March 5, 2025 • 63 mins
The majority of human beings currently live in urban areas -- and this trend seems set to continue. According to the most recent estimates, two-thirds of humanity will live in urban areas by 2050. However, not all cities are created equally. In fact, countries throughout the world are home to cities that, in one sense or another, do not officially exist. So what exactly are these secret, closed cities. What goes on there? Why are these areas hotbeds of the stuff they don't want you to know? Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they unravel the mystery in today's Classic episode from 2019.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with a classic episode this evening,
a true story. A while back, we looked around the
world and we realized we mentioned this on the show
in episodes or even strange news or listener mail or
interviews earlier. The majority of human beings now live in
urban areas. Most people live in cities. That trend is
(00:23):
probably going to continue. But you can't go to every city.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, that's right. Not all cities are created equal. In fact,
countries throughout the world are home to cities that, in
one way or another, don't exist.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
One of these is Oakridge, Tennessee. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted
to mention that because it is in the United States,
these are not as far flung nor as rare as
one might assume.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, so let's explore hidden cities that you can't go
to in this classic episode of Stuff they Don't want
you to Know.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
They call me Ben we are joined as always with
our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decond. Most importantly, you
are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Got a confession for you, Matt.
All right, I did my quarterly dive into our podcast
reviews about every three months. I do that.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
I noticed your Twitter request for reviews.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Oh yeah, and following me on Twitter.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Yeah yeah, No, I just saw it through the conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. I wanted to thank everybody who
took the time to make or to write a review,
whether good or bad or simply middling. We really do
appreciate it, and shout out to our longtime listeners, many
of whom I recognize just based on the way you talk.
In the review especially, there were a couple of great
(02:17):
ones where someone said, hey, I hope this gets you
guys one step further away from being fired, and I thought, wow,
you have been listening a long time. People like great
stuff to say about you, Matt, and about Noel, and
about you as well, Paul Mission Control Decands. So thanks
to everybody sincerely who checked in and gave us a rating,
(02:39):
even the people who for one reason or another gave
us one star because the facts that we presented about
a specific issue did not jibe with their opinions. Got you,
Thank you for taking the time.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Just feels like two dudes at a bar kicking it
one star. That sounds terrible.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Did you pull them up? Are you reading what?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (03:04):
No, seriously, I mean, without spending too much time on it.
It's uh, We're very fortunate for every listener, and we're
grateful for your time. I have to ask, and this
is something that you and I have talked about, I
think a little bit before off air. I have to ask, Matt,
are you, in your personal life a fan of maps,
cartography stuff like that.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Yeah? I mean my wall is just covered with maps
of video game worlds. Really yeah, But you know, in
the real world it's for some reason not as appealing
to me, though I do love knowing, let's say, within
the world of Skyrim, like where particular towns are with
relation to the Giant Mountain.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
This is so ridiculous. I have been playing. I'm at
the level of Skyrim on my replay where I am
just trying to find every location.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Oh yeah, no, I you have to do that.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Have you found on every location?
Speaker 4 (04:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I don't know if I have every so often, like
the numbers don't jive up yet.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Yeah, I remember taking that it's not an achievement. What
is it called the skill or whatever? At some point
where it reveals all locations on the map to you.
That was one of one of my.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
First playthroughs, though in Skyrim.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I think it is Skyrim. Maybe it's a different one.
I don't know. I've played so many at this point.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, I don't know if it's on Skyrim, but if
it is, I am excited.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I'm also fallout. That's a fallout.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
That's a Fallout thing, but still Bethesda, right, Yeah, I
like you. I'm a fan of maps, a fan of cartography,
and I think a lot of our fellow listeners are
as well. I'm one of those people who has you know.
At my house, I have a world map where I
can put the little pins in. Shout out to Mitch
Hedberg for his brilliant world map joke, which I will
(04:53):
not impersonate here. I'm also a fan of very old maps.
I have prints of the Perie Reese map that you
and I covered in a previous episode, and I have
a collection of out of date globes which are also
very interesting once you get to the Middle East, once
(05:14):
you get to Russia, the Balkan areas and so on.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
You you are a fascinating person.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Ben, What do you mean, Well, we have some of
those some of those globes still here in the office today.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Sure, it's an interesting way to look at the story
of humanity. And regardless of what kind of trends we
see in maps and on globes over time, we do
see one specific trend which has never been violated, as
never abated. It is the trend of our species to
(05:48):
construct increasingly larger, more dense urban areas. As we record
today's episode, humanity is officially an urban species.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
Right, Yeah, we are. We move towards those places, even
if it's on the outskirts, in the suburban areas. As
of twenty sixteen, more than four billion people lived in
these things that we would consider to be urban areas,
and there are only three point four billion people living
in what we would consider to be rural areas outside
(06:22):
of these bigger, established places.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Oh, and we should we should retroactively say this is
the here are the facts part of the show. That's right,
Everything that you're hearing for this part of for this
act of today's episode is indeed true. You're absolutely right, Matt.
As of twenty sixteen, there are already more people living
in cities than there were in rural areas. This explosive
(06:48):
migrational trend is set to continue by twenty fifty, assuming
we don't blow ourselves up or encounter like a pandemic, right,
assuming that we don't find ourselves in the midst of
a catastrophic water war.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
We will, but let's pretend.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Let's pretend, Okay, let's be let's be a little bit
naive about it. So everything goes okay until twenty fifty.
If everything goes more or less alright, then by twenty
to fifty, two thirds of our species will live in
urban areas, technically about sixty eight percent. So, whether you
love them or whether you hate them, it seems cities
(07:28):
are set to become one of humanity's most popular inventions.
And it's interesting to think of a city as an invention.
We don't because it's so normalized, it's so ancient. A
city is now just a place, But at some point
people invented it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Yeah, the concept of having one centralized area where people
can coexist generally with you know, some kind of castle
or stronghold or something to protect near the center, right,
or at least somewhere strategically within that place, and then
the homes and everything in the places of business all
(08:10):
shoot up around it.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Right, Yeah, exactly. And this is this is an interesting
distinction too, because what is the difference between you know,
an agglomeration of longhouses and a town or a town
and a village or a village. And of course it's
big because in the city, regardless of how you want
(08:32):
to classify a city or an urban area, and there
are a couple of different definitions out there, we do
have enough of a grasp on this phenomenon that we
can describe it on a global scale. Currently, the North
American continent is the most industrialized out of all the continents.
As of twenty eighteen, about eighty two percent of this
(08:56):
continent's population lives in an urbanized area. Eighty two percent.
So if you are listening to this show and you
happen to not be living in one of those dense agglomerations,
and congratulations, because you are an increasingly rare person generally
(09:18):
speaking on this continent.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah, well, and then if let's say you're living in
Latin America or somewhere in the Caribbean, you are not
far behind, only one percent less at eighty two percent
people within those populations live in something you know called
an urban area. And you know what makes sense, interestingly
enough in places in the Caribbean, because if you think
(09:44):
of the amount of land mass that you actually have there,
you can imagine how people would just end up moving
towards some of the more populated areas.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
That's a really good point.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
And for especially for the types of businesses that exist
in a lot of in a lot of those areas,
you need other people to be around to sell things too.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, that's a really good point. And surprisingly, only about
seventy four percent of Europeans can say the same, which
shocked me because the you know, the rise of industry
began earlier in Europe than it did in the US.
It's just surprising that only seventy four percent. I guess
(10:26):
because of the circumstances of my travels in Europe, I've
always seen it as a place with little wilderness, and
I know that's not true, especially the further east you go.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, well, you know, all of this is it's not discounting,
but it's not taking into account micro trends that occur,
you know, within like one city, Oh yeah, some people
migrating away from that city or more people then like
for a period of time and then getting an injection.
I'm thinking of a place like Detroit.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Exactly, the depopulation of Detroit.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
Yeah, but then then kind of a repopulation in certain
areas of Detroit, and then as that's gonna you know,
hopefully flourish in the coming decades.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, here's hoping. I would love to see the rise
of Detroit, you know, a reboot of the city. But
people will also tell you that rumors of Detroit's demise
have been greatly exaggerated. You know, sometimes the terrible things
we see on the news are just purposely made to
(11:30):
be terrible things because that's what keeps people's attention, right.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Yeah, I don't have much to add on that, agreed.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I feel like we're on the same page with that one.
But it may also surprise you go into your earlier statement, Matt,
it may surprise some of our listeners to know that
about sixty eight percent of Oceana's population is urbanized and
there you know, I think back to what you were
saying about the Caribbean archipelagoes and islands. You know, it's
(11:58):
a matter of scarcity of land in Oceana at least.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Yeah, and yeah, the natural wonders of a lot of
those places you want to protect as well. So you
end up just kind of squished together in one major area.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
That makes sense. And now, of course, for our finale
in this in this list, we have to mention the
two biggest populated continents, Asia and Africa. They come in
second and last place, respectively. Around half of Asia's population
(12:33):
lives in cities, forty three percent of Africa's population live
in urban areas. And as you know, as we like
to point out, both Asia and Africa are huge, huge
places filled with this incredible variety of ethnicity, of community,
(12:54):
of culture. It's beyond apples and oranges, you know what
I mean. So these numbers only count as a cohesive
thing if we're looking at the metric of just people
on a continent.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Yeah, it's about seventeen full fruit stands worth, right, per
per continent.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, Matt did the math of this, The fruit.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Math worked it out.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
So obviously this is not a static number, and it
shouldn't surprise anybody to learn that those last two continents,
renamed Asia and Africa, are also projected to experience the
largest growth in urbanization as we approach twenty fifty. And
this leads us, This leads us back to you, our
(13:41):
hypothetical but hopefully real listener, who has grown up in
or has moved to a rural area. We have to ask,
what is the future of these increasingly abandoned rural areas.
That's a story for another day, but today we're going
to give you this look at cities across the world
as a way of a pro another question. As we
(14:02):
hurtle toward the extinction of privacy, the normalization of mass surveillance,
and a future where opulence may well be defined as
simply having a decent view from your apartment or a
small backyard with a garden. It seems we will soon
live in a world without strangers, a crowded cognitive space
where everything is public, everything is urban, and the maps
(14:24):
of the future show us small concentrations of humanity, islands
of concrete and steel, separated by vast gulfs of what
would appear to be nothing to a city dwell er.
Of course it will be biodiversity. Hopefully there will be
agriculture things of that nature.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah, it's going to be wastes of fire and acid water, right,
I'm digging it right, But the domes over the cities
will protect us at least temporarily.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
All praise the dome m h yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Yeah. Well here's the thing though, there are all those
maps that we're like talking about, that we're thinking about
in the future. They're gonna have the big places. You know,
you're gonna your your London's are still going to be
on there.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Uh, you know, your your Mumbais.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
You know for sure your Mumbais, all all your different
places that are massive known entities will be there. But
there's one thing that probably won't be on your on
your maps then even twenty five years, thousand years in
the future. Mill maybe in a thousand years, but in
(15:39):
the future, there are still gonna be places that will
never make it to a map, places that would be
considered an urban area, a city even but won't show up.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
That's right, there's a bit of a bait and switch.
