What is UMMO? The greatest hoax of all time? A secret society with a mysterious agenda? An intelligence agency psyop? Or genuine contact from space aliens? Brad and Jake will attempt to answer these questions, and they’ve kidnapped Julian and Travis to come along for the intergalactic ride.
In the 1960s, a group of Spanish societal elites received a bevy of letters and phone calls from purported extra-terrestrial visitors. Each communication was tailored to their specific field and contained advanced technical details and theories. At the same time, multiple witnesses reported a number of compelling UFO sightings, leaving behind physical evidence bearing the Ummite symbol.
This contact was to become a decades-long affair that convinced multiple esteemed scientists, subverted Franco regime censorship, and left 1300 pages of alien writings to be poured over and debated for a generation. It also left destruction and misery in its wake, with at least two dangerous cults inspired by the lore. One may still be active to this day.
Will we find the madman trickster genius manipulator behind it all? Let the IBOZOO UU and WAAM WAAM flow through you, and experience all that is UMMO.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to our archive of premium episodes and ongoing series like PERVERTS, Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA
Brad Abrahams https://twitter.com/LoveAndSaucers https://bradabrahams.net/
Music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Editing by Corey Klotz.
https://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listeners, to the 269th chapter of the QAA podcast, the Umomania episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Brad Abrahams, Julian Field, and Travis View.
A cosmic law says that each world must take its own path to survive or to perish.
You have chosen the second.
You are destroying your planet, annihilating your species, and contaminating your atmosphere and your seas.
With sadness we contemplate your insanity.
We urgently desire with all our hearts your salvation.
Do not destroy your beautiful blue planet, a rare atmospheric world that floats so majestically in space, so full of life.
It is your choice.
Day 98.
Who am I to ambassador?
This episode is a return to my QAA roots, distracting you all from the insanity of politics and online discourse, the daily horrors of war, and Julian's twisted perversions.
It started with an innocuous email.
After our Spectral Voyager episode on the Socorro saucer, we received a message from a listener with an enigmatic tip.
There had been a UFO flap in Spain back in the 60s that had intriguing similarities to that of the craft Lonnie Zamora saw a few years before.
Both crafts had three telescoping legs protruding from an oval-shaped body, and the pictographic symbol on them also had a suspicious likeness.
I thought I was getting into a simple story about a couple isolated sightings, or that I'd uncover a long-discredited hoax.
No.
I was about to open a Pandora's box that was to consume my life for months.
Even though this is one of the most bizarre and fascinating tales I've come across, there's been very little coverage outside of Spain and France.
It made me aware how ignorant we are in the English world when it comes to esoteric stories from other countries.
It also doesn't help that the trail mostly went cold in the late 90s.
So each day, I fired up the Wayback Machine and scoured old geocities and angel fire sites like it was 1998.
I pieced together a story that spanned 30 years, from the 60s to the 90s, that has since taken on a life of its own.
It's inspired multiple cults, David Icke's reptilian agenda, and New Age ascended master mythology.
It has whiffs of a proto-QAnon, and believers and detractors still argue on obscure forums and social media today.
It might be about real-life extraterrestrials, or a secret society with an unknown agenda, an intelligence agency PSYOP, or one of the greatest hoaxes of all time.
By the end, I hope to give you an answer, but I'll start with a question.
What if Star Trek was real?
Oh, yes, please.
That's all we want.
We just want people walking around.
Aliens, humans, fucking living on a ship together.
Some people are orange, some people are green.
It would be nice, wouldn't it?
Who are the orange and green people on Star Trek?
You know, when you go to the space station, you just see a bunch of green and orange people, you know, sort of kind of walking around in the background.
Spoken like a fucking Star Wars dolt.
Yeah, no, I'll settle for just Patrick Stewart ordering me around.
That would be awesome.
The Anonymous Correspondence The year is 1966.
It's a crisp spring evening in Madrid as we float through the city center, turning down Alcala Street and into the bustling Café Lyon.
We push through to the back of the establishment, down a flight of rickety stairs, and into a basement bar called La Pallena Alegre, or the Happy Whale.
The air is thick with cigar smoke and loud with animated discussions.
It's a haphazard cross-section of society.
Famous poets and authors, actors, fascist politicians, and leftist activists.
We keep moving through the crowd until we reach a booth in the corner.
A group of five people speak excitedly in hushed tones.
They are the Friends of Space Visitors Society.
The society is a varied group, with Fernando Sesma, a government telegraph operator affectionately called the Professor, as their charismatic leader.
He's pictured below at the whale.
It's a pretty good-looking group for UFO enthusiasts, I think.
Yeah, there's some handsomeness here.
I think I'm it.
That could be me on the left there.
Yeah, wait a minute.
What the fuck?
And then the main guy looks a bit like a chubby David Lynch.
Look, he's even got, he's got the thin pencil mustache, the spectacles, the same haircut, a dwindling cigarette in his right hand.
Yeah, my Spanish roots.
It'd be so funny if this was the moment that we all realized that Julian was actually a time traveler.
And we're like, man, you've been a time traveler all this time?
How are you so stupid?
Yeah, it would be really disappointing, actually.
Jake's writing at work.
Shouldn't you know more about the world?
Hey, what kind of trick are you pulling?
Who could forget the amazing line, you've been a time traveler this whole time?
It's a writer.
That's good dialogue.
I'm going to save that for my next Great American Opus.
There was also a civil engineer, a police officer, a woman who worked at the American Embassy, and others.
They met at the Happy Whale Monthly to discuss the latest in ufological discourse.
But tonight was different.
Fernando Sesma had recently been telephoned by someone calling themselves Day 98, claiming to be an extraterrestrial emissary of a planet called Umo.
The voice sounded odd, almost robotic, and promised that written evidence was soon to come.
Here's a very poor quality recording of what the voice sounded like.
Well, that's sure to enrage everybody.
Yeah, the crazy moment that I realized all of the adults in the Peanuts cartoons are actually Umites.
At least it checks out they had leftist audio.
That written evidence soon came in the form of typewritten letters to SESMA and other members of the Space Visitors Society.
Each letter bore the same stamped symbol of the Umite civilization, what looks like the letter H with a line down the middle.
The first letters covered extensive ground, including daily life of the Umites, from housing, to food, to education and politics, as well as psychology, the arts, and religion.
They delved into complex themes for the time like network theory, unified field theory, and evolutionary genetics.
Here's a couple images that were included.
There's one of their favorite fruits, what their homes look like, and then some artist renderings of their space pads.
The symbol is pretty cool, I gotta say.
Like, in terms of alien- I mean, this looks like something that the Predator would press on his wrist before setting this self-destruct mechanism.
Yeah, the housing is very funny.
It's like if a 5G tower kept going and had a flying saucer attached to the top.
I mean, this looks suspiciously like George Jetson's house.
Yes, actually.
First, I'll take you through the wild intergalactic tale of how they got here.
In February of 1934, while conducting research at sea, a Norwegian science vessel emits a radio signal of 413.44 MHz.
Subsequent research confirmed this did indeed happen then and there.
That signal radiated out into the cosmos and 14 years later reached a planet in distant space called Umo near the red dwarf star Wolf 424, 3.6 light years away.
Intrigued by the society that sent this signal, the Umites send an expeditionary party to our planet.
Two years later, in March of 1950, their lenticular-shaped craft stealthily lands in a sparsely populated region of the Alps, near the small town of La Javie.
The ship left four male and two female Umaites behind.
