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August 16, 2015 — Christopher Garetano


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
This episode was about some good old conspiracy theories and fantastic claims about the Montauk Project and the Philadelphia Experiment. I even revealed my early involvement in a best-selling book about the latter.

Filmmaker Christopher Garetano clearly isn't asking you to believe any of this stuff is true, but his film is designed to present a fascinating look at the former.

We also continue the discussion on this week's episode of After The Paracast, which is part of our Paracast+ subscription service: Introducing The Paracast+ | The Paracast — The Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio
 
I don't believe in the Philadelphia Experiment. I also don't believe thousands of people were murdered in the Montauk Project.
But to his credit Christopher Garetano is not committed to the truth of these things.

I'd like to see it if I could stream it via iTunes.
 
Knowing little of the Montauk Project, and having watched the trailer before the show, I wasn't expecting much from this one; however, Christopher Garetano turned out to be very level headed, and exactly the kind of person who should be investigating something as pervasive as this story.

It reminds me a lot of Skinwalker Ranch, however, where Ryan Skinner tends to just go with anything and everything, Christopher really focused on reigning the subject in. I still don’t have an entirely clear picture of what he’s suggesting happened there, but I’m curious enough to watch the doc now.
 
I am a big fan of the, "Question everything" approach and support those who take it over those who take the, "Believe everything" route. And thank you Gene for bringing legitimacy to the field by bringing people like Christopher on to your show.

I Love You,
Gene Lionberg
 
Just finished listening to the main show and I'm writing this while listening to ATP. First off, thanks for asking my question. It was perfectly timed to get Garetano to discuss in greater detail the controversial Stewart Swerdlow, his involvement in the project and his wild claims. Unfortunately, none of Stewart's wild claims were addressed by the guest (or raised by the hosts). Garetano seemed to whitewash Swerdlow and simply talked about Swerdlow having a nice family, speaking languages other than English (but 15? Come on!) and having a successful website that espouses a philosophy that "many people" apparently follow like a religion, as if that lent him some sort of credibility for all his Montauk claims. Garetano's opinion, and I'm paraphrasing, of "why would anyone lie about this stuff, especially when they aren't making any money" was jaw-droppingly naive. During that short segment I kept shouting "Billy Meier!" at my Sonos speaker like I suffered from Tourette's Syndrome.

Perhaps these issues weren't raised by the hosts due to a lack of specific knowledge about how wild many of Swerdlow's claims are: related to the first "president" of the Soviet Union, Yakov Sverdlov (possible), participated in mind control experiments (plausible), a wide-range of psychic abilities which led to him being recruited for the experiments (plausible), a special chair created by aliens to "boost innate psychic abilities" and allow time travel (unlikely), existence of a "time tunnel" (related to the "alien chair," I believe) allowing exploration of different time and space, Mars, etc. (unlikely), sacrificial rituals involving children attended by high level politicians, industrialists, celebrities - George H.W. Bush, etc.
(unlikely), multiple alien abductions (unlikely), evil reptilians (unlikely), being imprisoned by the US gov't (plausible but for what), learning an alien "interdimensional hyperspace language" allowing communication with all conscious beings in the universe (unlikely). I could go on.

Granted, a discussion regarding Swerdlow and his multitude of bizarre and outlandish claims could easily have taken up the full 2 hours. The show did seem to go by awfully fast this week (time travel or missing time?). I was just a little surprised that Garetano, who came off as a thoughtful, fairly level-headed guy, who was out to find "the truth" about the Montauk Experiments, was so accepting of Swerdlow and seemed to bestow a fair amount of credibility on him, without discussing a single item of any proof whatsoever to support Swerdlow's claims. He seems to have spent a great deal of time with Swerdlow, certainly more than the 10-12 hours of presentations by Swerdlow that I sat through approximately 20 years ago, not to mention the books of his and Nichols I've read on the subject, yet he seemed to get a "pass" from Garetano, as opposed to Bielek or Nichols. I also feel that not tracking down Duncan Cameron and getting him on camera, or on audio at the very least, despite his expressed reluctance is a big detraction for a documentary about this subject.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have done a better job at composing a series of detailed questions that covered all of the issues I listed above. I was a bit too broad in my language and by leaving out the specific areas of inquiry from my questions, I did not serve the hosts, Paracast listenership, or my own curiosity, as well as I could have. I'm on the fence about spending $25 for the Blu-ray version of the documentary. I'm curious but not confident, based on his Paracast appearance, that Garetano really provides any clarity or answers around this complex and wide-ranging conspiracy theory.
 