We're not talking about normal cities. Now, what are we
talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. That's correct, as conspiratorial as
(16:11):
it may sound, the world is full of secret cities,
and attempting to enter these cities may cost you your life.
Picture this. There are entire cities, metropolis level cities that
are not villages. They're not puttering communes where everybody follows
(16:31):
one person who had some sort of purported spiritual experience.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
We're talking about large collections of multiple story buildings, huge
buildings that are just somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
With populations of hundreds of thousands of people. In some cases,
these are cities that do not officially exist in one
capacity or another. And what's more, we've been building these
cities for longer than you might want to think. Some
cities started off as secrets, only to be classified later.
(17:04):
Others remain closed to the majority of humanity as we
record today. Let's start with a safe, kind of bucolic
historic example, something relatively innocuous nowadays, and it'll be close
to home for a lot of our fellow listeners. That
is a little place called oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
Oh yes, oak Ridge, that has connections to New York
in some weird way. We'll get to that in a moment. So,
about seventy five years ago, the government in these here
United States, they took possession of around sixty thousand acres
in East Tennessee. Now officially this occurred on September nineteenth,
(17:45):
nineteen forty two. There was a kernel there Leslie Groves.
This guy just kind of looked at the map, maybe
took it, had some people take a trip out, and
then said, yeah, this is it, this is what we want.
And there wasn't anything, you know, particularly extraordinary about this area,
this huge swath of land. Even today, you know, if
(18:07):
you're looking back, you're reading about this, historians try and
figure out exactly like what this guy saw, but they're
still unsure.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, they can make a couple of guesses. We know
that this site and what would become Oakridge, Tennessee, was
chosen out of a short list of several other sites
across the contiguous US. Our guesses tend to be things like, well,
we needed maybe a source of water, we needed a
(18:38):
rural area that was removed from the hustle and bustle
of a city. Because at the time, if you wanted
something spooky done, or you wanted something done in secret.
You could just go to the great wilds of the United.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
States, but you still needed to have access to infrastructure
and shipping if.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
You needed it right, right, so you would want to
be able to contact the rest of the world when necessary. Anyhow,
whatever the logic was, that's what General Groves chose sixty
thousand acres there in East Tennessee. The area started out
with a few different names and the relatively sparse official documentation.
(19:21):
Sometimes it was called Site X, great name for a town.
Other times it was referred to as Clinton Engineering Works.
That is, as far as we could find, not a
reference to the later Clinton political dynasty.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Yeah, it is like a company name that just stood
for a location.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, there was a town named Clinton nearby near Knoxville, Tennessee,
and that's what they were named at naming this thing after.
But eventually it became oak Ridge. And while the name
of this place may have undergone some iterations, its purpose
was always crystal clear to those in the No. You see,
Groves was overseeing what we call the Manhattan Project today,
(20:04):
that's the New York connect right, Yeah. Yeah, And the
town that would become oak Ridge was built for the
express purpose of helping Uncle Sam build the first atomic bomb.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Oh yeah, And we have some information here coming from
the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History resonance there on
the land. The people who actually lived in Oak Ridge,
A lot of the families lived in the area really
on just in poverty or on the brink of poverty
for generations, and then all of a sudden, when this
(20:38):
land was purchased, all of them were just kicked out
just by you have to leave. The government is moving
in apologies, but not really just get out. And the
Feds came through the federal government and they condemned the
land and they paid the residents like really nothing, just
to get them the heck out of there as quickly
(20:59):
as power possible.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Right According to the New Hope Center, one resident at
the time received nine hundred dollars for forty acres of land.
That's about twenty two dollars and fifty cents per acre.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
If we adjust for inflation, that's about fourteen one hundred
and seventy seven dollars total, which works out to about
three hundred and fifty four dollars and forty three cents
per acre today. Talk about a steal. You know what?
I mean, yeah, so let's keep the timeline here too.
If you look into the Center for Oakridge Oral History,
(21:34):
you'll see stories from people recalling that as children, the
principal called everybody into the school and told them they
had received a special or special contact from the federal government. Yeah,
it was September nineteen forty two. They all had to
be out by December nineteen forty two. Uproot your entire life, right,
and the logic here is solid and it is also ruthless.
(21:56):
It's very important to again emphasize this happened in the
United States not very long ago.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Yeah, you have to imagine what the residents were going through,
what their lives were like, in order to really understand.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
First, a lot of the rural residents would doubtlessly accept
this lump sum of cash. It's a windfall, you know,
it could literally be a life changing amount of scratch
for a population where running water and indoor plumbing were
often a pipe dream. Terrible choice of words. Wow on
the level of science fiction. But there's a second, more
(22:33):
disturbing fact it played too well.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Yeah, a lot of the folks living around there didn't
have the education, let alone. You know, someone with enough
money to come through and mount any kind of legal
protest or action against what the federal government was doing
to them. And it was very clear that no matter what,
(22:56):
the federal government was moving in and you could either
essentially take them money or just leave. Right, You're gonna
take the money and leave, or you're just gonna leave right.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
They you know this is this is kind of an
eminent domain thing too, right. They could say for the
greater good, you have to leave this place. Yeah, we'll
give you a little bit of money, you have to
leave this place. And being impoverished, they simply do not
have the recourse to legal action, even if they could
find someone who would represent them. This is all happening,
(23:29):
by the way, under strict secrecy, so there's not going
to be any kind of public trial. It will get quashed.
By nineteen forty five, just a few years later, Oakridge, Tennessee,
has seventy five thousand people living and working in the area.
Very few of those seventy five thousand people knew the
ultimate purpose of the secret city. Many had no idea
(23:52):
what they were working on until the United States dropped
the first atomic bomb on Japan and the local paper said,
you know Oakridge delivers something to the Japanese.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, exactly what I've just mentioning there that seventy five
thousand people lived in the area. It's not you know,
we were talking about cities. We set this whole episode
up talking about cities. Oakridge was not like one big
facility where everyone went to work every day and then
everybody just left the area. They built a city there.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah. Yeah, schools, post office, shops, movie theater and some
of the people who were originally kicked out by the
Feds managed to get jobs later at Oakridge. Yeah, and
they didn't know what they were doing. They did not
know that they were processing and enriching uranium. Today, if
(24:46):
you wish, you can visit Oakridge. It still processes uranium today.
And while this is one of the more popular examples
of a secret city, it is far from the only
case of one. There are more closed cities and they
remain closed today. Will give an honorable mention to Mercury, Nevada,
which spoiler alert I'd like to save for another episode.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Well then we won't say anything else about it. Thank
you for you know, glancing across this episode Mercury Nevada.
We look forward to seeing you again soon.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Radioactive ships in the night.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Well, you know we're mentioning this, yes, but we're talking
about Oakridge and just it had a hand in the
Manhattan Project, And I don't know if I want to
spoil too much. We talked we made an episode on
the Manhattan Project not too long ago, I believe, didn't
we Maybe we didn't. Maybe it's just that other secret
project we're working on.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Yeah, or maybe we're both remembering forward again.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
I hate well, all right, Well, it's interesting that we're
hitting Oakridge, Tennessee in the United States, kind of in
the heartland where the Manhattan probably was being carried out,
where nuclear testing in the first atomic bombs were developed
in the United States, that were hitting that first and
(26:09):
knowing where we're going in this episode.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
That's right, where are we going? Indeed, where in the
world will we find our next forbidden city? We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor. In what should
not be a stunning plot twist to anybody was listened
(26:32):
to this show in the past, we are of course
headed to Russia.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
Soviet Russia.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yes, yes, like the US, the Soviet Union was also
scrambling to event new terrifying weapons of war, and like
the US, they decided secret cities were the best way
to carry out their work.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Oh yeah, so there were several of actually numerous conspiratorial communities,
communities that were off the books, forbidden secret. In nineteen
ninety three, a little bit of the you know what
would be considered the iron dome, the iron veil that
keeps information from linking out, was lifted. When these places
(27:13):
were officially called they get they were given a name
closed administrative territorial entities, and that translates to if you,
if you take the cyrilliki translate it, it's Zato or Zato.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I was in my head for some reason as Zatto,
but I think it's just because it seems like a
cool name for someone to have. Is my friend Zatto.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
It's very similar to a kiddi kat in Spanish.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Oh gotto.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Yeah, I don't know, that's where my head goes.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
But before then, before nineteen ninety three, if you look
at any government census, both in the Soviet Union and
Russia proper and different members of the Soviet Union, you
will see that these cities and the hundreds of thousands
of people living and working in them simply do not exist.
(28:08):
Closed cities were not marked on maps, and there were
no road marks that could lead some ignorant, naive traveler
to the secret settlement. It was built such that you
couldn't just accidentally be there and say, oh my god,
look at me.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Well, especially if you were taking any kind of public
transportation like a train or a bus or anything like that,
you would not be able to find them. You would
have to get in a vehicle and then like just
explore until you got to the gates where generally they
say attention, stay out, like you cannot come in here.
And it's crazy were you know, we talked about this
(28:46):
concept of the city itself was secret, so it was
hidden away, which is kind of mind blowing thinking about
large buildings and everything being secret. But then also that
the human beings that occupied the cities were taken, like
you said, literally taken off of the census and families
(29:06):
like when you have a child and you live in
one of these places, that child ostensibly doesn't exist outside
of the books for that closed city.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Right exactly, so strange and you can see that you
can see the problem. Here's it sets up a slippery
slope that's similar to the problem that the government of
China is having with unregistered births. Right when they had
the one child policy. What ended up happening because a
lot of parents you know, of course, want to have
(29:37):
the children that they were going to have. There's been
this rise of a population of human beings, female people
in China who are unregistered, so they have no rights,
they have no access to you know, healthcare, education, medicine.
It's a terrible, terrible situation and it's all because of
(29:59):
a couple the pieces of paper. How often does that
happen with our species? You know, other animals don't do that.
I'm not saying other animals are better than our brand
of animal, but I don't see, though nature's brutal, I
don't see a lot of other intelligent creatures, you know,
committing such horrific acts over paperwork.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
Yeah, we can really get into this if you want to,
but that's that's an intense discussion to have right there.
