Ronald Perdue is a pig farmer in 1980’s America. He is responsible for culling pigs (the slaughter of injured and non-viable pigs) which he does with stoic, unsympathetic abandon. In his free time, he is an avid reader and comments heavily on politics to his majority christian friends and family. He is expressed to be an honest man with pure intentions. He’s married to his wife, Celeste and has a daughter, Amber, who is away at college studying to be an engineer, and a son, Matthew, who is becoming a boxer. Ronald is angry with Matthews decision, and desired him to become a pig farmer as well. In flashback, we see Ronald explain to Matthew why culls have to happen- because Culling is a common practice in animal agriculture to ensure the health and welfare of the overall population. Matthew thinks this is stupid, and he takes a pet pig he names Mortimer who is blind and saves him from his dad’s cull, the act of which Matthew thinks is disturbing and unnecessary.
One day Mortimer, being blind, runs out into traffic. Matthew screams for his beloved pet to return to him, but Mortimer is run over, and gored to death. When he asks why bad things like this happen, Ronald explains that is the way of the world, there is no rhyme or reason to it.
On January 28, 1986, The Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster occurs, which Ronald watches on live TV. Many people in his town of Green Bank, WV, are crying, especially for the teacher on board, Christa McAuliffe.
When Ronald investigates some of the details of the event, they don’t add up. He starts to suspect the Challenger explosion was used by the government as a diversion tactic. He starts a journal detailing what he believes to be the government cover-up aspect, and it includes the following info:
“On December 12, 1985, just a month before the Challenger explosion, a US military plane crashed 19 seconds after takeoff from Gander International Airfield in Newfoundland, Canada. All 256 people on board died, 8 crew members and 248 members of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, making it the worst air disaster in US military history. Many, many people believe, for many reasons, that the Gander crash was orchestrated by the government. Harvey Day, a rescue worker at the crash site, says he saw 5 wooden boxes, and was turned away from the area by military men.
The boxes are largely supposed to have contained missiles and ammunition that may have been part of a top secret weapons trade.
“I have absolutely no doubt, I can categorically say I feel, I believe there has been an attempt to cover up what happened,” said Rep. Robin Tallon (D-S.C.) of his attempts to find answers in a Gander crash probe.
A bright flash was witnessed by multiple people before the crash.
Mysterious “casket-shaped” boxes were loaded onto the plane, the contents of which remain unknown to this day.
High levels of carbon monoxide were found in the lungs of flight passengers. Where did this poisonous gas come from? More importantly, if the passengers had died instantaneously in a crash, as was reported, how did they breathe this gas into their lungs? A dead person is obviously unable to inhale air, so the carbon monoxide couldn’t have come from a fire after the crash.
The crash scene left over thirty rescue workers with symptoms of radiation poisoning.
The soldiers on the flight were returning to the US from a six-month “peacekeeping” mission in the Middle East; the exact nature of their mission, however, was secretive and many people questioned what they were truly up to during their deployment.
The debris from the Gander crash was quickly buried in a dump (instead of reassembled to study the crash, as is the norm), and the US government sealed the crash records for 70 years.
In the months after the crash, as one strange detail after another emerged, the Gander crashed received a lot of media coverage. To reiterate, this was the worst air disaster in the history of the US military — and it was starting to look like it wasn’t an accident.
Simultaneously, Most have heard of the late 1980s Iran-contra scandal but few today are aware today of how massive the scandal was.
In a nutshell, members of the US government were caught illegally selling weapons to Iran in exchange for US hostages being held there. We’re not talking knives and handguns either; they were selling missiles and rocket launchers for millions of dollars. This group then used the money they made from the weapons sales to train and equip a group in Nicaragua (the Contras) who were engaged in civil war trying to overthrow the Nic. government.
But the real controversy of Iran-contra was that it exposed a shadowy group of federal agents, military personnel, and politicians who oversaw Iran-contra. This group was branded The Enterprise. The general public, almost all of Washington DC, and even a majority of the world had no idea this secret group even existed. Everything that was going on during Iran-contra — the missile sales, the training and funding of rebel armies who killed hundreds — it was all being done in total secrecy by The Enterprise, without telling Congress or anyone else in the government.
The Challenger mission, it should be noted, was essentially a military operation — four members of the Challenger crew were from the military and two were from major military contractors. Every major member of NASA’s leadership comes from the military.
