Episode 215: The Frederick Valentich Disappearance And The Port Chicago Fifty | Monique & Amy

The girls are back with a birthday episode, and they’re giving “rager” a new meaning as they travel from “maybe aliens snatched this man’s plane” to “the U.S. Navy really said racism? never heard of her.” First, Monique gives Amy the birthday gift of a deeply weird UFO disappearance: the 1978 case of Frederick Valentich, a 20-year-old Australian pilot who vanished over the Bass Strait after reporting a strange object hovering above him. His final transmission included the words “it’s not an aircraft,” followed by 17 seconds of creepy mechanical noise and then absolutely fucking nothing. Then Amy takes us into the Port Chicago disaster, one of the worst homefront disasters of World War II and a story so enraging it should come with a free blood pressure cuff. Black sailors were forced to load explosives without proper training, officers turned it into a speed competition, 320 people were killed in a massive blast and then the Navy blamed the surviving Black sailors when they refused to go back to the same deadly work. It took 80 years for the Port Chicago 50 and other convicted sailors to be exonerated.