Just the concept that a small paper that either proves
that you are who you are or from a certain
area has life or death consequences throughout time.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Like what we did that earlier. We definitely did a
video in this the concept of statelessness. Yeah, people who
do not have a country of origin, so strange. But
in this case, the people in these closed cities in
the USSR, as we'll come to find, they did not
have a huge problem with living life as ghost people,
(31:07):
according to the bureaucracy.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
And actually according to some reporting that's come out fairly
recently from and interviews from people who've lived inside these places,
because they got.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Perks, Yeah, they had a pretty good There's a documentary
and we'll talk about a little bit later where you
can see some of these quotes, and there are people saying,
we got everything that we wanted for the rest of
our lives for staying here. So of course we would
stay here. Don't screw this up for us outsiders. Residents
(31:40):
of these close cities were given private apartments, right, and
this is during the era of communism, so it's a
big get for them. Decent healthcare, and they had jobs
for life, they had job security. And at a time
when the much of the rest of the USSR was
having a difficult time coming by the most base of staples,
(32:01):
you know what I mean, wheat, milk, eggs, stuff like that,
residents of these close cities were getting things that were
exotic for the time, like bananas, condensed milk. They had
a lot of meat products they could eat. Literally, caviar
was available, literally caviar, yes, yes, literally caviar egg, although.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
You probably would not want to eat the caviar.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Which is a spoiler depending on the city. So even today,
here's the thing. Even today, most residents of these close
cities consider themselves incredibly fortunate to be living in a
zoto area. They're not bothered by the barbed wire fencing
that surrounds them or the cognitive fencing and bureaucratic fencing
that also surrounds them. They are very mission oriented. Instead
(32:45):
of diving into the numerous the numerous Cold War era
closed cities that we know about today and speculating on
the fifteen or twenty that are more or less certain
to exist but remain secret, let's just look at a few,
like high level examples.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
What do you think, Oh yeah, absolutely, And you know,
each of these that we're going to talk about coming
up are their own thing. Everything we've been talking about before,
this in relation to these Zato Zeto areas, it's similar,
very similar, but each one of these is going to
have its own tail and So let's take you to
a place called I'm gonna try and pronounce this.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Zelenogorsk, Zelenogorsk, Zelenogorsk. Yeah, we are not Russian. Please send in,
dear Russian speakers in the audience, please send in the
correct pronunciations here we would always prefer to be correct
rather than comfortable. So. Zelenogorsk is located in Russia by
(33:49):
the Khan river Ka n It was built in the
forties fifties era as part of the Soviet drive to
enrich uranium for the USSR nuclear program. Like Oakra, this
city had a population of thousands, and although it existed
for decades, it was not on official maps until nineteen
(34:09):
ninety two. Imagine trying to get mail. Oh, by the way,
when these things are in full swing, and some of
them still operate this way today. These cities are not
as you said, Matt on trade and bus routes. They're
only known by a postal code, a name, and a number.
So what it would be like It would be like
decad forty seven or something.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Yeah, yeah, exactly with that postal code. And the other
thing here is just like oak Ridge. We're kind of
comparing these two places. They this place still supplies a
good amount of the uranium for Russia's production there. It's no,
it's twenty nine percent of the enrichment capacity that exists
(34:52):
within Russia. So the actual places with centrifugias that are
enriching uranium. That's crazy to think, but even sends uranium
to other countries, including the United States, just because you
know you need a little extra uranium. Sometimes Unkridge can't
do all the production.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
You get bye with a little help from your friends.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
Yeah, exactly. And we're continuing with that trend here of
a lot of these closed off cities were specifically meant
to create or at least assist in the creation of
weapons of war, like massive weapons of war, new technologies
that could be used to establish dominance or at least
(35:34):
hopefully right.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Let's go to one of the most famous examples, a
town called Ozersk, also known as City forty. Oz Ersk
is located in the Ural Mountains. It was founded in
nineteen forty seven. First was known as Chileabinsk forty, then
Chileabinsk sixty five. Like other closed cities, as you said, Matt,
(35:56):
Ozersk was built to aid the Soviet nuclear probe. Unlike
some other forbidden cities, Osairsk has received a great deal
of media attention, notably in a documentary called City forty,
which we highly recommend.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Yeah, seriously check it out if you possibly can, or
at least read up on the contents of it, because
there are so many fascinating stories and humans.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Involved, and it is a tragic story. Yeah. So the
citizens of this place of City forty have a fairly
unique dilemma, and I quite like the way the Guardian
put it in an article on the closed city. It's
this Their water is contaminated, their mushrooms and berries are poisoned,
and their children may be sick. Ozersk and the surrounding
(36:43):
region is one of the most contaminated places on the planet,
referred to by some as the graveyard of Earth. Yet
most of City forty's residents do not want to leave.
They take pride in their community. They still have that
attitude of feeling that they have received immense privilege.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
Yes, and they have in a lot of ways, and
their families have benefited from that privilege. But their families
have also in most cases, a family member or two
or more have died because.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
They have lived in that place, right, Yeah, they were
heavily contaminated by industrial pollution from the nearby Mayak plutonium
plant from the what the late nineteen forties on, this
was an ongoing thing. This plant was one of the
largest producers of weapons grade plutonium for the Soviet Union
(37:41):
during a lot of the Cold War, particularly during the
atomic bomb program, and it was built with once again
the greater good in mind. You got to break a
few eggs. We want to get some atomic omelets, said
the Soviet government. You know what I mean, what's a
(38:03):
couple people in the great balance of life? You know
what I mean? Hakuna matata, et cetera, they said, And
then they built this with no regard for safety.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Well, yeah, that's that's the crazy thing. It's there have
been several one major disaster that occurred at one of
the major plants there that ended up irradiating I think
it was like two hundred thousand people or something like that,
or it was a crazy number of people in villages
(38:33):
that just lived, you know, upstream or away from the
actual plant. Because these they were dumping radioactive waste directly
into the water into that river that we keep talking
about there and we're.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Dumping solid waste, liquid waste, gaseous matter, all radioactive. And
then we're doing this for more for not more than,
but for around a decade, from nineteen four five to
fifty seven.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yeah, and here's here's the part that was mind blowing
for me as I was learning about it. You know,
when you imagine a nuclear accident or a disaster, what
comes to mind. Chernobyl, right through that island is first,
though Chernobyl always is at the top of the list.
(39:22):
And over all this time when the waste was being dumped,
the sum of contamination of radioactive contamination has been estimated
to be two to three times the release from the
Chernobyl accident explosions. Now here's the deal. Chernobyl kind of occurred, exploded,
Your your radioactive waste is you know, gone into the
(39:42):
air and is spread out across a wide area. But
for this they're literally pumping out the radioactive waste continually
for a decade.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
In nineteen fifty seven, this reaches ahead the MAAC plant
is the site of an enormous disaster. An underground tank
of highly irradiated liquid nuclear waste explodes and it contaminates
thousands of square kilometers of territory. Nowadays, it's known as
the Eastern Eural Radioactive Trace or the urt EURT. The
(40:18):
problem is that this disaster is quietly, efficiently and ruthlessly
covered up, and very very few people inside or outside
of the USSR we're aware of what actually happened until
at least nineteen eighty and this has also been called
the Kishtom disaster specifically, you know, this is September twenty ninth.
(40:44):
And I really appreciate what you're pointing out here, Matt,
because we're all familiar with your noble, especially in the
world of fiction in the recent day and age, because
there was a masterful miniseries done that I think aired
on HBO, but it didn't really address this. And can
(41:09):
you imagine living here and you've been told that you
are the sword and shield to save the world. Right,
that's why you and your family are working and this
great project to make this new weapon of war. You're
not doing it to sow chaos. You're doing it to
guarantee peace.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
Well and also be triumphant over those who want to
do harm.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Right exactly, because everyone is a war of defense. Da
da da da da da da. But didn't mean to
sound so dismissive. I just don't believe it when people
say that anymore, you know. But the kicker is imagine
being that person. So you're ideologically on board, probably, And.
Speaker 4 (41:54):
You learn.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Weeks after the fact, very least weeks after the fact,
that you and your children have been irradiated, and you
can't find anything about it, even in the news, even
in the secret city newspaper it's supposed to give you
one of the inner circle. You know what happened. Why
(42:18):
are you only seeing these vague reports, and why don't
they jibe with the first hand sightings you're hearing of
of people with skin falling off their faces, their body
parts being exposed, their hair falling out along with their toenails,
and so on.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
Yeah, let me quickly paint a scenario, just for all
of us sitting here and listening. Let's imagine that we're
one of the minority few who live out somewhere in
a rural area. And let's say we live in Russia.
It's nineteen fifty seven, and our small family own some
(42:57):
farmland and lots and lots of livestock, or at least
enough livestock, you know, to survive as well as a
lot of crops, and we're just hanging out. We're doing
all the strenuous work we have to do every day
to maintain what we have, which is still very little,
and then all of a sudden, you know, we don't
(43:17):
notice anything. Really. We heard maybe about a big bang,
a large bang that occurred somewhere, you know, southwest of
here a couple of days ago, but that's all we've
really heard about. There were some weird clouds that came over,
like appeared to be smoke or something. We haven't thought
about any of that stuff since that day. Well, a
(43:38):
big truck rolls through with a lot of our you know, countrymen,
our military people. They're just coming through and they happen
to stop by our farm and they let us know
that today we have to slaughter all of our cattle.
We have to uproot and then bury all of our crops.
(43:59):
Then we have to plow all that over, and then
we have to get the heck out because they're going
to purchase our farm for almost nothing.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
They're also wearing containment suits. Yeah, then they did not
bring spares.
Speaker 4 (44:12):
Yeah, just letting us know. And here's the other thing.
Let's say that occurs and then years later after you
know that went down, you know what's occurred. Nobody has
put any record of this down. Nobody is talking about
all the other farms like that were just in this
giant line that I can look at a map and see,
(44:34):
like I know, people lived in this line and they
all had to sell their houses, their farms, but nobody's
talking about it.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
There's a beauty, the dark beauty to the brutal logic there.
So the same way that rural people in the US
could not fight back against the lad been taken, people
who do not officially exist have no legal recourse because
(45:01):
they are ghosts. It just now reached a point where
their physical condition matched the condition of the paperwork, which
is just insidious. I mean, it is unclean to do
that to people. But I see the logic of it,
and there are plenty, plenty more. We could probably do
(45:24):
an episode per city on close cities in Russia, but
we don't want to just stay in the Cold War
in the US and Russia or the USSR. Excuse me,
Let's take a quick look at other cities, some of
which might surprise you. In the mainland of China, there
is a place called the nuclear town. It is in
the Gobi Desert in the western part of Gansu Province. Officially,
(45:49):
it's called the number four oh four Factory of China
National Nuclear Corporation. I love that it's called four oh four, right,
pretty it's such a bad internet joke.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
It's unknown.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
I hope someone did it on purpose. It's not found
yash so it's built back in nineteen fifty eight. So
probably not a good joke unless the people who did
four h four on the Internet were making a sideways
reference to this fact. Probably not. Probably not. The world's
not that convenient nor well written.
Speaker 4 (46:19):
I say we go that until someone tells us it's
for something else.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
And then let's accuse them of covering it up. That's right, Well,
that sounds like a plan in that. So this is
the biggest nuclear industry base in the country that we
know of. It's the country's first military nuclear reactor. Eighty
percent of China's nuclear bomb core components are built there.
For twenty years it was completely closed to outsiders. And
(46:46):
that's not the only case in China. There are a
couple of other more remote places where you have to
apply for what's called an alien travel document. In advance
to visit, and you have to report to the police
as soon as like your accommodations as soon as you
stay somewhere, And if you don't follow everything to the letter,
you get the boot. They will immediately take you out
(47:08):
of the country.
Speaker 4 (47:09):
Yeah, just get the heck out, man, We've got this
running thing. We're gonna come back to it in the conclusion.
