September 29, 2021 • 57 mins
Area 51 factors into stories about everything from weather-control devices to aliens. Ben Bowlin joins the show to look at the mythology of Area 51.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
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 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and love all Things Tech. And we're making Wednesdays the
new Fridays, just like Loki did on Disney. Plus that
(00:26):
being said, we're going to be moving a classic episode
to today Wednesday, because the episode I am currently working
on is not just technical, it also has a lot
of historical elements to it, and it's involving a lot
of digging around in old articles and putting things together,
and I'm just running a little behind. So our classic
(00:46):
episode is moving up from Friday to Wednesday, and we're
going to do an episode called the Mythology of Area
fifty one. Area one, of course, being the most famous
secret facility in the world. It is a place that
is connected to all sorts of different legends, from aliens
to crazy military experiments and more. And so this episode
(01:08):
really goes in to explore that I hope you enjoy.
We are in fact going to be concluding our trilogy
of episodes about Area fifty one in parts one and two.
If you haven't listened to them, already. We really went
over the history of the facility and what actually goes
on there and covered everything from the reason why it
(01:29):
was built in the first place to the various spy
planes and different technologies that were tested at that facility.
This episode, we're looking at the crazy yes, sir, we
are looking at all of the rumors, conspiracy theories and uh,
(01:49):
let's just say unsupported anecdotes to be diplomatic. That's very diplomatic. Yeah,
so so quick rundown, just so that we're all on
the same page. Area fifty one, also known as Groom Lake,
is a facility. It's out in Nevada. It's near the
what Well. It's near the Nevada Test Site, where a
lot of nuclear tests were held, in fact, some during
(02:12):
the lifetime of Very fifty one. Uh. It is uh
run by the CIA and the Air Force. Lockheed is
essentially the main contractor that does work there. It's not
the only one. We've seen some other aircraft from different
companies tested at that facility as well. And the whole
purpose of it is to be remote from everywhere else
(02:34):
so that secret tests of top secret spy technology can
happen without anyone learning about it. Because, as we've said,
if you want to be an effective spy, part of
that means people can't be aware of the tools that
you have at your disposal, right Yeah, And which, as
we say, that's why it is in a Goldilocks zone
(02:54):
for its for its purpose, right Yeah. One of my
favorite points that you made in the previous episode, I
believe was the first installment, was that this was just
far enough away to be so inconvenient to get to
that people people wouldn't try. Yeah, it was. It's a
remote desert location on a dry lake bed, and so
(03:19):
it was close enough where you could get supplies from
places like Las Vegas, which is less than a hundred
miles away, but far enough away where you know your
your casual traveler is unlikely to stumble upon it, especially
once you start posting lots of warning signs with scary
wording on it warning people away. Now, the fact that
(03:39):
it is remote, the fact that you do have these
signs that warn people away, uh, the fact that you
have to bring people in to work at this facility,
and most of them are commuting in maybe on a
weekly basis, which means you have to figure out how
do you transport them from some place like Las Vegas
to the actual facility itself. All of that means that
(04:01):
you're leaving just enough traces to really start to peak
people's interests. Right, Yeah, it's tantalizing. Oh and uh, point
of order for the listeners out there, Jonathan, we should
probably tell everybody check out the first two episodes of
this before you listen to this one. Right, it will
make this make I can't say more sense, but you'll
(04:25):
at least understand the references. Yeah. So so, yeah, we've
got just enough information for the typical person to say,
I really want to know what's happening there. And because
of the security uh features that are in place, including
roving bands, which we'll talk about a little bit later,
of security personnel, uh, it means that you end up
(04:45):
having to fill in a lot of gaps. And when
that happens, when people are given the leeway to try
and fill in like that, there's the big here, there
be dragons on the map. That's where you get the dragons. Right,
You're like, well, I don't know what's out there. It's
probably dangerous, so we're just gonna slap dragons on it
and call it a day. Yeah, which is you know,
(05:05):
at heart of valuable instinct to have, right, it's it's caution.
But what's happened here is that as we're gonna see um,
one thing with a grain of truth such as oh
there's something I'm not allowed to go see, uh, became
embellished and then exaggerated. And many times the people saying
(05:30):
these things sincerely do believe this. They're not hucksters, right, Yeah,
this this isn't necessarily someone who's trying to get a
book deal or trying to get on the talk show circuit.
It maybe someone who has just enough information to leap
to some conclusions that are not supportable. And also we
should say there are times where people make guesses where
(05:52):
either they latch onto something that is actually true or
they've got part of the story. So just because something
is a few arie or a rumor or a conspiracy
of some sort doesn't mean that there's nothing there. Right.
So here's a great example, and it's one of the
more grounded, no pun intended examples of the mythology around
(06:13):
Area fifty one, there's the myth that there is a
giant subterranean network of UH tunnels and facilities that are
underneath the ground. So that way, when you get that
overhead view of Area fifty one, keep in mind Area
fifty one is restricted airspace that goes all the way
up into space. But there are satellites since the nineties
(06:35):
that have taken multiple images of that area. So if
you know that, in fact, you're going to be photographed
from space there, that seems logical that you would want
to go underground, right, So you can understand why people
would say, oh, well, it makes sense. You you want
to have that secrecy, You can no longer depend upon
(06:55):
it above ground, so you have to go below. But
this raises some logistical issues, right, Yeah, how do you
build an underground base and keep it quiet? Especially as
we said in the history podcast, Uh, the construction workers
that were taken out there probably would have known something
(07:17):
about it because they would have been the ones digging. Yeah,
I mean, and digging is a big deal. You're talking
about subterranean network. That's a lot of earth that you
have to move. And only do you have to move it,
you then have to figure out what do you do
with the earth you have taken. You know, when you
when you create a whole, that dirt doesn't just magically disappear, right,
you have to put it someplace. And so that's that's
(07:40):
a logistical issue, and it's an enormous type of endeavor
to undertake. I mean, imagine having to create something a
network of tunnels that is stable enough to support the
weight of whatever is above it. Uh not to mention
the idea of like level upon level of subterranean layer
like Dr Evil style. It's it's an enormous task and
(08:05):
it would have required such a huge investment and manpower.
Let alone, I don't even think about the cost financially,
just the practical manpower necessary to make it. It's not likely.
And there there are some rumors that go so far
as to suggest that there are there's an entire underground
network of tunnels that connect various bases together. Yeah, and really,
(08:28):
when you think of the engineering challenge that represents and
the construction that is required, you realize that while it
might be technologically possible for us to do it, it
is not really feasible to do it secretly where you
have not left any trace at all in the whole
process right now. And I think that's really good distinction,
(08:49):
because it's not just plausible, but it is probable that
there is some sort of below the ground construction at
Roswell in excuse me, area fifty one, in that when
you build things, there might be a basement, there might
be a safe room something like that. But that is
(09:11):
a far far cry from uh, what what do we
have here? What's what's the biggest record? Jonathan fifty stories stories? Yeah,
imagine a fifty story skyscraper, but underground. I mean, if
you've ever seen a skyscraper being built, you know, this
is a process that takes some time. And we we
(09:32):
here at hell stuff works. We moved into this. You know,
we're in an office that has recently, over the last
maybe five or six years, seen a lot of growth
with the buildings around us, and so we've actually watched
year over year as skyscrapers were being built, and it
takes a really long time. Uh. And I know people
would say, yeah, but this is a top secret establishment,
(09:53):
you know, you they'd really pour a lot into it.
If you've ever seen the government at work, the US
government at work, speed is not one of the adjectives
you would typically use. Right where if the US everyone
is a superhero, it would probably not be the flash.
I mean, everyone knows that maybe the Blob. Yeah, I
was gonna go safe with Captain America. Well, all right,
(10:13):
I was he I was merely going to all the villains.
I was thinking the Blob or maybe the Jugger, not
you know, the Juggernauts. Cool though, that's a different podcast.
We We've got to get to one of the one
of the biggest things here, the biggest conspiracies we hear
about with Area fifty one. Well, first off, spoiler alert,
the real conspiracy is are their secret spy planes? Yes, yeah,
(10:38):
and that's exactly what it's for. And that's crazy. Yeah,
I mean that is the first off, the fact that
that can even be possible, it's kind of right now.
We talked in the last couple of podcasts about some
of the the aircraft that were under development there that
remains secret a good twenty years after they had finished testing,
(10:58):
and that's when they were unveiled. Uh. There was one
that that I think had a run from three to
eighty five something like that, and it wasn't it wasn't
acknowledged by the government until ninety six, which was the
first time anyone outside of that that program had seen it.
Um And I think that was maybe Tacit blue. But
it was one of those that just when you saw
(11:20):
the aircraft, you thought, wow, what a weird looking thing.
I can't believe that this remained secret. Granted they only
built two of them, and they were under strict rap
over at one. It never got further out from from
that area, Like even the tests would be done at night,
so it limited when the potential of even being spotted.
(11:41):
But they were the genuine articles of conspiracy were indeed
spotted in the sky. And that brings us to as
we were saying, the biggest part of the area, are
you talking us? Yeah? Yeah, Officially unidentified flying objects UFOs
(12:01):
more often than not, uh, they are attributed to being
alien as an extraterrestrial in nature, Area fifty one features
heavily and tons of different alien stories, both both the
kind that we see on the big screen, like Independence Day,
the famous sequence where they go down to Area fifty
(12:24):
one where they have uh, not just aliens, but they're
they're hardware that has been studied for years, and you know,
it's revealed that a lot of technology we depend upon
today has been reverse engineered from this alien technology. Still
can't build a decent spaceship though, no, we can't build
a decent spaceship. However, we have figured out that you
(12:44):
can introduce a computer virus as long as you have
an Apple MacBook laptop, which to this day, to this day,
my friend, that's still that's still bothered me. Yeah, yeah,
spoiler alert again, guys. But but yeah, so, so people
people started seeing UFOs, and it is correct to call
(13:05):
them that because I think there's one of the distinctions
that we're about to make, right. A UFO unidentified flying
object is simply that. Yeah, it just means that you
personally cannot identify what that object is. It doesn't mean
it's unidentify a ball. It may very well be that
there's a small group of people who know exactly what
(13:26):
that object is, like the like the stealth technology we
were just talking about. Those stealth programs when they were
under development, were strict secrets and only a few people,
relatively few people knew about them. Anyone outside that who
would have seen one of these aircraft flying around, naturally,
they would not be able to identify it. There was
no correlative they could say, oh, this looked like a
(13:49):
such and such. These things look really crazy. So calling
it a UFO is perfectly fine, you cannot identify it. Calling.
