Direct MP3 download: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1934329/10076510-episode-3-real-conspiracies-that-actually-happened-part-2.mp3
Secret Grasp is a podcast all about the mysterious and difficult to explain aspects of life. We cover topics relating to the paranormal, occult, psychic, spirituality, conspiracy theories, urban legends, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, ghosts, demons, and other strange occurrences. Visit us at www.secretgrasp.com
This episode is part 2 which discusses 11 MORE real conspiracies that are actually confirmed to have taken place:
– Operation Paperclip
-Project Mockingbird
– FBI spied on MLK
– Operation Snow White
– Big Oil pushed climate change disinfo
– Big Tobacco lied about cancer
– Nayirah Testimony
– #FreeBritney movement
– Bayer Medicine caused AIDS
– US Government violated an embargo and then used the proceeds to fund a rebel group
– Bohemian Grove
In the next episode we’re going to talk all about demonic possession.
Intro music:
50 by tobylane
Link: https://pixabay.com/music/beats-50-1280/
License: https://pixabay.com/service/license/
Outro music:
Half Mystery by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5026-half-mystery
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Show Notes
Hello and welcome to Episode 3 of Secret Grasp.
Secret Grasp is a podcast all about the mysterious and difficult to explain aspects of life.
We cover topics relating to the paranormal, occult, conspiracy theories, urban legends, cryptids, UFOs, aliens, ghosts, demons, and other strange occurrences.
You can find us on all of the major podcasting apps.
Today’s episode is Part 2 of real conspiracies that actually happened. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I’d go back and check out Part 1 first. I might end up referring back to some conspiracies from the last show here.
It’s also worth noting that Big Tech Companies like Youtube and Spotify have been deplatforming some shows like ours for misinformation. So if you want to be sure we can stay in touch, it’s best to go to our website at secretgrasp.com and sign up for the email list. I promise I won’t spam you, and I’ll only contact you via email regarding major updates to the show.
You can also find us on more censorship-resistant platforms like Bitchute, Odysee, and Rumble. Again, all of our links are available on our website at secretgrasp.com
Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip was a secret intelligence program after WWII to bring more than 1,600 German scientists, technicians, and engineers to work for the US government. One of these was famous rocket scientists Wernher von Braun.
Many of these scientists had direct ties to the Nazi party. I guess you could argue that many of them were working for the Nazis under threat of death or other punishment. But some people might be upset that they basically got a free pass. Only one scientist was sent back to Germany after the war to be tried for his crimes, and he was acquitted. So even people who conducted human experiments got off scott-free.
The main reasons for Operation Paperclip were for the US to get an advantage in the both the Cold War and the space race.
The Soviet Union similarly relocated more than 2,200 German scientists, over 6,000 if you include their family members. This was called Operation Osoaviakhim and was conducted in a single night on October 22, 1946.
I’m guessing that if you had to choose, the Americans would probably treat you much better than the Soviets. Here’s a quote from Fritz Karl Preikschat, a German engineer recruited to the Soviet Union via Operation Osoaviakhim and held in the Soviet Union for six years
“Between midnight and 3am, when everybody was asleep. They knew exactly where I lived, first of all: a few days before I was captured, a fellow came. They had a key – they had everything to the apartment, to the door. There was one interpreter who told me [in German]: “Get up! You are being mobilized to work in Russia”, and there were about half a dozen soldiers with machine guns, who surrounded me. When I wanted to get to the toilet, they checked it out first to make sure there was no escape hatch. It was a very tight operation. They did that with every family.”
Project Mockingbird
Project Mockingbird was a wiretapping operation that US President John F Kennedy initiated. It was to identify sources of government leaks by eavesdropping on the communications of journalists.