But just if you're going to create facile material to
be weaponized for any reason, or just let's say it's
just to run a power plant, it's a lot of
(47:29):
people that are doing that, are making these weird, hidden,
creepy cities.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, it turns out to maybe be the best way
to go about this, right because if you have because
you can control more variables, if you have the entire
city purpose built like we have. You know, we have
military armament manufacturers that are based in or near large
(47:57):
urban areas, but they no matter how well they secure
their grounds, they cannot control the millions of people who
live like you know, across the river or get through
the woods, I don't know, whatever you want to say. Yep.
So this is a very common trend, and these secret
(48:20):
cities are still around today and in some cases, Yes,
the people who live in them do not technically exist
on paper. We want to do one more example as
something that is completely different. It's a closed city, closed
part of a city that does not exist for nuclear
research and does not exist for some kind of human
(48:46):
rights abuse or concentration camp thing. Right, So let's travel
to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. You've heard it before. This
is not the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KSA should not
be a new thing to any of our life listeners.
It is a unique country in the world of geopolitics
for a number of reasons, and its most famous close
(49:06):
city is no different. Unlike the majority of secret cities
we've mentioned today, Mecca is not closed due to top
secret military or industrial research. Instead, it's a partially closed
city because every year millions and millions and millions of
people visit and you can too, as long as you
like them. Are a practitioner of Islam. Because only Muslims
(49:30):
are allowed in Mecca, it is the holiest, most important
city in the religion. It has off limits under any
circumstances to any non Muslims. Don't even try.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
Yeah, if you do attempt, and you don't meet all
of those requirements, you will immediately be deported and that
will be it. Thank you for trying to come in,
but we don't appreciate you. Why No, I'm just kidding.
It's not that harsh, but you would definitely get deported immediately.
Speaker 1 (49:59):
Well, you know, the penalty in practice maybe much harsher
than deportation, And a lot of it depends on what
kind of person who are your country of origin? Right, yes,
and it could go up to and including assault, torture, murder.
You just you don't know. And as a personal message
to anybody else who enjoys traveling to the edges of
(50:20):
the maps, to the places where normal people don't take vacation,
I definitely want to warn every non Muslim person against
trying to sneak into Mecca. It's not like taking a
quick illicit trip across the poorest Midwestern or Alaskan border
between Canada and the US. Your chances of being caught
(50:42):
are extremely high. If you feel that you must go
to Mecca, you genuinely must go there. The most rational
choice is to convert to Islam beforehand, actually do it.
Attempting to fake a conversion will also by the way
in all likelihood fail. I know that there are photographs
(51:02):
of plenty of someone who said, like, oh, it's not
getting a mecca or whatever. There was a recent story
about a guy who I think acquired his Israeli citizenship
in twenty fourteen, and he visited and he said that
it was on the up and up. But I have
a tough time believing him. And also, you know, inherently
(51:28):
it's the most important city in this religion, the millions
of people follow. I don't know, man, this is a
personal take. I want your opinion too, Matt. Should people
be able to do that? I feel like, personally would
be disrespectful for me to say, well, I don't care
about your core belief system. I need some selfies, you
(51:51):
know what I mean. That just feels I don't know.
Speaker 4 (51:54):
Yeah, no, yeah, it certainly doesn't feel like a good
eye idea. I'm trying to find it, like something that
would be the equivalent, But I don't know if there's
anything in the world that's as close to that. There
are I mean trying to imagine the whaling Wall or
(52:16):
but it's not like it's restricted.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
Well, in some religions in the West, like the Church
of Latter day Saints, don't they not allow some people
into the temple like people are not.
Speaker 4 (52:28):
Yeah, I mean yeah, or scientology or any you know,
a lot of these belief systems would have closed off areas,
closed off things, right, that's like micro understandings. But a
large place like Mecca, it's it's interesting, hmm. I'm trying
to imagine for some Well, no, it's not the same.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Someone started a religion and it was based in Detroit. Yeah,
and they said you can't go to Detroit unless you
follow this religion.
Speaker 4 (52:56):
Say, well, Detroit's pretty big.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
Detroit is really no, no, no, no, no, that that
callback just working live. You know, not all of these
are going to be one hundred Sali goldhad no.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
But it is. I think the core of what you're
saying in that it's a bad idea to undermine this
this rule that's in place, you know, for a reason,
for a very popular belief system. That's probably a bad idea.
(53:31):
But then, you know, I always imagine the spycraft that
occurs in a place like Mecca, or in a place
like Jerusalem or the Vatican. You know, there's probably fascinating
deep spycraft occurring in all of those places from varying
countries with varying interests, you know. And that's just me assuming,
(53:55):
but that's what I'm imagining when you're talking about something
as closed off as Mecca is.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah. Yeah, And of course you know, we have we
have a lot of listeners who are very close to
their faith, you know what I mean, and art and
practitioners thereof just just to me, and again this is
just my opinion. I do. I feel like it's completely
okay to say, hey, out of respect for our belief system,
(54:29):
just sorry, this one part of the world doesn't have
to be yours. I think that's perfectly okay. Like Aluru
or airs Rock as it's sometimes called in Australia, the
native population said, this is very important to us. Please
just stop having yourself aggrandizing tourist adventures here.
Speaker 4 (54:51):
The only problem is the moment you say you can't
go here. I mean it's that old thing like don't
touch that button.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Don't think of pink elephants, know, yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (55:01):
Mean psychologically that that occurs in many of us.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm no different. Obviously.
Speaker 4 (55:08):
What would be better is if you just kept it
off the map. Nobody knew about it. You just had
a postal code if you if you were aware of
you know, Mecca. But that's it.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
I guess yeah, yeah, there's the other part too. I
would go on record saying that it's completely different if
someone says, Okay, we have founded our new city or
our new religion or belief system, and everybody who was
living here before either convert or GTFO, I think that's
(55:41):
very different.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Yes, you know what I mean. I agree I'm making
I'm not trying to make light of out that situation.
It's just anyway trying to make a callback that I
think didn't work.
Speaker 1 (55:51):
Oh gosh, Well, instead of calling back, maybe let's call forward.
Because it seems the story continues for all of these
places we just mentioned. In the case of Russia, currently,
it's estimated they are about forty four closed cities in existence,
about one point five million people live in these total,
(56:13):
and there are also, according to rumors, around fifteen other
closed cities that exist without their whereabouts or their names
being disclosed by the government. If you would like to
visit a closed city, I'm very excited about giving this
a shot one day. You are welcome to give it.
The old college try getting into these places. Is if
(56:36):
you look at the spectrum of difficult entries and exits,
it's easier than entering North Sentinel Island, but it's still
tougher than getting into a place like the DPRK North Korea.
Non residents who want to visit closed cities have to
get a special pass from the Russian Security Service, the
(56:56):
secret police essentially. So if you Matt, and you Paul,
and I'm you listening, if we all, if we all
got together and we requested these passes, depending on the city,
and you know, Hinji, on the fact that we are
not Russian nationals, we would almost certainly be rejected. And
(57:19):
that's not that's not all. Applying for one of these things.
Even if you are a Russian national and you are
related to someone who lives in a close city, applying
for one of these things, whether or not you were accepted,
puts you on a list with Russian intelligence for the
rest of your life.
Speaker 4 (57:36):
Yeah, you know what else, guess you on that list?
What's that listening to an episode with the metadata Zato
and Russia Secret Cities.
Speaker 1 (57:46):
Oh no, it is in the metadata.
Speaker 4 (57:47):
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (57:49):
I had a depressing conversation with some of my old uh,
some of my old colleagues about which countries can get
into and out of, like the stands are pretty much
no goes for me and my friends who were working
in the PRC. We're saying, well, you know, it's okay.
(58:11):
I guess as long as your podcast isn't it Mandarin whoa?
And you know it makes you think, like what happened
with those with those folks for Radio Free America? Did
you hear about this?
Speaker 4 (58:23):
I did?
Speaker 1 (58:24):
We did? We talk about this here?
Speaker 4 (58:25):
I don't know if we talked about on a conversations.
Speaker 1 (58:29):
Yeah, yeah, so some weager journalists that we're working with
Radio Free America, which is a US supported propaganda network,
But it doesn't mean it's one hundred percent wrong all
the time. Their families have been threatened, and there's an
intense debate going on now about the situation western China,
(58:50):
which we should report on more soon. We we got
there a little bit before it broke international news. Anyhow,
if you want to visit this and if it is
worth being on a list with Russian intelligence for the
rest of your life not necessarily a bad thing, I guess,
then yeah, you're more than welcome to apply. But keep
in mind passes are only given to those who have
(59:12):
relatives and closed cities, or people are traveling to closed
cities on a business trip. So for like ay, maybe
we use different names, you know, like hey, I'm Johnny
America and I'm Dimmy big Bucks and we're here for
oil I don't know, the new kind of roller blade.
(59:37):
Then maybe we can get in. But even then access
isn't guaranteed. You can try to get a permanent pass,
but it's more challenging. There are two ways to get them.
Basically you have to have been born there, yeah, or
you have to work in one of the enterprises they
need so be a nuclear scientist or be born.
Speaker 4 (59:54):
There yeah, and get irradiated. Well, you hang out in
City forty just like everybody else. So this is something
I know we're wrapping up here, but really quickly something
that struck me. We talked about that disaster that officially
didn't occur within City forty, at least for a long time,
it was not disclosed that that actually happened and that
(01:00:17):
amount of radiation was released into the wild. It makes
me think about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the place where
the United States, you know, started its nuclear industry. Really,
it makes me wonder if anything has occurred within that
(01:00:38):
area that was never reported and was just covered up,
and people and livestock and crops were dosed beyond you know,
any sane amount and we just never found out about it,
because if we were to find out about it, there
would be such an uproar. I just it makes me wonder.
Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
Now, there's a side of me that says, if something
like that did occur at Oak Ridge, then there's no
way they could completely cover that up. Some paper somewhere,
somebody would know, somebody would talk. But the other part
of me thinks it was a time of war, and
just like the people of City forty, we were told
and we believed the people who lived there at the time,
(01:01:25):
that we were fighting the good fight. This is all
in the name of the United States victory, This is
all in the name of securing our family's futures, and
we'll go along with it. And then they all died
because they got dosed by radiation.
Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Yeah, they died. They died to a terminal condition known
as the greater Good.
Speaker 4 (01:01:45):
But that's all fabricated from my mind.
Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
I'm just wondering. It's possible have occurred. Yeah, that's the
disturbing thing. It's possible, you know what I mean, Like
the Villa incidents where the nuclear bomb was tested. Right,
these things happen. They may not happen in your backyard,
but that doesn't make them any less terrifying. And now
(01:02:08):
it gets to our final question. How long will these
closed cities stay closed? Some are Cold war relics, but
a surprising amount of them are still manufacturing fissile material. Right,
they're enriching uranium, they're making weapons grade plutonium. Business is booming,
Business is good. Those cities may well stay closed. And
(01:02:31):
what about the ones that we don't know, the ones
that are still off of the maps. And that's our
classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear
your thoughts. It's right, let us know what you think.
You can reach.
