What Happened to Glenn Miller?

Published Dec 15, 2023, 4:00 PM

Glenn Miller was an international superstar when he abruptly decided to dissolve his band and join the US military during WWII. While his songs were still being played across the world, he took a last-minute flight from England to France... and disappeared. In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive into the mystery, asking a question that remains officially unsolved in the modern day: What happened to Glenn Miller?

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.

Hello, welcome back to the show.

My name is Matt, my name is Nolan. They call me Bed. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul mission controlled decads. Most importantly, you are here and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We are recording this at the beginning of December twenty twenty three. Quick check in, guys, how we feel it here at the edge.

Of the new year, the edge of the universe? Pretty good, I think, you know, all in all things considered.

Yeah, OK, not great, but we'll get through it.

I'm just being optimistic. You know. It's certainly room for improvement. I know this would be where the Internet says, insert gift of someone vaguely gesturing at everything. We have a bit of a December ish episode tonight, folks, Castro Memories back. It's December fifteenth, nineteen forty four. The legendary band leader Glenn Miller is flying from London to Paris. Glenn is excited. He's bringing his band to the European front. Glenn is also, to be honest, massively irritated because it turns out he's been trying to catch this flight to France for several days and then somewhere over the English Channel his plane disappears. Almost eighty years later to the day, people are still asking what happened to Glenn Miller? Here are the facts. You guys know Glenn. You're musicians, right, Seriously, it's so weird.

In preparation for this episode, I didn't, I am if I would have. If you would have told me, hey, Matt, who's Glenn Miller, I would have got halo. But if you if you realize who he is, I guess in researching him, you're like, dang, this guy had a lot of influence on a lot of people, and I think music in general. Guys, can we just talk quickly about the thing that made his orchestra's sound unique the fingerprint?

Yeah? The horns?

Right, Yeah, it's the horn. Because he was he was a famous trombonist. I'm sure he was a multi instrument instrumentalist. I guess as a way you'd say that, but he was known for his trombone work. And when he would compose music, he would use the horns section, so like we're talking trumpets and trombones, other horns with saxophones and what was it. He would play like the same melody with both instruments at different octaves to give it a very I don't know, just cool.

Love the clarinet to that guy.

Yeah.

Yeah. He was born in nineteen oh four in Iowa, March first, and for a while he studied at the University of Colorado. He did take a music course. He got an incomplete, by the way, and he dropped out to work full time as a musician. As you said, Matt, his primary instrument was the trombone. He was a tromboner, a trombonist, no pun left behind.

Before you go, I think it's so funny you're talking about the University of Colorado. When you go to their website, they've got a huge page about him. And he literally like showed up and was like I'll take this.

Nah right. He also made a name for himself as an arranger, a composer, later a band leader, and as we all know, the life of a musician can be immensely challenging. So this guy goes from gig to gig, from band to band, before he gets hired on to play trombone for Ben Pollocks Orchestra in the mid nineteen twenties, and then after that Fleetwood Max style, he goes his own way. He's back to freelancing, and at some point, I believe in the late thirties, he says, well, when I start a band.

YEP, And that lasted for about a year. He was like, yeah, man, I've got a band, and people loved it, or at least people who were influential and important within the music industries maybe at the time, but yeah, it lasted about a year, and almost immediately he started up with another group of people.

Yeah. This first one, as you said, was sort of a critics darling, not a lot of mainstream notice, but people who heard it loved it. They loved what he was doing. And his second group really hit the zeitgeist. People loved this stuff. They played ballrooms, they played casinos. I've never seen a live band at a casino. What maybe that's a little bit of a dated thing. Like now it's more like stage you know, floor shows or you know, like magic or just to lay that kind of stuff. But back in the day.

Day, yeah, I mean, back in the day it was like I mean, we know, I think from our trip to Vegas and learning a lot of the history is that a lot of the the rules around who could and could not go into casinos pertaining to race had direct directly to do with some of these really hot, high level performers who were starting to not all be you know, white. I think Sammy Davis Junior led to a lot of changes or even the formation of a very specific casino that did allow black folks to patronize it and not just have to be you know, swooped in the back door.

Well yeah, and this is my problem as well, with just the cultural difference of the nineteen thirties to now and everything that I've ever known growing up, they're the dance club or a place where you would go out to dance with somebody or to meet somebody and dance. It's very different than the way we think about it now. And probably since we were you know, we've been born.

I mean officially, these bands were often referred to as dance bands.

You know, that was sort of the term of popular use. And this guy is in the thick of it. He is a pop star by this point, picture your favorite most successful pop star. He is in that sort of echelon at this moment in his life. They're all over the radio and their sound is, as we said, it's considered unique. Everybody loves it. They can't get enough. By nineteen thirty nine, Glenn is hosting his own radio show three times a week. They had all these hits. We were talking about it a little bit off air. I love Perfidia. Matt, you're a in the mood guy. You were talking about that one.

Oh my god, I don't know what it is about that song, man, it puts me in the mood.

Is that I may be wrong.

I think that's that one tuxedo junction, right, Ye, Sunday has Serenade and not to remember, there's also Moonlight Serenade. You got your Son Serenade and your Moonlight Serenade.

