Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack - Season 7, Episode 5 - Updated Full Episode | Forensic Files

[Music] this program is about unsolved mysteries whenever possible the actual family
members and police officials have participated in recreating the events what you're about to see is not a news
broadcast when a spectacular solar eclipse plunged much of mexico into darkness no one imagined that the event would
spawn an astounding wave of ufo sightings sightings experienced by thousands of eyewitnesses all across mexico
and captured on dozens of home videos on june 7th 1992 36 year old sammy wheeler was found shot to death in his
car and the small town of stanton virginia was overrun with rumors incredibly sammy's twin brothers sammy's
old girlfriend and her ex-husband are taking turns accusing each other of the murder
but still the question remains who killed sammy wheeler and perhaps someone watching can provide
a happy ending to the poignant story of gordon page jr only after years of misdiagnosis did
gode's parents learn that their son was suffering from autism then in 1991 gordy vanished from the
group home in which he had been placed jointly perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery
[Applause] so [Music] [Music] usually when we hear that a person in some remote community is at a ufo
sighting we respond with a smile and a shake of the head when three or four credible people
report seeing a mysterious craft we may pay just slightly more attention but when thousands of people claim to
see the same strange object and hunters provide videotape evidence we may begin to think that maybe
just maybe there is more than a grain of truth to the reports which brings us to the fantastic saga of
the mexico ufos july 11 1991 the last total eclipse of the sun in this century perhaps the most spectacular celestial
event of the past 200 years for the residents of mexico city the eclipse prompted a festive celebration
thousands took to the streets as one of the world's largest cities was plunged into total darkness
in the middle of broad daylight no one imagined the entire country was about to be swept up
in a wave of ufo hysteria that afternoon a television executive named guillermo araguin was videotaping
the eclipse when he noticed an unusual object overhead [Music] it was presented on the news it was said
that a very strange object was over mexico city but nobody said what it was when i saw it
i said oh my god this is a ufo a real ufo i mean you can look at it you can look
the video and be absolutely convinced what are you looking at jaime moussan is one of mexico's most
respected television journalists for the past nine years he has produced directed and hosted mexico's edition of
60 minutes or sesenta minutos eight days after the eclipse jaime presented the aragine footage as
part of a special ufo broadcast the network was inundated with phone calls we asked the people in mexico to bring
or their videos to us because we like to see in if in the clips they had recorded the same stuff
the telephone lines blew up i mean 40 000 calls at the same time then the the system was completely shot out
we received more than 15 videos and we now know for sure that at least in seven of them
we can see the same exactly the same ship that was recorded by guillermo aragina
one of the many videos was sent by eric aguilar a 19 year old student at national
university of mexico he was setting up to film the eclipse from a rooftop when his girlfriend
spotted something unusual in the sky my girlfriend commented that it was a ufo we thought it was a joke
no one really believed her when she said she saw a ufo but within moments they all decided that
the object was not a joke at all at first all we saw was a white dot in the sky that's all we could see in the beginning
later we saw that this dot was shining brightly [Music] it must have been a very bright star and
we didn't realize it at first we didn't realize it until we saw the video tape later
we saw that this dot it wasn't a dot it was a larger object and it was giving off light it was
shining at virtually the same time 60 miles from mexico city a businessman named luis lara
photographed a similar object as i raised the camera you could see something in the clouds
and it was a metal object and it looked like it was made of two plates you can distinguish a dome
and it turned on its own axis it was silver plated a color like aluminum you could see clearly it's not a star
it's a ufo because it had a shadow in it if it were a star or a planet you you would see clearly that it would be
completely luminous but this one had a little shadow underneath yet another video was shot by the bratan
family in puebla a city 80 miles east of mexico city [Music] magnifying the baton video revealed an
odd wave-like disturbance behind the pulsating disk perhaps some kind of energy trail
jaime moussan enhanced the aragine footage and compared it to the baton tape the objects the photograph nearly 100
miles apart were remarkably similar in every aspect the video from puebla was absolutely
identical to the one we had seen with arregin in mexico it was for the first time in history
never before we you had a tape of two ufos in two different places at exactly the same moment the videos
caused a sensation throughout mexico but the ufo craze was just beginning two months later an engineer named
vincente sanchez took his video camera to a military air show in mexico city i was following one of the planes and i
saw a shiny dot in the camera i didn't know what it was but it seemed to be moving
it was undulating so i let the planes go off and i focused more on this shiny dot in
the sky [Music] what i saw was a bright round object about 10 meters in diameter it was made
of silver it was shining very brightly and reflected the sunlight a lot [Music] it didn't fly like a plane it was
undulated the object appeared undulated and moved around very quickly a year later a similar object was
videotaped at the same air show this time the disc descended rapidly and mysteriously disappeared
by the time the 1993 air show rolled around people anticipated another sighting sure enough just as a squadron of
helicopters flew by the familiar metallic disc appeared it was traveling against the wind so
much so that had been a balloon considering the force of the helicopter blades it would have crashed
it kept on its path very very straight and steady until it got lost in the sky optical enhancement of this video seems
to reveal that the object crossed in close proximity to the helicopters curiously the military has consistently
declined to address the matter the military hasn't made any comment on that sighting or any sighting
and there are many more where we can relate the military or military planes to videos and
however we haven't have any kind of answer from them since the eclipse in july of 1991 there
have been thousands of sightings throughout mexico there is no clear pattern although the
great majority have occurred in and around mexico city the witnesses range from pilots to
doctors to bus drivers and even school children [Music] these drawings are made by a class of
fifth graders who allegedly saw ufos in march of 1993 the pictures are strikingly similar in
detail three shining lights with the brightest light in the center [Music] the objects were silver with red
one of them was coming down and the other one that you could see in the sky was silver
when they were a little lower you could see the shape of the objects they were like saucers with the dome
everything's silver and though it was harder to see there seemed to be a kind of
reddish magnetic field we haven't found a single reason why these little kids made this story up there were so many
and when you talk to them you can feel the honesty that they trust me they're just little kids
they don't care about the ufo conspiracy they don't care about if they are real or not
they saw what they saw people really like ufos people really believe in ufos and we are now convinced that we are
living an incredible experience as a country as a society because it's everywhere
it's not just one people is many people with their eyes in the sky and a camera in their hands
now is the video era and the video is going to solve the ufo mystery are the mexico ufos real
it is difficult to deny the startling images captured on videotape though a determined skeptic would no
doubt find some basis to discount the entire episode but for those who have actually
witnessed the mysterious objects in the skies over mexico seeing is believing [Music]
next a bizarre murder mystery in which three people including the victim's twin brother
accuse each other of pulling the trigger on june 7th 1992 the george washington national forest in virginia was visited
by murder that morning the body of 36 year old sammy wheeler was found in the back seat
of his sport vehicle sammy had been shot six times in the head and upper torso both the local sheriff's department and
the fbi investigated they quickly determined that the killer had gone to great lengths to clean the
crime scene all shell casings and fingerprints had been removed and an amateurish attempt
had been made to destroy the evidence there was an apparent effort to try and ignite the uh the vehicle there was some
paper and tissue stuffed in the gas cap the gas cap had been opened and apparently
a cigarette laid there lit in an effort to try there was some burning around there but it
it didn't ignite and didn't take effect when investigators discovered that sammy's wallet was missing
the case took on all the earmarks of a random act of violence but before long it would be revealed
that at least three people in sami wheeler's life might have watered him dead sammy's twin brother danny sammy's
girlfriend pat snead and pat's estranged husband bob bean [Music] what had begun as a routine
investigation quickly became a classic drama of love lies and murder in the months following sammy wheeler's
death danny wheeler pat sneed and bob bean took turns accusing each other of the
crime in this bizarre and convoluted case the principals agree on only one thing
it all started when sammy wheeler began dating pat snead in the fall of 1991 pat moved into a
rental unit owned by sammy's twin brother danny the property had been divided into
separate apartments pat and her two sons lived in one apartment with sammy danny lived in one of the others the
arrangement suited everyone except pat's estranged husband bob bean the situation was not really
what was in the best interest of my children i had approached patton and asked her to please
stop this living arrangement here okay we won't get into responses but uh anyway i felt that i was forced into
going to court to at least provide some kind or try to provide some kind of moral environment
for my children in february a court order was issued that prohibited sammy from being with
pat in the presence of the boys to comply sammy moved into his twin brother's apartment
bob bean remained suspicious he hired a private investigator to ensure that the court order was being obeyed
bob's private investigator came in and testified that sammy had violated the court's order
sammy never found out whether or not the judge believed that i know for sure sam did not violate that
court order but just to be safe he stayed away from the house then he was living in a truck without even a
bathroom or a shower just to appease bob bean so where are you gonna stay tonight
probably just stay in the car i hate it when you sleep in the car honey i can't give them any more
ammunition they've already got i never harbored any ill will at all towards sam people around here have a hard time
understanding how a man can accept that his wife is leaving him for another man well to be honest with you i knew what i
had and i was thankful to pass it on okay but after getting to know sam i found i kind of felt sorry for him and i
wanted to sit down and prepare him for what he was getting bob hated sam sam knew it
and i knew it bob says otherwise because i believe bob is a pathological liar sam expressed to me that he felt
that my ex-husband bob was capable of pretty much anything he did not trust him on june 3rd four days before he was
murdered sammy left danny's apartment at 5 30 a.m and chanced upon an unexpected
visitor bob bean's teenage son from a previous marriage come here what are you doing
just taking a few pictures yeah i see that you tell your dad i'm staying in the apartment okay
with danny i'm not in the house i'm not with pat i'm not with the kids i'm with my brother in the apartment
just like i'm supposed to be okay i'm i'm just taking some okay we'll cut it out huh all right no
more pictures got it no more pictures all right i thought that was very very strange for somebody to be taking
my twin brother's photograph at 5 30 in the morning i didn't like it at all that saturday at around 9 15 p.m sammy
set off for elk horn lake approximately 40 miles from his house he planned to spend the night in his truck
and begin fishing early the next day 12 hours later sammy wheeler was dead i believe bob bean had a motive to kill
my brother pets divorce from bob was going to be final on tuesday they were going to be married on
thursday sammy was killed on sunday just by coincidence just by coincidence sure it was sure it was a coincidence
sure it was i'm michael jordan too i used to play for the chicago bulls go talk to the people who know me okay
and ask them if i was really upset if pat was leaving okay the answer to that is no
so there's no motive on the face of it bob bean was a perfect suspect but he also had what appeared to be the
perfect alibi when sammy was murdered bean was on maneuvers with his army national guard
unit the night that he was killed i was on duty until eleven o'clock that night now the death
certificate indicates the time of death at one o'clock the camp that i was at is about 150
miles away there was no way that i could physically get from the camp to the murder scene
in that amount of time to kill sam it's just physically impossible one of our men from our department at
the time was in the same unit and remember seeing bob there so things checked out pretty good for him
i feel like that bob being new just as soon as sam wheeler was found dead he knew they were going
to come knocking on his door so he knew that he better have his story right danny wheeler believes that bob bean
later gave the photographs that his teenage son took to a professional hitman you'd have to
pay for the hitman and the fbi investigated my finances and i i don't have quite what it takes to pay
a professional there was nothing at all to support the theory of bob hiring someone
that that just didn't go inward with the investigation in the end bob bean was cleared as a
suspect but the question remained who murdered sammy wheeler as far as alibis go the only one who
really doesn't have an alibi according to what she's told me is pat bob bean first began to suspect pat a
week after the murder when their sons ages three and four began talking about the crime scene in surprising detail
