Hear Me Out - Mysteries, Conspiracy Theories & True Crime

During world war 2, a strategy used as part of America’s battle against Japan, saw troops deployed to small islands in the pacific ocean. From here they would collect supplies, group together, plan attacks - or just simply use as a stepping stone to the next island. This strategy, known to the military as Leapfrogging, occasionally led to American service men and women encountering primitive and tribal indigenous inhabitants. In many cases, the tribes people of these islands had never come into contact with modern civilisation. The soldiers, in exchange for disrupting their way of life, would share supplies of food, clothing and tools. And cargo was often left when the military moved on. Visitors to these islands, decades after the war, have found whole civilisations, tribes and cults, performing rituals, burning makeshift effigies of world war 2 aircraft, and joining in worship in hope that the strange people from the sky will one day return. Is this the default behaviour of humans when faced with visitations that we don’t understand? Could the mainstream religions that have persisted to this day have come about in the same way? Is it plausible that primitive civilisations have been visited millennia ago, and our history shaped by beings much more advanced than us?

Armin Meiwes may not be a familiar name to most people, but in March of 2001 he committed one of the strangest and most horrifying crimes ever to have taken place. Meiwes, a 43-year-old German computer repair technician was convicted of killing and eating 43-year-old Berlin engineer Bernd Brandes after meeting on an online cannibal fetish website called the ‘cannibal café’. Brandes had responded to an advert by Meiwes looking for an 18-30-year-old to be consensually slaughtered and consumed. Meiwes is now serving a life sentence in prison for murder but denies the charges on the grounds that Brands was a consenting and willing victim. What drives a person to want to consume another human and furthermore what drives someone to want to be consumed. This is the story of Armin Meiwes, the Rotenberg Cannibal.

On March 26th 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe, California 21 women and 18 men took their own lives using a cocktail of Phenobarbital, alcohol & suffocation. This was the work of a cult known as Heaven's Gate. Heaven's Gate leader – Marshall Applewhite, had brainwashed his followers over a 20-year period into believing that a UFO, hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet (which orbits earth every 2000 years) had come to rescue them and take them to a level above humanity and that if they could put aside their urges for money, drugs and sex that they would be transported aboard the ship and taken off into the infinite.

24th February 1978 - 5 Young men from California set off on a Friday evening to go and watch a basketball game. Although they were said to be highly functioning, each of the 5 friends all had learning difficulties and various mental health issues, and were unaccompanied on their trip.  They all led predominantly stay-at-home lives but played together in a special Olympics basketball team called the Gateway gators and they were due to play a tournament the next day -  with a chance of winning a trip to Disneyland. Although often referred to as boys, they ranged in age between 25 and 32 years old. They were seen buying snacks after the game and were said to be in high spirits, having watched their team win. They then reportedly headed south in the direction of home. For reasons still unknown, their abandoned vehicle was found the next day on an inhospitable snow covered mountain track 50 miles away from home. An eye witness who first found the car says they were seen with an unknown woman and a baby. 4 months later, their bodies were found. Stretched over a remote area of the Sierra Nevada mountains, 11 miles from the car. All except one. The mysterious circumstances around their disappearance and the last few weeks of their lives,  are both puzzling  and suspicious and remain unsolved over 40 years later.