The Mythology of Area 51

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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from stuff Com.
Hey there, everyone, welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
and joining me once again is Mr Ben Bolan of
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know, as well as
a myriad of other projects. Here at how Stuff Works
then welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited

(00:27):
to reach the last installment of this trilogy, but I'm
a little bit sad too. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's
always that moment of elation because you have the the
the conclusion, right. But it's okay. I'm here to tell
you right now that just like Return of the King
and Laura the Rings, there are going to be nine
separate endings to this podcast. So so the farewells will

(00:51):
not be you know, sudden, It'll be nice and drawn
out over a painful length of time. We are, in
fact going to be concluding our trilogy. You have 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 was

(01:13):
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, let's

(01:33):
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

(01:56):
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

(02:18):
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 goldilock zone

(02:38):
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

(03:03):
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

(03:23):
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 that means that you're

(03:45):
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

(04:06):
can't say more sense, but you'll 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

(04:28):
that you end up 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, at heart of valuable instinct to have, right,

(04:52):
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 these things sincerely do believe this.

(05:17):
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 either they latch onto

(05:38):
something that is actually true or they've got part of
the story. So just because something is a theory 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 the Area one. There's the

(05:59):
men 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. It
goes all the way up into space, but there are
satellites since the nineteen eighties that have taken multiple images

(06:22):
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 it above ground, so you
have to go below. But this raises some logistical issues, right, Yeah,

(06:46):
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 about it because they would have been the
ones digging. Yeah, I mean, and digging is a big deal.

(07:06):
You're talking about subterranean network. That's a lot of earth
that you have to move. And not 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 a logistical issue, and
it's an enormous type of endeavor to undertake. I mean,

(07:30):
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 it would have required
such a huge investment and manpower let alone. I don't

(07:53):
even think about the cost financially, just the practical manpower
necessary to make it. It's not likely. And there there
as 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, when you
think of the engineering challenge that represents and the construction

(08:17):
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, because it's not
just plausible, but it is probable that there is some

(08:39):
sort of below the ground construction at Roswell in excuse me,
at 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 a far far
cry from uh, what what do we have here? What's
what's the big record? Jonathan fifty stories stories. Yeah, imagine

(09:04):
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 hear
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

(09:25):
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,
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

(09:45):
you would typically use. If the US everyone is a superhero,
it would probably not be the Flash. Everyone knows that
maybe the Blob. Yeah, I was going to go safe
with Captain America. Well, all right, I was he I
was merely going to all the villain. So I was
thinking of Blob or maybe the juggernat you know the Juggernauts.
Cool though that's a different podcast. We We've got to

(10:07):
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, and that's 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. Right.

(10:31):
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,
and that's when they were unveiled. Uh. There was one
that that I think had a run from eighty three
to eighty five something like that, and it wasn't it

(10:51):
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 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

(11:13):
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.
But they were, the genuine articles of conspiracy were indeed
spotted in the sky. And that brings us to, as

(11:34):
we were saying, the biggest part of the area fifty
are you talking us? Yeah, yeah, officially unidentified flying objects
UFOs more often than not, uh, they are attributed to
being alien as an extraterrestrial in nature. Area fifty one

(11:55):
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 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

(12:18):
we depend upon today has been reverse engineered from this
alien technology. Still can't build a decent spaceship. Though now
we can't build a decent spaceship. However, we have figured
out that you 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 still

(12:39):
bothered me. Uh yeah, spoiler alert again, guys. But but yeah, so,
so people people started seeing UFOs, and it is correct
to call 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

(13:00):
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 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

(13:23):
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
such and such. These things looked really crazy. So calling
it a UFO is perfectly fine. You cannot identify it.
Calling making the leap from UFO to alien is a

(13:44):
little bit of a problem. So this brings us to
probably the most famous alien UH incident in all of
United States history, something that 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

(14:09):
those of you who are not in the United States,
is a completely separate state from Nevada. It's in a
completely different place. And you know, sometimes it'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

(14:33):
in space and time. Right, Roswell, New Mexico is hundreds
of miles away from Area fifty one, like almost a
thousand miles away. I think it's somewhere around eight hundred
miles away and actually one thousand, four hundred sixteen kilometers
according to Google Maps. Thank you Google Maps for letting

(14:53):
me know how far apart Roswell, New Mexico in Area
fifty one are. That's exactly it. So, by the wait,
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.
I did it by by driving. All the walking would
have been hilarious. Walking would have been like, at this

(15:14):
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 that their separated
by time. The Roswell Incident happened on July second, nineteen
forties 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 CIA settled

(15:37):
on Groom Lake as the the future home of Area
fifty one. It was like the nive was when construction began.
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

(15:57):
could not identify on identified flying objects. Sometimes they're referred
to as being kind of disc shaped. But part of
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

(16:22):
they changed. Uh, there's a very interesting thing here. It's
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.

