St. John’s warts

Note to readers: This post was originally published in January of 2017. Now that John McCain has, we are told, died, I think it highly inappropriate to run it again.  Ergo, I am running it again, testing the patience of the overseers.

Readers here know that presidents are selected long in advance of being elected. There must exist a pool of people being groomed at any given time. But not all make it – circumstances, maybe personality traits interfere. Hillary Clinton seemed destined for that office – something interfered. We do not know what. John McCain never made the cut, and was given up as Barack Obama’s foil in 2008, his last chance that never was a chance.

Looking back over his youth, I can see why he was at one time considered to have presidential timbre – handsome and attractive to women, photogenic, of the peerage, personable, even charming. I do not know what disqualified him – his legendary temper? Maybe just bad timing. For whatever reason, John McCain was chosen, but not selected.

The article below is unaltered. I cringe at some of the photo work, but take ownership anyway. I stand by my original conclusion: John McCain was never a POW, and never went anywhere near harm’s way. He was, after all, peerage, and the son of an Admiral.

Below the fold is the original piece. Comments are left intact.

In a land where actors read our news, entertainers succeed without talent, and where politicians are mere sock puppets for real power, Senator John McCain stands alone as perhaps the biggest hypocrite to ever stand before us asking for votes. That is his greatest achievement.

I have read several accounts now of the period of time that John McCain was held and tortured by the North Vietnamese. Certain aspects of it bear closer scrutiny.

But first, I want to review John McCain’s lineage, as we are finding now that every American president is running blue liquids through the veins. McCain should be no exception.

And he is not. By his own admission, his aunt was a descendant of Robert the Bruce, an early Scottish king and an important figure in Scottish history. Further, Gary Boyd Roberts of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, claims that McCain traces his ancestry to Isabel, an illegitimate daughter of William 1 of Scotland, or William the Lion.

I am not one who studies genealogy, as I don’t have the patience to sort through all of the ancestral databases around (or the necessary sideways vision to see what is hidden). So I am relying on the work of others. But the McCain’s do not deny their Scottish roots, and themselves lay claim to Robert the Bruce. So I am confident that John McCain is, just like every other powerful person in politics, news and entertainment in this country, of “the bloodline.”

McCain’s more recent heritage is also telling. An ancestor, John Young, served on General George Washington’s staff. His roots also go into the deep south and a slave owner in Mississippi, William Alexander McCain. His grandfather was Rear Admiral John S. McCain, his father the four-star admiral John S. McCain, who was commander of all U.S. forces in the Vietnam theater from 1968 to 1972. Since this is during the time that young John was a POW in North Vietnam, something seems …. not right.

In 1965 John married Carol Schepp, a runway model who would eventually serve as personal assistant to Nancy Reagan. He adopted her two children and bore one of their own. They divorced in 1980.

In that same year he married Cindy Lou Hensely, an heiress to the largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship in the United States. This connection also ties him to the Bronfman family fortune, a bootlegging operation gone legitimate with the repeal of prohibition. Every state has power behind power – in Arizona, it is the Bronfman family. McCain and Cindy Lou have a prenuptial agreement, we are told, so that John cannot legally take ownership of any of her estate unless by gift. And, I do not know who is on the deed to any of their eleven houses. That is all just interesting, but beyond the scope of this blog post.

John’s military career was hardly exemplary. Backroom talk in the 2008 campaign scoffed at him for ranking 894 our of 899 in his 1958 Annapolis class, for being a poor pilot who crashed two jets early in his career – this in addition to running into power lines with another. Nonetheless, says Wikipedia, John escaped injury and his flying skills improved. Wiki also tells us that he has a very high IQ despite his low class ranking. He simply did not apply himself.

I translate this to mean that John McCain was of the bloodline and was guaranteed success. He knew the right people and so did not have to work hard. He skated through the academy as a legacy, and was easily forgiven the huge cost to taxpayers of two fighter jet aircraft. For ordinary people, such antics generally mean the end of a flying career and a parking spot behind a desk. For John, it was pathway to success.

