Why This 1998 Conspiracy Show Got Instantly Suppressed (Phenomenon The Lost Archives)

➡ The podcast “Under the Docks” with Paranoid American and Sean Chris discusses a series called “Phenomenon, the Lost Archives” hosted by Dean Stockwell. The series, which aired for one season in 1998, is a mix of investigative reporting and mystery, covering real stories and interviews. The hosts discuss an episode titled “American Midnight” which delves into the mysterious deaths of two kids, Don Henry and Kevin Ives, linked to the Iran Contra scandal, CIA drug smuggling, and corruption at various levels of government. The episode highlights the parents’ quest for truth and justice, challenging the official narrative of their sons’ deaths.
➡ This text discusses a conspiracy involving drug smuggling and arms dealing in Mena, Arkansas during the 1980s. The operation was allegedly run by Barry Seal, a former pilot, who used a private airport to transport cocaine from the Medean cartel and firearms to Iran. Two teenagers, Don Henry and Kevin Ives, stumbled upon one of these drug drops and were subsequently killed, leading to a cover-up. Despite the dangerous and illegal activities, the operation was never fully exposed or held accountable due to its connections with high-ranking officials.
➡ Barry Seal’s lawyer revealed that Seal owed the IRS $98 million, which was surprising. The case was handled by a corrupt county prosecutor, Dan Harmon, who was later charged with multiple felonies. Despite Harmon’s corruption, the case was never reopened, leading to speculation of higher-level involvement. The operation continued even after Seal’s death and the case’s national attention, with Southern Air Transport moving their operations to Mena, Arkansas, and the federal investigation fizzling out in 1991.
➡ The text talks about a lesser-known Telemundo channel run by NBC in the 90s, and the author’s positive opinion about it. The author encourages readers to share their experiences with the channel in the comments. They also promote their research and comics on paranoidamerican.com, and Sean Chris’s content on killthemockingbirds.com. Lastly, they urge readers to support Paranoid American by purchasing merchandise and art.

All the witnesses that got murdered, all the people that end up dead around this thing. Th. This was never meant to come to light. Under the docks, yeah under the docks Buried deeper we breaking the locks. They collecting dots under the docks under the docks, yeah under the docks. Ahoy, mateys. This is under the Docks with Paranoid American and Sean Chris, charting through treacherous ways of documentaries to let you know, do they sink or do they swim? And if you have a documentary you think we should watch, go visit paranoidamerican.com and kill them birds dot com.

Don’t forget to, like, subscribe and share. Share, share the show and post all your snarky comments and everything. We love them. We eat them up. This one is another one out of my personal archive. I would also be shocked if anyone has heard of or seen the series before, even when I bring it up now with people like, oh, no. Dean Stockwell was a host of a conspiracy show. What are you talking about? So this is a series called Phenomenon, the Lost Archives. It was hosted by Dean Stockwell, who was the sidekick in Quantum Leap. If you ever watch Quantum Leap, he’s the guy that’s always hitting Ziggy.

So he hosted this show that lasted for one season. It was about 14 episodes in 1998. And it’s sort of a combination of X Files and Unsolved Mysteries, but with a much heavier lean into, like, investigative reporting, where they actually go and. And do interviews with people and victims and prosecutors and experts. And it’s so. It. It’s not fictional like X Files, and it’s not, like, reenacted the same way that Unsolved Mysteries is. It’s kind of like, I guess, like America’s Most Want you can throw in there, too. It’s sort of those things combined, and, man, I don’t know where this even aired.

Even before we started recording this episode, both of us were spending some time trying to find out. TV Guide, IMDb, Wikipedia. And when I first saw this, I think that it was uploaded to, like, some Torn or, like, a Usenet site in the early 2000s, which was only, I guess, like, three or four years after it had aired on TV. But what channel, like, where. What network even aired this? I have absolutely no idea. It’s part of the mystery. Yeah, that. That is the biggest mystery. Because like you said, I was leaning towards Fox for a minute.

