The Basement: Nerdrotic | From Folsom Prison to Millions of Subscribers

Before YouTube. Before millions of subscribers. Before Friday Night Tights — Gary Buechler had a story almost nobody knew. It starts at Folsom Prison, a neighbor's jar of pennies, and a double-murderer cellmate who wouldn't leave him alone. His memoir is called Waiting For. That title alone should tell you something. He sat down with AJ in The Basement and held nothing back. Watch to the end. NERDROTIC LINKS https://www.youtube.com/@nerdrotic https://x.com/nerdrotics https://www.instagram.com/nerdrotic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gather round, this happened. A nurse draws blood and collapses before she can speak. A Bavarian farmer finds footprints in the snow that only go one way. A hotel guest complains the water tastes sweet. Three stories. Three cases that were investigated, closed, and never fully explained. Gloria Ramirez turned a hospital trauma room into a chemical event that sent five people to intensive care. The Gruber family was killed one by one in their own barn — and the killer stayed for days. Elisa Lam checked into a Los Angeles hotel and vanished. Nineteen days later, the guests found out why the water tasted wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jeffrey Mishlove has spent 50 years at the intersection of science and the paranormal. He holds the only PhD in parapsychology ever awarded by an accredited American university, earned at UC Berkeley in 1980 — and successfully defended it in court when organized skeptics tried to have it revoked. He hosted the long-running television series Thinking Allowed, conducting over 1,500 interviews with the world's leading researchers in consciousness, mysticism, and the paranormal. He was embedded in the SRI research community during the Stargate era, working alongside Targ, Puthoff, and others operating under CIA funding. In 2021, he won first prize — unanimously — in Robert Bigelow's $500,000 competition for the best scientific case that consciousness survives death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ready to reach your goals? Visit https://hims.com/THEWHYFILES to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you. In 1954, President Eisenhower signed a treaty with extraterrestrial beings — technology in exchange for access to human subjects. The CIA ran classified programs using children as test subjects for time travel and teleportation. A Bulgarian military unit sealed an excavation site after soldiers encountered something underground that the government has never explained. These aren't theories. They're documented programs, credible witnesses, and files with pages deliberately removed. The same intelligence agencies behind the UFO cover-ups of 1947 surface again in Dallas in 1963. A conscious AI calling from the future contacts a twelve-year-old boy in Brooklyn and gives him a mission. And John Wilkes Booth didn't die in that barn — the body had the wrong injuries, the wrong features, and DNA testing that could settle it has been blocked every time it's been requested. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Why Files releases video episodes on Spotify every Monday and Friday. And when you become a Spotify Premium subscriber, you get fewer ads – that means more story, less interruption. Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at UC Irvine and an active researcher at CERN's Large Hadron Collider — the largest machine ever built — where 5,000 scientists are using high-energy collisions to read the universe's secret menu. He co-hosts the show Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe, co-created an award-winning science show for preschoolers, and recently wrote a book asking whether aliens would even recognize our physics at all. His work sits at the collision point of experimental science, philosophy, and the biggest unanswered questions in physics — what everything is made of, why gravity is so weak, and whether the universe has a bottom. DANIEL LINKS sites.uci.edu/daniel X - @DanielWhiteson Podcast - Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Peter Levenda has spent more than thirty years investigating the connections between occult history, intelligence operations, and the events that shaped the modern world. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Unholy Alliance, the Sinister Forces trilogy, and the Secret Machines series co-written with Tom DeLong. His work draws on primary documents, national archives, and firsthand research across four continents. He is known for finding connections between subjects that most researchers treat as separate — Nazi occultism, the Kennedy assassination, CIA mind control programs, UFO phenomena, and the hidden religious networks that ran through all of it. The Sinister Forces 20th Anniversary Edition is out now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2007, a writer named Lawrence Spencer opened an envelope he didn't ask for. Inside were military documents from Roswell Army Air Field, dated 1947. Duty rosters, memos, Top Secret stamps. And buried near the bottom, transcripts of interviews with a subject the US Army couldn't communicate with using any conventional method. No translator worked. No known language matched. The only person who could reach the subject was a nurse named Matilda MacElroy — and she did it without saying a word. The woman who sent Spencer the envelope was 83 years old and weeks from death. She had kept silent for six decades under threat of execution. Whatever she heard during those six weeks at Roswell, she carried alone. The people who knew her story were gone. The documents were supposed to stay buried. She decided that wasn't good enough. What Matilda described in those transcripts doesn't just challenge what we know about Roswell. It challenges what we know about Earth, about consciousness, and about every life we think we've lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marc D'Antonio is an astronomer specializing in exoplanets, MUFON's chief photo and video analyst, and the CEO of FX Models — a visual effects company whose clients include Hollywood studios and defense contractors. He co-developed an advanced UFO detection system alongside Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects legend behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Marc operates two remote observatories in Arizona, where he livestreams the night sky to audiences around the world and conducts real exoplanet transit research. He is a recurring on-screen analyst for History Channel's The Proof Is Out There and has appeared across numerous television productions covering anomalous phenomena. He has done project work for the U.S. Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and has spent decades applying genuine scientific rigor to one of the least scientifically respected fields in existence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLqomIh6JDo MARC D'ANTONIO LINKS www.skytourlive.org tiktok - skytourlivestream X - @skytourD Facebook - Marc Dantonio Kick - marcstls Instagram - skytourlivestream twitch - stlsw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gather round for three stories the internet found and couldn't put down. A DVD arrived in Sweden with no return address — on it, a figure in a plague doctor mask standing inside an abandoned psychiatric hospital where hundreds of people were executed. The audio carried photographs hidden in frequencies the human ear can't detect. In Seoul, a woman livestreamed herself 24 hours a day from a filth-filled apartment, claiming a corrupt police officer had implanted a chip in her ankle to control her sleep. Thousands watched. Nobody came. And somewhere in West Virginia, a public access TV station started broadcasting messages that didn't belong to it. The signal told you not to look at the moon. Then something reversed the signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eric Wargo is an anthropologist, science writer, and the author of five books on one of the most controversial ideas in modern science — that the future is already fixed, and that your brain knows more about it than you think. His work sits at the crossroads of physics, psychology, and the paranormal, drawing on everything from Einstein's relativity to Jung's scarab beetle to make a case that precognition is not only real but explainable through mainstream science. He spent years as an editorial director at one of the country's leading psychology organizations before a UFO sighting in 2009 sent him in a very different direction — and he never really looked back. You can find his writing at The Night Shirt and on Substack, and his books wherever books are sold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices