November 7, 2023 • 64 mins
Often in the mainstream media the term "conspiracy theory" is used as a way of dismissing a claim or idea immediately -- and it's a technique that works more often than you might think. However, despite the ardent efforts of various powerful groups across the planet, numerous events initially called conspiracy theories turned out to be conspiracy facts. Join the guys as they explore conspiracies that turned out to be true.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh this one, you guys, Matt Nole fellow conspiracy realists.
Every so often some of the craziest conspiracy theories do
turn out to be true. Not all of them, and
maybe not most of them, but some of them, some
of them, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Some of them are in this episode.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Indeed, we always talk about how the concept of a
conspiracy theory is like this thought terminating cliche, designed to,
you know, have whatever topic gets attached to be viewed
with skepticism. But oftentimes they're worthy of a little bit
more digging, and sometimes when you dig deep enough, you
find that grain of truth.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I can't remember which ones exactly are in here, but
I can't wait to re listen and find out.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, we're right there with you.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Name is Norman.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
They call me Ben. You are you, and you are
here that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
As always, we are accompanied by our super producer, Paul Decant,
who we nod to with great gratitude as always, thanks
for saving the show.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Paul. You drop the mission control.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
I feel like, you know, if you want to keep it,
you can call them that.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's a seasonal beast. You bring it out, you know,
around the holidays.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
We can just call him mission critical.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Here you go.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
His names are Legion.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Paul, Big crit, Decade, Paul, show saver, decade, show stopper.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Even it's ok if you wanted to stop it.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
That's true, Paul. What what we'll do is we'll ask
the listeners to submit some nicknames. If you're okay with.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That, that's great, okay, and then we'll put up a
poll on here's where it gets crazy, the Facebook group
and have people vote on their favorite ones.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, like Matt like you and I did with Agent
Scully or Alex Bones.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah that's true almost Alex Bones.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Almost Alex Bones. Everything that we just said at the
top of the show, folks, turns out to be true,
although they may sound like rumors. We can substantiate all
of those things. Speaking of fantastic segues, that's what this
episode is about.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Some segue jitsu right there.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Man, it was matrix level. I'll admit not my best work.
That's true, but this is an important episode and it's
a little bit of a collection, a little bit of
a mixtape. In the first part of what we are
aiming to make a continuing series conspiracies that turned out
(02:52):
to be true. This first part will focus on some
of the biggest government oriented conspiracy theories, that genre of
conspiracy theory, and these will be stories that for years
or decades were dismissed as absolute tomfoolery, tinfoil hat country,
but later it turned out to be partially or in
several cases, entirely true. So while we're focusing on some
(03:18):
government conspiracies in this episode, we'd like as you listen along,
to take stock of the things that you have read
personally and let us know through the various means of
contacting us about conspiracies that you found to be absolutely true.
They don't have to be government oriented, just anything that
(03:38):
was depicted as utter hogwash and later turned out to
be absolutely factual.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And yeah, when we say factual, we mean there are
some type of documents to back it up, there's some
type of acceptance in whatever field or community this play,
this thing took place.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
What they call in theaw enforcement world, an eyeball witness.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I'm sure, an eyeball witness or corroborating evidence of some
sort of that yes, this was true.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Or an eyewit Yeah we didn't. We hear that in
an earlier episode. Some I refer to people as eyewits.
That's the portmanteau for it.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I'm all about brevity, yeah, the soul of wit or
just you know wit. There you go, fa, No, that's great.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
No.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
So to do this episode justice, we have to explore
a little bit about how conspiracy theories are depicted in
your neck of the global woods today. So, in many ways,
the average English speaking person is taught a very particular
interpretation of the phrase conspiracy theory, and it's a It's
(04:43):
an interpretation that is at best disingenuous and at wors
purposely misleading. The idea of a conspiracy theory is a
term is often conflated with the idea of deception or
delusion or a This goes back to the concept of
what a certain psychologists call a thought terminating cliche a buzzword. Right,
(05:08):
So we see buzzwords in so much of mass media.
If you want to find the most succinct way to
encapsulate a thought of phenomenon or a group, you try
to distill it into a single word. That's why people
who think there was more to the story about the
nine to eleven attacks became called truthers. You could just
(05:29):
say truthers, and that means whatever you think it means.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And the people that believe President Barack Obama was not
of this country originally were called birthers exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, that's a great example. And these examples are not
just limited to the realm of conspiracy theory. You hear
it refer to in so many different ways. Hipsters. What's
a hipster, right, It's like.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
A flannel were in American spirits? Can what is it?
What are the shoes they wear? That's a hippie? Hipsters
wear like like Tom's Tom's Tom's wearing asymmetrical haircut, have
in just the mustache, having just the mustache.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I feel like you're describing me. So I really appreciate this.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Now you're what they call King of the mods.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
It's good to be king, though, so a thought terminating cliche.
The reason this can be dangerous is because in that
effort to succinctly describe something. A lot of important stuff
gets left out of the conversation. We have discussed in
the past, how calling uh the idea that the UK
is run by reptilian aliens who eat souls, calling that
(06:49):
a conspiracy theory, and calling the fact that HSBC laundered
money for drug cartels for years a conspiracy theory makes
them sound like they're equal when they're clearly not. Because
one of those things actually happened, it is true.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Well, it's a tool to smear people whose opinions you
do not agree with or are counter to your agenda. Right,
you label them conspiracy theorists, you label you, you equate
those two things that you just said, or things like that,
and then people do the thing that everyone does where
you kind of distill everything down and look at that
one word, and that's my narrative.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And we've discussed before that it was designed that way.
At least, conspiracy theory as a buzzword was designed that
way after the jfk assassination for any alternate ideas as
to what occurred.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
And by gum, we're taking it back.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, it's often used to the term conspiracy theory is
often used to dismiss a claim without having to investigates
merit its authenticity, or importantly, it's lack thereof. This bias
is something that has crept out of the realm of
mass media and intruded academic literature as well. For example,
you can find easily find multiple studies constructed with the
(08:00):
purpose of discovering or manufacturing a link between mental illness
and what the study makers call conspiracy theory, and the
difficulty here hinges on definition. What makes one thing a
conspiracy theory the way we would understand it in mass
discourse and the other or another an out and out
actual case of people conspiring in secret to do something sketchy.
(08:23):
The difference is what's often referred to as a conspiracy
theory and what exists as a legitimate conspiracy often takes
a back seat to the exploration of the psychological processes
involved as individuals and groups compare, analyze, and prioritize certain
forms of evidence. So we have two examples of genres
(08:46):
of conspiracies versus genres of conspiracy theory. So let's take
one of the most popular out there conspiracy theories around now,
just to look at it real quick. That is the
flat Earth meme. Otherwise known as earthers, otherwise known as earthers.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yes, flat earthers, but i'd like to, you know, in
the in the in the spirit of brevity, let's call
them earthers.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Sure that's better than flatters. Yeah, that's that's confusing me
a lot of things.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, and you know, Mission Critical p Decand actually has
a friend who was creating a documentary right now all
about flatter You.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Talked about it, maybe having them appre on the show.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Well, we're going to look into it. And much like uh,
you know, the minds of the flatters and the earthers. Uh,
Paul Paul Decan is currently absent. So wait a minute,
that was a while to get.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
That was worth it. So so this idea, this flat
earth idea, it fits the general mass media definition of
a conspiracy theory easily just proven, easily dismissed. There are
mountains of evidence, or should we say, vast horizons, indicating
the Earth, as well as all of the rest of
the planets our species has been able to observe, are
(10:04):
in fact spherical. This evidence includes astronomical observation. This evidence
also includes on the ground, easily reproducible experiments that you
can do right now in the comfort of your own home.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
It sounds like disinformation to me.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Ben, yeah, right, because the shadow on the moon is
a total, total, high production value David Blaine esque.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Oh but dude, but there was like proof for this,
disproof of this before we even have the technology that
we have today. I mean, guys like Galileo observed through
very simple, comparatively telescopes and could observe celestial bodies that
indicated this was not the case.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Right, Yeah, And ancient civilizations also knew the Earth was round,
and you could do it today even with the technology
that they would have had at that time. You can
stick a stick in the ground and watch the shadow
move as time passes with a little bit of simple
math actually which you know what, don't even bother with
(11:08):
the math. Just get another stick. Cool, We matrix dodged
that one. All you have to do is get two
sticks and then stick them some distance apart and realize
that if the Earth were flat, then two sticks in
different locations would produce the same shadow. They don't. They
never have, they never will. It just doesn't happen because
(11:30):
the Earth is not flat.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It sounds like hearsay to me.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
I don't know that you're being such a pill today.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
You guys know, NASA is controlled just the way the sticks,
all the sticks are working together to try and you know, fool, you.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Don't believe big stick.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah. My theory is that people that really espouse this belief,
it's just like a super super hipster throwback thing that
they're doing. It's like, I want to like live my
life like I'm a chromagnet or.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Something ironic perhaps in some way. And then there is
a group I think we cover this in a previous
episode on Flat Earth. There is a group that is
arguing it entirely to be pedantic, and their real argument
is that one can argue anything effectively if you use
the correct rules of rhetoric.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
People on the internet being pedantic imagine, that's insane.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
It would be the coolest conspiracy ever though, if that
would be living under the guys.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
But I asked this question before you guys, to what
end right right? Did this accomplish too? For whom who
is getting rich off of this? How is this keeping
us in the dark in some way that is actually
valuable to literally anyone?
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yeah, so hold on a second, because we get to that.
So additionally, the rules of our observable universe seem to
be exceedingly consistent, and all the proof we have there
is no evidence that any observable planet has been, is,
or will be quote unquote flat, whatever the hell that
is supposed to mean. This is a great example for
those of us in the crowd who consider ourselves be
hardcore skeptics. There's nothing that can distion proved the notion
(13:00):
of a spherical Earth, and to combat this dearth of
proof for the idea that Earth is not in fact spherical,
adherents of this belief system, like the ones who really
really hook line and sync or went for it, they're
forced to constantly widen the net of perceived collusion. So
there's a worldview where in confirmation bias is king. That
(13:22):
means that not only is the bulk of scientific consensus
from ancient times to twenty eighteen been a huge consistent
snow job, but millions of people across the span of
civilization have somehow consistently cooperated in covering up the truth.
For as you alluded to earlier, nol one reason or another.
But that's the final red flag here. Differing camps of
(13:46):
flat Earth, people who really believe in this, people who
really advocate for this belief system still can't agree on
exactly why this would happen.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Which is funny because to me, the conspiracy theories, the
weird ones, usually flow from some dis like disproportionate thing
that people perceive as being wrong, or like they're looking
for a boogeyman to explain a phenomenon, or like a
inequality of some kind. So there's that that is absent
here entirely. So what's the what's the reasoning for like
(14:17):
seeking out this h clearly disprovable way of thinking.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Well, the problem is that most of the academic literature
doesn't center on those concepts themselves. They center on the
psychological processes of the believers. And that's that's missing the mark.
It's interesting, but it's it's treating symptoms more so, I
would argue, And we have to remember this example, Okay,
easily disproven. That's what mass media means when they say
(14:43):
conspiracy theory. This example will come into play later. But
let's take another more more complicated example for comparison, like
secret government programs.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
We're familiar with those, right, how familiar? Well, I mean
they occur all the time at least throughout history and
our system of allowing documentation to be put out into
the public domain after a certain amount of time. It
just shows us that there have been rolling secret government
projects and programs and experiments and research throughout time and
(15:18):
they're still going. We just we are within that time
bubble before any of this stuff can become public.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
It's think it's declassified. We find out the flavor of
the types of secret programs there are. But I just
feel like now it's worse than it ever was. Whatever's
going on now is super dark and super weird.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
But here's the thing. There are claims, unsubstantiated claims of
even crazier stuff that we don't have documentation for, and
that has also existed in time memoriam.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right, yeah, yeah, we've got This is a genre of
conspiracy theory, and like you said, Matt, the way it
typically happens is that there will be outrageous allegations of
the legal conduct some and it will say, where's the proof,
show me the money. There's a lack of hard evidence.
That's either due to the classification of documents proving that stuff,
(16:07):
or to be fair, it could also be due to
the fact that people who say these things are lying
or diluted, or although I hesitate to use the word,
maybe let's not say crazy, maybe let's say extremely misinformed.