As their ship took off over their heads, one of the members of the group noticed something odd on the ground at their feet.
Some yellowed, stained, brittle paper, with written characters all over it.
They attributed some ritual meaning to it, and decided to preserve it as their first human artifact.
It turned out to be some pages of a feces-stained French newspaper, Le Figaro, used as toilet paper by a farmer.
Honestly, that is what you should use the pages of Le Figaro for.
Yeah, no better alien artifact than this, like a shit-stained pamphlet.
They took over a vacant country house and built an underground bunker to serve as their clandestine HQ.
For over 10 years, the Umites researched our biology and society with expeditions to several countries.
Some nights, they would break into people's houses, temporarily anesthetizing them, and take hair and vaginal secretion samples for research purposes.
This was before the trope of the gray gynecologists and anal probe motifs.
Wait, so they, okay, these were Spanish men because they were like, I bet they would try to get some pussy immediately.
Get a little smell.
Get a little smell.
As mentioned, the letters also contain some first descriptions of the Umites and their culture.
The first thing I wanted to know was, what did they look like?
And the answer is, of course, exactly like us.
Perhaps a little taller and more Nordic in appearance.
There's an artist rendering of them there.
Yes, they kind of look like Lurch from the Addams Family.
Yeah, just big foreheads, very receding hairline.
They had a complicated but reasonable biological explanation for why we and other intelligent
ET races look so similar.
There are some glaring differences, though.
At puberty, Umites' vocal cords atrophy to the point where speech becomes impossible
and telepathic communication becomes the norm.
The Umites who made it to Earth were the few anomalies that kept their voices.
Okay.
So, they sent their, like, weirdos that could speak?
Of course.
Of course.
I like this idea that talking is a sign of immaturity.
Wow.
That's awesome.
It's like reverse puberty where they lose their voices at 13.
"Son, today you'll become a man.
Now, shut the hell up."
Another big difference is the extreme sensitivity of their fingertips.
Holding a cold glass is excruciatingly painful, as is pressing a button on an elevator, the latter of which they have to use their knuckles.
This makes writing and typing nearly impossible for them.
They also have a much more advanced sense of smell than us.
One of their revered art forms is the blending of perfumed scents that are so subtle we humans wouldn't be able to smell them at all.
Wow, so Jeremy Fragrance, actually an alien.
He's an Umite.
Yeah, he's absolutely an Umite.
Well, actually, he talks way too much.
Well, he's very immature.
Yeah, he's a young Umite that was taken away and raised by humans, and look at the result.
All he cares about is golden Rolexes and red Ferraris.
Their home planet is much like our own as well.
Perhaps another reason why we're so physically similar to them.
They have a single continental landmass with highly active volcanoes spewing clouds of illuminated, colored gas for miles into the sky.
The second thing I wanted to know was, what was their culture like?
And these first letters offered a glimpse.
The Umites were basically space communists.
A little like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek.
There's no money.
The power structure takes complete care and control of the individual.
There's only one government for the entire planet.
There's no opposition party, no debates, or even differing opinions.
There's only one race, one religion, and no atheists.
They even pray before bedtime.
There's an artist's rendering of the Umite Council of Four.
I don't know if they're communists if there's no debates.
Have you ever heard of the Internationals, sir?
That's all they damn did!
They also explained how they got here so fast.
Their advanced understanding of technology allows them to warp, or fold space, in order to travel vast distances.
Again, like Star Trek.
In the 60s, while us Earth people were still confused by subatomic particles, the Umites were reverse engineering the space-time continuum.
Or as they called it, Ibozu-U.
Here's a diagram of one of their ships.
And do one of you want to describe it?
Yeah, it kind of looks like an egg, an egg crate, a little bit or like a clamshell style ship.
There's a cutaway kind of like Stephen Beasley's Incredible Cross Sections.
And in it, you can see a space traveler, but they are standing on the side of the wall as if You know, there's some sort of anti-gravity mechanism within the ship.
He's kind of like walking down the wall like in 2001.
Exactly.
Which doesn't make sense, because the length of the ship is kind of horizontal, so why would they decide to then fuck with that by walking on the vertical?
Yeah, you would have really narrow pathways and really high walls.
Yeah.
Parallel to the reception of these letters in 1966, an event was about to happen that would make this fantastical story feel all the more real.
José Luis Jordan Peña, a telecommunications technician and former science teacher, was driving home to Aluche, the southwest suburbs of Madrid.
Something caused him to bring his car to a screeching halt and get out.
It was a huge circular craft, about 35 feet in diameter, rising up from the ground and taking off into the sky.
Three landing gear-like protrusions underneath retracted as it rose.
It was emitting a vibratory hum and seemed to be changing colors as it flew.
Most interestingly, however, was the symbol underneath it, which was the Umite H. Yes.
Several other people claimed to have witnessed the craft, including a man named Vincent Ortugno, who saw it from his sixth-floor apartment.
These accounts soon made national papers and connected Peña with Fernando Sesma's Friends of Space Visitors group.
Soon, letters from the Umites were arriving in the mailboxes of about 20 more Spanish and French citizens, postmarked from as far away as Australia.
These people weren't just UFO enthusiasts.
They included doctors, engineers, elected officials, a police commissioner, and artists.
Each communication was tailored to their expertise, containing graphs, diagrams, microfilm, and bore the same stamped symbol.
Here's an example of, uh, one of the pages.
Yeah, some diagrams, some written stuff, and then some purple written text, and that little stamp.
I love the Umite stamp.
It looks like if a thumbprint had the Umite H imprinted into it.
One engineer even received a phone call from the same robotic-sounding voice as Sesma.
They talked for two hours about highly technical subjects.
Any question he had, the Umite would have an immediate answer for.
Days later, he received a package with voluminous documents pertaining to their conversation.
And there's some of the equations and strange diagrams he had.
Yeah, this was like the point in math class where they handed out the quiz and, you know, I flipped it over on my desk and I went, ugh, I'm getting a C. Yeah, I'm fucked.
As soon as everything was like letters and shit, I was like, I'm fucked.
More about their society, technology, and philosophy is shared, with Eastern religious sounding passages like... A great confusion inevitably arises when we start from the false assumption that space is an entity unto itself, completely separate from our mental phenomena, like feeling and perception.
We on UMO know for certain that there is a reality outside of ourselves, which stimulates our brain and sets in motion a mental process we call Buwai Wai Gai.
Okay.
Okay.
But this reality is as different from mental perception as a mountain is from the word
M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N, which is used to represent it.
Okay.
Okay.
That was definitely worth it for making Travis say "Bwa-Wa-Yi-Yi."
I mean, this sounds like something from a movie, when Jerry Lewis plays the alien, you
know?
"Here, on our planet, we call the process Bwa-Yi-Yi-Yi-Yi."
Oh yes, we finally got Travis Few to do his best, uh, jump towns.
And while they seem progressive in some ways, when it comes to sex, their puritanism would make Mike Pence proud.
They called Mike Pence a poo-poo-lee-poo.
No sex before marriage.
Masturbation is forbidden.
And if this aberration happens, it's treated with electroshocks.
Okay.
So, okay.
See, this is when, it's like every time they're like, this is cute.
Like they're inventing a whole civilization.
How fun.
And then it's like, if you come, you will be shocked.
Oh, God damn it.
I don't remember this part of Star Trek.
Yeah, they come for you.
They come for you with, like, the, you know, the extraterrestrial cattle prod.
And you just look up at him, your hands up, and you go, Boo!
Why, guy?
Oh, man.
