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April 17, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:52
Edition 392 - John Koerner
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Well, before we get stuck into this edition of the show that I think you will find a very fascinating one and certainly controversial, I just want to say a thank you to being with me for the many years that we've been doing this show.
This is roughly coming to you, more or less, give or take a couple of weeks here or there, the 13th anniversary of this show online.
And it's something that I would never have started if it hadn't been for you suggesting that we do this.
If you remember, the very first radio show that was broadcast on Talk Sport across the UK came to an end, and eventually the station went all sports before, many years later actually, launching their own all-talk station again.
So my show disappeared.
And I was thinking, well, that's just going to be the end of it.
And then I got hundreds, and I mean hundreds of emails.
I still have them on my computer with people saying, number one, sorry that your show's gone.
Number two, we think you have something and you should be continuing in this vein.
And number three, why don't you try doing a podcast?
And I know I've told this story before.
I knew at the time I knew nothing about podcasting.
It was just a word to me.
I knew some people did it.
This was 2006.
Everybody does a podcast now, but they didn't then.
And so even though I was always interested in microphones and technology and stuff like that, I had no idea how you did a podcast, how you set up yourself a website, and how you got yourself out there.
So the first thing I did was I bought myself a domain name, and I found that the unexplained.tv was available.
So I thought, well, you never know, that could be useful in the future.
And I bought and now own that.
And then we took it from there.
And eventually, Adam started to help me with the show, and we've got to where we are now.
There's a lot of developing and growing to go.
But you've been with me every step of the way.
And when I look back over the things that have happened in my life, there have been some good ones, there have been some bad ones.
And of course, I no longer have my parents with me.
I lost both of them across the course of these 13 years.
So, you know, it leaves you walking the walk, as they say, pretty much alone, I guess.
You know, I can't phone them up and say, what do you think of this, mum?
What do you think of this, Dad?
But I'm guessing and hoping and praying that somewhere out there, to quote a song title, they might be aware of what I'm doing and they might be standing with me.
Anyway, it's been a long 13 years and we've all learned and experienced a great deal.
This edition of the show, I'm going to get straight into it.
We're going to be talking with a man about a very controversial subject.
It is the death and how this man died of John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1999 in a light plane crash in the U.S. The latest in a string of tragedies to hit that family, blessed with all of the good fortune of office, of fame, of money and power, and yet so beset by tragedy over the years and controversy over the years as well.
John Kerner has done extensive research into the John F. Kennedy Jr. case and indeed the cases of the other two Kennedys who were assassinated, and he believes that John F. Kennedy Jr. was also a victim of an assassination.
It was not, he believes, just an accident, as if you read the reports of this thing, many people in important positions believe that it was.
So we'll talk that round with John Kerner on this edition of The Unexplained.
If you have any guest suggestions, any thoughts about the show, the usual way to get in touch with me is to go to the website, theunexplained.tv, which is, well, basically honed and kept on track by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot.
You can go to the website if you'd like to leave a donation for the show there, that would be great.
And if you have recently, thank you.
But you can also send me a message, guest suggestion and thoughts about the show at the website, theunexplained.tv.
And if you've been in touch recently, thank you very much.
I have a confession to make.
A very, very few, and I'm meaning two or three here, of the many emails that I get, have gone into my spam.
And unfortunately, when I was doing a clean out of my system, I've lost those emails.
One, I think, was from a guy called Mark.
But if you've emailed and you've been expecting some kind of response and you haven't got one, please, and I'm sorry to inconvenience you, please try again.
And that was just me being silly, doing a wrong right click, and then losing forever a couple of emails that had ended up in spam.
It was only a couple, but if you're expecting a reply, that's what happened.
And, you know, again, I apologize for that.
Okay, let's get to the U.S. now.
We're going to talk about John F. Kennedy Jr. and the way that he met his very sad end in 1999 with John Kerner.
John, thank you for coming on my show.
Oh, you're quite welcome.
How are you today, Howard?
I'm very good, John.
I've been very intrigued and very fired up to do this particular conversation because it's a topic that I haven't dealt with before.
I've talked about the Kennedys many times, but this is something that's new to me.
And I was around and working on the radio and actually reported the death of JFK Jr. on air to London.
So I vividly remember, even though it's 20 years ago now, that day.
And there were people at the time saying, oh, this is the curse of the Kennedys and it's terribly sad.
And I remember that I felt terribly sad that the young generation of Kennedys had been, you know, stilted and stunted in this way.
What for you, I guess, is the best first question to ask you, John, made you interested in the Kennedys?
Because it's not just JFK Jr. that you've researched.
It's the whole Kennedy clan, if we may call them that.
What is the appeal of them to you?
Well, especially with JFK Jr., what intrigued me about him is that he lived a life that I think was just filled with style and grace.
And he kind of made his life an example to other people to kind of live above politics, I guess you could say.
He would give to charities in a very anonymous and very private way, shunned the limelight.
And he kind of, I think for me, showed what it meant to be, meant to be a man, really, and to grow up in the 20th century in a way that we could kind of all emulate.
And he had so much pressure on his life.
I mean, here was the, you know, the only surviving son of the president.
And he had such great looks.
He had a great wife.
Magazine was very successful.
And he was just kind of able to just handle everything with all this pressure.
And despite all these different expectations, at the end of his life there, he decided that, well, just like his father, it was time to serve his country and run for office.
So I just think the kind of the man that he was, there are so few of them around anymore that just kind of can live a life where you have a person like him.
We really miss him because there's so few of them left, I think, like him.
He was a remarkable character, and I can remember that he did seem to have almost a sort of glow about him.
He had, you know, he had almost a showbiz allure about him.
I think that was the thing about him.
But then if you look back at JFK, and maybe, you know, you're too young to remember him in his heyday, and so am I. But if you look back at the newsreels of JFK and his brother, these people had something.
They had an appeal.
And John F. Kennedy Jr. certainly had that.
