June 13, 2019 • 50 mins
The secret military base Area 51 is inextricably linked to every secret, shady project the US government is rumored to be involved in – from reverse-engineering alien technology to coordinating a one-world government. The truth is much more mundane.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, Minneapolis in d C. It's me Josh, and I'm
coming to perform the End of the World or How
I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Humanity, my solo
live show, and I think you're gonna like it. Times
running out, though, so go to the Parkway Theater dot
com for Minneapolis tickets and the Miracle Theater dot com
for DC tickets. See you on June. In June, Welcome
(00:24):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there,
and there's Dylan the guest producer again. And this is
it's the podcast about Chuck. Some pretty heavy stuff. Yeah.
(00:52):
I could have sworn we did this one. What do
we do roswell no UFOs? Yes, we did that at
a comicconn or something, right, Yeah we did. We did alive.
I've never been satisfied with that one. I agree. Maybe
we'll redo it one day. Yeah, this is good. This
this this area fifty one. UM. I think this kind
(01:13):
of covers some ground that I didn't think. I was
surprised by. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, me too.
And I think the thing that I would wager you
were surprised about, which I was definitely surprised about, was
just how mundane the explanations for what goes on at
Area fifty one probably is secret government research the end, right,
(01:34):
but it probably doesn't have anything to do with reverse
engineering alien technology, and the secret seat of the one
World Government, the Majestic twelve, probably isn't located there. Probably
just bombs and planes. Probably it makes sense. And the
if there is a conspiracy going on, the one conspiracy
theory I saw for Area fifty one that made the
(01:56):
most sense to me is that it's actually meant to
be a distress action or has developed into a distraction
for some other place that no one even knows about.
A maybe maybe hopefully they're not quite that on the nose,
but it's possible. All right. So let's go back in time,
I guess, um to World War two, and well, first
(02:21):
of all, Area fifty one, just to geographically level set,
it's um less than a hundred miles from Las Vegas
in Nevada, South South Nevada. Yeah, it's six hundred square
miles um. And it's basically if you look at it
on Google Earth. It looks like a you know, a
big air field with a bunch of buildings, so that
I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of like
(02:45):
the test range and the air base and all of
that stuff that are the Area fifty one is located in.
I think that's six square miles. I'm pretty sure Area
fifty one itself is no more than sixties square miles.
Oh yeah, sure, just that, like the it's not like
they're six centered square miles of buildings, right, it's just that. Yeah,
the the installation that people think of as Area fifty
(03:06):
one is part of a larger, huge, big chunk of
the American desert in Nevada, right. So, uh, next to
Area fifty one is what's what you were kind of
talking about, the Nevada Test Site. And this is where
for about ten or eleven years, the Atomic Energy Commission
(03:26):
UM was setting off nuclear bombs um underground, above ground
and really sort of figuring out how to kill a
lot of people very easily and sort of the most
dangerous way you could imagine. Yeah, and you could see
this from Vegas like they would have parties when they
were doing the test because Vegas is like eighty miles
(03:48):
away or something like that, and they would have like
atomic cocktails and viewing parties and stuff like that, and
people would watch them shoot off bombs. Right. Um, but
this is obviously a part of the country that the
government would be very interested in keeping people away from,
not just for the bombs, but because of the um
(04:09):
the fallout, the radiation, but also the fact that they're
testing like supersensitive military equipment and um weapons, right, like
atomic bombs. Yeah. Like, previous to this, it was just land.
It was there were silver mines, it was cattle and wildlife.
But then the government said no, this is ours, and
we're going to train bombers here. Uh. And there was
(04:32):
a big bombing range and they were split into different numbers,
and that's where the number Area fifty one comes from,
which seems I don't know about arbitrary, but no one
knows if it really matters why it was named area one. No,
I think it was. If you look at old bombing
range maps, just the area where Area fifty one is
located was denoted as area between fifty and fifty two
(04:56):
is probably the answer. Yeah, that's basically from what I saw,
that was it. Yeah, so uh, there's another part to
this story. With World War two and this is Germany. Um,
they were a bit ahead of us as far as
jets go. Um, jet airplanes. Um. The United States is like,
this won't do it all. So we're gonna get um
kind of put the gas on our jet development. And
(05:17):
in nineteen forty three, lock keyed Um said was was
tasked with developing a jet fighter plane you can use
a British jet engine. Uh, And they tasked engineer Kelly
Johnson said get a team together. He got a team
together and they delivered the P eight Shooting Star, which
is one of the coolest looking old jets all the
(05:39):
all these planes are just amazing looking. Agreed. It's a
good idea when we talk about a new jet or something,
go look it up as we're talking about because most
of them are pretty boss looking. Yeah. I've never been
a plane guy, but I'm getting more and more into it.
Is that right? Yeah? I want to do a stealth
bomber episode one day. Okay, possibly the coolest plane. Yeah.
So um, Kelly Johnson is a that that just that
(06:02):
right there. Delivering America's first jet on like under time
and under budget was huge and he became a legendary
engineer right off the bat UM and they, I think
Lockheed said, hey, how would you like to keep this
pace up. We'll give you your team of elite engineers,
whatever funding you need, whatever resources you need, just ask
(06:24):
you can have it UM and you just keep developing
stuff really quickly for us UM and we will put
you at the cutting edge of aviation research. And so
Kelly Johnson and his team eventually became known as the
Skunk Works, which is legendary in aviation engineering because they
developed a whole bunch of really cool stuff, but also
(06:46):
they had a pretty great name too that was fairly intriguing.
But they were the first ones to kind of basically
develop agile project management from what I understand, YEA. And
this was all out of the what was known as
Site One, which was in Burbank, California, UM just sort
of a suburb of l A. But then in nineteen
fifty four they said, you know what we need now
(07:07):
is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spy plane.
We want something that can fly above radar um and
photograph Soviet military bases, missile installations. We're gonna name it
because we name everything Project aquatone, and that's where Johnson
and his team developed the U two UM the skunk
(07:29):
Works team, but they couldn't do this at Site one
anymore because it had to be super super secret obviously
because it was a spy plane, so they needed a
different place. And that's where that sort of all converges
onto this testing site in Nevada. Yeah, Kelly Johnson, uh
CIA officer named Richard Bissell and a couple of pilots
(07:51):
started scouting locations for where they could develop this in
super super secret and they went to look at the
old um out of test range, and specifically, the thing
that attracted them was a dry salt lake called Groom Lake,
and one of the pilots recounted taking some like sixteen
pounds shot put balls and dropping him on the ground
(08:13):
to see just how sandy the ground was and it
he said, it was solid as a tabletop. This lake
was the dry lake there like this will probably do.
And there's a lot of reasons why it would do,
not just because there was a dry lake bed that
was as hard as concrete, but because it was in
an area that was already off limits to the public.
(08:35):
Um the airspace was already restricted. It was remote. UM.
There are two mountain ranges that shield the UM the
test site from view. So this area, what became known
as Area fifty one, was just perfect for developing a
super secret spy plane in super secret and so the
CIA and UM the Skunkworks team said this will do.
(08:58):
Let's take this place over. Well, tell you about one
of the most fun things I ever got to do
as a p A. What wait, didn't weren't you arrested
by Ericastrada as you're gonna say, oh no, that stopped
in UM we did a car shoot on a dry
lake bed in Death Valley and they had like a big,
huge line of cars in a row, all driving in
(09:20):
perfect synchronicity, and the director wasn't happy, and they were like,
we want all the dust is behind them. He went,
I want dust in front of them. So the a
d ran and grabbed the keys to a mustang, threw
them to me and he said, get in that mustang
and drive a hundred feet in front of them as
fast as you can, fish tailing and doing donuts and stuff.
(09:42):
That was like me, yeah, oh man, it was so
much fun because it's a dry lake bed it's like
there's just no fear of hitting anything or flipping, Like
you could just do whatever you wanted. It was wonderful.
It was so much fun. Did you didn't hit a
jack rabbit or anything? Did you, uh, just a couple? No,
it was fine, it was It was a lot of fun.
(10:02):
So well was the last thing he said, Yeah, the
last thing while I was talking about how amazingly perfect
one is for developing a super secret spy plane. Yeah.
So they called it Paradise Ranch, and the locals around
there they were used to because of all the atomic
bomb testing. It kind of worked out because they weren't
gonna first of all, it was in the middle of nowhere,
(10:23):
but even the nearby communities, the ones that were close enough,
it just wasn't on anyone's radar because they had always
been doing weird things out there, so it's not like
it it pricked up anyone's ears. So it was kind
of the perfect cover to be there at Paradise Ranch
doing these development of these spy planes and stuff, right, right,
they so. But in addition to that, the cover story
(10:46):
initially that the CIA produced was that they were a
team of um bomb experts who were cleaning up unexploded
munitions from the time when it was used as a
bombing range. So that was why that was the story
that used for why there's a sudden appearance of like
trucks and people when there there hadn't been really much
of anything there before. Yeah, they're they're also natural barriers.
(11:09):
There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of
shielded it from view. Um, it was already remote, the
airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and
signed Executive Order UH one zero six N which basically
extended the airspace over area, and then in ninety eight
(11:29):
a public land order made this basically said that this
area doesn't exist anymore. It's not on maps, it's not acknowledged.
And this is one of the huge reasons why site
to the Ranch Area fifty one has been so um
and and we'll see later things have changed a little
(11:50):
bit in recent years. But just for the government to say, like,
I don't know what you're talking about over and over again,
it's sort of crazy making it is, but they would
as we'll see you later. They will they would say
an open court, this the the place where this person
claims to work does not exist. Like in court, and um,
(12:10):
the judge would just be like, what do you how
what how are we going to get around this? This
is a real problem. Um. But that from what I read, Chuck,
originally Area fifty one was CIA installation, and around seventy
it transferred hands to the Air Force. But from from
what I could tell, up until that point, or at
(12:33):
least the first several years in the mid to late
fifties and early sixties, UM, no one had any idea
that Area fifty one existed. They did a really good
job of keeping that place a genuine secret, not an
open secret like it became later on, but a real secret.