(16:45):
They had to change their story. Or did they just
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, Jonathan,
that's but if it happened, it wasn't because of aliens,

(17:06):
That's right. So get moving on. We're talking about the crash.
Just spotting these objects in the 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. UM, and so this,

(17:29):
this incident started to become embellished upon 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

(17:50):
unusual features and they were whisked away by the government. Uh.
And ultimately some people say that 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

(18:10):
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 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 road. Yeah,
it's a little bit of a little bit of a
problem with the story. Now what the official story from

(18:36):
the government was that the debris came from weather balloons
and that there were no bodies in fact that we
should stay right now, there's no evidence 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

(18:58):
it's it's yeah, there there are special effects uh experts
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,

(19:19):
because there really was debris, right, and they really did
find it, but they didn't find enough to have built
an entire thing, Yeah, to carry a person, you know.
Now 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

(19:41):
get to there in a second. So, uh, 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 didn't. I've seen both balloons and the weather. This
is neither of those two things. So moving on to
the the you know, kind of looking at the story

(20:02):
another way. One version of this that I was not
aware of until a friend of 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

(20:23):
secret military base. Now full disclosure, I have not read
this book yet. I read a synopsis 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

(20:44):
thorough description of the history of Very fifty one. But
there's a section apparently devoted to the Roswell incident and
Every fifty one supposed involvement in that, in which the
story gets even weirder, I think than alien And this
story involves Nazis and Communists, so you know, it's only

(21:05):
missing Indiana Jones to make it really a Hollywood film.
So the story that she tells according to a source,
I don't know what her source was. I don't 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,

(21:26):
the story is that a Nazi doctor, Joseph Mingola, actually
the s S officer who survived the World War two
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

(21:50):
of twelve with abnormally shaped heads, large eyes that are
of an odd shape, and that the whole idea was
that they were going to pilot some simple full 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,

(22:15):
in order to create a panic, essentially doing a War
of the World's type event. Uh, one step closer to
reality for War of the Worlds. 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

(22:36):
without knowing that it was actually a fictionalized radio program,
began 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,

(22:57):
something that we still see today with things like Mermaids.
At 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 incident, which remember, there was
never any evidence that bodies were found were in fact

(23:20):
human children that then were whisked away. I think there's
some big problems with this particular story. Problem Number 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

(23:44):
Mingola was trying to escape with records that he had uh,
he had created an at Auschwitz. Um, so he eventually
escaped Germany. He did at one point go back into
Soviet occupied territory in order to trieve some of these documents,
but he evaded capture and eventually escaped to South America

(24:07):
and then moved around quite a bit while on the run. 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. Um, so that

(24:29):
already is a problem. Secondly, it would be a real
problem 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,

(24:51):
you know, they probably get spotted. But then also, and
this this is a cruel thing to say, but why
would you secifically need that one very evil man to
do that sort of operation? Right? 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

(25:17):
a 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 it without having to
to go after the devil himself, right. I mean, the
whole story is is meant to appeal to our dark imaginations,

(25:41):
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
in US territory without any alien cover story. You don't

(26:06):
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. The Nazis that are involved
in in some other conspiracy theories about Area fifty one,

(26:27):
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 the United States
did with Operation paper Clip, which you know about when

(26:48):
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 and science
and and rocketry and specifically, but now they're working for
a different boss. They're working for the United States government. Uh,

(27:10):
and partly because they're getting guarantees from the US government
that they won't be tried as criminals for their work
for the Nazi regime. So yeah, there's certain reality, real
things that were happening in history that we're probably enough
to help fuel this kind of conspiracy here in the
United States. But you know, you didn't have to look

(27:31):
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 their official story goes,
is that it turned out they they were telling the

(27:53):
truth but telling its slant, as Emily Dickinson would say, right,
they were. They were not weather balloons that were being
uh deployed out over in New Mexico. Yeah, there were
balloons that were part of a spy program called Project Mogul,
which was a top secret experiment using high altitude balloons
that were carrying microphones. And the idea was the microphones

