Scribble

David Rind

00:00:00

Welcome back to One Thing, I'm David Rind. And a wild conspiracy theory arrives at the White House, but the path it took to get there is even wilder.

Teddy Brown

00:00:09

I have a lot of sympathy for conspiracy theorists who really need something to hold on to. They need something believe in explanation for their circumstances and unfortunately the truth of the matter is that sometimes bad things happen.

Karoline Leavitt

00:00:28

It'll be funny, it'll be entertaining, there will be some shots fired tonight, so everyone should tune in.

David Rind

00:00:36

That clip of White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt talking to Fox News before the White House Correspondents' Dinner went viral shortly after the event. That's because shots were fired. Not jokes or insults from President Donald Trump, as Levitt was alluding to, but actual bullets. Authorities say in a message sent to family members before the attack, Cole Thomas Allen allegedly wrote about targeting top administration officials, including President Trump. He called himself the friendly federal assassin, said he didn't expect forgiveness. But despite those details, conspiracy theories have been running wild on the internet in the days since.

Donie O’Sullivan

00:01:12

Marjorie Taylor Greene took to social media Sunday writing, I want to know why the Trump admin released Cole Allen's manifesto immediately, but they still keep a tight lid on Thomas Crooks.

David Rind

00:01:23

Green was talking about Thomas Crooks, the man who shot Gray's President Trump's ear during a rally in Pennsylvania during the 2024 campaign, and there are a lot of baseless theories about that assassination attempt too.

Tim Dillon

00:01:35

Maybe it was staged, maybe it was faked.

David Rind

00:01:40

Just to be totally clear here, there is no evidence either assassination attempt was staged. And for what it's worth, multiple investigations found Crooks acted alone and had considered killing both Trump and President Joe Biden. But over the past few months, another fringe conspiracy theory has taken hold.

Peter Doocy

00:01:58

10 missing scientists with access to classified stuff, nuclear material, aerospace, they've all gone missing or turned up dead in the last couple months.

David Rind

00:02:08

'Now this certainly sounds juicy. Multiple scientists with connections to government research go missing or end up dead. Talk of unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs and government cover-ups.

Reporter

00:02:19

Do you think that this is connected or totally random?

President Donald Trump

00:02:22

Well, I hope it's random, but we're going to know in the next week and a half. I just left a meeting on that subject, so pretty serious stuff.

David Rind

00:02:30

But is there an actual story here? And how did this theory move from the niche corners of YouTube all the way to the White House? And what does it say about our broader disinformation ecosystem? Let's turn to CNN senior writer Teddy Brown. He's been digging into this. Teddy, welcome to one thing and welcome to CNN, I guess. How long have you been on the job now?

Teddy Brown

00:02:49

This will be week three, David, so getting going. And how would you describe your beat? That's a good question. I've described it to people as sort of why the internet makes people crazy and sort of how the internet seeps into physical culture. And so I've covered a lot of different things for different outlets over the years, but it's an intersection of internet and culture.

David Rind

00:03:09

Why the internet makes people crazy. I mean, that sounds relevant. I know we all feel that way generally. Well, so your first feature story for us went up last week and it was titled how a speculative story about dead and missing scientists went from the fringe to the White House. So I guess my question is, how did it?

Teddy Brown

00:03:30

'So this dead scientist theory has been around for a few months now. I guess, you know, it's sort of two or three months. Um, and we wanted to trace where its beginnings were and then how it got to be mentioned by, uh, press secretary, love it and by president Trump. Because it seemed like there was a real velocity here. We had sort of this niche theory at the very beginning, something that was clearly sort of catnip for conspiracy theorists. And sort of it made its way from those folks up to the halls of power. And so President Trump mentioned it in mid-April.

David Rind

00:04:03

Can you just describe the basic outline of the theory for me?

Teddy Brown

00:04:08

So, I guess the count is now up to 13, but initially when we wrote the story it was 12 scientists.

Natasha Chen

00:04:14

The circumstances of these dozen or so people vary widely from people whose deaths had been publicly reported and explained with suspects arrested to people whose disappearances truly leave detectives stumped.

Teddy Brown

00:04:26

One scientist was killed with a front porch in a rural part of Los Angeles, north of Los angeles. Another one was killed by the man who had also shot 11 Brown students and killed two of them two days before. And a few other people just disappeared.