And one of the ways that they did that was
they they from from what workers later said in like
(12:55):
testimony in court cases, is that like they would be
interrogated at gum point to see if they were actually spies.
There were all sorts of like weird loyalty tests and
things like that, and UM, while they were working on
the you Tube spy plane in particular, they kept that
secret so serious that if you were out there working, um,
(13:16):
and you had nothing to do with the YouTube program,
you were just a worker. You were working on a
different program. They would move you indoors, close the doors,
closed the blinds on the windows before rolling the You
two out or testing it, like you were not allowed
to be outside or look. Yeah, that that was pretty
like remarkable. Like within Area fifty one they even had
(13:38):
subsecurity protocols in place. Um, I kind of just figured
like if you were in there, then you had access
to the alien room, right, you know, all the good stuff. Right.
But but think about that, because to even be on
the base or in Area one, you had to have
the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have
(14:00):
just to work on there. And even if you had that,
you still couldn't see the You two Spy plane or
know that it existed or hear people talk about it.
They wouldn't even let Bono in on it. So that
was a terrible joke. It was really bad. I was
really hoping we can't get around that one. So the
You two Spy plane was great until it wasn't. And
(14:21):
that was when Francis gary Powers was shot down in
nineteen sixty and the plane was all of a sudden
in the hand of the Soviets, and uh, they basically
were like, well that's the end of that. You can't
have a secret spy plane anymore once it's in the
hand of the Soviets. And it was also a big
deal because, uh, the American people all of a sudden
(14:43):
knew that the US government is definitely doing things in
total secret and developing technology that no one knows about.
It was a surprise to everybody, not just the Soviets,
but also the American public, like you were saying too.
And I looked to see if this was looked upon
by historians. Is like the point where Americans realized that
the government did things in secret that the American public
(15:06):
didn't know about. And I didn't see anything like that.
So I don't know if this is an ed comment
or what, but it makes sense. And certainly people didn't
know that the U two spy plane existed. The CIA
did a really good job of keeping it secret, but
when it was out, um, it was pretty humiliating for
the US. And it was also a big deal that
this spy plane was shot down because I Eisenhower had
(15:28):
approached Kruschev Krischev and said, hey, why don't we maintain
an open air space policy to one another so we
can keep tabs to make sure that either side is
keeping our word with our you know, armament treaties and
the stuff we're doing like we're enemies, but um, maybe
we should kind of be able to keep tabs on
one another. And Krischev said, no, there's not gonna be
(15:49):
any open air space policy. And so that the United
States went and developed this you two spy plane instead,
and when it got shot down flying over restricted airspace
of an enemy, that's an act of war and it
could have gone way differently than it did, but instead
it was a big humiliation for the United States. And
instead of this kind of tucking tail and running, the
(16:10):
guy who was in charge of it for the CIA,
Richard Bissell, went to the government and said, Hey, I've
got an idea. Let's get even more secret and develop
an even more secretive plane under an even more secretive project.
And that the government said, hey, let's do it. We're
scared of the Russians. Will double down. We'll triple down
(16:30):
if you want, buddy, And that became Project ox Cart.
That's right, uh, And that was a black project, and
it was so secret and so concealed that no one
was even allowed to know how much money was being spent. Yeah,
this is a big, big turning point here. It was,
I mean, this kind of started the era that we
still live in today, which in which the military just
(16:53):
dumps money into secret projects where there's um that that
don't exist as far as anyone is, and that there's
very little oversight for right, exactly interesting. Yeah, and apparently
it was this Richard Bissell's idea. All right, well, let's
take a break old Dick Bissell and we'll we'll get
back to Dick Bissell and the rest of ox Cart
(17:14):
right after this. So one of the problems with I
(17:41):
guess it's not a problem if you're comfortable with dumping
money into a project. But one of the I guess
expenses of a super super secret project is that it
just costs a lot more. Um. Background checks take time
and cost money. Uh, putting something in a super remote
location cost money, um, having extra security forces and it
(18:02):
all just cost a lot more money. I mean, it's
a it's a serious multiplier on cost to do something
that quote unquote doesn't exist. Right. But in addition to that,
Chuck two is just the fact that, uh, the technology
that was being developed was so cutting edge, it's just
by definition required even more money on top of the
extra money for it being so super secret. Yeah. So
(18:25):
ox Card eventually led to the SR seventy one Blackbird,
another amazingly cool plane, probably the coolest of all time
if you ask me. Yeah, I said the stealth Barmber earlier,
but the SR seventy one is that it was pretty awesome,
although there is another one later on that I'll I'll mention.
Uh well, I'll go ahead and say the Bird of
Prey stealth jet. You like that one, Huh, that's pretty cool.
(18:47):
It looks a little bit like a super cool tongue depressor.
You know what I'm talking about. I know what a
tongue depressor is. This looks like that, like a flying
gray tongue depressor. It's like a opsacle stick though, right, um, yeah,
but wider. Okay, But the SR seventy one Blackbird definitely
not a popsicle stick. No, No, it's just cool. Plus,
(19:10):
it doesn't hurt the fact that G. I. Joe Well
Cobra technically had the SR seventy one Blackbird as one
of their planes. That's funny. Uh So oxcart um they
needed better infrastructure basically, and it was they couldn't just
pour money into the development of the jet. At this point,
they had to really update all the facilities, expanding on land,
(19:34):
expanding and more restricted airspace. Even that happened in nineteen two,
and it just sort of, I think, ingrained the super
permanence of Area fifty one. And also like the fact that,
like the government said, no, okay, this was a humiliating
thing to have a YouTube shot down. Rather than maybe
we'll just kind of take another tack, they really went
(19:55):
further down the path of just completely secret black projects
and they developed some pretty pretty amazing stuff there. Um
the uh I think you were saying the Bird of
Prey that was from the nineties, right, Yeah, I think
it's cool looking. The F one seventeen Nighthawk, that's the
one that's like a single wing stealth bomber. I believe, yes.
(20:19):
And this is also where they take and um, like
if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that
to area to check out as well. Yeah, there's another
program at right Patterson Base in Dayton that's like set
up specifically for that. But I wonder if this is
like even more highly sensitive. I don't know, Um, but yeah,
(20:41):
they've captured Miggs before, captured radar systems and they reverse
engineered him there, which will come into play you later on. Um.
And then there was another one called the Tacit Blue
stealth Bombers. So basically, any stealth aircraft, whether it was
the stealth black Hawks or the stealth bombers that were
(21:01):
developed from the sixties onward, Um, it was probably developed
and tested in super secrecy in area right. So, like
I said, this made it just sort of a shop
that they would that wouldn't close essentially at this point, um,
in that there's an area known as Freedom Ridge. Very
(21:23):
ironic name because Freedom Ridge was taken by the government
right and closed off to the public. And this is
where uh tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars
to try and check out things, and they said no more,
Freedom Ridge is now ours. It's called get out of
here Ridge. Yeah, shot on site Ridge. That's right. So, um,
(21:46):
if you are like get to the Aliens, what are
you guys even talking about the aliens and Area fifty
one as synonymous as they are now, and they are synonymous.
The highway that Area fifty one is off of the
road Area fifty one is off of has been officially
renamed by the state of Nevada as the Extraterrestrial Highway.
It's Highway three oh five, as synonymous as this base
(22:09):
is with aliens and UFOs. That's actually relatively recent. It
was operating for a good thirty five years, I think,
um before Aliens became tied to Area fifty one. And
there's actually a moment in time that you can point
to where it happened. Then it happened on a broadcast
(22:32):
in May of nine, almost just past thirty years ago
on k l as, the local Las Vegas um TV network.
I'm not sure what network affiliate they are, but they
had like their five o'clock news, and on it they
interviewed a guy who was anonymous, went by the pseudonym Dennis,
and he basically said, Hey, I'm doing a lot of
(22:52):
weird stuff out there at Area fifty one. Let me
tell you all about it. Yeah, his name, his real
name was Bob Lazar and he, uh, have you seen
interviews with this guy? Did you see the more recent one? No,
the but the one where he said I think it
was a good idea. That one. No, I'm talking about
(23:13):
there was one just from a few years ago. Um,
it's I gotta say, I mean, I'm not uh conspiracy
guy at all. But when you listen to Bob Blazar
talk today, he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or
a weirdo, or like he would be lying. He hasn't
like made money off of this or like he's He's
(23:35):
basically like, listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't
attached to my name because I'm trying to run a
business in Michigan and it doesn't help that people think
i'm some ufo kok Bob blazars alien apples and oh good,
and he said, but he was like, you know, everything
(23:56):
that I told you was true though, and that's just
the deal. Uh, you know, and I don't care if
anyone believes me. He's kind of like that though. Two.
In the early interviews, Um, at the very least, he's
very calm and not at all kookie or anything like.
It's specifically the stuff he was talking about that was
so compelling. Yeah, so his story is, Um, then you
(24:18):
can go watch this stuff for yourself and see it all.
But he basically explains how he's an engineer and he
was working on reverse engineering um uh, flying saucers essentially
alien spacecraft and alien technology. And at one point he
(24:38):
was in a room and they left him alone with
all these files that describe alien technology and alien autopsies
and all of this stuff. And uh, it's pretty remarkable
to listen to. It didn't make the hugest waves because
it was it was a local news station. At first,
it didn't, Yeah, and then it was picked up by Japan,
(24:58):
oddly enough, and and after it went to Japan, it
went kind of worldwide and before you know it, um,
the whole area just sort of became alien central. And
this is we should point out. This also has a
lot to do with the fact that in the seventies
and eighties did the United States kind of went ufo nuts.
