April 21, 2021 • 51 mins
The US experienced a massive economic boom in the years following the close of World War II. The country managed to avoid the destruction that laid waste to parts of Asia and Europe -- and it was also in possession of nuclear technology. As many Americans (but far from all) saw their quality of life increase, experts and military officials alike scrambled to maintain their strategic nuclear edge: To understand as much as possible about the effects and consequences of the deadly new thing they'd created. One result of this desperation? Project SUNSHINE.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio, Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. At the very top, we need to
say that today's episode may contain information that is not
suitable for all members of the audience, and candidly, the
(00:50):
subject of today's episode got to me, which very rarely happens.
It's a tale of quiet desperation. It's a tale of
a real global cabal and the looming existential threat of
nuclear annihilation, all occurring just under the glitzy surface of
unprecedented American prosperity. I mean, what do you guys think
(01:14):
of when you think of the nineteen fifties, postwar America.
Everybody has a home. Everybody has a bunch of cool
gadgets that are filling up that home, that are making
life easier for everybody. The future. Uh is what that
felt like. But you know the past, I don't know,
I don't know. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly right, That's exactly
(01:37):
what I was kidding at. You said it much better,
ben Um, but no, it's true. It's that's that kind
of like idyllic you know, clip art kind of American
dream sense with also this like you know, absolutely terrifying
underbelly just beneath the surface, kind of ready to you know,
(01:57):
devour everyone whole well said. In some ways, this is
a study of two very different worlds existing concurrently. On
one world, we have a shiny universe of brand new
homes and automobiles, solid jobs, two point five happy kids
in suburbs across the country. The other world is a
(02:20):
world of vast and true conspiracy, a violation that we
still don't fully understand the extent of It's a profound
crime nearly a century old, and the consequences of it
remain with us in the modern day. This is a
horror story, folks, But let's talk about the fun part first.
Here are the facts, so that for the world, not
(02:43):
just the US, it's the post World War two time,
which for a lot of intens and purposes was great
because there was such a devastating period that had occurred
just before the nineteen fifties, and there's a feeling of
rebirth that's coming out of that stuff. Um and in
particular in the United States, as who you know, we're seeing,
(03:06):
at least according to our news and all the history
I've ever learned, were seen as the victors, were seen
as the ones who really brought victory home for the world. Yeah,
I would say that, you know, the nineteen fifties were
a particularly great time for a big segment of the
US population. Uh, And they were an exception to the rule,
(03:28):
because the nineteen fifties were horrible for a lot of
the rest of the world due to that enormous devastation
that we're alluding to a World War two, the US
was very much in what is called the catbird seat,
a little idiom that I love but still don't completely understand.
Please explain it somewhat well. Well, the fighting didn't happen
(03:50):
on American soil, right, The our cities were not destroyed
the way much of Europe was, right, right, exactly, So
they're too big actors here. First, the Americans are the
inventors of nuclear technology. Also the first country to deploy
this disastrous weapon in the field. So the US emerges
(04:11):
as one of the world's most deadly military forces, in fact,
the most deadly military force on Earth. And that's that's
something that continues today. And also geography played a huge role.
The US was isolated by two enormous oceans. It was
really expensive to get over there, right, and because of that,
(04:34):
they avoided that destruction. They still had a manufacturing base
that had been accelerated through, you know, the war effort.
So we're making more stuff than ever before. We're the
we're like, if the world is a suburb, we're the
only house that didn't get hit by the tornado, kind
of end. And people were worried about this. The world
(04:59):
is full pessimists, of course, right, And there were numerous
experts who were arguing back and forth about the uncertain
future because everybody knew unemployment rates had fluctuated widely over
just the past few decades. In the nineteen thirties, around
one out of four people were out of work due
(05:20):
to the Great Depression. Still a terrible day. It wasn't
a particularly great depression. It was a terrible depression, but
it was you know, the big one. Um. But yeah,
the war effort um caused industrialization because you know, all
of that stuff was needed to aid the war effort,
with infrastructure and machinery of weapons of war, etcetera. By
(05:41):
nineteen forty four, unemployment had precipitously dropped to one point
two percent. Uh. And this even to this day is
a record low. And everyone and you know, their mother, sister, dog, brother,
everyone was working. UMA yimists were concerned that this was
(06:02):
like a bubble that was going to pop. This was
not sustainable. Had the United States become addicted to war
where we're going to have to face it that we
were addicted to war, It's possible. Was global conflict now
just an absolute necessity? Was this something that we were
going to have to continue to almost you know, lean
(06:22):
into in order to save our economy? Uh? It certainly
feels like it sometimes even today. UM, Folks like Senator
James Mead believe that the US would never be able
to successfully convert from our military economy to a civilian one.
And and this becomes sort of like this boogeyman of
these these visions of things that were only just recently
(06:44):
you know, out of people's you know, daily lives, things
like these decaying factories. Uh and those huge, horrible unemployment numbers. Um.
So people were spooked and they were gonna do whatever
it took to kind of keep things on the up
and up right. Yeah exactly. I mean part of being
an economic expert or politician like Senator Mead is a
(07:09):
big part of that is being the person who goes
into a good situation and starts naming all the reasons
it will be terrible. Shortly you're you're paid to ruin
the party. Luckily, Mead and the other experts were proven
incorrect in their predictions. Those unique advantages we mentioned for
(07:29):
the US paved the way for the post war economic boom. Paul,
can we get some music? Okay? Perfect? Yeah, exactly that.