So what happens when this stuff comes true? When, as
(16:29):
we pointed out, it is declassified, we see a hard
reset on the popular narrative. When leaked or declassified stuff
proves the people who sounded crazy we're telling the truth
the entire time.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Then everybody says, oh, well, yeah, I mean, obviously we
knew that. We just you know whatever.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Everybody knows that.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And that's my favorite part, that sudden backpedal. I'm not surprised.
I knew that was true.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
It's not very helpful.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
No, no, it's it's a weird cousin to one of
the most unhelpful things you can say in any conversation.
I told you so, that was it.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Talked about this the other day. Has anyone ever she said,
your dad said that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not
to throw you down into the bus. But that's the worst.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It's just not a it's it's not an addition to
a conversation.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
And it's probably not even true. I'm like, when when
did you tell me so. How did that conversation go.
I'm sorry, I'm getting up in arms of it's true.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
The same people say I told you so. It's like,
oh good, I'm glad you're into your earlier statements.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
What do you want to talk about now?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Right?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Right?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So we have to make an important note here too.
Recent technological breakthroughs, primarily in the field of communication, have
drastically increased the pace at which these types of conspiracies
can be confirmed or debunked. And that goes to what
you were saying, Matt, about the bubble. The bubble is
changing because the average person, if if the five of
(17:59):
us us here in the studio and you listening, we're
alive in the nineteen sixties, we might have one or
two things absolutely confirmed in this genre of secret government programs,
and we could easily go to our deathbeds not knowing
about the other stuff, just wondering if that weird thing
that hippie told us and hate Ashbury was true.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
You met him too, Yeah, he told me a bunch
of stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Man, he's really he's on one.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
He had a lot to say.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
And in the twenty first century, though, where we live today,
it's increasingly easy for a single individual, one person to
play a tremendously important role in history. Someone like an
Edward Snowden or Louise Elizondo can relay classified information of
their own accord and share it out with the world
(18:45):
before any of the old orthodox suppression methods can be deployed.
And that means, if we want to wax a little
bit poetic about it, that all of us now have
our hands on the lids of innumerable Pandora's jars, and
each one of those cannot be closed once it's open.
Now it just now. We used to have a situation
(19:05):
where there would be maybe fifty five hundred people that
knew a secret, right and several of them die. One
of them maybe tries to tell someone and they commit suicide,
two shots to the back of their head, they fall
off a building, they take a permanent vacation in Mexico.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Cini tablet under the tongue.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Cinai tablet under the tongue. But now, if we have
fifty five hundred people have a secret, any one of
them could just leak it easily and it will probably
ruin their life. But there's no way to get that
information back and Over the past few years, we've often
discovered in the course of this show that there is
(19:45):
a grain of truth behind some of the strangest sounding
fringe theories. In some cases, we found these theories to
be more or less absolutely true, such as mk ultra.
That's I mean, I don't even think we should spend
time on that one today.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah, you don't have to approve or disprove anything. It's
just out there.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
It happened. It happened. We paid for the government to
give people LSD. But the weirdest thing about this is
the rabbit hole continues. It's like looking into a fractal
We keep finding more stuff, and we'd like to tell
you about some of it. After a word from our sponsors.
(20:30):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
So we're gonna go through and kind of do a
round up, go down a list in a way of
a couple of these government conspiracies that we found. Remember
we're in the genre of government here, we're not branching
out into everything. We'll do that in a later date.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
We'll have ourselves little conspiracy rodeo.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yes, that's that's right, it's conspiracy round up. I've been
watching a lot of toy story too lately with the sun.
Oh my gosh. Okay, the old problem specter is an
important character in the second of that.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
I haven't watched it skipped right to three.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Oh man, I'm not kidding.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
I haven't seen seen.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
I haven't I saw the first one.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
You see too.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Now Pau hasn't seen too either, Really conversation, isn't that funny?
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Cool?
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Guys all secret ghost? Paul said he's seen one in three,
but not too so hush your mouth, Frederick, But it's
too late.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You unscrewed the jar. Everyone knows about the prospect.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Badgers are everywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
The badgers are out of the bag.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
But but yeah, okay, so we're gonna we're gonna intentionally
skip some of the things we covered in depth on
previous episodes. As you were saying, Matt, this is about
the government one of the maybe we maybe we look
at this in terms of what it was originally portrayed
as and what was actually true about it.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So okay, So what's our first one.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Our first one has to do well, let's let's say
the conspiracy theory. If you were walking up on the
street and somebody grabbed you by the shirt and said, hey,
the government is spying on us right now.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
You met that guy too. You met that guy, I
met him. Yeah. Originally this was seen as the classic
conspiratorial belief, someone who had maybe read nineteen eighty four
a few times too many and became paranoid, and they
became assured that the government was watching them. This is
a complicated thing because paranoia is inherently narcissistic. Paranoia inherently
(22:31):
comes from the axiom that I, the person being observed,
am somehow so important that eyes from afar, people in
high places are obsessed with me and what I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
It sounds like you've telled a little bit of that before, Ben,
I know I have well a little narcissism slash paranoia. Yeah.
Oh yeah, see Paul too. I can can feel it. No,
I'm not okay, Well I don't.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Just for the I'd like to go on record and
say I don't like the way that you're looking at
both of us and nodding.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
But with a smile, like a genuine heavy smile while
we're talking about something so dark.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
So that's the thing, though, This mental illness is a
serious issue, and we don't mean to deride at all
anyone who is suffering from it. But this belief, this
paranoid belief the government is watching my every move used
to dovetail very well with some symptoms of mental illness,
and it made that person ran up to you on
(23:33):
the street seem like a crackpot and easily dismissed until
that is.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, the news came out like the actual news. Oh yeah, yeah,
and they said, hey, everybody, so the government is spying
on all of us.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
That was a big indication for a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Was yeah, it really was. And this is around the
time specifically, well, I mean there have been smaller stories
about things like Echelon and some of the other projects
around the around the countries in the world where they
discuss how, yes, there are massive surveillance programs going on. Sure,
but when you know Edward Snowden came forth and said, guys,
(24:19):
it's bigger than that. It's a lot more than that,
and it's everybody.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Know what that hippie hyde Ashbury said, I told you so.
Oh yeah, yeah, he's got like shut up, man, that's
not helpful.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
He's got some stuff to work on with himself, I.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Think, And well that's not the only thing.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah. Yeah, So this came out in increments. First, the
news broke that yes, the US government was indeed spying
on people, but only certain high value targets. Their spying
on Leonard Peltier in the American Indian movement, right, who
they considered a domestic terrorist. Their spying on Martin Luther King,
whom they consider a destabilizing factor, John Lennon, Their spying
(24:54):
on John Lennon because of what, because of his perceived
left wing beliefs.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, and then with coin pro counterintelligence program, they're going
through and actually doing this all like consistently a lot.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
And then the next big milestone is the news breaks
about monitoring international communication, so only certain high value possibly
destabilizing domestic individuals or only international you know, phone calls
and stuff, because we want to stop terrorism. And those
existed as rumors, but they became substantiated by the acknowledgment
(25:27):
of stuff like Echelon or five Eyes, where a lot
of where five anglosphere countries agreed to pass the buck
and find loopholes in their own surveillance laws.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Right, So for the average American citizen, it's okay, Well,
if I travel to another country, maybe I'm being looked at.
Maybe if I'm a really important person in a movement somewhere,
I'm being looked at.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Maybe if I attended the same you know, Democratic Socialist
Party of America meeting with a celebrity or a musician,
I might be on a list. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Maybe maybe if I went to Kent State University for
any reason whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
But otherwise, normal Jane or John dosif they don't have
any they don't have any appeal, why would the FEDS
go to the massive trouble of putting them under a microscope.
It turns out, actually, yes, uh, they do have appeal,
And yes we did attract the attention. And yes, uncle
(26:23):
Sam was and is monitoring you. The same technological advances
that allow people to leak classified information very easily also
allow domestic surveillance to extend widely without exception. I mean, okay,
virtually without exception. These surveillance techniques depend on partnerships with
private businesses telecoms you know, AT and T, Verizon comcasts,
(26:48):
and social media platforms Instagram, Facebook.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
What are the same company?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Same company? Yeah, there we go. I needed a different one, Thank.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
You, Tumblr, tumbl Tumbsnapchat.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Is legislation that was pushed through in the wake of
public unease over terrorism that allowed, for the first time
in human history, the first time in human history allowed
the majority of a population to be intimately traced should
they catch the attention of the US government right now
when don't be too paranoid. We don't want to be
(27:21):
too alarmist right about this, but right now, if you
somehow rose to the level where you got personal attention
from the intelligence agencies in the US in a very
short amount of time, they could know more about you
than your loved ones know about you, which is a spooky,
spooky thing. And it doesn't matter whether or not you
(27:42):
have secrets.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, that's well. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're
a liar.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
I'm just an enigma dog. Okay, I'm not a liar.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I was looking at keep it just keep it close
to the vest man. So that's okay. So that's one.
That's one thing that turned out to be absolutely true.
And this is happening as we record this episode. Not
for nothing have we made that running joke where we well,
I guess it's time to do it again, where we
(28:14):
apologize to that poor hypothetical Nessay, intern, who has to
listen to this show? I hope it's going all right, man,
haven't heard from you in a while.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
I think he's listening to the show or monitoring our
personal phone calls.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
He might be doing both. I mean, it's tough to
be an intern. He probably has like a transcript on
one thing and he's listening to the audio one.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
On one side, yea yeah, and then another on the
other and wait, a multitask. Do we have a name
for him?
Speaker 1 (28:40):
We used to call him Steve, but interns turnover so quickly.
I wonder if it's a new guy now.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Or he's a pretty common name, though it could be
a different guy named Steve at this point.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, maybe he has a maybe as a government assigned name,
and it's just like Johnny Blank.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
He's just a Russian bot now, maybe it is.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
And can we call our intern Ricky that way? It
could be.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, okay, Ricky. Well, we hope school is going well
for you and school school. Stick with it, Van, I
hope your summer is going all right. Feel free to
write to us conspiracy HowStuffWorks dot Com. On that note,
there's another subgenre of what we're often called conspiracy theories
that turned out to be absolutely and in this case,
(29:27):
horrifically true. In the years of World War Two leading
up to it and during the war, the American public
was sold this fantastic, idealistic, shining image of what the
US was and what the US would become. The United States. Okay,
everybody on, here's where it gets crazy. I'm trying to
hit the t the US. Oh man, Yeah, it's gonna
(29:54):
it's the battle has been fought. Yeah, I accept that.
I think it's hilarious. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Don't don't don't justify these monsters.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
It Wasn't it better though, when it was YouTube commenters
with just awful screen names saying it's because it made
it feel yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, I loved it because there would be very salient points.
There would be people writing four paragraph essays that had fantastic,
fantastic perspectives, and then their names would be like surfer
Boy booty Time twelve. Yeah, I'm like, wow, that's a
great point. Surfer Boy booty time.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
There it is Traveler twelve.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Yeah, like that. That should be like a raunchy comedy.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
It's one heck of a weird pickup line. But so
the the US and the Allies were portrayed as inarguably
the good guys, with a nation united behind them. Every
red blooded Jane and John Doseph was doing their part,
whether you're at home or you're on the front, to
prevent the dastardly Axis powers from sowing chaos and atrocity
(31:01):
across Europe, North Africa, Asia, and possibly beyond. And there
was propaganda that came out, propaganda plenty that portrayed the
Axis as insanely violent powers, raping, pillaging, murdering, and even
experimenting on innocent people in their possession. Of course, the
weird thing about the propaganda was the racist stuff was
(31:23):
completely inaccurate, obviously, but the propaganda about the violence was
largely accurate in a very disturbing way. And by implication,
what this propaganda did was say that the US and
the Allies were the polar opposite of Axis forces, fighting
for the safety and dignity of these strangers oceans away,
(31:45):
just because we're good people, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
That decent, you know, we're fighting for justice for all.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Now, there were a few outliers, anti war activists, or
anyone who had the goal to suggest that the US
was not as clean and un besmirched as it would
have its citizens believe. They were at best dismissed. They
were most often accused of being spies or traders, and
in some occasions they were completely blackballed from their own industries,
(32:13):
or they were persecuted by the government up to and
including criminal charges and jail time.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Or you know, they were put into prison camps like
most of the Japanese American citizens.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Right, or they were put into asylums because they were crazy.