yes i know that some very bad guy shot sam he was in the trooper that's right he
was found in his car we went to the mountain you did when did you go to the mountains when
sam got shot at first i didn't think much of it but later on they started getting a
little bit more specific and offering a little bit more details and all of a sudden when they would come
to visit i noticed that they were exhibiting some definite behavior uh which was suggestive
that uh they were scared they were frightened okay now let me just make sure that the
camera's working all right bob bean was so convinced that he even videotaped his sons
and then presented the tape to the police who was there when sam died [Music] mommy mommy was there yeah
i believe bob is a very very sick man the fact that he would put his kids in the position that he has his little two
and three-year-old children at that time through what he put them through proves that he has no scruples
no morals he cares about no one now not even his own flesh and blood little infant children he is a sick sick
man you know in the end the police dismissed the boy's testimony as unreliable investigators also believe that pat had
an airtight alibi i'll see you later i'm gonna be in the living room if you need anything so give
me a call okay okay the night that sam was killed i was at home alone with my two children
i had absolutely no motive to kill sam wheeler sam was sam and my children were my life
and i planned for them to be for a long time pat snead was eliminated as a suspect
perhaps not surprisingly bob beam soon raised yet another possibility there's only two things that can come
between brothers twin brothers that i'm aware of it's money and a woman that's all i got to say i you know i
don't offer anything i'll let somebody else make the accusations immediately after sam was killed um
the only person that i had in mind who i thought did it was my ex-husband i have since then
had time lots of time as you know to think about things that have happened and to wonder you know if somebody else
could have had a reason for wanting sam dead sam's brother danny may have wanted him
out of the way the reason for that i have been told is that danny was in love with me
pat says that shortly after sammy's death danny made a surprising confession to one of her girlfriends
she just said that danny wheeler told her that he was in love with me that he had
been in love with me for a long time that he thought about me every night that he wanted to hold me in his arms
every night there's not an ounce of truth in those allegations if she married my brother she was gonna
be like a sister to me and my family doesn't go in for incest she never once physically attracted me
even before sam got involved with her i didn't think she was a good-looking woman
on the morning of sammy's body was discovered his father and sergeant height broke the news to danny and pat
he's dead son oh no pat believes danny's hysterical reaction was a clever ploy to hide the fact that he was the killer
where'd you go get bobby he's trying to help him out he's down the road don't you go get him you know it's him
not sure don't you go get him daddy dad i told you long ago it was bob he doesn't know we don't know anything
about beans get out of my way danny what this is not gonna happen i think most of his
behavior when he first found out that that sam was dead was a show was to make everybody else basically more than
likely the law enforcement people more than anybody else to think that he was feeling
some way that he wasn't i think he was putting on a show for them why is she lying it makes me wonder what
is she hiding it makes me wonder god knows what that did to me when my brother died
and why she would say things like that makes me wonder about her maybe bob bean didn't kill my brother
maybe it was pet that killed my brother as for danny the police confirmed that he also
has an alibi on the night of sammy's murder danny was seen bar hopping until the early morning
hours pat snead bob bean and danny wheeler would would not be considered any more
suspects uh in this case than um than anyone else at the at the present time they
they provided alibis we've corroborated them they've taken a polygraph they've shown no
deception uh they are no more uh of a suspect in in in our eyes than than anyone else at
the present time who killed sammy wheeler despite all of the accusations and denials
the fbi has concluded that sami was the victim of random violence the local authorities however believe
that sammy wheeler may have known his killer [Music] when we return a mother and father hope
you can help solve the mysterious disappearance of their son gordon page jr this is gordon page jr at 18 months of
age he was born autistic and the results were tragic not because of the autism but because
gordy was never correctly diagnosed his father gordon page senior remembers i guess maybe when he was real young we
thought something was wrong but we didn't know what he didn't walk like other kids and run