But there's something about I don't know. It's that it's the ride symbol and the drummer's not doing much at all, but like just keeps it going and it just flows and again usually with the horn section.

It's just Oh.

That band that there is just a very they're they're they're kind of like tie disco vibes almost, but like it is just a very steady kind of drum uh performance. But then you'll have the big old blasty drum solo occasionally. Yeah, it's neat to watching these cats play because they'll have the snare tilted at a weird angle and they'll be playing side stick kind of with that ride. Unless even the kick drum, it's not a kicky kind of sound. It's a very The ride is everything, and everything comes with the bass upright bass, so they're not doing a big banging kick. That's not the sound of this type of music at all.

Is beautiful, very cool. It is beautiful. If you have not had the pleasure of listening to the Glenn Miller version of Perfidia, do check it out. It's astonishing. So anyway, what we're saying is, yeah, the dogs get it, let's leave it in. These are all bangers, and in a very real way, this guy's work begins to define the era of what we call swing music. He's at the top of his game. He's thirty eight years old, and the Western world is shocked when he suddenly disbands his orchestra, which was very successful, and he enlists in the US Army to help with World War Two. We have a little bit of his correspondence with Uncle Sam right.

On August twelfth, nineteen forty two, he wrote this letter arguing that he could in his band could possibly be a morale booster for you know, the Boys in Blue, that's the cops, what do you call it?

Anyway, it was exclusively boys at this time for the trump the choices of Red White vis go.

And this is largely the foundation of what led to things like the USO, which is you know, comedians, musicians, influencers that come and you know, give special performances, you know, for the troops. But Glenn kind of took this upon himself and it was sort of like his idea. He wanted to quote, put a little more spring into the feet of our marching men and a little more joy into their hearts.

Like the end of Ghostbusters too, just a little love in your heart.

Well it is, oh, and it's quite I think it's quite inspiring actually, because this solidifies him not only as a pop star right and an important figure in that way, he becomes kind of an American hero just for deciding to do this and making it happen.

M M, yeah, one hundred percent. And so from October of that year all the way to December of nineteen forty four, he is he's got he gets the rank of a captain. He's leading an outfit called the Army Air Force Band. This is huge. Forty two people in this orchestra, a nineteen piece swing band at its core, so they've got the classics and then got the you know, the stuff he cut a rug to. There were no chumps in the squad. Had this band continued with Glenn, we have no idea how many more contributions he would have made to the musical canon of America and indeed the world overall. Why don't we know what would have happened? Well, because his flight never arrived in Paris. Shades of missing in Alaska. Shout out to our pal John Waalzac. Shout out to Paul Decktt, who also works on that show. To date, in twenty twenty three, no trace of this plane has been discovered or at least officially confirmed. So we have to ask ourselves what happened to Glenn? How did one of the world's most popular musicians simply disappear? Here's where it gets crazy. Let's keep going. I mean, think about it. Taylor Swift, very popular musician. What if Taylor Swift one day hopped a flight to the Middle East and just vanished.

People would commit suicide on mass that is would happened. Well, the Swifties would find her, They would find her, there would be a million amateur detectives spawned overnight, or.

They would at least find a scapegoat.

Yeah. Yeah, it's weird because in this case, because of the time period, right, because the world was at war when this occurred. Because planes are getting shot down all over the place, right and in different at the edges of battlefields, you know, across Europe. It is very weird that it occurs, right, with this very popular person on a flight that is military related, but it's not. It's not like a military mission in the same way, right mm hmm.

Yeah, you could call it a casual flight, which several researchers have. Let's stick with the facts one moment longer before we get into the theories. Let's look at the provable stuff. With help from the author Dennis Spragg in his book Glenn Miller Declassified, which is considered by far the most exhaustive investigation. He notes a couple of weird things. Miller's flight, the one he actually made it on, was booked on short notice. He had already tried to get like it was booked the night before, because he had already tried and failed to get on several other flights. And he basically took a really small airplane with help from a military buddy, an acquaintance that we'll get to and it's there were only three people aboard, and he was just done waiting. He was so pissed that he had to be beyond standby and his first light got canceled, and then he had another one that got canceled. I'm Glenn m fing Miller.

Let's talk about why. So his band was going to have to be in Paris, right and they were going to perform there? What on Christmas?

State?

Yes, And what Glenn had to do as the leader of the brain behind that stuff was all the things that like an executive producer would have to do, right, You've got to figure out how do I actually get where are all of my people going to stay? What food are they going to be eating? You know, like all of the logistics. I guess that was on him to figure all of that out, which is why he wanted to be there before the rest of the band, at least according to a lot of the writing, right, that's that's been put into the record, which is why he felt a real need get whatever I have to do. I'm going to get there early.

Consummate professional. He only got a seat on this tiny plane. Is it's a nord Dune you see sixty four a Norseman. You can see a picture of this and it looks almost like a biplane, you know.

Yes, but it's a unique cool aircraft. Don't you think?

Oh? Unique cool? Would you say easily identifiable? I might.

So.

Miller, being a military man himself at this point, he has a little bit of juice with the eighth Air Force. He has an acquaintance, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Bessel, who is headed that way. He's like, oh, I'm going to France, you know what I mean? Why just hop with me. I'm already headed there. This was ad hoc, This was a phone call. This was can you do me a favorite type stuff? Not necessarily secret, but not necessarily official.