For anyone interested in the "rabbit hole" that is the full Montauk Project experience after listening to this week's show, and provided you have a few hours to kill, here is a YouTube link to a 3 hour audio interview with Al Bielek. What I find remarkable, and more than a bit surprising, about this interview is how rational Bielek sounds and how he relates a phenomenal amount of complex detail. It's interesting from a creative story-telling standpoint, at the very least.

 
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It seems like there's some smoke around the Montauk Project. Mind Control, maybe as has been said already. And most likely not thousands and thousands dead, but if some people died in a secret military project, it would still be a significant case. Particularly if they were homeless kids. :confused:
I know that the claims made by the witnesses are outlandish, but the case could be based on something extraordinary. I get the impression that we may never find out, based on the available information.
 
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I don't buy into the Montauk mystery (or the Philadelphia Experiment), but I thoroughly enjoyed this show and am willing to keep an open mind about it. I was left wondering about the idea of "neutralizing" witnesses by discrediting them...many of the really "out there" stories - Dulce, Mothman, the Philadelphia Experiment, etc. have a level of crazy to them that is so extreme it does seem manufactured. Perhaps manufactured by unstable minds or could it be an effort (by those in the know?) to discredit the field in general or that particular story? By the way, I was listening to this episode (and the one with Micah Hanks) on a road trip from New York to Tennessee that took me past Point Pleasant (Mothman), Flatwoods (the Flatwoods Monster), Hopkinsville, KY (Hopkinsville Goblins) and Franklin, KY (Mantell UFO crash) - quite the accidental paranormal road trip. :)
 
Of course both the Montauk Project and Philadelphia Experiment are wacky beyond belief, but the Montauk witnesses definately point toward some goverment-military mind manipulation. Only problem-no clear evidence. So it's either just noise/insanity/a hoax or else it's been successfully hushed up. How can we ever know? I know that the chair and the monster and tens of thousands dead are outlandish, but there's enough in the story to suggest that something unusual happened. Again: what? And how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Roll Tootsie-Pop? The world may never know.
 
Enjoyed the show, Christopher Garetano was a good guest.

Two thoughts:

People often mention disinformation in relation to these type of stories. Usually what they mean is that the US government is spreading false information to discredit the UFO movement. This seems odd as the movement is pretty capable of discrediting itself at the moment....
A lot of these stories surfaced during the cold war a time of great paranoia and espionage. I've started to wonder whether such stories are propagated by state players to either distract or demonise the opposition. For example, the US has a very well placed source that is giving them details of secret Russian military technology. If the Russians found out that the US knew about this technology suspicion would automatically fall on the source and they would become compromised. So the US govt spends a small amount of it's overall budget on remote viewing teams, let it be known, in a roundabout fashion, that these teams are producing stunning results including details of previously unknown Russian tanks/submarines/whatever. Could it work? It might?

I simplify but could talk about secret projects developing new skills/abilities/mind control techniques just be put out to unnerve the Russians, cover existing sources, or indeed just get them to waste their espionage teams' time investigating nonsense?

The flipside of that is that could these stories about secret military bases where children are being killed are disseminated by the Russians to lead to distrust of the US government, more transparency of what the military is up to and people generally asking difficult questions. With recent reports on the Russian "troll factory" we already know that Russia currently tries to spread this kind of disinformation.