Natasha Chen

00:04:39

Disappearances like that of Anthony Chavez, 78 years old, who disappeared last year from Los Alamos, New Mexico. The clues show that Chavez was home the day before he was reported missing, but left all his stuff behind. And though he was a hiker and could have gone to one of the many canyons in the area, it was also pouring rain that day and he didn't bring a jacket.

Teddy Brown

00:04:59

And disappearances always sort of give conspiracy theorists something to look at because there's no explanation for what happens.

Natasha Chen

00:05:05

Chavez's best friend told me he tried to get the FBI involved initially, but was hung up on. The FBI declined to comment.

Daniel Liszt (YouTube)

00:05:18

Strange little thing, I'm gonna come into this in such a strange way.

Teddy Brown

00:05:21

And so one of the first people we talked to, one of first people to bring this up, was a guy named Daniel List, who runs a website called darkjournalist.com.

Daniel Liszt (YouTube)

00:05:28

One of the things I've noted about the presence of the men in black in the early UFO cases is the apotheon that takes place around them now.

Teddy Brown

00:05:36

He has about almost 200,000 YouTube subscribers, and he makes these really, really long videos, you know, sort of two to three hours, explaining some of his theories about the connection between, you know deep state conspiracies. He's very into extra special life. He's really into aliens.

Daniel Liszt (YouTube)

00:05:53

As we progress through these different scientific figures, we're going to end up at Larrero and the strange plasma research he was doing. And it's going to relate back to a very interesting character indeed, who is in fact, the president's uncle. And that might open up a lot more questions for us here tonight.

Teddy Brown

00:06:14

And it was a three hour video talking about this physicist of Portuguese design who was killed in, I think, late December.

Teddy Brown

00:06:23

I am just very interested in hearing about how you heard about in the first place.

Daniel Liszt

00:06:29

I've tried stories about scientists who've been missing before.

Teddy Brown

00:06:35

So when I talked to Daniel, he really ran down in quite a lot of detail, which is common to conspiracy theorists. I think that the amount of detail they sort of have in their heads is incredible.

David Rind

00:06:44

Yeah, like they have the research, they have a thing for every little data point.

Teddy Brown

00:06:49

It's incredible. And so, you know, he was talking about these 12 scientists working on different but related things or things that they were kind of siloed away from each other, but all laddered up to the same thing.

Daniel Liszt

00:07:01

And then there's three cases that are associated with Huntsville and the fact that it is interesting because we're moving our space headquarters to Huntsfield now.

Teddy Brown

00:07:10

You know, everything from advanced metals to exoplanet research, you know, sort of research on planets or outside of our solar system. But the thing with Daniel is that he also ties it back to a lot of things that to the average observer seem sort of ludicrous. He sort of compared the murder of Larrero and then added in Mahomet Atta being. Going through Maine and also had like being picked up in the same car as Lerero's killer was picked up. It's a Nissan Centro, like it's not really that rare car. So Daniel really tries to tie all this stuff into like a huge massive conspiracy that includes, you know, dead scientists that were killed in the 1950s and the 1970s, then Muhammad Atta and then Lerro. And so it is this daisy chain of events. That he considers all connected to one another.

David Rind

00:08:03

So at this point, Daniel is doing his YouTube videos, largely to an audience who is kind of into this kind of stuff already. So how does that go from there to being picked up by people in position of power?

Teddy Brown

00:08:17

'I think Jessica Reed Krause was probably the beginning of this story, beginning to be picked up by politicians and administration officials. So Jessica Reed-Krause is the woman behind Instagram and sub-sector account Cut House and Habit. She first came to prominence, I believe, at the Britney Spears trial. Her real moment of fame was that and also defending Johnny... With like TikToks and Twitter and Instagram posts against Amber Heard during their trial a few years ago.

Jessica Reed Kraus

00:08:49

I think that Donald Trump was very close to Galeen Maxwell, just like everybody in that era.

Teddy Brown

00:08:55

'And then was a presence at the Galane-Maxwell trial where she was sort of a de facto defender of Galane who she thought was taking the fall for Epstein.

Jessica Reed Kraus

00:09:04

I mean, I think that's where she should be in a low security prison.

Teddy Brown

00:09:10

And she's slowly but surely become this huge figure, especially among the reactionary right, where she has the ears of people in Congress. She has the years of people in the White House, she says.