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with a classic episode this evening,
a true story. A while back, we looked around the
world and we realized we mentioned this on the show
in episodes or even strange news or listener mail or
interviews earlier. The majority of human beings now live in
urban areas. Most people live in cities. That trend is
(00:23):
probably going to continue. But you can't go to every city.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah, that's right. Not all cities are created equal. In fact,
countries throughout the world are home to cities that, in
one way or another, don't exist.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
One of these is Oakridge, Tennessee. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted
to mention that because it is in the United States,
these are not as far flung nor as rare as
one might assume.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, so let's explore hidden cities that you can't go
to in this classic episode of Stuff they Don't want
you to Know.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 4 (01:19):
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
They call me Ben we are joined as always with
our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decond. Most importantly, you
are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. Got a confession for you, Matt.
All right, I did my quarterly dive into our podcast
reviews about every three months. I do that.
Speaker 4 (01:44):
I noticed your Twitter request for reviews.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Oh yeah, and following me on Twitter.
Speaker 4 (01:50):
Yeah yeah, No, I just saw it through the conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. I wanted to thank everybody who
took the time to make or to write a review,
whether good or bad or simply middling. We really do
appreciate it, and shout out to our longtime listeners, many
of whom I recognize just based on the way you talk.
In the review especially, there were a couple of great
(02:17):
ones where someone said, hey, I hope this gets you
guys one step further away from being fired, and I thought, wow,
you have been listening a long time. People like great
stuff to say about you, Matt, and about Noel, and
about you as well, Paul Mission Control Decands. So thanks
to everybody sincerely who checked in and gave us a rating,
(02:39):
even the people who for one reason or another gave
us one star because the facts that we presented about
a specific issue did not jibe with their opinions. Got you,
Thank you for taking the time.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
Just feels like two dudes at a bar kicking it
one star. That sounds terrible.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Did you pull them up? Are you reading what?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (03:04):
No, seriously, I mean, without spending too much time on it.
It's uh, We're very fortunate for every listener, and we're
grateful for your time. I have to ask, and this
is something that you and I have talked about, I
think a little bit before off air. I have to ask, Matt,
are you, in your personal life a fan of maps,
cartography stuff like that.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Yeah? I mean my wall is just covered with maps
of video game worlds. Really yeah, But you know, in
the real world it's for some reason not as appealing
to me, though I do love knowing, let's say, within
the world of Skyrim, like where particular towns are with
relation to the Giant Mountain.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
This is so ridiculous. I have been playing. I'm at
the level of Skyrim on my replay where I am
just trying to find every location.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Oh yeah, no, I you have to do that.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Have you found on every location?
Speaker 4 (04:01):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I don't know if I have every so often, like
the numbers don't jive up yet.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
Yeah, I remember taking that it's not an achievement. What
is it called the skill or whatever? At some point
where it reveals all locations on the map to you.
That was one of one of my.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
First playthroughs, though in Skyrim.
Speaker 4 (04:21):
I think it is Skyrim. Maybe it's a different one.
I don't know. I've played so many at this point.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, I don't know if it's on Skyrim, but if
it is, I am excited.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
I'm also fallout. That's a fallout.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
That's a Fallout thing, but still Bethesda, right, Yeah, I
like you. I'm a fan of maps, a fan of cartography,
and I think a lot of our fellow listeners are
as well. I'm one of those people who has you know.
At my house, I have a world map where I
can put the little pins in. Shout out to Mitch
Hedberg for his brilliant world map joke, which I will
(04:53):
not impersonate here. I'm also a fan of very old maps.
I have prints of the Perie Reese map that you
and I covered in a previous episode, and I have
a collection of out of date globes which are also
very interesting once you get to the Middle East, once
(05:14):
you get to Russia, the Balkan areas and so on.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
You you are a fascinating person.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Ben, What do you mean, Well, we have some of
those some of those globes still here in the office today.
Speaker 4 (05:25):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Sure, it's an interesting way to look at the story
of humanity. And regardless of what kind of trends we
see in maps and on globes over time, we do
see one specific trend which has never been violated, as
never abated. It is the trend of our species to
(05:48):
construct increasingly larger, more dense urban areas. As we record
today's episode, humanity is officially an urban species.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
Right, Yeah, we are. We move towards those places, even
if it's on the outskirts, in the suburban areas. As
of twenty sixteen, more than four billion people lived in
these things that we would consider to be urban areas,
and there are only three point four billion people living
in what we would consider to be rural areas outside
(06:22):
of these bigger, established places.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Oh, and we should we should retroactively say this is
the here are the facts part of the show. That's right,
Everything that you're hearing for this part of for this
act of today's episode is indeed true. You're absolutely right, Matt.
As of twenty sixteen, there are already more people living
in cities than there were in rural areas. This explosive
(06:48):
migrational trend is set to continue by twenty fifty, assuming
we don't blow ourselves up or encounter like a pandemic, right,
assuming that we don't find ourselves in the midst of
a catastrophic water war.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
We will, but let's pretend.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Let's pretend, Okay, let's be let's be a little bit
naive about it. So everything goes okay until twenty fifty.
If everything goes more or less alright, then by twenty
to fifty, two thirds of our species will live in
urban areas, technically about sixty eight percent. So, whether you
love them or whether you hate them, it seems cities
(07:28):
are set to become one of humanity's most popular inventions.
And it's interesting to think of a city as an invention.
We don't because it's so normalized, it's so ancient. A
city is now just a place, But at some point
people invented it, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Yeah, the concept of having one centralized area where people
can coexist generally with you know, some kind of castle
or stronghold or something to protect near the center, right,
or at least somewhere strategically within that place, and then
the homes and everything in the places of business all
(08:10):
shoot up around it.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Right, Yeah, exactly. And this is this is an interesting
distinction too, because what is the difference between you know,
an agglomeration of longhouses and a town or a town
and a village or a village. And of course it's
big because in the city, regardless of how you want
(08:32):
to classify a city or an urban area, and there
are a couple of different definitions out there, we do
have enough of a grasp on this phenomenon that we
can describe it on a global scale. Currently, the North
American continent is the most industrialized out of all the continents.
As of twenty eighteen, about eighty two percent of this
(08:56):
continent's population lives in an urbanized area. Eighty two percent.
So if you are listening to this show and you
happen to not be living in one of those dense agglomerations,
and congratulations, because you are an increasingly rare person generally
(09:18):
speaking on this continent.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah, well, and then if let's say you're living in
Latin America or somewhere in the Caribbean, you are not
far behind, only one percent less at eighty two percent
people within those populations live in something you know called
an urban area. And you know what makes sense, interestingly
enough in places in the Caribbean, because if you think
(09:44):
of the amount of land mass that you actually have there,
you can imagine how people would just end up moving
towards some of the more populated areas.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
That's a really good point.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
And for especially for the types of businesses that exist
in a lot of in a lot of those areas,
you need other people to be around to sell things too.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, that's a really good point. And surprisingly, only about
seventy four percent of Europeans can say the same, which
shocked me because the you know, the rise of industry
began earlier in Europe than it did in the US.
It's just surprising that only seventy four percent. I guess
(10:26):
because of the circumstances of my travels in Europe, I've
always seen it as a place with little wilderness, and
I know that's not true, especially the further east you go.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
Yeah, well, you know, all of this is it's not discounting,
but it's not taking into account micro trends that occur,
you know, within like one city, Oh yeah, some people
migrating away from that city or more people then like
for a period of time and then getting an injection.
I'm thinking of a place like Detroit.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Exactly, the depopulation of Detroit.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
Yeah, but then then kind of a repopulation in certain
areas of Detroit, and then as that's gonna you know,
hopefully flourish in the coming decades.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah, here's hoping. I would love to see the rise
of Detroit, you know, a reboot of the city. But
people will also tell you that rumors of Detroit's demise
have been greatly exaggerated. You know, sometimes the terrible things
we see on the news are just purposely made to
(11:30):
be terrible things because that's what keeps people's attention, right.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
Yeah, I don't have much to add on that, agreed.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
I feel like we're on the same page with that one.
But it may also surprise you go into your earlier statement, Matt,
it may surprise some of our listeners to know that
about sixty eight percent of Oceana's population is urbanized and
there you know, I think back to what you were
saying about the Caribbean archipelagoes and islands. You know, it's
(11:58):
a matter of scarcity of land in Oceana at least.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
Yeah, and yeah, the natural wonders of a lot of
those places you want to protect as well. So you
end up just kind of squished together in one major area.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
That makes sense. And now, of course, for our finale
in this in this list, we have to mention the
two biggest populated continents, Asia and Africa. They come in
second and last place, respectively. Around half of Asia's population
(12:33):
lives in cities, forty three percent of Africa's population live
in urban areas. And as you know, as we like
to point out, both Asia and Africa are huge, huge
places filled with this incredible variety of ethnicity, of community,
(12:54):
of culture. It's beyond apples and oranges, you know what
I mean. So these numbers only count as a cohesive
thing if we're looking at the metric of just people
on a continent.
Speaker 4 (13:09):
Yeah, it's about seventeen full fruit stands worth, right, per
per continent.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah, Matt did the math of this, The fruit.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Math worked it out.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
So obviously this is not a static number, and it
shouldn't surprise anybody to learn that those last two continents,
renamed Asia and Africa, are also projected to experience the
largest growth in urbanization as we approach twenty fifty. And
this leads us, This leads us back to you, our
(13:41):
hypothetical but hopefully real listener, who has grown up in
or has moved to a rural area. We have to ask,
what is the future of these increasingly abandoned rural areas.
That's a story for another day, but today we're going
to give you this look at cities across the world
as a way of a pro another question. As we
(14:02):
hurtle toward the extinction of privacy, the normalization of mass surveillance,
and a future where opulence may well be defined as
simply having a decent view from your apartment or a
small backyard with a garden. It seems we will soon
live in a world without strangers, a crowded cognitive space
where everything is public, everything is urban, and the maps
(14:24):
of the future show us small concentrations of humanity, islands
of concrete and steel, separated by vast gulfs of what
would appear to be nothing to a city dwell er.
Of course it will be biodiversity. Hopefully there will be
agriculture things of that nature.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
Yeah, it's going to be wastes of fire and acid water, right,
I'm digging it right, But the domes over the cities
will protect us at least temporarily.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
All praise the dome m h yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
Yeah. Well here's the thing though, there are all those
maps that we're like talking about, that we're thinking about
in the future. They're gonna have the big places. You know,
you're gonna your your London's are still going to be
on there.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Uh, you know, your your Mumbais.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
You know for sure your Mumbais, all all your different
places that are massive known entities will be there. But
there's one thing that probably won't be on your on
your maps then even twenty five years, thousand years in
the future. Mill maybe in a thousand years, but in
(15:39):
the future, there are still gonna be places that will
never make it to a map, places that would be
considered an urban area, a city even but won't show up.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
That's right, there's a bit of a bait and switch.
We're not talking about normal cities. Now, what are we
talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. That's correct, as conspiratorial as
(16:11):
it may sound, the world is full of secret cities,
and attempting to enter these cities may cost you your life.