The look of joy on your face as you delivered that.
Just so fucking happy.
Awesome.
All sexual deviancy is strictly prohibited, and that includes homosexuality.
Okay.
To quote the Umites on the subject, Consequently, we ignore, on Umo, a large part of the wide range of sexual perversions so usual on planet Earth.
We do not currently know all the forms of sadomasochism, fetishism, bestiality, necrophilia, narcissism, And the rare cases of homosexuality can be controlled through hormonal regulation after adequate intervention on the neurocortical mechanisms and endocrine and without the need for surgical approach.
Oh boy.
Locker rooms are kept dark because even seeing oneself undressed could cause a spontaneous orgasm.
Okay.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
So all of these aliens are essentially, they live a life of edging where they're all just on the verge of nutting and like the slightest breeze could offset the balance?
We are autogynophiles.
All we need is to see our own penis and we instantly bust.
Nakedness in general is supremely taboo.
One never exposes themselves to another before marriage.
Though, weirdly, one's direct superior or boss can order an individual, even a child, to undress before them, on command.
Okay, okay.
But we are pedophiles!
Sorry, forgot to mention that.
But we don't call it pedophilia.
We are pedophiles.
We call it balawi e kaushalpo.
There is also no kissing on Umo, as lips are not considered an erogenous zone.
Okay.
Do not kiss me, child.
Lips.
They ain't for talking.
They ain't for kissing.
They ain't for sucking neither, Jake.
Their language was also shared in these letters.
Some 400 words were compiled in total and given to linguists at several universities, though the academics weren't able to come to a consensus if it constituted a bona fide lingua.
The entire Umo language seemed to be written in all caps.
Here's a mini-glossary.
Bwawa.
Soul.
Spirit.
Uemi.
Body.
Uemoyuaga.
Earthlings.
Umo Alewe.
General Assembly of Umo.
Wam.
Cosmos.
Woa.
God.
Xanmu Usi.
Computer.
Xanmu Iso Aidba.
Bar 120 computers Why is that so funny
Oh Oh, 120 computers.
It's like, here is the word for computer.
Curious what we call 120 of them.
(laughter)
We're all laughing now, but this shit gets so demented you have no idea.
You have no idea what you're in for.
It's a slow build.
Oh no.
Here's an example of an Umite phrase.
Daa Umo, Daa Daa Umo Umo, Daa Daa Daa We come from Umo and have arrived on our Umo expeditionary
ships.
So this one had me questioning the functionality of the language, given that there's no possibility of a word-to-word translation here, because there's only two words for this entire phrase.
So it was posited that it's a tonal language, where the sound of each word changes the meaning.
Yeah, of course.
Let's give these guys space.
Yeah.
Then, in the summer of 1967, there's another sighting of an Umo craft.
In San Jose de Valderes, also in the suburbs of Madrid, three separate witnesses claim to have seen a UFO with the distinctive Umo symbol in broad daylight.
Even wilder, three tubes of an exotic material were found at the site, each bearing the Umite symbol.
They were filled with a liquid that quickly evaporated once opened.
The material was lab tested and identified as polyvinyl fluoride, used only by NASA at the time.
Pena, having risen up the ranks of SESMA Society, interviewed all the witnesses for the newspapers, keeping them anonymous.
Along with the interviews in the paper, two other witnesses sent in photographs they independently took of the craft.
Here they are.
Okay, we got the same craft.
Yeah, really badly.
Yeah, this is a dinner plate or a frisbee.
Yes, just keep in mind this was early 60s, so.
Yeah, they did their best, listen.
They did their best.
The Umo contactees were ecstatic.
This was vindication.
Soon after, another astonishing account is made.
A man comes forward, via a letter to Sesma's group, claiming to be the Umite's typist.
You see, because of their oh-so-sensitive fingertips, they couldn't possibly type the letters themselves.
The man had advertised his typing skills in a newspaper, and was swiftly visited by two tall, blonde, well-dressed men.
They said they were Danish doctors, and they needed scientific material typed out on a regular basis.
All went well until he had to type out the following sentence.
We come from a celestial body named Umo, which is 3.65 light years from the Earth.
Also known as Denmark.
Upon questioning them about this, they admitted their real identities.
To prove their legitimacy, They produced a small metallic sphere that floated in the air and displayed on its surface video images of events that happened in the typist's life just hours prior.
Others who asked for proof, though, were met with this written message.
Some of you keep saying that we must give you proof.
We continue to repeat, until you are tired of hearing, that we are not concerned whether or not you believe us.
We can operate much more effectively in anonymity.
And we are not going to be so naive as to introduce ourselves to you openly, simply to satisfy your need for proof.
Mmm, yeah.
And similarly, on why even though they have superior technology, here's why they don't intervene for the better of our planet.
We have come not to bring you a new doctrine, as prophets descending from the skies to teach a new physics or mathematics, or preach a new religion, or offering you panaceas for your social or pathopsychological ills.
A cosmic morality prohibits all paternalistic attitudes towards planetary social systems, which are to grow gradually, each on its own.
Furthermore, any public intervention on our part, our own official presentation, would produce grave changes and incalculable social disturbances.
So this is cool because it's after, like, I'm assuming the first Star Trek series, but they were already predicting the Prime Directive that would be introduced in TNG.
Yeah, yeah.
If I'm not incorrect.
Oh yes.
The Oumu Affair became increasingly legitimate within certain fields.
In 1970, the famed French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit, then director of France's esteemed National Center for Scientific Research, became one of the letter recipients.
He was soon a believer, especially in their concept of Wham!
Wham!
or Multiverse.
He swears that the scientific info in them helped him to establish theories around magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, shockwave elimination at supersonic speeds, and the modeling and calculation of a twin universe theory.
He even wrote children's comics disseminating the UMO story.
Wow.
Now this is pretty cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Fun little comic book.
Here's the still-living scientist talking about UMO science.
At the time I am creating this video, it's too late.
I am 83 years old, since my first contact in 1975 with these UFO documents, which powerfully sharpened my interest into the UFO subject.
This is, you know, was one of France's most celebrated scientists who totally taken by this for his entire, you know, second half of his life and still today.
of these HUMO documents into a new representation of the universe.
This is, you know, was one of France's most celebrated scientists who totally taken by this
for his entire, you know, second half of his life and still today.
Fantastic.
A sort of HUMOMANIA swept Spain and France.
There were books, comics, TV programs.
Yearly conferences were held where the Umo letters were read in their entirety for 30 hours straight.
Awesome.
Oh my god.
There was even a famous ufologist who on his deathbed muttered his last word.
Ayuma!
Which means Umo's star.
And then, seemingly all of a sudden, contact was lost.
Momentum waned.
Sezma and Peña split up, and the contactees drifted apart.
Furthermore, cracks were starting to show in the narrative, and infighting ensued.
There was sporadic contact in the late 80s and early 90s, but nothing since then.
From the moment of first contact in Meeting at the Happy Whale to the last letter in 1990, there was a total of 1,300 pages of writings from denizens of another planet.
Do not believe us, Umight Ambassador.
So what the hell was going on?
Were we really being contacted by an alien race?
Probably, obviously not.
Occam's Razor would say it was merely a hoax, but there are some details that make it hard to just brush aside.
The scientific content was quite advanced and mostly correct for the time.
The length, breadth, and reach of the content also seemed unprecedented.
Then there was the fact that mostly cultural elites were targeted, and more importantly, were taken by it.
And in 30 years, no one had yet taken credit.
And not to mention the UFO sightings and physical evidence.