How could you say this stuff about Uncle Sam?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Hey? Ugh, isn't he like a fictional character?
Speaker 1 (32:36):
He is based on a real person?
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Is right?
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (32:39):
An episode on that maybe yet I don't know if.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
But what what actually happened? Though?
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Well? Actually turns out that the US was conducting illegal
experiments on its own citizens, yes, as well as foreign populations.
For decades. During World War Two and the years following,
the government paid particularly close attention to the effects of
radiation on human beings. I wonder why, Ben, Yeah, I
(33:07):
wonder why looking to see how things might pan out
in some sort of dystopian future.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Ding Ding give them that. As cigar passim in Omaha,
Steak used to win this round. It is absolutely true.
It's a good thing. They volunteered, right kidding. They had
no idea, They had no idea what was happening. They
were unsuspecting. Beginning roughly nineteen forty five, scientists working directly
for the US government conducted at least at least thirty
separate programs in which they knowingly and purposely exposed innocent
(33:38):
US citizens to life changing or in many cases, life
ending amounts of radiation. This is shortly after the discovery
of plutonium in the early nineteen forties. In one case,
they directly shot people up with plutonium just to see
what would happen.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Didn't give them like superpowers instantly.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
If pain is a superpower, then they were like they
they took eighteen people who had terminal illnesses and they said,
we were going to give you experimental treatments. We are
going to we may not be able to save your life,
and we cannot predict the side effects. Both of those
things were technically true. They said, but it may lengthen
(34:19):
your lifespan. And this gets really dirty, really quick.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Because that wasn't even sort of true. The lengthening of
the lifespan thing, that was just sort of like a hook.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yeah yeah, and Deadpool, yeah exactly exactly. So what they
were doing, what they were actually doing, that is, was
they were hoping to take the information they gained, just
like you had said, and use it to plan for
scenarios where the US suffered a direct nuclear hit conditions.
(34:49):
And they also gave children and pregnant mothers food and
drink riddled with a radiation because they said, well, how
will there'll be pregnant women when the nukes hit? What
will happen. Let's sacrifice you know, a handful of actual
children now, with the rationale being that we're doing it
(35:11):
so we can save kids later.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
I remember that guy we talked about on the other show,
Ridiculous History had the poison squad who purposefully ate poison
contaminants and food. Yeah, that was volunteer Harvey. Yeah, Harvey.
But this is way more nefarious and terrifying.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It comes from the same mindset though, you know. So
here's the other part. They took active soldiers that they
would later send the war, and they marched them over
radioactive dirt at active test sites. And then when these
non consenting patients died with no knowledge that they were dying,
of radiation poisoning. The US government would go back in
(35:51):
secret and rob their graves to study their remains, including infants.
So we're talking digging up children, cutting off limbs, seeing
what happens.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Well, who was doing the digging? Was it just low
level like office cross Well?
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Okay, so there one thing we know about for sure
is this thing called Project Sunshine.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
That sounds like fun.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, it's nice, doesn't It sounds wonderful. I think it
has more to do with the brightness of an atomic
blast than anything else.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Or the fact that sunshine gives you cancer.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah, that's very true. So in this it was the
United States Atomic Energy Commission along with the thing that
would eventually become the RAND Corporation, working together. So it
was somebody employed by them, either direct employees or contract workers.
And what they would do this is, let's say, what
they wanted to do. They wanted to study the effects
(36:45):
of strontium ninety, which was the most dangerous isotope radioactive
isotope that exists as nuclear fallout. And they knew this
from a previous project. And in this case they wanted
to stuff especially young human flesh, and the effects of
strontium ninety. So, as Ben was saying, like looking at
(37:08):
people who they had already kind of dosed with or
experimented with and then dug up their bodies. In this case,
they're trying to find recently deceased bodies, specifically infants, young children,
and that kind of thing, get tissue samples, and then
test those samples. So they would do everything from go
to a morgue and take an arm of a you know,
(37:30):
a child that had recently deceased without asking their family members,
without asking anyone if they could use it, and then
testing it and then disposing of it later. And they
there were at least fifteen hundred test subjects in Project
Sunshine geese or just deceased victims became or pieces of them.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, and you would say many, most, if not all,
of those came from the act of grave robbing.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
It's not a lot of It wasn't grave robbing, it
was it was it.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Was sneaking samples from more glifting more glift.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, there is a there's a place you can go
just really quickly if you want to check this out
on rand dot org. Actually you can find it and
it is Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons Project Sunshine in
its dated August sixth, nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Oh go, I know I figured out the worst phrase
for this, morg mooching. Oh yeah, that's a rough one.
On a side note, with this, we find an interesting
biographical tale here. It is the tale of Albert Stevens.
Albert Stevens was someone who fell into the web of
(38:41):
illegal government radiation experiments in the US in nineteen forty five.
He was a fifty eight year old house painter. He
had been told that he was suffering from terminal cancer
with only months to live. The truth is that he
was suffering from a severe gastric but he had doctors
(39:02):
tell him it was cancer. So he was admitted to
the University of California San Francisco Medical Center to treat
the cancer that he did not have to get cough
cough treatment.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Cough cough, what's cough cough treatment?
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Cough cough treatment? Is me really pointing out that they
were lying.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
To Oh I see how I got.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
You got it? So this guy, this poor guy, Albert, he,
as he says, given a few months to live. On
May tenth of that year, scientists working for Uncle Sam,
pretending to treat the cancer that he did not have
secretly shot him up with the single largest amount of
plutonium a human being has ever received to the modern
(39:48):
day is just under one microgram.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
You know.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
The sample had two different isotopes of plutonium, was a cocktail.
One of the isotopes was weekly radioactive, so still dangerous,
but not an immediate death sentence. It had a half
life of twenty four one hundred years. Yeah, and then
the other highly radioactive isotope had a half life of
about eighty seven a little less than eighty eight years. He
(40:13):
received free medical and additional testing for the rest of
his life from the same group that riddled his body
with radiation, and his family thought this experimental cancer treatment
was working because he didn't have cancer and he lived
more than a few months. In fact, he lived twenty
one years suffering the effects of this cartoonish amount of
(40:37):
plutonium that stayed in his system, in his bones, in
his skin, in his organs. His spine was degrading at
a horrific rate. His eyes were fighting a losing battle
with cataracts. And he was still there with the doctors
who were cough cough treating kauf cough him and they
(41:00):
conducted operations while he was alive to remove parts of
his organs to see what was happening to them, took
his spleen, parts of his liver, as pancreas, his lymph nodes.
His family the whole time is saying, Wow, it's amazing
that you have survived cancer. Thank you for this experimental treatment.
(41:20):
He died twenty one years later on January ninth, nineteen
sixty six, of a heart attack. So during those twenty
one years he was alive, he received more radiation than
any other living human being, sixty times the government's maximum
safe lifetime exposure threshold, which turns out is a real thing. Yeah,
(41:43):
and now it feels like a ticking clock every time
you have to go through the airport's security line or
use a microwave, wow, or get an X ray.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah. So it's a ton of radiation that this gentleman
had pumped into his body. And here's the thing. We've
been talking about all these radiation experiments, but we're about
to get into something that is a very different kind
of horror, and we're going to get into that. After
a quick word from our sponsoro.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
We're back. We hope you had an enjoyable break we did. Yeah,
we had to take a second too. We had to
take a second to reset because this is the darkest
part of today's episode, Like you know the scene in
Willy Wonka where everything gets very spooky and terrifying and
disturbing as the as the boat goes through the tunnel.
(42:43):
This is the dark tunnel of the show and it's
unfortunately a serious thing. There was for a long time
conspiracy theory roundly dismissed throughout the United Kingdom in Europe
as a whole, and for decades, people like David Ike,
musicians like Johnny Rotten, and various former members of Britain's
(43:05):
entertainment industry or even its government alluded to this conspiracy
and they were ignored. They were roundly ignored. Depending on
their social standing, they were simply dismissed or they were ridiculed.
And the conspiracy was this that there was an active,
ongoing child abuse network in the UK, and furthermore that
(43:29):
members of the entertainment industry and the government, the people
with their hands at the levers of power, were colluding
to cover this up. Not to cover it up and
stop it, but to stop people from reporting it as
it continued.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
These people who alluded to this, many of them were
convinced that there was this child abuse network and that
it was being actively covered up. Some of them, like
David Ike, were dismissed as crack or Johnny Rotten was
dismissed sometimes as their version of an Internet troll, just
intentionally poking the bear, attempting to be edgy through making
(44:10):
controversial statements.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
From the pistols. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Yeah. There were a couple of interviews where he would
hint at knowing people high up in the entertainment industry.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, John Leiden, it's his name, yes, yes,
when you and you originally said Johnny Rotten, I thought
maybe this was like a screen name or something. They
didn't realize it was actual the Johnny Rotten. I didn't
know this part of his story. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
And the same dismissal went for people who alleged their
careers have been threatened not just in the entertainment industry,
but in law enforcement as well when they attempted to
blow the whistle on what they saw as an intergenerational
cycle of crime. The people named as criminals and frankly
monsters in this situation included numerous MP's government officials, aristocrats,
(44:59):
perhaps most notoriously the one that we know about in
the US, the very creepy children's entertainer and DJ, the
late Jimmy Seville.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Ye like this story just to point out here, members
of Parliament is MPs just in case. Oh yeah, yeah,
I don't know why that just came to mind.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
That's a good point.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
I was thinking military police in my head for a moment.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I was like, no, sull parliament funkadelic.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yes, members of parliament funkadelic who also make laws in
the audit Kingdom?
Speaker 3 (45:29):
Funk.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Is there a venn diagram here? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (45:33):
No.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
I think it's good to point that out because remember,
we thought everyone knew about Matt Libb.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
I know now I'm paranoid about everything.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Oh you didn't get them at the book fair, you guys.
I mean, I don't know. We can't assume that everyone
had the same upbringing, right he did. We all kind
of grew up in this part of the neck of
the woods. So I don't even know if they have
scholastic book fairs everywhere else in the country.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I don't know everywhere really, Yep.
Speaker 3 (45:54):
It was a touring thing they had, like road cases
full of these books.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, what they didn't have everywhere is Jimmy Seville dancing
around on stage talking to children and being completely not creepy.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Top of the pops right, and people was yes, So
here's what actually happened. Here's what gave truth to what
was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, sometimes so vehemently that
it ruined people's careers if they said they thought any
part of it was true. As several of these people
were universally men passed away after they were dead. This
(46:27):
is important, after they were beyond the bounds of mortal
judgment or a human legal system. The press was finally
allowed to admit. Oh yes, turns out that is true.
People like Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith were admitted and
proven to be serial abusers and quite prolific. Jimmy Seville
(46:50):
in particular, was not just sexually assaulting children, who was
also purposely targeting disabled children. And to add a a
little bit of uh morbid icing on the cake here,
there's pretty compelling evidence that he was sexually assaulting corpses
as well at one of the non at one of
(47:12):
the hospitals. Yeah, he was I think on the board
of Is.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
There any sense that he had like people colluding with
him on this or oh my god, yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
If not, if not actively participating these things with him
the way.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, if we're probably not going to go into a
ton of the details about these guys. I think that's
as detailed as we'll get as far as what they did.
But if you have the stomach for it and you
want to know what a real monster is, like, we
were discussing off Mike Cyril Smith and stuff that he
was known to be doing after the fact, so you
(47:51):
can look it up if you wish, but we're probably
not going to discuss it here, right.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
So we bring this up, and this is very heavy
stuff because it is important for this to be separated
from that dismissive realm of conspiracy theory. Yes, okay, David
Ike has said a lot of things that cannot be
proven true. It turns out you can call it a
you can call it that thing where maybe a broken
(48:16):
clock is right twice a day or something like that,
call it whatever you want. It turns out that this
cover up, at least partially is absolutely true. This is
conspiracy fact, at least in the broad strokes of the
claims and accusations these powerful men were literally getting away
with incredibly violent, reprehensible crimes with the knowing and continual
(48:39):
support of facets of the UK government.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
And you might ask why why, knowing, how did the
government know about that? You have to remember a lot
of this is either an MP of some a part
of the government, or somebody like Jimmy Seville who is
working directly for the government through the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
And hobnobbing with the aristocracy, receiving commendations of plenty. So
we do have to acknowledge that while the broad strokes
of this are true, the rumors went even further and
continued to do so, claiming that there might be some
sort of occult aspect to these crimes, claiming that absolutely
(49:19):
everyone was involved or is involved, and we don't know,
We don't have proof of that. But what we do
have proof of is that numerous files implicating living retired
members of the UK government, some of whom may have
passed away by now, have gone missing. And despite multiple
(49:40):
calls for investigation from the British public and some less
cynical government officials who are trying to do right by
their constituents. This series of events seems set to play
out like the notorious Detroux affair in Belgium. Yes, just
troublingly similar.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah and yeah wow, And we have to remember that
it's also so here even in the US, not so
much at a federal government level something like this occurring.