Picture this. There are entire cities, metropolis level cities that
are not villages. They're not puttering communes where everybody follows
(16:31):
one person who had some sort of purported spiritual experience.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
We're talking about large collections of multiple story buildings, huge
buildings that are just somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
With populations of hundreds of thousands of people. In some cases,
these are cities that do not officially exist in one
capacity or another. And what's more, we've been building these
cities for longer than you might want to think. Some
cities started off as secrets, only to be classified later.
(17:04):
Others remain closed to the majority of humanity as we
record today. Let's start with a safe, kind of bucolic
historic example, something relatively innocuous nowadays, and it'll be close
to home for a lot of our fellow listeners. That
is a little place called oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
Oh yes, oak Ridge, that has connections to New York
in some weird way. We'll get to that in a moment. So,
about seventy five years ago, the government in these here
United States, they took possession of around sixty thousand acres
in East Tennessee. Now officially this occurred on September nineteenth,
(17:45):
nineteen forty two. There was a kernel there Leslie Groves.
This guy just kind of looked at the map, maybe
took it, had some people take a trip out, and
then said, yeah, this is it, this is what we want.
And there wasn't anything, you know, particularly extraordinary about this area,
this huge swath of land. Even today, you know, if
(18:07):
you're looking back, you're reading about this, historians try and
figure out exactly like what this guy saw, but they're
still unsure.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, they can make a couple of guesses. We know
that this site and what would become Oakridge, Tennessee, was
chosen out of a short list of several other sites
across the contiguous US. Our guesses tend to be things like, well,
we needed maybe a source of water, we needed a
(18:38):
rural area that was removed from the hustle and bustle
of a city. Because at the time, if you wanted
something spooky done, or you wanted something done in secret.
You could just go to the great wilds of the United.
Speaker 4 (18:53):
States, but you still needed to have access to infrastructure
and shipping if.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
You needed it right, right, so you would want to
be able to contact the rest of the world when necessary. Anyhow,
whatever the logic was, that's what General Groves chose sixty
thousand acres there in East Tennessee. The area started out
with a few different names and the relatively sparse official documentation.
(19:21):
Sometimes it was called Site X, great name for a town.
Other times it was referred to as Clinton Engineering Works.
That is, as far as we could find, not a
reference to the later Clinton political dynasty.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Yeah, it is like a company name that just stood
for a location.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, there was a town named Clinton nearby near Knoxville, Tennessee,
and that's what they were named at naming this thing after.
But eventually it became oak Ridge. And while the name
of this place may have undergone some iterations, its purpose
was always crystal clear to those in the No. You see,
Groves was overseeing what we call the Manhattan Project today,
(20:04):
that's the New York connect right, Yeah. Yeah, And the
town that would become oak Ridge was built for the
express purpose of helping Uncle Sam build the first atomic bomb.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Oh yeah, And we have some information here coming from
the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History resonance there on
the land. The people who actually lived in Oak Ridge,
A lot of the families lived in the area really
on just in poverty or on the brink of poverty
for generations, and then all of a sudden, when this
(20:38):
land was purchased, all of them were just kicked out
just by you have to leave. The government is moving
in apologies, but not really just get out. And the
Feds came through the federal government and they condemned the
land and they paid the residents like really nothing, just
to get them the heck out of there as quickly
(20:59):
as power possible.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Right According to the New Hope Center, one resident at
the time received nine hundred dollars for forty acres of land.
That's about twenty two dollars and fifty cents per acre.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
That's crazy.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
If we adjust for inflation, that's about fourteen one hundred
and seventy seven dollars total, which works out to about
three hundred and fifty four dollars and forty three cents
per acre today. Talk about a steal. You know what?
I mean, yeah, so let's keep the timeline here too.
If you look into the Center for Oakridge Oral History,
(21:34):
you'll see stories from people recalling that as children, the
principal called everybody into the school and told them they
had received a special or special contact from the federal government. Yeah,
it was September nineteen forty two. They all had to
be out by December nineteen forty two. Uproot your entire life, right,
and the logic here is solid and it is also ruthless.
(21:56):
It's very important to again emphasize this happened in the
United States not very long ago.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Yeah, you have to imagine what the residents were going through,
what their lives were like, in order to really understand.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
First, a lot of the rural residents would doubtlessly accept
this lump sum of cash. It's a windfall, you know,
it could literally be a life changing amount of scratch
for a population where running water and indoor plumbing were
often a pipe dream. Terrible choice of words. Wow on
the level of science fiction. But there's a second, more
(22:33):
disturbing fact it played too well.
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Yeah, a lot of the folks living around there didn't
have the education, let alone. You know, someone with enough
money to come through and mount any kind of legal
protest or action against what the federal government was doing
to them. And it was very clear that no matter what,
(22:56):
the federal government was moving in and you could either
essentially take them money or just leave. Right, You're gonna
take the money and leave, or you're just gonna leave right.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
They you know this is this is kind of an
eminent domain thing too, right. They could say for the
greater good, you have to leave this place. Yeah, we'll
give you a little bit of money, you have to
leave this place. And being impoverished, they simply do not
have the recourse to legal action, even if they could
find someone who would represent them. This is all happening,
(23:29):
by the way, under strict secrecy, so there's not going
to be any kind of public trial. It will get quashed.
By nineteen forty five, just a few years later, Oakridge, Tennessee,
has seventy five thousand people living and working in the area.
Very few of those seventy five thousand people knew the
ultimate purpose of the secret city. Many had no idea
(23:52):
what they were working on until the United States dropped
the first atomic bomb on Japan and the local paper said,
you know Oakridge delivers something to the Japanese.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Yeah, exactly what I've just mentioning there that seventy five
thousand people lived in the area. It's not you know,
we were talking about cities. We set this whole episode
up talking about cities. Oakridge was not like one big
facility where everyone went to work every day and then
everybody just left the area. They built a city there.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah. Yeah, schools, post office, shops, movie theater and some
of the people who were originally kicked out by the
Feds managed to get jobs later at Oakridge. Yeah, and
they didn't know what they were doing. They did not
know that they were processing and enriching uranium. Today, if
(24:46):
you wish, you can visit Oakridge. It still processes uranium today.
And while this is one of the more popular examples
of a secret city, it is far from the only
case of one. There are more closed cities and they
remain closed today. Will give an honorable mention to Mercury, Nevada,
which spoiler alert I'd like to save for another episode.
Speaker 4 (25:09):
Well then we won't say anything else about it. Thank
you for you know, glancing across this episode Mercury Nevada.
We look forward to seeing you again soon.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Radioactive ships in the night.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
Well, you know we're mentioning this, yes, but we're talking
about Oakridge and just it had a hand in the
Manhattan Project, And I don't know if I want to
spoil too much. We talked we made an episode on
the Manhattan Project not too long ago, I believe, didn't
we Maybe we didn't. Maybe it's just that other secret
project we're working on.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Yeah, or maybe we're both remembering forward again.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
I hate well, all right, Well, it's interesting that we're
hitting Oakridge, Tennessee in the United States, kind of in
the heartland where the Manhattan probably was being carried out,
where nuclear testing in the first atomic bombs were developed
in the United States, that were hitting that first and
(26:09):
knowing where we're going in this episode.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
That's right, where are we going? Indeed, where in the
world will we find our next forbidden city? We'll tell
you after a word from our sponsor. In what should
not be a stunning plot twist to anybody was listened
(26:32):
to this show in the past, we are of course
headed to Russia.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
Soviet Russia.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yes, yes, like the US, the Soviet Union was also
scrambling to event new terrifying weapons of war, and like
the US, they decided secret cities were the best way
to carry out their work.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Oh yeah, so there were several of actually numerous conspiratorial communities,
communities that were off the books, forbidden secret. In nineteen
ninety three, a little bit of the you know what
would be considered the iron dome, the iron veil that
keeps information from linking out, was lifted. When these places
(27:13):
were officially called they get they were given a name
closed administrative territorial entities, and that translates to if you,
if you take the cyrilliki translate it, it's Zato or Zato.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I was in my head for some reason as Zatto,
but I think it's just because it seems like a
cool name for someone to have. Is my friend Zatto.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
It's very similar to a kiddi kat in Spanish.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Oh gotto.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
Yeah, I don't know, that's where my head goes.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
But before then, before nineteen ninety three, if you look
at any government census, both in the Soviet Union and
Russia proper and different members of the Soviet Union, you
will see that these cities and the hundreds of thousands
of people living and working in them simply do not exist.
(28:08):
Closed cities were not marked on maps, and there were
no road marks that could lead some ignorant, naive traveler
to the secret settlement. It was built such that you
couldn't just accidentally be there and say, oh my god,
look at me.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Well, especially if you were taking any kind of public
transportation like a train or a bus or anything like that,
you would not be able to find them. You would
have to get in a vehicle and then like just
explore until you got to the gates where generally they
say attention, stay out, like you cannot come in here.
And it's crazy were you know, we talked about this
(28:46):
concept of the city itself was secret, so it was
hidden away, which is kind of mind blowing thinking about
large buildings and everything being secret. But then also that
the human beings that occupied the cities were taken, like
you said, literally taken off of the census and families
(29:06):
like when you have a child and you live in
one of these places, that child ostensibly doesn't exist outside
of the books for that closed city.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Right exactly, so strange and you can see that you
can see the problem. Here's it sets up a slippery
slope that's similar to the problem that the government of
China is having with unregistered births. Right when they had
the one child policy. What ended up happening because a
lot of parents you know, of course, want to have
(29:37):
the children that they were going to have. There's been
this rise of a population of human beings, female people
in China who are unregistered, so they have no rights,
they have no access to you know, healthcare, education, medicine.
It's a terrible, terrible situation and it's all because of
(29:59):
a couple the pieces of paper. How often does that
happen with our species? You know, other animals don't do that.
I'm not saying other animals are better than our brand
of animal, but I don't see, though nature's brutal, I
don't see a lot of other intelligent creatures, you know,
committing such horrific acts over paperwork.
Speaker 4 (30:22):
Yeah, we can really get into this if you want to,
but that's that's an intense discussion to have right there.
Just the concept that a small paper that either proves
that you are who you are or from a certain
area has life or death consequences throughout time.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Like what we did that earlier. We definitely did a
video in this the concept of statelessness. Yeah, people who
do not have a country of origin, so strange. But
in this case, the people in these closed cities in
the USSR, as we'll come to find, they did not
have a huge problem with living life as ghost people,
(31:07):
according to the bureaucracy.
Speaker 4 (31:09):
And actually according to some reporting that's come out fairly
recently from and interviews from people who've lived inside these places,
because they got.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Perks, Yeah, they had a pretty good There's a documentary
and we'll talk about a little bit later where you
can see some of these quotes, and there are people saying,
we got everything that we wanted for the rest of
our lives for staying here. So of course we would
stay here. Don't screw this up for us outsiders. Residents
(31:40):
of these close cities were given private apartments, right, and
this is during the era of communism, so it's a
big get for them. Decent healthcare, and they had jobs
for life, they had job security. And at a time
when the much of the rest of the USSR was
having a difficult time coming by the most base of staples,
(32:01):
you know what I mean, wheat, milk, eggs, stuff like that,
residents of these close cities were getting things that were
exotic for the time, like bananas, condensed milk. They had
a lot of meat products they could eat. Literally, caviar
was available, literally caviar, yes, yes, literally caviar egg, although.
