AJ Gentile is the creator and host of "The Why Files."www.thewhyfiles.com Visit www.squarespace.com/ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What inspired AJ Gentile to create The Why Files?
He was so excited. Yeah, it's a great show, dude. It's like everything I'm fascinated by. Anunnaki, Aliens, Secret Bases. How did you get involved with making a show like this? Is this something you've always been interested in? I mean, like, grew up Art Bell. Yes, there he is.
There he is. I mean, the GOAT. The GOAT. Dad was an overnight cop, so always overnight radio. So it was always Dr. Demento. Yes. You remember him? And Art Bell. So I kind of grew up with the weird stories. And it just got in the Twilight Zone. We watched as kids. It was, like, required watching from Dad. The old black and whites, the classics. So that was always in there. So I'll skip 20 years.
We had a podcasting studio in L.A. on Sunset. We were doing pretty well, hosting a lot of shows, guys you knew, like when COVID hit, Kill Tony came and worked out of our studio, Jeremiah, Metzger, all the guys. Didn't make any money, but it was a cool setup. But then they locked down the city, impossibly. And we didn't really know what to do. Then they set fire to the city somehow.
And the wife and I are racing down Hollywood Boulevard being chased by people with bats and boxes of Adidas. And we were like, this is too much. And we just started packing. That's it. We got out. And I didn't know what to do. So I'd been working in showbiz. not super successfully like on the cusp, but I've been a professional host, editor, producer, writer for TV. So I was like, YouTube, easy.
I'm a natural. So I started the channel talking about science and weird stuff. And it was the hardest thing I ever did. It was like impossible to do. And I started out like following all the consultants. High energy, smash the like, be a YouTuber, top 10 list. And I did that for a little while. It's like, ah, no one's watching. This feels stupid. And then I just, I said, fuck it.
Let me just talk about the shit I want to talk about. So I think the first good one was Operation High Jump. Admiral Byrd goes down to Antarctica with an armed fleet supposedly looking for Nazi UFOs, and it's a six-month mission, and in a few days they have to turn back, and it's crazy stuff. So I did that story, and I think I got 50,000 views. I don't think I saw that one. It's an old one.
What happened in Operation High Jump?
All right. Admiral Byrd goes down. This is just after the war. Remember, the Nazis were fleeing to South America, so mostly Argentina. So the Nazis had established or tried to establish a base in Antarctica. That's true. It's New Schwabenland. Now, people say they were trying to build a Nazi base and all that stuff. They were really just looking for a whaling station to get oil.
So Hitler didn't want to rely on outside sources. So anyway, after the war, they go down there. We still don't really know specifically why. It was supposed to be just to see how our aircraft would operate in cold weather. That was what they said. But this was a fleet that was armed to the teeth, like super armed. The first helicopters were the destroyers. So they go down there.
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Chapter 2: How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect AJ's podcasting journey?
What the fuck? I would love to know the official reason. See if you can Google. Is there an official reason why you're not allowed to go to certain areas of the Grand Canyon?
They use a VPN there, brother. I was looking at an article about the original article, and it says that the two guys mentioned might not have even existed. Right. There's no evidence of them. G.E. Kincaid? And another guy named S.A. Jordan.
Oh, so it might be just a story that someone printed?
Some horseshit? When I was looking into one of these things before, I found something explaining that back in the early 1900s when newspapers were a really popular thing to read, I don't know if it was like a game or if there was actual prizes people would play amongst themselves to try to get fake stories printed. If you could get the craziest story printed, you'd win like 500 bucks.
I might be wrong, but I think Jordan was connected to the Smithsonian, at least according to the story.
I pulled this from the Smithsonian debunk, which, I mean, obviously they would if this is the way we're going to go with it, but...
them debunking this and they gave two links one to the original 1909 article and one to a 2008 update and that's where i was pulling that from i don't trust the smithsonian they're exempt from all kinds of stuff yeah well like you're there's a law passed not too long ago that if you have native american artifacts that are important to that culture especially burial artifacts they must be returned unless you're the smithsonian then you can make you can make a case that you don't have to give it back how do they have so much power
It's a government agency.
Smithsonian's a government... Oh, I didn't even know. I thought it was a private agency. So there's no official story as to why this area of the Grand Canyon is off limits.
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Chapter 3: What are the theories behind Operation High Jump?
That's the theory. Have you heard about ley lines? Kind of. It's this alleged grid of energy that circles the earth. And almost like how magnetic fields work. And these energy lines have intersection points. And on these intersection points are things like Stonehenge, Giza. Whoa. It's in snow on a mountain in France. Wow. Where are the tracks in? Whoa.
Okay, what the fuck is that? No footprints, no tracks.
Footprints right here.
Yeah, but that could be... That could be the people that discovered it.
Right. Oh, there's a guy that did it, though. It's an artist that did this. These aren't crop circles. This is an artist doing it.
That's kind of what I was trying to say. Fucking incredible.
An artist did that? Yeah, it has the guy's name on that first picture we had here. Amazing. Simon Beck.
So the artist angle is a conspiracy angle. There's a man named John Lundberg who was part of a group called CircleMakers.org, which is an art project and also... a sociology experiment. He would make fake crop circles to see how people would react. Years later, Lundberg and some associates created a documentary called Mirage Men, which is an excellent documentary.
It's mostly about Richard Doty and his disinformation campaign on behalf of the Air Force to discredit the UFO community. Drove Paul Benowitz nuts. Bill Moore, who's the guy who essentially brought Roswell out to the public, Bill Moore was taking payments and being fed information from Doty to muddy the waters in the UFO community.
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