Oh yeah, not official at all, because let's talk about why the planes kept getting delayed. The weather was so terrible that the military was like, na, we can't fly anything across the English Channel right now, as dangerous as hell. No, absolutely, we're not going to send our big aircraft over there that you could get a flight on. Glenn Miller and these guys are like, eh, but what if we took a baby plane.

Just a tiny, tiny plane once in a while as a treat.

Yeah?

Yeah, And so, because this is ad hoc, the story goes that the Allied Command in Northwestern Europe, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force or CHAFF, they didn't know where he was. And so Miller and this lieutenant colonel and their pilot, a very young guy, it's twenty two year old named John Morgan, they crossed the channel, and or they attempt to cross the channel. The Eighth Air Force, the Allied authorities, they don't even know the plane is missing until three days later, on December eighteenth. Like you said, Matt, the rest of the band and flew on separate planes, on much larger planes.

They got cleared when they were supposed to go, basically when the weather cleared up, and uh, we're going to get into but that's why the communication was so poor because of the ad hoc nature of this that you're talking about. So we can't stress that enough. The reason why nobody knew until the eighteenth, three days later, is because they kind of just winged it.

Ah, worth it, worth it, the NILP I'd left behind it winged it. Oh, he's going to need a parachute. And so Miller's own wife, this is heartbreaking. His wife, Helen, doesn't learn that her husband has disappeared until December twenty third, making this the worst Christmas ever. On the twenty fourth, the next day, the United States government informs the press and the public and everybody is asking what actually happened. We have to remember this is before the age of ubiquitous social media, right, so your access to information is limited to radio and print and books and film right at that point.

Yeah, I've heard, guys, we were talking about Taylor Swift. I've heard it compared to if the Rolling Stones got on a flight just in their regular you know, touring the world kind of thing, and they just went down and we didn't know for weeks that the Rolling Stones had disappeared. The only reason we find out is, you know, it's like and imagine it having right around Christmas too, But like, just the impact basically that the stones had when they were coming up is what this guy had on the world. And just to lose him like that and for it to be a mystery, I think is the craziest thing.

That's definitely wild. That's a great comparison. And let's pause for a word from our sponsor. When we return, will dive into the official explanation and the theories. We're back, so what officially happens? We want to give a shout out to our pal friend of the show, Jordan run Talk Legend in his time. He wrote an article for People magazine in twenty nineteen about this and we quite like the way he put it.

Also did a really cool podcast called Stoness Touring Party that has got a lot of stones on private planes and you can use your imagination and imagine what might have happened given the fervor around that US tour that the podcast goes into. But Jordan points out that in the article this the official explanation is the most obvious. Miller and crew fell victim to bad weather, and then goes on to talk about some meteorological terms that are probably of a.

Particular interest to aviators.

Something called the cloud ceiling had fallen to fifteen hundred feet, which is just a little bit more than four hundred and fifty seven meters, if that's your bag. In twin Wood Farm, which is the British point of departure for Basil and Miller's.

Flight, And according to the story, France wasn't having great weather either. They were already dealing with similar meteorological conditions let's call it fog of war plus you know, regular fog and French air traffic control. I'm still not sure on this one. Apparently French ATC denied the pilot Morgan's request to take this flight over the Channel, and they flew the plane anyway. But you can find other people arguing it was not foggy, or that the flight was not unauthorized. Curious or and curious.

It's so weird because everything I've seen in researching for this shows that it is like may I don't know, I don't know if it's just the official story that was put out there has been repeated so many times, you know, as we encounter some of these some of these other stories like that, it just becomes a part of the record that everybody points to when they're going to write an article. But it does seem like most people agree whether was at least a factor in the flight, if the flight timing at least.

Yeah, because again, for two days before the flight, he couldn't get on the plane because of the weather, So it makes sense. Jordan also notes that this particular craft these three men were on had a couple of known issues. One of them was an issue with the engine carburetors, and the other wind was the fuel lines. Fuel Lines can freeze if the temperature is low enough, and it turns out that's bad for planes.

Okay, serious question. Isn't this a Canadian created, crafted plane, like you are correct, some pretty cold weather, right, you know, that's just weird that the fuel lines would be an issue in a plane, you know, with creative the Yeah whatever.

I did a Casino de Niro shrug since we're audio on that. So yeah. So if you go to a twenty fourteen episode of History Detective where in the interview Dennis Sprague, you'll see that he argues the aircraft got over the channel, it hit those freezing temperatures, that eighty six is the engine and this UC sixty four A goes nose down, face first into the water, and Dennis Sprague argues that this happened very quickly, like within the space of eight.

Seconds after taking off.

No, not after taking off, sorry, you know, in the air things go wrong. Eight seconds later they hit the water, and he believes that all three people died near instantaneously.

Wow, I guess that makes sense, because the reason you get cloud cover right like that is because of two different walls of temperature right that are smashing up against each other. I can imagine that there would you you know, you hit that threshold near the channel or something, you hit really cold temperatures, and then that's it.