Speaker 4 (32:18):
You probably would not want to eat the caviar.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Which is a spoiler depending on the city. So even today,
here's the thing. Even today, most residents of these close
cities consider themselves incredibly fortunate to be living in a
zoto area. They're not bothered by the barbed wire fencing
that surrounds them or the cognitive fencing and bureaucratic fencing
that also surrounds them. They are very mission oriented. Instead
(32:45):
of diving into the numerous the numerous Cold War era
closed cities that we know about today and speculating on
the fifteen or twenty that are more or less certain
to exist but remain secret, let's just look at a few,
like high level examples.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
What do you think, Oh yeah, absolutely, And you know,
each of these that we're going to talk about coming
up are their own thing. Everything we've been talking about before,
this in relation to these Zato Zeto areas, it's similar,
very similar, but each one of these is going to
have its own tail and So let's take you to
a place called I'm gonna try and pronounce this.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Zelenogorsk, Zelenogorsk, Zelenogorsk. Yeah, we are not Russian. Please send in,
dear Russian speakers in the audience, please send in the
correct pronunciations here we would always prefer to be correct
rather than comfortable. So. Zelenogorsk is located in Russia by
(33:49):
the Khan river Ka n It was built in the
forties fifties era as part of the Soviet drive to
enrich uranium for the USSR nuclear program. Like Oakra, this
city had a population of thousands, and although it existed
for decades, it was not on official maps until nineteen
(34:09):
ninety two. Imagine trying to get mail. Oh, by the way,
when these things are in full swing, and some of
them still operate this way today. These cities are not
as you said, Matt on trade and bus routes. They're
only known by a postal code, a name, and a number.
So what it would be like It would be like
decad forty seven or something.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
Yeah, yeah, exactly with that postal code. And the other
thing here is just like oak Ridge. We're kind of
comparing these two places. They this place still supplies a
good amount of the uranium for Russia's production there. It's no,
it's twenty nine percent of the enrichment capacity that exists
(34:52):
within Russia. So the actual places with centrifugias that are
enriching uranium. That's crazy to think, but even sends uranium
to other countries, including the United States, just because you
know you need a little extra uranium. Sometimes Unkridge can't
do all the production.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
You get bye with a little help from your friends.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
Yeah, exactly. And we're continuing with that trend here of
a lot of these closed off cities were specifically meant
to create or at least assist in the creation of
weapons of war, like massive weapons of war, new technologies
that could be used to establish dominance or at least
(35:34):
hopefully right.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Let's go to one of the most famous examples, a
town called Ozersk, also known as City forty. Oz Ersk
is located in the Ural Mountains. It was founded in
nineteen forty seven. First was known as Chileabinsk forty, then
Chileabinsk sixty five. Like other closed cities, as you said, Matt,
(35:56):
Ozersk was built to aid the Soviet nuclear probe. Unlike
some other forbidden cities, Osairsk has received a great deal
of media attention, notably in a documentary called City forty,
which we highly recommend.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
Yeah, seriously check it out if you possibly can, or
at least read up on the contents of it, because
there are so many fascinating stories and humans.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Involved, and it is a tragic story. Yeah. So the
citizens of this place of City forty have a fairly
unique dilemma, and I quite like the way the Guardian
put it in an article on the closed city. It's
this Their water is contaminated, their mushrooms and berries are poisoned,
and their children may be sick. Ozersk and the surrounding
(36:43):
region is one of the most contaminated places on the planet,
referred to by some as the graveyard of Earth. Yet
most of City forty's residents do not want to leave.
They take pride in their community. They still have that
attitude of feeling that they have received immense privilege.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
Yes, and they have in a lot of ways, and
their families have benefited from that privilege. But their families
have also in most cases, a family member or two
or more have died because.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
They have lived in that place, right, Yeah, they were
heavily contaminated by industrial pollution from the nearby Mayak plutonium
plant from the what the late nineteen forties on, this
was an ongoing thing. This plant was one of the
largest producers of weapons grade plutonium for the Soviet Union
(37:41):
during a lot of the Cold War, particularly during the
atomic bomb program, and it was built with once again
the greater good in mind. You got to break a
few eggs. We want to get some atomic omelets, said
the Soviet government. You know what I mean, what's a
(38:03):
couple people in the great balance of life? You know
what I mean? Hakuna matata, et cetera, they said, And
then they built this with no regard for safety.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
Well, yeah, that's that's the crazy thing. It's there have
been several one major disaster that occurred at one of
the major plants there that ended up irradiating I think
it was like two hundred thousand people or something like that,
or it was a crazy number of people in villages
(38:33):
that just lived, you know, upstream or away from the
actual plant. Because these they were dumping radioactive waste directly
into the water into that river that we keep talking
about there and we're.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Dumping solid waste, liquid waste, gaseous matter, all radioactive. And
then we're doing this for more for not more than,
but for around a decade, from nineteen four five to
fifty seven.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yeah, and here's here's the part that was mind blowing
for me as I was learning about it. You know,
when you imagine a nuclear accident or a disaster, what
comes to mind. Chernobyl, right through that island is first,
though Chernobyl always is at the top of the list.
(39:22):
And over all this time when the waste was being dumped,
the sum of contamination of radioactive contamination has been estimated
to be two to three times the release from the
Chernobyl accident explosions. Now here's the deal. Chernobyl kind of occurred, exploded,
Your your radioactive waste is you know, gone into the
(39:42):
air and is spread out across a wide area. But
for this they're literally pumping out the radioactive waste continually
for a decade.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
In nineteen fifty seven, this reaches ahead the MAAC plant
is the site of an enormous disaster. An underground tank
of highly irradiated liquid nuclear waste explodes and it contaminates
thousands of square kilometers of territory. Nowadays, it's known as
the Eastern Eural Radioactive Trace or the urt EURT. The
(40:18):
problem is that this disaster is quietly, efficiently and ruthlessly
covered up, and very very few people inside or outside
of the USSR we're aware of what actually happened until
at least nineteen eighty and this has also been called
the Kishtom disaster specifically, you know, this is September twenty ninth.
(40:44):
And I really appreciate what you're pointing out here, Matt,
because we're all familiar with your noble, especially in the
world of fiction in the recent day and age, because
there was a masterful miniseries done that I think aired
on HBO, but it didn't really address this. And can
(41:09):
you imagine living here and you've been told that you
are the sword and shield to save the world. Right,
that's why you and your family are working and this
great project to make this new weapon of war. You're
not doing it to sow chaos. You're doing it to
guarantee peace.
Speaker 4 (41:28):
Well and also be triumphant over those who want to
do harm.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Right exactly, because everyone is a war of defense. Da
da da da da da da. But didn't mean to
sound so dismissive. I just don't believe it when people
say that anymore, you know. But the kicker is imagine
being that person. So you're ideologically on board, probably, And.
Speaker 4 (41:54):
You learn.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Weeks after the fact, very least weeks after the fact,
that you and your children have been irradiated, and you
can't find anything about it, even in the news, even
in the secret city newspaper it's supposed to give you
one of the inner circle. You know what happened. Why
(42:18):
are you only seeing these vague reports, and why don't
they jibe with the first hand sightings you're hearing of
of people with skin falling off their faces, their body
parts being exposed, their hair falling out along with their toenails,
and so on.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
Yeah, let me quickly paint a scenario, just for all
of us sitting here and listening. Let's imagine that we're
one of the minority few who live out somewhere in
a rural area. And let's say we live in Russia.
It's nineteen fifty seven, and our small family own some
(42:57):
farmland and lots and lots of livestock, or at least
enough livestock, you know, to survive as well as a
lot of crops, and we're just hanging out. We're doing
all the strenuous work we have to do every day
to maintain what we have, which is still very little,
and then all of a sudden, you know, we don't
(43:17):
notice anything. Really. We heard maybe about a big bang,
a large bang that occurred somewhere, you know, southwest of
here a couple of days ago, but that's all we've
really heard about. There were some weird clouds that came over,
like appeared to be smoke or something. We haven't thought
about any of that stuff since that day. Well, a
(43:38):
big truck rolls through with a lot of our you know, countrymen,
our military people. They're just coming through and they happen
to stop by our farm and they let us know
that today we have to slaughter all of our cattle.
We have to uproot and then bury all of our crops.
(43:59):
Then we have to plow all that over, and then
we have to get the heck out because they're going
to purchase our farm for almost nothing.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
They're also wearing containment suits. Yeah, then they did not
bring spares.
Speaker 4 (44:12):
Yeah, just letting us know. And here's the other thing.
Let's say that occurs and then years later after you
know that went down, you know what's occurred. Nobody has
put any record of this down. Nobody is talking about
all the other farms like that were just in this
giant line that I can look at a map and see,
(44:34):
like I know, people lived in this line and they
all had to sell their houses, their farms, but nobody's
talking about it.
Speaker 1 (44:41):
There's a beauty, the dark beauty to the brutal logic there.
So the same way that rural people in the US
could not fight back against the lad been taken, people
who do not officially exist have no legal recourse because
(45:01):
they are ghosts. It just now reached a point where
their physical condition matched the condition of the paperwork, which
is just insidious. I mean, it is unclean to do
that to people. But I see the logic of it,
and there are plenty, plenty more. We could probably do
(45:24):
an episode per city on close cities in Russia, but
we don't want to just stay in the Cold War
in the US and Russia or the USSR. Excuse me,
Let's take a quick look at other cities, some of
which might surprise you. In the mainland of China, there
is a place called the nuclear town. It is in
the Gobi Desert in the western part of Gansu Province. Officially,
(45:49):
it's called the number four oh four Factory of China
National Nuclear Corporation. I love that it's called four oh four, right,
pretty it's such a bad internet joke.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
It's unknown.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
I hope someone did it on purpose. It's not found
yash so it's built back in nineteen fifty eight. So
probably not a good joke unless the people who did
four h four on the Internet were making a sideways
reference to this fact. Probably not. Probably not. The world's
not that convenient nor well written.
Speaker 4 (46:19):
I say we go that until someone tells us it's
for something else.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
And then let's accuse them of covering it up. That's right, Well,
that sounds like a plan in that. So this is
the biggest nuclear industry base in the country that we
know of. It's the country's first military nuclear reactor. Eighty
percent of China's nuclear bomb core components are built there.
For twenty years it was completely closed to outsiders. And
(46:46):
that's not the only case in China. There are a
couple of other more remote places where you have to
apply for what's called an alien travel document. In advance
to visit, and you have to report to the police
as soon as like your accommodations as soon as you
stay somewhere, And if you don't follow everything to the letter,
you get the boot. They will immediately take you out
(47:08):
of the country.
Speaker 4 (47:09):
Yeah, just get the heck out, man, We've got this
running thing. We're gonna come back to it in the conclusion.