(25:18):
Oh yeah, man. There are so many great books at
the time that were coming out that claimed everything from
like UFOs were responsible for them you to Triangle, or
Atlantis was populated by UFOs, or the Nasca Lines were
for UFOs, or the Egyptians built the Pyramids with the UFOs.
All that stuff came out of the seventies and eighties. Yeah.
(25:39):
So this all kind of coincided with lazar Um having
his news interview and it and it really just kind
of changed everything it did, right, So he kind of
like came out at a time when America was primed
to really believe it. But but if you think about it,
like everything you hear about and think about from about
Area fifty one today did not exist pre nine, pre
Bob Lazar. All started with Bob Lazar. And the reason
(26:02):
why everybody wasn't just like so he's just some nut
who came out and said this stuff. Who cares? How
did that? How did that become truly cemented with Area
fifty one? Is that Weirdly, some of the stuff he
talked about kind of held water, Like he would talk
about just mundane day to day stuff that went on
Area fifty one UM that seemed to h be able
(26:27):
to be correlated from locals like it held up um
there is a um. There was a scanner once. He
said that you would get in and out of rooms
by scanning your hands and it would scan the bone
structure of your hand. That was how you were identified
and could come in and out of rooms. And supposedly
somebody found years like thirty years later, mentioned of something
(26:51):
like that and some declassified report about Area fifty one UM.
He also and this is what really kind of legitimized him.
He would take people out on Wednesday nights and at
the time he would say, I never saw what time
it was, but at the time he said it would happen,
lights would rise up in the sky and they would
do all sorts of UFO E kind of stuff. And
(27:12):
the fact that he knew about these schedules really kind
of added legitimacy to his claims. Yeah, and the new
interview that I saw, he was explaining some of that
uh anti gravitational propulsion technology that the aliens had supposedly
used that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer, and
he was sort of walking, uh walking the person through
(27:34):
it that was in the room, and he was like,
oh yeah, and he said, we had this thing. It
was sort of like half a basketball and when you
went to put your hand on it, he was like,
there was this he was it was like bringing two magnets,
you know, opposite poles too. There's opposite poles that repel.
And he said, that's kind of what it felt like.
And he said, so we would drop like a golf
ball and it would just you know, skirt off to
(27:55):
the side without hitting it, and like as if it
had bounced, and the way he was just scribing it,
I was just like, this guy just seems so credible, right,
it was so like shocking. I didn't know what to expect.
I thought he was I thought he was not going
to be credible. I guess right. UM. I didn't see
the interview with them, but UM, I read about that
(28:16):
technology and UM and by the way, everybody, you can
erase your email. It's like polls that repel each other
chuck not o. UM. The the anti gravity technology was
talking about it was basically saying, like around the craft
or whatever that they were reverse engineering, it would bend gravity,
(28:36):
so this could just move right through space basically at
light speed. That's the big suspicion among ufologists who follow
this stuff is that they reverse engineering light speed aircraft
that was propelled using anti gravity technology on engines that
were matter anti matter engines. And in back in you
(28:56):
couldn't There wasn't an Internet to start with, but even
if there was, you could and find stuff like descriptions
of anti gravity craft at the time. So for this
guy to just come out and start talking about this
in an authoritative way, yeah, he he's an enigmatic figure.
For sure, but he was also one whose credibility was
questioned right out of the gate too, right. Yeah, I
mean he said that he went to m I t
(29:18):
into cal Tech. There are no records of him being
a student. Um U. The conspiracy theorists will say, like,
you know how easy it is for the government to
wipe that glean? Um do you? Yeah? I'm like, I
don't know, is that easy? Uh So that's what they
will say. Um They will also say that they also
(29:42):
like got in touch with his professors to make sure
they never talked and stuff like that. But that's when
I get a little bit like, you can't. You can't
have hundreds of people or thousands of people involved in
some big, massive cover up like someone's gonna talk. You're
just not aking big enough. I agree with you. That's
(30:03):
when it kind of starts to get inky for me.
But he did disappear, and so I mean not disappear, disappear, disappear.
But he uh, I mean, it's not like he was like,
all right, and now I'm gonna go make all the
money on this right exactly, Like he moved and tried
to start like a regular business and tried to just
not be in the public eye. Yeah, he did, which
I think adds to his credibility even more. You know,
(30:25):
a little bit, Let's take our last break and then
come back, shall we Let's do it, but let's promise
we're gonna come back. Okay, all right, stop, okay, Chuck.
(30:58):
So Bob Blazar comes along, just starts spouting out at
the mouth about all the crazy alien stuff that's going
on in Area fifty one, and then he kind of
like fades into the background for a while, and everybody
else kind of took it from there. If you have
anything to do with government conspiracies or believe in UFOs
(31:18):
or aliens or whatever, all that stuff started to get
saddled little by little onto Area fifty one. And one
of the things, um that pretty early on got connected
to Area fifty one, but almost across the board. Any
reasonable source or skeptical source will say, like the two
have nothing to do with one another. Is Roswell and
(31:39):
Area fifty one. Yeah, the Roswell crash in when something crashed,
gentleman found pieces of an air pieces of some kind
of unidentified object, and uh, it became UFO Central. Later
it was it was said to be a weather balloon.
(32:01):
But first the Army said it was a flying disk
that kind of right. Sure, I mean it looks like um,
I've seen that that one famous picture of the guy
crouching with what looks like just some balloon material, right,
But you know he was just a stooge for the
government and that was just a profit that came up with.
(32:22):
So the Roswell crash happens in UM, there's no way
Area forty one would have been associated with it. The whole,
the whole mythos around Roswell is that Um, there was
a UFO crash that happened. Some aliens survived or at
the very least their bodies were recovered, depending on who
you ask, and the UFO and the aliens alive or
(32:43):
dead were taken for further study to wear Area fifty one.
Area fifty one back in seven when the Roswell crash happened,
UM was not even on the CIA's radar. It was
that basically a defunct air strip and day Um nuclear
testing range still, so there wouldn't have been any place
(33:04):
to take the aliens in the first place. And then secondly,
after the Roswell crush happened, UM, the idea of the
an alien um, an alien crash having taken place there.
That didn't come about until like the eighties too, so
really people started to kind of catch onto this a
little late. So probably Area fifty one in Roswell have
(33:25):
nothing to do with one another. And let's not forget
that they're like eight hundred miles apart two even though
to everyone in America and really the rest of the
world outside of the Southwest thinks they're like right next
to each other, I think, so, you know, yeah, So
there have been a lot of crazy theories over the years. Um.
The very most basic um are, like you just said, like,
(33:47):
there's alien corpses there, there's alien technology there. Uh, and
the US military has been studying this stuff and trying
to perfect everything from time travel to light speed travel. Right,
that's that's the basic ground zero approach. Don't forget interdimensional
travel too, why not? Um another one I saw, there's
(34:10):
some pretty pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The
moon landing was faked there, and then after that, right,
but then after that, Kubrick was executed on site and
replaced by a clone that cloned did some great work.
They did, um better than Barry Linden Right would love
Barry Lindon. I've never seen it, so I can'tently hate
on it. It's amazing. UM, weather control experiments. That's probably
(34:33):
the most believable for me. Cloud seating, sure, why not?
Why not? Um? And then there's like stage two of
of conspiracy theories. Yes, that is uh, there are aliens
that clock in every day at Area fifty one and
work side by side with us in harmony, in harmony
(34:57):
in order to build like an alien human hybrid race. Um.
And of all this sounds familiar. I will bet that
you watched a pretty hefty amount of X files because
they really tapped into this stuff. Um. They basically just
appropriated it for plotlines, um, which is great. I love
the X Files. But it was just I guess Chris
(35:21):
Carter used to hang out with like uthologists or something
just to get ideas. Did he really or he had
too of yeah, or he has one himself. I don't
know much about maybe so uh. And then, of course,
if you even ramp that up a little bit more,
that that that this is all part of a giant
conspiracy to create a one world government that is human
(35:43):
alien run right. And that's where um, that majestic twelve
I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They they are
supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists. There's twelve of
them who were impaneled by Eisenhower after the Roswald crash
um or I guess it would have been Truman, I
(36:04):
think still um who and they were put together, just
the cream of the crop to basically go contact the
aliens and basically broke her a meeting I guess between
the President and the aliens. And they managed to um
leverage this to catapult themselves into the status of actual
(36:26):
people who run the world. So they're the ones who
are forming this this one world government. And that is
where Area one or that's where it's located. The seat
of this government is located underground in Area Yeah. This
next one is um a little more recent and very
kookie um. And it's it's the notion that Hitler and
(36:47):
Stalin got together and hatched a plan to undermine the
United States in World War two by distracting us about
the threat of an impending alien invasion. And they would
do this by building a fake spaceship filling it with
mutant children that Joseph Mingola created and um fill the
(37:12):
spaceship with those kids, and then the craft crashed in
a storm, and that was the Roswell incident, right, it
was meant to land, and then these mutant children come
out speaking German supposed right. Supposedly the mutant children who
were the aliens that were found in the Roswell crash
had huge heads and giant eyes. They were basically like
(37:34):
the Grays of alien legend um and that Stalin and
Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to
the World the War of the World's broadcast. They wanted
to incite that kind of panic um by actually creating
this fake alien invasion with all the drugs. Hitler was
on after we know this now who knows? I'm sure
(37:57):
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a create idea. It's
a create idea. Man. Let's what else you got? What
else you got? What else can we do? Solents like
mellow He tried CBD. He's like, no, that's the one
thing I haven't right, he got anything right, but it'll
mix well with everything else. So this is this is
obviously not a thing either. Well. This is from a
(38:18):
book by um an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe,
and she this book came out in two thousand and eleven,
and she based this whole thing on an alleged Area
fifty one insider who was her source, who said that
he worked on a project UM that had to do
with this somehow, some way, but that this this was
(38:41):
where all of this alien stuff came from. It was
a it was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets. UM.