That makes sense to me logically. Yeah, it's a plausible explanation. It's still the official explanation of the US. It's it's just true. Planes are subject to a tremendous amount of variables in every single flight. Apologies for any of our fellow conspiracy realists who are listening to this on a plane. Now you're going to be okay.

Well, my dog doesn't think so.

Be careful. So obviously not everyone accepts this explanation. The news goes nuts and then it dies down and fast forward, the world still spend, other crazy things are happening into China conflict, the Cold War immediately starts after World War Two, and it's not until the late nineteen eighties that there is a renaissance in speculation. In nineteen eighty five, a British diver named Clive Ward found what he thought might be the Norseman, the wreckage of it off the coast of France. He found, according to the story, no crazy damage to the plane, no signs of the plane's serial number registration, and no human remains on the craft. As we record, this has still yet to be officially confirmed as Miller's plane, and so the speculation only grows.

And in that speculation there's some wild stuff. There's some wild stuff, there's some pretty convincing. There's even a deathbed, not a confession, but like a deathbed realization almost was recorded.

There are a lot of theories, right, and some of these touch upon, dare we say, the runway of conspiracy. But how many of those take off and how many actually land? Oh no, So let's talk about the first one. Friendly fire? What is friendly fire?

Oh man, It's when you accidentally get kicked in the nuts during a game of dodgeball.

Huh yeah, maybe yeah. I think it might have to do with your team accidentally.

Yeah, by your team, sorry, yeah, but maybe not kick, maybe hit with the ball. So I just I don't know why I had that on the brain. For sure, it's a thing. It sounds fun, friendly fire. No, it happens in like video games too. Certain games disable that where you can't accidentally shoot your team member or your party member. But I do believe there are some online type games where you you definitely can and then that's very bad, very bad for you. But in war, the fog of war is a term that we we know happens very often. People are freaked out, they're on edge, they're keyed up. Something might go aw pop out at you, and you just you shoot first and ask questions later, and then only to realize that it was your buddy, you know, Steve.

Well, yeah, classic Steve.

Yeah.

But it's also it's a horrifying thing that occurs to every military. Yes, and it happens way more than you think, unfortunately, and it is it. It's why things.

Are enough that they made a term for it, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, but it's why things like official, buttoned up flight plans that are communicated between like three or four different entities, right, are so important. It's what was that chef thinks something you mentioned earlier, Ben, It's a they had a weird acronym to it, but it was like special Yeah.

Supreme Supreme Headquarters. It rolls off the tongue the Supreme Headquarters ally Expeditionary Force Shaief's all right, now, rock the CASBA.

But that's why that's so important, because they are monitoring where specifically like pretty relatively small avenues of travel that are permitted for different different types of aircraft at different times every day, and it's all to prevent friendly fire mostly, I think because if you can't identify an aircraft, as we all know, if you're in a hot war time and there's some unknown aircraft flying around your airspace, you're probably not going to take too kind to it.

And I mean, these are all meant to be sort of covert flight plans in the first place, so you know, the good guys need to know exactly where you know, good guys in quotation marries where they are so they don't accidentally mistake them for somebody else trying to be sneaky because everyone's trying to be sneaky in these situations.

Yeah, yeah, how do you get the correct information out to people without that information being collected by rivals or enemy forces. Let's go to a guy named Fredshaw. At the time, Fredshaw was the navigator of a Lancaster plane that was based in Methwold, not meth World. That cost me the resource style in Jersey. Yeah, I was like meth worlds crazy. And on the day that Miller's plane disappeared, there were a bunch of Lancaster bombers, one of them was Shaws, Fredshaw's, and they were returning from Germany because they were sent on a bombing raid. But the bombing raid had to be aborted because they didn't have the again to comms, right to structure, They didn't have the stuff they needed in place to successfully conduct that raid. So they go all the way out there, they turn around and the squadron says, crap, we can't land with all these bombs on these planes. Somebody get these MFN bombs off this MFM plane and they had a redundancy. They had a contingency for this, I should say, the jettison one hundred thousand bombs into a place called the South Jettison area. This was a known place right to the idea of mapping out safe places to do things. This was where you were supposed to go. It's like the public restroom for bombs.

Isn't that crazy? Over the English Channel? Like dropping one hundred thousand bombs and it's like that blows my mind because it has to do with weight, right, and fuel reserves, like how much fuel you have to get in certain places, and then being able to land the vehicle the plane safely like that. It's crazy to me that you would drop a waste that many bombs because those things what I mean, my god, we talked now about how expressed are and everything, and I know those have way more sophisticated components on them. But dang man, I.

Really wanted to make a George Jettison joke, but it didn't present itself there it is. That's the best you can do, and you can't actually make the joke. You just say what the pune was going to be. We just leave it at that.

So these bombs, like you said, no, they get George jettisoned from four to five thousand feet above right from that elevation, and at this time, our buddy Fredshaw, who has never seen this occur before, he looks down and out the window of his craft, and according to him, he sees these bombs exploding above the surface of the sea, and at the same time he sees a plane about twenty five hundred feet below. This plane is flying south, which would have been the same direction of Miller's plane, if this was indeed Miller's. And so he let's treat him as an eyewitness here, and let's take a couple of his quotes that occur far after the fact.

By the way, absolutely this is what he noted years later. And as we know, eyewitness accounts you and on the best day close to the event.