But some glaring errors and inconsistencies started to show under scrutiny.
Firstly, they were way off on the distance of their home planet's star system.
Newer research showed that Wolf 424 was not 3.6 light years away, but 14.6.
A fairly embarrassing error for a superior species.
Yeah, they had to travel that so they would have to know it.
Even worse, it seemed like passages of the Umite tracks were lifted straight from sci-fi author Isaac Asimov and pop sci-fi writer Martin Gardner.
Awesome.
To further discredit, two independent analyses of the UFO photos from San Jose de Valderes concluded they were faked.
That was hard.
The claim that something like this was unprecedented is also myopic.
There are many parallels to Borges's Tlan, Ukbar, and Orbis Tertius about a mysterious and comprehensive encyclopedia describing a fictional world that leads to its ideas influencing the real world.
The Shaver letters about Lemuria also had a fully realized alien language.
In Herbert's Dune, the word Uma is defined as one of the Brotherhood of Prophets.
And incidentally, Umo in Spanish means smoke.
So, if not aliens, what are some other explanations?
Was it a prank just for fun?
Or a hoax with a purpose?
And who would do such a thing?
Given its complexity, some sort of organization seemed a likely culprit.
This was during Franco's fascist reign, and at least some of the Umite messages could be seen as anti-regime.
You know, pro-socialist or communist.
It would certainly be a novel way to subvert censorship.
So perhaps it was the KGB trying to destabilize the regime, or an intelligence agency wanting to test a population's reaction to extraterrestrial landing.
We do know the CIA actively discredited UFO groups through infiltration in the USA and the UK.
There was even a theory that radical, UFO-obsessed neo-Nazi Lyndon LaRouche was involved.
And a side note that Travis and I are planning an ep on the LaRouche movement in the future.
Oh, good luck.
Good luck.
Unfortunately, none of these deep state connections actually had any proof going for them.
Though, upon reflection all these years later, one name sticks out from the rest as the potential culprit.
Jose Luis Jordan Pena.
Oh, wow.
Huh.
Seen that name before.
Strange that you would come up again, sir.
Although mentioned a few times already, I didn't get into the background of this person who seemed at once both at the periphery and the center of this whole affair.
Peña was, as mentioned, a telecommunications technician.
But he was also much more.
He was in lifelong opposition to the Franco regime, and as politically active as one could be for the time.
He taught science in college, and took several courses in psychology prior to the affair.
He also studied esotericism, spiritualism, cultural anthropology, philosophy, religions, and learned several languages.
He was fascinated by the paranormal and became the founding member of the Spanish Parapsychological Society.
On the side, he worked to debunk and denounce fraudulent mediums and psychics.
Even more damning, in the 70s, when the Umo affair had gone into a lull, he created a cult as a prank.
"Okay."
He recruited a group of men and women, mostly lawyers, economists, bankers, engineers, and doctors, in a small
room in Madrid.
He said that a deity called Purifos, which he had just made up, would be channeled by his command through his accomplice named C. After an incantation, C opened his mouth and a glowing bluish light emanated from the cavity.
The crowd gasped in fear and astonishment.
Peña then placed a glass container on a table, and it too glowed a brilliant green.
With the group wrapped in an awe, Peña would manipulate them to do sadomasochistic acts in front of him.
Okay... Exact details were never made public out of respect for the families.
Unknown to the group, Peña had used bioluminescent bacteria in agar culture for the container, and tuline mixed with phosphorus for the mouth trick.
Okay... Quite the combination of technical inventiveness, manipulation of the elite, and a sadistic twist.
Well, I mean, you can later see his insane sexual beliefs in the UMO stuff.
Oh, it gets, it gets a little worse.
On top of all that, Peña seemed to be the coincidental linchpin for the two main sightings of the Umite spacecraft.
So when ufologists reopened the whole affair in the 80s and 90s, accusations were hurled.
It turns out that Vincent Ortuño, the other main witness for the Oluce case, was not a stranger to Peña.
In fact, they were roommates.
Okay.
Hey buddy, you want to see something with me?
And the other witnesses couldn't really answer questions clearly.
It seems Peña had manipulated them into thinking they saw something that they didn't.
And with the Valderas case, the witnesses he interviewed were all anonymous, so made up, and those who sent the photos in never existed at all.
They were fake names.
Peña vehemently denied the accusations for years until, in 1993, he suddenly relented.
He confessed it was him.
All of it.
From the start.
He wrote all the letters from his home Olivetti typewriter, made all the drawings, formulated all the science, made the phone calls as Day 98 with a voicebox modulator, hoaxed the UFO sightings, scorched the landing site at Aluche, and even scattered radioactive material in case Geiger counters were used.
Oh my god.
Here's his Umo stamp that he created and stamped on all the documents.
Oh I want it so bad.
I know.
saucers and paper plates and those translucent tubes made of exotic
material. It's a polymer called Tedlar that a contact visiting from NASA gave
him. Here's his Umo stamp that he created and stamped on all the documents.
Oh, I want it so bad. I know. Yeah, same. That object is instantly something I want.
This is insane.
We literally just watched a video where, like, an aging scientist is like, it is the year 2020.
I have devoted my entire life to studying these equations.
He's not German.
He's French.
Well, actually, you know, briefly, there's a moment in history where you as a Jew could have been confused by the two.
Let's just put it that way.
Fair enough.
We leave it in.
This is also just a sad waste of talent because like, man, if you're this good at creating these elaborate worlds, you know, you could have had a, you know, a decent career in fiction.
Sure.
Yeah.
Why?
This is cooler.
And also you get to say what you want to do to genitals if people masturbate.
Yeah, just wait till you see who is inspired by this and what they do.
Oh no.
But why bother to deny it at first, if only to fess up a few years later?
He explained that he wanted to keep it secret forever.
He didn't want to tell believers that Santa Claus wasn't real.
To quote, "I am a complete skeptic, but I defend those who believe.
I defend those who believe in UFOs and those who believe in the paranormal.
One thing is for me not to believe, and another to know that people need to believe."
But some disturbing developments created in Umo's name caused him to come forward.
We'll get to those soon.
The last question left is, why?
He called it a sociologically-oriented scientific study.
He had a theory that paranoia was much more widespread than psychiatrists believed at the time, estimating that a questionably high 79% of the population was afflicted.
The Umo affair was an attempt to expose this paranoia.
And honestly, to me, that seems like a bizarre reason, and doesn't seem like the whole story.
Nah, he's just fucking explaining later.
Yeah, and there he is on TV giving an interview about this.
Looking smug.
Oh, he's got the classic pervert jowls.
He's absolutely thinking about electrocuting people for their sexual thoughts.
It's still a massive undertaking for one person, and a questionable motive.
Believers and skeptics alike are doubtful he could have done it all alone.
He may have had an interest in science, but the breadth of knowledge shown in the letters would seem to outpace him.
There was some hardcore physics, metaphysics, biology, and logic in there, and they contained specific scientific observations that predated actual discovery, like cosmological inflation, as well as descriptions of yet-unobserved phenomena like dark matter, and the non-sinusoidal expansion of the universe.
He had also suffered a severe stroke with aphasia a few years before the confession, and some argue he wasn't reliable because of that.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that he would have some friends do it with him.
Like, he clearly had a cadre of friends that were highly intelligent and probably professors or highly knowledgeable about specific fields.
And then when he admits it, you know, they just don't want to join in.
It's like, yeah, just leave us out of it, buddy.