like other kids and as he got older you know he'd just sit there and look around
and didn't even move they always told us that he was the big boy he'd just be clumsy maybe but then he'd
outgrow it he didn't really seem unusual to us because that was our first child and we
just we just raised him like a normal child and he was slow that's what what we thought he was just slow
now gordon i'm putting five pieces of fruit on the table you see that one two three four five how many pieces of fruit
are on the table gordon five that's very good now i'm gonna take the two apples away
now look down here how many pieces of fruit are left on the table gordon 22. now gordon come on to his parents
gordy was a paradox at times he seemed unable to grasp simple addition and subtraction
yet gordy had a phenomenal memory especially when it came to baseball russ gibson batting average 193
who runs one the baseball cards he must i would say probably had 25 or 30 000 baseball cards
and he knew the names of every player all the statistics of the cards and he would just sit there and memorize
him don money batting average 223 home runs seven i don't think that gordy realized that he was slow
in grade school he had a lot of friends and then as he got older in junior high his peers started advancing you know
getting ahead of him and when he needed tutorial help and he had to go into a special ed
room it bothered him and he had a hard time in 11th and 12th grade because all his peers were dating
driving cars going out and doing things and he was much just a loner actually you know
because he couldn't keep up with everybody who's passing him by gordy worked hard to keep up in june of
1981 he graduated from high school his parents hoped he would be able to hold down a job and eventually helped
him apply for one at a local grocery store then they held their breath and waited
he said dad i got the job he said you know it's minimum wage 3.25 cents or 15 cents whatever it was but he said i
start monday isn't that great and it made me feel so happy and i dropped him off at work in the morning
and i would hide where he couldn't see me and it made me feel proud as a father to see
him working and to see him happy soon however the store manager reported that gordy although a conscientious
worker had trouble communicating with customers his dad tried to coach gordy at home
using a video camera you're carrying the groceries to my car now and i say thank you what do you say no
you say you're welcome okay let me let's do it again thank you what do you say if nobody says anything
then you don't just smile at them let's see that nice gordon page smile come on it's worth a million dollars let's see
it come on let's see it oh yeah if you smile at people like that they'll just love it
gordy's winning smile was not enough things didn't work out at the grocery store
and he was let go [Music] eventually both linda and gordon page worried sick about their son's future
met with social medias and asked for their evaluation of gordy's case well we're going to recommend that
gordon move to a group home i've taken care of gordy his whole life this is his home i don't think so
you folks won't be around forever at this point when you die gordon will be a lost soul
finally we agreed to try it and we went to visit a group home and the lady said well he can't stay
here until he goes to see if he needs to be stabilized on medication in the hospital
so we did this we finally agreed and the doctor there put him on ritalin and valium
and gordon wasn't gordon after that the combination of ritalin a stimulant and valium a tranquilizer
plunged gordy into another world of physical and psychological torment [Music] [Applause]
what is it [Music] son what i i feel like cats are scratching inside my brain [Music]
you feel helpless there's anything you can do and all i do is call a doctor and tell him what was going on
he said don't worry about it that's just typical for his illness and it takes time for the medication to
work and i said what is his illness and he said well whatever it is there are signs of this and signs of that
but nobody would specifically come out and say this is what's wrong with him nearly five months gordy and his parents
struggled with the medication where are we going just for the ride finally the pages consulted another
doctor who told him that the combination of ritalin and value was making gory virtually catatonic
in september of 1989 gordy's family moved to florida gordy stayed in michigan the preceding
spring he had been accepted at a highly regarded group home in grand rapids for several months all went well then
a near tragedy on november 29 1989 a workman left his truck running in the driveway
gordy heavily medicated couldn't resist the temptation [Music] [Music] so [Music]
[Music] oh my god are you doing look at my car we interviewed the lady who was a victim in
the accident she gave a subscription which fit on gordon our officers then received another call a call from one of
