Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
He Scammed Millions of Dollars With Pigeons - The Arlan Galbraith Story
03 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: Who is Arlan Galbraith and what is his connection to pigeon racing?
So this guy scams people out of millions of dollars by selling pigeons? Now the guy's name is Arlen, and Arlen's around 33 years old when this story starts, and he's living in Canada, and bro really, really loves pigeons. He loves raising them, he loves training them, he also happens to love money. Now, he and his family, they have a farm and they raise cattle and pigs and stuff.
But what he's really focused on are the pigeons, specifically racing pigeons, which are like a pigeon trained to race. Here's some sample footage of pigeon racing just so you can sort of see what it looks like. And so one day in 1980, the worst thing happens to Arlen. The dude goes broke, and he has to file for bankruptcy.
So now, in order to earn a living, he has to do farm work for other people just to keep himself and his family afloat. Now, it's around this time that he starts getting more involved with his local pigeon racing communities. And he becomes a member of several official pigeon racing organizations. And he breeds pigeons and he races them for years. And so decades pass. And it's now 2001.
And around this time, he decides he doesn't want to be broke anymore. And he gets this idea to start a company around pigeon racing and breeding. But the problem is he isn't particularly doing anything special to set him apart from other pigeon racing companies. So he thinks the only way to get people's attention is to just lie.
So he starts telling people that he's developed his own genetic line of pigeons, like super pigeons. And these super pigeons are specifically bred for racing, and they're going to be the fastest pigeons anyone's ever seen. So he sets up this company based around this lie and he calls it Pigeon King International.
Then he starts running classified ads in some local farming magazines, trying to recruit some investors. And this surprisingly works. Soon he's in meetings with investors who are mostly just farmers, but they're willing to invest. And he like bullshits these guys.
He tells them this whole story about how pigeon racing is huge in the Middle East and that he has contracts in Saudi Arabia and how there's so much money to be made selling racing pigeons in that part of the world.
Arlen even brings along a picture of Mike Tyson to these meetings and he shows it to people because Mike Tyson is, I guess, famously into pigeon racing. So Arlen tells these investors that he sold pigeons to Mike Tyson before. And these farmer investor guys are impressed and they like believe him.
Now, Arlen tells these people that if they buy two of his super racing pigeons off of him and breed them, he guarantees that he will buy back all the pigeons offspring later at a higher price. So they will end up making money off this deal. It's not just buying birds. This is actually an investment, according to him. But regardless, it works. The people are like, sold.
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Chapter 2: What led Arlan Galbraith to start his pigeon breeding business?
Now, in order to keep investors believing that his scam is legit, he is actually fulfilling part of his deal. When the first investors come back with their offspring pigeons, Arlen does, in fact, buy them from them. Then he just finds more investors to sell those baby pigeons to, and he tells them the same lie. So it's not long before this pigeon-selling scam...
turns into one big Ponzi scheme where he buys back the young bird from current investors and sells those same pigeons to new investors.
And if you're like, Ray, so what? He's not scamming that much money. How much could a few pigeons really cost? Well, actually, they cost a lot because each investor buys a lot from him.
One family even takes out a loan and borrows $125,000 from the bank to buy 360 pairs of pigeons. So all of this adds up really quickly. And Arlen, soon, he's making millions of dollars off this bird scam. But then things get even worse because apparently these millions of dollars just aren't enough for Arlen. He wants more.
So after spending so much time telling all his lies about prize winning super pigeons, I guess Arlen starts thinking that he can make even more money if he makes up a different lie. So he starts telling his investors slash farmers that he is going to eventually sell these pigeons that people are breeding to the meat market for people to eat.
And that pigeon meat, which is known as squab, squab is going to be the next big thing. And that it's going to be the equivalent of chicken and that in five years, everyone's going to be eating at McDonald's ordering a McSquab. And surprisingly, this works too. It keeps investors interested and more and more people buy into Arlen's scam.
And as more people buy into the scam, Arlen expands his company. He hires other salesmen and they start recruiting people to buy the pigeons outside of Canada, like in Pennsylvania and across the American Midwest. And so now Arlen has built a whole community of pigeon breeders. And in 2007, hundreds of breeders are making literally thousands of dollars a year selling pigeons back to Arlen.
And Arlen, he's pulling in a ton of money as well. And so he just keeps building on this Ponzi scheme and building his wealth. Until, until around 2007, when a Mennonite nut grower somehow discovers that Arlen's whole pigeon selling operation is just one big get rich quick scheme. And I don't know if this guy buy pigeons from Arlen or what, but the guy figures it out.
And he goes and he ends up tipping off this guy, Thornton. And Thornton is like a one-man vigilante. He runs a website where he tries to take down scammers operating things like pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes and such. So Thornton is very interested in hearing about this super pigeon scam that Arlen is doing.
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