There is something else to be noted about a legacy, the grandson/son of two admirals: It is highly unlikely he will be put in harm’s way. Picture yourself as his commanding officer – do you want to take the heat for sending him out on a dangerous mission where he might be captured or killed? This is why I question his stint in North Vietnam as a bomber pilot and as a prisoner of war, especially in the period 1968 to 1972, when his father was commander of all U.S. forces in the theater. Something smells.

Thus do we find American blue bloods like Joseph Kennedy, Jr., George H.W. Bush, John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, John F. Kennedy, and most likely John McCain given fake heroics to bolster their credentials.

Ergo, I enter the John McCain POW story, with high skepticism.

The USS Forrestal

McCain was said to be part of the USS Forrestal incident, which appears to be a real tragedy in which 134** sailors were killed and another 161** injured. We are, of course, at the mercy of the military in these matters, as they control all information. However, photographs of that event look un-doctored.

What is odd, and this theme will be repeated throughout the McCain saga, is that John is attributed with heroic qualities in Wikipedia. He was supposedly on the Forrestal that day. Here is how it reads:

On July 29, 1967, McCain, by then a lieutenant commander, was near the epicenter of the USS Forrestal fire. He escaped from his burning jet and was trying to help another pilot escape when a bomb exploded;^[28] McCain was struck in the legs and chest by fragments.

This theme will run throughout his flying and POW days: John never runs. John always puts his fellow soldiers first, helps people in need, and easily risks his own life to save others.  John boldly goes … this seems to me to be a narrative. They are creating a hero for us. At this point I will give them the benefit of the doubt, and allow that John was on the Forrestal that day, but if he was where they say he was, he should not have survived. He claims his own aircraft was hit by a missile launched from another aircraft. Others say it hit a nearby craft. They say he jumped from his jet into a pool of burning jet fuel. He was carrying two 1,000 pound bombs. No way does he survive all of this, much less with only shrapnel wounds and no burns.

John supposedly escaped the cockpit and “… leaped from his plane into the pool of burning jet fuel that immediately surrounded him. About 90 seconds later he was blown 15 feet back when the first bomb “cooked off” and exploded, killing several nearby firefighters.” (FactCheck.org, McCain’s Plane Crashes). John then assisted other sailors in pushing bombs overboard to prevent even more carnage.

The official story now has the errant missile hitting the plane next to him and killing the pilot, Lieutenant  Commander Fred White. We are told that McCain’s memories of that day are wrong, and being in the middle of the tragedy, he could not be expected to have accurate recall. While I agree with that, I think it also apparent that McCain should at least amend his statements regarding that day.

As a Catholic boy I was steeped in Lives of the Saints, where ordinary people were retroactively made superhuman as examples to help us lead good lives. It was a revision of Greek and Roman mythology, albeit with lower quality writing. In the same manner, it appears to me that John McCain was being scripted for a different future than the one he had, that he was being groomed to be more than just a senator from Arizona.Wikipedia is crediting him with superhuman qualities. The USS Forrestal was part of that scripting. Perhaps he was there that day, but far more likely, not. The son of an admiral does not get put in harm’s way, nor miraculously escape death and or injury while being right in the middle of it all.

Moving forward, however, our hero, St. John, fresh from the Forrestal tragedy and wounded, immediately volunteers for more danger. Superheroes do that.

“With the Forrestal out of commission, McCain volunteered for assignment with the USS Oriskany, another aircraft carrier employed in Operation Rolling Thunder.^[32] Once there, he would be awarded the Navy Commendation Medal and the Bronze Star for missions flown over North Vietnam.^[33]”

(Yes, alert readers, I too see that footnote number ’33’.)

John McCain, Prisoner of War

The account of John McCain’s stint as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam from 1967 to 1973 reads like the Passion Play. I cite Wikipedia:

“McCain fractured both arms and a leg ejecting from the aircraft,^[36] and nearly drowned when he parachuted into Trúc Bạch Lake.^[34] Some North Vietnamese pulled him ashore, then others crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted him.”

It probably does not hurt to remember that this was during a time of war when propaganda was at fever pitch. The enemy, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were painted in the public mind as animals with no regard for human life, so that everything they did had to be done for the wrong reasons, and no good deed could stand without an evil one to go with it. Here it is said that they rescued McCain from a lake. That won’t do, so they also add that they beat him up in the process.

“Although McCain was badly wounded, his captors refused to treat his injuries, beating and interrogating him to get information; he was given medical care only when the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a high-ranking admiral.”