Second thought:

We see this idea of large numbers of children being murdered or abused by authorities or establishment figures repeatedly these days. In Europe these stories tend to be linked to stories of satanic abuse. David Icke and others take the concept even further. As I was listening to Christopher talk about the Montauk Project I was reminded of these other stories. Also because some of the witness testimony for them comes from people who have had difficult lives and are potentially damaged because of that. Could there be a psychological process where people who have been abused or damaged as children turn that experience into a metaphorical story where the abuse they receive is literally administered by the state rather than figuratively - through incompetence or a lack of proper social care/safety net?

Just thoughts, not sure how far I'd defend either...
 
In line with your train of thought Ravensfee, I'm inclined to think the Montauk witnesses are likely all suffering from mental illness. A close relative of mine suffers from schizophrenia and her delusions can sometimes be very believable in the sense that she is absolutely sincere about them - also, there is a unsettling thread of commonality among schizophrenics regarding their delusions. There are general characteristics of the delusions which appear from person to person. The stories told by the Montauk witnesses fairly well conform to the general nature of schizophrenic delusions - ideas of grandeur, persecution and complicated scenarios involving the government, mass murder and human experiments.
On the supremely speculative side, I do find myself wondering along the lines of what Garentano suggested that these may have been implanted memories to discredit the individual (maybe not so much the field). Perhaps a scientist working on a black project gets squirrely and maybe he's already a little loopy or eccentric so the scientist is subjected to a few weeks or months of mind warping torture and bam he comes out sounding loonier than ever. The only folks that will listen to him will be on the fringes. Maybe some of his "memories" have a loose basis in actual events, but everything is so scrambled he can't make sense of it. So his own mind does the rest of the work by creating even more fantastical scenarios where he's the persecuted hero trying to save humanity. Of course, as stated before how would anyone ever be able to prove it...maybe top secret documents, but even so it would probably just go largely ignored with a collective "meh" kind of like MK Ultra.
 
If there is mental programming going on to effect disinformation-maybe the aim isn't to discredit investigators in the paranormal field. Maybe there's some other motivation for the possible disinformation that hasn't been considered. I don't know what that'd be but..there are some smart cookie-puss people on this forum who may have a theory.
 
Is it just me or does Chris Garetano sound a lot like actor Ed Bishop...Commander Straker from the old UFO TV show?
 
Chris was an excellent guest. I'd like to hear more of him. I'd actually like to see him investigate other cases and outlandish claims. His style is great. That said, I don't buy any of the Montauk or PHL Xmnt stories. I agree with the earlier comment of why would someone keep repeating a story for no gain? Think: Billy Meier. There are all kinds of folks that will do it just to do it. The Trent's (IMO), Rex Heflin, etc.

Also, I could have sworn that in around 2011 I was listening to an episode of the Paracast and there was a guest on that sounded like this Al Bielick guy. He had outlandish claims of being part of the PHL Xmnt. Falling off the side of the ship and into a time warp, etc. etc. Who was the guest? Was it Al Bielick? But then again, I thought it was established on this episode that Al was never a guest on the Paracast?

Anyways, this last episode was great.
 
I thought this was a great show. I'd read a couple of the Montauk books and found the chaotic storyline uncompelling. Garetano's focus on three or four main people involved and his commentary about working with them really helped me understand the story and what is compelling about it.

At one point Garetano says that one of his interviewees was super-twitchy while seated and then seemed normal when he stood up after the cameras were off. In college I had a good friend who was schizophrenic and the drugs (early neuroleptics) he was on gave him tardive dyskinesia, which is basically involuntary movements of muscle groups large and small. It was really only noticeable when he was sitting still, but then it could be quite noticeable. Once he stood up and started moving, it disappeared. That's what I thought of as I heard Garetano's tell that story.
 
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