So the study of the US and the nineteen fifties is,
I would argue, best understood as a study in paradox
like life was great. Life was aces for a lot
(07:50):
of white people who towed the correct ideological lines, but
the horror of racism remained. The civil rights movement was
in its nascent stages. The red scare of communism costs
people their livelihoods. There was terror behind America's shiny new smile.
But on the bright side, we'll bring back the happy music.
(08:13):
Business was booming. Everything was That's why we call that
generation the baby boomers. Think of it like, after years
of rations and shortages and insane propaganda, people are kind
of like um, the folks and countries that were able
to end the pandemic. You know, they're desperate to get outside,
get some action, enjoy the good life. And man, they
(08:36):
loved spending money. It was a veritable shopping spree going
on in the US. And like we said before, homes
were one of the biggest things that people were buying
and moving into. And of course there are bills that
we've mentioned before on this show that we're available to
help people who needed homes, who needed to be able
to afford one. Cars were huge. I mean, you're just
(08:59):
gonna you had to have a car, and you had
to be able to drive fairly long distances a lot
of times. You know, again, there's a lot of parts
of the economy. We're just required a ton of travel.
And because you have homes, because you have nice cars,
you fill them up with things because there's space in there,
and they're all these companies that are manufacturing things that
are specifically designed for all of these new homeowners, all
(09:21):
of these new car owners. Uh. And a lot of
that stuff ends up being, like I mentioned at the top, appliances. Yeah,
I love those. I'm a sucker for the retro television stuff.
Please send us your favorite weird commercials from the fifties
and sixties. But not the Ronald McDonald one, I will
(09:43):
have no Uh, that too was always creepy to me. Um.
It doesn't surprise me that they kind of phased him
out a bit, didn't they. Yeah, they did, they did.
The original Ronald McDonald is a spooky, spooky dude. But yes,
this the lture became something that defined success and even
(10:03):
morality in terms of material It was both good and
just to have new things. Uh. The population of the
US was heavily incentivized to become consumers, more so than citizens.
And the reason this happened is because of what you
were talking about earlier, NOL, the real fear that industry
(10:25):
would die without the incentive to create more and more
weapons of war. So like automobile manufacturers who came to
the rescue during World War Two went back like they
stopped making engines for planes and stuff like that, or
making bombers like Ford did, and they went back to
making cars, and they were like, we had to move
(10:47):
these whips. So people were very encouraged to buy this stuff.
New car sales quadruple between nineteen nineteen fifty five. This
is back in the day when it wasn't a terrible
idea to a brand new car. By the end of
the nineteen fifties, like seventy five of American households had
at least one car. That's a huge change. Also, people
(11:10):
were like crazy that oh yeah, the yie old baby boom.
Well yeah, I mean the war was over. Times are good.
Things are great. My house is filled with silver things
that can nuke, things, microwave, all this petroleum jelly laying around,
(11:32):
Like what am I gonna do? Not that, not that,
but the it's we're gonna talk about a little bit.
But it's interesting how you can see this as in
as an ideological shift from hot warfare, from warfare actual
(11:53):
to cultural warfare in a way, and how all of
these things that are being produced are in some ways
promoting the America Rican way, the capitalist ideal. And it's
really interesting to see that, like you're you're depicting, here
been a necessary shift for the economy to continue on. Yeah,
so this is so we were painting, I think, the
(12:16):
the propagandistic image, which happened because for very real and
valid reasons in this time of prosperity. For a portion
of the American population, about four million children are born
each and every year during the nineteen fifties, that's that,
(12:36):
that is the baby Boomer generation. And for so many people,
this is still what a lot of people mean when
they refer to the American dream. Right, this is back
when depending on your demographic, of course, you could without
going into debt at a college, you could get a
solid job out of high school. You could buy a house,
(12:57):
you could buy a car, you could buy two cars.
You could afford to have kids. Every so often, you
might celebrate your anniversary or whatever with a nice trip,
maybe to Hawaii. I don't know what people did, is
this is where kind of the middle class started becoming
a thing, because they were the ones that bought all
this year. Right, Yes, so they there's kind of that
feedback loop. Right, people are making more money than they
(13:20):
did before, and they're putting it back in the economy
which also employs them. There is a good argument that
an economy is a Ponzi scheme or capitalism is, but
stress at the very least, right, it's the snake eating
its own tail, and as long as it continues the cycle,
then it will continue to exist. I'm probably oversimplifying it,
but it certainly feels a little bit like a fairy
(13:43):
tale kind of you know, yeah, this, I agree, and
I don't think you're oversimplifying it very much. You know,
this is what was happening, and even now some people
will look back at that and ignore all the domestic
problems were occurring and say those were the good old days.
(14:04):
But this dream had a dark side because despite the
measurable improvements and the lives of so many Americans, experts
both domestic and abroad, knew that there were storms gathering
on the horizon. Nuclear weaponry the other big advantage of
the US the Pandora's jar, and now the lid was unscrewed,
(14:25):
the seal was broken, that radioactive jin wasn't going back
in the bottle anytime soon. So the average American, whatever
you want to take that to mean, was basking this
moment of unprecedented prosperity, but US politicians, military officials, and
scientists were racing against the clock to prevent their enemies
(14:47):
from acquiring nuclear weapons. They ultimately failed in this pursuit.
They also continued to experiment with nukes. They were desperate
to maintain this strategic edge for as long as possible.