Jessica Reed Kraus

00:09:22

Mcc, wants his name.

Teddy Brown

00:09:23

McCaslin, the Air Force General?

Jessica Reed Kraus

00:09:25

Yeah, so as soon as that happened, I posted that too, because it's like, okay, now we're starting to see a pattern and

Teddy Brown

00:09:33

And so Jessica picked this up in I believe February and this was about the General McCasland who was an Air Force major general who people have alleged to have connections to the extraterrestrial research community. There's a famous email that a lot of people reference between Tom DeLong.

David Rind

00:09:56

Wait, the guy from Blink 182?

Teddy Brown

00:09:58

Yes, who's a big alien enthusiast. Like he's, this is the one thing everyone knows about Tom DeLonge now. It's like, it's not all the small things now. It's, like, no, that guy loves aliens.

Jessica Reed Kraus

00:10:06

It was very interesting that Tom DeLonge was trying to get him to come forward. It's like of all the people in the White House, he seemed to think this guy had valuable information and seemed to know a lot, right?

Teddy Brown

00:10:21

And Tom had sent an email to John Podesta and in that WikiLeaks tranche of files that came out asking about General McCasland and if you could help him research aliens. This is, you know, again, this is just like excellent fodder for these conspiracy theorists who are thinking about like how do these things connect to one another? How does it go back to politics? So Jessica wrote about these dead scientists in February, you know sort of making the point of. Are they connected to one another? Are they working on the same things? How are all these scientists in a name dead? And that was, I think, the most important and most influential pickup for this.

Jessica Reed Kraus

00:11:00

I was happy that it became a talking point in some of these recent press hearings and that the president mentioned it directly. And so to me that shows that they're taking it seriously. But I.

Teddy Brown

00:11:13

So you had her writing about that and then of course you get down the line you have sort of more politicians and officials talking about it sort of in the immediate aftermath of her writing about it.

David Rind

00:11:22

Right, I remember Congressman Tim Burchette from Tennessee, he's going on shows like Benny Johnson's podcast and amplifying this stuff. It's one thing to have, you know, a social media rabble rouser talking about this, but you have an elected member of Congress kind of talking about it. That's just going to get a lot more pick up.

Teddy Brown

00:11:41

And Tim Burchett is an interesting guy and that he is also a big extraterrestrial sort of, I say enthusiast, but he's very interested in the concept of like the government hiding things and the government needing to disclose secret plans or agendas with the people.

Tim Burchett

00:11:58

There's just too many of them disappearing, Benny. I'm just, nothing happens by coincidence in this town or around this town. Something's going on.

Teddy Brown

00:12:08

Congressman Burschett has been banging the Trump for a long time, but the McCaslin disappearance, and I should say that McCasland has not been found. The story goes that he left his house in New Mexico, didn't take his phone, wallowed her keys, and was never seen from again.

Tim Burchett

00:12:22

You're never gonna convince me otherwise. I don't care what they find. I don't care what the find at this point. How does, my wife said it the other day, how does somebody disappear in this day and age?

Teddy Brown

00:12:34

So you had Congressman Birchett going through that. You also had Congresswoman Annapolina Luna from Florida, who is a huge forerunner of alien disclosure, UAP disclosure as they call it, actually hosted a congressional panel last year that Jessica Reed Krause was at about specific disclosure. So she's been very interested in this topic as well. And it's been sort of banging the drum to sort of get the government to tell them what's going on.

David Rind

00:12:59

So you have a couple of members of Congress who are big in the UAP community picking up on some of this. Where does President Trump enter the picture?

Teddy Brown

00:13:08

So we have this sequence of events where you have Congress and Berkshire talking about it and going and Benny Johnson and giving interviews to the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail is one of the biggest sources of fuel for this. So they write a whole handful of pieces about this. And then other outlets are picking up. The New York Post talking about, you have Newsweek talking about at some point. And then what I was told is that the most likely sequence of events here was that once it got on Fox News, President Trump is likely to have seen it just by virtue of watching television. And this isn't to say that this is a new area for President Trump. He has talked about Disclosure Day and giving people more information about extraterrestrials.

David Rind

00:13:50

Yeah, he's been teasing this for since his first term, that there's stuff out there, we're going to release it, whether it's Aliens, whether that's the Martin Luther King Jr. Files, etc. Etc.