Making the leap from UFO to a IN is a
little bit of a problem. So this brings us to
probably the most famous alien incident in all of the
(14:10):
United States history. Something that is that factors into numerous,
I'd say dozens, if not hundreds, of different conspiracy theories,
the Roswell incident. Now, Roswell is in New Mexico, which,
for those of you who are not in the United States,
is a completely separate state from Nevada. It's in a
(14:32):
completely different place. And you know, sometimes there's a pet
peeve of mine, Jonathan, is that people often conflate Area
fifty one or Groom Lake and the incident in Roswell, Right,
and so two things that these are incidence separated both
in space and time. Right, Roswell, New Mexico is hundreds
(14:55):
of miles away from Area fifty one, like almost a
thou miles away, And I think it's somewhere around eight
hundred miles away and eight actually one thousand, four hundred
sixteen kilometers according to Google Maps. Thank you Google Maps
for letting me know how far apart Roswell, New Mexico
in Area fifty one are. That's exactly it. Uh So,
(15:15):
by the way, don't don't rely upon Google Maps for
turn by turn directions to Area fifty one. You know
you'll just end up in Las Vegas. Did you Did
you do it by d I did it by by driving,
although walking would have been hilarious. Walking would have been like,
at this point people are going to ask you to
turn around? Uh so, or at this point you've probably
died of dehydration. So the other thing I said was
(15:38):
that their separated by time. The Roswell incident happened on
July second, nineteen seven. So for those of you who
listened to our first episode about Area fifty one, you
remember that it was the mid nineteen fifties when the
c i A settled on Groom Lake as the the
future home of Area fifty one. It was when construction began,
(16:01):
So this is almost a decade apart when of these
two events. So then you have the The actual story
of the Roswell incident is that some people in Roswell,
New Mexico, I saw some strange floating objects that they
could not identify un identified flying objects. Sometimes they're referred
to as being kind of disc shaped, but part of
(16:21):
the problem is that we're so far distanced from the
initial event that the story has not remained consistent through
all the different retellings. Yeah, and I can speak to
a little bit of that because we have we have
some copies of the newspaper articles that changed, and because
they changed. Uh, there's a very interesting thing here. It's
(16:41):
the interpretation of that. Uh, people who believe that there
was some sort of extraterrestrial incident. Somebody, somebody managed to
drive a spacecraft well enough to get to Earth but
not well enough to stay above Earth, right, and then uh,
the news found out about it and they got shut
down there to change their story or did they just
(17:05):
correct the reporting when they had more information. That's a
that's a good question, Like did did some gentlemen wearing
black suits and sunglasses show up at the newspaper and
say you need to you need to address this. I mean,
and Jonathan, that's possible. But if it happened, it wasn't
because of aliens, That's right, So get moving on. We're
talking about the crash. Just spotting these objects in the
(17:28):
air wasn't the only thing that happened with Roswell incident.
What specifically went on from there was that some people
found debris on the ground and it was described as
being shiny and metallic in nature. No one was really
sure what it was actually made of at the time,
and so this this incident started to become embellished upon
(17:50):
over time. In fact, there's some versions of the story
where they didn't just find physical debris from some flying object,
but also bodies. And this is where we get into
the alien stuff, where supposedly there were these bodies of
creatures that had unusual features and they were whisked away
by the government. Uh. And ultimately some people say that
(18:13):
that's they went to Area fifty one. The purpose was
not to study strange materials, although we did eventually get
some Soviet aircraft at Area fifty one where they were
tested like the bigs, But it's not meant to be
a scientific laboratory. That's not the purpose of Every fifty one.
So it would make no sense to send any kind
(18:34):
of extraterrestrials there. It also doesn't make sense to send
extra terrestrial bodies to a place that hasn't been built yet.
That's a that's a big one. That's a it's a
bump in the Yeah, it's a little bit of a
little bit of a problem with the story. Now what
the official story from the government was that the debris
came from weather balloons and that there were no bodies.
(18:57):
In fact, that we should stay right now, there's no
evid it's at all that anyone ever came across a body.
That was something that was added to this story over time. Yeah, sorry, guys.
That autopsy on YouTube is most likely a hope. It's
it's yeah, there there are some special effects UH experts
(19:19):
who have actually commented on it and somewhat derisively. So
we're like, like, they should have hired me. I could
have done a much better job. But there is there
There is no no hard evidence that there was even
from the debris they found when they were looking at it,
because there really was debris, right and they really did
find it, but they didn't find enough to have built
(19:41):
an entire thing, yeah, to carry a person. You know this.
So the official story from the government was at these
were weather balloons. They were meant specifically to UH to
study the weather at high altitudes. Now, as it turns out,
that's not the real story. But we will get to
there in a second. We'll be back to talk about
more mythology of Area fifty one in just a moment. So, uh,
(20:13):
this was one of those things where people were saying,
it doesn't look like any weather balloon I've ever seen,
which is true. It did. I've seen both balloons and
the weathers, and this is neither of those two things.
So moving on to the the you know, kind of
looking at the story another way. One version of this
that I was not aware of until a friend of
(20:34):
the show, Nate Lenkson, he's the editor of Wired Dot
Code Dot uk. Uh. He he turned me on to this.
I had never heard about this. It's a book written
by Annie Jacobson called Area fifty one and Uncensored History
of America's top secret military base. Now full disclosure, I
have not read this book yet. I read a synopsis
(20:57):
of the book and a synopsis of the story we're
about the cover, So this may not actually be accurate
to the book itself. I want to make that clear.
I've also heard that most of the book is pretty
much what we covered in our first two episodes of
the podcast, a very thorough description of the history of
Vera fifty one. But there's a section apparently devoted to
(21:19):
the Roswell incident and every fifty one supposed involvement in that,
in which the story gets even weirder, I think than aliens.
And this story involves Nazis and communists, so you know,
it's only missing Indiana Jones to make it really a
Hollywood film. So the story that she tells according to
(21:41):
a source, I don't know what her source was, Yeah,
a source. I don't know if she names the source
in the book. The synopsis, I said, said anonymous, But
again I haven't read the book. But according to the synopsis,
the story is that a Nazi doctor, Joseph Mingla, actually
the s S officer who survived the World War two
(22:04):
and then and then eventually escaped to South America, that
Mingola had worked on behalf of Joseph Stalin doing these
horrific procedures on children, resulting in children around the age
of twelve with abnormally shaped heads, large eyes that are
of an odd shape, and that the whole idea was
(22:25):
that they were going to pilot some simple aircraft to
fly around the United States and land and essentially star
crap up, yeah, scare people, Yeah, exactly, this idea that
they would this idea that they would fake aliens. Yeah,
in order to create a panic, essentially doing a war
(22:46):
of the World's type event, uh, one step closer to
reality or of the world's For those who don't remember
or don't know what this is, um, it was a
an Orson Wells project, a radio program that was portrayed
in such a way that people who tuned in, without
knowing that it was actually a fictionalized radio program, began
(23:09):
to think that there was actually, uh, an alien invasion happening.
It was this sort of famous little blip on the
radar of of people freaking out because they weren't aware that,
in fact, it was a fictional account, uh, something that
we still see today, uh with things like Mermaids. At
(23:29):
any rate. That's enough commentary on that. But yeah, the uh,
the story that she relays is that Mingola had done
these these horror horrific procedures and that the bodies found
at the Roswal incidant, which remember, there was never any
evidence that bodies were found were in fact human children
(23:50):
that then were whisked away. I think there are some
big problems with this particular story. Problem. No one Mingola
was on the run from the Soviets, he did not.
I mean, the Soviets were the ones who were who
were approaching when Hitler committed suicide, right, they'd rather than
be captured by the Soviets. Um Hitler committed suicide, and
(24:12):
Mingola was trying to escape with records that he had,
uh he had created at Auschwitz. Um So, he eventually
escaped Germany. He did at one point go back into
Soviet occupied territory in order to retrieve some of these documents,
but he evaded capture and eventually escaped to South America
(24:34):
and then moved around quite a bit while Uh yeah, yeah,
he was being he was being pursued by agents both
Soviet and American. And so it's unlikely that he would
have collaborated with Joseph Stalin and certainly unlikely that he
would have been allowed to escape. Yeah, the Soviets. Um So,
(24:57):
that already is a problem. Secondly, it would be a
real problem that the idea of people being fooled long
enough to not realize these were humans, right, Yeah, And
then there's the other there's the other question. Why would
they crash there and not in a more occupied place.
Why not in New York City or something like that why, um,
(25:19):
you know they probably get spotted. But then also, and
this this is a cruel thing to say, but why
would you specifically need that one very evil man to
do that sort of operation? Right? Exactly, It's not like
if you're going to if you're going to do something
so inhuman, uh is there I mean, narratively it's a
(25:45):
great story in the sense that there only one person
is this twisted to pull this off? But in reality
we know, unfortunately that's not the case that if you
really did have the the will to do something this horrible,
you could probably do without having to to go after
the devil himself. Right, I mean, the whole story is
(26:06):
is meant to appeal to our dark imaginations, and it's
a terrible thing, but it's also one of those things
that you could say, yeah, I can imagine this actually
playing out in some way. Ultimately, you also have to
ask the question, what's the effect you're going for? If
the effect you're going for is to cause a panic,
I can't think of anything that would have caused a
bigger panic than having Soviet airmen being able to land
(26:28):
in U. S. Territory without any alien cover story. You
don't need that to cause a scare. There's really no
benefit here, like the the the entire operation does not
seem to have an actual return on investments, so it
doesn't make sense from that perspective either. So the Nazis
(26:51):
that are involved in in some other conspiracy theories about
Avery fifty one, like the the UFOs that are seen
are product of, you know, Nazi experiments towards the close
of the war. And a lot of that comes from
a very real, uh and kind of frightening thing that
(27:11):
the United States did with Operation paper Clip, which you
know about when they brought over some surviving scientists from
Germany right right right when you're when you're when you
get the rockets scientists specifically who worked over in Germany
to then come to the United States and continue their
work in science and and rocketry and specifically, but now
(27:34):
they're working for a different boss. They're working with the
United States government, uh and partly because they're getting guarantees
from the U. S Government that they won't be tried
as criminals for their work for the Nazi regime. So yeah,
there's certain real, real things that were happening in history
that we're probably enough to help fuel this kind of
(27:54):
conspiracy here in the United States. But you know, you
didn't have to look far to see real instances of
some pretty shady dealings on both sides, uh, but without
having to make stuff upright and now, Also one thing
that didn't help the government's case, and as far as
(28:15):
their official story goes, is that it turned out they
they were telling the truth, but telling it slant, as
Emily Dickinson would say, right they were. They were not
weather balloons that were being uh deployed out over in
New Mexico. There were balloons though, Yeah, there were balloons
that were part of a spy program called Project Mogul,
(28:36):
which was a top secret experiment using high altitude balloons
that were carrying microphones. And the idea was the microphones
would be able to detect sounds from Soviet nuclear tests,
so that we in the United States would have a
clue when that was going on, and we that would
help us kind of know how far along the Soviets
(28:57):
were with their nuclear program compared to our own nuclear program.
So there was again this need for secrecy. We didn't
want the Soviets to know that we, in fact had
developed this technology to listen out for uh, these these
sound waves, um, because we didn't want them to try
and come up with different ways of testing their nuclear
arms and therefore hiding it from us, so reverse engineering
(29:20):
it and hearing what we're doing exactly. That's also another
another good point. So the cover story of weather balloons
was necessary to protect the secrecy of the spy program,
but it had nothing to do with aliens. It had
everything to do with spying it. Maybe it might have
even been to the government's benefit that people were latching
on to the aliens story because it took attention away
(29:41):
from what it was really meant to do. So there's
not a whole lot of incentive upon the government's part
to come out and say specifically, guys, no, it's not aliens,
because it helped keep the attention away. But you don't
want it to You don't want that story to run
rampant either, because it could legitimately causing either a panic
(30:02):
or just a growing distrust in the government itself. Sure,
and they don't need any help. That's regardless of what
what what your political beliefs are. We speaking of beliefs,
this is going to be a lot of fun for
me personally, I think for you too. Because one thing
that always keeps the Area fifty one legends alive is
(30:26):
that there. It seems like every year there's someone who
comes out and says, well, I was person exit place.
Why I know the truth, Ryan, Now I will finally
reveal it. And you're thinking of someone specific in this case, right,
I am specifically thinking of Bob Lazar. Yeah, Robert Lazar
(30:49):
or Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on a
project in which the military had come into possession of
alien technology, and his job was to reverse engineer that
al and technology to learn how it works so that
we could take advantage of that tech here on Earth
and thus kind of leap forward what would normally be
the process of developing TEX so instead of you know,
(31:11):
constantly testing and improving and refining, we could jump straight ahead,
you know, skip eight steps in that process and jump
straight to you know, miraculous smartphones that react to our touch,
that kind of thing. And so he claimed that he
had worked at a facility that was near Groom Lake,
so not technically at Area fifty one, but adjacent to it.
(31:33):
It was the real secret place. It's called S four. Yeah,
it's it's so secret that it didn't even get a
full name. Um, it just gets a letter and a
number of designation and it's he said that it housed
no fewer than nine spacecraft. Uh. Here's the thing that
a lot of his his claims to his background don't
check out right. Like he he claims to have advanced
(31:55):
degrees from m I. T and from cal Tech, but
there's no record of him there. Now. Granted, some people
say that that's evidence of the conspiracy. Yeah, that in fact,
this shows that the government was so interested in keeping
it a secret that they have wiped clean his background.
Although to do that you would also have to white
clean the memories of every professor and every student who
(32:17):
would have also attended. And you see that this this
kind of domino effect. How how wide those ripples would
have to go in order for this to remain an
effective secret? It becomes unmanageable at some point. Wouldn't it
be easier at this point? My question would be for
many of these cases is why did someone go to
(32:39):
so such great links to keep you alive? Because from
from a government's perspective, we know that if they're picking
one kind of skull degree, they'll pick the easier one,
which is usually an assisted fall off a building or
something like that. You know, assassination is just off the table, right,
then that can ever be done? Like, yeah, how do
(33:01):
you how do you uh, if it did come down
to there's this one person who has tons of information,
like it's essentially Snowden. Yeah, there's Edward Snowden of Area
fifty one, who is ready, he has access to all
the information. He's ready to spill the beans. Um, and
you want to discredit him, you don't go to every
(33:23):
single person in his past. Don't tell anybody about this, right, Yeah,
it's just it's just not practical, right, It's it's it
would be a monumental task. So essentially what we're getting
round too is that lazars Um his claims to his
his credentials are suspect, right, and that that is a
(33:43):
very diplomatic way to put it. Of course, you know,
we're also showing that his side of it is that
someone is a racing his past to discredit him. As
as you said, you know, Jonathan, recently, Mr Lazar in
the past few years went uh back into the public
eye now I mean, I guess more into the mainstream
(34:03):
public eye, and he was asked to react to the
CIA's official admittance uh of area fifty ones existence, which
as we know, it didn't happen for a little while.
And uh he said he was not impressed because this
was a very tiny baby step forward. I think that's
the quote he used. And uh he was waiting for
(34:26):
them to reveal S four, which is the site he
says he worked at reverse engineering these things. Now, he
has many, many claims. Uh. He speaks at length about
interspecial politics, about injuries he's suffered by technology that we
won't hear about for several decades. Uh. But I I
(34:50):
really like the point you made that. Um. One of
the other things people who believe him see his proof
is um what they perceive as a inexplicable jump in technology,
right right, Well, the truth is that if you look
at any technology closely enough, you will see incremental improvements.
It's very, very rare that we have someone come out
(35:14):
with a brand new piece of technology that has no
precedent to it, right, Yeah, exactly, Television, perfect example. So, yeah,
you look at these things like television was really building
upon the developments of radio, and you think, okay, well
what about Tesla and Marconi. Well they were working on
research that had preceded them as well. These are all
(35:35):
if you if you really dig down into it, you know,
you look at the invention of the light bulb, you
look at all of these sort of inventions that we
we take for granted. We like the stories that say
this inventor came up with this idea and implemented it,
and now it exists and before it never did. Usually
the truth is much more complicated, with lots of different
things leading into that invention, including earlier invention that may
(36:00):
not have been practical but showed a working concept, and
then this other inventor like Thomas Edison comes along and
takes that takes that concept and makes it practical. So
now it's something that we can actually use as opposed
to just a cool idea, but we didn't know how
to to you know, capitalize on it. So you know,
(36:20):
I think most of the advances we've seen over the
over the decades have been examples of this where people
have made incremental improvements and maybe grab together multiple pieces
of technology and then and then package them in such
a way that it's a really compelling piece of tech.
But if you break it down component by component, you
(36:41):
start to see the actual process of this creating something,
refining it, tweaking and putting it out again, refining it again.
I don't see any enormous leaps where someone has jumped
well ahead of everywhere else. Maybe Claude Shan and his uh,
his computer science with using binary logic, his approach to
(37:07):
computer science was pretty much fully formed. But that's kind
of similar to Albert Einstein and his theories of relativity.
These were ideas that both men had developed over years,
and then they presented them as complete pictures. So to us,
the outsiders, it looks like a person just came up
with a brilliant process, fully formed instantaneously. The truth is
(37:28):
it actually took several years to build that up, and
even then they were building on previous thoughts and knowledge.
They were just incorporating it in a new way. Yeah,
but what about the lasers. Okay, so lasers are an issue, right, Um,
I'm glad you brought up lasers. One of the things
that have has often been attributed to Area fifty one
(37:49):
is energy weapons. So this ties into the strategic defense initiative,
often referred to derisively as star wars. Yeah, this was
the Graham in the nineteen eighties, and I promise that
I will do an episode about the Star Wars program
that will go into full detail. I know, I've got
a lot of listeners who have asked me to do it,
(38:11):
and I really want to at some point, but it's
gonna be a little bit further down the road. But
it's um. You know. The whole idea was that it
was going to be a system that would shoot down
incoming i C b M S intercontinental ballistic missiles. This
was the height of the Cold War nineteen eighties. I mean,
propaganda was ridiculous in both the Soviet Union and the
United States. I grew up in that era, and I remember,
(38:32):
like the Russians being the bad guys all the time,
you know, from from uh everything from Red Dawn to
Rocky four. So anyway, um, or was it three? It
might have been three Rocky three? Uh. At any rate,
the the idea here was that the energy weapons that
would shoot down these missiles were supposedly under development at
Area fifty one. Again not really the purpose for Area
(38:55):
fifty one. I mean you could you could understand them,
uh testing such a vice because that is kind of
what they were doing. But they were mostly testing airborne things,
not not ground to air technology. It was mostly aircraft
that they were really focusing on, and not offensive aircraft,
just spycraft. Yeah, I mean, there are some of the
(39:16):
drones they worked on probably had offensive but yeah, it
was it was mostly again, it was mostly reconnaissance type stuff.
We've got more to say about the mythology of area
fifty one after this quick break. So then you have
(39:36):
the weather control devices, another very popular conspiracy theory of it. So,
first of all, we don't have any technology powerful enough
to control the weather. Weather is an incredibly chaotic system
that we do not fully understand it. Before you can
under before you can really control something, you have to
at least have some understanding of how it works. Now,
(39:57):
people have conducted experiments with weather manipulation, things like influence it,
like seeding clouds, that kind of thing. But even this,
we can't be fully sure how effective they are, right,
Because here's the problem is that you can't you can't
have a scientific consensus on whether or not something is
effective unless you're able to have a control group. And
(40:19):
you can't really have a control group with whether I
mean you can you can have as close to the same, uh,
kind of elements in play in two different and two
different instances, and one you seed the cloud and one
you don't, and then you see how much rain results.
But even then again, whether it's such a complex system
that you can't you can't be completely certain that the
(40:42):
seeding is the effective agent, right, And you know the
problem with whether is it's a chaotic system that is
one massive cluster of systems. So any two points you
pick are ultimately in the same system, so are they
really is there a control tough and stuff. And then
on top of that, you know things like HARP, which
(41:03):
I'm sure you guys have talked about, which was designed
to to actually look at interactions in the ionosphere. Now,
the isonosphere around Earth can conduct electricity. In fact, when
we get a big electrical impulse in there from something
like a solar flare or coronal mass ejection, it can
make the auroras at the polls really active because that's
(41:26):
that's kind of the convergence point for this electric field.
And uh, and so there's certainly things that interact with
atmospheric um phenomena, but we still can't control the weather there.
Now it doesn't help. I'm just gonna be honest with you, Jonathan,
it does not help uh to dispel any of the
(41:46):
speculation about places like HARP, you know, when it was
an operation, because the descriptions from from the government and
from HARP about what they were doing we're just cartooniously
vague in some ways. So, yeah, it's a high frequency
active auroral research program, which already you're you're thinking, they're
(42:06):
at least a couple of words in there that I'm
not entirely sure what they're supposed to mean. Um. And
it really was about beaming energy into the ionosphere. To
the goal for HARP, at least on the government side,
that the military funded side, was can we use the
ionosphere as a conduit through which we can communicate with
distant vehicles like submarines that are under the water. I mean,
(42:28):
they really were hoping that this would be a way
of doing that. The scientists at HARP were mostly thinking,
if we can keep getting funding for what we want
to do, which is to study the ionosphere, then we
should try and keep that door open for the possibility
that this could be a communications tool, even if we
don't think it will really work. So um, which happens. Yeah,
(42:50):
that's that's essentially what happened with HARP. And then eventually
the military said, you know what, we're done and they
pulled the funding. So that was the story of HARP. Well,
a lot of those same stories apply to Area fifty one,
but there's no evidence that there were any weather control
systems under development. There's certainly no evidence that anything ever
did any actual weather manipulation. So uh yeah, yeah, that
(43:14):
just doesn't that doesn't really fly. Um. And then if
there's a piece of tech and science fiction, there's a
chance that there's at least some story out there that
there's something like that underdevelopment at Area fifty one. You know,
warp coils, teleporters, phasers, whatever you want to think about.