Can be a little sketch. But this is years later. Just pointing that out.

It was obvious to me that the aeroplane below was in trouble, so I watched intently. Then just before it went out of sight under the leading edge of the wing, I saw it flick over to port in what looked.

Like an incipient spin. I don't quite know what that is, but it's cool word.

I guess I'm confusing with incipid, which would be a really stupid spin. This is an incipient spin, which is something different, which we'll find out about in a minute. And eventually I saw it disappear into the English channel.

Ban, I saw you giggling. It was an incipient spin. Oh yeah, no, I was checking to make sure the etymology was right before I said anything. It just means nascent beginning emergent. Oh, like he sees the plane beginning to spin. Got it. And I was actually looking up port yeah.

Uh, front, So let's I don't remember. I usually didn't realize they used nautical terms as well for airplanes.

I think one, there's port, there's starboard, starboard, and stern, right yeah, yeah, and uh they're used for spacecraft as well. Guys, we have to figure this out before we go into space.

Do it well, before we do that, let's get another quick quote from mister Shaw, because I again it's it's terms that we're unfamiliar with. He said, Uh, I crawled from my navigator seat and put my head in the observation blister, which I've seen some World War two, you know stuff, some films where they used actual aircraft and things, and I think that's actually it looks kind of like a bubble window right that you can look out more from the bottom, not even from the side.

Right, mm hmm, yeah, because you needed that visual acuity, right. And it also reminds me of that terrifying poem. It goes like this, the death of the ball turret gutter from my mother's sleep. I fell into the state and I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life. I woke to Black Flack and the Nightmare Fighters. When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose. God. So okay, So other people on the craft Pershaw, They confirm this. The bomb aimer reports the same sighting. Someone goes over the intercom and says they've seen something go down. But apparently this downed plane observation doesn't get reported because the bombers are not an enemy territory and because the raid that they were set time was cut short. They never actually bombed it, so there wasn't an official operation and it got lost in the bureaucracy. At least that's the story Shaw doesn't. Shaw writes this down in his log book, but he doesn't link this sighting to the disappearance of Glenn Miller until nineteen fifty six because he sees a film called the Glenn Miller Story. Yep.

And of course we've seen this over the years, right, some big piece of media gets released and then other people come out of the woodwork to say, oh, I saw this or I saw that, which means then it's on everybody else to vet that story, right, because none of us want to believe we're I mean, we all want to believe in a compelling story like that and someone's bringing truth to light for the first time, but we also don't want to be suckers. So when when Shaw first comes out, he's looked at in that way, right, he's kind of dismissed.

Right, like, is this guy just after publicity?

You know?

Is he doing some sort of macabre play for attention? But he checks his old log book, and the logbook is real, and he does have this writing of this observation that he definitely didn't make in nineteen fifty six. He made it after this flight. And the problem is that it gives us a couple of prominent questions. First, could Miller's plane have strayed into that South jettison zone. We know that, as you said earlier, there were approved routes, There were airways through which these craft were allowed to fly at certain times, and apparently the approved shuttle route to France was pretty close to that south Jettison area, close enough that there's a margin of error. So if the weather is bad, if you're maybe an inexperienced pilot and you don't have the best grasp of navigating by instruments alone.

Which might know his pilot, right was not, at least he didn't have the extra certification you needed.

Right, Yeah, So it is possible then, with all these factors that they could have gone off the trail a bit. He would have been morgan, the pilot would have been using a compass, and it may have been human error. And when they stray into this jettison zone, if they did, then maybe they got hit by as you said, no friendly fire. Shaw's not the only one saying this though.

No, you're right, guys, just quickly, I have this image of bombs falling from bombers like that right several thousand feet above you. If you're in a noisy little plane like they're in, right, I don't think you would hear a thing. You know, we're so used to the sound of bombs falling from popular media, you know, and all of that. Maybe there is something there. I don't know.

Experience, it seems for a fact, honestly, and depending on the size and the distance, perhaps, but yeah, maybe the explosion.

But again, but if you're on that plane and that type of bomb explodes just above where your heads are on that plane, I don't know if you even hear anything it would if it happened, I think it would just be over.

Aren't bombs sometimes attached to parachutes? I think we talked about in a previous episode. We talked about a couple of different like crazy World War two bombing schemes. But I these would be unguided bombs right at this time, So that's right, Yeah, so they could have had parachutes perhaps, definitely to your point, World War two bombs did have parachutes, right.

It would increase visibility. You know, you're in a heap of trouble if you're flying along that path, right and you can see that either in the distance heading towards it, or just alongside you maybe parallel.

Yeah, and now let's introduce a guy named Victor Gregory, who captained the plane that Shaw was on. He later confirmed Shaw's account and he said, look, our bombardier spotted the plane, called the navigator over to have a look, and then, according to the story, fred Shaw identified the plane as a Norseman as this UC sixty four A, which good. I I guess that's amazing.

Yeah, from what what are we saying over two thousand feet away? Aroun a thousand feet away? Because the Norseman theoretically is flying underneath that cloud cover, right, which is very low in the sky. And just to be all like what, but here's the other thing we did talk about how it's a very unique plane.

Right.