Weird thing is is there's another guy out there who
supposedly has a different source who tells the same story.
But this other source UM says that this is it
was all fake. That I saw the files myself, but
(39:04):
I believe that it was meant to be a test
of loyalty, or to see how I would react working
at Area fifty one two files like this and be like,
oh my god, this is real, this is real. I
can't believe this is this is actually real. So I
guess to see how gullible you were and therefore how
trustworthy you were, right, which could explain Bob blazar situation too,
because he was supposedly in a room full of files
(39:26):
he probably shouldn't have seen either, right, So that that
you've got three different sources who supposedly worked at Area
fifty one. Technically, I should say, because we'll get email.
Bob Blazar worked at S four, which is an even
more secret installation that's attached to AREAT one. But you've
got three people who allegedly worked in Area fifty one
(39:47):
who all tell a story about basically being left in
a room with files that contained information about aliens, whether
it was a hoax or real or whatever. And maybe
that is because that kind of correlates with the idea
that there were like gunpoint interrogations to verify your allegiance
to the government or the military or whatever. Maybe that
(40:07):
is something they tried there. Yeah, it doesn't make the
actual aliens real, It just makes the presence of the
files real. That's true. So Area fifty one today as
it truly exists. Um, if you're driving down Highway three
seventy five, there's an unmarked dirt road between mile markers
(40:28):
twenty nine and thirty or I guess thirty and twenty nine,
and uh, you turn on that road. It's twelve miles
on a dirt road, and you'll get to a gate
and there'll be warning signs all along saying restricted area
sort of like close encounters type stuff. Um, there will
there will be cameras and censors everywhere, So don't think
you're like getting away with anything. No, there's there's Mike's
(40:50):
that listen to your conversation like you were. You were
under as close surveillance as you've ever been in your
life from what I understand. Yeah, and there are guards
of course, and they will say I'm sorry, turn around
and drive back to the highway. And if you persist
a little bit, um, then you will get arrested. Um.
If you're around the perimeter area kind of walking around
with your binoculars, um, they will probably come and take
(41:12):
your binoculars and tell you to leave, or drive you,
um back to the highway, or maybe smash your facing
and bury you in the deserts. Well, there's a sign
that says use of deadly fourth forces authorized. Um. But
there's from what I've seen, there's never been an incident
that where that actually happened. You're much more likely to
get handed over to the local cops, who will slap
(41:34):
you with a several hundred dollar fine sure if you
if you give them any kind of guff and don't
leave immediately when they tell you to. So kind of
the cool thing about Area fifty one there, Um obviously
that I mean there are civilian workers that work there.
It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing, um
(41:55):
because you can look at satellite photographs and year by
year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with
more buildings. Uh. If you work there, and um, I
mean they have to have everything from food services to
custodial services, to plumbing and electricians and stuff like that,
and all of those people have the highest possible security
(42:16):
clearance an American can have. Oh sure, so they don't
drive down that dirt road and just go to the
gate and say how you doing, Rick, and they go
come on in Jane. Uh, they go to mccarren Airport
in Las Vegas and they all get on a big
basically air taxi. Um, it's a seven thirty seven passenger
(42:37):
jet that fly. They call him the Janet Jets at center.
The call signed Janet. They're white, the big thick red stripe.
You can look it up online and they that's how
they get to work every day. They fly everyone in
on a seven thirty seven and you can see them
on the tarmac. They just get in with the regular planes.
It's just look for the Giant seven thirty sevens that
are white with the red stripe and pretty cool. No logo,
(43:00):
no nothing. They don't actually have a name, like you said.
They fly under call signed Janet. People have tried to
figure out forever what Janet means. There's an idea that
it's just another non existent terminal stands for that or
joint air network for employee transportation. But if you go
visit the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame, they tell the
(43:22):
story that there was a commander of Area fifty one
named Richard A. Sampson from v one and he chose
his wife's name Janet to identify the commuter shuttles. And
that's the that's the most romantic, super secret government story
of all. So we kind of teased earlier on that. Um,
(43:43):
the government is no longer saying like I don't know
what you're talking about. Like, no, the satellite image that
we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything
but dirt. Um, that's all changed a little bit now
because of a lawsuit in the mid nineteen nineties or
a group of workers from Air that sued the government
(44:03):
because of the it's an environmental disaster there, or you know,
maybe that's changing now, but it had been for many,
many years because of the fact that it's a black
project and so unregulated that they were just basically doing
everything like dumping hazardous waste and burning it and trenches
(44:25):
and people were there just inhaling these fumes and getting
really sick. And a guy named Robert Frost that worked there,
an employee UM had a lot of really bad health problems.
Doctor said, you were sufferings from some kind of a
really bad chemical reaction, and in order to treat it,
we need to know what it is. And the government said, sorry,
(44:46):
we can't tell you that. He died. He died, and
some other co workers filed this lawsuit and one of
them ended up dying too, and they finally got to
like a Nevada i think, or a federal circuit court
that said, no, you gott don't have a right to
know what what you've been exposed to. They weren't looking
for money, they just wanted to know what was killing them.
(45:07):
And and and the reason that they had no legal right
to know was and this is that that trial that
I was referring to earlier where the government representatives were saying, like,
we like, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry,
So imagine like trying to just get past that barrier, right,
You're suing the government to find out what they were
burning that made you sick, But the government's in court saying, like,
(45:28):
the place that they're talking about doesn't even exist. That's like,
that's obstacle one. But the whole reason that they were
burning this stuff in the first place is because UM
Area fifty one operates under what's called the mosaic theory,
and the mosaic theory is that any little piece of
information a spy gets his hands on could be fit
(45:49):
together with other information to to provide a larger picture
of what what's being done at Area fifty one. And
as a result, nothing can come out of Area fifty
one UM like the chemical that's killing the people, right,
or computers that go in and are used. Once they
get decommissioned, they get put in this pit and these trenches,
(46:12):
and every two weeks they go out there with jet
fuel and everything that's been put into the trenches over
the last two weeks gets douse with jet fuel, it's
set on fire with road flares and whatever is in
that smoke the workers get exposed to because for some
reason they built the trenches upwind of this um this
installation rather than downwind, and so people were exposed to
(46:33):
this every two weeks for years and years and years,
and things like you know, um anti radar paint, um.
The jet fuel that they're using is an acceler and
I'm sure wasn't helping, but just all sorts of exotic
materials that was super super classified. The this is what
was killing these people. We're making them sick exactly. And
(46:54):
the government said, no, this is just to classify. These
people can't know, they're just gonna have to go off
and die on tree did because we're not going to
say publicly what what they were exposed to. And that's
that's where it stood that case. Uh they did finally,
finally in that case say okay, there's an area fifty one.
(47:15):
I know, the whole courtroom went out for beers that
day afterwards, so there's a thing there, and that that's
really all we can say, sorry, is there's a thing there.
But that was the very first sort of uh insight
into the just that admission that there was something there
was the first time that had ever happened, which is
(47:37):
in the mid nineties. Yeah, and um, you were saying,
like people would point to satellite images of the place
and you can see that it's growing now, like you
can see it on like Google Maps. That is really
new because it wasn't very long ago where all the
satellites in space were controlled by the government, and the
government could control what ended up in satellite images, so
(47:57):
they blocked out anything any image of But as private
firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible.
So just a little by little, it's it's becoming to
the point now where they're like, yes, they acknowledge something's there, No,
you can't know what's going on there is basically the
status quo now pretty much. So that's Area fifty one.
(48:19):
And sorry, we kind of took the government tach here
and uh didn't really go all in on the alien theories,
but I just don't think that's what it is. Uh.
If you want to know more about Area fifty one, UM,
I guess just start reading about it. There's some pretty
interesting stuff out there. And since I said that it's
time for a listener mail. This is about nicknames. This
(48:43):
is from Rob Bob. Oh yeah this one. Hey guys,
my name is Rob Bob, Rob and Bob combined into
a singular form. Uh like Jim Bob, but better. My
mom has explained to me that it started when I
was about six months old. I was a really chunky kid,
like and then ninety nine percentile for weight. They felt
like no other nickname like Robbie or Bobby fits, so
(49:06):
they started calling me Rob Bob. Um. Many years later,
I meet my wife, which is almost eight years ago now,
and quickly found out that her favorite writer is Richard Wright.
Since reading his novel Native Son, has wanted to name
her kid Richard to honor the impact he had on
her life. She had visited his grave in Parison as
(49:27):
every book he ever published. Um. When she met me,
I told her about my super nicknames that I had
wanted to call my kid because you see, my father
is William Bill for short. But now since we came
up with these weird names, I call my dad will
Bill to bug him. This leads me to why I
have always wanted to name my child Richard since high school.