And then you’re like, yeah, doesn’t look like the similar Fox go to especially in 1998. And then I was like, yeah, you’re kind of right. We should be that should be recognizable and it’s not. And I don’t know where it aired. And I personally have never seen this series whatsoever. So I. I do feel that we may dip back into this well later on down the line. So just to preface this, that we’re not reviewing the entire series. We just picked a single episode. And my guess is we will probably return to the series for another episode in the future.

The episode that we’re covering, it was aired on November 6, 1998, and it was called American Midnight. And American Midnight is about these two kids that died in part with this Iran Contra scandal that involves CIA drug smuggling and George Bush and corrupt prosecutors and corrupt medical examiners, the Medean cartel, Iran. Like, it just. It connects all of these different things. And if you’ve never heard about this, then pull up a chair and listen up, because it’s important. Revealed in the upcoming episodes of this program are the contents of recently unearthed repository classified by the secret government.

These are the phenomenon archives. And that’s what Dean Stockwell says every time one of these episodes starts. And it hits so hard. And the music and the little interstitials are definitely dated. It brings you back to when PlayStation 1 was like the hottest game console on the planet. Right. But it hits certain hard, man. Like, and I, again, I would have been so lucky to have actually watched this when it came out. I wouldn’t be surprised that we find a backstory that they recorded all 14 of these episodes and they just immediately got suppressed. Someone was like, oh, that’s not going on my network.

And this one’s a great example of that, because like I was saying in, in the intro to this, this is not X Files, and it’s not sort of America’s Most Wanted in terms of like the fake reenactments. These are legitimate stories and actual investigative reporting that you don’t even see news corporations do anymore, let alone a TV show that was ultimately made for entertainment. Yeah, it was great too, because you actually get people that were involved, from witnesses to the parents that were involved to actually people that were investigating it. And they go into detail of who these people were and why it’s important.

So let me just do a quick recap for if you’re not familiar with this story about Mina, Arkansas and Clinton and the Iran Contra scandal and Bush. There’s a million things that it ties into. But ultimately, this is about two kids that died. It was Don Henry and Kevin Ives. Don Henry and Kevin Ives. They live in the small town by Mena, Arkansas, and they’re basically out one night walking around the train tracks. There’s a lot of people here work in the train industry, believe Kevin I’s dad was a train engineer. So like they were just familiar with the area.

Just out in the middle of the night walking around and then all of a sudden the bodies are found dismembered on the train tracks. And the immediate official reports were that these kids smoked some of the pot a little too much of the pot they laid down on the train tracks and they passed out and that the oncoming train that they were so stoned out of their minds on 1986 pot that they got in Arkansas that they didn’t hear the train coming, they didn’t wake up, and the train dismembered them. And that’s basically, you know, oops.

Two, two stone teenagers, two dope heads died doing something stupid in the middle of the night. Case closed. Well, the parents didn’t want to say case closed. The parents wanted to look into this because they were like, first of all, my, my son ain’t no dope head. You know, I mean, again, we’re talking about two teenagers smoking weed in the middle of the, the train. Anyways, it’s like, my kid wasn’t no dope head. But also they started getting contacted by eyewitnesses. They would get contacted by anonymous witnesses that were like, hey, I was there. I saw guys show up.

I, I heard a gunshot. I saw this happen. Then there was one of the train engineers that was on the train at the time that said that the bodies were already on the tracks covered with plastic tarps, and that by the time they saw these tarp covered bodies, they couldn’t stop in time and they hit them. But they, they saw the bodies dead already before the train hit. So long story short, the official narrative breaks down immediately. The medical examiner that works for the state, he comes out and he’s like, yep. They just, they lay down the train tracks and that’s all that happened.

They had a, the family had a second analysis done on the, the two boys bodies they found one of them had, was hit in the face with what they think was the butt of a rifle and the other one had stab wounds. And even after they found this conclusive, objective proof, they bring it back to the state medical examiner and he’s just like, nope, nope, none of that happened. No one was stabbed. I, I know what I’m talking about. If you look deep, they don’t do it in this documentary. But if you look deeper into that medical examiner and his name is Mollock, by the way.