There were only a couple dozen that were operating during the war, right, So like maybe.

Maybe it stuck out, you know, maybe it was like when Tesla first came out, you would notice a Tesla immediately on the road. I don't know, it's it's a good argument, and I think it's safe to say that we're the three of us in that situation. We almost definitely could not randomly identify a small Canadian aircraft. Yeah.

Well, and especially all the pictures I'm seeing it's in black and white.

I'm just chiking.

I'm just jogging. I'm just I was gonna make a joke about fog and it would be really hard to see those colors.

All right, that's warre you go.

Yeah, everything's in black and white.

And so Gregory was asked, well, why didn't you come forward until later? And there's there's a ton more about this. Folks were just giving you the high level stuff, not an altitude joke. Gregory says, in part, Look, my own concern was getting my airplane home safely. We're fighting a war. We lost thousands of planes. And then he adds, we had some pretty grim raids after that, and they didn't announce Miller's death until later. It had gone completely from my mind, which is believable. And you know, he is he appears to be giving an honest, good faith explanation, right and saying, you know, clearly he's also aware of the danger of memory and eyewitness recollections.

Yeah, it's the kind of thing you want to believe, right, You want to believe that humans are going to be honest about that, and that they could recall something like this with that kind of clarity and wouldn't want to, you know, pull the wall over anybody's eyes. It's tough because this isn't even close to the only story that's out there, not at all.

This story where he does inspire the Royal Air Force to carry out an investigation, but there's no raid report on record because the raid was aborted. And because of this, there are so many branches of speculation, especially on the friendly fire concept. Look the author we cited earlier, Dennis Spragge, he himself considers the friendly fire theory untrue, and he does a lot of forensics here. He points to a about an hour to an hour and a half discrepancy between when that Jennison of bombs occurred and when he believes Miller's flight would have been in that area potentially. But like you said, Matt, this is far far from the only theory, all right. This is the deep water, This is the more fringe theories there. There's a genre of alternative explanations about Glenn Miller's dem or disappearance that point to deep conspiracy. One of them comes out in nineteen ninety seven. A German journalist named udof Quote helped me with that one. Oh, I think he did a fine job.

I was gonna say ohta perfect perfect. You have to yell when you say like that, waiting to do it. It's like Clayton, Yes, now look, I'm being flippant, No district. The German language is a beautiful language. I just have a fun time with over enunciating and saying in a bit of a yelly fashion.

What did this guy do though, Well, he was a as you said, a very talented and intelligent German journalist who really threw himself into the research and looking through just you know, hundreds of pages of American and German intelligence that he was able to get access to, documenting wartime efforts for a book that he was writing on German intelligence Age Sees in particular. And uf Quota supposedly did find some evidence to cover this whole thing up, and he argued that Glenn Miller arrived in Paris on December fourteenth, alive and well, but later died under some chipilating and scandalous circumstances, perhaps, let's just say, in the company of a lady who was paid to keep his company.

Right, and was a professional at keeping company, such that she made his heart go pitter patter, and he died.

Put pitter peta caput. I want to Maybe this isn't necessary, but in my mind, guys, I just wanted you to know I'm separating this theory into two very distinct things, sure, which is he actually made it there in some kind of cover up situation, right, and then that there was this other thing potentially with a sex worker, but also just in general that he was working in some other capacity for an intelligent side too, because there's stuff in there. There are other theories I don't think we're really going to touch on, but that he was actually on some covert mission almost of diplomacy with Germany.

Well factor negotiations. This is not out of the question though. We know things like this did happen, and we have examples of folks who were able to use their status, whatever it might have been, to help their government. There's actually a really cool podcast, not a fictional, like a scripted type podcast that my heart is developing right now.

The should be out soon.

Spoiler alert slightly, just a little bit of a tip about this guy named Fodor who was the founder of this very influential travel guide and because he was always traveling around and doing scoping out new things for these guides, he was a perfect can to be a covert agent, and he very much was, and that is what the series is about it. But believe there's actually a documentary out there or out about it too. This is definitely something we should talk about photo on the podcast some time, maybe a little closer to when the show comes out.

And to be honest, not only is that kind of stuff possible and plausible, like friendly fire, it may occur more than we think, right, but it's also not necessarily James Bond glorious type stuff.

You know.

It's like, let's have a conversation off the record in a way that the official powers can plausibly deny things happened if that conversation doesn't work out. And we know, by the way, to this point, we know that Miller was involved in propaganda, many Allied figures, many access figures, people note, celebrities, entertainers, They were involved in propagandistic exercises. Right. Miller made broadcast to Germans in the German language where it was attempting to persuade them like, you know, guten tag guys, it's your buddy Glynn, give up the war, you know what I mean, be on the right side of history. And that may have been a factor in what it was doing. But for that to be the explanation, then we're asking a lot, We're ascribing a lot of talent to whomever would cover that up.

Yeah, for sure. Well I mean, well, do you guys remember when you found out Julia Child had some operations with the what is it, oh, the thing before the CIA oss that one, Like, I remember learning that and just being dumbfounded. But it's what, it's exactly what you're speaking to Ben being able to use that celebrity and almost universal appreciation to get messages across. So it is almost psychological stuff and operations more than anything. But it does seem like an enemy would not want to take him out. Maybe for those same reasons.