I realized I was focusing mainly on Star Trek there,
but but really all of that has at some time
(43:36):
or another been attributed to area. Warp drives, uh, teleportation devises, lightsabers, Yeah, okay,
thank you. No, we've got story guards, you know, we've
got there. So moving on another another host of conspiracy
theories around Area fifty one don't have so much to
do with what was actually going on at the facility,
(43:57):
but rather the mysterious chef do we organizations that were
behind it all. Yeah, like the real life Smoking Man exactly. Yeah.
So a lot of these conspiracy theories involve organizations that
have no official um uh designation, or they don't they
aren't officially acknowledged by the government, right. So some of
(44:19):
them have a designation, but they're not you know, they're
they're not in any government files because that's how secret
they are. And alleged designation. Yeah. So here the big
one for area of fifty one at least is the
Majestic Twelve. Majestic twelve is a group that existed many
years ago, according to the conspiracy lore, and included people
(44:42):
like President Truman as well as the head of CIA
and also like top businessmen, like essentially the most powerful
people in the United States at that time, and that
their purpose was to solidify power and control worldwide, right
like this was gonna be like the Trilateral Commission was
often referred to as being the secret organization for these
(45:03):
sort of purposes, which is not what it was for
um uh. There are other organizations that are meant to
be like think tanks that have often been kind of
compared to this sort of the Majestic Twelve however, is
one that appears to have been completely fabricated. Uh. There
was a UFO enthusiast named William L. Moore who produced
(45:23):
papers that he claimed proved the group's existence, But a
lot of people who have looked at these papers have
said that they don't hold up to scrutiny, That the
signatures that are there appeared to have been copied from
other documents and then pasted into them into the Majestic twelve,
the MJ twelve papers, uh, and that there does not
appear to be any sort of evidence supporting the existence
(45:46):
of such an organization. So if your organization isn't real,
then chances are it's not actually the secret one behind area.
So the so, the the idea that has become you know,
common currency in a lot of these beliefs is that
in J twelve did exist, but was had its world
(46:10):
rocked when news of the extraterrestrial crash in hit them.
And then they've they've spent the next few decades, um,
you know what, more and more I think maybe X
files was inspired some of these well, you know, and
it's very like m J twelve shares a lot of
the same kind of traits as other shadowy, conspiratorial uh,
(46:33):
most likely fictional organization. It's a trope. It's right up
there with things like the Illuminati, for example. Uh. Then
you have some real people who really do exist that
have kind of helped fuel the mystique around Area fifty one,
not necessarily, you know, purposefully setting out to define the mystique,
but they're part of it. And those are the Camo dudes.
(46:55):
That's that's what the folks in the Area fifty one
u biz, the people who like to watch Area fifty one,
not the ones who are actually working there. What they
referred to these guys as Camo dudes because they tend
to be wearing a desert camouflage outfits. You know, they're
out in Nevada, so they're wearing these these kind of
desert cam outfits. They travel in pairs, usually in in
(47:18):
four wheel drive vehicles, and they are, uh, the perimeter
guards essentially is what they serve as. So if someone
starts to come close to the Area fifty one borders,
then they may end up encountering a pair of these
Camo dudes who tend to not appear to be military.
(47:39):
The best guess is, in fact, they are probably part
of some contract group that ends up doing security for
things like military installations. So not not official military personnel,
but rather private citizens who are part of a contractor
and their job is to um to firmly suggest to
(48:00):
people that they should go somewhere else rather than than
try and get footage of the area. I have a
quotation for you from an incident. This is published in
the Huffington's post. A UFO conspiracy film crew was detained
at gunpoint at the Air fifty one Gate in two
thousand twelve. Here's here's the quotation. According to a crew member,
(48:23):
a camouflage dress guard carrying an M sixteen told a
member of this team, we could make you disappear and
your body will never be found. Uh. I'm gonna go
ahead and say maybe they're playing it up, but the
point is that, yes, you're not supposed to be there.
As we said in the first PEW podcast, don't don't
(48:44):
try to go you guys. Yeah, most of the most
of the reports I've read didn't have a point where
the the Camo dudes were actively aiming weapons in their direction,
but rather they were they were visibly armed. Yeah, so
that's one thing, you know. I was certainly they were armed,
but they weren't. I don't remember reading a whole lot
(49:04):
of them either brandishing their weapons like as far as
I recall, most of the incidents involved their weapons being holstered.
But they have in the past, according to a lot
of reports, confiscated film back when film was a thing,
or demanded to have various equipment turned over to them.
Because again, the facility is all about spy aircraft, so
(49:28):
you don't want footage leaking of either the facility or
the aircraft that are under development there. Um, So it's
not necessarily that big of a mystery, but the fact
that you have these guys who are not easily identifiable
as belonging to a specific United States government organization, that
definitely adds to that mystery. And they're not identifying themselves.
(49:48):
And also to be candid in in some cases not all,
but in some cases if you were making a film,
then you want to have that sort of con flick.
So it it's also possible that in some cases these
are the threat as it is as it is is
um embellished, or it's possible that people are purposefully agitating
(50:14):
the guards. Yeah, it's it's definitely without being there. We
can't say for sure, but that but but both scenarios
seem to be plausible to me, Right, I don't know
what really unfolded. It may be that the truth is
somewhere in between those two those two scenarios, right, But
you can't accidentally end up there, no, you purposefully We're
trying to get there. And this is clearly an area
(50:36):
that is off limits. Uh, and is you know, is
legally off limits? Some people are and you know, we
talked about that in the second episode of the history
about how Area fifty one gets a whole lot of
legal leeway um in in ways that other places in
the United States simply do not, and that that will
(50:57):
also adds to this curiosity we have of Area fifty one.
I think we've really covered kind of what drives that,
the fact that, you know, human beings are curious, right,
we want to know things. When we see something that
we do not understand, Often one of our earliest responses
is how does that work? Or what is going on here?
(51:18):
What's really happening? Unless it's really scary, and which is
where's the closest exit? And can I run faster than
ben Um because you don't have to run the fastest, No,
just faster than the slowest person. As long as I'm
not the slowest person in the office, I'm still got
a chance. Yeah, So I can certainly see and I
(51:39):
feel it too. I mean I certainly have this curiosity
about Area fifty one. Heck, just just going from the
baseline most mundane description of what's going on there, there's
still so many questions like, how do they how do
they really maintain that level of secrecy. How much does
the typical worker at Area fifty one know about what's
(51:59):
going on? How do they make sure that people working
on one project remain oblivious to everything else that's happening.
How do they schedule these things? What is it like
being a pilot for one of these aircraft? I mean,
there are a lot of questions that we don't have
the answers too. So I think, uh, you know, it
was a lot of fun tackling this this subject, and
(52:21):
I think it really did merit the three episodes because
it is such a touchstone for everything from the political
ideology from the nineteen fifties forward to just a pop
culture you know touchstone, right, It's it's like that's that's
the go to for science fiction. Now I have a
question for you. Absolutely when and now that we have,
(52:44):
along with the rest of the tech stuff audience explored
stem discern the the ideas and the reality and the
miss very fifty one, I have to ask you, what
would you do if one of the you know, if
one of the strangest things turned out to be true.
You know, I like to I would like to think
(53:04):
that I'm the type of skeptic who, when presented with
incontrovertible evidence that something I believe to be true is
in fact not true, and that something I thought was
just purely made up is in fact the truth, that
I would be able to accept it. Saying that and
actually doing it are two different things, right, I don't
(53:25):
know if that's how I would truly react. I'd like
to think that if suddenly there was just pure evidence
that in fact the Roswell incident involved aliens, and that
the aliens were in fact Holstad Area fifty one, and
all of these crazy conspiracy theories were actually true, I
like to believe that I would be able to say,
you know what, I never would have bought into this,
(53:48):
but it turns out it was right. And I was wrong.
I'd like to think I could do that. I think
you would. I like, okay, incontrovertible evidence then would have
to be something like aliens landing at your house and
saying like, hey, guys, have you seen our buddies? They
showed up maybe I don't know, you know, seventy earth
years ago something around there. Yeah, they checked their watch
(54:10):
for seventy earth years ago and they're big fans of
text stuff, and so they heard that we had done
an episode. Yeah, I feel like you're the kind of
guy would go, huh, well, yeah, okay, I guess let
me let me call my boss. I would be like,
some of um, all right, Well, it turns out I
was a big fat head and I was wrong about everything.
(54:31):
That's not everything. But also, yeah, it is true that
there is, at least there are several conspiracies that we're
at work at Area fifty one, and we've we've explored those,
and I guess what what I would want people to
take away from this is that there really is amazing
strange science fiction, action thriller movie level stuff there. It
(54:53):
just may not be what people are claiming. It is, right,
that doesn't mean it's you know, not interesting. It certainly is,
and it's uh, it's really again an evidence of human
achievement for both an engineering side and just a secrecy
keeping side, because it's really hard to keep those secrets.
So I do suspect that they do that by managing
(55:14):
how many people are allowed to know any one thing
at any one time, otherwise you know, loose lips. I
hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. I
really enjoy reading, writing researching about Area fifty one. One
of my favorite articles I ever wrote for How Stuff
Works back when I was writing for them, was on
how Area fifty one works. It was also one of
(55:36):
my longest articles I ever wrote, to the point where
my editor was suggesting that I cut out a couple
of segments, but I felt like it really added, you know,
some character and flavor to the piece, so I fought
for it and ultimately it all went in. I honestly
don't know if that paid off. I was not looking
at the analytics for that article. Maybe people dropped off
way before then, but it was it was a fun
(55:58):
experience and I'm glad we got a chance to revisit
it tomorrow. You will have a new episode of Smart
Talks with IBM in this feed, and then on Friday
you will hear the episode that I've been working on
but has so far been a little slow to come together.
I can't tell you what it's about just yet, except
I'll say, Darlin, it's better downwards wetter under the sea.