But in nineteen eighty eight, something similar did happen in Omaha, Nebraska,
where there was a community federal credit union that was
(50:16):
it was raided by federal agents and it was found
out that there was this guy named Lawrence E. Larry
King who was behind some serious things. There are allegations
of child sex trafficking and prostitution and rape and all
kinds of things with boys young boys that came out
(50:38):
as an actual occurrence here within the United States. These
kinds of things have happened over the years, and we
just have to keep in mind that it's not always
a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Right, And we have to also be respectful of the
victims involved, whether those are the direct victims of the
crimes or the people who who were somehow punished for
bringing that stuff to light when it was occurring.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
Even the people that get slandered on the sidelines that
actually don't have anything to do with it, but they
get caught up in maybe the larger parts or the
fringes of the theory.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Because this is the kind of red meat that sells
in tabloids, you know, so a news organization or a
tabloid entertainment outfit would be incentivized to report this kind
of stuff.
Speaker 3 (51:30):
Well, look at this stuff with the Vatican that's been
trickling out over the past few years. And we recently
had the Pope come out and apologize for standing behind
one of these archbishops that had like clearly covered up
a lot of these sex crimes by you know, priests,
and he, you know, our current are the current Pope
(51:53):
came out and said, hey, I made a mistake. That's
a big deal. And talk about a conspiracy. I mean,
like that's something that's been going back generations and that's
just been covered up and covered up. And now finally
in the wake of everything that's going on with all
these sex abuse criminals being brought to justice or at
least brought to light, it's this critical mass, you know.
(52:14):
And then also have this pope that's a little bit
more human than we're used to and will come out
and own up to this stuff. It's interesting to.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
See, it really is, and we can only hope, we
can only hope that substantive change comes out about this.
But for the case of the UK cover ups, the
scariest part of the story is how much we don't know.
We do not know if it stopped, We do not
know if it continues today. We do not know who's involved,
how they might be connected, or what people in the
(52:44):
UK can do to try and prevent children in their
country from falling into the clutches of this kind of thing.
If it's still happening. Again, it would be unfair for
us to say it's definitely still happening. We don't know
because all the reports about it keep disappearing. Yeah, but
we can't end on that note. Nope, I need to
(53:05):
don't go in a little long. But we can't end
completely on that note. Maybe we can talk about a
mad science conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
That sounds fun, but is it government related?
Speaker 1 (53:16):
It is?
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Okay, well, then let's do it.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Okay, Okay, we'll do one more.
Speaker 3 (53:19):
Matt will allow it.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Thank you, Matt. Here's the here's the gist. It sounded
like something straight out of a dime store fiction novel.
A brilliant, super villainous organization uses the weather patterns of
Earth itself as a weapon. For years. Let's let's go
back to that man on the street situation that Matt
brought up earlier. For years, people would have situations where
(53:43):
someone runs up to them and it's like, man, you
know what they're doing up there in Alaska, up at
that harp. They're changing the weather man. Global warming is
made by Uncle Sam.
Speaker 2 (53:55):
Consistently, tornadoes come from harp and nast hurricanes.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
It's a twister.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
It turns out that.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Hey, wait, are they making hurricanes too? They're making hurricanes.
Speaker 1 (54:11):
So let's throw in a British guy so it doesn't
seem like.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
We're we're Southern.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
We can't do that.
Speaker 3 (54:22):
We can. That's exactly That's exactly why we can think.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
So I think, so, hey, did you hear them making
blizzards too?
Speaker 3 (54:28):
There we go sick of all these blizzards.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
Blizzards everywhere I'm up here in New York City.
Speaker 3 (54:35):
Were losing were like listeners, Hey have you heard of harp?
Speaker 1 (54:43):
Hey, they're changing the weather like a mad bastard.
Speaker 2 (54:46):
It's a delicious beverage.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
HARP So okay, so hopefully we didn't rag off this
off too much, but it was a very popular thing,
often dismissed as a conspiracy theory, if not HARP, specifically
the idea of weather modification. People were dismissed as total
tinfoil hat nut jobs, and the mass media would say, no,
one can control the weather, you guys, that's what's the next?
(55:11):
What's next? Do they think we're being literal when we
say it's raining cats and dogs? Back to you, Janis.
They were dismissed. But it turns out, actually, while there
is no solid proof that HARP ever was intentionally affecting
the weather, and a lot of HARP stuff is not
once you dig into the files, it's not near as
(55:32):
mysterious or sexy as you might think. It is still
pretty vague, admittedly, but if we bracket HARP out of there,
there's absolutely proof that multiple governments, not just the US,
also notably China, have experimented with weather and continue to
experiment with it both as an agricultural tool and as
(55:52):
a weapon. And guess which one our country used it for?
Just you know, yeah, I mean, you guys already know
what are.
Speaker 3 (56:00):
You talking about the rain making supervillain?
Speaker 1 (56:03):
Ye, well that's one, but the US government in Vietnam
used weather as a weapon to combat communist forces.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
Okay, cool, because we know another story about a guy
who tried to save San Diego from a drought and
claimed that he could manipulate the weather by shooting this
like special cocktail of chemicals up into the clouds that
he had devised, and supposedly it worked so well that
it flooded the reservoir and caused thousands of dollars of
damages and they ran the guy out of town on
a rail. Uh and he you know, didn't get paid
(56:35):
a yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yeah, he did the work. Though he did do the work.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
But then wasn't there a thing too where like this
was used. Cloud seating technology was used like as a
kind of a firework display at the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
Oh yeah, to prevent to prevent winter weather coming into
Moscow a couple of times Moscow and a couple other places. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (56:58):
For some reason, I thought I read that it was
like used as part of the like some sort of
like big showy display.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
That's interesting. I mean, the thing is whether modification technology,
specifically cloud seating, which is the most well known form
of this this technology, we still don't know exactly what
it is capable of. Just like all the mad scientists
from those previously mentioned dime store sci fi novels, we're
(57:26):
messing with things we don't understand. Maybe there is some
things man was not meant to do. Maybe we spend
so much time asking ourselves if we could do something
that we skip the part where we ask ourselves whether
we should do a thing.
Speaker 3 (57:40):
Just a quick aside, China did spend apparently thirty million
dollars to make it rain in advance of the opening ceremony.
Speaker 1 (57:48):
In two two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
Right, that's right, yes, exactly, And that's that's the one
I had. Oh yeah, yeah, yah, I was misunderstanding it.
I knew had to do with the opening ceremonies. But
they were literally trying to control the weather so that
it would would rain earlier and not when they wanted
it to look nice and pretty.
Speaker 1 (58:02):
So we still have the rain, just change the schedule exactly.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
But it's controversial. And they used salt and mineral filled
bullets they shot in the sky, much like our rain
making super villain in San Diego.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
They used cannons specifically. Yeah, and they still China still
has a weather modification bureau. They're much more transparent about
it than the US ever was, so kudos to them.
They're also arguably largely using that as an agricultural technology.
We used it as a weapon, hoping to trigger mud slides,
(58:35):
disrupt trading, communication, and transit routes during the Vietnam War
conflicts in Southeast Asia right now as we're recording this.
Both of these countries can reproduce these effects today at
any given time. All they need is a place to
set up the sky guns, the weather guns, and then
(58:58):
they can let it roll. But the problem is this,
you might ask yourself, well, if they can do that,
why are we having so many reports of catastrophic climate
related events occurring. The thing is, both of these countries
can mess with the controls of the world's global weather
system to a small degree, but neither of them can
(59:21):
control the consequences of what happens. Because don't think of
the weather like a string that you can pull with
that leads to a cloud that makes rain. When you
pull the string, instead, it's a lot more like a web,
and you pull a piece of the web you affect
the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (59:38):
Yeah. We also can't control any of the large mechanisms
like the airflow around the Earth. We can't affect how
the northern leaves are going to be affected. We can't
do anything like that currently, at least, what we know
about is just adding moisture or taking it away essentially.
Speaker 1 (59:55):
Yeah, and we don't know how that affects things like
So with the case that Nol just mentioned earlier with
Charles Mallory Hatfield out in San Diego, the same thing happened.
We can create the effect, but we have no means
of controlling it. So imagine that you have this tremendously
power like Okay, let's seene of it this way. Let's
(01:00:16):
say you have a gigantic plane and you can do
two things with the plane. You can make it so
that it never flies, or you can start it and
you can get it up in the air. Once it's
in the air, the controls don't work. You don't know
what's going to happen. It goes where it wants, it crashes,
(01:00:39):
it can drop a bomb who knows, it hits another
plane who knows. And that may be one of the
primary reasons that we don't see more weather modification happening
now because the technology is the basis of it is
pretty easy to understand, so other governments can do it.
There are a couple of international agreements where people say, oh, okay,
(01:01:00):
we're not gonna use the weather as a weapon.
Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
But not an exact science though. Right, it's kind of
rolling the dice, like there's a lot of factors in play,
like you're, you're, you're, you're making the initial you know, shot,
but after that it's out of your hand. It's in
in God's hands.
Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
As they say, yeah, you can't, uh, you have no control, right,
And this this is uh, this is just one example
of a conspiracy theory based in science that turned out
to be absolutely true. At this point, we are scratching
the surface. We hope while you're listening you have taken
note of other things that were once portrayed as conspiracy
(01:01:37):
theories that turned out to be absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
If that is the.
Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Case, we'd like to hear from you. What what what
events or phenomena have you found to be at least
partially true. It doesn't have to be all the way true,
because as we know, rumors accrete, they grow exponentially but
have you found anything that people thought was other utter
hogwash that had a pearl amid the amid the swine
(01:02:05):
of deception or misinformation? And also also one thing, what
do you guys think about doing some thank yous at
the end credits at the end. Sure well, First, thank
you very much Paul, Mission Critical set for this episode,
big big Chrit. Yes, no, thanks Paul, Thanks Paul, Thanks
(01:02:26):
so much to super producer Paul. Thank you very much
to our the person who does our write ups for
our podcast, Diana Brown. Every time we have a podcast
come out, you can find on how stuff works a
quick summation of what's happening. You know. If you want
to share it around with your friends, please do so.
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Thanks to Sarah Glyme who takes care of a lot
of that work for us too, working with them.
Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Yeah, and especially most importantly, thank you to you, and
thank you to the folks who have joined Here's where
it gets crazy in mass We were talking about this
earlier today.
Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
They have been just rolling in. Yeah, little doggies like
little badgers, but good badgers, badgers of kindness and friendship.
Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Yeah, we appreciate you hanging out with us over there.
We will be on there periodically to discuss things, post things.
We'll be looking at your posts for sure, so join us.
Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
Tell your friends keep your nose cleaner. We'll ban you.
Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Yes, we might just hate speech. Yeah, that's the big thing.
Just don't be a chirk. Let's discuss things. Just don't
be a jerk.
Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Where where can people find us? On the Internet.
Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
You can find us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
We are conspiracy Stuff on Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram,
we are a conspiracy stuff show. You can go to
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com and
check out every podcast we've ever done, some videos, some
other things. You can call us and that's the end
of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
questions about this episode, you can get into contact with
(01:03:56):
us in a number of different ways. One of the
best is to give us a call. Our number is
one eight three three st d WYTK. If you don't
want to do that, you can send us a good
old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio
app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Oh this one, you guys, Matt Nole fellow conspiracy realists.