(49:49):
Then we would in order to have a will Bill,
a Rob Bob, and a Rick Dick, all in three
generations of awesomeness, my wife does not approve and things
we should look else air for name ideas with great
admiration Rob Bob and Rachel Nice. Thanks Robbob, good luck
with that with your your quest. Yeah, I don't think
(50:09):
Rick Dick is going to fly in your household. I
don't think so either. Rachel may may have the cooler
head here, I think so. Well. If you want to
get in touch with this, like Rob Bob did, we
would love that. You can go on to stuff you
Should Know dot com check out our social links there,
or you can send us an email to Stuff podcast
at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
(50:32):
is a production of i heeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows
Hello, Minneapolis in d C. It's me Josh, and I'm
coming to perform the End of the World or How
I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Humanity, my solo
live show, and I think you're gonna like it. Times
running out, though, so go to the Parkway Theater dot
com for Minneapolis tickets and the Miracle Theater dot com
for DC tickets. See you on June. In June, Welcome
(00:24):
to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there,
and there's Dylan the guest producer again. And this is
it's the podcast about Chuck. Some pretty heavy stuff. Yeah.
(00:52):
I could have sworn we did this one. What do
we do roswell no UFOs? Yes, we did that at
a comicconn or something, right, Yeah we did. We did alive.
I've never been satisfied with that one. I agree. Maybe
we'll redo it one day. Yeah, this is good. This
this this area fifty one. UM. I think this kind
(01:13):
of covers some ground that I didn't think. I was
surprised by. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, me too.
And I think the thing that I would wager you
were surprised about, which I was definitely surprised about, was
just how mundane the explanations for what goes on at
Area fifty one probably is secret government research the end, right,
(01:34):
but it probably doesn't have anything to do with reverse
engineering alien technology, and the secret seat of the one
World Government, the Majestic twelve, probably isn't located there. Probably
just bombs and planes. Probably it makes sense. And the
if there is a conspiracy going on, the one conspiracy
theory I saw for Area fifty one that made the
(01:56):
most sense to me is that it's actually meant to
be a distress action or has developed into a distraction
for some other place that no one even knows about.
A maybe maybe hopefully they're not quite that on the nose,
but it's possible. All right. So let's go back in time,
I guess, um to World War two, and well, first
(02:21):
of all, Area fifty one, just to geographically level set,
it's um less than a hundred miles from Las Vegas
in Nevada, South South Nevada. Yeah, it's six hundred square
miles um. And it's basically if you look at it
on Google Earth. It looks like a you know, a
big air field with a bunch of buildings, so that
I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of like
(02:45):
the test range and the air base and all of
that stuff that are the Area fifty one is located in.
I think that's six square miles. I'm pretty sure Area
fifty one itself is no more than sixties square miles.
Oh yeah, sure, just that, like the it's not like
they're six centered square miles of buildings, right, it's just that. Yeah,
the the installation that people think of as Area fifty
(03:06):
one is part of a larger, huge, big chunk of
the American desert in Nevada, right. So, uh, next to
Area fifty one is what's what you were kind of
talking about, the Nevada Test Site. And this is where
for about ten or eleven years, the Atomic Energy Commission
(03:26):
UM was setting off nuclear bombs um underground, above ground
and really sort of figuring out how to kill a
lot of people very easily and sort of the most
dangerous way you could imagine. Yeah, and you could see
this from Vegas like they would have parties when they
were doing the test because Vegas is like eighty miles
(03:48):
away or something like that, and they would have like
atomic cocktails and viewing parties and stuff like that, and
people would watch them shoot off bombs. Right. Um, but
this is obviously a part of the country that the
government would be very interested in keeping people away from,
not just for the bombs, but because of the um
(04:09):
the fallout, the radiation, but also the fact that they're
testing like supersensitive military equipment and um weapons, right, like
atomic bombs. Yeah. Like, previous to this, it was just land.
It was there were silver mines, it was cattle and wildlife.
But then the government said no, this is ours, and
we're going to train bombers here. Uh. And there was
(04:32):
a big bombing range and they were split into different numbers,
and that's where the number Area fifty one comes from,
which seems I don't know about arbitrary, but no one
knows if it really matters why it was named area one. No,
I think it was. If you look at old bombing
range maps, just the area where Area fifty one is
located was denoted as area between fifty and fifty two
(04:56):
is probably the answer. Yeah, that's basically from what I saw,
that was it. Yeah, so uh, there's another part to
this story. With World War two and this is Germany. Um,
they were a bit ahead of us as far as
jets go. Um, jet airplanes. Um. The United States is like,
this won't do it all. So we're gonna get um
kind of put the gas on our jet development. And
(05:17):
in nineteen forty three, lock keyed Um said was was
tasked with developing a jet fighter plane you can use
a British jet engine. Uh, And they tasked engineer Kelly
Johnson said get a team together. He got a team
together and they delivered the P eight Shooting Star, which
is one of the coolest looking old jets all the
(05:39):
all these planes are just amazing looking. Agreed. It's a
good idea when we talk about a new jet or something,
go look it up as we're talking about because most
of them are pretty boss looking. Yeah. I've never been
a plane guy, but I'm getting more and more into it.
Is that right? Yeah? I want to do a stealth
bomber episode one day. Okay, possibly the coolest plane. Yeah.
So um, Kelly Johnson is a that that just that
(06:02):
right there. Delivering America's first jet on like under time
and under budget was huge and he became a legendary
engineer right off the bat UM and they, I think
Lockheed said, hey, how would you like to keep this
pace up. We'll give you your team of elite engineers,
whatever funding you need, whatever resources you need, just ask
(06:24):
you can have it UM and you just keep developing
stuff really quickly for us UM and we will put
you at the cutting edge of aviation research. And so
Kelly Johnson and his team eventually became known as the
Skunk Works, which is legendary in aviation engineering because they
developed a whole bunch of really cool stuff, but also
(06:46):
they had a pretty great name too that was fairly intriguing.
But they were the first ones to kind of basically
develop agile project management from what I understand, YEA. And
this was all out of the what was known as
Site One, which was in Burbank, California, UM just sort
of a suburb of l A. But then in nineteen
fifty four they said, you know what we need now
(07:07):
is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spy plane.
We want something that can fly above radar um and
photograph Soviet military bases, missile installations. We're gonna name it
because we name everything Project aquatone, and that's where Johnson
and his team developed the U two UM the skunk
(07:29):
Works team, but they couldn't do this at Site one
anymore because it had to be super super secret obviously
because it was a spy plane, so they needed a
different place. And that's where that sort of all converges
onto this testing site in Nevada. Yeah, Kelly Johnson, uh
CIA officer named Richard Bissell and a couple of pilots
(07:51):
started scouting locations for where they could develop this in
super super secret and they went to look at the
old um out of test range, and specifically, the thing
that attracted them was a dry salt lake called Groom Lake,
and one of the pilots recounted taking some like sixteen
pounds shot put balls and dropping him on the ground
(08:13):
to see just how sandy the ground was and it
he said, it was solid as a tabletop. This lake
was the dry lake there like this will probably do.
And there's a lot of reasons why it would do,
not just because there was a dry lake bed that
was as hard as concrete, but because it was in
an area that was already off limits to the public.
(08:35):
Um the airspace was already restricted. It was remote. UM.
There are two mountain ranges that shield the UM the
test site from view. So this area, what became known
as Area fifty one, was just perfect for developing a
super secret spy plane in super secret and so the
CIA and UM the Skunkworks team said this will do.
(08:58):
Let's take this place over. Well, tell you about one
of the most fun things I ever got to do
as a p A. What wait, didn't weren't you arrested
by Ericastrada as you're gonna say, oh no, that stopped
in UM we did a car shoot on a dry
lake bed in Death Valley and they had like a big,
huge line of cars in a row, all driving in
(09:20):
perfect synchronicity, and the director wasn't happy, and they were like,
we want all the dust is behind them. He went,
I want dust in front of them. So the a
d ran and grabbed the keys to a mustang, threw
them to me and he said, get in that mustang
and drive a hundred feet in front of them as
fast as you can, fish tailing and doing donuts and stuff.
(09:42):
That was like me, yeah, oh man, it was so
much fun because it's a dry lake bed it's like
there's just no fear of hitting anything or flipping, Like
you could just do whatever you wanted. It was wonderful.
It was so much fun. Did you didn't hit a
jack rabbit or anything? Did you, uh, just a couple? No,
it was fine, it was It was a lot of fun.
(10:02):
So well was the last thing he said, Yeah, the
last thing while I was talking about how amazingly perfect
one is for developing a super secret spy plane. Yeah.
So they called it Paradise Ranch, and the locals around
there they were used to because of all the atomic
bomb testing. It kind of worked out because they weren't
gonna first of all, it was in the middle of nowhere,
(10:23):
but even the nearby communities, the ones that were close enough,
it just wasn't on anyone's radar because they had always
been doing weird things out there, so it's not like
it it pricked up anyone's ears. So it was kind
of the perfect cover to be there at Paradise Ranch
doing these development of these spy planes and stuff, right, right,
they so. But in addition to that, the cover story
(10:46):
initially that the CIA produced was that they were a
team of um bomb experts who were cleaning up unexploded
munitions from the time when it was used as a
bombing range. So that was why that was the story
that used for why there's a sudden appearance of like
trucks and people when there there hadn't been really much
of anything there before. Yeah, they're they're also natural barriers.
(11:09):
There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of
shielded it from view. Um, it was already remote, the
airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and
signed Executive Order UH one zero six N which basically
extended the airspace over area, and then in ninety eight
(11:29):
a public land order made this basically said that this
area doesn't exist anymore. It's not on maps, it's not acknowledged.
And this is one of the huge reasons why site
to the Ranch Area fifty one has been so um
and and we'll see later things have changed a little
(11:50):
bit in recent years. But just for the government to say, like,
I don't know what you're talking about over and over again,
it's sort of crazy making it is, but they would
as we'll see you later. They will they would say
an open court, this the the place where this person
claims to work does not exist. Like in court, and um,
(12:10):
the judge would just be like, what do you how
what how are we going to get around this? This
is a real problem. Um. But that from what I read, Chuck,
originally Area fifty one was CIA installation, and around seventy
it transferred hands to the Air Force. But from from
what I could tell, up until that point, or at
(12:33):
least the first several years in the mid to late
fifties and early sixties, UM, no one had any idea
that Area fifty one existed. They did a really good
job of keeping that place a genuine secret, not an
open secret like it became later on, but a real secret.