As you know, it is disputed whether he was intending to go into politics or certainly to run towards the White House at the time of his death.
Some people say that is not the case.
Right.
We can, from the research that I did, and it was, again, coming from the people that he knew him best and reporting from, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times and some books that came out subsequently.
He had made the decision that he wanted to run for the governor of New York.
He ruled out running for U.S. Senate because it would put up against the Clinton family, who he was very close with.
And he felt that it was kind of more suited to him to be a manager because he had kind of done that as, you know, editor of George Magazine.
And he felt that would be an easier path to the White House than the Senate.
So that was his plan.
He was making, you know, plans to sell his magazine in the late part of 1999.
And once he sold the magazine, that would allow him to, you know, basically come into the field of politics for the first time and then be able to run for office.
Now, you know, Ted Kennedy, he did achieve political office.
He did achieve notoriety.
You know, he managed that in spite of what happened at Chappaquiddick and the controversy about that, of course, at the back end of the 1960s.
But he, you know, was, unfortunately, his career was towards the back end of it was halted.
Well, it was certainly slowed down by ill health.
So, you know, this was the next greatest hope of the Kennedys, I guess, if you assume that this man was going to run and that was ultimately going to head for some kind of political career, governor of New York, whatever it might be.
This guy was the great hope, wasn't he?
He really was.
I mean, look at the timeframe here, too.
If he would run for office, he was thinking about the 2002 campaign for governor.
It would be the next time around.
And it'd be interesting to see if the timeline kind of plays out here.
Of course, the terrorist attacks on September 11th of 2001, he would have been in New York City during those attacks.
He could have kind of let our nation, healed the nation, really, running for governor that year in 2002, and then perhaps the presidency in 2004.
And the way this kind of weirdly plays out, he would have been the same age as his father would have been when he took the oath of office in 1963 as in 2004, 42 years old.
Very unusual.
Now, let's wind the clock back here because it's important to set this into context.
Who do you believe, many people have had their 10 cents worth, who do you believe killed JFK?
And then moving on from there, who do you believe killed RFK?
Well, kind of just going off from what I believe and other people have put forward, it seems like the best evidence, because he had the most motive, is the CIA.
And if you look at the way this kind of plays out, President Kennedy, he made enemies of the agency after the Bay Pigs invasion, when he chose not to bomb Cuba.
And after that, they kind of just split their own ways, and he decided to break them into a thousand pieces, as he told his brother.
And at that point in time, he did a number of things that made them upset, including trying to withdraw from the Vietnam War and the war in Laos.
And also, what ends up happening, too, is the agency starts to destroy the Peace Corps, which also makes them more upset.
So you have all these different motives that take place on the part of the agency.
And that seems like it's confirmed because just a quick thing I could mention, E. Howard Hunt, one of these men from the agency on his deathbed, he makes this confession that it was in fact the agency that planned his assassination.
And they were behind getting the shooters and conspiring to kill the president in 1963.
And I think E. Howard Hunt, who we best know, of course, for Watergate, but Ian Howard Hunt was in Dallas on that day.
Right.
He was probably one of the three tramps that the Dallas police photographer, Dallas Morning News, I should say, photographed coming off those railroad cars.
And you mentioned Robert Kennedy, too.
That one's much easier to prove because Sirhan Sirhan, just four years ago, confessed to his lawyer, William Pepper, that he was brainwashed by the agency to kill Robert Kennedy.
He was one of the members of their MK Ultra program, and he admitted this to his lawyer a few years ago.
I mean, there was always been speculation because of the fact that Sir Han Sirhan was a name that came out of nowhere.
But so was Lee Harvey Ottawa, but Sir Han Sirhan was a name that had just appeared in the news back then.
And people have been speculating over the years that perhaps he was some kind of Manchurian candidate.
Right, and he was.
In fact, interesting point about this, too.
We had happen two years ago, Robert Kennedy's son, RFK Jr., visited Sir Hans Sirhan in his California jail, and he now has concluded, like I just mentioned, that the agency killed his father because the assassin confessed this to him when he visited him in prison.
So we know for a fact, based on Robert Kennedy's son and the assassin himself, that the agency was behind killing Robert Kennedy.
It's a big thing to hear.
It's a big claim to hear because the CIA, of course, is meant to have the best interests of American citizens at heart.
And the very idea that they could be involved in domestic skull druggery of that kind is going to be a pill that's going to be very hard for a lot of people to swallow.
And as you know, I've been reading reviews of your book and critiques of your book.
A lot of people don't buy this.
Well, I understand that.
But I mean, if you look at the evidence, it's really there.
I mean, it's not even too hard to prove.
I mean, because you have the assassin himself admitting this.
You have the family now admitting this.
There was the motive there because the agency wanted to keep the war in Vietnam going and also the drug trade in Laos to keep going too.
So you have the motive, the means, the opportunity, the assassin, all the pieces are there to put this together.
I mean, it's pretty obvious what happened there.
But for that to happen, a lot of people are going to have to have been either or complicit or turned a blind eye.
Right.
And you look at some of the easy ways to prove the government is complicit in this.
I mean, just look at, let's go back to JFK's assassination.
When the autopsy takes place, you have every doctor at Parkland and then at Bethesda, where they do the autopsy, the second autopsy, they all have the same conclusion that the president's back of his head has been blown off.
And they all point to the same spot, the back of his head.
But the photographs were all altered.
So how do you explain that one?
Is that just done by accident?
And of course, as we know, a lot of photographs, and I think in the hundreds, simply disappeared.
Right.
So that's not going to happen just by, you know, just a random number of people.
That takes coordination, planning.
We also know that this Bruder film was taken by the agency to their Hawkeye plan in Rochester.
They altered that too to change it to make it look like the headshot was different.
They took out the stoppage of the car.
So there are a number of different things to this Vruder film and photographs that were done as part of this plan.
So it's all there.
It just has to be, you know, research has to be done.