(56:22):
But that's as much as I can say. All right.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on
tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a trend
in tech, you know a specific product, maybe let me
know send me a message. Best way to do that
as on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
(56:45):
really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and love all Things Tech. And we're making Wednesdays the
new Fridays, just like Loki did on Disney. Plus that
(00:26):
being said, we're going to be moving a classic episode
to today Wednesday, because the episode I am currently working
on is not just technical, it also has a lot
of historical elements to it, and it's involving a lot
of digging around in old articles and putting things together,
and I'm just running a little behind. So our classic
(00:46):
episode is moving up from Friday to Wednesday, and we're
going to do an episode called the Mythology of Area
fifty one. Area one, of course, being the most famous
secret facility in the world. It is a place that
is connected to all sorts of different legends, from aliens
to crazy military experiments and more. And so this episode
(01:08):
really goes in to explore that I hope you enjoy.
We are in fact going to be concluding our trilogy
of episodes about Area fifty one in parts one and two.
If you haven't listened to them, already. We really went
over the history of the facility and what actually goes
on there and covered everything from the reason why it
(01:29):
was built in the first place to the various spy
planes and different technologies that were tested at that facility.
This episode, we're looking at the crazy yes, sir, we
are looking at all of the rumors, conspiracy theories and uh,
(01:49):
let's just say unsupported anecdotes to be diplomatic. That's very diplomatic. Yeah,
so so quick rundown, just so that we're all on
the same page. Area fifty one, also known as Groom Lake,
is a facility. It's out in Nevada. It's near the
what Well. It's near the Nevada Test Site, where a
lot of nuclear tests were held, in fact, some during
(02:12):
the lifetime of Very fifty one. Uh. It is uh
run by the CIA and the Air Force. Lockheed is
essentially the main contractor that does work there. It's not
the only one. We've seen some other aircraft from different
companies tested at that facility as well. And the whole
purpose of it is to be remote from everywhere else
(02:34):
so that secret tests of top secret spy technology can
happen without anyone learning about it. Because, as we've said,
if you want to be an effective spy, part of
that means people can't be aware of the tools that
you have at your disposal, right Yeah, And which, as
we say, that's why it is in a Goldilocks zone
(02:54):
for its for its purpose, right Yeah. One of my
favorite points that you made in the previous episode, I
believe was the first installment, was that this was just
far enough away to be so inconvenient to get to
that people people wouldn't try. Yeah, it was. It's a
remote desert location on a dry lake bed, and so
(03:19):
it was close enough where you could get supplies from
places like Las Vegas, which is less than a hundred
miles away, but far enough away where you know your
your casual traveler is unlikely to stumble upon it, especially
once you start posting lots of warning signs with scary
wording on it warning people away. Now, the fact that
(03:39):
it is remote, the fact that you do have these
signs that warn people away, uh, the fact that you
have to bring people in to work at this facility,
and most of them are commuting in maybe on a
weekly basis, which means you have to figure out how
do you transport them from some place like Las Vegas
to the actual facility itself. All of that means that
(04:01):
you're leaving just enough traces to really start to peak
people's interests. Right, Yeah, it's tantalizing. Oh and uh, point
of order for the listeners out there, Jonathan, we should
probably tell everybody check out the first two episodes of
this before you listen to this one. Right, it will
make this make I can't say more sense, but you'll
(04:25):
at least understand the references. Yeah. So so, yeah, we've
got just enough information for the typical person to say,
I really want to know what's happening there. And because
of the security uh features that are in place, including
roving bands, which we'll talk about a little bit later,
of security personnel, uh, it means that you end up
(04:45):
having to fill in a lot of gaps. And when
that happens, when people are given the leeway to try
and fill in like that, there's the big here, there
be dragons on the map. That's where you get the dragons. Right,
You're like, well, I don't know what's out there. It's
probably dangerous, so we're just gonna slap dragons on it
and call it a day. Yeah, which is you know,
(05:05):
at heart of valuable instinct to have, right, it's it's caution.
But what's happened here is that as we're gonna see um,
one thing with a grain of truth such as oh
there's something I'm not allowed to go see, uh, became
embellished and then exaggerated. And many times the people saying
(05:30):
these things sincerely do believe this. They're not hucksters, right, Yeah,
this this isn't necessarily someone who's trying to get a
book deal or trying to get on the talk show circuit.
It maybe someone who has just enough information to leap
to some conclusions that are not supportable. And also we
should say there are times where people make guesses where
(05:52):
either they latch onto something that is actually true or
they've got part of the story. So just because something
is a few arie or a rumor or a conspiracy
of some sort doesn't mean that there's nothing there. Right.
So here's a great example, and it's one of the
more grounded, no pun intended examples of the mythology around
(06:13):
Area fifty one, there's the myth that there is a
giant subterranean network of UH tunnels and facilities that are
underneath the ground. So that way, when you get that
overhead view of Area fifty one, keep in mind Area
fifty one is restricted airspace that goes all the way
up into space. But there are satellites since the nineties
(06:35):
that have taken multiple images of that area. So if
you know that, in fact, you're going to be photographed
from space there, that seems logical that you would want
to go underground, right, So you can understand why people
would say, oh, well, it makes sense. You you want
to have that secrecy, You can no longer depend upon
(06:55):
it above ground, so you have to go below. But
this raises some logistical issues, right, Yeah, how do you
build an underground base and keep it quiet? Especially as
we said in the history podcast, Uh, the construction workers
that were taken out there probably would have known something
(07:17):
about it because they would have been the ones digging. Yeah,
I mean, and digging is a big deal. You're talking
about subterranean network. That's a lot of earth that you
have to move. And only do you have to move it,
you then have to figure out what do you do
with the earth you have taken. You know, when you
when you create a whole, that dirt doesn't just magically disappear, right,
you have to put it someplace. And so that's that's
(07:40):
a logistical issue, and it's an enormous type of endeavor
to undertake. I mean, imagine having to create something a
network of tunnels that is stable enough to support the
weight of whatever is above it. Uh not to mention
the idea of like level upon level of subterranean layer
like Dr Evil style. It's it's an enormous task and
(08:05):
it would have required such a huge investment and manpower.
Let alone, I don't even think about the cost financially,
just the practical manpower necessary to make it. It's not likely.
And there there are some rumors that go so far
as to suggest that there are there's an entire underground
network of tunnels that connect various bases together. Yeah, and really,
(08:28):
when you think of the engineering challenge that represents and
the construction that is required, you realize that while it
might be technologically possible for us to do it, it
is not really feasible to do it secretly where you
have not left any trace at all in the whole
process right now. And I think that's really good distinction,
(08:49):
because it's not just plausible, but it is probable that
there is some sort of below the ground construction at
Roswell in excuse me, area fifty one, in that when
you build things, there might be a basement, there might
be a safe room something like that. But that is
(09:11):
a far far cry from uh, what what do we
have here? What's what's the biggest record? Jonathan fifty stories stories? Yeah,
imagine a fifty story skyscraper, but underground. I mean, if
you've ever seen a skyscraper being built, you know, this
is a process that takes some time. And we we
(09:32):
here at hell stuff works. We moved into this. You know,
we're in an office that has recently, over the last
maybe five or six years, seen a lot of growth
with the buildings around us, and so we've actually watched
year over year as skyscrapers were being built, and it
takes a really long time. Uh. And I know people
would say, yeah, but this is a top secret establishment,
(09:53):
you know, you they'd really pour a lot into it.
If you've ever seen the government at work, the US
government at work, speed is not one of the adjectives
you would typically use. Right where if the US everyone
is a superhero, it would probably not be the flash.
I mean, everyone knows that maybe the Blob. Yeah, I
was gonna go safe with Captain America. Well, all right,
(10:13):
I was he I was merely going to all the villains.
I was thinking the Blob or maybe the Jugger, not
you know, the Juggernauts. Cool though, that's a different podcast.
We We've got to get to one of the one
of the biggest things here, the biggest conspiracies we hear
about with Area fifty one. Well, first off, spoiler alert,
the real conspiracy is are their secret spy planes? Yes, yeah,
(10:38):
and that's exactly what it's for. And that's crazy. Yeah,
I mean that is the first off, the fact that
that can even be possible, it's kind of right now.
We talked in the last couple of podcasts about some
of the the aircraft that were under development there that
remains secret a good twenty years after they had finished testing,
(10:58):
and that's when they were unveiled. Uh. There was one
that that I think had a run from three to
eighty five something like that, and it wasn't it wasn't
acknowledged by the government until ninety six, which was the
first time anyone outside of that that program had seen it.
Um And I think that was maybe Tacit blue. But
it was one of those that just when you saw
(11:20):
the aircraft, you thought, wow, what a weird looking thing.
I can't believe that this remained secret. Granted they only
built two of them, and they were under strict rap
over at one. It never got further out from from
that area, Like even the tests would be done at night,
so it limited when the potential of even being spotted.
(11:41):
But they were the genuine articles of conspiracy were indeed
spotted in the sky. And that brings us to as
we were saying, the biggest part of the area, are
you talking us? Yeah? Yeah, Officially unidentified flying objects UFOs
(12:01):
more often than not, uh, they are attributed to being
alien as an extraterrestrial in nature, Area fifty one features
heavily and tons of different alien stories, both both the
kind that we see on the big screen, like Independence Day,
the famous sequence where they go down to Area fifty
(12:24):
one where they have uh, not just aliens, but they're
they're hardware that has been studied for years, and you know,
it's revealed that a lot of technology we depend upon
today has been reverse engineered from this alien technology. Still
can't build a decent spaceship though, no, we can't build
a decent spaceship. However, we have figured out that you
(12:44):
can introduce a computer virus as long as you have
an Apple MacBook laptop, which to this day, to this day,
my friend, that's still that's still bothered me. Yeah, yeah,
spoiler alert again, guys. But but yeah, so, so people
people started seeing UFOs, and it is correct to call
(13:05):
them that because I think there's one of the distinctions
that we're about to make, right. A UFO unidentified flying
object is simply that. Yeah, it just means that you
personally cannot identify what that object is. It doesn't mean
it's unidentify a ball. It may very well be that
there's a small group of people who know exactly what
(13:26):
that object is, like the like the stealth technology we
were just talking about. Those stealth programs when they were
under development, were strict secrets and only a few people,
relatively few people knew about them. Anyone outside that who
would have seen one of these aircraft flying around, naturally,
they would not be able to identify it. There was
no correlative they could say, oh, this looked like a
(13:49):
such and such. These things look really crazy. So calling
it a UFO is perfectly fine, you cannot identify it. Calling.