I just have to throw his. His name is Molok. But. And he, and he’s. This is a, a particular event that has to do with two kids that were killed by the state for horrible reasons. But one of the other cases say you will sacrificed if, if you will. But one of the other event, unrelated events to this, but that also brought Molock controversy in public was that he. There was a body that had been fully decapitated and he claimed the person died from a stomach ulcer, not from the decapitation. And he said it was because he died and then his dog like bit his head off or so it was like silly.

And everyone realized that this guy didn’t know what he was doing, but he’s employed by the state so he just kind of becomes the guy that’ll say whatever the state needs him to say. So that’s the, the main premise of these two kids died. There was a massive cover up. It involved all levels of the local government, the regional government, even all the way up to the White House. And that this is where the story starts to get a little bit crazy. And the fact that like they used the Moloch. I’m so glad you said it because that was the first thing I heard.

I was like, Dr. Moloch. Like wait, they didn’t say that, did they? Yeah, I had it like rewind it. I’m like, maybe I’m not hearing this correctly. And then when they use the marijuana thing, right, like, oh, they’re just smoking some pot, Devil’s lettuce and they passed out. And remind you, this is the 80s so like not everybody was super about pop back then. But if you told me that they had drank a fifth or like, you know what I mean? And they passed on the tr, I, I might believe that because you can get drunk enough to pass out and not know.

I don’t know anybody in particular that’s going to be like, I’m so stoned, dude. I’m just going to lay on the railroad track. I don’t. I’ve smoked a lot of my adult life, most of my adult life and I have never been in a scenario like that. If I’ve ever been in a close scenario to that, it’s been with alcohol. But I will say that I really like that they, off the bat, they start interviewing people. You, you get the mom, right? And then and the dad and they’re like, yeah, I think they would know about railroad stuff.

I mean their dad’s a railroad Engineer and you’re like, okay, this. Now red flags are popping up everywhere and this is a traditional conspiracy, right? This is not ancient aliens, like not saying, not knocking in the other conspiracies, but this is like the conspiracies that we can show. Hey, here you go. Here’s the proof. Go to CIA.gov this is true crime, political conspiracy, right? Like an actual crime happened here and no one was ever held accountable for it. It’s, it’s not necessarily an unsolved mystery because according to the state, this has been solved. According to the parents, it’s definitely not been solved.

And I would, I would argue anyone with a quarter of a brain that looks into this and sees all of the different trials that were cancelled, all the other federal grand jury investigations that just got cancelled, all the witnesses that got murdered, all the people that end up dead around this thing, th. This was never meant to come to light. And it’s, it’s actually shocking that we even know of as much as we do about this based on how secret they try to keep this. So one of the questions they start to answer is why Mina? Why Mina, Arkansas? What does this have to do with Iran and Medean cartel and drug smuggling and George Bush? Like how does that relate to Mena, Arkansas? Well, the answer was that Mina, Arkansas had this private airport.

And the private airport just had basically zero security. There was no one watching it, no one keeping logs and making sure that everything was above board. And this got exploited by a guy named Barry Seal. Barry Seal, if you look in is a wild rabbit hole on its own. Like he could have his own documentary series just on him. And in fact there was a movie from, by Tom Cruise, I want to say it was called American Made, I think that’s the name of it. And it’s about the Barry Seal story. And Barry Seal was a pilot for the youngest pilot ever in twa.

And then he sign up for Delta Force and then he ends up working for the CIA flying Air America and where Iran and Colombia all kind of come involved here is that one of the missions that he was doing for the CIA was that he would deliver firearms to Iran and make money off of those firearms and then take that money and buy cocaine with it from the Medean cartel and, and then bring that cocaine into the US via Mina, Arkansas. And basically they would just do a low flyby and they would drop it and they had this completely custom rigged airplane that was specifically made for dropping bales of cocaine onto the ground and they made a special little aluminum Wrapper that they would drop it on.

