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October 28, 2015: The Amityville Horror Hoax - Joel Martin & Bill Birnes

Oct 28, 2015
2h 24m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell presents a bombshell revelation with journalist Joel Martin and author Bill Birnes: the Amityville Horror was a deliberate hoax. Martin, present the night of the DeFeo family murders in 1974, recounts how attorney William Weber admitted on his radio show that he and George Lutz fabricated the haunting over bottles of champagne to generate book and movie profits.

Martin details how parapsychologist Stephen Kaplan spent 20 years investigating the fraud, systematically debunking each claim. The demon cat was a neighbor's pet, the oozing walls were fingerprint powder residue, the red room was chipping paint, and the green slime was leftover forensic chemicals. Weber later sued Lutz for his share after Lutz fled to the West Coast without paying. Martin also reveals the eerie personal toll, including learning of his wife's death by car just minutes before taping the Weber interview.

Bill Birnes then shares a stunning claim from a former intelligence officer: Father Malachi Martin, the famed Catholic scholar and exorcist, served as a cooperating individual for the CIA. According to this source, Martin retrieved an ancient artifact containing alien mathematical data from a Paris hotel room after the original finder was dispatched by an operative.

Key Moments

  1. Transcript

    Art calls Amityville a hoax revelation: Art frames the episode as a duty to reveal whether the famous Amityville Horror story was a hoax.

  2. Transcript

    Weber admits the fantasy: Martin says attorney William Weber and George Lutz created the fantasy and Weber admitted it on the radio.

  3. Transcript

    Hoax over champagne: Martin says the story was created over bottles of champagne or wine.

  4. Transcript

    The red room was paint: Martin says the famous red room was just chipping paint, not blood.

  5. Transcript

    Green slime was forensic residue: Martin explains the alleged green slime as leftover police forensic material backing up in the toilet.

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