Were these military personnel simply ordered to take one for the team and participate in a hoax that would distract from a situation (the Gander crash) that could lead to some really powerful people getting in some really hot water?
If so, it worked! The Gander became an afterthought when the Challenger explosion and investigation drenched the headlines for months. The public pressure that was starting to mount for answers in the Gander crash all but fizzled out. Ask anyone about the Gander crash, and few recall it. Ask them about Challenger; everyone remembers.”
He publishes his findings in a book, he calls “The Challenger Investigation: Why I Think The Explosion Was A Hoax”. In subsequent weeks, government agents can be seen conspicuously driving through Green Bank and asking locals questions about Ronald.
Celeste tells him she is worried for their lives and Matthew and Amber’s life as well.
Ronald is visited by men dressed all in black who he assumes are government agents. They call themselves Agent Meadows and Agent Brush, and have no descriptive features or tone of voice. Ronald nervously avoids talking about his book. It becomes glaringly obvious the two men are not human. The two men in black use a tractor beam that comes out of a small onyx box they reveal to ‘blast’ Ronald and Celeste, after which they are extremely docile, have some missing time, and wave goodbye to the men in black.
In the subsequent weeks, Ronald and Celeste begin having severe memory impairment, which appears alike to Alzheimers. Their children put them into a home, seeing no other choice.
Flash forward to 2018. Matthew, after a failed boxing career in which he was knocked out by an up and coming African American boxer named Ty Griggs, becomes preoccupied with the Challenger story. Griggs hit Matthew so hard he suffers from concussive effects and sometimes hallucinations. Matthew deeply resents Griggs as he effectively ended his career. When he calls Griggs racial epithets in media, he knows he will never have a career again.
Matthew, now dejected from his career and derided as a racist, begins going full tilt into conspiracy theories.
Matthew reads his dad’s book, which he had avoided heretofore. He becomes obsessed with the topic. He arranges an interview under a false premise with the living Judith Resnik, who is a college professor. She agrees, believing he is another professor interviewing her about the process of becoming an ivy league professor.
The interview occurs on a Sunday. Matthew ‘ambushes’ Judith with Challenger questions, and she gets angry and walks away, refusing to answer.
Matthew uploads the interview on his YouTube Channel, which he calls “Conspiracy Corner”. At this time, Amber is seen in graduate school, becoming a professor.
Matthew begins developing a paranoid, delusional perspective that ‘if the government could orchestrate the Challenger, what else have they done?’ He begins to swear to his YouTube audience that he will get to the bottom of it. He speaks to some ex military people interested in getting to the bottom of some government plots, some are about the Challenger, others mention a plan called ‘The Cephahedron’ which they believe is a plan to forcibly lower the worlds IQ levels so as to create a permanent worker class, intelligent enough to run the machines and swab the floors, but not intelligent enough to question what is happening.
Matthew and the group of conspiracy theorists use their former secret clearance knowledge to infiltrate a government building in which President Al Hardee is having a secret meeting. When they infiltrate, they see the plan is true- the government plans to lower IQs in an elaborate 13-stepped program to ultimately eliminate dissidents. They watch Al Hardee explain from a quiet distance. Al Hardee describes the getting rid of dissidents against the program as a “Culling”being necessary, and Men In Black appear and brief the attendees on the method of “Culling”.. The men in black visit dissidents and zap them with a degeneration beam that makes them forget everything to the point of Alzheimers like symptoms.
Matthew begins having a hallucination: that Al Hardee is actually a giant squid pretending to be a man. This delusion is so strong that he abandons the observing group and charges Hardee. Matthew is killed by secret service agents, and the other conspiracy theorists rush out of the building.
Flash forward to the Covid 19 pandemic, 2021. Amber Perdue is a professor, and teaching a class. Everyone In her class is masked. She is instructing everyone to get a booster after class that day.
One student asks why he should have to take the booster if President Biden can still get Covid despite being vaxxed. Amber Perdue tells him there’s a time and a place for questions, but public health is important. The student says, “Didn’t your brother die trying to kill President Hardee?”
Amber says solemnly that her brother was not well, after a boxing injury, and that his indulgence in ‘conspiracy theories’ was dangerous, just like not getting the vaccine.