Teddy Brown

00:14:00

'All these things and you know typically it turns out to be nothing or that he whether he doesn't actually give or you know hand over any sort of transparent file dossier or whatever. I should say that Jessica Rea-Cross has a history of being associated with these things in that she was one of the few people who has handed over what was essentially the Epstein files of course is a giant binder of documents that didn't really contain anything but I think the idea of President Trump hating over documents that allegedly uncover government secrets to, you know, independent researchers, independent journalists has been a typical strategy of his administration.

David Rind

00:14:41

All right, gotta take a break. When we come back, what Trump has said about the theory and what that says about the future of conspiracy theories in politics. Stick around. I mean, what did Trump say about it? Does he sound like he is concerned about it or buys into the theory at all?

Teddy Brown

00:15:02

You know, this is an interesting part of this because I do think that general tenor of the administration is we're going to look into it.

Peter Doocy

00:15:10

Have you been briefed yet about whether or not these cases are connected? Yeah, I have. And can you tell us if...

President Donald Trump

00:15:17

They are connected? Well, so far, I mean, they're individuals. We have a lot of scientists.

Teddy Brown

00:15:21

They're not giving it any true credence. I think President Trump said, I certainly hope it's a coincidence.

President Donald Trump

00:15:28

So, so far, it's not a major, you know, there's sometimes a little bit of a connection anyway, and you say, oh, this is a terrible thing. But so far we're finding that there's not much of a connection. We'll let you know. We're going to be doing a full report on it. It's very serious.

Teddy Brown

00:15:45

Which isn't exactly admitting to it, isn't exactly, you know, sort of totally engaging with it, but it is sort of throwing a little bit of red meat to people who want more to Slow's Files.

David Rind

00:15:55

Yeah, it leaves the door open.

Teddy Brown

00:15:57

Exactly, and FBI Director Cash Patel also talked about, you know, we're going to investigate this and give everyone a full report, but he even tried to throw a little bit of cold water on the connection between all these people.

David Rind

00:16:09

I mean, yeah, I just want to be very clear here as we're talking about this. Is there any actual connective tissue that ties all this together into some broader thing, or is this truly a conspiracy theory that has just moved up the chain to the highest levels of power?

Teddy Brown

00:16:24

You know, I keep coming back to this and that some of the experts on the topic said, do you know how many thousands of people work on these things for NASA? And it's like the, and the thing is, is that this wasn't one weekend of people disappearing. This wasn't even one year of people disappearing. There are deaths that people are trying to connect to this conspiracy. They go all the way back to 2022. There are deaths that have already been solved. There are really tragic comments from families that are like, our daughter, our son, or our brother, whatever it is, really struggled with a lot of things, and whether that's addiction or mental health, and some of these people aren't even scientists. One woman who disappeared was an administrative assistant at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. It's not to say that she doesn't know a lot, but she is, she was an administrative assistant. She wasn't a researcher working on, you know, ultra classified things. So I do think to the conspiracy theory community, it's anyone who is even associated with these things. We can draw a connection to that, the wider theory.

David Rind

00:17:23

Is there something unique about this moment that we're living in that allows these theories to flourish in the way that this one has?

Teddy Brown

00:17:30

'I was talking to the Mother Jones reporter, Anna Merlin, and she has written about conspiracy theories very in-depth. She wrote a book about conspiracy theories in American culture. And she told me that the velocity is the real difference here, and that it can go from these really niche corners of the internet, people like Daniel List, and then go to Jessica Krause, who isn't really niche anymore. She has more than a million followers and close subscribers. And it goes so fast from those people to the halls of power. So I think that that is new. And then sort of being more theoretical about it, I think that there's just a lot of general despondence among people and conspiracy theories give people something to attach to for an explanation because they're so desperate for one. And so I always tell people like, I've got a lot sympathy for conspiracy theorists who really need something to hold on to. They need something believe in explanation for their circumstances. And unfortunately the truth of the matter is that sometimes Bad things happen.

David Rind

00:18:31

To that point, I was reading in the New York Times this week, the widow of the firefighter who was killed at President Trump's Butler rally said that she gets angry when she hears the theories that the shooting was staged in some way, but she still kind of believes In our own conspiracy theory that the gunman was part of some wider plot, even though multiple investigations have found he acted alone, I guess I'm just wondering, is there any way to combat that kind of thinking when you combine that despondency, that sadness with the speed that it can just rip through the internet when there's always just that one thing that can explain the unexplainable to people?