(28:16):
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
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

(28:38):
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 engineering it
and hearing what we're doing exactly. That's also another another
good point. So the cover story of weather balloons was

(28:58):
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 from
what it was really meant to do. So there's not
a whole lot of incentive upon the government's part to

(29:20):
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 start causing either a
panic or just a growing distrust in the government itself. Sure,
and they don't need any help. That's regardless of what

(29:41):
what uh what your political beliefs are we speaking of beliefs.
This is going to be a lot of fun for
me personally, I think for YouTube because one thing that
always keeps the area fifty one legends alive is that there.
It seems like every year there's someone who comes out

(30:02):
and says, well, I was person exit place, why I
know the truth right, and now I will finally reveal it.
And you're thinking of someone specific in this case, right,
and specifically thinking of Bob Lazar, Yeah, Robert Lazar or
Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on a project

(30:25):
in which the military had come into possession of alien technology,
and his job was to reverse engineer that alien 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 tech. So instead of you know, constantly testing and

(30:45):
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 facil that was near Groom Lake, so
not technically at Area fifty one, but adjacent to it.
It was the real secret place. It's called S four. Yeah,

(31:08):
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

(31:28):
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

(31:49):
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

(32:11):
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,
that can never be done, Like, yeah, how do you

(32:34):
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 there's an 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

(32:55):
every single person in his past. Don't tell anybody about this, right,
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
around two is that Lazar's his claims to his his
credentials are suspect, right, and that that is a very

(33:16):
diplomatic way to put it. Of course, you know, we're
also showing that his side of it is that someone
is racing his past to discredit him. As as you said,
you know, Jonathan, recently, Mr Lazar in the past few
years went back into the public eye now I mean,
I guess more into the mainstream public eye, and he

(33:38):
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 them to reveal S four,

(34:01):
which is the site he says he worked at reverse
engineering these things. Now, he has many, many claims. He
speaks at length about interspecial politics, about injuries he's suffered
by technology that we won't hear about for several decades. Uh.

(34:21):
But I I 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. 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

(34:46):
come out with a brand new piece of technology that
has no precedent to it. 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, oh, well,
what about Tesla and Marconi, Well, they were working on
research that had preceded them as well. These are all

(35:07):
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 liked 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 inventions that may

(35:32):
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,

(35:53):
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

(36:13):
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 Shannon and his
uh his computer science with using binary logic. His approach

(36:38):
to 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 instantaneous sleep. The truth is,

(37:00):
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

(37:21):
is energy weapons. So this ties into the strategic defense initiative,
often referred to derisively as star Wars. Yeah, this was
the program 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,

(37:43):
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 the Soviet Union and the United States.
I grew up in that era, and I remember, like

(38:04):
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? 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.

(38:24):
Again not really the purpose for Area fifty one. I
mean you could you could understand them, uh testing such
a device, 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,

(38:47):
I mean, they're some of the drones they worked on
probably had offensive kick, but yeah, it was it was
mostly again, it was mostly reconnaissance type stuff. So then
you have the weather control devices, another very popular conspirat
c theory of it. So, first of all, we don't
have any technology powerful enough to control the weather. Whether
it is an incredibly chaotic system that we do not

(39:09):
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, people have conducted experiments
with weather manipulation, 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

(39:31):
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 you can't really have a control group
with weather. 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

(39:52):
seed the cloud, in 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 seating 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

(40:13):
any two points you pick are ultimately in the same system,
So are they really is there a control? It's tough
and stuff. And then on top of that, you know
things like HARP, which I'm sure you guys have talked about,
which was designed to to actually look at interactions in
the ionosphere. Now, the ionosphere around Earth can conduct electricity.

(40:34):
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 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

(40:58):
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 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,

(41:21):
it's a high frequency active auroral research program. Already you're
you're thinking they're at least a couple of words in
there that I'm not entirely sure what they're supposed to
be UM. And it really was about beaming energy into
the ionosphere too. 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

(41:43):
can communicate with distant vehicles like submarines that are under
the water. I mean, 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,

(42:05):
even if we don't think it will really work. So um,
which happens. Yeah, 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

(42:28):
no evidence that anything ever did any actual weather manipulation.
So uh yeahh that 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

(42:50):
think about. I realized I was focusing mainly on Star
Trek there, but but really all of that has at
some time or another been attributed to area. Warp drive uh,
teleportation devises, lightsabers, Yeah, okay, thank you. No, we've got stars,
you know, we've got there. So moving on another another