And one of the ways that they did that was
they they from from what workers later said in like
(12:55):
testimony in court cases, is that like they would be
interrogated at gum point to see if they were actually spies.
There were all sorts of like weird loyalty tests and
things like that, and UM, while they were working on
the you Tube spy plane in particular, they kept that
secret so serious that if you were out there working, um,
(13:16):
and you had nothing to do with the YouTube program,
you were just a worker. You were working on a
different program. They would move you indoors, close the doors,
closed the blinds on the windows before rolling the You
two out or testing it, like you were not allowed
to be outside or look. Yeah, that that was pretty
like remarkable. Like within Area fifty one they even had
(13:38):
subsecurity protocols in place. Um, I kind of just figured
like if you were in there, then you had access
to the alien room, right, you know, all the good stuff. Right.
But but think about that, because to even be on
the base or in Area one, you had to have
the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have
(14:00):
just to work on there. And even if you had that,
you still couldn't see the You two Spy plane or
know that it existed or hear people talk about it.
They wouldn't even let Bono in on it. So that
was a terrible joke. It was really bad. I was
really hoping we can't get around that one. So the
You two Spy plane was great until it wasn't. And
(14:21):
that was when Francis gary Powers was shot down in
nineteen sixty and the plane was all of a sudden
in the hand of the Soviets, and uh, they basically
were like, well that's the end of that. You can't
have a secret spy plane anymore once it's in the
hand of the Soviets. And it was also a big
deal because, uh, the American people all of a sudden
(14:43):
knew that the US government is definitely doing things in
total secret and developing technology that no one knows about.
It was a surprise to everybody, not just the Soviets,
but also the American public, like you were saying too.
And I looked to see if this was looked upon
by historians. Is like the point where Americans realized that
the government did things in secret that the American public
(15:06):
didn't know about. And I didn't see anything like that.
So I don't know if this is an ed comment
or what, but it makes sense. And certainly people didn't
know that the U two spy plane existed. The CIA
did a really good job of keeping it secret, but
when it was out, um, it was pretty humiliating for
the US. And it was also a big deal that
this spy plane was shot down because I Eisenhower had
(15:28):
approached Kruschev Krischev and said, hey, why don't we maintain
an open air space policy to one another so we
can keep tabs to make sure that either side is
keeping our word with our you know, armament treaties and
the stuff we're doing like we're enemies, but um, maybe
we should kind of be able to keep tabs on
one another. And Krischev said, no, there's not gonna be
(15:49):
any open air space policy. And so that the United
States went and developed this you two spy plane instead,
and when it got shot down flying over restricted airspace
of an enemy, that's an act of war and it
could have gone way differently than it did, but instead
it was a big humiliation for the United States. And
instead of this kind of tucking tail and running, the
(16:10):
guy who was in charge of it for the CIA,
Richard Bissell, went to the government and said, Hey, I've
got an idea. Let's get even more secret and develop
an even more secretive plane under an even more secretive project.
And that the government said, hey, let's do it. We're
scared of the Russians. Will double down. We'll triple down
(16:30):
if you want, buddy, And that became Project ox Cart.
That's right, uh, And that was a black project, and
it was so secret and so concealed that no one
was even allowed to know how much money was being spent. Yeah,
this is a big, big turning point here. It was,
I mean, this kind of started the era that we
still live in today, which in which the military just
(16:53):
dumps money into secret projects where there's um that that
don't exist as far as anyone is, and that there's
very little oversight for right, exactly interesting. Yeah, and apparently
it was this Richard Bissell's idea. All right, well, let's
take a break old Dick Bissell and we'll we'll get
back to Dick Bissell and the rest of ox Cart
(17:14):
right after this. So one of the problems with I
(17:41):
guess it's not a problem if you're comfortable with dumping
money into a project. But one of the I guess
expenses of a super super secret project is that it
just costs a lot more. Um. Background checks take time
and cost money. Uh, putting something in a super remote
location cost money, um, having extra security forces and it
(18:02):
all just cost a lot more money. I mean, it's
a it's a serious multiplier on cost to do something
that quote unquote doesn't exist. Right. But in addition to that,
Chuck two is just the fact that, uh, the technology
that was being developed was so cutting edge, it's just
by definition required even more money on top of the
extra money for it being so super secret. Yeah. So
(18:25):
ox Card eventually led to the SR seventy one Blackbird,
another amazingly cool plane, probably the coolest of all time
if you ask me. Yeah, I said the stealth Barmber earlier,
but the SR seventy one is that it was pretty awesome,
although there is another one later on that I'll I'll mention.
Uh well, I'll go ahead and say the Bird of
Prey stealth jet. You like that one, Huh, that's pretty cool.
(18:47):
It looks a little bit like a super cool tongue depressor.
You know what I'm talking about. I know what a
tongue depressor is. This looks like that, like a flying
gray tongue depressor. It's like a opsacle stick though, right, um, yeah,
but wider. Okay, But the SR seventy one Blackbird definitely
not a popsicle stick. No, No, it's just cool. Plus,
(19:10):
it doesn't hurt the fact that G. I. Joe Well
Cobra technically had the SR seventy one Blackbird as one
of their planes. That's funny. Uh So oxcart um they
needed better infrastructure basically, and it was they couldn't just
pour money into the development of the jet. At this point,
they had to really update all the facilities, expanding on land,
(19:34):
expanding and more restricted airspace. Even that happened in nineteen two,
and it just sort of, I think, ingrained the super
permanence of Area fifty one. And also like the fact that,
like the government said, no, okay, this was a humiliating
thing to have a YouTube shot down. Rather than maybe
we'll just kind of take another tack, they really went
(19:55):
further down the path of just completely secret black projects
and they developed some pretty pretty amazing stuff there. Um
the uh I think you were saying the Bird of
Prey that was from the nineties, right, Yeah, I think
it's cool looking. The F one seventeen Nighthawk, that's the
one that's like a single wing stealth bomber. I believe, yes.
(20:19):
And this is also where they take and um, like
if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that
to area to check out as well. Yeah, there's another
program at right Patterson Base in Dayton that's like set
up specifically for that. But I wonder if this is
like even more highly sensitive. I don't know, Um, but yeah,
(20:41):
they've captured Miggs before, captured radar systems and they reverse
engineered him there, which will come into play you later on. Um.
And then there was another one called the Tacit Blue
stealth Bombers. So basically, any stealth aircraft, whether it was
the stealth black Hawks or the stealth bombers that were
(21:01):
developed from the sixties onward, Um, it was probably developed
and tested in super secrecy in area right. So, like
I said, this made it just sort of a shop
that they would that wouldn't close essentially at this point, um,
in that there's an area known as Freedom Ridge. Very
(21:23):
ironic name because Freedom Ridge was taken by the government
right and closed off to the public. And this is
where uh tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars
to try and check out things, and they said no more,
Freedom Ridge is now ours. It's called get out of
here Ridge. Yeah, shot on site Ridge. That's right. So, um,
(21:46):
if you are like get to the Aliens, what are
you guys even talking about the aliens and Area fifty
one as synonymous as they are now, and they are synonymous.
The highway that Area fifty one is off of the
road Area fifty one is off of has been officially
renamed by the state of Nevada as the Extraterrestrial Highway.
It's Highway three oh five, as synonymous as this base
(22:09):
is with aliens and UFOs. That's actually relatively recent. It
was operating for a good thirty five years, I think,
um before Aliens became tied to Area fifty one. And
there's actually a moment in time that you can point
to where it happened. Then it happened on a broadcast
(22:32):
in May of nine, almost just past thirty years ago
on k l as, the local Las Vegas um TV network.
I'm not sure what network affiliate they are, but they
had like their five o'clock news, and on it they
interviewed a guy who was anonymous, went by the pseudonym Dennis,
and he basically said, Hey, I'm doing a lot of
(22:52):
weird stuff out there at Area fifty one. Let me
tell you all about it. Yeah, his name, his real
name was Bob Lazar and he, uh, have you seen
interviews with this guy? Did you see the more recent one? No,
the but the one where he said I think it
was a good idea. That one. No, I'm talking about
(23:13):
there was one just from a few years ago. Um,
it's I gotta say, I mean, I'm not uh conspiracy
guy at all. But when you listen to Bob Blazar
talk today, he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or
a weirdo, or like he would be lying. He hasn't
like made money off of this or like he's He's
(23:35):
basically like, listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't
attached to my name because I'm trying to run a
business in Michigan and it doesn't help that people think
i'm some ufo kok Bob blazars alien apples and oh good,
and he said, but he was like, you know, everything
(23:56):
that I told you was true though, and that's just
the deal. Uh, you know, and I don't care if
anyone believes me. He's kind of like that though. Two.
In the early interviews, Um, at the very least, he's
very calm and not at all kookie or anything like.
It's specifically the stuff he was talking about that was
so compelling. Yeah, so his story is, Um, then you
(24:18):
can go watch this stuff for yourself and see it all.
But he basically explains how he's an engineer and he
was working on reverse engineering um uh, flying saucers essentially
alien spacecraft and alien technology. And at one point he
(24:38):
was in a room and they left him alone with
all these files that describe alien technology and alien autopsies
and all of this stuff. And uh, it's pretty remarkable
to listen to. It didn't make the hugest waves because
it was it was a local news station. At first,
it didn't, Yeah, and then it was picked up by Japan,
(24:58):
oddly enough, and and after it went to Japan, it
went kind of worldwide and before you know it, um,
the whole area just sort of became alien central. And
this is we should point out. This also has a
lot to do with the fact that in the seventies
and eighties did the United States kind of went ufo nuts.