Consequences be damned, because you know, we use the phrase
allies right when we're talking about that World War two alliance,
(15:11):
but history proves it might be better to call them
the frenemies, because you know, the Cold War basically started
like the day after World War Two ended. I think
I think maybe the US Russia took it afternoon off
and then they were like, all right, back at it,
but quieter this time. Yes, it's so quiet, it's almost silent,
(15:34):
and there's a desperation behind it, you guys. And it
leads us to what we're gonna talk about today, an
actual dag um conspiracy for real, really really, yes, ever, ever,
forever ever. Because Uncle Sam, the government of the United
States of America wasn't fit to just sit with those
(15:56):
nuclear weapons and say we are king now of just instruction,
we win ha ha. They wanted to see what else
could be done with these weapons? How far could this
be taken? What else can be done with this technology?
And oh boy, yeah, well, I mean it's understandable, right
(16:16):
because they knew that the number one goal of every
other country capable of doing so was to get nukes.
Everybody wants the new toy. Everybody wants the biggest gun,
you know, Like imagine if you were in the universe
of Ghostbusters and you found out that you could build
your own Goes or the Destroyer. That's that's what people
(16:38):
were doing. And this is dangerous because in a very
real way, this means that the world as we knew
it could end at any given moment. And although everyone
at this time was very much aware of the devastating
impact a nuclear weapon could create. Everyone knew about Hiroshima
(16:59):
and Nagasa Hockey, but no one, not even the experts,
understood the full extent of fallout. How did it affect
the atmosphere? How long did it stay? Could dropping a
bomb in you know, Nepal later create fallout in Europe?
Things like that, These questions whereas things you could model
(17:21):
and you could try to test, and they definitely did,
but they were also racing to learn more about how
this affected ecosystems and organisms. They were driven, we have
to say, by desperation, and as we continue, that's that's
something everybody needs to remember. These people did not see
themselves as villains, but that desperation is how we ended
(17:45):
up with a ghoulish plan called Project Sunshine. We'll be
back after the break. Here's where it gets crazy. So
you know, um, you've got these nuclear weapons. You know
(18:06):
what they do in theory, You've tested them on you know,
you've you've done nuclear test detonations, etcetera. But what do
they do to people? What do they do to human
flesh and human bodies? You can do them with animals
and in various environments lacking humans. Honestly, there were a
lot more animals back than ben you pointed out, So
(18:27):
the ethics of this was not as much of a
concern as it certainly would be today. But it's again
about how it affects that human tissue. Was it going
to do? Uh? The U s Atomic Energy Commission created
something called Project Gabriel, which was an investigation to figure
out the full impact on the human population in a
(18:51):
nuclear fallout zone. Through this project, the government concluded that
the most dangerous part of this whole situation was the
radio act the isotope known as trontium ninety um, which
is a calcium like radioactive substance that is produced when
nuclear explosions occur um. It can be absorbed by plants
(19:13):
and animals, and it passes through food to humans, and
humans bones can absorb it too. And if I'm not mistaken,
this is where a certain form of is it iodine
or there's some some pill you can ingest that will
block the absorption of that isotope. Well, I don't know.
The first thing you have to do to figure out
(19:34):
if something like that would function is you need to
get those isotopes into human bones, exactly right. You gotta
test them. You gotta test it out. Did it go
from that cattle into Bill? It's a Bill. Yes, Bill
drew the short end of the straw at the lab.
So he's out there, you know, drinking milk straight from
(19:57):
the utter, just to see if he can get radiation
through it. It was. It was a weird, weird gig
for Bill. But but you're right. They needed this data.
They needed to figure out what happened when the radioactive
rubber hit the road, which means they needed human test subjects.
They needed human tissue. The a e C. Commissioner at
(20:20):
the time, a guy named Dr Willard Libby, complained about
this constantly because he knew the score, he knew what
was up. He was like, look, it's ugly, but we're
trying to save the world here. We need people because
they remember, they're not They're not just worried about their bombs.
They're worried about other countries developing the tech and then
dropping on them. Exactly. Yeah, so they so at the
(20:43):
very least, they need to figure out how that stuff,
uh interacts with the human body so that maybe they
can figure out some mitigation, you know, procedures or whatever,
like that pill that I can't remember the name, but
definitely is a thing that we'll probably get to. We
have to mention this part, folks. Obviously, the government could
illegally experiment on disadvantaged populations. They have certainly done so
(21:07):
in the past, and there are people who will assure
you that the experiments like this continue in the modern day.
But there's a problem with those experiments. Sometimes they have survivors,
and survivors have a tendency to, you know, talk to
people about the horrible things that happened to them, and
so Project Gabriel led to a classified program called Project
(21:29):
Sunshine in ninety three. It started out as just another
secret investigation, which is a weird sentence to say, but accurate,
and then it quickly took a dark turn. Do not
let the name fool you. In fact, let's let Dr
Libby himself introduce his project with this infamous quote. This
(21:50):
comes from a secret meeting in nineteen fifty five when
he was talking about the importance of getting humans to
experiment on. I don't know how to get um, but
I do say that it is a matter of prime
importance to get them, and particularly in the young age group.
So human samples are often of prime importance. And if
(22:11):
anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching,
they will really be serving their country hand hand nudge, nudge,
wink wink. We need young bodies. Let's go snatch some
anyone good. Yes, we got your back, We got your back.
And the bluntness, the candid nature of that statement really
(22:32):
stood out to me. I I hope it stands out
to everybody listening, because with that, the US government got
into the business of stealing the corpses of children. That
is what today's episode is about, and that's part away.
It got to me this wasn't a small operation. This
was a global network. Sunshine created an invisible army of
(22:55):
modern day resurrection men, literal corpse thieves. And we we
talked about resurrection in the past, but somebody give us
the quick and dirty just because it's such a cool
term for such a horrible thing. Yeah, I mean it was.