Making the leap from UFO to a IN is a
little bit of a problem. So this brings us to
probably the most famous alien incident in all of the
(14:10):
United States history. Something that is that factors into numerous,
I'd say dozens, if not hundreds, of different conspiracy theories,
the Roswell incident. Now, Roswell is in New Mexico, which,
for those of you who are not in the United States,
is a completely separate state from Nevada. It's in a
(14:32):
completely different place. And you know, sometimes there's a pet
peeve of mine, Jonathan, is that people often conflate Area
fifty one or Groom Lake and the incident in Roswell, Right,
and so two things that these are incidence separated both
in space and time. Right, Roswell, New Mexico is hundreds
(14:55):
of miles away from Area fifty one, like almost a
thou miles away, And I think it's somewhere around eight
hundred miles away and eight actually one thousand, four hundred
sixteen kilometers according to Google Maps. Thank you Google Maps
for letting me know how far apart Roswell, New Mexico
in Area fifty one are. That's exactly it. Uh So,
(15:15):
by the way, don't don't rely upon Google Maps for
turn by turn directions to Area fifty one. You know
you'll just end up in Las Vegas. Did you Did
you do it by d I did it by by driving,
although walking would have been hilarious. Walking would have been like,
at this point people are going to ask you to
turn around? Uh so, or at this point you've probably
died of dehydration. So the other thing I said was
(15:38):
that their separated by time. The Roswell incident happened on
July second, nineteen seven. So for those of you who
listened to our first episode about Area fifty one, you
remember that it was the mid nineteen fifties when the
c i A settled on Groom Lake as the the
future home of Area fifty one. It was when construction began,
(16:01):
So this is almost a decade apart when of these
two events. So then you have the The actual story
of the Roswell incident is that some people in Roswell,
New Mexico, I saw some strange floating objects that they
could not identify un identified flying objects. Sometimes they're referred
to as being kind of disc shaped, but part of
(16:21):
the problem is that we're so far distanced from the
initial event that the story has not remained consistent through
all the different retellings. Yeah, and I can speak to
a little bit of that because we have we have
some copies of the newspaper articles that changed, and because
they changed. Uh, there's a very interesting thing here. It's
(16:41):
the interpretation of that. Uh, people who believe that there
was some sort of extraterrestrial incident. Somebody, somebody managed to
drive a spacecraft well enough to get to Earth but
not well enough to stay above Earth, right, and then uh,
the news found out about it and they got shut
down there to change their story or did they just
(17:05):
correct the reporting when they had more information. That's a
that's a good question, Like did did some gentlemen wearing
black suits and sunglasses show up at the newspaper and
say you need to you need to address this. I mean,
and Jonathan, that's possible. But if it happened, it wasn't
because of aliens, That's right, So get moving on. We're
talking about the crash. Just spotting these objects in the
(17:28):
air wasn't the only thing that happened with Roswell incident.
What specifically went on from there was that some people
found debris on the ground and it was described as
being shiny and metallic in nature. No one was really
sure what it was actually made of at the time,
and so this this incident started to become embellished upon
(17:50):
over time. In fact, there's some versions of the story
where they didn't just find physical debris from some flying object,
but also bodies. And this is where we get into
the alien stuff, where supposedly there were these bodies of
creatures that had unusual features and they were whisked away
by the government. Uh. And ultimately some people say that
(18:13):
that's they went to Area fifty one. The purpose was
not to study strange materials, although we did eventually get
some Soviet aircraft at Area fifty one where they were
tested like the bigs, But it's not meant to be
a scientific laboratory. That's not the purpose of Every fifty one.
So it would make no sense to send any kind
(18:34):
of extraterrestrials there. It also doesn't make sense to send
extra terrestrial bodies to a place that hasn't been built yet.
That's a that's a big one. That's a it's a
bump in the Yeah, it's a little bit of a
little bit of a problem with the story. Now what
the official story from the government was that the debris
came from weather balloons and that there were no bodies.
(18:57):
In fact, that we should stay right now, there's no
evid it's at all that anyone ever came across a body.
That was something that was added to this story over time. Yeah, sorry, guys.
That autopsy on YouTube is most likely a hope. It's
it's yeah, there there are some special effects UH experts
(19:19):
who have actually commented on it and somewhat derisively. So
we're like, like, they should have hired me. I could
have done a much better job. But there is there
There is no no hard evidence that there was even
from the debris they found when they were looking at it,
because there really was debris, right and they really did
find it, but they didn't find enough to have built
(19:41):
an entire thing, yeah, to carry a person. You know this.
So the official story from the government was at these
were weather balloons. They were meant specifically to UH to
study the weather at high altitudes. Now, as it turns out,
that's not the real story. But we will get to
there in a second. We'll be back to talk about
more mythology of Area fifty one in just a moment. So, uh,
(20:13):
this was one of those things where people were saying,
it doesn't look like any weather balloon I've ever seen,
which is true. It did. I've seen both balloons and
the weathers, and this is neither of those two things.
So moving on to the the you know, kind of
looking at the story another way. One version of this
that I was not aware of until a friend of
(20:34):
the show, Nate Lenkson, he's the editor of Wired Dot
Code Dot uk. Uh. He he turned me on to this.
I had never heard about this. It's a book written
by Annie Jacobson called Area fifty one and Uncensored History
of America's top secret military base. Now full disclosure, I
have not read this book yet. I read a synopsis
(20:57):
of the book and a synopsis of the story we're
about the cover, So this may not actually be accurate
to the book itself. I want to make that clear.
I've also heard that most of the book is pretty
much what we covered in our first two episodes of
the podcast, a very thorough description of the history of
Vera fifty one. But there's a section apparently devoted to
(21:19):
the Roswell incident and every fifty one supposed involvement in that,
in which the story gets even weirder, I think than aliens.
And this story involves Nazis and communists, so you know,
it's only missing Indiana Jones to make it really a
Hollywood film. So the story that she tells according to
(21:41):
a source, I don't know what her source was, Yeah,
a source. I don't know if she names the source
in the book. The synopsis, I said, said anonymous, But
again I haven't read the book. But according to the synopsis,
the story is that a Nazi doctor, Joseph Mingla, actually
the s S officer who survived the World War two
(22:04):
and then and then eventually escaped to South America, that
Mingola had worked on behalf of Joseph Stalin doing these
horrific procedures on children, resulting in children around the age
of twelve with abnormally shaped heads, large eyes that are
of an odd shape, and that the whole idea was
(22:25):
that they were going to pilot some simple aircraft to
fly around the United States and land and essentially star
crap up, yeah, scare people, Yeah, exactly, this idea that
they would this idea that they would fake aliens. Yeah,
in order to create a panic, essentially doing a war
(22:46):
of the World's type event, uh, one step closer to
reality or of the world's For those who don't remember
or don't know what this is, um, it was a
an Orson Wells project, a radio program that was portrayed
in such a way that people who tuned in, without
knowing that it was actually a fictionalized radio program, began
(23:09):
to think that there was actually, uh, an alien invasion happening.
It was this sort of famous little blip on the
radar of of people freaking out because they weren't aware that,
in fact, it was a fictional account, uh, something that
we still see today, uh with things like Mermaids. At
(23:29):
any rate. That's enough commentary on that. But yeah, the uh,
the story that she relays is that Mingola had done
these these horror horrific procedures and that the bodies found
at the Roswal incidant, which remember, there was never any
evidence that bodies were found were in fact human children
(23:50):
that then were whisked away. I think there are some
big problems with this particular story. Problem. No one Mingola
was on the run from the Soviets, he did not.
I mean, the Soviets were the ones who were who
were approaching when Hitler committed suicide, right, they'd rather than
be captured by the Soviets. Um Hitler committed suicide, and
(24:12):
Mingola was trying to escape with records that he had,
uh he had created at Auschwitz. Um So, he eventually
escaped Germany. He did at one point go back into
Soviet occupied territory in order to retrieve some of these documents,
but he evaded capture and eventually escaped to South America
(24:34):
and then moved around quite a bit while Uh yeah, yeah,
he was being he was being pursued by agents both
Soviet and American. And so it's unlikely that he would
have collaborated with Joseph Stalin and certainly unlikely that he
would have been allowed to escape. Yeah, the Soviets. Um So,
(24:57):
that already is a problem. Secondly, it would be a
real problem that the idea of people being fooled long
enough to not realize these were humans, right, Yeah, And
then there's the other there's the other question. Why would
they crash there and not in a more occupied place.
Why not in New York City or something like that why, um,
(25:19):
you know they probably get spotted. But then also, and
this this is a cruel thing to say, but why
would you specifically need that one very evil man to
do that sort of operation? Right? Exactly, It's not like
if you're going to if you're going to do something
so inhuman, uh is there I mean, narratively it's a
(25:45):
great story in the sense that there only one person
is this twisted to pull this off? But in reality
we know, unfortunately that's not the case that if you
really did have the the will to do something this horrible,
you could probably do without having to to go after
the devil himself. Right, I mean, the whole story is
(26:06):
is meant to appeal to our dark imaginations, and it's
a terrible thing, but it's also one of those things
that you could say, yeah, I can imagine this actually
playing out in some way. Ultimately, you also have to
ask the question, what's the effect you're going for? If
the effect you're going for is to cause a panic,
I can't think of anything that would have caused a
bigger panic than having Soviet airmen being able to land
(26:28):
in U. S. Territory without any alien cover story. You
don't need that to cause a scare. There's really no
benefit here, like the the the entire operation does not
seem to have an actual return on investments, so it
doesn't make sense from that perspective either. So the Nazis
(26:51):
that are involved in in some other conspiracy theories about
Avery fifty one, like the the UFOs that are seen
are product of, you know, Nazi experiments towards the close
of the war. And a lot of that comes from
a very real, uh and kind of frightening thing that
(27:11):
the United States did with Operation paper Clip, which you
know about when they brought over some surviving scientists from
Germany right right right when you're when you're when you
get the rockets scientists specifically who worked over in Germany
to then come to the United States and continue their
work in science and and rocketry and specifically, but now
(27:34):
they're working for a different boss. They're working with the
United States government, uh and partly because they're getting guarantees
from the U. S Government that they won't be tried
as criminals for their work for the Nazi regime. So yeah,
there's certain real, real things that were happening in history
that we're probably enough to help fuel this kind of
(27:54):
conspiracy here in the United States. But you know, you
didn't have to look far to see real instances of
some pretty shady dealings on both sides, uh, but without
having to make stuff upright and now, Also one thing
that didn't help the government's case, and as far as
(28:15):
their official story goes, is that it turned out they
they were telling the truth, but telling it slant, as
Emily Dickinson would say, right they were. They were not
weather balloons that were being uh deployed out over in
New Mexico. There were balloons though, Yeah, there were balloons
that were part of a spy program called Project Mogul,
(28:36):
which was a top secret experiment using high altitude balloons
that were carrying microphones. And the idea was the microphones
would be able to detect sounds from Soviet nuclear tests,
so that we in the United States would have a
clue when that was going on, and we that would
help us kind of know how far along the Soviets
(28:57):
were with their nuclear program compared to our own nuclear program.