But just if you're going to create facile material to
be weaponized for any reason, or just let's say it's
just to run a power plant, it's a lot of
(47:29):
people that are doing that, are making these weird, hidden,
creepy cities.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, it turns out to maybe be the best way
to go about this, right because if you have because
you can control more variables, if you have the entire
city purpose built like we have. You know, we have
military armament manufacturers that are based in or near large
(47:57):
urban areas, but they no matter how well they secure
their grounds, they cannot control the millions of people who
live like you know, across the river or get through
the woods, I don't know, whatever you want to say. Yep.
So this is a very common trend, and these secret
(48:20):
cities are still around today and in some cases, Yes,
the people who live in them do not technically exist
on paper. We want to do one more example as
something that is completely different. It's a closed city, closed
part of a city that does not exist for nuclear
research and does not exist for some kind of human
(48:46):
rights abuse or concentration camp thing. Right, So let's travel
to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. You've heard it before. This
is not the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KSA should not
be a new thing to any of our life listeners.
It is a unique country in the world of geopolitics
for a number of reasons, and its most famous close
(49:06):
city is no different. Unlike the majority of secret cities
we've mentioned today, Mecca is not closed due to top
secret military or industrial research. Instead, it's a partially closed
city because every year millions and millions and millions of
people visit and you can too, as long as you
like them. Are a practitioner of Islam. Because only Muslims
(49:30):
are allowed in Mecca, it is the holiest, most important
city in the religion. It has off limits under any
circumstances to any non Muslims. Don't even try.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
Yeah, if you do attempt, and you don't meet all
of those requirements, you will immediately be deported and that
will be it. Thank you for trying to come in,
but we don't appreciate you. Why No, I'm just kidding.
It's not that harsh, but you would definitely get deported immediately.
Speaker 1 (49:59):
Well, you know, the penalty in practice maybe much harsher
than deportation, And a lot of it depends on what
kind of person who are your country of origin? Right, yes,
and it could go up to and including assault, torture, murder.
You just you don't know. And as a personal message
to anybody else who enjoys traveling to the edges of
(50:20):
the maps, to the places where normal people don't take vacation,
I definitely want to warn every non Muslim person against
trying to sneak into Mecca. It's not like taking a
quick illicit trip across the poorest Midwestern or Alaskan border
between Canada and the US. Your chances of being caught
(50:42):
are extremely high. If you feel that you must go
to Mecca, you genuinely must go there. The most rational
choice is to convert to Islam beforehand, actually do it.
Attempting to fake a conversion will also by the way
in all likelihood fail. I know that there are photographs
(51:02):
of plenty of someone who said, like, oh, it's not
getting a mecca or whatever. There was a recent story
about a guy who I think acquired his Israeli citizenship
in twenty fourteen, and he visited and he said that
it was on the up and up. But I have
a tough time believing him. And also, you know, inherently
(51:28):
it's the most important city in this religion, the millions
of people follow. I don't know, man, this is a
personal take. I want your opinion too, Matt. Should people
be able to do that? I feel like, personally would
be disrespectful for me to say, well, I don't care
about your core belief system. I need some selfies, you
(51:51):
know what I mean. That just feels I don't know.
Speaker 4 (51:54):
Yeah, no, yeah, it certainly doesn't feel like a good
eye idea. I'm trying to find it, like something that
would be the equivalent, But I don't know if there's
anything in the world that's as close to that. There
are I mean trying to imagine the whaling Wall or
(52:16):
but it's not like it's restricted.
Speaker 1 (52:18):
Well, in some religions in the West, like the Church
of Latter day Saints, don't they not allow some people
into the temple like people are not.
Speaker 4 (52:28):
Yeah, I mean yeah, or scientology or any you know,
a lot of these belief systems would have closed off areas,
closed off things, right, that's like micro understandings. But a
large place like Mecca, it's it's interesting, hmm. I'm trying
to imagine for some Well, no, it's not the same.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Someone started a religion and it was based in Detroit. Yeah,
and they said you can't go to Detroit unless you
follow this religion.
Speaker 4 (52:56):
Say, well, Detroit's pretty big.
Speaker 1 (52:58):
Detroit is really no, no, no, no, no, that that
callback just working live. You know, not all of these
are going to be one hundred Sali goldhad no.
Speaker 4 (53:10):
But it is. I think the core of what you're
saying in that it's a bad idea to undermine this
this rule that's in place, you know, for a reason,
for a very popular belief system. That's probably a bad idea.
(53:31):
But then, you know, I always imagine the spycraft that
occurs in a place like Mecca, or in a place
like Jerusalem or the Vatican. You know, there's probably fascinating
deep spycraft occurring in all of those places from varying
countries with varying interests, you know. And that's just me assuming,
(53:55):
but that's what I'm imagining when you're talking about something
as closed off as Mecca is.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
Yeah. Yeah, And of course you know, we have we
have a lot of listeners who are very close to
their faith, you know what I mean, and art and
practitioners thereof just just to me, and again this is
just my opinion. I do. I feel like it's completely
okay to say, hey, out of respect for our belief system,
(54:29):
just sorry, this one part of the world doesn't have
to be yours. I think that's perfectly okay. Like Aluru
or airs Rock as it's sometimes called in Australia, the
native population said, this is very important to us. Please
just stop having yourself aggrandizing tourist adventures here.
Speaker 4 (54:51):
The only problem is the moment you say you can't
go here. I mean it's that old thing like don't
touch that button.
Speaker 1 (54:58):
Don't think of pink elephants, know, yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (55:01):
Mean psychologically that that occurs in many of us.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm no different. Obviously.
Speaker 4 (55:08):
What would be better is if you just kept it
off the map. Nobody knew about it. You just had
a postal code if you if you were aware of
you know, Mecca. But that's it.
Speaker 1 (55:20):
I guess yeah, yeah, there's the other part too. I
would go on record saying that it's completely different if
someone says, Okay, we have founded our new city or
our new religion or belief system, and everybody who was
living here before either convert or GTFO, I think that's
(55:41):
very different.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Yes, you know what I mean. I agree I'm making
I'm not trying to make light of out that situation.
It's just anyway trying to make a callback that I
think didn't work.
Speaker 1 (55:51):
Oh gosh, Well, instead of calling back, maybe let's call forward.
Because it seems the story continues for all of these
places we just mentioned. In the case of Russia, currently,
it's estimated they are about forty four closed cities in existence,
about one point five million people live in these total,
(56:13):
and there are also, according to rumors, around fifteen other
closed cities that exist without their whereabouts or their names
being disclosed by the government. If you would like to
visit a closed city, I'm very excited about giving this
a shot one day. You are welcome to give it.
The old college try getting into these places. Is if
(56:36):
you look at the spectrum of difficult entries and exits,
it's easier than entering North Sentinel Island, but it's still
tougher than getting into a place like the DPRK North Korea.
Non residents who want to visit closed cities have to
get a special pass from the Russian Security Service, the
(56:56):
secret police essentially. So if you Matt, and you Paul,
and I'm you listening, if we all, if we all
got together and we requested these passes, depending on the city,
and you know, Hinji, on the fact that we are
not Russian nationals, we would almost certainly be rejected. And
(57:19):
that's not that's not all. Applying for one of these things.
Even if you are a Russian national and you are
related to someone who lives in a close city, applying
for one of these things, whether or not you were accepted,
puts you on a list with Russian intelligence for the
rest of your life.
Speaker 4 (57:36):
Yeah, you know what else, guess you on that list?
What's that listening to an episode with the metadata Zato
and Russia Secret Cities.
Speaker 1 (57:46):
Oh no, it is in the metadata.
Speaker 4 (57:47):
I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1 (57:49):
I had a depressing conversation with some of my old uh,
some of my old colleagues about which countries can get
into and out of, like the stands are pretty much
no goes for me and my friends who were working
in the PRC. We're saying, well, you know, it's okay.
(58:11):
I guess as long as your podcast isn't it Mandarin whoa?
And you know it makes you think, like what happened
with those with those folks for Radio Free America? Did
you hear about this?
Speaker 4 (58:23):
I did?
Speaker 1 (58:24):
We did? We talk about this here?
Speaker 4 (58:25):
I don't know if we talked about on a conversations.
Speaker 1 (58:29):
Yeah, yeah, so some weager journalists that we're working with
Radio Free America, which is a US supported propaganda network,
But it doesn't mean it's one hundred percent wrong all
the time. Their families have been threatened, and there's an
intense debate going on now about the situation western China,
(58:50):
which we should report on more soon. We we got
there a little bit before it broke international news. Anyhow,
if you want to visit this and if it is
worth being on a list with Russian intelligence for the
rest of your life not necessarily a bad thing, I guess,
then yeah, you're more than welcome to apply. But keep
in mind passes are only given to those who have
(59:12):
relatives and closed cities, or people are traveling to closed
cities on a business trip. So for like ay, maybe
we use different names, you know, like hey, I'm Johnny
America and I'm Dimmy big Bucks and we're here for
oil I don't know, the new kind of roller blade.
(59:37):
Then maybe we can get in. But even then access
isn't guaranteed. You can try to get a permanent pass,
but it's more challenging. There are two ways to get them.
Basically you have to have been born there, yeah, or
you have to work in one of the enterprises they
need so be a nuclear scientist or be born.
Speaker 4 (59:54):
There yeah, and get irradiated. Well, you hang out in
City forty just like everybody else. So this is something
I know we're wrapping up here, but really quickly something
that struck me. We talked about that disaster that officially
didn't occur within City forty, at least for a long time,
it was not disclosed that that actually happened and that
(01:00:17):
amount of radiation was released into the wild. It makes
me think about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the place where
the United States, you know, started its nuclear industry. Really,
it makes me wonder if anything has occurred within that
(01:00:38):
area that was never reported and was just covered up,
and people and livestock and crops were dosed beyond you know,
any sane amount and we just never found out about it,
because if we were to find out about it, there
would be such an uproar. I just it makes me wonder.
Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 4 (01:01:03):
Now, there's a side of me that says, if something
like that did occur at Oak Ridge, then there's no
way they could completely cover that up. Some paper somewhere,
somebody would know, somebody would talk. But the other part
of me thinks it was a time of war, and
just like the people of City forty, we were told
and we believed the people who lived there at the time,
(01:01:25):
that we were fighting the good fight. This is all
in the name of the United States victory, This is
all in the name of securing our family's futures, and
we'll go along with it. And then they all died
because they got dosed by radiation.
Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Yeah, they died. They died to a terminal condition known
as the greater Good.
Speaker 4 (01:01:45):
But that's all fabricated from my mind.
Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
I'm just wondering. It's possible have occurred. Yeah, that's the
disturbing thing. It's possible, you know what I mean, Like
the Villa incidents where the nuclear bomb was tested. Right,
these things happen. They may not happen in your backyard,
but that doesn't make them any less terrifying. And now
(01:02:08):
it gets to our final question. How long will these
closed cities stay closed? Some are Cold war relics, but
a surprising amount of them are still manufacturing fissile material. Right,
they're enriching uranium, they're making weapons grade plutonium. Business is booming,
Business is good. Those cities may well stay closed. And
(01:02:31):
what about the ones that we don't know, the ones
that are still off of the maps. And that's our
classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear
your thoughts. It's right, let us know what you think.
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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