North Vietnamese, after all, were subhuman.

I am going to go with a basic assumption here – more profound conclusions will follow, but I am going to treat this whole narrative as real for now. Pilots are not given any more information than they need to know to do their job, so that interrogation is fairly routine, captors wanting to know details of the ship he flew from, his command structure, maybe even the size of his outfit. Since North Vietnam did not have a significant air force, there was not going to be a serious attack on the USS Oriskany, even as they knew where it was. So any beating and torture of McCain would have been done only for the sheer joy of it. And of course, that’s what we are told they did.

Once they learned that McCain was the son of a high-ranking admiral, all bets were off. He was no longer a POW, but a pawn on the chess board, the object became trade bait – what could they get for him in return? Indeed, we are told, the Vietnamese did play it that way, but releasing McCain at this point interferes with the narrative, so he is kept imprisoned.

…the North Vietnamese offered McCain early release^[44] because they wanted to appear merciful for propaganda purposes,^[45] and also to show other POWs that elite prisoners were willing to be treated preferentially.^[44] McCain turned down the offer; he would only accept repatriation if every man taken in before him was released as well. Such early release was prohibited by the POW’s interpretation of the military Code of Conduct: To prevent the enemy from using prisoners for propaganda, officers were to agree to be released in the order in which they were captured.”

So McCain calls on his superhuman powers to forgo release and give the Vietnamese a propaganda victory. Instead, he elects to continue the torture.

That’s questionable. The offer to release McCain was not made to John, but rather to the American command, so that the decision to leave him in prison was not John’s, but rather his commanding officers. He would have had no say in the matter.

“McCain spent six weeks in the hospital while receiving marginal care.^[34] By then having lost 50 pounds (23 kg), in a chest cast, and with his gray hair turned white as snow,^[34] McCain was sent to a different camp on the outskirts of Hanoi^[40] in December 1967, into a cell with two other Americans who did not expect him to live a week.^[41] In March 1968, McCain was put into solitary confinement, where he would remain for two years.”

We will look at photographs later, but for now note that none support the 50-pound weight loss. We might assume that such photos were kept private by the Vietnamese, so as not to enrage the American public even further … I suppose.

Solitary confinement is salt on the wounds, of course. It is a punishment far more severe than any physical wounds, a form of torture that destroys the will and sanity of all but the strongest of humans. I think that is the point here – McCain is being painted as an extraordinary man of superhuman strength.

“In August 1968, a program of severe torture began on McCain.^[46] He was subjected to rope bindings and repeated beatings every two hours, at the same time as he was suffering from dysentery.^[34][46] Further injuries led to the beginning of a suicide attempt, stopped by guards.^[34] Eventually, McCain made an anti-American propaganda “confession”.^[34] He has always felt that his statement was dishonorable, but as he later wrote, “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”^[47][48] Many American POWs were tortured and maltreated in order to extract “confessions” and propaganda statements;^[49] virtually all of them eventually yielded something to their captors.^[50] McCain subsequently received two to three beatings weekly because of his continued refusal to sign additional statements.^[51]“

That “confession,” to me anyway, reads like misdirection. If we don’t ask the right question, does the answer matter? The question should not be “Did McCain confess?”, but rather “Was McCain really captive in North Vietnam?” But the confession story gets in the way, and so we forget to ask the basics. That’s how it works.

Footnotes in Wikipedia jump around quite a bit, and by Straight’s hypothesis are done as a signalling device to insiders, allowing them to know what is real and fake. Above we noted “33,” probably signalling that McCain’s medals are fake. Here we note in the quoted passage above a jump from 34, in sequence, to “47,” out of sequence, and also a spook signal. But what is it telling us? He lists four possibilities, though it is not a complete list:

1. “That never really happened”
2. “We did that/That was our doing” (Intelligence)
3. “He/She/It is one of us” (if a certain person or company is flagged)
4. “That is false”

The “47” above is signalling, as I see it, “That never really happened.” McCain did not reach a breaking point because McCain was not a POW, and was not in North Vietnam during this period. McCain is a fake, and his entire POW record was manufactured out of whole cloth.