So there was again this need for secrecy. We didn't
want the Soviets to know that we, in fact had
developed this technology to listen out for uh, these these
sound waves, um, because we didn't want them to try
and come up with different ways of testing their nuclear
arms and therefore hiding it from us, so reverse engineering
(29:20):
it and hearing what we're doing exactly. That's also another
another good point. So the cover story of weather balloons
was necessary to protect the secrecy of the spy program,
but it had nothing to do with aliens. It had
everything to do with spying it. Maybe it might have
even been to the government's benefit that people were latching
on to the aliens story because it took attention away
(29:41):
from what it was really meant to do. So there's
not a whole lot of incentive upon the government's part
to come out and say specifically, guys, no, it's not aliens,
because it helped keep the attention away. But you don't
want it to You don't want that story to run
rampant either, because it could legitimately causing either a panic
(30:02):
or just a growing distrust in the government itself. Sure,
and they don't need any help. That's regardless of what
what what your political beliefs are. We speaking of beliefs,
this is going to be a lot of fun for
me personally, I think for you too. Because one thing
that always keeps the Area fifty one legends alive is
(30:26):
that there. It seems like every year there's someone who
comes out and says, well, I was person exit place.
Why I know the truth, Ryan, Now I will finally
reveal it. And you're thinking of someone specific in this case, right,
I am specifically thinking of Bob Lazar. Yeah, Robert Lazar
(30:49):
or Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on a
project in which the military had come into possession of
alien technology, and his job was to reverse engineer that
al and technology to learn how it works so that
we could take advantage of that tech here on Earth
and thus kind of leap forward what would normally be
the process of developing TEX so instead of you know,
(31:11):
constantly testing and improving and refining, we could jump straight ahead,
you know, skip eight steps in that process and jump
straight to you know, miraculous smartphones that react to our touch,
that kind of thing. And so he claimed that he
had worked at a facility that was near Groom Lake,
so not technically at Area fifty one, but adjacent to it.
(31:33):
It was the real secret place. It's called S four. Yeah,
it's it's so secret that it didn't even get a
full name. Um, it just gets a letter and a
number of designation and it's he said that it housed
no fewer than nine spacecraft. Uh. Here's the thing that
a lot of his his claims to his background don't
check out right. Like he he claims to have advanced
(31:55):
degrees from m I. T and from cal Tech, but
there's no record of him there. Now. Granted, some people
say that that's evidence of the conspiracy. Yeah, that in fact,
this shows that the government was so interested in keeping
it a secret that they have wiped clean his background.
Although to do that you would also have to white
clean the memories of every professor and every student who
(32:17):
would have also attended. And you see that this this
kind of domino effect. How how wide those ripples would
have to go in order for this to remain an
effective secret? It becomes unmanageable at some point. Wouldn't it
be easier at this point? My question would be for
many of these cases is why did someone go to
(32:39):
so such great links to keep you alive? Because from
from a government's perspective, we know that if they're picking
one kind of skull degree, they'll pick the easier one,
which is usually an assisted fall off a building or
something like that. You know, assassination is just off the table, right,
then that can ever be done? Like, yeah, how do
(33:01):
you how do you uh, if it did come down
to there's this one person who has tons of information,
like it's essentially Snowden. Yeah, there's Edward Snowden of Area
fifty one, who is ready, he has access to all
the information. He's ready to spill the beans. Um, and
you want to discredit him, you don't go to every
(33:23):
single person in his past. Don't tell anybody about this, right, Yeah,
it's just it's just not practical, right, It's it's it
would be a monumental task. So essentially what we're getting
round too is that lazars Um his claims to his
his credentials are suspect, right, and that that is a
(33:43):
very diplomatic way to put it. Of course, you know,
we're also showing that his side of it is that
someone is a racing his past to discredit him. As
as you said, you know, Jonathan, recently, Mr Lazar in
the past few years went uh back into the public
eye now I mean, I guess more into the mainstream
(34:03):
public eye, and he was asked to react to the
CIA's official admittance uh of area fifty ones existence, which
as we know, it didn't happen for a little while.
And uh he said he was not impressed because this
was a very tiny baby step forward. I think that's
the quote he used. And uh he was waiting for
(34:26):
them to reveal S four, which is the site he
says he worked at reverse engineering these things. Now, he
has many, many claims. Uh. He speaks at length about
interspecial politics, about injuries he's suffered by technology that we
won't hear about for several decades. Uh. But I I
(34:50):
really like the point you made that. Um. One of
the other things people who believe him see his proof
is um what they perceive as a inexplicable jump in technology,
right right, Well, the truth is that if you look
at any technology closely enough, you will see incremental improvements.
It's very, very rare that we have someone come out
(35:14):
with a brand new piece of technology that has no
precedent to it, right, Yeah, exactly, Television, perfect example. So, yeah,
you look at these things like television was really building
upon the developments of radio, and you think, okay, well
what about Tesla and Marconi. Well they were working on
research that had preceded them as well. These are all
(35:35):
if you if you really dig down into it, you know,
you look at the invention of the light bulb, you
look at all of these sort of inventions that we
we take for granted. We like the stories that say
this inventor came up with this idea and implemented it,
and now it exists and before it never did. Usually
the truth is much more complicated, with lots of different
things leading into that invention, including earlier invention that may
(36:00):
not have been practical but showed a working concept, and
then this other inventor like Thomas Edison comes along and
takes that takes that concept and makes it practical. So
now it's something that we can actually use as opposed
to just a cool idea, but we didn't know how
to to you know, capitalize on it. So you know,
(36:20):
I think most of the advances we've seen over the
over the decades have been examples of this where people
have made incremental improvements and maybe grab together multiple pieces
of technology and then and then package them in such
a way that it's a really compelling piece of tech.
But if you break it down component by component, you
(36:41):
start to see the actual process of this creating something,
refining it, tweaking and putting it out again, refining it again.
I don't see any enormous leaps where someone has jumped
well ahead of everywhere else. Maybe Claude Shan and his uh,
his computer science with using binary logic, his approach to
(37:07):
computer science was pretty much fully formed. But that's kind
of similar to Albert Einstein and his theories of relativity.
These were ideas that both men had developed over years,
and then they presented them as complete pictures. So to us,
the outsiders, it looks like a person just came up
with a brilliant process, fully formed instantaneously. The truth is
(37:28):
it actually took several years to build that up, and
even then they were building on previous thoughts and knowledge.
They were just incorporating it in a new way. Yeah,
but what about the lasers. Okay, so lasers are an issue, right, Um,
I'm glad you brought up lasers. One of the things
that have has often been attributed to Area fifty one
(37:49):
is energy weapons. So this ties into the strategic defense initiative,
often referred to derisively as star wars. Yeah, this was
the Graham in the nineteen eighties, and I promise that
I will do an episode about the Star Wars program
that will go into full detail. I know, I've got
a lot of listeners who have asked me to do it,
(38:11):
and I really want to at some point, but it's
gonna be a little bit further down the road. But
it's um. You know. The whole idea was that it
was going to be a system that would shoot down
incoming i C b M S intercontinental ballistic missiles. This
was the height of the Cold War nineteen eighties. I mean,
propaganda was ridiculous in both the Soviet Union and the
United States. I grew up in that era, and I remember,
(38:32):
like the Russians being the bad guys all the time,
you know, from from uh everything from Red Dawn to
Rocky four. So anyway, um, or was it three? It
might have been three Rocky three? Uh. At any rate,
the the idea here was that the energy weapons that
would shoot down these missiles were supposedly under development at
Area fifty one. Again not really the purpose for Area
(38:55):
fifty one. I mean you could you could understand them,
uh testing such a vice because that is kind of
what they were doing. But they were mostly testing airborne things,
not not ground to air technology. It was mostly aircraft
that they were really focusing on, and not offensive aircraft,
just spycraft. Yeah, I mean, there are some of the
(39:16):
drones they worked on probably had offensive but yeah, it
was it was mostly again, it was mostly reconnaissance type stuff.
We've got more to say about the mythology of area
fifty one after this quick break. So then you have
(39:36):
the weather control devices, another very popular conspiracy theory of it. So,
first of all, we don't have any technology powerful enough
to control the weather. Weather is an incredibly chaotic system
that we do not fully understand it. Before you can
under before you can really control something, you have to
at least have some understanding of how it works. Now,
(39:57):
people have conducted experiments with weather manipulation, things like influence it,
like seeding clouds, that kind of thing. But even this,
we can't be fully sure how effective they are, right,
Because here's the problem is that you can't you can't
have a scientific consensus on whether or not something is
effective unless you're able to have a control group. And
(40:19):
you can't really have a control group with whether I
mean you can you can have as close to the same, uh,
kind of elements in play in two different and two
different instances, and one you seed the cloud and one
you don't, and then you see how much rain results.
But even then again, whether it's such a complex system
that you can't you can't be completely certain that the
(40:42):
seeding is the effective agent, right, And you know the
problem with whether is it's a chaotic system that is
one massive cluster of systems. So any two points you
pick are ultimately in the same system, so are they
really is there a control tough and stuff. And then
on top of that, you know things like HARP, which
(41:03):
I'm sure you guys have talked about, which was designed
to to actually look at interactions in the ionosphere. Now,
the isonosphere around Earth can conduct electricity. In fact, when
we get a big electrical impulse in there from something
like a solar flare or coronal mass ejection, it can
make the auroras at the polls really active because that's
(41:26):
that's kind of the convergence point for this electric field.
And uh, and so there's certainly things that interact with
atmospheric um phenomena, but we still can't control the weather there.
Now it doesn't help. I'm just gonna be honest with you, Jonathan,
it does not help uh to dispel any of the
(41:46):
speculation about places like HARP, you know, when it was
an operation, because the descriptions from from the government and
from HARP about what they were doing we're just cartooniously
vague in some ways. So, yeah, it's a high frequency
active auroral research program, which already you're you're thinking, they're
(42:06):
at least a couple of words in there that I'm
not entirely sure what they're supposed to mean. Um. And
it really was about beaming energy into the ionosphere. To
the goal for HARP, at least on the government side,
that the military funded side, was can we use the
ionosphere as a conduit through which we can communicate with
distant vehicles like submarines that are under the water. I mean,
(42:28):
they really were hoping that this would be a way
of doing that. The scientists at HARP were mostly thinking,
if we can keep getting funding for what we want
to do, which is to study the ionosphere, then we
should try and keep that door open for the possibility
that this could be a communications tool, even if we
don't think it will really work. So um, which happens. Yeah,
(42:50):
that's that's essentially what happened with HARP. And then eventually
the military said, you know what, we're done and they
pulled the funding. So that was the story of HARP. Well,
a lot of those same stories apply to Area fifty one,
but there's no evidence that there were any weather control
systems under development. There's certainly no evidence that anything ever
did any actual weather manipulation. So uh yeah, yeah, that
(43:14):
just doesn't that doesn't really fly. Um. And then if
there's a piece of tech and science fiction, there's a
chance that there's at least some story out there that
there's something like that underdevelopment at Area fifty one. You know,
warp coils, teleporters, phasers, whatever you want to think about.