Every so often some of the craziest conspiracy theories do
turn out to be true. Not all of them, and
maybe not most of them, but some of them, some
of them, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Some of them are in this episode.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Indeed, we always talk about how the concept of a
conspiracy theory is like this thought terminating cliche, designed to,
you know, have whatever topic gets attached to be viewed
with skepticism. But oftentimes they're worthy of a little bit
more digging, and sometimes when you dig deep enough, you
find that grain of truth.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
I can't remember which ones exactly are in here, but
I can't wait to re listen and find out.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, we're right there with you.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Name is Norman.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
They call me Ben. You are you, and you are
here that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
As always, we are accompanied by our super producer, Paul Decant,
who we nod to with great gratitude as always, thanks
for saving the show.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Paul. You drop the mission control.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
I feel like, you know, if you want to keep it,
you can call them that.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's a seasonal beast. You bring it out, you know,
around the holidays.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
We can just call him mission critical.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Here you go.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
His names are Legion.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Paul, Big crit, Decade, Paul, show saver, decade, show stopper.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Even it's ok if you wanted to stop it.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
That's true, Paul. What what we'll do is we'll ask
the listeners to submit some nicknames. If you're okay with.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That, that's great, okay, and then we'll put up a
poll on here's where it gets crazy, the Facebook group
and have people vote on their favorite ones.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, like Matt like you and I did with Agent
Scully or Alex Bones.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah that's true almost Alex Bones.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
Almost Alex Bones. Everything that we just said at the
top of the show, folks, turns out to be true,
although they may sound like rumors. We can substantiate all
of those things. Speaking of fantastic segues, that's what this
episode is about.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
Some segue jitsu right there.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Man, it was matrix level. I'll admit not my best work.
That's true, but this is an important episode and it's
a little bit of a collection, a little bit of
a mixtape. In the first part of what we are
aiming to make a continuing series conspiracies that turned out
(02:52):
to be true. This first part will focus on some
of the biggest government oriented conspiracy theories, that genre of
conspiracy theory, and these will be stories that for years
or decades were dismissed as absolute tomfoolery, tinfoil hat country,
but later it turned out to be partially or in
several cases, entirely true. So while we're focusing on some
(03:18):
government conspiracies in this episode, we'd like as you listen along,
to take stock of the things that you have read
personally and let us know through the various means of
contacting us about conspiracies that you found to be absolutely true.
They don't have to be government oriented, just anything that
(03:38):
was depicted as utter hogwash and later turned out to
be absolutely factual.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And yeah, when we say factual, we mean there are
some type of documents to back it up, there's some
type of acceptance in whatever field or community this play,
this thing took place.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
What they call in theaw enforcement world, an eyeball witness.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I'm sure, an eyeball witness or corroborating evidence of some
sort of that yes, this was true.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Or an eyewit Yeah we didn't. We hear that in
an earlier episode. Some I refer to people as eyewits.
That's the portmanteau for it.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I'm all about brevity, yeah, the soul of wit or
just you know wit. There you go, fa, No, that's great.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
No.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
So to do this episode justice, we have to explore
a little bit about how conspiracy theories are depicted in
your neck of the global woods today. So, in many ways,
the average English speaking person is taught a very particular
interpretation of the phrase conspiracy theory, and it's a It's
(04:43):
an interpretation that is at best disingenuous and at wors
purposely misleading. The idea of a conspiracy theory is a
term is often conflated with the idea of deception or
delusion or a This goes back to the concept of
what a certain psychologists call a thought terminating cliche a buzzword. Right,
(05:08):
So we see buzzwords in so much of mass media.
If you want to find the most succinct way to
encapsulate a thought of phenomenon or a group, you try
to distill it into a single word. That's why people
who think there was more to the story about the
nine to eleven attacks became called truthers. You could just
(05:29):
say truthers, and that means whatever you think it means.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And the people that believe President Barack Obama was not
of this country originally were called birthers exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, that's a great example. And these examples are not
just limited to the realm of conspiracy theory. You hear
it refer to in so many different ways. Hipsters. What's
a hipster, right, It's like.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
A flannel were in American spirits? Can what is it?
What are the shoes they wear? That's a hippie? Hipsters
wear like like Tom's Tom's Tom's wearing asymmetrical haircut, have
in just the mustache, having just the mustache.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
I feel like you're describing me. So I really appreciate this.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Now you're what they call King of the mods.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
It's good to be king, though, so a thought terminating cliche.
The reason this can be dangerous is because in that
effort to succinctly describe something. A lot of important stuff
gets left out of the conversation. We have discussed in
the past, how calling uh the idea that the UK
is run by reptilian aliens who eat souls, calling that
(06:49):
a conspiracy theory, and calling the fact that HSBC laundered
money for drug cartels for years a conspiracy theory makes
them sound like they're equal when they're clearly not. Because
one of those things actually happened, it is true.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
Well, it's a tool to smear people whose opinions you
do not agree with or are counter to your agenda. Right,
you label them conspiracy theorists, you label you, you equate
those two things that you just said, or things like that,
and then people do the thing that everyone does where
you kind of distill everything down and look at that
one word, and that's my narrative.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And we've discussed before that it was designed that way.
At least, conspiracy theory as a buzzword was designed that
way after the jfk assassination for any alternate ideas as
to what occurred.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
And by gum, we're taking it back.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Yeah, it's often used to the term conspiracy theory is
often used to dismiss a claim without having to investigates
merit its authenticity, or importantly, it's lack thereof. This bias
is something that has crept out of the realm of
mass media and intruded academic literature as well. For example,
you can find easily find multiple studies constructed with the
(08:00):
purpose of discovering or manufacturing a link between mental illness
and what the study makers call conspiracy theory, and the
difficulty here hinges on definition. What makes one thing a
conspiracy theory the way we would understand it in mass
discourse and the other or another an out and out
actual case of people conspiring in secret to do something sketchy.
(08:23):
The difference is what's often referred to as a conspiracy
theory and what exists as a legitimate conspiracy often takes
a back seat to the exploration of the psychological processes
involved as individuals and groups compare, analyze, and prioritize certain
forms of evidence. So we have two examples of genres
(08:46):
of conspiracies versus genres of conspiracy theory. So let's take
one of the most popular out there conspiracy theories around now,
just to look at it real quick. That is the
flat Earth meme. Otherwise known as earthers, otherwise known as earthers.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yes, flat earthers, but i'd like to, you know, in
the in the in the spirit of brevity, let's call
them earthers.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Sure that's better than flatters. Yeah, that's that's confusing me
a lot of things.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, and you know, Mission Critical p Decand actually has
a friend who was creating a documentary right now all
about flatter You.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Talked about it, maybe having them appre on the show.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Well, we're going to look into it. And much like uh,
you know, the minds of the flatters and the earthers. Uh,
Paul Paul Decan is currently absent. So wait a minute,
that was a while to get.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
That was worth it. So so this idea, this flat
earth idea, it fits the general mass media definition of
a conspiracy theory easily just proven, easily dismissed. There are
mountains of evidence, or should we say, vast horizons, indicating
the Earth, as well as all of the rest of
the planets our species has been able to observe, are
(10:04):
in fact spherical. This evidence includes astronomical observation. This evidence
also includes on the ground, easily reproducible experiments that you
can do right now in the comfort of your own home.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
It sounds like disinformation to me.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Ben, yeah, right, because the shadow on the moon is
a total, total, high production value David Blaine esque.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Oh but dude, but there was like proof for this,
disproof of this before we even have the technology that
we have today. I mean, guys like Galileo observed through
very simple, comparatively telescopes and could observe celestial bodies that
indicated this was not the case.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Right, Yeah, And ancient civilizations also knew the Earth was round,
and you could do it today even with the technology
that they would have had at that time. You can
stick a stick in the ground and watch the shadow
move as time passes with a little bit of simple
math actually which you know what, don't even bother with
(11:08):
the math. Just get another stick. Cool, We matrix dodged
that one. All you have to do is get two
sticks and then stick them some distance apart and realize
that if the Earth were flat, then two sticks in
different locations would produce the same shadow. They don't. They
never have, they never will. It just doesn't happen because
(11:30):
the Earth is not flat.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It sounds like hearsay to me.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
I don't know that you're being such a pill today.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
You guys know, NASA is controlled just the way the sticks,
all the sticks are working together to try and you know, fool, you.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
Don't believe big stick.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah. My theory is that people that really espouse this belief,
it's just like a super super hipster throwback thing that
they're doing. It's like, I want to like live my
life like I'm a chromagnet or.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Something ironic perhaps in some way. And then there is
a group I think we cover this in a previous
episode on Flat Earth. There is a group that is
arguing it entirely to be pedantic, and their real argument
is that one can argue anything effectively if you use
the correct rules of rhetoric.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
People on the internet being pedantic imagine, that's insane.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
It would be the coolest conspiracy ever though, if that
would be living under the guys.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
But I asked this question before you guys, to what
end right right? Did this accomplish too? For whom who
is getting rich off of this? How is this keeping
us in the dark in some way that is actually
valuable to literally anyone?
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yeah, so hold on a second, because we get to that.
So additionally, the rules of our observable universe seem to
be exceedingly consistent, and all the proof we have there
is no evidence that any observable planet has been, is,
or will be quote unquote flat, whatever the hell that
is supposed to mean. This is a great example for
those of us in the crowd who consider ourselves be
hardcore skeptics. There's nothing that can distion proved the notion
(13:00):
of a spherical Earth, and to combat this dearth of
proof for the idea that Earth is not in fact spherical,
adherents of this belief system, like the ones who really
really hook line and sync or went for it, they're
forced to constantly widen the net of perceived collusion. So
there's a worldview where in confirmation bias is king. That
(13:22):
means that not only is the bulk of scientific consensus
from ancient times to twenty eighteen been a huge consistent
snow job, but millions of people across the span of
civilization have somehow consistently cooperated in covering up the truth.
For as you alluded to earlier, nol one reason or another.
But that's the final red flag here. Differing camps of
(13:46):
flat Earth, people who really believe in this, people who
really advocate for this belief system still can't agree on
exactly why this would happen.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
Which is funny because to me, the conspiracy theories, the
weird ones, usually flow from some dis like disproportionate thing
that people perceive as being wrong, or like they're looking
for a boogeyman to explain a phenomenon, or like a
inequality of some kind. So there's that that is absent
here entirely. So what's the what's the reasoning for like
(14:17):
seeking out this h clearly disprovable way of thinking.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Well, the problem is that most of the academic literature
doesn't center on those concepts themselves. They center on the
psychological processes of the believers. And that's that's missing the mark.
It's interesting, but it's it's treating symptoms more so, I
would argue, And we have to remember this example, Okay,
easily disproven. That's what mass media means when they say
(14:43):
conspiracy theory. This example will come into play later. But
let's take another more more complicated example for comparison, like
secret government programs.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
We're familiar with those, right, how familiar? Well, I mean
they occur all the time at least throughout history and
our system of allowing documentation to be put out into
the public domain after a certain amount of time. It
just shows us that there have been rolling secret government
projects and programs and experiments and research throughout time and
(15:18):
they're still going. We just we are within that time
bubble before any of this stuff can become public.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
It's think it's declassified. We find out the flavor of
the types of secret programs there are. But I just
feel like now it's worse than it ever was. Whatever's
going on now is super dark and super weird.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
But here's the thing. There are claims, unsubstantiated claims of
even crazier stuff that we don't have documentation for, and
that has also existed in time memoriam.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Right, yeah, yeah, we've got This is a genre of
conspiracy theory, and like you said, Matt, the way it
typically happens is that there will be outrageous allegations of
the legal conduct some and it will say, where's the proof,
show me the money. There's a lack of hard evidence.
That's either due to the classification of documents proving that stuff,
(16:07):
or to be fair, it could also be due to
the fact that people who say these things are lying
or diluted, or although I hesitate to use the word,
maybe let's not say crazy, maybe let's say extremely misinformed.
So what happens when this stuff comes true? When, as
(16:29):
we pointed out, it is declassified, we see a hard
reset on the popular narrative. When leaked or declassified stuff
proves the people who sounded crazy we're telling the truth
the entire time.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Then everybody says, oh, well, yeah, I mean, obviously we
knew that. We just you know whatever.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Everybody knows that.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And that's my favorite part, that sudden backpedal. I'm not surprised.
I knew that was true.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
It's not very helpful.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
No, no, it's it's a weird cousin to one of
the most unhelpful things you can say in any conversation.