So I guess you could consider it kind of like NSA mass surveilance version 1.0
Project Mockingbird wasn’t made public until the CIA declassified a 702-page document referred to as the Family Jewels. In this document, it’s summarized as follows:
“Project Mockingbird, a telephone intercept activity, was conducted between 12 March 1963 and 15 June 1963, and targeted two Washington based newsmen who, at the time, had been publishing news articles based on, and frequently quoting, classified materials of this Agency and others, including Top Secret and Special Intelligence.[11]”
The Family Jewels document included many other juicy details, including:
The reports describe numerous activities conducted by the CIA from the 1950s to 1970s that may have violated its charter. According to a briefing provided by CIA Director William Colby to the Justice Department on December 31, 1974, these included 18 issues which were of legal concern:[12]
Confinement of a KGB defector, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, that “might be regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws”
Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott (see also Project Mockingbird)[12]
Physical surveillance of investigative journalist and muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including Les Whitten of The Washington Post and future Fox News Channel anchor and managing editor Brit Hume. Jack Anderson had written two articles on CIA-backed assassination attempts on Cuban leader Fidel Castro
Physical surveillance of Michael Getler, then a Washington Post reporter, who was later an ombudsman for The Washington Post and PBS
Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee
Break-in at the office of a former defector
Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee
Opening of mail to and from the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1973 (including letters associated with actress Jane Fonda) (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport)
Opening of mail to and from the People’s Republic of China from 1969 to 1972 (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport – see also Project SHAMROCK by the NSA)
Funding of behavior modification research on unwitting US citizens, including unscientific, non-consensual human experiments[13] (see also Project MKULTRA concerning LSD experiments)
Assassination plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro, some of which had Mafia involvement; DR Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; and René Schneider, Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. All of these plots were said to be unsuccessful[14]
Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971 (see Project RESISTANCE, Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS)
Surveillance of a particular Latin American female, and of US citizens in Detroit
Surveillance of former CIA officer and Agency critic Victor Marchetti, author of the book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, published in 1974
Amassing of files on 9,900-plus US citizens related to the antiwar movement (see Project RESISTANCE, Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS)
Polygraph experiments with the sheriff of San Mateo County, California
Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws
Testing of electronic equipment on US telephone circuits
(Source: Wikpedia)
Don’t confuse Project Mockingbird with Operation Mockingbird, which is an alleged large-scale program of the CIA that began during the Cold War and attmpted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes.
FBI spied on MLK
Basically what it sounds like. Could be considered part of COINTELPRO.
The FBI also sent a package to MLK that’s referred to as the FBI-King Suicide Letter or blackmail package. It included a tape recording allegedly of King’s sexual indiscretions.
The letter doesn’t specify what it wants King to do. King understood the letter as advocating that he commit suicide. Others suggest it may have just been suggesting that he decline the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1971, an activist group broke into an FBI office in Pennsylavania and stole classified documents that revealed the FBI had indeed sent the letter.
Operation Snow White
The Church of Scientology is infamous when it comes to being litigious and trying to remove any negative information about their organization from the public record. Sometimes the lengths they’ll go to include criminal acts.
Operation Snow White involved around 5,000 church members working as covert agents who infiltrated 136 government agencies. Once inside, they removed records relating to Scientology and the founder L Ron Hubbard.
Big oil pushed climate disinfo
File this one under “no duh”, but basically the country’s leading oil and gas companies have known about climate change and the dangers that fossil fuels pose for decades. Yet they did nothing and ignored warnings by their own scientists in the name of profit.
A 1979 Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels quote “Will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades. It concluded quote “The potential problem is great and urgent.”
Instead of listening to this kind of advice, companies just buried their findings, and actually actively paid for other studies to undermine the scientific understandings of climate change.
Knowledge of climate change goes back to at least 1959, at a petroleum conference called the Energy and Man symposium.
Famous scientist Edward Teller, who helped invent the hydrogen bomb, had this warning for industry executives and other people attending:
“Whenever you burn conventional fuel,you create carbon dioxide. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect. If the world kept using fossil fuels, the ice caps would begin to melt, raising sea levels. Eventually, all the coastal cities would be covered”.