I realized I was focusing mainly on Star Trek there,
but but really all of that has at some time
(43:36):
or another been attributed to area. Warp drives, uh, teleportation devises, lightsabers, Yeah, okay,
thank you. No, we've got story guards, you know, we've
got there. So moving on another another host of conspiracy
theories around Area fifty one don't have so much to
do with what was actually going on at the facility,
(43:57):
but rather the mysterious chef do we organizations that were
behind it all. Yeah, like the real life Smoking Man exactly. Yeah.
So a lot of these conspiracy theories involve organizations that
have no official um uh designation, or they don't they
aren't officially acknowledged by the government, right. So some of
(44:19):
them have a designation, but they're not you know, they're
they're not in any government files because that's how secret
they are. And alleged designation. Yeah. So here the big
one for area of fifty one at least is the
Majestic Twelve. Majestic twelve is a group that existed many
years ago, according to the conspiracy lore, and included people
(44:42):
like President Truman as well as the head of CIA
and also like top businessmen, like essentially the most powerful
people in the United States at that time, and that
their purpose was to solidify power and control worldwide, right
like this was gonna be like the Trilateral Commission was
often referred to as being the secret organization for these
(45:03):
sort of purposes, which is not what it was for
um uh. There are other organizations that are meant to
be like think tanks that have often been kind of
compared to this sort of the Majestic Twelve however, is
one that appears to have been completely fabricated. Uh. There
was a UFO enthusiast named William L. Moore who produced
(45:23):
papers that he claimed proved the group's existence, But a
lot of people who have looked at these papers have
said that they don't hold up to scrutiny, That the
signatures that are there appeared to have been copied from
other documents and then pasted into them into the Majestic twelve,
the MJ twelve papers, uh, and that there does not
appear to be any sort of evidence supporting the existence
(45:46):
of such an organization. So if your organization isn't real,
then chances are it's not actually the secret one behind area.
So the so, the the idea that has become you know,
common currency in a lot of these beliefs is that
in J twelve did exist, but was had its world
(46:10):
rocked when news of the extraterrestrial crash in hit them.
And then they've they've spent the next few decades, um,
you know what, more and more I think maybe X
files was inspired some of these well, you know, and
it's very like m J twelve shares a lot of
the same kind of traits as other shadowy, conspiratorial uh,
(46:33):
most likely fictional organization. It's a trope. It's right up
there with things like the Illuminati, for example. Uh. Then
you have some real people who really do exist that
have kind of helped fuel the mystique around Area fifty one,
not necessarily, you know, purposefully setting out to define the mystique,
but they're part of it. And those are the Camo dudes.
(46:55):
That's that's what the folks in the Area fifty one
u biz, the people who like to watch Area fifty one,
not the ones who are actually working there. What they
referred to these guys as Camo dudes because they tend
to be wearing a desert camouflage outfits. You know, they're
out in Nevada, so they're wearing these these kind of
desert cam outfits. They travel in pairs, usually in in
(47:18):
four wheel drive vehicles, and they are, uh, the perimeter
guards essentially is what they serve as. So if someone
starts to come close to the Area fifty one borders,
then they may end up encountering a pair of these
Camo dudes who tend to not appear to be military.
(47:39):
The best guess is, in fact, they are probably part
of some contract group that ends up doing security for
things like military installations. So not not official military personnel,
but rather private citizens who are part of a contractor
and their job is to um to firmly suggest to
(48:00):
people that they should go somewhere else rather than than
try and get footage of the area. I have a
quotation for you from an incident. This is published in
the Huffington's post. A UFO conspiracy film crew was detained
at gunpoint at the Air fifty one Gate in two
thousand twelve. Here's here's the quotation. According to a crew member,
(48:23):
a camouflage dress guard carrying an M sixteen told a
member of this team, we could make you disappear and
your body will never be found. Uh. I'm gonna go
ahead and say maybe they're playing it up, but the
point is that, yes, you're not supposed to be there.
As we said in the first PEW podcast, don't don't
(48:44):
try to go you guys. Yeah, most of the most
of the reports I've read didn't have a point where
the the Camo dudes were actively aiming weapons in their direction,
but rather they were they were visibly armed. Yeah, so
that's one thing, you know. I was certainly they were armed,
but they weren't. I don't remember reading a whole lot
(49:04):
of them either brandishing their weapons like as far as
I recall, most of the incidents involved their weapons being holstered.
But they have in the past, according to a lot
of reports, confiscated film back when film was a thing,
or demanded to have various equipment turned over to them.
Because again, the facility is all about spy aircraft, so
(49:28):
you don't want footage leaking of either the facility or
the aircraft that are under development there. Um, So it's
not necessarily that big of a mystery, but the fact
that you have these guys who are not easily identifiable
as belonging to a specific United States government organization, that
definitely adds to that mystery. And they're not identifying themselves.
(49:48):
And also to be candid in in some cases not all,
but in some cases if you were making a film,
then you want to have that sort of con flick.
So it it's also possible that in some cases these
are the threat as it is as it is is
um embellished, or it's possible that people are purposefully agitating
(50:14):
the guards. Yeah, it's it's definitely without being there. We
can't say for sure, but that but but both scenarios
seem to be plausible to me, Right, I don't know
what really unfolded. It may be that the truth is
somewhere in between those two those two scenarios, right, But
you can't accidentally end up there, no, you purposefully We're
trying to get there. And this is clearly an area
(50:36):
that is off limits. Uh, and is you know, is
legally off limits? Some people are and you know, we
talked about that in the second episode of the history
about how Area fifty one gets a whole lot of
legal leeway um in in ways that other places in
the United States simply do not, and that that will
(50:57):
also adds to this curiosity we have of Area fifty one.
I think we've really covered kind of what drives that,
the fact that, you know, human beings are curious, right,
we want to know things. When we see something that
we do not understand, Often one of our earliest responses
is how does that work? Or what is going on here?
(51:18):
What's really happening? Unless it's really scary, and which is
where's the closest exit? And can I run faster than
ben Um because you don't have to run the fastest, No,
just faster than the slowest person. As long as I'm
not the slowest person in the office, I'm still got
a chance. Yeah, So I can certainly see and I
(51:39):
feel it too. I mean I certainly have this curiosity
about Area fifty one. Heck, just just going from the
baseline most mundane description of what's going on there, there's
still so many questions like, how do they how do
they really maintain that level of secrecy. How much does
the typical worker at Area fifty one know about what's
(51:59):
going on? How do they make sure that people working
on one project remain oblivious to everything else that's happening.
How do they schedule these things? What is it like
being a pilot for one of these aircraft? I mean,
there are a lot of questions that we don't have
the answers too. So I think, uh, you know, it
was a lot of fun tackling this this subject, and
(52:21):
I think it really did merit the three episodes because
it is such a touchstone for everything from the political
ideology from the nineteen fifties forward to just a pop
culture you know touchstone, right, It's it's like that's that's
the go to for science fiction. Now I have a
question for you. Absolutely when and now that we have,
(52:44):
along with the rest of the tech stuff audience explored
stem discern the the ideas and the reality and the
miss very fifty one, I have to ask you, what
would you do if one of the you know, if
one of the strangest things turned out to be true.
You know, I like to I would like to think
(53:04):
that I'm the type of skeptic who, when presented with
incontrovertible evidence that something I believe to be true is
in fact not true, and that something I thought was
just purely made up is in fact the truth, that
I would be able to accept it. Saying that and
actually doing it are two different things, right, I don't
(53:25):
know if that's how I would truly react. I'd like
to think that if suddenly there was just pure evidence
that in fact the Roswell incident involved aliens, and that
the aliens were in fact Holstad Area fifty one, and
all of these crazy conspiracy theories were actually true, I
like to believe that I would be able to say,
you know what, I never would have bought into this,
(53:48):
but it turns out it was right. And I was wrong.
I'd like to think I could do that. I think
you would. I like, okay, incontrovertible evidence then would have
to be something like aliens landing at your house and
saying like, hey, guys, have you seen our buddies? They
showed up maybe I don't know, you know, seventy earth
years ago something around there. Yeah, they checked their watch
(54:10):
for seventy earth years ago and they're big fans of
text stuff, and so they heard that we had done
an episode. Yeah, I feel like you're the kind of
guy would go, huh, well, yeah, okay, I guess let
me let me call my boss. I would be like,
some of um, all right, Well, it turns out I
was a big fat head and I was wrong about everything.
(54:31):
That's not everything. But also, yeah, it is true that
there is, at least there are several conspiracies that we're
at work at Area fifty one, and we've we've explored those,
and I guess what what I would want people to
take away from this is that there really is amazing
strange science fiction, action thriller movie level stuff there. It
(54:53):
just may not be what people are claiming. It is, right,
that doesn't mean it's you know, not interesting. It certainly is,
and it's uh, it's really again an evidence of human
achievement for both an engineering side and just a secrecy
keeping side, because it's really hard to keep those secrets.
So I do suspect that they do that by managing
(55:14):
how many people are allowed to know any one thing
at any one time, otherwise you know, loose lips. I
hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. I
really enjoy reading, writing researching about Area fifty one. One
of my favorite articles I ever wrote for How Stuff
Works back when I was writing for them, was on
how Area fifty one works. It was also one of
(55:36):
my longest articles I ever wrote, to the point where
my editor was suggesting that I cut out a couple
of segments, but I felt like it really added, you know,
some character and flavor to the piece, so I fought
for it and ultimately it all went in. I honestly
don't know if that paid off. I was not looking
at the analytics for that article. Maybe people dropped off
way before then, but it was it was a fun
(55:58):
experience and I'm glad we got a chance to revisit
it tomorrow. You will have a new episode of Smart
Talks with IBM in this feed, and then on Friday
you will hear the episode that I've been working on
but has so far been a little slow to come together.
I can't tell you what it's about just yet, except
I'll say, Darlin, it's better downwards wetter under the sea.
(56:22):
But that's as much as I can say. All right.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on
tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a trend
in tech, you know a specific product, maybe let me
know send me a message. Best way to do that
as on Twitter. The handle for the show is text
stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again
(56:45):
really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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