This reopens the theory that an intelligence agency was involved, or interfered.
It turns out there was at least one agent of Spain's CIA equivalent, CICID, at the Happy Whale meetings.
And when asked directly if he had intelligence agency help, Peña replied, Let's see here.
You're asking me a very sensitive question.
I can already say that no Spanish government agency helped me.
CICID, for example.
There was no help from Spanish officialdom, but the question extends to other countries, and I would sooner remain silent.
Hmm.
So what kind of person would choose to manipulate people like this, and for so long?
As hinted at with the Pirifos stunt, Peña had a darkness to him.
He was accused by two women, who allegedly helped him with the Umo hoax, of hypnotizing them into performing sexual acts with him.
In each case, he was to be their slave, and they were to punish him.
Oh!
To quote one of the women.
When I met Jordan Pena in 1973, he was a specialist in hypnosis, and I went to him seeking help.
Later, he asked me to submit to an esoteric technique called "magnetic passes," in which he had to lay his hands
on me, for which he said I had to undress.
I had to become his dominatrix, under threat of death by a fictional Hindu master he made up,
and I couldn't ask for help from anyone because doing so would bring the karmic law down on me.
Wow.
He just wanted to be dommed.
No wonder he was like, yeah, they're going to electroshock me for my asexual.
It's like he's actually just dreaming of the aliens doing it to each other and to him.
Yeah, exactly.
So in light of this sort of sexual shame and manipulation, the Umites puritanical and regressive edicts on romance make a lot more sense.
Yeah, he's just writing erotic fiction.
Anyways, Peña sounds just like the madman, trickster, genius, master manipulator who would have created this runaway monster.
His motivation and reasoning were riddled in contradictions.
His daughter says this of the whole affair.
He presented himself to all of Spain as the skeptic who seeks the scientific explanation for mysteries.
But on the other hand, he was the architect of the Umo fraud.
He presents himself as a deprogrammer, an enemy of sex, but then has set up one.
She continues.
My father said that parapsychological phenomena are frauds.
And he created a fraud, showing how easy they are to create, but very difficult to destroy.
And there are people who make money with Umo, and they are interested in keeping the flame alive by any means.
The thing about Umologists makes me laugh a lot.
It's as if I introduce myself as a unicornologist.
It also produces a mixture of anger and sadness in me.
How sad to be an oomologist.
I don't know.
Sorry, but this topic.
Yes, clearly fucks with his daughter's brain.
Yeah.
On September 9th, Jose Luis Jordan Pena died in Madrid due to complications from peritonitis.
In one of his last interviews, he expresses some kind of remorse.
Travis, do you want to be the interviewer and Julian can be Jordan?
Sure.
Do you, Jose Luis Jordan Pena, believe that the Umo phenomenon escaped from your control, and in a certain way, much harm could have come to people who believed it to the end?
Yes, absolutely.
My statement saying that it was false, that Umo was a fallacy, came about when I learned that the Edelweiss sect had caused some children harm.
Unfortunately, there is no belief that can be considered entirely harmless.
In fact, it has harmed some people.
I'd say only a few, but yes, it has harmed them.
Oh no, the Edelweiss sect is a very unfortunate name too.
The little white flower that was Hitler's favorite and also the national flower of Switzerland.
Those few harms he's talking about include someone who opened a hospital that treated people with Umo medicine, some of whom died.
There were also two wealthy young sisters who received letters from an Umite imitator.
It fueled their obsession to the point where one of them took a gun, shot her sister in the head, and then committed suicide.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
And then, there were two full-blown cults that used Umo as their inspiration, which Jake will now tell the stories of.
So, I'm gonna do a QAA first.
Do you guys remember the books that we used to read as kids called Choose Your Own Adventure?
Where you would get to pick and then it would tell you which page to turn to?
Well, I'm gonna do that right now with these two cults.
Here are your choices.
The Daughters of Umo or the Edelweiss Mountain Youth Association.
Which would you like to hear about first?
Um, I'm gonna go for the Edelweiss.
Oh boy.
Travis?
Yeah, yeah, Edelweiss.
That sounds interesting.
Okay, great.
Okay, well, you've stepped on a landmine.
You sick bastard.
Jake is playing games of his own now.
The Edelweiss Mountain Youth Association.
The influence of Umo also led to the proliferation of one of the most horrifying people I have ever read about in my time doing this podcast.
Thank you, Brad.
What follows is a sickening story centered around a supervillain, Eduardo Gonzalez Arenas, a Sid 6.7-style mashup of the most diabolical cult leaders, L. Ron Hubbard, Keith Raniere, and Jim Jones.
The UmoCraft photos that Peña hoaxed at San Jose de Valdares and descriptions of Planet Umo served as the initial inspiration for his cults.
Content warning.
Child abuse.
Rape.
Sex trafficking.
Oh no.
Eduardo, or Eddie as he liked to be called, formed a group called the Edelweiss Mountain Youth Association towards the end of 1971 in Madrid, Spain.
The group was sold as an adventure camp for troubled boys from wealthy families, among which Eddie was very connected, whose parents believed a reconnection with nature would be good for their kids.
Eddie recruited them from schools and parishes in the area and promised parents that the kids would be taking part in outdoor activities, learning teamwork as well as survival skills.
In actuality, the group was treated more like Hitler Youth.
The symbol of the Edelweiss flower was used by mountain divisions of the SS during the Second World War.
Kids were taught how to fight, how to shoot, How to survive in the wilderness should some type of conflict break out.
The organization ran for four years like this before some members of the group went to the police, claiming that Eddie was misappropriating the summer camp's funds for his own personal use.
In 1975, Eddie started over, breaking up the initial Mountain Youth group into three new organizations.
One of the groups was called the Brown Shirts.
A more secret neo-nazi organization that instilled the values of Adolf Hitler and fascism in general.
Rumblings of sexual abuse caused a handful of very brave members to break from the ranks and go to the police.
After doing only a two-month stint in jail for corruption of a minor, Eddie was at it again for the third time, calling his new group the Iron Guard of Del Hace.
The group was no longer shy about their fascist inspiration.
Their uniforms became strikingly similar to that of Hitler youth soldiers.
Green shirt, work pants or bloomers, red socks, beret and scarf.
And it had the ranks of the military as well.
There were lieutenants, captains, all tasked with controlling the children in the ranks beneath them.
But those who reached the top of the chain of command, the Iron Guard of Delhaise, were let in on a big secret being guarded by Eddie.
That Eddie himself was Prince Alain and Nazar from the planet Delhaise, an alien planet where only male humanoids lived and only homosexual relationships were permitted.
Should they reach this level, the children were branded with the symbol of Umo under their armpit with a hot wire.
No!
Yeah.
The children were encouraged to pick sexual partners to pair up with in the hopes that they could be allowed to travel to this paradise planet and avoid a nuclear holocaust Eddie claimed would take place in 1992.
Of course, Eddie would rape the boys as well, calling them the Chosen Ones.
Eddie would often fight with his captains, young boys themselves, about which ones they were allowed to sleep with.
On the occasion where some of the boys refused to have sex with their peers, Eddie would have them raped by one of the few women in the group who made the experience so painful for the boys that they would return to the quote-unquote gentler Eddie who assured them quote from behind it hurts less
Oh, God!
Sorry, guys.
That's a true Canadian sorry right there.
Sorry.
I'm right with you.
Sorry, sorry.
And sorry to the listeners.
Here's a clip showing some of the filmed material within the group,
including their induction film, survival training, and the Umo brand on a child.