(25:18):
Oh yeah, man. There are so many great books at
the time that were coming out that claimed everything from
like UFOs were responsible for them you to Triangle, or
Atlantis was populated by UFOs, or the Nasca Lines were
for UFOs, or the Egyptians built the Pyramids with the UFOs.
All that stuff came out of the seventies and eighties. Yeah.
(25:39):
So this all kind of coincided with lazar Um having
his news interview and it and it really just kind
of changed everything it did, right, So he kind of
like came out at a time when America was primed
to really believe it. But but if you think about it,
like everything you hear about and think about from about
Area fifty one today did not exist pre nine, pre
Bob Lazar. All started with Bob Lazar. And the reason
(26:02):
why everybody wasn't just like so he's just some nut
who came out and said this stuff. Who cares? How
did that? How did that become truly cemented with Area
fifty one? Is that Weirdly, some of the stuff he
talked about kind of held water, Like he would talk
about just mundane day to day stuff that went on
Area fifty one UM that seemed to h be able
(26:27):
to be correlated from locals like it held up um
there is a um. There was a scanner once. He
said that you would get in and out of rooms
by scanning your hands and it would scan the bone
structure of your hand. That was how you were identified
and could come in and out of rooms. And supposedly
somebody found years like thirty years later, mentioned of something
(26:51):
like that and some declassified report about Area fifty one UM.
He also and this is what really kind of legitimized him.
He would take people out on Wednesday nights and at
the time he would say, I never saw what time
it was, but at the time he said it would happen,
lights would rise up in the sky and they would
do all sorts of UFO E kind of stuff. And
(27:12):
the fact that he knew about these schedules really kind
of added legitimacy to his claims. Yeah, and the new
interview that I saw, he was explaining some of that
uh anti gravitational propulsion technology that the aliens had supposedly
used that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer, and
he was sort of walking, uh walking the person through
(27:34):
it that was in the room, and he was like,
oh yeah, and he said, we had this thing. It
was sort of like half a basketball and when you
went to put your hand on it, he was like,
there was this he was it was like bringing two magnets,
you know, opposite poles too. There's opposite poles that repel.
And he said, that's kind of what it felt like.
And he said, so we would drop like a golf
ball and it would just you know, skirt off to
(27:55):
the side without hitting it, and like as if it
had bounced, and the way he was just scribing it,
I was just like, this guy just seems so credible, right,
it was so like shocking. I didn't know what to expect.
I thought he was I thought he was not going
to be credible. I guess right. UM. I didn't see
the interview with them, but UM, I read about that
(28:16):
technology and UM and by the way, everybody, you can
erase your email. It's like polls that repel each other
chuck not o. UM. The the anti gravity technology was
talking about it was basically saying, like around the craft
or whatever that they were reverse engineering, it would bend gravity,
(28:36):
so this could just move right through space basically at
light speed. That's the big suspicion among ufologists who follow
this stuff is that they reverse engineering light speed aircraft
that was propelled using anti gravity technology on engines that
were matter anti matter engines. And in back in you
(28:56):
couldn't There wasn't an Internet to start with, but even
if there was, you could and find stuff like descriptions
of anti gravity craft at the time. So for this
guy to just come out and start talking about this
in an authoritative way, yeah, he he's an enigmatic figure.
For sure, but he was also one whose credibility was
questioned right out of the gate too, right. Yeah, I
mean he said that he went to m I t
(29:18):
into cal Tech. There are no records of him being
a student. Um U. The conspiracy theorists will say, like,
you know how easy it is for the government to
wipe that glean? Um do you? Yeah? I'm like, I
don't know, is that easy? Uh So that's what they
will say. Um They will also say that they also
(29:42):
like got in touch with his professors to make sure
they never talked and stuff like that. But that's when
I get a little bit like, you can't. You can't
have hundreds of people or thousands of people involved in
some big, massive cover up like someone's gonna talk. You're
just not aking big enough. I agree with you. That's
(30:03):
when it kind of starts to get inky for me.
But he did disappear, and so I mean not disappear, disappear, disappear.
But he uh, I mean, it's not like he was like,
all right, and now I'm gonna go make all the
money on this right exactly, Like he moved and tried
to start like a regular business and tried to just
not be in the public eye. Yeah, he did, which
I think adds to his credibility even more. You know,
(30:25):
a little bit, Let's take our last break and then
come back, shall we Let's do it, but let's promise
we're gonna come back. Okay, all right, stop, okay, Chuck.
(30:58):
So Bob Blazar comes along, just starts spouting out at
the mouth about all the crazy alien stuff that's going
on in Area fifty one, and then he kind of
like fades into the background for a while, and everybody
else kind of took it from there. If you have
anything to do with government conspiracies or believe in UFOs
(31:18):
or aliens or whatever, all that stuff started to get
saddled little by little onto Area fifty one. And one
of the things, um that pretty early on got connected
to Area fifty one, but almost across the board. Any
reasonable source or skeptical source will say, like the two
have nothing to do with one another. Is Roswell and
(31:39):
Area fifty one. Yeah, the Roswell crash in when something crashed,
gentleman found pieces of an air pieces of some kind
of unidentified object, and uh, it became UFO Central. Later
it was it was said to be a weather balloon.
(32:01):
But first the Army said it was a flying disk
that kind of right. Sure, I mean it looks like um,
I've seen that that one famous picture of the guy
crouching with what looks like just some balloon material, right,
But you know he was just a stooge for the
government and that was just a profit that came up with.
(32:22):
So the Roswell crash happens in UM, there's no way
Area forty one would have been associated with it. The whole,
the whole mythos around Roswell is that Um, there was
a UFO crash that happened. Some aliens survived or at
the very least their bodies were recovered, depending on who
you ask, and the UFO and the aliens alive or
(32:43):
dead were taken for further study to wear Area fifty one.
Area fifty one back in seven when the Roswell crash happened,
UM was not even on the CIA's radar. It was
that basically a defunct air strip and day Um nuclear
testing range still, so there wouldn't have been any place
(33:04):
to take the aliens in the first place. And then secondly,
after the Roswell crush happened, UM, the idea of the
an alien um, an alien crash having taken place there.
That didn't come about until like the eighties too, so
really people started to kind of catch onto this a
little late. So probably Area fifty one in Roswell have
(33:25):
nothing to do with one another. And let's not forget
that they're like eight hundred miles apart two even though
to everyone in America and really the rest of the
world outside of the Southwest thinks they're like right next
to each other, I think, so, you know, yeah, So
there have been a lot of crazy theories over the years. Um.
The very most basic um are, like you just said, like,
(33:47):
there's alien corpses there, there's alien technology there. Uh, and
the US military has been studying this stuff and trying
to perfect everything from time travel to light speed travel. Right,
that's that's the basic ground zero approach. Don't forget interdimensional
travel too, why not? Um another one I saw, there's
(34:10):
some pretty pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The
moon landing was faked there, and then after that, right,
but then after that, Kubrick was executed on site and
replaced by a clone that cloned did some great work.
They did, um better than Barry Linden Right would love
Barry Lindon. I've never seen it, so I can'tently hate
on it. It's amazing. UM, weather control experiments. That's probably
(34:33):
the most believable for me. Cloud seating, sure, why not?
Why not? Um? And then there's like stage two of
of conspiracy theories. Yes, that is uh, there are aliens
that clock in every day at Area fifty one and
work side by side with us in harmony, in harmony
(34:57):
in order to build like an alien human hybrid race. Um.
And of all this sounds familiar. I will bet that
you watched a pretty hefty amount of X files because
they really tapped into this stuff. Um. They basically just
appropriated it for plotlines, um, which is great. I love
the X Files. But it was just I guess Chris
(35:21):
Carter used to hang out with like uthologists or something
just to get ideas. Did he really or he had
too of yeah, or he has one himself. I don't
know much about maybe so uh. And then, of course,
if you even ramp that up a little bit more,
that that that this is all part of a giant
conspiracy to create a one world government that is human
(35:43):
alien run right. And that's where um, that majestic twelve
I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They they are
supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists. There's twelve of
them who were impaneled by Eisenhower after the Roswald crash
um or I guess it would have been Truman, I
(36:04):
think still um who and they were put together, just
the cream of the crop to basically go contact the
aliens and basically broke her a meeting I guess between
the President and the aliens. And they managed to um
leverage this to catapult themselves into the status of actual
(36:26):
people who run the world. So they're the ones who
are forming this this one world government. And that is
where Area one or that's where it's located. The seat
of this government is located underground in Area Yeah. This
next one is um a little more recent and very
kookie um. And it's it's the notion that Hitler and
(36:47):
Stalin got together and hatched a plan to undermine the
United States in World War two by distracting us about
the threat of an impending alien invasion. And they would
do this by building a fake spaceship filling it with
mutant children that Joseph Mingola created and um fill the
(37:12):
spaceship with those kids, and then the craft crashed in
a storm, and that was the Roswell incident, right, it
was meant to land, and then these mutant children come
out speaking German supposed right. Supposedly the mutant children who
were the aliens that were found in the Roswell crash
had huge heads and giant eyes. They were basically like
(37:34):
the Grays of alien legend um and that Stalin and
Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to
the World the War of the World's broadcast. They wanted
to incite that kind of panic um by actually creating
this fake alien invasion with all the drugs. Hitler was
on after we know this now who knows? I'm sure
(37:57):
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a create idea. It's
a create idea. Man. Let's what else you got? What
else you got? What else can we do? Solents like
mellow He tried CBD. He's like, no, that's the one
thing I haven't right, he got anything right, but it'll
mix well with everything else. So this is this is
obviously not a thing either. Well. This is from a
(38:18):
book by um an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe,
and she this book came out in two thousand and eleven,
and she based this whole thing on an alleged Area
fifty one insider who was her source, who said that
he worked on a project UM that had to do
with this somehow, some way, but that this this was
(38:41):
where all of this alien stuff came from. It was
a it was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets. UM.