I told you so, that was it.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
Talked about this the other day. Has anyone ever she said,
your dad said that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not
to throw you down into the bus. But that's the worst.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
It's just not a it's it's not an addition to
a conversation.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
And it's probably not even true. I'm like, when when
did you tell me so. How did that conversation go.
I'm sorry, I'm getting up in arms of it's true.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
The same people say I told you so. It's like,
oh good, I'm glad you're into your earlier statements.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
What do you want to talk about now?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Right?
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Right?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
So we have to make an important note here too.
Recent technological breakthroughs, primarily in the field of communication, have
drastically increased the pace at which these types of conspiracies
can be confirmed or debunked. And that goes to what
you were saying, Matt, about the bubble. The bubble is
changing because the average person, if if the five of
(17:59):
us us here in the studio and you listening, we're
alive in the nineteen sixties, we might have one or
two things absolutely confirmed in this genre of secret government programs,
and we could easily go to our deathbeds not knowing
about the other stuff, just wondering if that weird thing
that hippie told us and hate Ashbury was true.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
You met him too, Yeah, he told me a bunch
of stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Man, he's really he's on one.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
He had a lot to say.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
And in the twenty first century, though, where we live today,
it's increasingly easy for a single individual, one person to
play a tremendously important role in history. Someone like an
Edward Snowden or Louise Elizondo can relay classified information of
their own accord and share it out with the world
(18:45):
before any of the old orthodox suppression methods can be deployed.
And that means, if we want to wax a little
bit poetic about it, that all of us now have
our hands on the lids of innumerable Pandora's jars, and
each one of those cannot be closed once it's open.
Now it just now. We used to have a situation
(19:05):
where there would be maybe fifty five hundred people that
knew a secret, right and several of them die. One
of them maybe tries to tell someone and they commit suicide,
two shots to the back of their head, they fall
off a building, they take a permanent vacation in Mexico.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
Cini tablet under the tongue.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Cinai tablet under the tongue. But now, if we have
fifty five hundred people have a secret, any one of
them could just leak it easily and it will probably
ruin their life. But there's no way to get that
information back and Over the past few years, we've often
discovered in the course of this show that there is
(19:45):
a grain of truth behind some of the strangest sounding
fringe theories. In some cases, we found these theories to
be more or less absolutely true, such as mk ultra.
That's I mean, I don't even think we should spend
time on that one today.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Yeah, you don't have to approve or disprove anything. It's
just out there.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
It happened. It happened. We paid for the government to
give people LSD. But the weirdest thing about this is
the rabbit hole continues. It's like looking into a fractal
We keep finding more stuff, and we'd like to tell
you about some of it. After a word from our sponsors.
(20:30):
Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
So we're gonna go through and kind of do a
round up, go down a list in a way of
a couple of these government conspiracies that we found. Remember
we're in the genre of government here, we're not branching
out into everything. We'll do that in a later date.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
We'll have ourselves little conspiracy rodeo.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yes, that's that's right, it's conspiracy round up. I've been
watching a lot of toy story too lately with the sun.
Oh my gosh. Okay, the old problem specter is an
important character in the second of that.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
I haven't watched it skipped right to three.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Oh man, I'm not kidding.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
I haven't seen seen.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
I haven't I saw the first one.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
You see too.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Now Pau hasn't seen too either, Really conversation, isn't that funny?
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Cool?
Speaker 3 (21:20):
Guys all secret ghost? Paul said he's seen one in three,
but not too so hush your mouth, Frederick, But it's
too late.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You unscrewed the jar. Everyone knows about the prospect.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Badgers are everywhere.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
The badgers are out of the bag.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
But but yeah, okay, so we're gonna we're gonna intentionally
skip some of the things we covered in depth on
previous episodes. As you were saying, Matt, this is about
the government one of the maybe we maybe we look
at this in terms of what it was originally portrayed
as and what was actually true about it.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
That's good.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
So okay, So what's our first one.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Our first one has to do well, let's let's say
the conspiracy theory. If you were walking up on the
street and somebody grabbed you by the shirt and said, hey,
the government is spying on us right now.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
You met that guy too. You met that guy, I
met him. Yeah. Originally this was seen as the classic
conspiratorial belief, someone who had maybe read nineteen eighty four
a few times too many and became paranoid, and they
became assured that the government was watching them. This is
a complicated thing because paranoia is inherently narcissistic. Paranoia inherently
(22:31):
comes from the axiom that I, the person being observed,
am somehow so important that eyes from afar, people in
high places are obsessed with me and what I'm doing.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
It sounds like you've telled a little bit of that before, Ben,
I know I have well a little narcissism slash paranoia. Yeah.
Oh yeah, see Paul too. I can can feel it. No,
I'm not okay, Well I don't.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Just for the I'd like to go on record and
say I don't like the way that you're looking at
both of us and nodding.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
But with a smile, like a genuine heavy smile while
we're talking about something so dark.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
So that's the thing, though, This mental illness is a
serious issue, and we don't mean to deride at all
anyone who is suffering from it. But this belief, this
paranoid belief the government is watching my every move used
to dovetail very well with some symptoms of mental illness,
and it made that person ran up to you on
(23:33):
the street seem like a crackpot and easily dismissed until
that is.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Yeah, the news came out like the actual news. Oh yeah, yeah,
and they said, hey, everybody, so the government is spying
on all of us.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
That was a big indication for a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Was yeah, it really was. And this is around the
time specifically, well, I mean there have been smaller stories
about things like Echelon and some of the other projects
around the around the countries in the world where they
discuss how, yes, there are massive surveillance programs going on. Sure,
but when you know Edward Snowden came forth and said, guys,
(24:19):
it's bigger than that. It's a lot more than that,
and it's everybody.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
Know what that hippie hyde Ashbury said, I told you so.
Oh yeah, yeah, he's got like shut up, man, that's
not helpful.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
He's got some stuff to work on with himself, I.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Think, And well that's not the only thing.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah. Yeah, So this came out in increments. First, the
news broke that yes, the US government was indeed spying
on people, but only certain high value targets. Their spying
on Leonard Peltier in the American Indian movement, right, who
they considered a domestic terrorist. Their spying on Martin Luther King,
whom they consider a destabilizing factor, John Lennon, Their spying
(24:54):
on John Lennon because of what, because of his perceived
left wing beliefs.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, and then with coin pro counterintelligence program, they're going
through and actually doing this all like consistently a lot.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
And then the next big milestone is the news breaks
about monitoring international communication, so only certain high value possibly
destabilizing domestic individuals or only international you know, phone calls
and stuff, because we want to stop terrorism. And those
existed as rumors, but they became substantiated by the acknowledgment
(25:27):
of stuff like Echelon or five Eyes, where a lot
of where five anglosphere countries agreed to pass the buck
and find loopholes in their own surveillance laws.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Right, So for the average American citizen, it's okay, Well,
if I travel to another country, maybe I'm being looked at.
Maybe if I'm a really important person in a movement somewhere,
I'm being looked at.
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Maybe if I attended the same you know, Democratic Socialist
Party of America meeting with a celebrity or a musician,
I might be on a list. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Maybe maybe if I went to Kent State University for
any reason whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
But otherwise, normal Jane or John dosif they don't have
any they don't have any appeal, why would the FEDS
go to the massive trouble of putting them under a microscope.
It turns out, actually, yes, uh, they do have appeal,
And yes we did attract the attention. And yes, uncle
(26:23):
Sam was and is monitoring you. The same technological advances
that allow people to leak classified information very easily also
allow domestic surveillance to extend widely without exception. I mean, okay,
virtually without exception. These surveillance techniques depend on partnerships with
private businesses telecoms you know, AT and T, Verizon comcasts,
(26:48):
and social media platforms Instagram, Facebook.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
What are the same company?
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Same company? Yeah, there we go. I needed a different one, Thank.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
You, Tumblr, tumbl Tumbsnapchat.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Is legislation that was pushed through in the wake of
public unease over terrorism that allowed, for the first time
in human history, the first time in human history allowed
the majority of a population to be intimately traced should
they catch the attention of the US government right now
when don't be too paranoid. We don't want to be
(27:21):
too alarmist right about this, but right now, if you
somehow rose to the level where you got personal attention
from the intelligence agencies in the US in a very
short amount of time, they could know more about you
than your loved ones know about you, which is a spooky,
spooky thing. And it doesn't matter whether or not you
(27:42):
have secrets.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, that's well. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're
a liar.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
I'm just an enigma dog. Okay, I'm not a liar.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
I was looking at keep it just keep it close
to the vest man. So that's okay. So that's one.
That's one thing that turned out to be absolutely true.
And this is happening as we record this episode. Not
for nothing have we made that running joke where we well,
I guess it's time to do it again, where we
(28:14):
apologize to that poor hypothetical Nessay, intern, who has to
listen to this show? I hope it's going all right, man,
haven't heard from you in a while.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
I think he's listening to the show or monitoring our
personal phone calls.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
He might be doing both. I mean, it's tough to
be an intern. He probably has like a transcript on
one thing and he's listening to the audio one.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
On one side, yea yeah, and then another on the
other and wait, a multitask. Do we have a name
for him?
Speaker 1 (28:40):
We used to call him Steve, but interns turnover so quickly.
I wonder if it's a new guy now.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
Or he's a pretty common name, though it could be
a different guy named Steve at this point.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah, maybe he has a maybe as a government assigned name,
and it's just like Johnny Blank.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
He's just a Russian bot now, maybe it is.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
And can we call our intern Ricky that way? It
could be.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
Yeah, okay, Ricky. Well, we hope school is going well
for you and school school. Stick with it, Van, I
hope your summer is going all right. Feel free to
write to us conspiracy HowStuffWorks dot Com. On that note,
there's another subgenre of what we're often called conspiracy theories
that turned out to be absolutely and in this case,
(29:27):
horrifically true. In the years of World War Two leading
up to it and during the war, the American public
was sold this fantastic, idealistic, shining image of what the
US was and what the US would become. The United States. Okay,
everybody on, here's where it gets crazy. I'm trying to
hit the t the US. Oh man, Yeah, it's gonna
(29:54):
it's the battle has been fought. Yeah, I accept that.
I think it's hilarious. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Don't don't don't justify these monsters.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
It Wasn't it better though, when it was YouTube commenters
with just awful screen names saying it's because it made
it feel yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, I loved it because there would be very salient points.
There would be people writing four paragraph essays that had fantastic,
fantastic perspectives, and then their names would be like surfer
Boy booty Time twelve. Yeah, I'm like, wow, that's a
great point. Surfer Boy booty time.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
There it is Traveler twelve.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Yeah, like that. That should be like a raunchy comedy.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
It's one heck of a weird pickup line. But so
the the US and the Allies were portrayed as inarguably
the good guys, with a nation united behind them. Every
red blooded Jane and John Doseph was doing their part,
whether you're at home or you're on the front, to
prevent the dastardly Axis powers from sowing chaos and atrocity
(31:01):
across Europe, North Africa, Asia, and possibly beyond. And there
was propaganda that came out, propaganda plenty that portrayed the
Axis as insanely violent powers, raping, pillaging, murdering, and even
experimenting on innocent people in their possession. Of course, the
weird thing about the propaganda was the racist stuff was
(31:23):
completely inaccurate, obviously, but the propaganda about the violence was
largely accurate in a very disturbing way. And by implication,
what this propaganda did was say that the US and
the Allies were the polar opposite of Axis forces, fighting
for the safety and dignity of these strangers oceans away,
(31:45):
just because we're good people, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:47):
That decent, you know, we're fighting for justice for all.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Now, there were a few outliers, anti war activists, or
anyone who had the goal to suggest that the US
was not as clean and un besmirched as it would
have its citizens believe. They were at best dismissed. They
were most often accused of being spies or traders, and
in some occasions they were completely blackballed from their own industries,
(32:13):
or they were persecuted by the government up to and
including criminal charges and jail time.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Or you know, they were put into prison camps like
most of the Japanese American citizens.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
Right, or they were put into asylums because they were crazy.
How could you say this stuff about Uncle Sam?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Hey? Ugh, isn't he like a fictional character?
Speaker 1 (32:36):
He is based on a real person?
Speaker 3 (32:37):
Is right?
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (32:39):
An episode on that maybe yet I don't know if.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
But what what actually happened? Though?
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Well? Actually turns out that the US was conducting illegal
experiments on its own citizens, yes, as well as foreign populations.