I know that is controversial. I’ll have more to say as we wrap his up below, but for now, I want to look at some of the POW photos. They tend to support my hypothesis.

According to Wikipedia, McCain had ejected and parachuted after being hit by a missile, fracturing both arms and a leg. His helmet was blown off by the force of the ejection. He landed in  Trúc Bạch Lake, sank to the bottom and managed to resurface. This is a photo of his rescue, we are told, though keep in mind that we have no way of knowing anything about these photos other than what we are told.

 

It does not look like McCain. Above and on the right is a photo of McCain in bed said to be during the time immediately after his supposed capture. (His hair turned white during his time of torture, we are told, so this has to be earlier, and right after rescue, as he is hospitalized.) Note one feature of the man being rescued on the left … a severely receding hairline. By that evidence, I suggest we are not looking at McCain in the rescue photo. But at the very least, the best we can say is that we don’t know who that man in the water is.

Note above in the Wikipedia account how the Vietnamese refused to give him medical care after his capture. Further note that he had fractured both arms and a leg. Further note that he was eventually put in a chest cast. But see here how he has indeed received care, and has a cast on his right arm. His left arm, if fractured, looks healthy enough, but even if fractured, why would they cast one but not the other? [Post publishing note: I just saw the cigarette in his left hand. He is able to move it.]  And, of course, the chest cast is missing.

[1/26/17: After discussion below and reflection, I have changed my mind on this – it is indeed a real photo, possibly taken after one of his two plane crashes, and done stateside. If McCain to this day cannot raise his arm above his head, it might be traceable to those crashes early in his career. And if that is the case, it adds fuel to the argument that he was grounded after the second crash – due to physical disability. Other photos shown here still fall under the “suspicious” heading.]

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Given all the contradictory information, I would look for signs of photo monkey business – while the lighting appears consistent, a source low and to the left, that line under his chin could well be a dark room improvisation used to hide the paste-up lines used to put his head on someone else’s body. Further evidence of that same phenomenon is shown to the right, where another line appears, this time partially obscured by a bed sheet.Look at the athletic neck! While it is properly sized in his cadet photo up above, here he looks like a linebacker on the football team. It could all be caused by his posture on his back, but take a look at this one:

Here is yet another shot of him from the same photo session (I would guess), and in the photos above where his neck is very large (as wide as his head), in this photo it is quite long, and the telltale line is there yet again. Stand back from this photo as see from a distance how that neck is just too long.

To the right here is a photo of McCain after his return to civilization, his neck now at regular size and length. This is a real photo of the real man, no monkey business. Everything above is, in my opinion,  doctored. The question is, why? More later.

Other photographs of McCain during his time of captivity are revealing as well. We are told he lost 50 pounds during that time, but that does not show up anywhere.

To the left here is an odd duck of a photo. This again must be right after his capture, as he is not in a chest cast yet. The right arm has received temporary treatment prior to the cast we see in the photos above. The attendant is attempting to monitor something through his clothing – perhaps his heart rate by holding the stethoscope on his thumb. The head has an odd look about it,, the neck now at normal size, but those telltale lines there under the chin again. Indeed, given the shadow under the chin, it appears again as if his face has again been pasted on another body.

[8/26/18] This last photo looks odd, but those above are probably real, and from his earlier stateside crash.

That is said to be McCain on his release from captivity, March of 1973. I don’t trust that to be true,  as again he’s got too much neck and his head now is much smaller than everyone else’s But the thing to note is that he is walking just fine. (See photo below.) He looks healthy. They all do. It is said that treatment improved after 1969 – from this photo it is apparent that in the ensuing years after his 1967 capture, he had three squares and a place to lay his head.

[8/26/18] I say now this photo is real. Where it was taken, the amount if staging involved … I would say South Vietnam or Thailand, and a completely staged event.

This photo must have been taken after March of 1973 and before August of 1974, when Nixon left office. McCain is using two crutches. The lighting is odd, the lower half of his face darkened while Nixon and the fellow to McCain’s right are fully illuminated. John is not really looking at Nixon, but rather to his left and past him.

It appears as though McCain’s head is pasted on another body here, that of a real military man who was really injured. This is the ultimate hypocrisy. (Also note, as we so often find with these fake photos, an extra appendage, the hand with no body by the red arrow. It could be that the that the bright spot under McCain’s chin is a shoulder emblem attached to that very, very long arm. More likely, they neglected to remove the hand of someone standing very near to the president.)

