El Mercurio

Things came to a head when, in early July, one of these unidentified flying objects supposedly crashed into the desert just outside the small town of Roswell, New Mexico.

The US Air Force was quick to react, maybe a little too quick, some thought, with the military telling local newspapers that the whole thing was the result of a downed weather balloon.

But the heavy military presence, combined with the subsequent media blackout, led many to suspect that the US government was trying to cover something up.

Theories about what could have been were all over the place.

For those who haven't watched the episode Strange Lights Over Kentucky, which is linked in the description, don't worry if you haven't watched that episode yet as either of these videos can be watched independently.

And I will briefly recap the story in this video for the sake of clarity.

The UFO incident in early 1948 was highly publicized at the time, appearing in various newspapers and magazines in the weeks following, primarily due to the incident resulting in the death of an experienced and decorated World War II pilot, Captain Thomas F. Mantell, when he attempted to chase an unknown object into high altitudes, and because his plane was not equipped for high altitude flights, he likely succumbed to oxygen deprivation during his ascent, fell unconscious, and then crashed.

The question of why an experienced pilot would risk his life to perform such a reckless maneuver, a pilot who knew full well that a flight over 15,000 feet without oxygen equipment was dangerous under any circumstances, never seems to have been answered.

And he gave a newspaper interview with Chile's leading newspaper.

Not only was this Chile's leading newspaper, it's called El Mercurio, still in publication.

It's one of the oldest newspapers in the world.

Not only is El Mercurio the leading Chilean newspaper, it's the leading Spanish-speaking newspaper in the world.

It's read around the world.

And to this major newspaper, El Mercurio, Admiral Byrd was asked some pretty hard questions.

And one of the questions was, why are you stopping in Valparaiso? He said, we had to put in for repairs.

And they said, well, as far as we know, there were no major storms in the Arctic Sea at the time.

And so they were then calling off Operation High Jump two months into the six-month operation, and it was on the way back.

that Admiral Byrd talked to a journalist from the El Mercurio newspaper, and he quipped that we would be confronted with an enemy that has the ability to fly pole to pole at incredible speeds.

And so that article got published, and when Byrd got back to America, he was instantly put into quarantine and interrogated intensely.

Here's one of the most decorated and celebrated military men in history.

And then Admiral Byrd said something that made this whole thing a lot worse.

So on March 5th, 1947, a Chilean newspaper called El Mercurio published an interview with Admiral Byrd where he said that in a future war, the US could be attacked by aircraft flying over one or both of the poles, and basically that the polar regions were now America's front doors.

So historians read that as kind of just like a Cold War warning, you know? Like, the shortest route for a Soviet bomber to reach America is basically going straight over the North Pole.

So Admiral Byrd is just saying like, "Hey, we gotta protect the North Pole because that is a window for, you know, uh, some type of hostile force to come into America." But people like to point out what Byrd didn't say.

So one of them starts with something that he actually said.

In March nineteen forty-seven, right after High Jump, a Chilean newspaper called, um, El Mercurio ran an interview in which Byrd warned that America needed to be ready for aircraft that could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds.

Now, the official spin is that he was talking about enemy planes in the next war.

But this is a documented interview.

Wow, incredible.

You know that talking about signed shirts, when Platini came here in Argentina in 1990, In 1997, before the World Cup in 1998, I used to work for the journal El Mercurio from Chile.

And I went to the press conference and I attended the press conference of Michel Platini.

He was presenting the World Cup, blah, blah, blah.

But what Byrd said afterward is what matters.

On March 5th, 1947, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio published an interview with Byrd conducted aboard the expedition's command ship, the USS Mount Olympus.

The interview was given to Lee Vanatter of International News Service.

It was never published in English.

But it was there.

And that made me think, well, is there some sort of conflict going on down there that we're not being told about? You know, which raises, again, the big question because, you know, you had Admiral Byrd and Operation High Jump and his comments that he made in El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper about, you know, the U.S.

better get ready to defend itself against fighters that can fly from pole to pole with tremendous speed.

Now, the spin lately has been, well, Byrd was saying that in conjunction with the strategic thinking at the time that, you know, the Arctic was going to become a hot zone if a war were ever to break out between the West and the communist bloc.

And they're, you know, the latest thing is that they're trying to raise translation issues and all of the, you know, all of the normal academic stuff to deflate the importance of what he said and the context and timing in which he said it.

He said it after he called a quit to the expedition when the expedition was returning to the United States.

And he said it to a Chilean reporter who duly reported it in El Mercurio in Santiago de Chile.

So, you know, again, something clearly is going on down there.