Teddy Brown

00:19:10

I think being on the butt end of a conspiracy theory doesn't inoculate you against trying to figure out why this happened to you. And so I think a lot of people have trouble accepting the bad luck or the bad hand they're dealt and they want some reason why this happen to them. And that woman is probably is right to be angry, I mean, like her husband was killed during a rally, that's awful. Yeah, but. I think that it is this need for explanation that people really have and it can be heartbreaking.

David Rind

00:19:47

Is there something to be said about how embedded the media apparatus that helps spread some of this stuff is? You know, I'm thinking of how Infowars is still fighting tooth and nail in court to stop the Onion, the satirical site, from taking over the company after this defamation case. I mean, Alex Jones has yet to pay a single cent to the families of the Sandy Hook victims, you know, who he dragged through the mud and spread all these horrible lies about, You know and still He has a voice in this system.

Teddy Brown

00:20:19

I think that I draw a line between people who propagate conspiracies with their own benefits and the people who are more receptive to those theories because they're looking for some rationale as to the really terrible state of the world they're living in. And so someone like Alex Jones, who consistently went after these families with no sort of proof or anything, was preying on people who were terrified for their children and don't want something to happen to their kids. When you take advantage of people's neuroses and fears and paranoias, um, I think it's really cynical. Um, and I blame the people who are spreading those theories. I don't blame the people who end up believing those theories because again, they just, they're looking for some reason why things are the way they are.

David Rind

00:21:04

I mean, when we talk about President Trump's part in all of this, he's obviously spread conspiracies, you know, even before he was president, the birtherism stuff with President Obama. But I guess, going forward, when you talk about people who are in office, obviously, you're just going to get a lot more people who have been exposed to some of this stuff, who are very online, who have seen this stuff kind of fly past them. So, like, are we going to see more acceptance of that from... Folks in higher office as we move forward here.

Teddy Brown

00:21:35

I do want to give credit to Anna Marlana again here because she made a very good point about two different things. One is that the administration, the Trump administration has made up a lot of media people, you have Dan Bogg, you know, I know he isn't in the FBI anymore, but he was a podcaster. Uh, Pete Hexeth was on Fox news. You have a lot media figures who are now, um, in the higher levels of government that you did before. These are people who are on X constantly. They're looking at Reddit. There is sort of, you know, sort of there is. This different type of media diet that a lot of these people have. And the second part of that is that I think President Trump understands very well is that this is an attention economy, even for them. And so the idea that you can sort of create these things that have fit, not even out of thin air, but a very tenuous connections to one another does give you a route to getting people's attention. And the, The Trump administration does a very good job of that. I mean, both, um, Cash Patel and President Trump were just sort of like, well, we're going to see what's going on. It's never sort of full denial. It's like, no, we'll, we are going to do this for you.

David Rind

00:22:41

And we've seen with the Epstein files how some of those promises have kind of come back to really haunt them in major ways.

Teddy Brown

00:22:48

Some of the chatter around this was that they're throwing a little bit of cold water on the conspiracy theory for the scientists because they don't want to run into another situation like the Epstein files where there is no satisfaction to the end of the conspiracy theory. You have Epstein dead, you have this promise of files being released and never come. So they're trying to sort of figure that out.

David Rind

00:23:08

I mean, that's, it's kind of a tried and true thing, right? A lot of times the questions are more tantalizing and more interesting than the actual answers they produce. You see that in, you know, movies and TV and in real life.

Teddy Brown

00:23:19

Absolutely.

David Rind

00:23:21

Well, Teddy, thanks for walking us through this wild story. I really appreciate it.

Teddy Brown

00:23:26

Thanks for watching.

David Rind

00:23:29

'We should say, we asked the White House about whether it was downplaying the scientist's story to avoid another Epstein situation. They told us in a statement that they continue to coordinate an inter-agency response to investigate these events and provide transparency, and will not get ahead of the investigation. That's all we got today. Thank you so much for listening. You can read Teddy's story over at cnn.com. We'll drop a link in our show notes. If you like the show, make sure you're following it, so a new episode will pop in your feed right away, and our next episode comes your way on Sunday. I'll talk to you then.

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