And the wrapper would unfold when it hit the ground. It would absorb all the shock. It had, like, a little parachute. Like, they had this thing down to an absolute science. And part of the deal that I guess he had worked out, allegedly, with the government, Was that, hey, if I’m doing all these covert operations for you, then I get to keep a kilo for myself every once in a while. And, like, this guy can keep a kilo and that I’m basically, you can’t touch me on this. Like, you won’t ever arrest me for doing cocaine deliveries in this.

This area of this Mina, Arkansas airport. So what happened is that one night, one of these bales happened to drop right where don Henry and Kevin ives were hanging out. They went up to inspect it, and right when they went up to inspect it, Whatever team showed up to, like, capture these. The drugs, saw these two kids. The kids saw them. The kids saw what was going on. They had to go. Because now they just found themselves in the middle of an international arms dealing and drug smuggling operation, which. Which had tentacles that go way outside of Mena, Arkansas.

Talk about the wrong place at the wrong time. On the highest level, they’re just probably kids. They’re 16, 17, right? You’re many times when I was younger, I’m sure you could attest to this, too. Maybe not the woods, because I didn’t live in that area, but we traveled and hiked and checked out all kinds of different things around my environment. I’ve walked so many places and. And just so happens that they’re like, hey, that’s weird. These duffel bags from the sky are just chilling right here. Let’s check it out. And at the same time, you got cartel members and who else? Who knows who else? Because this is my favorite part of the whole documentary is the guy dropping the load’s name is Billy Bob bottoms.

Man, that’s got to be the best name I’ve ever heard in my life. Billy Bob bottoms really explains everything. But he’s dropping these loads. No pun intended. He’s dropping these loads. And he even claims, like, yeah, we had it perfect. We had these aluminum pallets that were attached to these things. So that way, when it falls down, it doesn’t, you know, destroy any of the product. And not only were those kids there, there was other people there. Because as it unfolds, they start seeing eyewitnesses coming forward to like, oh, hey, I saw what happened, right? I saw that there was a guy with a gun and, and then a shot fired.

I saw that from. Because they, they said it was so dark. And if you’ve been in these places when it’s so dark you, if there’s no light shining towards your way, they can’t see you. But since they have some light towards you could see kind of what’s going on. And I, I tend to believe like this is a real, like you said earlier, a true crime conspiracy that is a classic of how the government works. And yeah, Billy Bob Bottoms, one of the best names ever. His, as his real name by the way, is William Bottom.

So it is Billy Bob Bottoms. And the important thing of why we’re even talking about him is that this is Barry Seal’s brother in law. So Barry Seal brings his brother in law and now his brother in law is helping also fly these planes and doing these drops. So not, not only is Barry Seal dealing with the Medan Cartel and, and with the CIA and the DEA and the nsa, he’s got George Herbert Walker’s Bush Bush seniors phone number in his like black book. So like this guy is, he’s kind of like the coke running Epstein in a way.

Right. Like he’s got connections to all the people he brings his brother on. And at the time of this, this documentary being made, they’re interviewing Billy Bomb, Billy Bob Bottoms. It’s so fun to say they’re interviewing him for this episode. Right. So it’s fascinating that they got this guy on camera. And at this point, Barry Seal had already been taken out allegedly by the Medean cartel. If we put our tinfoil hats on, I’m just going to be like it was probably the CIA or something. But yeah, whatever, the Medean cartel, sure. And Billy Bob is talking about how the Mena arc, the Mena airport is where this was happening.

They were doing four to five drops a week, that every single drop was between 300 and 1500 kilos. And that they were roughly making something like $75 million. And this is 1998 money, which this is depressing, is half of what it is in 2026. So 75 million in 98 is basically 150 million in 2026. And they make this claim that Barry sealed this time was depositing something like $50,000 a day into his bank account. So this guy is balling out of control. Billy Bob Bottoms is balling out of control. And they’re basically doing this with absolutely no risk, aside from maybe getting killed by the Medean cartel, which does happen.