Right you would ideally you would want to turn the piece right in the game. But I mean, okay, if if this stuff about the if the diver finds this plane right in eighty seven, if there is truth of any sort to a conspiracy, if the guy is acting as more than one of the world's most popular musicians, then why why cover it up? Was it embarrassment on behalf of the allies or the access powers they were speaking with? And if you planted a plane. That's crazy. You'll see people arguing the plane was planted in the channel. How are you going to go to all that trouble and then forget to add bodies. It feels like a misstep.

Because they think it's going to be found in the eighties and the bodies would just be disintegrated by that.

Okay. So famously inefficient governments are the folks who can't figure out how to get people to pay the taxes every year. They're the same ones going in me out in nineteen eighty seven, they will be playing found and this will put the whole Glenn Miller debacle to bed. And everybody's like, oh, chuff, chuff chuff.

Yeah. Yeah, it's weird to me because there are human beings that have devoted most of their lives to researching this stuff, right, kind of similar to the Zodiac researchers who maintain things and just like that's their thing, you know, and they're gonna find out every piece of information that ever comes up, every interview. They've got it and they're gonna analyze it. There are human beings out there that look at the Glenn Miller story and do the same thing like Rick Gillespie of Tiger I think is how you would say it, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.

And that's a cool blackronym.

Well, they look at stuff like this and often it's almost like not skeptoid, but what's the one where the uh snoops, snap spe Yeah. It reminds you of those where you you almost look at anything new and you automatically say no to it unless you can prove it right. And I do wonder if there's almost too much skepticism even in myself right now when I'm considering this, because there's it's got to be a possibility, right.

And we don't know enough to say that did not occur exactly. And that's this gets us to the next genre of theories surrounding Glenn Miller, the weird stuff. What if he was a spy, What if he stepped the wrong way and Old Ike was like get rid of him? Or what if he what if he was taken by enemy forces? What if he was sent to make some sort of backroom negotiation and things went sideways for him? I mean, I also probably one of the craziest ones I read, and I don't know much about this one guys. But I read this idea that factions of the US military decided to kill Miller off the record because he was threatening to expose quote a cabal of gay US officers, which sounds nuts until we realized that, you know, legendary heroes of World War Two like Alan Turrey were prosecuted or persecuted and then prosecuted for their sexual orientation.

Yeah, and have their lives ruined. I mean really, at the time of the time, that was tantamounts to, you know, being tried for witchcraft. I mean, it's really serious business. So yeah, the accusation, whether whether we have any details that would actually tie Miller to something like that or to have any kind of I don't know. I mean, I bet a lot of band leaders were probably pretty famously homophobic back then.

Maybe that in and of itself, but that's a little bit of a stretch. Bro House.

Also, the idea maybe that he faked his own death, we don't really have any detail to support that. The guy was absolutely at his peak, you know, he was monstrous celebrity. We know that it at least we feels that his sentiment for wanting to do this USO esque stuff was coming from a place of goodness, a place of like, you know, really wanting to help.

It doesn't really that that angle doesn't really make any sense.

I don't know, Ben, if you found any anything, any breadcrumbs on that one.

Unfortunately not at this point, because it kind of like we're talking about the long game of telephone that is history. We take a couple of things we know to be true, right, the homophobia, the persecution of that, which was very much real also continues today, of course, and we take the fact that this immensely popular with close ties to the US government disappeared, and then people are trying to kind of like red string get together, and unfortunately that's that's not enough. I think we can say, now, look, if it turns out that one is the truth, then we're going to be the first people to come on on the show and say, hey, here's what actually happened. There's also the idea never even got on the plane.

But Ben, what would it take to to convince you? Cause, like I right now, I'm skeptical that I could be convinced.

I don't think Glenn Miller is real.

No, But what I mean, it's like, even if somebody brings a document like this is definitely a CIA document that proves that this is actually what occurred, you know, or something. I would be crazy skeptical simply because of where we are with technology and you know, the way we are with human interest in just doing something like that that might get us a little what cloud or something on social media. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, I was talking to my kid about something kind of similar to that. They were just really fed up with the whole like being bullied into having a position on Palestine and Israel. Like my kid, my fourteen year old kid, like just fed up with this, and literally it was like I couldn't possibly have a stance or an opinion on it that would be a value to the point where I'm just I don't feel the need to just talk about it all the time because I don't really have anything to say. But then you have so many people flooding with all of this information slash misinformation, and that's they're fed up by that too, because it's just so much stuff out there that it's almost like it makes your head spin and like, am I trying to Are people trying to play me?

They're bullying me?

And we know it's like so many different sides of things that it is stymying. You know, it really does kind of make you give you pause, and it's like, can I trust anything? Can I trust any of this?

Yeah? I don't know. We also know that committing pseudo side faking one's death is is incredibly difficult, like even back then. And I think you guys are making great points about the post truth environment, right, Like evidence can be faked now quite effectively. By the way, especially if we're talking about you know, just a screen grab of apparently blurry document. You can make that stuff. You can make it at home, try it out yourself. I'm kidding, don't it's probably a crime on some level.

Is kind of fun, like, get some photoshop time in.