(43:10):
host of conspiracy theories around Area fifty one don't have
so much to do with what was actually going on
at the facility, but rather the mysterious shadowy 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

(43:35):
they don't they aren't officially acknowledged by the government, right,
So some of 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. In alleged designation. Yeah, so
here the big one for Area fifty one at least
is the Majestic Twelve. Majestic twelve is a group that

(43:57):
existed many years ago a core to the conspiracy lore uh,
and included people 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

(44:20):
was often referred to as being the secret organization for
these 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 ship. The Majestic twelve, however,
is one that appears to have been completely fabricated. Uh.
There was a UFO enthusiast named William L. Moore who

(44:43):
produced 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 j twelve papers, uh, and that there
does not appear to be any sort of evidence supporting

(45:05):
the existence of such an organization. So if your organization
isn't real, then chances are it's not actually the secret
one behind are. But that's no fun. So the so,
the the the idea that has become you know, common
currency in a lot of these beliefs is that in
JA twelve did exist, but was had its world rocked

(45:31):
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 the 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 most

(45:53):
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.

(46:15):
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

(46:39):
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.

(46:59):
The best guests 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

(47:20):
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. Uh in
two thousand twelve. H here's here's the quotation. According to

(47:42):
a crew member, 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 few podcast,

(48:03):
don't don't 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,
so that's one thing, you know, it was certainly they
were armed, but they weren't. I don't remember reading a

(48:23):
whole lot 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

(48:46):
spy aircraft, so 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, sure,
that definitely adds to that mystery, and they're not identifying themselves.

(49:08):
And also to be candid in in some cases, not all,
but in some cases if you're making a film, then
you want to have that sort of conflict. So it
it's also possible that in some cases these are the
threat as it is as it is, is um embellished,

(49:29):
or it's possible that people are purposefully agitating 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

(49:51):
end up there, No, you purposefully we're trying to get there.
And this is clearly an area 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

(50:13):
that other places in the United States simply do not,
and that that 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

(50:33):
of our earliest responses is how does that work? Or
what is going on here? 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, just faster than the slowest person.
As long as I'm not the slowest person in the office,

(50:54):
I'm still got a chance. Yeah, so I can certainly
see and I ll 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.

(51:15):
How much does the typical worker at Area fifty one
know about what's 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,

(51:38):
it was a lot of fun tackling this this subject,
and 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 for you. Absolutely.

(52:01):
When and now that we have along with the rest
of the text off audience explored, stim discerned, the the
ideas and the reality and the mist Very fifty one,
I have to ask you, now, what would you do
if one of the you know, if one of the
strangest things turned out to be true? H you know,

(52:23):
I like to I would like to think 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

(52:43):
it are two different things, right, I don't 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 Roswal incident involved aliens, and that the aliens
were in fact Holstad area fifty one, and all of
these easy conspiracy theories were actually true, I like to
believe that I would be able to say, you know what,

(53:05):
I never would have bought into this, 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,

(53:29):
they checked their watch for seventy year 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 them, all right, Well, it
turns out I was a big fat head and I

(53:49):
was wrong about everything. 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 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

(54:11):
movie level stuff there. It 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

(54:32):
suspect that they do that by managing how many people
are allowed to know any one thing at any one time,
otherwise you know, loose lips. So Ben, now that we've
concluded these three episodes, please let our listeners know where
they can find all of the things that you do
here at how Stuff Works. Oh yeah, thank you Jonathan,

(54:52):
and thank you Text Stuff listeners as well for having
me over. Uh. You can find more of our episodes
of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know on YouTube
on iTunes, you can also find Jonathan and I on
brain Stuff, which is our everyday science show. And you
can find uh Scott who might be making appearance on

(55:14):
here later, uh my compatriot on car Stuff and uh, well,
you know, Jonathan and I are on a bunch of
different shows. If you haven't checked out Forward Thinking or
heard about it yet, then give give him a look.
He's also on YouTube under that show Ben I ask
you to plug your shows and you start plugging. Mind
what a swell guy is there? There's no doubt. Well

(55:36):
now why I have him on all the time? Right? Well,
guys out there, if you have any questions about Area
fifty one, or you have any stories you want to share,
maybe your favorite conspiracy theory, or maybe you just want
to know how something in the tech world works. You
have an idea for a show that is is you know,
just burning you up inside. You gotta let me know.

(55:57):
Get in touch with me, My email address is tech
Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me
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