And one of the claims they make too Is Barry Seals lawyer, after his death, talks about how he owed the IRS $98 million. Like, that’s wild. Like, never heard of that in my life. I’m like, wait, 98 million? So I’m assuming from all the deposits that he was making, but they never went hard after him for probably obvious reasons. Well, I have heard that the irs, regardless of how you make your money, even if it’s through illegal means, you still have to report that income. So the IRS is like, look, we don’t care if you’re bringing coke into the country.

You just need to pay us based on your profits. And then. And we won’t tell the. The other thing, too, is that they talk about this guy, Dan Harmon. So Dan Harmon was the county prosecutor of this case, and he’s the one that had the medical examiner say what he said. He’s the one that made sure that this didn’t go beyond this county case, even somehow. They don’t really explain. Everyone’s confused by this, that they talk and they bring it up in this documentary, but that there was a grand jury that said that a. They had to send all the evidence of the remains, all of the evidence of things found at the crime scene to a separate independent investigative panel, and that this had to go back through trial again.

But it just kept getting shut down. That kept getting canceled. And this guy Dan Harmon, who’s the county prosecutor, well, it turns out that he basically gets popped for, like, nine to 11 felonies, including drug smuggling and embezzlement. And, like, this dude was super, super corrupt. And even though he’s the one that was preventing this case from proceeding after he gets in trouble, no one still wants to touch it. No one wants to reopen this case. And the parents are sitting there like, this guy’s clearly a criminal, and he clearly is the one that killed this case.

Why is it still killed? Even though. And I guess the answer is, like, well, because he has someone above him, and that person has someone above him. And if you trace that all the way to the top, it basically leads to Reagan and Bush directly. So, yeah, they’re. They’re probably not letting this one slide ever. They also mentioned that. That three months after they’re supposed to have this new investigation, that’s when Barry Seal gets taken out. Barry Seal’s plane gets shot down. American hostages are taken, and on one of those hostages, again, they find contacts to the nsa, to George Bush and the CIA, and, like, stitch into their clothing.

Even after this happens, even after Barry Seal dies, even after the plane and the hostage are taken. They’re still running coke through the Bena, Arkansas, airport. So, like, the kids dying and Barry Seal dying, and this making national news still does not stop this operation. And, in fact, it ramps up. They mentioned in 1987, this company, Southern Air Transport, they move their operations from Miami to Mena, and they continue doing even more operations that eventually this entire investigation shut down in 1991. So this is at least like, half a decade after the murders had already happened.

And the federal investigation just fizzled out. Nothing happened with that. The grand jury, nothing happened with that. Six years later, after that gets shut down. This is when Linda Ives, Kevin’s mom, she gets contacted by two other eyewitnesses, and they’re the ones that were like, we were there. We heard gunshots. We saw a flash. It definitely was not two kids just laying on the train tracks getting run over by a train. One of those guys, name was Tom Nealhouse. He’s the one that says they hear the shot. And then there’s another anonymous lady that gets interviewed.

And, like, I don’t know if they just didn’t have the technology in, like, 1998 when they were making this, but, bro, I swear, as she’s talking, she kind of, like, shifts in her chair, and you see, like, the top half of her face, and then it goes back behind the black again. And I’m just like, I hope she’s like, you know, still alive. I hope they didn’t, like, oh, we know who she is now. And they took her out. Got her, Got her. And then in 1995, so like, a decade after this happens, 95, Kevin’s mom, Linda Ives, she talks directly to the FBI, and she’s like, look, what the hell is going on here? You’ve.

You’ve had, you know, grand juries, you’ve been mandated by the federal government to, like, reopen this case, investigate. And the FBI is like, yeah, about that. We’re so sorry. We didn’t find any credible evidence of any kind. We didn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. We looked into ourselves, found ourselves. We didn’t do anything wrong. So it’s just. It’s time to drop it, Linda. Let’s just. Let’s just let this one, you know, go by. And then one of the. The police that was looking into this, that was on Linda’s side, that’s like, yeah, this is fishy. Let’s look into this.