I have my own thoughts on global warming and climate change, as I’m sure you do too. But it’s clear that oil companies have been cooking the books when it comes to the topic for quite a while.
Big tobacco lied about cancer
In a similar vein to oil companies and global warming, we’ve got proof that tobacco companies buried evidence on the harm that smoking causes for decades.
By the 1950s, there was an unmistakable link between smoking and lung cancer. But Philip Morris, one of the world’s largest cigarette companies, didn’t admit that smoking could cause cancer until the 1990s.
Tobacco companies also denied that they can manipulate the level of nicotine in their products to create and sustain addiction.
Tobacco companies don’t even seem to admit that nicotine is addictive.
In Time Magazine in 1997, the president and CEO of Philip Morris had the following to say. Quote:
“If [cigarettes] are behaviorally addictive or habit forming, they are much more like … GummiBears, and I eat Gummi Bears, and I don’t like it when I don’t eat my Gummi Bears, but I’m certainly not addicted to them.”
I mean, come on. Imagine the intellectual hoops you’ve got to jump through to compare cigarettes to Gummi bears.
They also denied for a long time that second-hand smoke was harmful, and basically every other harmful aspect of smoking.
The truth is that more people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined.
Nayirah testimony
False testimony given before US Congress in 1990 and used as rationale for the US to back Kuwait in the Gulf War.
Nayirah was a 15 year old girl who testified using only her first name. It turned out she was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. Her testimony turned out to be organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, run by a US public relations firm on behalf of the Kuwaiti government.
In her testimony, Nayirah claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, taking the incubators, and leaving the babies to die.
In 1992, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch published results showing that there was no truth to the claim that soldiers stole incubators and allowed babies to die on the floor.
#Freebritney movement
A social movement to grant American singer Britney Spears autonomy from her conservatorship that began in 2008.
If you’re old enough, you probably remember footage of Britney Spears having a mental breakdown and shaving her head.
Britney Spears has been involuntarily placed in psychiatric care a couple of times. Following that, her father filed a petition to get temporary conservatorship of Britney Spears, which got made permanent the same year.
Basically it gave her dad control over all of her personal affairs. She was banned from driving, being able to marry, to have a child, or basically live her life as an adult. Basically she was being held hostage by her own family and told how to live every aspect of her life.
Many celebrities including Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, and Cher supported Britney and eventually the conservatorship was ended. California governor Gavin Newsom also signed a bill nicknamed #Freebritney into law that closes loopholes in conservatorships and improves transparency.
The US government violated an embargo by selling weapons to Iran, and then used the money to support Nicaraguan militants.
In 1985, the Regan administration sold arms to Iran, which was then under an embargo. The profits were later used to fund an anticommunist rebel group in Nicaragua called the Contras.
It started off when 7 American hostages were taken by a group in Lebanon with ties to Iran. The US sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the freedom of the hostages. In the end only 5 of the 7 hostages were released.
Bohemian Grove
Every July, some of the richest and most powerful men in the world head to Bohemian Grove.
It’s a campground in California that covers over 2,500 acres.
Former US presidents and leaders of big corporations attend.
What actually happens there is hard to confirm, we have footage from Alex Jones in the 2000s that would seem to suggest they do some kind of theatrical reinactment featuring a giant owl statue.
Some people say that they’re sacrificing children to the god Molech, but of course that’s just speculation.
Secret meetings are nothing new. You’ve got other annual conferences like Bilderberg or the Trilateral Commission that happen every year as well.
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In the next episode, I’m going to go over some real-life conspiracies that have actually been confirmed to have happened.
Just a reminder as well that if you have a strange, creepy, or weird real life story you’d like to share on the show, you can email me. Secretgrasp (at) gmail.com. You can either send an MP3 file of yourself telling the story, or write it out for me to read on the show.
We’ll be in touch soon.