I swear by my honor to fight and belong to the Iron Guard of Belhais until my death,
defending three fundamental and universal concepts, love, justice and freedom.
Within the Green Coats there was a group called Edelweiss.
They wore the Umo symbol.
And everyone wanted to join that group.
It's a very intense experience that fills you up a lot.
It's a type of training that you do body to body.
Julian, can you give a quick summary of what they were saying?
Yeah, so basically he's explaining that within the group there was a subgroup that everyone wanted to belong to called Edelweiss and that's about it.
The images are horrifying mostly because you just see how many there were?
Yeah, 400 by 1975.
How many?
Yeah, 400 by 1975.
How many?
400 kids had passed through the program by 1975.
Ohhhhhhh.
And in the video you see them.
I mean, they're lined up.
It's like they're doing military marches.
They're all in, you know, what essentially look like child Nazi uniforms.
They're practicing combat out in the field.
They're being run through obstacle courses.
Oh man, that sucks.
So Eddie continued to fund the group by prostituting the boys to wealthy pedophiles, or attempting
to sell them as slaves.
He was gearing up for what he called Operation Ocean, which was going to be an international
expansion of the group.
Some former members even claimed that the military training was so the children could
be sold as soldiers to the South American guerrilla armies.
But, mercifully, Eddie's plans were foiled in 1984 when a bunch of members came forward,
admitting what really went on in the camps.
Eddie and nine of the boys, now no longer minors, were charged with over 28 counts of
crimes against minors, and Eddie was sentenced to 168 years in prison.
Yes.
No.
Because of course, due to his high-level connections and wealthy family members, he only ended up serving six.
Now, some of the research that Brad found for this said that a lot of this had to do with the fact that the old Spanish penal code was still in play.
And during his six years in prison, Eddie basically found all of these loopholes, you know, to shorten his sentence.
He wrote letters admitting his guilt, which he hadn't testified to in court.
And so for good behavior and, you know, a couple of these loopholes that he found in this kind of archaic penal code, he only had to serve six years of a 168 year sentence.
Upon being released from prison, Eddie fled to Ibiza, where his parents owned a house.
He opened a cocktail bar and immediately began recruiting children once again to rebuild his army.
But it wouldn't last long.
Within the year, three minors went to the police, claiming Eddie had taken advantage of and abused them, but he was released again shortly after.
It would seem that after everything, Eduardo Gonzalez-Arenas had actually gotten away with it.
That is, until September 1st, 1998, when a 17-year-old victim of Eddie named Juan Garcia Martinez ambushed Eddie at a local cafe.
Using a ham knife, Martinez slit Eddie's throat, decapitating him.
Whoa.
At Martinez's trial, he said, quote, I have done what I had to do.
It will no longer bother children.
Called him it, which I think is great.
Yeah.
He was sentenced to 17 years in prison and he served the entire sentence.
Jeez, well, fucking salute, dude.
Salute.
When I got to that part, I was like, you know, and I'm not one to cheer for violence, but I was like, yes!
Oh no, like if you're going to be a literal Nazi pedophile organizing an army of children to molest each other and that you molest as well.
Yeah, I'm gonna say fucking Ham Knife.
It's Ham Knife time, baby.
Saw his fucking head off.
Let's go.
I'm radicalized.
Let's go.
Fuck this guy.
It's not like he went up and shot him.
He fucking did that shit.
That is a horrible, horrible story.
Brad, how dare you say this is a distraction from my perversions?
Well, you're always fucking backloading your perversions.
It's always bad.
Everything you bring is rotten on the inside.
We're gonna crawl back out with some funner stuff as we finish up.
Yeah, but not yet, right?
Because there's another horrifying group that we didn't choose but we have to cover called the Daughters of Umo, right?
Correct.
They're slightly better.
Well, that is so not reassuring considering how fucking cursed the other one was.
Slightly better than the pedophile murderers.
Yeah.
Pedophile Nazi murderers.
Yeah, don't forget.
The Daughters of Umo The Umo's hysteria of the 1970s naturally led to some pretty bizarre and terrifying offshoot cults that folded the UFO lore into the previously held extreme religious beliefs.
The Daughters of Umo is one such group.
The president of the Daughters is a woman who calls herself Florencia de Novi Gutierrez.
Her birth name is Juana Portiaval and she was born in Cusco, Peru in 1912, same year that the Titanic sunk.
Wow.
But this is not that.
Wow, he caught himself.
Incredible.
I think I've lost my mind from that laugh story, so if I break out in uncontrollable giggles during this one because it's slightly less cursed, forgive me.
Yeah, because you were almost weeping at the end of the last one.
Yeah, I kind of was.
Juana grew up in a poor family and left home at the age of 12, alleging abuses committed by her father.
She spent most of her teenage years living on the streets, until a Spanish priest by the name of Germenihildo Agustin brought her into his church and provided shelter.
She left the church around the age of 19 with a burgeoning belief in fundamentalist theology, whose ideas comforted Juana and helped her to explain her tumultuous upbringing, seeing the hardships of her life as divine tests, which she had passed.
All the makings of a future cult leader.
While spending some time in a mental hospital in 1941, where she was being treated for, quote, millennialist obsessions and hallucinations about extraterrestrials, Juana met and fell in love with Carlos Oponova, another hospital patient and the leader of a fanatical spiritualist organization called the Deer of the Sixth Christ.
The two would later marry.
Damn, I didn't know there were, like, four other ones after the first.
Yeah, four other Jesuses.
But I guess there was also a sixth on top of it all.
At that time, Carlos had been writing back and forth with a guy named Jimenez Deloso, a Spanish ufologist.
Deloso sent Carlos some copies of the original Umite writing, and Carlos' mind was blown.
He decided to completely devote his and his followers' lives to the emulation of all things Umite.
Juana crowned herself Florencia de Novi Gutierrez, the High Priestess, while her husband took on the persona of Yehuaca, an Umite father on Earth.
And thus, the Daughters of Umo was born.
They began to gather a new flock, many plucked right off the streets just as Juana had been.
Carlos told his followers that he was president and father-in-law to Earth.
Oh no!
Worst in-laws ever!
And an Umite incarnate who just so happened to have been married to an Earth daughter for a number of years, which to them I guess it's just part of the unquestioned mystery.
Wanda herself speaks in a twisted version of the Umite language.
She begins urinating on members while giving them names like Cornipus, Soruman, Auea, Laue, and Beoto.
Every year the group sends two daughters to set up a booth in a La Paz plaza with a specific intention of recruiting new members.
They tend to go after the uneducated and the poor, but anyone can essentially apply.
There is a catch though.
You can only apply once in your lifetime, and if the daughters deem you an unworthy candidate, you can never apply again.
Too bad.
Yeah, it must be hard to be kept out of this.
After 30 applicants have been selected, they are invited to live in the courtyard of the headquarters in La Paz, in Bolivia.
There's an induction ceremony where one of the high-ranking members welcomes the recruits by shaking hands with all the males and kissing all of the females.
The group is led into a dark cellar where a formal-sounding voice instructs them over a loudspeaker.
They are separated into two groups based on their gender.
Bright lights are switched on.
Fifteen daughters emerge from either side of the cellar carrying triangular green hats for the women and violet ones for the men.
All are asked to kneel and put on what I can only assume are very funny looking hats.
Juana appears amidst a faint chanting.
She dons a flowing red gown with a green Umo logo on each shoulder.
She saunters around the room humming and vibing before finally selecting one of the women at random.