His name was Russell Welch. He slowly starts getting poisoned with anthrax over the mail. And He. He doesn’t die from that. He ends up dying in like 2020. So he survives all of that. But basically every single person involved in this case that came to speak out or that said they saw something was going on or was involved, like 90 of them ends up dying through murder or freak accident or passing out on train tracks because they smoked two joints or bare minimum, were threatened or kind of coerced to like get away. Because even, like, the sheriff is like, yeah, my kidneys almost shut down.

Then I kind of retired. Yeah, I didn’t like how that anthrax tasted. Like I said, this one came out of my personal vaults. I am. I love this entire series. This was the very first episode that I ever saw of it that made me look into, like, what the hell is this called? What other episodes do they have? So I’m sure we’ll revisit it. So I would say that the hidden treasures and the overboard moments for this one. The hidden treasure is just the whole episode, the whole series. Dean Stockwell, the. The ability that they had, actual investigative journalism and interviews with the people affected the fact that it’s only like a 40 minute run time and it feels like you get a very comprehensive overview.

Again, they get into Iran and the condonistas and Reagan and Bush and like all these, and they spell it all out and you’re not left, like, being confused. If anything, you’re like, damn, this government’s corrupt as hell. That’s kind of like the walkway from this. I think it’s probably the best TV documentary series on conspiracies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. This phenomenon Lost archives. So I cannot give it higher praise. That is the hidden treasure this entire series. And that the interviews in this documentary. Most of these people are dead now. That. That we do have direct interviews with eyewitnesses, the mom, the prosecutors, the investigators.

There’s nothing else like this. If you were to try and find another conspiracy documentary series where they go to this level of detail, I just don’t think it exists. So I. Again, hidden treasure is everything. I agree, 100. And I don’t really have any overboard moments. This is probably up there with one of my favorite documentaries I’ve ever watched. Yeah, I don’t have any overboard moments. If I had to like bend over backwards and come up with a criticism, it’s that at the end of this episode, you don’t really get any answers. Well, you know who else didn’t get any answers? The mom of the deceased.

You know, kid, like, she didn’t get answers either. So I don’t know what I’m expecting watching a TV series if this lady never got closure. So I don’t. I don’t credit that against it. I think that, yeah, this one is free from overboard moments. All hidden treasures. No overboard. Gee, I wonder how this is gonna go. Sink or swim. Swim all the way. This is. This was really my alley. This is what I get into of, like, government conspiracies. Here’s the paper trail, here’s the proof. Here’s the dead witnesses. Here’s everybody, like, gone. That doesn’t exist anymore.

Still trying to fight it. And then they give up because they’re like, I’ve been intimidated enough. Think when you just go, start talking about something else. So it’s a swim for me all the way. Same here. I mean, the reason that I pulled it out of the. The archives was because this is probably the. The crown jewel in, again, if we have to, like, make all the qualifiers. But a. A TV series, like a. A sequential series about conspiracies. I’ve got a bunch. There’s a bunch that I actually like. This is the top of them. And what’s crazy to me is, again, like, I don’t even know where this aired or when it aired or how it aired.

The closest that I got was some forum discussion where someone’s like, oh, yeah, they aired that on channel 52. And I don’t even know what channel 52 is, man. The closest I found was a Telemundo channel run by NBC in the late 90s on the West Coast. I don’t think that that’s it. I have no idea. But, yeah, this. This one is probably completely unheard of. If. If you’ve heard of this or if you’ve seen this before, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Like, how did you find it? When did you find it? What did you think of it? I.

I don’t have enough good things to say about it. So, yeah, all. All the way Swim. And if you want more high praise and you want to see how this influenced, you can check out all the comics and all the research that I’ve put together@ paranoidamerican.com and. And Sean Chris, he’s got some killer content at kill the mockingbirds.com, a podcast that’s been going on for. How many years? Are you at, like, a decade yet? What’s going on? Half a decade? You know, get in there. Don’t forget to, like, subscribe and share the show. This is under the docs Peace.

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