For decades. During World War Two and the years following,
the government paid particularly close attention to the effects of
radiation on human beings. I wonder why, Ben, Yeah, I
(33:07):
wonder why looking to see how things might pan out
in some sort of dystopian future.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Ding Ding give them that. As cigar passim in Omaha,
Steak used to win this round. It is absolutely true.
It's a good thing. They volunteered, right kidding. They had
no idea, They had no idea what was happening. They
were unsuspecting. Beginning roughly nineteen forty five, scientists working directly
for the US government conducted at least at least thirty
separate programs in which they knowingly and purposely exposed innocent
(33:38):
US citizens to life changing or in many cases, life
ending amounts of radiation. This is shortly after the discovery
of plutonium in the early nineteen forties. In one case,
they directly shot people up with plutonium just to see
what would happen.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Didn't give them like superpowers instantly.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
If pain is a superpower, then they were like they
they took eighteen people who had terminal illnesses and they said,
we were going to give you experimental treatments. We are
going to we may not be able to save your life,
and we cannot predict the side effects. Both of those
things were technically true. They said, but it may lengthen
(34:19):
your lifespan. And this gets really dirty, really quick.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Because that wasn't even sort of true. The lengthening of
the lifespan thing, that was just sort of like a hook.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Yeah yeah, and Deadpool, yeah exactly exactly. So what they
were doing, what they were actually doing, that is, was
they were hoping to take the information they gained, just
like you had said, and use it to plan for
scenarios where the US suffered a direct nuclear hit conditions.
(34:49):
And they also gave children and pregnant mothers food and
drink riddled with a radiation because they said, well, how
will there'll be pregnant women when the nukes hit? What
will happen. Let's sacrifice you know, a handful of actual
children now, with the rationale being that we're doing it
(35:11):
so we can save kids later.
Speaker 3 (35:13):
I remember that guy we talked about on the other show,
Ridiculous History had the poison squad who purposefully ate poison
contaminants and food. Yeah, that was volunteer Harvey. Yeah, Harvey.
But this is way more nefarious and terrifying.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
It comes from the same mindset though, you know. So
here's the other part. They took active soldiers that they
would later send the war, and they marched them over
radioactive dirt at active test sites. And then when these
non consenting patients died with no knowledge that they were dying,
of radiation poisoning. The US government would go back in
(35:51):
secret and rob their graves to study their remains, including infants.
So we're talking digging up children, cutting off limbs, seeing
what happens.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Well, who was doing the digging? Was it just low
level like office cross Well?
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Okay, so there one thing we know about for sure
is this thing called Project Sunshine.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
That sounds like fun.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah, it's nice, doesn't It sounds wonderful. I think it
has more to do with the brightness of an atomic
blast than anything else.
Speaker 3 (36:22):
Or the fact that sunshine gives you cancer.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah, that's very true. So in this it was the
United States Atomic Energy Commission along with the thing that
would eventually become the RAND Corporation, working together. So it
was somebody employed by them, either direct employees or contract workers.
And what they would do this is, let's say, what
they wanted to do. They wanted to study the effects
(36:45):
of strontium ninety, which was the most dangerous isotope radioactive
isotope that exists as nuclear fallout. And they knew this
from a previous project. And in this case they wanted
to stuff especially young human flesh, and the effects of
strontium ninety. So, as Ben was saying, like looking at
(37:08):
people who they had already kind of dosed with or
experimented with and then dug up their bodies. In this case,
they're trying to find recently deceased bodies, specifically infants, young children,
and that kind of thing, get tissue samples, and then
test those samples. So they would do everything from go
to a morgue and take an arm of a you know,
(37:30):
a child that had recently deceased without asking their family members,
without asking anyone if they could use it, and then
testing it and then disposing of it later. And they
there were at least fifteen hundred test subjects in Project
Sunshine geese or just deceased victims became or pieces of them.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, and you would say many, most, if not all,
of those came from the act of grave robbing.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
It's not a lot of It wasn't grave robbing, it
was it was it.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Was sneaking samples from more glifting more glift.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, there is a there's a place you can go
just really quickly if you want to check this out
on rand dot org. Actually you can find it and
it is Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons Project Sunshine in
its dated August sixth, nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Oh go, I know I figured out the worst phrase
for this, morg mooching. Oh yeah, that's a rough one.
On a side note, with this, we find an interesting
biographical tale here. It is the tale of Albert Stevens.
Albert Stevens was someone who fell into the web of
(38:41):
illegal government radiation experiments in the US in nineteen forty five.
He was a fifty eight year old house painter. He
had been told that he was suffering from terminal cancer
with only months to live. The truth is that he
was suffering from a severe gastric but he had doctors
(39:02):
tell him it was cancer. So he was admitted to
the University of California San Francisco Medical Center to treat
the cancer that he did not have to get cough
cough treatment.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Cough cough, what's cough cough treatment?
Speaker 1 (39:19):
Cough cough treatment? Is me really pointing out that they
were lying.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
To Oh I see how I got.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
You got it? So this guy, this poor guy, Albert, he,
as he says, given a few months to live. On
May tenth of that year, scientists working for Uncle Sam,
pretending to treat the cancer that he did not have
secretly shot him up with the single largest amount of
plutonium a human being has ever received to the modern
(39:48):
day is just under one microgram.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
You know.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
The sample had two different isotopes of plutonium, was a cocktail.
One of the isotopes was weekly radioactive, so still dangerous,
but not an immediate death sentence. It had a half
life of twenty four one hundred years. Yeah, and then
the other highly radioactive isotope had a half life of
about eighty seven a little less than eighty eight years. He
(40:13):
received free medical and additional testing for the rest of
his life from the same group that riddled his body
with radiation, and his family thought this experimental cancer treatment
was working because he didn't have cancer and he lived
more than a few months. In fact, he lived twenty
one years suffering the effects of this cartoonish amount of
(40:37):
plutonium that stayed in his system, in his bones, in
his skin, in his organs. His spine was degrading at
a horrific rate. His eyes were fighting a losing battle
with cataracts. And he was still there with the doctors
who were cough cough treating kauf cough him and they
(41:00):
conducted operations while he was alive to remove parts of
his organs to see what was happening to them, took
his spleen, parts of his liver, as pancreas, his lymph nodes.
His family the whole time is saying, Wow, it's amazing
that you have survived cancer. Thank you for this experimental treatment.
(41:20):
He died twenty one years later on January ninth, nineteen
sixty six, of a heart attack. So during those twenty
one years he was alive, he received more radiation than
any other living human being, sixty times the government's maximum
safe lifetime exposure threshold, which turns out is a real thing. Yeah,
(41:43):
and now it feels like a ticking clock every time
you have to go through the airport's security line or
use a microwave, wow, or get an X ray.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah. So it's a ton of radiation that this gentleman
had pumped into his body. And here's the thing. We've
been talking about all these radiation experiments, but we're about
to get into something that is a very different kind
of horror, and we're going to get into that. After
a quick word from our sponsoro.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
We're back. We hope you had an enjoyable break we did. Yeah,
we had to take a second too. We had to
take a second to reset because this is the darkest
part of today's episode, Like you know the scene in
Willy Wonka where everything gets very spooky and terrifying and
disturbing as the as the boat goes through the tunnel.
(42:43):
This is the dark tunnel of the show and it's
unfortunately a serious thing. There was for a long time
conspiracy theory roundly dismissed throughout the United Kingdom in Europe
as a whole, and for decades, people like David Ike,
musicians like Johnny Rotten, and various former members of Britain's
(43:05):
entertainment industry or even its government alluded to this conspiracy
and they were ignored. They were roundly ignored. Depending on
their social standing, they were simply dismissed or they were ridiculed.
And the conspiracy was this that there was an active,
ongoing child abuse network in the UK, and furthermore that
(43:29):
members of the entertainment industry and the government, the people
with their hands at the levers of power, were colluding
to cover this up. Not to cover it up and
stop it, but to stop people from reporting it as
it continued.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Yeah, So.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
These people who alluded to this, many of them were
convinced that there was this child abuse network and that
it was being actively covered up. Some of them, like
David Ike, were dismissed as crack or Johnny Rotten was
dismissed sometimes as their version of an Internet troll, just
intentionally poking the bear, attempting to be edgy through making
(44:10):
controversial statements.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
From the pistols. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Yeah. There were a couple of interviews where he would
hint at knowing people high up in the entertainment industry.
Speaker 3 (44:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, John Leiden, it's his name, yes, yes,
when you and you originally said Johnny Rotten, I thought
maybe this was like a screen name or something. They
didn't realize it was actual the Johnny Rotten. I didn't
know this part of his story. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
And the same dismissal went for people who alleged their
careers have been threatened not just in the entertainment industry,
but in law enforcement as well when they attempted to
blow the whistle on what they saw as an intergenerational
cycle of crime. The people named as criminals and frankly
monsters in this situation included numerous MP's government officials, aristocrats,
(44:59):
perhaps most notoriously the one that we know about in
the US, the very creepy children's entertainer and DJ, the
late Jimmy Seville.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Ye like this story just to point out here, members
of Parliament is MPs just in case. Oh yeah, yeah,
I don't know why that just came to mind.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
That's a good point.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
I was thinking military police in my head for a moment.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I was like, no, sull parliament funkadelic.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yes, members of parliament funkadelic who also make laws in
the audit Kingdom?
Speaker 3 (45:29):
Funk.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Is there a venn diagram here? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (45:33):
No.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
I think it's good to point that out because remember,
we thought everyone knew about Matt Libb.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
I know now I'm paranoid about everything.
Speaker 3 (45:40):
Oh you didn't get them at the book fair, you guys.
I mean, I don't know. We can't assume that everyone
had the same upbringing, right he did. We all kind
of grew up in this part of the neck of
the woods. So I don't even know if they have
scholastic book fairs everywhere else in the country.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I don't know everywhere really, Yep.
Speaker 3 (45:54):
It was a touring thing they had, like road cases
full of these books.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Yeah, what they didn't have everywhere is Jimmy Seville dancing
around on stage talking to children and being completely not creepy.
Speaker 1 (46:06):
Top of the pops right, and people was yes, So
here's what actually happened. Here's what gave truth to what
was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, sometimes so vehemently that
it ruined people's careers if they said they thought any
part of it was true. As several of these people
were universally men passed away after they were dead. This
(46:27):
is important, after they were beyond the bounds of mortal
judgment or a human legal system. The press was finally
allowed to admit. Oh yes, turns out that is true.
People like Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith were admitted and
proven to be serial abusers and quite prolific. Jimmy Seville
(46:50):
in particular, was not just sexually assaulting children, who was
also purposely targeting disabled children. And to add a a
little bit of uh morbid icing on the cake here,
there's pretty compelling evidence that he was sexually assaulting corpses
as well at one of the non at one of
(47:12):
the hospitals. Yeah, he was I think on the board
of Is.
Speaker 3 (47:15):
There any sense that he had like people colluding with
him on this or oh my god, yeah.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
If not, if not actively participating these things with him
the way.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
Yeah, if we're probably not going to go into a
ton of the details about these guys. I think that's
as detailed as we'll get as far as what they did.
But if you have the stomach for it and you
want to know what a real monster is, like, we
were discussing off Mike Cyril Smith and stuff that he
was known to be doing after the fact, so you
(47:51):
can look it up if you wish, but we're probably
not going to discuss it here, right.
Speaker 1 (47:55):
So we bring this up, and this is very heavy
stuff because it is important for this to be separated
from that dismissive realm of conspiracy theory. Yes, okay, David
Ike has said a lot of things that cannot be
proven true. It turns out you can call it a
you can call it that thing where maybe a broken
(48:16):
clock is right twice a day or something like that,
call it whatever you want. It turns out that this
cover up, at least partially is absolutely true. This is
conspiracy fact, at least in the broad strokes of the
claims and accusations these powerful men were literally getting away
with incredibly violent, reprehensible crimes with the knowing and continual
(48:39):
support of facets of the UK government.