It's fun. It's a good basic skill to have, right, especially in this gig economy. But the thing is there.

I read in my mind, I read that as gig economy.

There we go, yeah, okay, let's let's do you know what, Let's be the first three person Ted Talk gig Academy and then we'll just sort of yes and through it.

Right sick. It so so much synergy in that Ted Talk.

Mm hmm. We're really we're really leveraging our senergy. Look as far as we can tell, folks, and there is a lot of work that's gone into this. Miller does not appear to have faked his death, or there's no proof that he did. So it does appear that he did leave on that plane, was leaving on a jet plane and never landed in Paris. So you can find more and more stuff. Like a doctor Chris Valenti is probably one of the more famous or infamous people with alternative theories about what happened to Miller. And he he's got some problems. It's a story for another day. Maybe he claimed that he got a phone call from a government official who was threatening him and saying, you know, harm is going to come to your family and to you if you reveal the truth about Glenn Miller. And then he said he could not reveal his findings as a result.

Oh wow, of course, no, I'm just joking. I mean, that's I don't know the I think. It's still astounding to me that in May of twenty twenty three, CBS News, like a local channel in Tampa, can put on an entire story that only lasts a couple of minutes, right, But there's a there's an actual reporter out in the field talking to this guy, doctor James DiAngelo, who says, yes, I was an oncologist, but now I'm obsessed with searching for Glenn Miller and I think I know where he is. They do the whole story on it, tell it again, right, and then at the end of the story it's basically like, oh, well, we think we know the serial number for the engine, so if we did find the engine, we could prove that it was the correct one, which is something but just something, but it's also nothing.

It's kind of Oak Island esque.

Yeah.

Uh, this is the truth though sadly, people disappear every day. And if we go back to Dennis Spratt and I believe our pal Jordan agrees with him, this guy who did the best investigation so far, the most credible one. He believes it is a perfect storm of bad weather, human error, and defects in the Norseman aircraft and that brought the plane down. But until there's conclusive proof, until there's that engine with the serial number or human remains, then these alternative explanations are going to proliferate. So it's a pickle m h.

Yeah, and again huge shout out to Jordan who does great work on all kinds.

Of history mysteries, specifically.

Ones that involve musicians and rivals. Was a cool show still out there that it ended, but there's some there's a good catalog out there. Please do check out Stone's Touring Party it ended as well, and there's some great bonus content in there, and we're just really.

Proud of that show.

And I think it's a really interesting history of a band and of the United States and what it was like, you know, to be a kid going to a concert in the South, you know in the nineteen early nineteen seventies, you know, where the atmosphere was definitely a little bit fraud.

Yeah, guys, gotta just shout out a website really quick because I found it to be fascinating and research here t I g h R dot org. There's like a five I think it's more more than this, but a five part series of just words, you know, written on a web page, but it gives you some of the most detailed information about flight logs and times and you know, what communications were supposed to occur when that flight was going to take off on it was on the fifteenth of December, right, nineteen forty four. But it just I really enjoyed the way I could see a full picture right of military personnel that are supposed to log certain things with certain groups, and it didn't seem to happen that morning, or at least officially it didn't happen, which makes you wonder.

We can't wait to hear your thoughts, folks. Is this a case of tragic death compounded by interest in a public figure or is there more to the story something they don't want you to know? Tell us and also tune in later, because fans of JD. Salinger, the time has come. We're gonna have our pal Jordan over on air in the near future to talk about the catcher and the Rye and whether it was a trigger for assassinations.

That's what a bomb sounds like when it's falling in a cartoon. Anyway, Sorry, this is a nose flue, you guys. I found this plastic thing laying around my studio, and then I was at a music store and I saw the same one and I was like, what the heck is that music story? That's a nose flut. I'm like, how did this end up? In my studio and then I looked at a video on how to play it. It's a stupid instrument, but you can't make that whistle sound like a like a cartoon bomb falling. What do you think the stupidest instruments are? How do you feel about the trombone? Got any theories about Glenn Miller and then how he may have disappeared?

Let us know.

Yeah, you can find us all over the place. Hey, we are conspiracy stuff on YouTube. That is primary, right now, go back to YouTube. Make sure you've got your what is it notifications? Now, guys, hit the bell button. Make sure you've got that. We're gonna be putting up videos and more videos with our faces. Hopefully at least three of you are interested in that.

Well, there's three of us, so that'd be one.

Apiece exactly, and then we'd be in business. You can find us on x on Facebook, also conspiracy stuff, Instagram and TikTok conspiracy Stuff show.

And there's other ways to get in touch with us, aren't there. That's right. You can call us any old time day, any old time of night. We've got a number. We keep it simple. Say it with us at home. One eight three three std wytk. You'll hear a hopefully familiar voice. You will hear a beep like so beep or maybe a nose flute effect. Kidding, it's a beep. And when you hear that, you'll have three minutes. Those three minutes are yours. Go nuts, Tell us what's on your mind, Give us leads to new episodes. Let us know if we can use your name and or message on the air. Most importantly, if three minutes doesn't fit, we got your back. Send us the link, send us the footage, send us the videos. Take us to the edge of the rabbit hole. We will do the rest. All you have to do is drop us a line at our good old fashioned email address where.

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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. 
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