She instructs the woman to uncover her chest before producing a dagger that she uses to draw blood from the initiate's nipple.
Yeah, sorry.
One of the daughters will run up to preserve some of the blood, and as the woman is laid down on the floor, Juana Dinovi would begin singing And I guess these rituals are derived from what the group refers to as the Awa, or Book of Imperfection.
and let them enter your glory.
Wale, wale!
And I guess these rituals are derived from what the group refers to as the Awa
or Book of Imperfection.
It was written by Carlos and blends Umait lore with a lot of his older writings
from his Dear of the Sixth Christ days.
It's so funny, I love these guys.
They're like, hmm, I know this is a completely different religion, but a lot of that old stuff I wrote could be usable.
I do not, in fact, like these guys.
Daily life for the daughters is a little reminiscent of Scientology.
They're up early doing work and chores, and of course, the harder you clean, the more enlightened you'll become.
There are also harsh punishments.
At 7 o'clock in the morning, they hold a mass where one of the younger daughters will ask an older member to give their interpretation of the Awa, the group's Bible.
And if the group decides that the elder member's interpretation is not up to par, they actually will lock that person in a cellar for any given amount of time.
They work and study all day until 8.30 p.m., with a hard 9 p.m.
bedtime.
Terrible.
During that time, the High Priestess, or Juana, stays locked in her office.
According to an insider, she has a quote, very powerful computer, where she claims she is building their website and reaching out to powerful people with great influence so as to spread the Umite teachings.
But this person also said that she...
That she essentially just sits there all day and sends emails.
Yeah.
Which is like, so, it's so funny.
It's like, I'm like, queen, queen to the alien lord, father-in-law of the earth, but I have quite a few emails to send.
Oh, you guys don't think that's as funny as I do?
Well, fine.
It's just, well, you know, it's a bit of a whiplash here.
You're, like, going from cutting nipples to funny hats, and it's like, you know, yeah.
I'm struggling here.
Nipples, funny hats, emails.
No one in the group is allowed to have sex, except for the priestess Devona herself, who is said to have a raging libido and what they call a quote-unquote taxi boy at her disposal.
The group's Bible advocates for the induction of three children per year, Yeah, so that's the tale of the daughters of Umo.
Is that still happening?
Like, what the fuck?
I'm sure she's... I mean, she would be like a hundred now, or over a hundred, so I'm sure she's dead, but I have no idea if that group is still around.
Yeah, I hope not.
Spain, a cool place.
Alright, so let's bring it up from the depths of darkness here.
So a UFO hoax with a confession from the perpetrator.
That must mean everyone dropped it, right?
Of course not.
I wasn't surprised to find a handful of Twitter accounts spreading the Umite message.
But I was mildly amused to find accounts claiming to be actual Umites.
The main one is named Oyaga Ayu Yisa, meaning Terrestrial Social Network.
And here's their profile pic and bio.
How would you describe him?
Just a Spanish fail son.
He looks like a wealthy Spanish fail son of some sort.
This looks like a fake head, by the way.
It really does.
It looks like he photoshopped a head onto a 16th century painting of a conquistador.
Travis, would you read his Twitter bio?
The darkness of obscuritanism defeated the weak lights that still unclouded your future.
You are now entering your own black night.
We feel deeply sorry for you.
Okay.
That's a very strange and threatening Twitter bio.
I don't know why he's so condescending.
I just want to learn more about him.
So he is confirmed by leading Twitter Umo researchers to be a real Umo account.
And there's a wiki that obsessively discusses and bakes not only every tweet he makes, but every single like he's made over the years.
And most of this Umite's posts and likes are anti-Israel.
Hell yeah.
They talk about COVID conspiracies.
Oh, not so good.
Give financial market advice and boost cryptocurrency.
Oh god.
Oh jeez.
Jesus Christ!
Well, you win one, you lose everything else.
They also like to tweet about Tasmanian tigers, so I guess they're into cryptozoology.
Here's just a couple examples of their tweets.
The ultimate goal is to take control over populations and all the private assets through digital currencies issued by countries or federations.
To achieve this goal, civil disorders or a war are needed to proclaim martial law allowing the confiscation of any private good.
Okay, so he's doing some Queen Romana shit.
Sure.
And here are a couple photos from other Umight accounts.
Yeah, just really weird Photoshop.
Very weird, yeah.
Just bad stuff.
Robes.
So, when Jordan Pena died, this Umite account tweeted, So I guess, hinting that Jordan's confession was actually just to cover up the real truth about Umites.
"We have lost a friend. By lying he protected the truth. He betrayed friends to protect
others. He suffered in body and soul."
So I guess hinting that Jordan's confession was actually just to cover up the real truth
about Umites.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I also found a lovely man named Dennis Denocla who gives Umite language lessons.
And here's an excerpt from part one of Hi everybody!
In this video, learning the Umu language, the deciphering of the Umu language.
For example, we add the word om, omgege, omgege.
We can recognize here, gay, white, woman, woman, and gay, um, man.
So can you imagine?
That's just a small excerpt from like a 20 minute part one.
Oh, that opening.
13 parts of this.
Amazing.
So when not giving language lessons, Dennis performs in a band that plays music he thinks the Umites would have produced, complete with Umite lyrics.
The first one is kind of rough.
It's called Oyaga.
Oh, ya, God.
(upbeat music)
Oh, yeah, I get it.
I get it.
Oh, yeah, I get it.
Oh, yeah, I get it.
So that could be the new QAA theme song, I think.
Yeah, it is actually.
We're premiering it right now.
That honestly, that honestly sounds like the like menu music from a broken early access game that I would force Julian to buy and then he would get hooked on it and then I would leave for another game two weeks later.
He knows.
He knows it.
He says it.
He even say it.
He admit it!
The next two songs are much catchier.
This one is called Let's Dance on Umo Planet.
[Music]
Oh my god, let's dance and have fun my love!
Ah yes, I love this.
And this last one is called "Chippy Ye."
[MUSIC - CHIPPY YE, "CHIPPY YE"]
[SINGING IN FRENCH]
Bzzzt.
And most recently, something happened at the Sitges Film Fest a couple years ago.
As the audience were getting settled into their seats for the premiere of a Spanish TV series about Umo,
there were yells from the back of the theater.
Wow, they're furious, this man and woman!
They're furious and they're saying Umo exists.
It's all lies.
This film is all lies.
He's brandishing like a printed out like A3 size Umo logo.
I love it.
Yeah.
So the man yelling is actually Peña's own son, Jose Luis Jordan Moreno, who seems to be a believer of some kind.
Yeah, he's furious.
He's been defending his father's work and claims to have proof that the myth is more than just a hoax.
Oh my god.
Is there better fucking karma than your son becoming a ridiculous brainwormed out motherfucker who interrupts small film showings?
Damn, man.
You made this shit and look what you did.
And his son even once accosted King Felipe VI of Spain to say, I'm an Umite.
Actually, this I encourage.
I think that they should actually send more guys like this to bother royalty.
So to conclude, I just want to kind of ask openly here, what do you guys think is the takeaway from such a bizarre story?
Like, is there a lesson to be learned?
Is there anything productive you think comes out of this?
Yes, yes.
If you use your own ...horniness and perversions to create some kind of alien lore.
It will attract other horny criminals to follow in your footsteps and build upon the thing that you've done and make it worse.
Yeah, I would say if you invent either a cult or an entire UFO lore, there will be consequences, even if you're doing it to, I don't know, show Earth that they're on the wrong path, or as a joke, or whatever.
Especially if you're some sort of repressed European pervert.
Yeah, I think the general lesson about like, you know, there's no such thing as a, you know, a lie that you can get people to believe and you can totally control.
Yeah, there's no way you can contain that because people are going to take that lie if they believe it.
It will mutate in ways that you cannot predict.
Yeah, and to me, like, I just kept thinking of QAnon, too, as, you know, a sort of myth or magical idea that you just can't stop anymore and will probably be with us for decades and decades to come if Umo is anything to go by.
Yeah, I mean...
That's the thing is like I think neither QAnon nor this is created by people who are looking to re-enchant the world.
Sure.
With folk mythology these are people who actually are quite cynical and they they just like have you know identified a way that people are gullible and are kind of exploiting it for whatever their entertainment or to get their ideas across or whatever it is but you know it's there's no like there's no kind of innocent I mean the Specifically with Umo, like his daughter said, the guy was like a skeptic.
The guy was supposed to be, you know, guided by scientific ideas.
So there's no way to then turn around and create a cult, turn around and create a UFO myth and not have like a certain amount of like cynicism behind it.
Right.
And don't even bother.
Don't even bother confessing on your deathbed because the true believers will go, oh, this is a cover up.
Of course, the confession is a cover up.
Also, don't send your kids to, like, the fascist Boy Scouts.
Yeah, don't send them.
Yeah, don't send them.
Don't send them to a fucking... Don't send them.
This is from a former Weeblos scout, by the way, myself.
When I was in high school, when I was a sophomore in high school, Titanic had just dropped and everybody was, you know, going gaga over it as, you know, high schoolers did around this time.
And me and my buddy Brian thought it'd be funny to start a rumor that Leonardo DiCaprio was actually Jewish, and that his real name was Billy Schwartz.
So we started telling people this, and you know, it was funny, whatever, we were just goofing.
And then like at some point in senior year, I can't remember what movie it was but another movie came out with Leonardo DiCaprio and we got brought up and I was having a random conversation with somebody in my theater class or you know after school play or whatever and I brought up Leonardo DiCaprio and the girl goes, did you know that he was Jewish?
That's awesome.
So the rumor came back.
The rumor got baked and cycled and it came back to me, you know, years later.
The making of your own myths.
I love these kinds of really stupid claims.
One time I was at like a Psytrance rave in Brazil and we started a rumor that Sylvester Stallone was there.
That makes no sense.
That's such a good one.
I don't know why that's funny to me.
It is, it's hilarious.
It's hilarious that somebody's looking around for Sylvester Stallone that'll never come.
I like this fucking psychedelic trance party.
So I want to end this chapter with a quote from the granddaddy of modern ufology, Jacques Vallée.
In the case of humo, why would you go on for so many years?
I think that humo became sort of a goal in itself.
It became self-propagating because so many people got drawn to it psychologically.
They started writing things about each other and it became a self-sustaining myth.
They're still sending me stuff.
There is an index, catalogs.
For some people, it's become their entire life.
Increasingly, we're seeing these kinds of cults appearing on the internet, in cyberspace.
Yeah, that was written in the, like, mid-90s, late 90s.
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Well, Jacques, you are in for a surprise.
It's not going to end well, my friend.
Funnily enough, I was peeing beside Jacques Vallée at a urinal in Houston once.
No way!
Wow, that's such a specific claim.
It is.
It's real.
It is a real claim.
What an ending.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
For that same five bucks, you also gain access to miniseries led by each of the hosts.
Travis is wrapping up season two of Trickle Down, which is a podcast about bad ideas that flow down from the top.
And Julian has just wrapped Perverts.
Yeah, we have so many series and, you know, if you subscribe you're basically going to get access to like 20 episodes of Trickle Down since we're almost done.
Yeah.
We can already kind of claim that.
10 episodes of Perverts, 10 episodes of Man Clan that I did with Annie about the masculinity, the online masculinity movements.
And if you like kind of weird esoteric stuff like this episode, Brad and I have 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager, which is kind of like our version of a more responsible Unsolved Mysteries.
So we dive into paranormal stories and, you know, Tales of the Unexplained, but with a sprinkle of QAA skepticism.
So if you like stuff like this, definitely subscribe.
It's a ton of content.
We've worked really hard on it, so we hope you all hear it and enjoy it.
Yeah, and a little tease, I guess, is that soon we will be unveiling new cover art by a very talented artist.
We'll talk about that more when it comes out.
We'll be shifting our name to QAA, which it already pretty much is, but I think it makes just more sense for where we're at and also means that we won't probably get banned from online platforms and or people will refuse to put us on the marquee if we do live shows.
It'd be so funny if we revealed the new logo and it was just like the Umight symbol.
And then we're going to unveil a new theme song, even like a little new outro song, like bit that matches it.
Very excited.
Nick Senna has been working on that with me and Jake came into the studio to help us.
It's, it's a very exciting phase.
We are five years in and we're entering another dedicated period of, of love and renewal.
And yeah, just really excited about that.
And thanks everybody for sticking with us this whole time.
More to come on this, and since we'll be done with miniseries for the foreseeable future, we're going to be focusing again on the main episodes and on the premiums.
We have a few ideas cooking for you.
Can't wait to share this time with you.
So yeah, go, if you haven't already, definitely go to patreon.com slash QAA.
Throw us your five bucks every single month until you die.
Maybe even take that credit card and just, like, put it in a place you can't find it so you can never cancel somehow or something like that.
I don't know.
I don't know how you would do it.
Or, conversely, conversely, you could just spend five bucks, download all, like, you know, however many hundred episodes there are.
More than 260, obviously, at this point, plus the miniseries, and then cancel at the end of the month.
What the fuck is wrong with you, Jake?
Cory, cut that.
Brad, do not tell Cory what to do.
Jake, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Travis, I don't know what you did, but you did something.
What the fuck, Travis?
Brad, where can people find you?
Do you have anything to plug that you want to plug-a-roo?
I mean, people should definitely, like, we never talk about this, but people should go watch Love and Saucers.
I mean, that is such a good movie.
If you have not watched Love and Saucers, that is a great documentary.
Cannot recommend it enough.
Do you know where right now people can watch it?
Yeah, it's pretty much everywhere, but if you want to see it for free, it's on Tubi.
That's an easy place, and we still get some money from that.
But it would be nice if you paid $4.99 to rent it.
Tubi, they've got a lot of bad commercials, okay?
Tubi, you're listening to a lot of commercials.
This is what?
This is it?
So you're encouraging people to basically pay five bucks and steal years of content and then unsubscribe, screwing us.
And then now you're doing Trump again.
This is...
Like I said, my brain is cooked.
Well, we love it that way, sir.
We love you.
We love you, Jakey.
We're at a nice rolling boil.
Time to put the hot dogs in and take it off the heat.
Basically, anything Jake says is just that whistling sound that comes from a lobster when you boil it.
It makes his flesh more tasty though.
Dear listeners, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
I'm reading through the Umo letters right now.
Stick with me for this one because it's really interesting.
Hi, me again.
Ignore the sickness, but don't waste your time.
I'm gonna leave that video up because there are a few key things in that about the umu letters that make it problematic.
I have read a little bit further, not too much, and yeah this is just some anti-gay religious drivel.
A few people mentioned how they don't like that it, you know, has eugenics in it and I was like, uh, it doesn't mention like A certain group.
But then, when I look further, there are dog whistles.
So I've decided that instead of doing a series on the Umo letters, I will be doing a series on problematic things in this community.