And a lot of this has been done by Jim Morris, late Jim Mars, in his book Crossfire.
He looked into a lot of this stuff.
I interviewed Jim Mars about that at the time.
He is very, as we both know, very sadly missed.
He really is.
In fact, he's the one that kind of got me into the JFK Jr. conspiracy here because he made some good points about that that kind of piqued me to write this book.
We'll get into that.
But let me just get back to JFK for just a second.
You know, I interviewed somebody just a couple of weeks ago who told me, he said authoritatively, that it was the mafia who did it.
So you see that there are many theories out there.
No, I can understand that.
But I mean, can the mafia alter photographs of the president's head?
I mean, would they have access to the president's autopsy photographs?
No.
Can the mafia alter the Zabruder film?
No.
Those are the kind of things that they wouldn't be able to do.
So when the cover-up takes place, you look at where things are happening.
That's not the type of things that they do.
And again, if you just look at those two pieces of evidence right there, it can lead you to those that are complicit in the crime.
So you believe that people in the agency felt this man had to be stopped for the reason that you outlined, and his brother also had to be stopped for similar reasons.
And when you are in charge of the resources that they're in charge of, you say it's possible to make that happen, and you also say it's possible to keep it quiet for decades.
Right.
And there are so many things that he's doing and they're just making them come to that conclusion.
I mean, in March of 1963, he shuts down Operation Northwoods, which agency was playing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They were going to try to start a war against Cuba by killing American citizens through terrorist attacks.
And JFK shuts that down in March of 63.
So you have the president doing that, trying to end the Vietnam War, end the war in Laos, these different things that he was attempting to do that were against their interests.
And it was pretty clear there was going to be four more years of JFK.
He's going to get a second term.
In your government system, in the government system that I live under, there is a separation of powers, and it's meant to keep people safe.
You are saying that in this instance, at the very highest level, and very shockingly, that separation of powers completely broke down.
Interestingly enough, it seems like at one point in time, the agency was in its place.
President Truman started the CAA, and he said after the JFK assassination that they had kind of gone rogue.
He was interviewed by Life magazine, and he said the men running the agency now were not honorable men, like the men he appointed.
So he almost realized he created this monster that wasn't intended to be.
They had gone off the charts, off their original purpose, which was good and honorable to fight the Cold War.
And Truman recognized almost too late that he had created a monster.
You cited E. Howard Hunt.
Have any people perhaps who worked at the agency, or because they'd be getting up in years now, perhaps people who had family who worked in the agency, have any of those people spoken with you?
I had, in terms of the JFK Jr. assassination, I had a number of people speak to me about that one.
So that's where I came into it.
I think we need to get into this then.
And we have what a lot of us will have known as this boy who so much Of the world felt such sympathy for when his father was killed in the way that he was killed.
And then, certainly this side of the Atlantic, he appears to go very much off the radar.
You know, we don't hear about him.
There's the occasional feature about the Kennedys, about Jackie and Aristotle Onassis, but you don't see much about the family in the intervening years.
What sort of a life was he living as a young person, as a boy, and then subsequently becoming the man?
Well, he went to private school and he had a kind of a privileged life growing up.
But then as he gets a bit older, he starts to get more mature.
He was a lawyer.
He won every case that he argued.
So he was a successful lawyer, went to law school.
He also, of course, ran George Magazine and did two conspiracy issues, by the way, years before, just two years before his death.
One issue, by the way, article written by Oliver Stone about the JFK movie, goes to the JFK assassination conspiracy.
So he gets into conspiracies with George Magazine.
So that's his life path.
I mean, he lives kind of a sheltered life, but he chooses that kind of life because I think he wants to kind of stay away from politics.
And by the time we get to 99, he certainly changed his mind.
Did he ever make any comments as he was growing up, as he was becoming a man, perhaps when he was at the magazine, about his father's assassination, about the killing of Robert Kennedy?
Yes, he was interested pretty early on in this.
He dated a girl named Meg Azzioni in high school.
And Meg talked about this in a book that she wrote, that he was obsessed with finding out the truth of his father's assassination.
And this began when he was about 17 years old.
And at that point in time, he started to do his own research and try to figure out on his own who was behind the assassination.
He felt that he was, he came at the conclusion that the Warren Commission was not the truth.
And then he, again, I mentioned too, he contacted Oliver Stone to publish this article in March of 1998 in his magazine that goes through the conspiracy theories in a JFK movie that Oliver Stone put out in 1991.
So he was definitely in favor of the conspiracy theories that the agency was behind his father's assassination.
Right.
And do you think that he had piqued the interest, perhaps, of people who may want to keep, if there was a conspiracy, and a lot of people believe there was, and, you know, it was a conspiracy that led to the events in Dallas, Texas, and the events, of course, in Los Angeles.
Do you think that by having this interest, the contact with Oliver Stone, publishing those things in the magazine, maybe speaking about this too, to people that he knew, do you think he piqued the attention of some people who wanted all of this stuff kept quiet?
I think he did.
And it seems like the way I looked at this, that I tried to kind of reverse engineer the crime scene and figure out that if this wasn't an accident, if this really was an assassination, then you have to figure out, well, who would want him dead then?
And just kind of how Sherlock Holmes would do this, if you put down in front of you who has the motive and the means to do this, the two major figures you could point to would be the Clinton family or maybe the agency or the Bush family.
And of course, there is a theory that goes around, but then many theories go around, that Hillary Clinton wanted a clear path towards running herself and that he was standing in her way.
Right.
And I wanted to look at that possibility in the book, too.
So I kind of went through this step by step.
So she was running for the Senate in 1999.
So he told her and the family, the Clinton family, he's not going to run for the Senate.
He wanted to run for governor of New York.
So he was not a threat to her.
And I have to say that what I've read about that particular conspiracy theory, just so I've said this, it sounds absurd and a big stretch.
It just does not sound like anything that would be possible.
But I'm sorry, I interrupted, but I needed to say that.
