would think that that was valid, that the public would be frightened.
I see.
Okay.
Something I never questioned.
Really?
What about now?
Do you question it?
Oh, I think they, in fact, they've done surveys.
It turns out that there's something between 80 and 90 percent of the general public, regardless of from what country, that believe that they're real.
Sure.
So now it's a different ballgame.
Yes, totally different.
Is that part of the reason why you came forward to testify at the conference here?
Well, I truly believed that had I tried to give that kind of testimony maybe seven or eight years ago, that my life would have been danger.
I'm afraid I would have forfeited it.
I see.
But now, I'm in my 80s.
I don't think that it wouldn't be worthwhile to do me in anyway now.
Okay.
So you kind of have a license to tell the truth at this point.
Yes, I feel I do.
All right.
Well, this has been very, very interesting.
I'd love to come back and spend a little more time with you if we get some time tomorrow.
I'm very, very interested to hear the rest of your testimony.
You're going to be testifying again tomorrow, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Tomorrow and I have another one on Friday.
Let me ask you this.
To it or far away?
I saw one.
Do you know where Parker, Arizona is?
I've heard of it.
Oh, it's on the Colorado River.
Uh-huh.
Anyway, it's a very, oh, kind of an area that guys come up there, drive speedboats and that sort of thing.
One landed under the lower bridge on that.
There's a, it's 10 miles roughly from the upper bridge to the lower bridge, and they control the water level there, you know, for boat races.
But one came in there and landed it.
And it didn't stay that long because I saw the thing land.
But then I turned and went to lunch and came back and it was gone.
So you were not very impressed if you went to lunch while it was sitting there?
To begin with, I don't think it would be a good idea to try to enter one.
Do you?
Well, was this a round, like a typical round UFO? Yes.
What was the size?
Yeah.
Would you estimate the size?
About 12 to 14 feet in diameter.
Okay.
And I bet you're a good observer.
You probably can...
Try to be, yeah.
And it had writing on the outside of it, identifying it, assigning it a number.
And...
Well, was it in England?
They, and this is true of all of them, they have a landing system on them that they keep them completely level.
Now what they do, they'll pull up and stop and they run these, I'll call them main gear, they run these triangles, there's three of them, they run those down so that the thing is level.
Even though it's parked on an incline of some kind, they use that to compensate for that and level it.
I see.
Do they then withdraw them so they're kind of floating there?
No.
They leave them down?
They leave them down while they're on the ground.
While they're landed.
Okay.
Just to kind of wrap things up, and I won't keep you for very much longer, is there anything about your experience over the years, being a pilot, seeing UFOs, interacting with the magic, or people that worked kind of above you, I guess, who worked for magic, that type of thing?
Do you feel, sort of, regret your experience at that time or are you proud of it?
How do you feel about your experience?
I'm proud of my record.
So you feel that when you were serving your country by debunking UFOs that it was sort of in service to the country in whatever way they saw fit?
Yes.
Okay.
Because you say you didn't question it, right?
No, I didn't.
And yet, so times have changed and now you feel that it's okay to come forward.
Do you have any feelings about the beings themselves that might have been flying those things?
In other words, you say you don't believe there were what we would call part of what I would call part of the secret space program, right?
Yeah, I don't.
I've seen enough photographs and that sort of thing of them, you know, that They're dead.
I wouldn't consider them human.
I think they're completely different genealogy without a doubt.
Okay, but in terms of well, let me ask you this because you were part of this sort of community for a very long time.
Were you aware of Project Paperclip, for example?
Absolutely.
Okay.
And so you know there are a lot of Nazis that came over as part of that sort of program.
And they brought some technology with them, right?
Yeah.
Paperclip 1, of course, was Dr.
Christy Kristof.
Paperclip 2 was Wernher von Braun.
So, yeah, I'm familiar with it.
Did you ever meet those guys?
Yes, I have.
I've met them both.
Have you?
Okay.
And, well, let me see.
What about Fermi?
You know, I guess...
Enrico Fermi?
Yeah.
I've not met him, but I know, of course, who he is.
And there's an award, the Enrico Fermi Award, that's given to the man that makes the outstanding contribution to science.
Okay.
What about Kamler?
Do you know who Kammler is?
No.
He's a Nazi.
Kammler?
K-A-M-M-L-E-R? Kammler?
No.
Doesn't ring a bell?
Okay.
I thought you were saying Himmler.
Oh, no.
Well, that's...
Yeah, now there's another one.
Did you know him?
I didn't know him personally, but I sure knew who he was.
I see.
Okay.
Well, any significant Nazis that you did know besides Wernher von Rahn and, what did you say, Kristoff?
Yeah, Dr.
Kristoff.
No.
Okay.
What did you think about Werner Von Braun?
Well, you're a very gifted scientist, there's no question about that.
Were you aware that the Nazis were, or the ones that were working with the Americans, had a base down in the Argentina area?
No, I didn't know that.
Okay.
Were you aware of Area 51 back in those days?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah?
Okay.
How about Dulce, New Mexico?
Did you know about that base?
Los Alamos?
Los Alamos.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So were you based in any of these areas yourself or no?
No, I was never based in them.
I did research work at MIT. I did research work at, well, where Stanford is, that area.
