On October 1, 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends. The abduction occurred while her mother slept soundly in the room next door. This was the rarest type of all kidnappings — a stranger abduction from the home — and it triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, along with a media frenzy. By the time it was all over, actress Winona Ryder would even offer a reward for Polly’s safe return; a move investigative journalist Kim Cross said police asked her to walk back for fears it would draw opportunists and waste resources hunting false leads.
Cross joined George Knapp to discuss the way the case was perceived in the public, and the way it was handled. That included discussion of how the media portrayed and the public perceived Polly’s father, the use of Ryder and other celebrities as a tool to keep the story in the public eye, and mistakes made by the police in the early stages of the abduction; such as not issuing a radio alert of the abduction that could have saved her life. That call, ironically, was made due to fears that the media would get the story over radio scanners. These are insights Cross was uniquely positioned to share in her new book, In Light of All Darkness, as her father-in-law, Eddie Freyer, was not only instrumental in eventually capturing Polly’s murderer, he continues to teach law enforcement investigators lessons learned from the case.
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In the second half, British UFO researcher and author Mark Olly joined George to discuss his new book on the 1983 Llanilar UFO crash in Wales, a case he and others have dubbed “Europe’s Roswell.” Mark told Knapp that the case parallels Roswell in many ways. This includes the recovery of a mysterious metal – in this case, a material composed mostly of the rare earth element lanthanum that the researcher who recovered the metal turned into keychains for friends – and government obfuscation and cover-up. In this case, the forest service came in and removed all trees with evidence of damage from the crash, claiming they were removed due to wind damage, Olly explained.
He also related how the local UFO researcher Gary Rowe, who was able to locate and remove the material with the assistance of a local farmer, was approached by Men in Black type characters who asked him to return the material, which he refused to do. That material, which proved to be comprised mainly of lanthanum as noted, has now been analyzed by labs in both Europe and the United States after sitting in storage for decades, and Olly hopes that these analyses will continue to provide new insights.
KNAPP'S NEWS:
George Knapp shares a wide variety of news articles that challenge our preconceived notions about everything from animal rights to the nature of gravity itself:
- Stunning Images From the James Webb Space Telescope
- Physicists Challenge "Fundamental Nature of Gravity" With New Theory
- Two Men Accused of Killing 3,600 Bald Eagles and Other Rare Birds
- Lost World of Lagoons Discovered in Atacama Desert
- SETI Searches for Life at Previously Unexplored Frequencies
- What Would it Means to Treat Animals Fairly?