No, you're right.
It is absurd because the families were and still are.
They were still very close.
In fact, one big thing we can point out is during the 1990s, George Magazine was a big supporter of President Clinton.
He did not print a single word that would criticize the president.
So he was always on board with the Clinton administration.
In fact, Jackie Kennedy was a big supporter of, at that time, Governor Clinton when he ran for the presidency back in 1992.
We also probably know, everyone knows that JFK met Bill Clinton in the White House in 1963.
So that's how he wanted to start his career in politics from his meeting with the president.
So these different connections were there.
So there was no motive there between the two families.
Just like you said, it's counterintuitive.
It's just nonsensical.
It just doesn't make any sense, really.
You know, the thing that amazes me most about what you've been telling me is that over here, you know, all right, I was young and at university for part of this, but, you know, I got the Sunday newspapers and would read features and listen to the voice of America and all the other stuff.
And I followed American politics.
I was not on any level aware of JFK Jr. other than references in the social pages and photographs of dinners and do's and events.
I just wasn't aware of somebody who was either political or had some kind of burning interest to get to the absolute truth of what happened to his father.
I think as time goes on, after his mother dies, he feels like it's time to grow up and it's time to take the same path that his father did and have a career in public service.
And at that point in his life, when we get to the spring of 1999, that's his plans.
He's going to run for governor of New York.
He tells his friend the idea of running for mayor of New York was not good enough.
It's just not a big enough stepping stone to the White House.
So he has these plans.
He's going to sell the magazine.
And that's when this horrible tragedy takes place on July 16th of 1999.
Talk to me about that flight.
He'd been learning to fly.
He'd passed his flying exams, I think, a year before.
He was quite a new pilot of a light plane, wasn't he?
He hadn't been doing this for a long time.
Well, that's actually not quite true.
I mean, that's one of these myths that I kind of want to dispel here that the media kind of put forward at the time.
He'd been flying since 1983.
So he had a long record of flight.
In fact, he flew this same flight from New Jersey to Hannesport 17 times without a flight instructor and five times at night.
So he knew what he was doing.
He knew how to use autopilot.
In fact, two of his flight instructors, Ralph Howard and Harold Anderson, they both mentioned to the media later on that this myth that he was some kind of reckless pilot was completely not even true.
He checked every nut and bolt.
He was very meticulous.
And I looked up this one thing that I found in the NTSB report that was kind of revealing.
On April 28th of 1998, he had a test where they gave him conditions of spatial disorientation, the same thing that crashed, allegedly crashed his plane.
He passed that test with a hood on in the dark.
So he recovered the aircraft in the same conditions into total darkness without a flight instructor in a simulator.
So he knew what he was doing.
He had proper training, as you pointed out.
And it all kind of points to the fact that this was not an accident.
Okay, talk to me about the flight then.
I know that he was going to a wedding, but he was not alone, was he?
He was with his sister-in-law, Lauren Bassett, and his wife, Carolyn Bassett.
So there are three people in the aircraft.
He takes off at precisely 8.39 p.m.
And then we know one interesting fact that takes place, he calls in air traffic control at 9.39 p.m., as you would do if you're a proper pilot.
You call one hour into the flight to check in.
He's about two, three minutes from landing.
He tells the people at air traffic control at Hayannisport.
He says he's going to drop off his sister-in-law and head up to the wedding for Rory Kennedy.
So at that point in time, if anything was wrong with him or the aircraft, he would have said something, but he did not.
He said everything was fine.
So we know that he makes this call in at 9.39 p.m.
And if he was suffering from disorientation or the aircraft was having trouble, he would report to this and he did not make any distress call.
Everything was okay.
He'd broken his ankle and he was recovering from that, wasn't he?
Is there any suggestion, as I think I have read, that that might have been a factor in impairing him?
That's a great point we need to take a look at, too.
So he had this accident with a paragliding, parasailing thing that he used to use for recreation.
Happens on May 30th of 1999.
So we get to the point, it's Thursday morning, July 15th.
He goes to the doctor.
Cast is taken off.
He tests the ankle.
Ankle is fine.
He goes to all Thursday, goes to a Yankees game, gets a workout in.
All that day, he walks around New York City without the cast.
Get to Friday, another day without the cast.
Everything is fine.
So he gets to the point where we get to the airfield, goes into a convenience store across the street, and the cashier there says, hey, how you doing?
How's the ankle feeling?
He says, it feels great.
Nothing wrong with it.
Feels fine.
So we know two days he has to walk around with the healed ankle.
He tells the store clerk he's feeling good.
We also know, as I mentioned before, he took off without incident with the pedals.
And he could also use autopilot if he wanted to.
So everything was good with the ankle.
So it doesn't seem like if there's a factor there, it's not the ankle.
Was he not advised not to fly?
Well, it seems like if that's going to be the question, why would that be?
Why would there be advising anyone for him not to fly?
Well, could it be the weather?
Well, the weather was fine then, too, because the FAA looked into this, hired a guy named Edward Meyer, who works out at LaGuardia.
He's a specialist for the FAA looking into weather patterns and such.
And he concluded that the weather that night was completely clear.
There was nothing that would have caused spatial disorientation.
So it seems like whatever conditions were there, he looked into it.
His weather was looking good.
His ankle was feeling fine.
So it just seems like everything is ruled out here that could cause an accident.
And as far as we know, then, what were the circumstances of the crash?
You mentioned disorientation.
Right.
The NTSB report claims that he was suffering from spatial disorientation.
Now, it's kind of like if you're in a blizzard or something, you can't see what's in front of you.
You don't know what is left, what's right, what's up, what's down, and you make decisions.
They're not logical.
So they're claiming that he was suffering from this when he crashed the airplane.
But looking at the evidence, that's not the case because the weather was fine.
He knew how to fly.
And if he was suffering from this, he would have reported that very thing one hour into the flight.
So once we get to 9.39 p.m., he makes the call in.