Stanford Research?
No, Stanford University.
Boy, that's all been so long ago.
Right.
Okay.
Well, what kind of research were you doing?
Well, Christoph Christoph, his son, his name was George.
Well, George Christoph and I did some research.
We did research work on cancer and we did research work on a fuel saver.
We're rather proud of that.
You could take an old automobile and we used to test drive one from Phoenix down to Tucson and back and we got better than 50 miles to the gallon.
In an old Buick 8-cylinder.
And how did you do that?
We had a...
Actually, it looks like a...
What kind of light?
The fluorescent light.
LED? Yeah, it looks like a fluorescent light.
And it's circular, and you would put that inside of the carburetor.
And what it did, we would generate...
The highest we ever got was O13, but we'd generate oxygen, is what we were doing there.
And by doing that, you improved the gas mileage.
That's very interesting.
Okay.
But what was the significance of putting the light in there?
What it did is it generated oxygen.
So you had a much richer oxygen mixture with the gasoline, which increased the efficiency.
How did the light generate oxygen?
Was it a rotating cylinder?
I mean, how did light generate oxygen?
It actually takes the ambient air that comes in there and turns it to basically pure oxygen.
Really?
Do you think they're using that technology for anything that you've worked on?
As a matter of fact, we tried desperately to sell it to somebody.
I gave a presentation to the Prime Minister of Canada.
I gave one to, of course, General Motors and Ford and everybody.
And at that time, there wasn't that kind of motivation to save gasoline.
There is now.
Back then, gasoline, what, 30 cents a gallon?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Okay.
But as far as the Nazis go, you know, did you know what they were building?
Because have you ever heard of Foo Fighters?
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's that comes from World War Two.
And so weren't Foo Fighters a kind of a UFO that the Nazis built?
I don't think we know who was actually building them, but they're very common.
The B-17s and B-24s and like that would go on, you know, in the era of the thousand-plane raid and this type of thing.
Well, those Foo Fighters would actually be going in and out throughout the formation.
Right.
Inbound to the target and also coming back out.
And so you don't believe that we create, you don't believe the humans built the Foo Fighters?
You think they were from outer space?
I didn't know of any technology that the U.S. had that did it, so in my opinion they had to come from someplace else.
Okay.
Have you ever heard of the Nazi Bell?
The Nazi Bell?
No.
No?
Okay.
Have you heard of the Henge?
The Henge.
Yeah, it's called the Henge, with an E, Henge.
It's a big structure.
It was said that they put these counter-rotating cylinders inside a hen.
This happened in Germany.
You're way ahead of me.
I didn't know that.
Okay.
So you never heard of the Nazi belt.
Have you seen the movie Contact?
No?
No, I'm not a big movie fan.
You're not?
Okay.
Alright, well did you work with any Nazis directly that you knew of?
No.
Actually there was a POW escape that happened in Phoenix Arizona and I did by chance meet a couple of the former prisoner of war And they were very happy that they wanted to settle in the United States and in fact did.
Uh-huh.
And probably went to work for us, right?
Well, they had to live.
I don't know what jobs they took.
I see.
But they were from Nazi Germany?
Yes.
I see.
They were captured prisoners of war.
Uh-huh.
Were they Americans to begin with?
No, they were German.
German?
Yeah.
So we captured them?
We captured them, exactly.
Interesting.
And you met them?
Yeah, I met a couple of them.
Were they scientists or were they military guys?
Just military guys.
They weren't high-ranking types.
They were enlisted.
I see.
So...
In terms of the philosophy of the military, once Paperclip happened, did you notice any kind of change in the philosophy of the military in the U.S.? You know, once the Nazis became part of it?
No.
The only thing about that at all, I knew what was going on, for instance, at Pina Moon Day, and not much beyond that.
I do know what Christoph did, though, was a great benefit to the United States that virtually nobody knows about.
The Germans were way ahead of us as far as the production of an atomic bomb, and Christoph, what he did is he just kept Muddling up the formulas and one thing or another to keep them from ever getting there so it would work.
Had he not done that, they'd have had the bomb ahead of us.
Okay, but Christoph was Nazi, wasn't he?
He was...
I don't know.
What he was, he was a Bulgarian and by far the wealthiest man in Bulgaria.
He...
But he was in charge.
The reason he was paperclip one was he was actually in charge of the atomic weapon development for the Germans.
And when, let's see, it was John Foster Dollis.
Anyway, Christoph was extremely wealthy and he had the A total of $26 million in the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.
And he sued in the World Court to get his money.
Won the case.
Then guess what they did?
They said, we won't pay you here.
You'll have to come to Bulgaria to collect it.
Well, of course, if he'd showed up, they'd have executed him.
Wow.
Wow.
But then he came and lived in the United States, right?
Yeah.
Did he get his money then?
Actually, and this is what's the author of a musical.
I'm trying to remember the name.
Anyway, what he did, what Christophe did, he took two tons of gold bars.
And had them put him up underneath the carriage of his automobile and drove out over the mountains, through Switzerland and out in the United States.
That's how he got out.
Do you remember the movie Sound of Music?
Yes.
The route that that guy did is the same one that Christoph used as a guide on how to get across.
Incredible.
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