Weird thing is is there's another guy out there who
supposedly has a different source who tells the same story.
But this other source UM says that this is it
was all fake. That I saw the files myself, but
(39:04):
I believe that it was meant to be a test
of loyalty, or to see how I would react working
at Area fifty one two files like this and be like,
oh my god, this is real, this is real. I
can't believe this is this is actually real. So I
guess to see how gullible you were and therefore how
trustworthy you were, right, which could explain Bob blazar situation too,
because he was supposedly in a room full of files
(39:26):
he probably shouldn't have seen either, right, So that that
you've got three different sources who supposedly worked at Area
fifty one. Technically, I should say, because we'll get email.
Bob Blazar worked at S four, which is an even
more secret installation that's attached to AREAT one. But you've
got three people who allegedly worked in Area fifty one
(39:47):
who all tell a story about basically being left in
a room with files that contained information about aliens, whether
it was a hoax or real or whatever. And maybe
that is because that kind of correlates with the idea
that there were like gunpoint interrogations to verify your allegiance
to the government or the military or whatever. Maybe that
(40:07):
is something they tried there. Yeah, it doesn't make the
actual aliens real, It just makes the presence of the
files real. That's true. So Area fifty one today as
it truly exists. Um, if you're driving down Highway three
seventy five, there's an unmarked dirt road between mile markers
(40:28):
twenty nine and thirty or I guess thirty and twenty nine,
and uh, you turn on that road. It's twelve miles
on a dirt road, and you'll get to a gate
and there'll be warning signs all along saying restricted area
sort of like close encounters type stuff. Um, there will
there will be cameras and censors everywhere, So don't think
you're like getting away with anything. No, there's there's Mike's
(40:50):
that listen to your conversation like you were. You were
under as close surveillance as you've ever been in your
life from what I understand. Yeah, and there are guards
of course, and they will say I'm sorry, turn around
and drive back to the highway. And if you persist
a little bit, um, then you will get arrested. Um.
If you're around the perimeter area kind of walking around
with your binoculars, um, they will probably come and take
(41:12):
your binoculars and tell you to leave, or drive you,
um back to the highway, or maybe smash your facing
and bury you in the deserts. Well, there's a sign
that says use of deadly fourth forces authorized. Um. But
there's from what I've seen, there's never been an incident
that where that actually happened. You're much more likely to
get handed over to the local cops, who will slap
(41:34):
you with a several hundred dollar fine sure if you
if you give them any kind of guff and don't
leave immediately when they tell you to. So kind of
the cool thing about Area fifty one there, Um obviously
that I mean there are civilian workers that work there.
It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing, um
(41:55):
because you can look at satellite photographs and year by
year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with
more buildings. Uh. If you work there, and um, I
mean they have to have everything from food services to
custodial services, to plumbing and electricians and stuff like that,
and all of those people have the highest possible security
(42:16):
clearance an American can have. Oh sure, so they don't
drive down that dirt road and just go to the
gate and say how you doing, Rick, and they go
come on in Jane. Uh, they go to mccarren Airport
in Las Vegas and they all get on a big
basically air taxi. Um, it's a seven thirty seven passenger
(42:37):
jet that fly. They call him the Janet Jets at center.
The call signed Janet. They're white, the big thick red stripe.
You can look it up online and they that's how
they get to work every day. They fly everyone in
on a seven thirty seven and you can see them
on the tarmac. They just get in with the regular planes.
It's just look for the Giant seven thirty sevens that
are white with the red stripe and pretty cool. No logo,
(43:00):
no nothing. They don't actually have a name, like you said.
They fly under call signed Janet. People have tried to
figure out forever what Janet means. There's an idea that
it's just another non existent terminal stands for that or
joint air network for employee transportation. But if you go
visit the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame, they tell the
(43:22):
story that there was a commander of Area fifty one
named Richard A. Sampson from v one and he chose
his wife's name Janet to identify the commuter shuttles. And
that's the that's the most romantic, super secret government story
of all. So we kind of teased earlier on that. Um,
(43:43):
the government is no longer saying like I don't know
what you're talking about. Like, no, the satellite image that
we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything
but dirt. Um, that's all changed a little bit now
because of a lawsuit in the mid nineteen nineties or
a group of workers from Air that sued the government
(44:03):
because of the it's an environmental disaster there, or you know,
maybe that's changing now, but it had been for many,
many years because of the fact that it's a black
project and so unregulated that they were just basically doing
everything like dumping hazardous waste and burning it and trenches
(44:25):
and people were there just inhaling these fumes and getting
really sick. And a guy named Robert Frost that worked there,
an employee UM had a lot of really bad health problems.
Doctor said, you were sufferings from some kind of a
really bad chemical reaction, and in order to treat it,
we need to know what it is. And the government said, sorry,
(44:46):
we can't tell you that. He died. He died, and
some other co workers filed this lawsuit and one of
them ended up dying too, and they finally got to
like a Nevada i think, or a federal circuit court
that said, no, you gott don't have a right to
know what what you've been exposed to. They weren't looking
for money, they just wanted to know what was killing them.
(45:07):
And and and the reason that they had no legal right
to know was and this is that that trial that
I was referring to earlier where the government representatives were saying, like,
we like, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry,
So imagine like trying to just get past that barrier, right,
You're suing the government to find out what they were
burning that made you sick, But the government's in court saying, like,
(45:28):
the place that they're talking about doesn't even exist. That's like,
that's obstacle one. But the whole reason that they were
burning this stuff in the first place is because UM
Area fifty one operates under what's called the mosaic theory,
and the mosaic theory is that any little piece of
information a spy gets his hands on could be fit
(45:49):
together with other information to to provide a larger picture
of what what's being done at Area fifty one. And
as a result, nothing can come out of Area fifty
one UM like the chemical that's killing the people, right,
or computers that go in and are used. Once they
get decommissioned, they get put in this pit and these trenches,
(46:12):
and every two weeks they go out there with jet
fuel and everything that's been put into the trenches over
the last two weeks gets douse with jet fuel, it's
set on fire with road flares and whatever is in
that smoke the workers get exposed to because for some
reason they built the trenches upwind of this um this
installation rather than downwind, and so people were exposed to
(46:33):
this every two weeks for years and years and years,
and things like you know, um anti radar paint, um.
The jet fuel that they're using is an acceler and
I'm sure wasn't helping, but just all sorts of exotic
materials that was super super classified. The this is what
was killing these people. We're making them sick exactly. And
(46:54):
the government said, no, this is just to classify. These
people can't know, they're just gonna have to go off
and die on tree did because we're not going to
say publicly what what they were exposed to. And that's
that's where it stood that case. Uh they did finally,
finally in that case say okay, there's an area fifty one.
(47:15):
I know, the whole courtroom went out for beers that
day afterwards, so there's a thing there, and that that's
really all we can say, sorry, is there's a thing there.
But that was the very first sort of uh insight
into the just that admission that there was something there
was the first time that had ever happened, which is
(47:37):
in the mid nineties. Yeah, and um, you were saying,
like people would point to satellite images of the place
and you can see that it's growing now, like you
can see it on like Google Maps. That is really
new because it wasn't very long ago where all the
satellites in space were controlled by the government, and the
government could control what ended up in satellite images, so
(47:57):
they blocked out anything any image of But as private
firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible.
So just a little by little, it's it's becoming to
the point now where they're like, yes, they acknowledge something's there, No,
you can't know what's going on there is basically the
status quo now pretty much. So that's Area fifty one.
(48:19):
And sorry, we kind of took the government tach here
and uh didn't really go all in on the alien theories,
but I just don't think that's what it is. Uh.
If you want to know more about Area fifty one, UM,
I guess just start reading about it. There's some pretty
interesting stuff out there. And since I said that it's
time for a listener mail. This is about nicknames. This
(48:43):
is from Rob Bob. Oh yeah this one. Hey guys,
my name is Rob Bob, Rob and Bob combined into
a singular form. Uh like Jim Bob, but better. My
mom has explained to me that it started when I
was about six months old. I was a really chunky kid,
like and then ninety nine percentile for weight. They felt
like no other nickname like Robbie or Bobby fits, so
(49:06):
they started calling me Rob Bob. Um. Many years later,
I meet my wife, which is almost eight years ago now,
and quickly found out that her favorite writer is Richard Wright.
Since reading his novel Native Son, has wanted to name
her kid Richard to honor the impact he had on
her life. She had visited his grave in Parison as
(49:27):
every book he ever published. Um. When she met me,
I told her about my super nicknames that I had
wanted to call my kid because you see, my father
is William Bill for short. But now since we came
up with these weird names, I call my dad will
Bill to bug him. This leads me to why I
have always wanted to name my child Richard since high school.
(49:49):
Then we would in order to have a will Bill,
a Rob Bob, and a Rick Dick, all in three
generations of awesomeness, my wife does not approve and things
we should look else air for name ideas with great
admiration Rob Bob and Rachel Nice. Thanks Robbob, good luck
with that with your your quest. Yeah, I don't think
(50:09):
Rick Dick is going to fly in your household. I
don't think so either. Rachel may may have the cooler
head here, I think so. Well. If you want to
get in touch with this, like Rob Bob did, we
would love that. You can go on to stuff you
Should Know dot com check out our social links there,
or you can send us an email to Stuff podcast
at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know
(50:32):
is a production of i heeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
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