And one minute later, there is this explosion in the sky.
And there are witnesses that see this on the ground.
Three people see this, this explosion, this flash of light, and hear an explosion.
So it seems like based on the evidence, that's now what happened here.
Now, not spatial disorientation.
And we bring Jim Mars into the story here, too.
Jim Mars was interviewed about this.
I looked into his interviews about this.
He talked about this.
He had a long record of looking into crashes when he was a reporter for the Dallas Morning News.
And what piqued his interest about this, he said, kind of red lights were blinking in his mind.
He said there was a 17-mile, nautical-mile debris field for this.
So that doesn't make any sense.
If it was just a crash site with just an accident where the plane would go down into one spot, there would be the bodies, the luggage, the plane just in one area with maybe two or three mile area where they would recover the wreckage.
But the Navy and the Coast Guard sealed off 17 nautical miles, and they were finding luggage, sneakers, debris on the land, as if it had been a breaching of the cabin from an explosion.
And also, I think you say that the people who were investigating this excluded the media and everybody else from that search for, I think, five days.
Very strange.
That's an excellent point to make because you think about this.
Doesn't make any sense because you have, you know where the plane drops off of radar.
It's 100 feet of water.
So you're not talking about look in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or something, the Pacific Ocean, where we get one of these big aircrafts that we don't know where they are.
This is off Muther's Vineyard.
We know exactly where the plane went down.
We know exactly when it went down.
So there is no reason it would take five days to find three bodies in one aircraft in 100 feet of water.
It doesn't make any sense.
So Jim Mars and I also concluded that what they were doing here is they wanted, they needed time to recover all the wreckage, make it look like it was an accident.
And in fact, just take a wild guess who goes in there for recovery.
The CIA, they're the ones that go in there for recovery.
So it's very strange.
Well, I guess they would have had to have had some involvement because of who he was to an extent.
It is a big claim, though, to say that there is more to this crash than simply an accident and a tragic one at that.
If this plane was brought down somehow, and you say that there were reports of an explosion, people definitely registered that.
And you say that the debris field also speaks to the fact that there may well have been an explosion on board that plane.
The certainty is, isn't it, that if somebody had engineered that plane to crash in some way, it would be very hard to cover that up.
Wouldn't it?
I don't think it would be that difficult.
I mean, you're not talking about that many people that would be involved.
I mean, all you would really need is a small number of people to get this accomplished.
You just need to put one bomb on the plane, and that's all you would need to do.
So you think it was a bomb?
It seems like that, or maybe a surface-to-air missile.
And I want to mention one more thing.
Do you actually think that somebody would have shot that down with, what, with a handheld launcher or something?
It's possible, because if you have this area, you're thinking about, and it's night, it's very dark, you have an area where you're in the middle of the water, you're in lots of boats out there, so it's possible to get away with that.
The airfield where he had his aircraft at Cowfield, there was no security there, not even a single security guard in the entire airfield.
So you could go have access to his aircraft pretty easily.
And one more thing I want to mention, too, that almost is like the Trump card here that gives us evidence of conspiracy, is his rescue beacon.
This is a very unusual part of the story here.
And I think it's almost like proof positive that there was a conspiracy by the government.
So you have here at 2.15 a.m., ABC News, Peter Jennings, ABC News reports that the Navy and the Coast Guard had picked up the Pepper Saratoga's rescue beacon at 2.15 a.m. on the following day, the 17th of July.
Sorry, that's a naval ship?
Yeah, a naval ship has radioed into ABC News, all the news outlets.
They've said to the media, we have located the Pepper Saratoga.
We're hearing the rescue beacon.
We're closing in on the wreckage and the bodies.
2.15 a.m. on the 17th of July.
Now, as I said, it makes sense because you know where the plane went down.
It's about, you know, six, seven hours after the crash, 100 feet of water.
It's the plane.
It has to be.
So then the Navy and the Coast Guard make this bizarre claim.
They say, well, hang on a second.
It's not the Pepper of Saratoga.
It's a downed Navy military aircraft.
It's not the Pepper of Saratoga.
It's a downed naval aircraft in the same area.
It's not downed in the same area.
It's a downed naval aircraft.
It's not the Pepper of Saratoga.
That begs a whole lot of other questions, doesn't it?
What is a naval aircraft doing, crashing, coming down in that same area at that same time?
It is an amazing thing to say because either one of two things has to be the truth here.
Think about this.
It either has to be that aircraft or they're lying about it.
It can't be one or the other.
Either it is the Pepper Saratoga's beacon or it is this actual naval aircraft.
Now, if it's the naval aircraft, like you said, how did it crash?
Did they collide with JFK's plane?
Is there a dead pilot in that aircraft?
Where is the wreckage of that craft?
What mission was it on?
All of those things.
Did we get the answers to those questions?
Well, the thing is, after that happens, the media just drops the story.
They don't ask the questions that I'm asking because it seems like if it wasn't JFK's plane, they don't really care about it.
So at that point in time, the story goes away.
But when you have early parts of the story like this that kind of get leaked on information, you get the truth every now and then.
This is one big thing here.
So if it was not a Navy military aircraft, it was JFK Jr.'s plane, then they're lying about this to buy themselves some more time, in other words, to make it look like it was an accident.
Or perhaps, I mean, the other conclusion that you could come to, couldn't you, is that there was an accident.
And if it involved some kind of military aircraft, maybe somebody somewhere just simply didn't want details of that accident to get out because it's embarrassing.
It's a major embarrassment, huge embarrassment, that they just killed the president's son.
It's horrible.
But again, the question though is then, if that's the case, who's the pilot that they would have to then, you know, destroy or liquidate?
Where is he?
So there must be another body there that would have been sacrificed.
Well, there are multiple questions about that plane.
You know, who was piloting it?
Where did it fly out from?
What kind of a plane was it?
What was it doing in the area?
And you can probably find six more questions on top of that.
Here's one more weird thing, too.