It was especially um during early days of say medical experimentation,
you know, when um surgeons were trying to figure out
(23:19):
how you know, the human body and the human anatomy functioned.
Uh So in order to do that, they would often
grave rob and then dig up corpses and cut them
open to see what what's what? Yeah, nailed it. It's
just like a well I think we talked about it
at length in our episode on whether or not Benjamin
Franklin was serial killer. The resurrection men came about because
(23:44):
of gaps and loopholes in the laws at the time,
Like it was legal to conduct medical experiments on cadavers,
but it was illegal to buy them, so you just
have plausible deniability, get some creepy and were desperate person
to like Will said, rob a grave for you, and
then you just pretend like, well, I don't know where
(24:06):
this body came from, officer, I'm just trying to learn
about kidneys. What do they just have like a body
drop off repository like the return thing and a library
like I mean what I mean, I know we're gonna
get there, but jeezus, this is bleak. Yeah, it's true.
This was a massive operation, even if even if it
was just sort of an implied operation. Right, Um, there
(24:29):
were project managers who didn't want to disclose the actual
nature of the research that was being done because if
they did, then it could put their personal contacts and
the people that were helping them out who were pimply
breaking the law at risk. Um. So they decided to
have researchers use people that they knew to recruit other
(24:52):
people to do more of this stuff. Degrees of separation.
That's how it works. I mean, that's that's the brilliant
part about surveillance programs like five Eyes. This network operated
everywhere from Australia to Europe through various means, and we
still don't know the extent of this. We still don't
(25:12):
know the specifics, but through various means, by hook or
by crook, pieces of dead human beings were being stolen
and they were being shipped off to the US. It
seems that many of the governments of countries involved had
no idea what was happening. Um. And that's that in
itself is pretty distressing. And it's an important point, uh,
(25:36):
that that you make here. Because some of these people
were gathering samples, Like you said, they were contacted informally,
you know, kind of off the books operation like agent
between us. You want to help me steal somebodies. What
are you doing Wednesday? Uh. They were given different reasons
for this too, because the folks in charge of Projects
(25:57):
Sunshine didn't want every and to know this was a
program related to nuclear weaponry, so they made up a
couple of different reasons. And that means that not all
the people involved in this network understood exactly why they
were shipping these samples to the US. And there were
(26:19):
a lot of samples. This was not a one and
done thing. This was not tragic case of like half
a dozen very unfortunate families. Was way deeper and way
more extreme. Yeah, according to the documents available that you know,
are declassified on this stuff. There were at least fifteen hundred,
(26:39):
I believe samples. I'm not doing the sound because I
keep I'm going back and forth between whether or not
to do that sound, just depending on the listeners reactions.
Sometimes it's like I love it, give me some swish swish.
Sometimes this man leave me alone with that swish wish. Yeah,
but Matt, you just described like the internet, you know,
I mean, people are okay, educate yourself. Oh dang, no,
(27:04):
the tables have turned okay, So let's get back seriousness.
There were over fifteen hundred samples of human flesh tissue.
A lot of them were from babies and young children,
as was stated by Dr Libby, that was important. Um again,
they were stolen from all around the world. And here's
(27:26):
the weird thing, and I we can't tell you if
it's just what was reported, you know, and what was
put in official documents by people who were keeping track
of this stuff or or not. But allegedly only five
hundred of those samples, so one third, were actually tested
for the purposes of Project Sunshine, which in itself it's
(27:47):
its own kind of heartbreak, you know what I mean?
All this for nothing for so little. It reminds me
of our discussions about Unit seven thirty one in Japan,
or some of the atrocities committed by German scientists during
World War Two. There was some useful science that came
(28:09):
from this, but the big misconception that a lot of
people have is that this science was incredibly impactful or
even good science. The events of seven thirty one were
it was an APPATOI. It wasn't allowed. It was a
chartl house. Yeah, and the parents, you know of of
of these children had no idea what was going on. Look,
(28:33):
it's one of these things where it's like do the
means justify the ends. It's sort of like black ops
and stuff, where clearly laws are broken, uh, to the
greater good, for the greater good. But then when you
start seeing things like only five samples were analyzed, you
start to be like, well, why why do they need
so many? And why was it such a widespread operation?
(28:53):
Because it really is absolutely abominable behavior, at least for
people that are religious. Can you imagine finding out that
your child's you know, body was desecrated, dug up used
for science experimentation. Well, that that's actually kind of where
I want to go. I will will hit it more
(29:16):
at the end here, But I wonder if transparency would
have changed people's thinking. There's a there's a lot of
patriotism going around for a long time in the United
States after the Second World War, and I wonder if
instead of doing it, you know, in the dark, surreptitiously
stealing bodies, it was, Hey, we we really need to
(29:38):
test this powerful weapon and the effects of it for
the safety of national security, for ours, the strength as
a union. We need you, or children's corpses, because because
you know, at least they're not asking for your firstborn
or you're young the way, or they're not killing children
(29:59):
and torturing children and people as in Unit one, they
are definitely experimenting on the thing that was once a
loved one. Yeah, um, call it Project HEROD. Sure you
gotta wonder too. I'm picturing the scenario in my mind
where you know, like a representative comes and Knox and says,
Mrs Jones, we we have your country needs you. There's
(30:21):
a thing you can do to really help us out. Um,
We're here to ask if we can you know, honor
the memory of your child by having it serve and
potentially save the lives of millions, right, good line. Yeah,
that's it's something that occurred to me as well, and
it's one of the one of the closing things we
(30:41):
can really dive into towards the end of this episode.
So let's pause for a moment for word from our sponsors,
and then we'll return with some examples of how this
process occurred. And we're back. Uh. There's a British documentary
(31:07):
we'd like to draw your attention to came out in
n It's called Deadly Experiments. In Deadly Experiments, one of
the people interviewed is a woman named Jane Pritchard. She
is British. She had a child that was still born
in nine seven, and she learned that when her child
(31:31):
when when she gave birth, the doctors who spirited the
child away removed its legs and sent those legs off
to the US for Projects Sunshine. She was forbidden to
dress her daughter for the funeral because the doctors knew
that if she did, she would find out what happened
(31:52):
to literally half of her child. She also continues and
she says, I asked if I could put her christening
robe honor, but I wasn't allowed to and that upset
me terribly because she wasn't christened. No one asked me
about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her,
and that, you know, that goes that ties in exactly
(32:14):
to what you're talking about with the idea of religious practices.
You know what I mean? These are these are some
of the most important sacred traditions in a lot of
belief systems. And words like we're three guys who were
paid to talk, and words fail me to try to
(32:35):
describe the profundity of that experience. I mean, imagine you
have you have a stillborn child. That is an emotional
trauma that will follow you like a shadow for the
rest of your days. And then on top of that tragedy,
you learn that your child's body has been desecrated in
(33:00):
the name of nuclear war. So and he continues, So okay.
Even Canada and the UK for a number of years
had alleged that deaths like this occurred, but there wasn't
an official investigation for decades. It wasn't even until two
thousand and one. Remember this stuff was happening to fifty six.
(33:23):
It wasn't until two thousand and one that Britain's atomic
Energy Agency acknowledged that they were stealing the bones of children,
which you know to to the point of fairy tale.
This sounds like a fable, This sounds like folklore. This
sounds like a boogeyman, a monster from ages past. Now
(33:45):
you're absolutely right. So what happens to the bodies of
the people that we love when they're gone? Um? There
are obviously options, you have things like cremation and burial,
em bombing, um. But it's not like h and deup
with some sort of inventory or a checklist of what
happens to organs. I'll only say this because I've been
(34:08):
watching six ft Under a lot lately. Apparently when a
body is picked up from the morgue or after an autopsy,
you know, by a an embalming um service or or
company or uh funeral home, there is absolutely a checklist,
like if, for example, if someone was in a you know,
accident where parts were severed. Um, there is a checklist
(34:31):
for things an episode involving a severed foot that points
that out in six ft Under, But we don't get that.
We could probably request it, but we don't. So it's
not like most of us would actually have some sort
of checklist as to where the organs especially end up, uh,
and where different body parts might turn up right, Yeah, absolutely,
(34:52):
I mean and and also think about, you know, think
about the grief that someone is going through. Uh. It's
it's easy to understand how figuring out what happened to
specific body parts wouldn't be the highest priority because you're
just trying to make it from one day to the next.
(35:14):
And regulatory agencies exist in multiple countries to monitor these processes,
but the average person doesn't really have a way to
learn whether their loved ones body parts are being given
a dignified burial in accordance to their religious statutes, or
whether they're being illicitly taken for other purposes. A few
(35:36):
years back here in our home state of Georgia, authorities
discovered this funeral home north of Atlanta was being paid to,
you know, do a typical burial service, but they were
taking the bodies and just like throwing them in freezers
and in the woods. It's um, these are you know,
this is taking advantage of very vulnerable people at one
(35:58):
of the worst moments in their lives. And that that's
one of the most frightening lessons about Project Sunshine that's
I think that's one of the two big things we
should keep in mind here. Something like this conspiracy could
easily happen again in the modern day. The only reason
(36:18):
it's if it's not happening now. The only reason stuff
like this is not happening is because people haven't found
a rationalization that they felt was noble enough. We're one
excuse away from something like this happening again, and and
and wasn't necessary back to thirty one, it's I mean,
it is crucial to understand the effects of nuclear fallout,
(36:42):
nuclear waste. Were there better ways to go about it?
Like what you guys were saying earlier, That's what I
keep thinking, Like what if you what if you phrased
it as this is a way for your family to
serve not only your country, but the world, you know
what I mean? Yeah, I mean I don't like, if
you check organ donor or something like that on your
(37:05):
on your registration and your you know, your license or whatever,
does that mean does this qualify? I don't know, it's
it's sort of silly question, but I'm not intending it
to be. I just mean, you know, this is obviously
extenuating circumstances when you know, desperate times and all of that.
(37:25):
I'm just wondering if there would be a way to
kind of like interpret that as you're an organ donor
or you know, when people say they're doing in their
body the science, I always like, what does that actually mean?
Is that some sort of like writ that you have
to create that says which you know exactly which research
lab you want to donate your body too for a
specific project? Or is it just more like what do
(37:46):
you need here? I am excuse me, right? I I
imagine there's some way uh to there there's some way
to specify uh cause or an experiment or an institution
to which you donate your body or parts of your body,
But I I don't know. The closest experience I have
(38:07):
had with consensual donation of body parts has been I
went through a phase where I really wanted to donate
my left eye to uh to someone. But they're they're
understandably there there's some there's some legal hurdles. If you're
a guy who's just like I want to give away
one of my eyes, first question is like, well, who
(38:30):
do you want to give this cornea too? And if
your answer is I d k L O L. Then
they're understandably going to be a little bit weirded out.
But why did you not give away your eye? It
got too complicated, honestly, that's the reason, okay. Uh. And
(38:52):
and also you know it's something that would still be
interested in doing. I mean, giving giving someone power of
site is an amazing thing, you know. Um. But also
I wear contacts, so it's like it's like it's it's
like giving away a car, right is my is my
(39:15):
eyes so bad that it would be like giving someone
a lemon, a beat up car that they really don't
want to drive, you know, and it just sits in
the driveway of their skull. Uh. That phrase the driveway
of your skull. Then that's incredible. But but lets let
us know about that. No, I think your question about
(39:35):
organ donation is is really interesting. I haven't thought about
it in that way. I know, you know, I don't
know about you guys, but I think most people our
age in this state become organ donors because they knock
a couple of bucks off the license gate exactly. And again,
it's all does come down to um as as so
(39:56):
much so often burial does uh to religious belief and
I think that's the greatest betrayal. You know, is in
a country where supposedly we prize people's right to exercise
their religious you know, freedom so highly to betray that trust,
you know, is is this pretty pretty uh egregious? And
(40:19):
this goes to our second, perhaps the most important point.
No one in this conspiracy saw themselves as villains, right.
Everybody is the protagonist of their story. And these people
who consider themselves good people, through through a series of
(40:40):
slippery sloops, found themselves stealing corpses of children, Which makes
you think what lengths would you go to if you
genuinely thought you were saving the world. In this case,
it was not a hypothetical question, and it's something you know.
It's it's easy to say that these people were monstrous,
(41:04):
but then you have to ask yourself, what would you
do in that situation? If you thought that you could
save billions of people by breaking, by bending them breaking
some ethical rules, would you do it? I mean, what
would you prefer to be haunted by? Is another way
to put it. Would you prefer to spend the rest
of your life knowing that you literally still corpses? Or
(41:27):
would you prefer to be haunted by the idea that
you could have saved the world and decided not to.
I don't. I don't know an easy way out of that.
I don't know the solution there. It's a it's a
weird thing. I gotta tell you. I'm really torn. I'm
genuinely torn because I know if someone did that to
(41:47):
my son, like if he had just passed away and
parts of him were taken away, I would be furious.
I'd be I'd be going on a little hunt for
the hunt for the resurrection people who took parts of
my son. But it's also you know, scientifically, if you
take belief out of it, it's a dead body and
it really is something that you know could potentially help.
(42:10):
But at the same time, they're researching the effects of
nuclear weapons, uh, like these terrifying weapons that the research
isn't necessarily going to save anybody, right, I mean, if
it's a weapon and you just realize, well, we've got
to protect people from the effects of this weapon, you
don't you don't necessarily need to know how it affects
(42:33):
the human body. I don't know. Just like I said, though,
I mean, it's about like trying to figure out how
can we guard our population against the use of these
weapons by others? You know? And by the way, that
thing that I was struggling so desperately, remember, it's just
it's called uh potassium iodide, and it's just a pill
(42:54):
that blocks radioactive iodine from entering the thyroid. So not
quite the same thing. But you know, they might not
have known how that worked if they hadn't studied the
effects of that on the human body and knowing that
the thyroid absorbs that particular radioactive material. So I I
do get it. But also I'm when I wanted to
(43:15):
ask a question, ben, Um, did I miss this or why? So?
Why children specifically or was that just part of the
you know, part of the whole deal. They were just
some children involved. Yeah, it was just their vibe, I guess. No,
I'm kidding. I'm kidding. That's a horrible thing to say. Yeah.
The the issue was that children would be children of
(43:39):
this era, would be the first kids born after the
creation and deployment of nuclear weapons. So they like you
could if you took anybody was born before that time,
you would only see the effect of what happened to
them at that moment later in life when they were exposed,
you know, when then when they're like fifty years old
(44:01):
or something. But if you if you look at children,
you're looking at an organism that is new to the environment.
So it's it's kind of like the study of microplastics, right.
It was a big deal when scientists found out that
microplastics are occurring in human bodies while children are in
(44:22):
the womb, you know what I mean. That means that
it's already something that's with you from day zero. So
if you have a stillborn child and you're able to
test it for levels of things like strontium ninety, then
what you can learn is that you can learn basically
whether the radiation or the contamination is ubiquitous enough to
(44:47):
enter through another filter. So it's because remember kids just
being born. If it's born and it has traces of
contamination in it already, that means that this contaminant, ever
it is, be a microplastics or strontium ninety, has managed
to pass through another filter. It's gone from the environment,
(45:08):
maybe to an animal, a cow or whatever, into a
human that is burying a child, and then from that
human into the other human inside of them. So there's
there's a logic to it. But it's um, it's it's
kind of a soulless logic, I would argue, And you're right,
you know, it's hard to parse this. It's not something
(45:29):
with an easy answer, and it's startling. It should be
startling that investigations are kind of ongoing. You know, you
would think that this guy would get much more press coverage.
It was in it was in the New York Times
a couple of times. You would think that it got
um much more attention, or that the American public at
(45:52):
the very least, which would be putting more eyes on
these kind of classified projects that occur. But for now,
what we can say is it's a conspiracy. It really happened,
and something like this, based on what we know about
human psychology, could easily happen again. Uh, this is a
(46:15):
tragedy all around, you know what I mean. There's not
there's there's not an evil mad scientist in here. There's
there there's just like like it always is, there's there's
a massive terrified, frightened people who are doing their best
not to die. What a doubter. Okay, who's got jokes?
(46:36):
Oh yeah, no, I don't don't think I have any
jokes after that, doing their best not to die. That's
the most emo thing I've heard all week. But it's true.
It's all we're that's what we're all doing. Yeah, thankfully
it's gotten a little easier, I think. Ah, these days,
it's there's a lot of things trying to kill us,
no question about that. Um. But now I didn't know
(46:58):
about this project, and I have to say this, this
is such a cliche thing, but how come all of
these government projects that are like involving horrible things. I'll
have names like Operation Twinkle Toes and Operations Starfruit, Operations
capri Son, you know, like they're all horrible, horrible thing.
I understand why they do it. It's like to get
(47:21):
people off the set of like how absolutely horrible and
maniacal what's actually going on is? But it's it's definitely
an interesting dichotomy when you read about so many of these, right, Yeah,
I like to I know this is not true, but
I like to imagine that there is in every government
there's like one person, one lady, one guy, just some
(47:44):
generic dude whose entire job is to think up these names,
and like they get up, you know, they get to
the office eight or nine or whatever, and they've got
a list of crazy stuff that their government is doing.
And then they you know, like they lean back, they
have some coffee, and they're like, let's call this one
project Artichokes. I like artichokes, and then let's torture some people,
(48:08):
right right, And I, um, yeah, I don't know, I
don't know the process. I know it can change. You know,
sometimes they really like acronyms or initialisms and then yeah,
like like you said, no, sometimes it's it seems purposefully misleading.
Like if we ever hear about a top secret government
(48:29):
project that's been declassified and its name is like Project
Fuzzy Warm Times, and that's clearly evil, right, gotta be
gotta be the most evil one. The more snuggly the name,
the more evil of the project. Um, that's my theory. Um.
But no, no, this is something that I think everyone
(48:49):
should know about. Um, certainly a dark period and history
in general, but also in like weird government conspiracies. And
it's far from the only example. We'd like to know
what you think, what lengths would you go to if
you genuinely thought you were saving the world. Uh, let
us know if you have experience with other similar stories
(49:13):
in your neck of the global woods. Obviously being based
in the US, we see a lot of stuff that
emerges from the US specifically, but that doesn't mean that
other countries aren't also doing dastardly things. We want to
hear from you as always. You're the most important part
of the show, so let us know. We try to
(49:33):
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(49:54):
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(50:14):
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(51:13):
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your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio, Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, You
are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want
you to know. At the very top, we need to
say that today's episode may contain information that is not
suitable for all members of the audience, and candidly, the
(00:50):
subject of today's episode got to me, which very rarely happens.
It's a tale of quiet desperation. It's a tale of
a real global cabal and the looming existential threat of
nuclear annihilation, all occurring just under the glitzy surface of
unprecedented American prosperity. I mean, what do you guys think
(01:14):
of when you think of the nineteen fifties, postwar America.
Everybody has a home. Everybody has a bunch of cool
gadgets that are filling up that home, that are making
life easier for everybody. The future. Uh is what that
felt like. But you know the past, I don't know,
I don't know. Yeah, exactly, that's exactly right, That's exactly
(01:37):
what I was kidding at. You said it much better,
ben Um, but no, it's true. It's that's that kind
of like idyllic you know, clip art kind of American
dream sense with also this like you know, absolutely terrifying
underbelly just beneath the surface, kind of ready to you know,
(01:57):
devour everyone whole well said. In some ways, this is
a study of two very different worlds existing concurrently. On
one world, we have a shiny universe of brand new
homes and automobiles, solid jobs, two point five happy kids
in suburbs across the country. The other world is a
(02:20):
world of vast and true conspiracy, a violation that we
still don't fully understand the extent of It's a profound
crime nearly a century old, and the consequences of it
remain with us in the modern day. This is a
horror story, folks, But let's talk about the fun part first.
Here are the facts, so that for the world, not
(02:43):
just the US, it's the post World War two time,
which for a lot of intens and purposes was great
because there was such a devastating period that had occurred
just before the nineteen fifties, and there's a feeling of
rebirth that's coming out of that stuff. Um and in
particular in the United States, as who you know, we're seeing,
(03:06):
at least according to our news and all the history
I've ever learned, were seen as the victors, were seen
as the ones who really brought victory home for the world. Yeah,
I would say that, you know, the nineteen fifties were
a particularly great time for a big segment of the
US population. Uh, And they were an exception to the rule,
(03:28):
because the nineteen fifties were horrible for a lot of
the rest of the world due to that enormous devastation
that we're alluding to a World War two, the US
was very much in what is called the catbird seat,
a little idiom that I love but still don't completely understand.
Please explain it somewhat well. Well, the fighting didn't happen
(03:50):
on American soil, right, The our cities were not destroyed
the way much of Europe was, right, right, exactly, So
they're too big actors here. First, the Americans are the
inventors of nuclear technology. Also the first country to deploy
this disastrous weapon in the field. So the US emerges
(04:11):
as one of the world's most deadly military forces, in fact,
the most deadly military force on Earth. And that's that's
something that continues today. And also geography played a huge role.
The US was isolated by two enormous oceans. It was
really expensive to get over there, right, and because of that,
(04:34):
they avoided that destruction. They still had a manufacturing base
that had been accelerated through, you know, the war effort.
So we're making more stuff than ever before. We're the
we're like, if the world is a suburb, we're the
only house that didn't get hit by the tornado, kind
of end. And people were worried about this. The world
(04:59):
is full pessimists, of course, right, And there were numerous
experts who were arguing back and forth about the uncertain
future because everybody knew unemployment rates had fluctuated widely over
just the past few decades. In the nineteen thirties, around
one out of four people were out of work due
(05:20):
to the Great Depression. Still a terrible day. It wasn't
a particularly great depression. It was a terrible depression, but
it was you know, the big one. Um. But yeah,
the war effort um caused industrialization because you know, all
of that stuff was needed to aid the war effort,
with infrastructure and machinery of weapons of war, etcetera. By
(05:41):
nineteen forty four, unemployment had precipitously dropped to one point
two percent. Uh. And this even to this day is
a record low. And everyone and you know, their mother, sister, dog, brother,
everyone was working. UMA yimists were concerned that this was
(06:02):
like a bubble that was going to pop. This was
not sustainable. Had the United States become addicted to war
where we're going to have to face it that we
were addicted to war, It's possible. Was global conflict now
just an absolute necessity? Was this something that we were
going to have to continue to almost you know, lean
(06:22):
into in order to save our economy? Uh? It certainly
feels like it sometimes even today. UM, Folks like Senator
James Mead believe that the US would never be able
to successfully convert from our military economy to a civilian one.