our elementary schools that a person fitting gordon page's description was at this elementary school wanting to
teach a class so we responded to there and at that time picked up mr gordon page
do you remember driving that truck over there yeah also you do realize you're involved in a
car accident later gordy would tell his parents that all he had wanted to do was visit
his younger brother away at college in texas gordon page gordy was subsequently placed in a county hospital
he was evaluated by psychiatric social worker bill arnold 16785 what he was brought in with label
schizophrenia what are you laughing about people their schizophrenic will with medication
over a couple of week periods usually they'll start to clear up in their thinking and their
their behavior will come in line and they they start getting back more to normal
uh with gordon that didn't work the more medication he got the more the at times he became almost mute and just
withdrew didn't do anything tell me about the voices that you told the doctor about gordon
i'm going home for christmas right yeah i'm sure that we'll be able to get you out of here by christmas time
after several months of intensive therapy with gordy bill arnold arrived at a surprising conclusion
he decided gordy was not schizophrenic after all but rather a high-functioning autistic
tell me about your baseball card collection gordon woody fry 1966 pirate rookie of the year pirate is he uh
your favorite player woody fry okay do you have other dalton jones dalton jones 1961
batting average 322. once we got him off all those medications and we started treating him as possibly
an autistic and working on training and just giving him some respect he was a totally different individual
just a totally different individual than that withdrawn acting out individual that we saw on medication
and we'll need you to sign this the pages were confident that gordy had at last been correctly diagnosed
soon they found a group home in grand rapids which specialized in autism but this says i can't visit gordon there
was only one drawback for two months no visitors were allowed while gordy adapted to his new
environment mr page i understand how you want the very best for your son and so do we we just want to give him
his best shot at integrating with the program here he's waiting for you on may 22nd 1991
gordon page senior was set to return to florida that afternoon he shared an emotional
goodbye with his oldest son [Music] hello gordon how you doing son we kind of stood there and talked and we
hugged and talked a little bit more and then we walked over to the van and i said everything's going to
work out [Music] gordy seemed desperate for his father to stay against his better judgment gordon page
did not open the door it was a decision he would come to regret it's very painful now in retrospect i
wish i had allowed him just to get in and crawl back and just driven right to florida
and come home but you don't think of those things and we didn't know what we were going to be
facing in the future the future came all too quickly four days after his father had left
gordy disappeared and orderly made the discovery during the regular midnight bed check
around an hour later a local fireman reported that he had seen someone who matched gordy's description
hitchhiking in the direction of interstate 96 an intense police search of the area
turned up no leads [Music] i'm angry i feel bad for gordon i feel bad as a parent
that i wasn't able to find help earlier that it had to be when he was 27 28 years of age that we finally found
out what was wrong we just want our son back we want to be reunited as a family and we love gordon very much
we will never stop looking for gordy because we love him and we've always been a close family he
would know that we want him back and no we will never stop looking for him we love you
gordy what's your name hi my name is gordon page what's yours hi my name is gordon page what's your name
[Music] [Music] join me in two weeks for a special two-hour edition of unsolved mysteries
[Music] [Applause] [Music] you

This episode includes: Mexico UFO, Slain Sammy, Pts. 1 & 2 & UD and Missing Rainman.

Brief Summary

UFO sightings in Mexico, Sammy Wheeler's murder, and Gordon Page Jr.'s disappearance are discussed in this episode.

Key points

The Mexico UFOs. Thousands witnessed UFOs during the solar eclipse in 1991, igniting a nationwide craze.
Bizarre Murder Mystery. Sammy Wheeler's murder leads to a web of accusations among his loved ones.
The Discovery of Sammy's Body. Sammy's body is discovered, leading to a tense family confrontation.
Gordy's Struggles with Autism. Gordy's challenges with autism and medication lead to a life-altering diagnosis.
The Painful Goodbye. A father shares an emotional goodbye with his son, leading to regret.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

What are you looking at?

A witness reacting to a UFO sighting.

3:48WatchJul 26, 2021

Tension

65/ 100Some tension

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