The beacon signal for the Pepper Saratoga is a high-pitched shrill sound.
It just goes like that.
A naval aircraft is like a foghorn.
It repeats over and over again.
So it's hard to confuse them.
So it's unusual they would confuse a different signal because they're not the same signal.
That's also part of the story.
It doesn't make any sense either.
So it seems like, again, as I mentioned, it's either they're lying about it or it's the actual Pepper Saratoga, both of which are just profoundly interesting.
Yes, I agree with that.
But if there was some kind of conspiracy to either cover up the details of an accident or something more sinister than that, you are talking about potentially hundreds of people being in on this, people involved in the search, every agency involved in the search, including the CIA and the military, the Navy.
You are talking about a lot of people all connected and their families and people connected with them.
And you're really telling me that it's 20 years now, very nearly, 20 years on.
Everybody's kept shumbling about that.
Well, think about this.
Parts of the agency just do what they want.
I mean, they have their own black budget with their own funding.
So it's possible that a small group of people here could have accomplished this.
It could really take more than just a few people to do this.
And I mean, it's not like, like you mentioned before, like we're a democracy anymore because you have this agency that just does what they want.
They have their own, almost their own government.
So it wouldn't even take that many people to accomplish this, not really that many.
But it's possible to entertain conspiracy theories about JFK.
There is a lot of circumstantial and solid evidence around that.
But if you look at JFK Jr., he wasn't the president.
He was a long way from potentially, and a lot of things can happen on that route.
He was a very long way away from the White House, if ever he'd wanted that.
Why would anybody want to go to those lengths at that stage of his political existence to take him away?
Well, again, at this point in his life, he is going to be, if he continues this path, a threat to the Bush family.
He can be a threat to the agency.
I mean, he's going to expose the truth of his father's assassination.
So there are things about him that make him a threat.
And I mean, I think if you just look at those basic reasons, I just think it just makes a lot of sense.
I mean, even just I'm just trying to go back to the point I made before.
If you just kind of reverse engineer the crime scene, looking at it from that perspective, he was not a bad pilot.
There was evidence of the explosion.
It covered up the crime scene.
Even the autopsy report is unusual.
You can see on the outside.
Well, I looked at the autopsy report.
So you can see it kind of almost shows how his body was destroyed.
There are markings across his midsection as if his upper and lower half were separated in an explosion.
There are markings all throughout his left and right arm as if his arm were separated in an explosion.
So again, in the autopsy, it kind of shows, I think, the way the body was kind of blown to bits.
In fact, in the funeral, it was a closed casket, and he was also cremated.
So there's a lot of unusual things about that entire process after they recovered the wreckage.
And what makes me just unusual points about this, just keep adding to the list, as I mentioned before, the CIA were the ones doing recovery.
And why are they there?
They're not operating domestically.
They have no role to be there.
They shouldn't be there in any capacity.
So their very presence is illegal.
It's unconstitutional.
And it doesn't make any sense that they're doing a recovery, reconnaissance.
What about the plane?
The wreckage of the plane should surely tell the full story, shouldn't it?
I mean, that is what, you know, the NTSB in America, we have our own transport safety organization here in the UK.
There are organizations like that in every country.
When there's an air crash, when people die, then their remit is to get to the bottom of it.
And they have to recover as much wreckage as they can.
They reconstruct the plane, and the plane tells the story.
What story did this plane tell?
Well, it told a story of a plane that was blown to many pieces.
And again, I want to go back to what Jim Mars was saying because he did the best research on this because he was the expert in plane crashes from his time working at Dallas Morning News.
The thing that made him just so upset about this was that he was pointing out that they were finding wreckage on the land, people's houses.
They were finding wreckage like sneakers, luggage from Lauren Bissett, parts of the aircraft, wheels.
So they had to recover so much of this wreckage because the cabinet had been breached.
So again, the reason it took them five days, it was not to recover the bodies.
It was a piece together all the parts of the aircraft that had been separated into many different pieces all throughout Martha's Vineyard Sound.
Now, I'm not an aviator, but common sense would say that if it was a navigation problem, disorientation, or whatever, the plane would have retained structural integrity until the point of impact.
It would have been fairly straightforward, I guess.
And you're telling me that the way that this happened is completely different.
Exactly right.
So it would have been a situation where if it was spirling down into this one spot, into the sound, it would have entered the water, crushed into one spot, almost like a trash compactor.
The impact would have compacted the bodies, the aircraft, everything just into one specific location, which would have been very easy to find.
And as I mentioned before, it looks like they did find it at 2.15 a.m.
That's when they probably found the aircraft and recovered at least some of the body parts.
They may have found at least the initial location.
Who knows?
But it seems like that was not the case because from the evidence that you can see, there was 17 nautical miles of debris from that one specific area where they started the recovery efforts.
So it's not what the NTSB report would have us believe.
Have you ever sort of taken time out in these investigations and just stopped to think about this?
Because, of course, the first reaction of somebody, and I know that it was my reaction, I was terribly sad that this family had been beset by another tragedy in that way.
It just was inconceivable on that level.
And he seemed to be, you know, such a, you know, in a lot of ways, he was a young guy.
He seemed to be a really cool guy who had a great future ahead of him.
So it was a terrible tragedy.
And then a few hours later, you start thinking to yourself, well, it's another Kennedy.
It's another tragedy for the Kennedy family.
And you maybe have a little idea that maybe something else might have been involved in this because of the previous cases.
And then you dismiss that.
And you look at what appears to be the evidence as presented by the media.
And it looks like a terrible accident and part of what the media have wanted to call over the years the curse of the Kennedys, the sadnesses and tragedies that have befallen that family.
Do you think that you perhaps have overreacted to a few pieces of evidence, maybe things that are circumstantial you started to regard as fact?
In other words, are you sure of your ground here?
Well, one thing that I can point out is since the book has come out, I have been contacted by two different people that were witnesses to the explosion.