8/26/18: Real photo, faked up injuries as I see it now. His injuries happened long before in a stateside crash, and had nothing to do with Vietnam..

There are several problems with this photo, the most obvious being the absence of John McCain. But beyond that, notice that malnutrition does not affect heads and faces as it does the bodies. The men are all thin, of course, but the faces are not those of emaciated humans.  These men look healthy from the neck up. Also note that they are all well-barbered, so that while the Vietnamese were starving them, they were also making sure they had regular shaves and haircuts.

I do not mean to belittle the suffering of the men in this photo, whoever they are. Other people’s heads have been pasted on their bodies. The original photo, prior to doctoring, is probably World War II era, perhaps a prison camp in the European theater. There was considerable suffering in the concentration camps in the closing days of the war as Allied bombing cut off supply lines. This photo is not Hanoi. If nothing else, it is bad propaganda – no way would the Vietnamese allow such a photo to make the rounds. But for the Americans to say that John McCain is in it is absurd. Do they think we are not paying attention? (Yes.)

(Another version of this photo that I saw had a caption saying that while this photo was taken, Jane Fonda was two blocks away posing on a gun turret. We have covered that matter here. It appears that Jane, like John, never went to Vietnam either.)

Another photo has troubled me, this one:

In conversations with Straight as I worked on this piece, he suggested I consider the possibility that John McCain did not graduate 894 out of a class of 899, but perhaps that he didn’t even graduate, that he flunked out. I know from family experiences that military photos are often hasty, that they drape the very top of a uniform around the neck and take the photo and say “Next!”

But this photo has an even weirder quality about it, as if that face was pasted on another head. That bulbous neck is not the McCain we see above, and we know he was not on the football team. In addition, it is of poor quality for a class portrait, and the dark lines around the face speak of darkroom work. It is indeed John McCain’s mouth, nose and eyes, perhaps even his hair at that time (though it is never that dark in any other photos). The photo does not look real, and suggests that Straight is on to something. Perhaps John McCain did not graduate Annapolis at all. That’s why they had to fake this photo. I leave open that possibility.

Notice the grainy quality of the photo, not at all like a formal institutional picture. That could be because it is a copy of a copy of a copy, but also know that they often grain up photographs that are faked in the darkroom to hide signs of monkey business.

The pasted-up nature of the above photo suggests that McCain did not graduate Annapolis, but set that aside. After leaving there he was taken into flight training school in Florida. A member of the bloodline can fail in one endeavor and easily move on to another. There is more funny business going on here, and I suggest it is contained in the following passages from Wikipedia:

McCain’s early military career began when he was commissioned an ensign and started two and a half years of training at Pensacola to become a naval aviator.^[15] While there, he earned a reputation as a partying man.^[6] He completed flight school in 1960, and became a naval pilot of ground-attack aircraft, assigned to A-1 Skyraider squadrons^[16] aboard the aircraft carriers USS Intrepid and USS Enterprise^[17] in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas.^[18] McCain began as a sub-par flier^[18] who was at times careless and reckless;^[19] during the early to mid-1960s, the planes he was flying crashed twice and once collided with power lines, but he received no major injuries.^[19] His aviation skills improved over time,^[18] and he was seen as a good pilot, albeit one who tended to “push the envelope” in his flying.^[19]

How many aviation trainees are allowed to wreck fighter jets as part of their training? We are told he managed to destroy two, but survived without injury and so kept on flying. I am questioning here if bloodline could rescue him at this point. Those fighter jets cost tens of millions. It is far more likely that he washed out of flight school after flunking out of Annapolis.

I cannot fathom a man having such repeated failure and yet being allowed to continue his career as a fighter pilot. He has “politician” written all over him.

The John McCain Story, as it really happened?

John Sidney McCain III, son and grandson of admirals, descendant of Scottish kings, was born to wealth, married wealth, and so never had to earn anything. He was given a position at Annapolis, but as a party boy did not distinguish himself in any way. His graduation, 894 out of 899, was an alternative to flunking out – the people at the academy knew he was of distinguished genes, and so possibly passed him through. Or, he flunked out but was nonetheless admitted to Navy Flight Training School.

