The Riot fAct

Mr. Phil Schneider is wearing a yellow, short-sleeve, button-up shirt. His frenetic movements belie the calmness he is desperately trying to project in his voice. He opens giving some short biographical details which he interrupts sporadically with darting movements to show the audience the props he’s brought with him. The props are laid on a table to his right as he takes the podium. Schneider introduces the props by name, he explains a little about a few of them as he goes along.

It’s likely his props are there to buttress Phil’s bonfides as a geologist. At times during his presentation, he will refer to various props that seem to illustrate his points. We’ll get to the props later. What we’re after first are the following things Schneider tells us:     

1. Schneider spent 17 years in black budget programs
2. Schneider was a Government Geologist
3. Schneider was a Structural Engineer with Aerospace Applications
4. Schneider was a self-taught metallurgist (sort-of famous in his own right?)

So, this isn’t an exercise in debunking Schneider. Rather, I’d like to be able to prove him as a reliable reporter. If there is an alien base underground in New Mexico, that’s something we should know unambiguously.

Phil Schneider was 48 years old when his body was found on January 17^th, 1996. His death certificate lists the immediate cause of death as “ASPHIXATION BY LIGATURE STRANGULATION.” Under Manner of Death, the medical examiner has marked “Suicide” and written, “strangled self with surgical tubing.” There are many folks who have made tried to make hay about Schneider’s suicide. I am not one of those folks. The medical examiner who autopsied Phil Schneider was fully qualified and served the State of Oregon for almost 30 years. I will not call her expertise into question and you shouldn’t either.

We’ll start with what HE tells us and some generally understood facts. Born in 1947, Phil would have turned 18 in 1965. All things considered, it’s curious why he wasn’t drafted for military service in Vietnam with the other almost 2 million Americans drafted between the early 1960s and then mid-1970s. It could be that Schneider began college at 18, dual-majored in geology and engineering, and researched metallurgy in his spare time. Prior to 1971, Schneider could have applied for, and likely been approved, for a student deferment. Only about a third of all American soldiers in Vietnam were drafted. The other two-thirds volunteered. It’s hard to imagine that a patriot like Phil, who, loves his country more than he loves his life, would have skipped out on the call to serve.

So, under this hypothetical theory of Phil’s past, he starts college in 1965 with dual majors. Let’s say he finishes his BS in four years and likely goes on to get a Masters in two more years. So, by 1971, a newly graduated Phil Schneider prepares to enter the workforce. He has a few years to gain some experience. So, in this time between college and “the war (which occurred in 1979),” he has a few years to work at some of the places he has claimed to have been employed – Morrison-Knudsen Company, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Navy to include a few.

Of course, there is no real reason Schneider HAD to go to college. In the 1960s and 1970s, experience could be gained on the job and more easily translated into qualification. At the same time, degrees acted as less of gate. Meaning a person without a degree but with sufficient experience might not be immediately shown the door for not having a degree.

Summing up the above, this potential path for Phil is reasonable. He was born to a father who had been a Captain in the Navy. His mother was a homemaker. He spent his childhood and teen years in an upper middle-class home with all the advantages a white male in the 1960s enjoyed. It’s entirely possible that he was a stellar student who got into a great engineering school. All things being equal, there is room in the timeline for Phil’s government work in the “black budget programs.”

Unfortunately for Phil, all things are not equal. What if the years Phil Schneider needed to earn his degrees and gain work experience were not empty years that he could fill learning and building. There is another story about what Phil Schneider was doing in the 60s and 70s and it isn’t exactly college. So, the decision is yours. I will outline the high points of this *other* history so you’re armed with both sides of the story. You get to pick what you want to believe.

NOTE: I will not publish the source documents I have in full. They contain details about Phil Schneider’s conditions and symptoms that I think just don’t need to be out in wider circulation. Whether you think he deserves it or not, I plan to leave Phil with some dignity intact.

Turns out, YouTube used to be chock full of folks who loved to turn on their cameras and say amazing and fantastic things. Unfortunately, Joe had to shut his channel down and move on to other things. It’s a shame because I miss him and the work. Joe was a great friend.

At some point in 2018, Joe and I decided to do an episode on Phil Schneider. So, I dug in and watched Phil’s videos. I researched everything I could find on him and some of his family members. As a matter of process in my work with JFTC, I routinely put in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for military records and the FBI. Occasionally, a request actually returned “responsive results” from the Nation Personnel Records Center (NPRC)  and I would get military records in the mail for people of interest to myself and Joe. However, nothing ever came back responsive from the FBI…at least not until February 2019.

You guessed it – the FBI had a file on Phil Schneider.