And this one woman said that people at the sound, they know what happened, but they're scared to talk because there is this idea that, like with the JFK assassination, there might be some effort to silence the witnesses.
And I look in my book, there's a portion of in my book where I try to recover the names of the witnesses who saw this explosion.
And there was a lot of resistance to trying to figure out those names.
And the process for that took me many years.
And when you say resistance from the people themselves or others?
Resistance from people that I had come into contact with that didn't want to reveal the names of people involved.
There was one situation where a reporter for Martha's Vineyard Gazette had witnessed the explosion of the aircraft.
So all we knew about this from other people's reporting, that the person was an intern at the Gazette for the summer of 1999, and it was a male.
That's all they would tell any other paper that had looked into this.
So I wanted to know if I could find out this person's actual name.
Well, I guess that's not going to be that difficult because how many people would have worked for that paper?
Right.
And you have to find out who would work for the paper that would just be a male reporter in the summer of 99.
So what you have to do to find that out is get microfilm from the area.
So I asked three different libraries for that microfilm, and all three of them denied access to the microfilm.
I only got the microfilm because the Library of Congress finally got it for me, and I found out the person's name that way.
So that kind of resistance, I think, is just emblematic of what you can kind of encounter from trying to cover up the truth about this.
But you did get the name, and you did find the person.
I did find the person.
I got the name, yeah.
And what did the person tell you?
Well, the person confirmed exactly what I, you know, what I was telling you here.
All three of them, it's interesting.
They saw the same thing.
There was a single explosion, flash of light, and at the same time, about 9.41 p.m. on that night.
It was a clear night.
A lot of people were walking around.
And it was not the kind of night that could have caused anything to make him disoriented.
They all said exactly the same thing.
It's difficult.
You always, in any case like this, you have to look back, don't you?
You have to say, well, who would stand to benefit for him being out of the picture?
Who do you think could have benefited from this?
Well, at this point in his life, it seems like he's come to the conclusion that the agency has killed his father, and the Bush family was involved with this in some capacity, George H.W. Bush.
That's a big claim.
It is, but it's not a claim that I'm making.
It's a claim that other people have made, you know, with a lot of evidence.
And Bush Sr. was in the agency.
I mean, he helped plan the Bay Pigs invasion.
The two ships were named Barbara and Houston that were part of the Bay Pigs invasion.
Where he went through why the president was, you know, the agency was upset about that because he didn't provide air cover for the invasion.
And then you go forward in time.
There's other things that happen where he publishes this article about the assassination, and then he also hires investigators to look into the assassination.
So he's got that on his mind.
And he's also going to run for the presidency, which is going to put up against George H.W. Bush.
So, I mean, all these things are kind of lining up.
But they may also be coincidence.
They could be.
I mean, again, the way I looked at this, as I said before, I try to look at this logically.
I'm looking at the crime scene.
Okay.
I'm reverse engineering it.
It's not an accident.
He wasn't a bad pilot.
He wasn't suffering from disorientation.
There's witnesses to an explosion.
The Navy lied about the rescue beacon.
It would never have taken five days to recover an aircraft.
So there are serious questions here you have to ask that don't lead to an accident.
So if you conclude that, which I think is logical, then you go back and say, well, who would want him dead?
It's not the Clintons.
So what are you going to do about this now, then?
I think the next thing to do is just keep trying my best to keep telling the truth.
I mean, it's just all I want to keep doing is trying to, as I was saying with you, present the case logically.
And as I mentioned before, since the book has come out, there's been a good reception.
I got these two contacts from other witnesses.
They've said people want to talk.
They've been waiting to talk about this for 20 years.
They're ready to embrace the truth.
Because when you look at what happened back after he was killed, there was all these different reports that he was a bad pilot, that this was his fault.
And if you look at the evidence, this was not his fault.
What about the Kennedy family?
And people, you probably won't get to talk to the Kennedy family, but what about people who know them?
Has anybody spoken with you about their reaction to this?
I did get a letter from the Kennedy family that was received at my college address in Williamsville.
And this man said that he's a cousin of the family.
He's a supporter of the family.
And he read my book, read my other Kennedy book too.
And he said that he's very supportive of it.
He likes what I'm doing and at least got one letter.
So that was good.
I'm hopeful too, by the way, because I mentioned before that Armor Kennedy Jr., he admitted visiting Sir Hann, Sir Ann, that the agency killed his father.
That's a huge step forward for the family to understand who was behind the killings of their family.
And we just have to say, by way of explanation, you say that a letter was received at your college.
You're not a student.
You're an academic at a college.
Right.
Yeah, I'm a professor of social sciences in Buffalo.
Yeah.
This is, and I can understand that it would become this way.
Totally understand.
It's a bit of an obsession with you, isn't it?
I mean that in the nicest possible way.
I don't mean that in the clinical way, but you know what I'm saying.
Yeah, maybe more of a vocation might be a better word for it.
But yeah, I've written about six or seven paranormal books.
So yeah, this is the kind of field that I like diving into.
I feel like it's the most interesting part of history, or that keeps people's fascination going, I think, the easiest.
My mind, anyway, at least my students too.
They seem to like the conspiracy theories and the unexplained type of history that you usually get in your textbook.
Of course, conspiracy theories can, you know, they're always interesting to explore.
They can cause a lot of upset and a lot of harm.
And of course, for the person researching, the worst possible thing is loose ends and an incomplete story.
You want to get to the bottom of things.
Do you believe at the moment, John, that there are people who have truth to tell that sit uncomfortably with them and with a little more pushing by somebody, perhaps you, they may well be willing to spill what they know?
I think so.
I mean, I think it just takes someone with the courage to want to tell the truth.
I mean, there are risks.
I mean, people have died in the service of the truth.
I mean, think about, I want to mention one woman named Nina Rhodes Hughes.
I mean, she was a witness to the RFK assassination.
She saw a second gunman, and she kept quiet for almost 50 years because she felt that she would be killed.
And she came forward just the past few years and she said, she told the FBI that she saw another gunman, but they never believed her.
So she came forward a few years ago.
So if you get people to have courage, they will come forward eventually.
And it just takes some time.
And there were also a string of deaths around JFK.
I'm terribly sorry that I've forgotten her name, which used to be on the tip of my tongue.
She was a celebrity journalist.
Dorothy Kilgaron.
Dorothy Kilgaron.
I mean, this person was a huge talent, a great journalist, somebody who had celebrity status, who appeared on programs like What's My Line in the U.S. There was also Mary Pinchett-Meyer, the mistress of JFK.
We can mention her briefly.
Unusual connection here.
JFK began his affair with Mary Pinchett-Meyer on July 16th, 1962, the same day the JFK Jr. death in 1999, same day, July 16th.
Could be coincidence, but then history throws up a lot of coincidences like that.
It really does.
They are truly inexplicable and unexplainable.
Even if we go back in time, but July 16th, 1945 is the day of the testing, and New Mexico does it for the Manhattan Project.
So it's an unusual day in U.S. history, July 16th.
A lot of unusual things happened that day.
I mean, there are days in history that are auspicious, and there are days that are infamous.
And, you know, the day when JFK was assassinated is infamous.
And the day when JFK Jr. died, well, that's in its own category and is a very, very sad thing.
History tells us this was an accident.
But now some people, including yourself, are starting to say there's more to this.
And simple, if that's what you believe, then a desire for justice presumably is going to drive you on to find out as much as you can.
I think that's the goal of this.
I mean, I hope, because this is the first book that's been written about this.
I mean, it took a long time for the JFK assassination to get the truth about.
So I think hopefully this is just a start.
I mean, if you look at 20 years ago, I mean, it is a long time, but it's not like it's 50 years ago.
So we're looking at a time when we all remember if we're relatively young enough.
So it's a situation where We remember the tragedy.
I think one thing we can mention too is just such a good man, a good and decent father.
And he could have been the father if his wife was pregnant, which she might have been.
There was speculation about that.
Yes, I read that today, too.
Yeah.
So just a lot of sadness that surrounded that.
And, you know, it is a tragedy, however, he met his end.
It is a terrible tragedy, and it is an unfulfilled set of potentials.
We'll never know what the story may have been had he lived.
Well, it is a fascinating story, and I'm taking in the enormity of it myself now.
You know that whenever you venture into territory like this, I did an interview recently, I've done many about JFK.
I got a lot of emails saying, you know, way to go that you've done this, an email from people saying this is completely wrong, and why are you letting this person perpetrate this hogwash on your listener?
These things always inspire emotions, and they cause people to take a side and take a view.
Are you ready for the reactions that you're going to get?
The book hasn't been out that long.
This interview is going to be going out.
Eventually, people will hear it.
They will want to have their two cents worth.
Are you happy for people to contact you and tell you what they think?
I'm definitely happy to hear what people have to say.
I mean, it's part of the process.
And I've been, you know, publishing, writing books for many years now, so I'm kind of used to the criticism.
And I'll just kind of take my lumps as I go.
And I've been trying to, I think, present my case with logic, evidence, and facts.
I don't usually speculate anything unless I have a way to back it up with the source.
So I think if I keep that approach, academic approach, I think I'm safe with whatever I talk about.
And it's valid for the simple fact that if we live in a society where we're not allowed to ask questions about anything, then we have a great big problem.
You are entitled to ask questions.
And I would be interested to hear the answer to those questions if you ever get them.
John, thank you so much for that.
I wish you luck with the book.
If people want to read about you and it, have you got a place online where they can just dial into and see it?
Yes, I have a website.
It's a company that I run.
We do walking tours in Western New York.
Again, it's paranormalwalks.com.
So again, paranormalwalks.com.
And then you also have Amazon.
I have an author, a page on there, John Kerner.
And the book is Exploding the Truth, the JFK Jr. assassination.
Okay.
And what would you say to people maybe listening to this who say, well, he's got a website called Paranormal Walks.
He's clearly captivated by conspiracy theories.
He's just got a lot of fiction going around in his head, and he's started to believe it as fact.
That's funny.
Well, I mean, if you look at the area of the paranormal, I mean, it's a broad area.
It covers all kinds of things.
It does.
And it's not as if I'm looking at this from the perspective of faith and belief.
I mean, I'm an academic.
I've been teaching American history for 15 years now.
I'm a professor of social sciences.
I publish books about conspiracies, some academic books too that are not about conspiracies.
Well, I think you're basically saying I have the right to do this.
And you've got a lot of strings to your bow.
Listen, I'm a news guy.
And when I started doing a program that included interviews about paranormality and conspiracy theories, some of my news colleagues, I think they still think that I've gone completely crazy.
I started my career as a journalist.
I spent a number of years as a reporter.
Actually, my academic background is in journalism.
So I'm approaching this area from the perspective of facts, evidence, logic.
So if you want to label people in this field as, you know, nut jobs, do your homework first.
Look at the facts.
Look at the sources.
All my books have at least, in some cases, 500 endnotes.
I mean, if you want to make these accusations, do your homework first and then come back at me and tell me that I'm wrong.
All I would say to you at the end of this is keep asking the questions, John.
We've got to keep doing it.
And thank you very much.
I've enjoyed this conversation.
Oh, it's been great, Hara.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
And best to everyone and listeners out there.
John Kerner and a controversial look at the case of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the way that he died.
Your thoughts on this, welcome.
I'm sure John Kerner wouldn't mind receiving email from you if you have thoughts about this that you want to put to him.
You can always get in touch with me by going to the website theunexplained.tv and I'll put a link to John Kerner's work on the website there at theunexplained.tv.
We have more great guests in the pipeline here on this show.
So as we head into the 14th year of the Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in sunny London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
And when you do stay in touch, please don't forget to tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Okay, thank you very much.
Take care.
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