He tried his hand at piloting and failed. He was grounded. It was apparent to everyone in his family and to others in the peerage that if he was going to have a career, it would have to be in politics, and not the military. Thus does Wikipedia tell us that …

McCain decided to leave the Navy. It was doubtful whether he would ever be promoted to the rank of full admiral, as he had poor annual physicals and had been given no major sea command.^[68] His chances of being promoted to rear admiral were better, but McCain declined that prospect, as he had already made plans to run for Congress and said he could “do more good there.”^[69][70] McCain retired from the Navy on April 1, 1981,^[71] as a captain.^[33]

(Note the ’33’ again! It suggests to us that his rank of captain was fake.) In real life, this is known as “failing forward,” or “tripping uphill.” But if McCain was going to succeed in politics, he needed more than his half-baked period of military service could offer. He need war hero status. So it is that John McCain became a fake prisoner of war.

As a failed and grounded pilot, he was not on the USS Forrestal, and not on the USS Oriskany. He did not participate in Operation Thunder, the savage attack on North Vietnam in 1967. He was not shot down over Hanoi, and was never a POW. They made it all up.*

But why? Why not just let him serve his wife’s Anheusur-Busch distributorship in Arizona? Why was he selected to be elected?

“Spotters” work for the oligarchy looking for people with potential for high office. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for instance, is credited with having spotting both Jimmy Carter and Barry Soetoro (Barack Obama) long before they held the office of President. Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown is said to have spotted presidential timbre in his student, Bill Clinton. I speculate here that someone saw something in John McCain’s appearance, a certain charm and swagger and way with women that spelled “electable” and even “presidential.” John F. Kennedy had it too, which is why PT109 was invented. This man, they decided, could stand before a national audience and sell himself.

Thus did the spooks go into action, taking him out of circulation, rewriting his history, doctoring photos as seen above, getting him ready for a life of what is euphemistically called “public service.”

John McCain was destined to be president. He was selected. He was groomed. He was given a heroic image and a heroic false past. But it did not work out.

The year for his election should have been 2000, but for reasons unknown he was cast aside, and the job of president given to George W. Bush, no one’s first choice for anything (and with an even spottier military record!). What happened?

I suggest as a working theory that McCain’s temper cost him the job. His tantrums are legend. Some might suggest that we cannot afford to have a leader who might lose it at a conference table with world leaders, or who might launch a bomb on an enemy in anger. But it does not work like that. Presidents are at best ribbon cutters. Real power lies elsewhere. Any damage he might do would be easily limited.

However, McCain might have earned the reputation of being hard to manage, and that is a fatal flaw in an office that requires subservience to the power of others at all times. He might indeed go off on his own, do things that have to be undone, and eventually removed from office via the scandal/bad press route, ala Nixon. That is a real pain to manage.

How much easier simply to remove him from the selection pool. Thus, I speculate, did George W. Bush, a man even less accomplished but far easier to manage, become president in the year 2000 – John McCain’s year. It was an insult, but deemed necessary given McCain’s character flaws.

McCain was allowed the Republican nomination in 2008, but by that time he was too old, and anyway, it was the Democrats’ turn. He was put up as a sacrificial lamb. Time had passed him by. He knew it, but did his duty while Barry Soetoro, the new fair-haired boy complete with a fake name, fake background (and even a fake birth certificate) took office.

Thus did the presidential aspirations of Senator John McCain, like those aircraft he piloted, end up a pile of debris. All of the fake photos, the fictional background gone to waste. He was a failed project.

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*Natural question: If McCain was not a POW, why didn’t the Vietnamese blow the whistle on him? In wartime everything the enemy says is automatically disbelieved as propaganda, so even were they to speak up  it would be to no effect. Anyway, they had their own propaganda to manage. After the war threats and incentives probably keep them quiet. There is probably mutual agreement at high levels that certain secrets are to be kept by both sides. (Thus, for example, do the Russians allow the Edward Snowden myth to be perpetuated … tit for tat.)

** I just noticed after posting this piece that 134 and 161 each total “8”, a spook marker. Indeed, the USS Forrestal event might be suspect.

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PS: See the post that follows for more photo analysis and some great comments.