Speaker 2 (48:41):
And you might ask why why, knowing, how did the
government know about that? You have to remember a lot
of this is either an MP of some a part
of the government, or somebody like Jimmy Seville who is
working directly for the government through the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
And hobnobbing with the aristocracy, receiving commendations of plenty. So
we do have to acknowledge that while the broad strokes
of this are true, the rumors went even further and
continued to do so, claiming that there might be some
sort of occult aspect to these crimes, claiming that absolutely
(49:19):
everyone was involved or is involved, and we don't know,
We don't have proof of that. But what we do
have proof of is that numerous files implicating living retired
members of the UK government, some of whom may have
passed away by now, have gone missing. And despite multiple
(49:40):
calls for investigation from the British public and some less
cynical government officials who are trying to do right by
their constituents. This series of events seems set to play
out like the notorious Detroux affair in Belgium. Yes, just
troublingly similar.
Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah and yeah wow, And we have to remember that
it's also so here even in the US, not so
much at a federal government level something like this occurring.
But in nineteen eighty eight, something similar did happen in Omaha, Nebraska,
where there was a community federal credit union that was
(50:16):
it was raided by federal agents and it was found
out that there was this guy named Lawrence E. Larry
King who was behind some serious things. There are allegations
of child sex trafficking and prostitution and rape and all
kinds of things with boys young boys that came out
(50:38):
as an actual occurrence here within the United States. These
kinds of things have happened over the years, and we
just have to keep in mind that it's not always
a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
Right, And we have to also be respectful of the
victims involved, whether those are the direct victims of the
crimes or the people who who were somehow punished for
bringing that stuff to light when it was occurring.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
Even the people that get slandered on the sidelines that
actually don't have anything to do with it, but they
get caught up in maybe the larger parts or the
fringes of the theory.
Speaker 1 (51:18):
Because this is the kind of red meat that sells
in tabloids, you know, so a news organization or a
tabloid entertainment outfit would be incentivized to report this kind
of stuff.
Speaker 3 (51:30):
Well, look at this stuff with the Vatican that's been
trickling out over the past few years. And we recently
had the Pope come out and apologize for standing behind
one of these archbishops that had like clearly covered up
a lot of these sex crimes by you know, priests,
and he, you know, our current are the current Pope
(51:53):
came out and said, hey, I made a mistake. That's
a big deal. And talk about a conspiracy. I mean,
like that's something that's been going back generations and that's
just been covered up and covered up. And now finally
in the wake of everything that's going on with all
these sex abuse criminals being brought to justice or at
least brought to light, it's this critical mass, you know.
(52:14):
And then also have this pope that's a little bit
more human than we're used to and will come out
and own up to this stuff. It's interesting to.
Speaker 1 (52:22):
See, it really is, and we can only hope, we
can only hope that substantive change comes out about this.
But for the case of the UK cover ups, the
scariest part of the story is how much we don't know.
We do not know if it stopped, We do not
know if it continues today. We do not know who's involved,
how they might be connected, or what people in the
(52:44):
UK can do to try and prevent children in their
country from falling into the clutches of this kind of thing.
If it's still happening. Again, it would be unfair for
us to say it's definitely still happening. We don't know
because all the reports about it keep disappearing. Yeah, but
we can't end on that note. Nope, I need to
(53:05):
don't go in a little long. But we can't end
completely on that note. Maybe we can talk about a
mad science conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.
Speaker 2 (53:13):
That sounds fun, but is it government related?
Speaker 1 (53:16):
It is?
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Okay, well, then let's do it.
Speaker 1 (53:18):
Okay, Okay, we'll do one more.
Speaker 3 (53:19):
Matt will allow it.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Thank you, Matt. Here's the here's the gist. It sounded
like something straight out of a dime store fiction novel.
A brilliant, super villainous organization uses the weather patterns of
Earth itself as a weapon. For years. Let's let's go
back to that man on the street situation that Matt
brought up earlier. For years, people would have situations where
(53:43):
someone runs up to them and it's like, man, you
know what they're doing up there in Alaska, up at
that harp. They're changing the weather man. Global warming is
made by Uncle Sam.
Speaker 2 (53:55):
Consistently, tornadoes come from harp and nast hurricanes.
Speaker 3 (54:01):
It's a twister.
Speaker 1 (54:04):
It turns out that.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Hey, wait, are they making hurricanes too? They're making hurricanes.
Speaker 1 (54:11):
So let's throw in a British guy so it doesn't
seem like.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
We're we're Southern.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
We can't do that.
Speaker 3 (54:22):
We can. That's exactly That's exactly why we can think.
Speaker 2 (54:25):
So I think, so, hey, did you hear them making
blizzards too?
Speaker 3 (54:28):
There we go sick of all these blizzards.
Speaker 2 (54:32):
Blizzards everywhere I'm up here in New York City.
Speaker 3 (54:35):
Were losing were like listeners, Hey have you heard of harp?
Speaker 1 (54:43):
Hey, they're changing the weather like a mad bastard.
Speaker 2 (54:46):
It's a delicious beverage.
Speaker 1 (54:47):
HARP So okay, so hopefully we didn't rag off this
off too much, but it was a very popular thing,
often dismissed as a conspiracy theory, if not HARP, specifically
the idea of weather modification. People were dismissed as total
tinfoil hat nut jobs, and the mass media would say, no,
one can control the weather, you guys, that's what's the next?
(55:11):
What's next? Do they think we're being literal when we
say it's raining cats and dogs? Back to you, Janis.
They were dismissed. But it turns out, actually, while there
is no solid proof that HARP ever was intentionally affecting
the weather, and a lot of HARP stuff is not
once you dig into the files, it's not near as
(55:32):
mysterious or sexy as you might think. It is still
pretty vague, admittedly, but if we bracket HARP out of there,
there's absolutely proof that multiple governments, not just the US,
also notably China, have experimented with weather and continue to
experiment with it both as an agricultural tool and as
(55:52):
a weapon. And guess which one our country used it for?
Just you know, yeah, I mean, you guys already know
what are.
Speaker 3 (56:00):
You talking about the rain making supervillain?
Speaker 1 (56:03):
Ye, well that's one, but the US government in Vietnam
used weather as a weapon to combat communist forces.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
Okay, cool, because we know another story about a guy
who tried to save San Diego from a drought and
claimed that he could manipulate the weather by shooting this
like special cocktail of chemicals up into the clouds that
he had devised, and supposedly it worked so well that
it flooded the reservoir and caused thousands of dollars of
damages and they ran the guy out of town on
a rail. Uh and he you know, didn't get paid
(56:35):
a yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yeah, he did the work. Though he did do the work.
Speaker 3 (56:39):
But then wasn't there a thing too where like this
was used. Cloud seating technology was used like as a
kind of a firework display at the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
Oh yeah, to prevent to prevent winter weather coming into
Moscow a couple of times Moscow and a couple other places. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (56:58):
For some reason, I thought I read that it was
like used as part of the like some sort of
like big showy display.
Speaker 1 (57:04):
That's interesting. I mean, the thing is whether modification technology,
specifically cloud seating, which is the most well known form
of this this technology, we still don't know exactly what
it is capable of. Just like all the mad scientists
from those previously mentioned dime store sci fi novels, we're
(57:26):
messing with things we don't understand. Maybe there is some
things man was not meant to do. Maybe we spend
so much time asking ourselves if we could do something
that we skip the part where we ask ourselves whether
we should do a thing.
Speaker 3 (57:40):
Just a quick aside, China did spend apparently thirty million
dollars to make it rain in advance of the opening ceremony.
Speaker 1 (57:48):
In two two thousand and eight.
Speaker 3 (57:49):
Right, that's right, yes, exactly, And that's that's the one
I had. Oh yeah, yeah, yah, I was misunderstanding it.
I knew had to do with the opening ceremonies. But
they were literally trying to control the weather so that
it would would rain earlier and not when they wanted
it to look nice and pretty.
Speaker 1 (58:02):
So we still have the rain, just change the schedule exactly.
Speaker 3 (58:05):
But it's controversial. And they used salt and mineral filled
bullets they shot in the sky, much like our rain
making super villain in San Diego.
Speaker 1 (58:12):
They used cannons specifically. Yeah, and they still China still
has a weather modification bureau. They're much more transparent about
it than the US ever was, so kudos to them.
They're also arguably largely using that as an agricultural technology.
We used it as a weapon, hoping to trigger mud slides,
(58:35):
disrupt trading, communication, and transit routes during the Vietnam War
conflicts in Southeast Asia right now as we're recording this.
Both of these countries can reproduce these effects today at
any given time. All they need is a place to
set up the sky guns, the weather guns, and then
(58:58):
they can let it roll. But the problem is this,
you might ask yourself, well, if they can do that,
why are we having so many reports of catastrophic climate
related events occurring. The thing is, both of these countries
can mess with the controls of the world's global weather
system to a small degree, but neither of them can
(59:21):
control the consequences of what happens. Because don't think of
the weather like a string that you can pull with
that leads to a cloud that makes rain. When you
pull the string, instead, it's a lot more like a web,
and you pull a piece of the web you affect
the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (59:38):
Yeah. We also can't control any of the large mechanisms
like the airflow around the Earth. We can't affect how
the northern leaves are going to be affected. We can't
do anything like that currently, at least, what we know
about is just adding moisture or taking it away essentially.
Speaker 1 (59:55):
Yeah, and we don't know how that affects things like
So with the case that Nol just mentioned earlier with
Charles Mallory Hatfield out in San Diego, the same thing happened.
We can create the effect, but we have no means
of controlling it. So imagine that you have this tremendously
power like Okay, let's seene of it this way. Let's
(01:00:16):
say you have a gigantic plane and you can do
two things with the plane. You can make it so
that it never flies, or you can start it and
you can get it up in the air. Once it's
in the air, the controls don't work. You don't know
what's going to happen. It goes where it wants, it crashes,
(01:00:39):
it can drop a bomb who knows, it hits another
plane who knows. And that may be one of the
primary reasons that we don't see more weather modification happening
now because the technology is the basis of it is
pretty easy to understand, so other governments can do it.
There are a couple of international agreements where people say, oh, okay,
(01:01:00):
we're not gonna use the weather as a weapon.
Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
But not an exact science though. Right, it's kind of
rolling the dice, like there's a lot of factors in play,
like you're, you're, you're, you're making the initial you know, shot,
but after that it's out of your hand. It's in
in God's hands.
Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
As they say, yeah, you can't, uh, you have no control, right,
And this this is uh, this is just one example
of a conspiracy theory based in science that turned out
to be absolutely true. At this point, we are scratching
the surface. We hope while you're listening you have taken
note of other things that were once portrayed as conspiracy
(01:01:37):
theories that turned out to be absolutely true.
Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
If that is the.
Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
Case, we'd like to hear from you. What what what
events or phenomena have you found to be at least
partially true. It doesn't have to be all the way true,
because as we know, rumors accrete, they grow exponentially but
have you found anything that people thought was other utter
hogwash that had a pearl amid the amid the swine
(01:02:05):
of deception or misinformation? And also also one thing, what
do you guys think about doing some thank yous at
the end credits at the end. Sure well, First, thank
you very much Paul, Mission Critical set for this episode,
big big Chrit. Yes, no, thanks Paul, Thanks Paul, Thanks
(01:02:26):
so much to super producer Paul. Thank you very much
to our the person who does our write ups for
our podcast, Diana Brown. Every time we have a podcast
come out, you can find on how stuff works a
quick summation of what's happening. You know. If you want
to share it around with your friends, please do so.
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Thanks to Sarah Glyme who takes care of a lot
of that work for us too, working with them.
Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Yeah, and especially most importantly, thank you to you, and
thank you to the folks who have joined Here's where
it gets crazy in mass We were talking about this
earlier today.
Speaker 3 (01:03:00):
They have been just rolling in. Yeah, little doggies like
little badgers, but good badgers, badgers of kindness and friendship.
Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Yeah, we appreciate you hanging out with us over there.
We will be on there periodically to discuss things, post things.
We'll be looking at your posts for sure, so join us.
Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
Tell your friends keep your nose cleaner. We'll ban you.
Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Yes, we might just hate speech. Yeah, that's the big thing.
Just don't be a chirk. Let's discuss things. Just don't
be a jerk.
Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
Where where can people find us? On the Internet.
Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
You can find us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
We are conspiracy Stuff on Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram,
we are a conspiracy stuff show. You can go to
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know dot com and
check out every podcast we've ever done, some videos, some
other things. You can call us and that's the end
of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or
questions about this episode, you can get into contact with
(01:03:56):
us in a number of different ways. One of the
best is to give us a call. Our number is
one eight three three st d WYTK. If you don't
want to do that, you can send us a good
old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:04:12):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio
app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.