The conversation shifts to the old days of Las Vegas when the mob kept order, Haggard's friendship with casino owner Benny Binion, and the time he lost $25,000 to a quick-handed hotel waiter during an Elvis show. Haggard shares his own UFO encounter near Vandenberg Air Force Base and his wife's sighting of five objects over the Colorado River during the Phoenix Lights period. He advocates for ending the drug war and legalizing marijuana, arguing that hemp could revitalize American farming.
Art and Merle find common ground discussing strange weather patterns, the feeling that civilization is approaching a major turning point, and the mysterious booming sounds both hear regularly from the direction of Area 51.
Key Moments
Father dies, freight trains, San Quentin at 19: Haggard tells Art his father died when he was nine, he started leaving home at eleven, riding freight trains, and wound up in San Quentin at nineteen - labeled 'incorrigible,' two years and nine months in.
Talking through the vent to Caryl Chessman: Haggard describes being in the hole at San Quentin for making beer in the yard, talking through a vent to Caryl Chessman - twelve years on death row, sleeping on a Bible for a pillow with no clothes - and deciding right there to turn his life around.
Searchlight over the cockpit near Vandenberg: Haggard recounts a UFO sighting from his own plane after being cleared through Vandenberg airspace - an enormous searchlight that filled the cockpit, hovered roughly 1,500 feet above for ten minutes, then shot off at enormous speed. He called the tower; they had nothing flying and no radar return.