And and this becomes sort of like this boogeyman of
these these visions of things that were only just recently
(06:44):
you know, out of people's you know, daily lives, things
like these decaying factories. Uh and those huge, horrible unemployment numbers. Um.
So people were spooked and they were gonna do whatever
it took to kind of keep things on the up
and up right. Yeah exactly. I mean part of being
an economic expert or politician like Senator Mead is a
(07:09):
big part of that is being the person who goes
into a good situation and starts naming all the reasons
it will be terrible. Shortly you're you're paid to ruin
the party. Luckily, Mead and the other experts were proven
incorrect in their predictions. Those unique advantages we mentioned for
(07:29):
the US paved the way for the post war economic boom. Paul,
can we get some music? Okay? Perfect? Yeah, exactly that.
So the study of the US and the nineteen fifties is,
I would argue, best understood as a study in paradox
like life was great. Life was aces for a lot
(07:50):
of white people who towed the correct ideological lines, but
the horror of racism remained. The civil rights movement was
in its nascent stages. The red scare of communism costs
people their livelihoods. There was terror behind America's shiny new smile.
But on the bright side, we'll bring back the happy music.
(08:13):
Business was booming. Everything was That's why we call that
generation the baby boomers. Think of it like, after years
of rations and shortages and insane propaganda, people are kind
of like um, the folks and countries that were able
to end the pandemic. You know, they're desperate to get outside,
get some action, enjoy the good life. And man, they
(08:36):
loved spending money. It was a veritable shopping spree going
on in the US. And like we said before, homes
were one of the biggest things that people were buying
and moving into. And of course there are bills that
we've mentioned before on this show that we're available to
help people who needed homes, who needed to be able
to afford one. Cars were huge. I mean, you're just
(08:59):
gonna you had to have a car, and you had
to be able to drive fairly long distances a lot
of times. You know, again, there's a lot of parts
of the economy. We're just required a ton of travel.
And because you have homes, because you have nice cars,
you fill them up with things because there's space in there,
and they're all these companies that are manufacturing things that
are specifically designed for all of these new homeowners, all
(09:21):
of these new car owners. Uh. And a lot of
that stuff ends up being, like I mentioned at the top, appliances. Yeah,
I love those. I'm a sucker for the retro television stuff.
Please send us your favorite weird commercials from the fifties
and sixties. But not the Ronald McDonald one, I will
(09:43):
have no Uh, that too was always creepy to me. Um.
It doesn't surprise me that they kind of phased him
out a bit, didn't they. Yeah, they did, they did.
The original Ronald McDonald is a spooky, spooky dude. But yes,
this the lture became something that defined success and even
(10:03):
morality in terms of material It was both good and
just to have new things. Uh. The population of the
US was heavily incentivized to become consumers, more so than citizens.
And the reason this happened is because of what you
were talking about earlier, NOL, the real fear that industry
(10:25):
would die without the incentive to create more and more
weapons of war. So like automobile manufacturers who came to
the rescue during World War Two went back like they
stopped making engines for planes and stuff like that, or
making bombers like Ford did, and they went back to
making cars, and they were like, we had to move
(10:47):
these whips. So people were very encouraged to buy this stuff.
New car sales quadruple between nineteen nineteen fifty five. This
is back in the day when it wasn't a terrible
idea to a brand new car. By the end of
the nineteen fifties, like seventy five of American households had
at least one car. That's a huge change. Also, people
(11:10):
were like crazy that oh yeah, the yie old baby boom.
Well yeah, I mean the war was over. Times are good.
Things are great. My house is filled with silver things
that can nuke, things, microwave, all this petroleum jelly laying around,
(11:32):
Like what am I gonna do? Not that, not that,
but the it's we're gonna talk about a little bit.
But it's interesting how you can see this as in
as an ideological shift from hot warfare, from warfare actual
(11:53):
to cultural warfare in a way, and how all of
these things that are being produced are in some ways
promoting the America Rican way, the capitalist ideal. And it's
really interesting to see that, like you're you're depicting, here
been a necessary shift for the economy to continue on. Yeah,
so this is so we were painting, I think, the
(12:16):
the propagandistic image, which happened because for very real and
valid reasons in this time of prosperity. For a portion
of the American population, about four million children are born
each and every year during the nineteen fifties, that's that,
(12:36):
that is the baby Boomer generation. And for so many people,
this is still what a lot of people mean when
they refer to the American dream. Right, this is back
when depending on your demographic, of course, you could without
going into debt at a college, you could get a
solid job out of high school. You could buy a house,
(12:57):
you could buy a car, you could buy two cars.
You could afford to have kids. Every so often, you
might celebrate your anniversary or whatever with a nice trip,
maybe to Hawaii. I don't know what people did, is
this is where kind of the middle class started becoming
a thing, because they were the ones that bought all
this year. Right, Yes, so they there's kind of that
feedback loop. Right, people are making more money than they
(13:20):
did before, and they're putting it back in the economy
which also employs them. There is a good argument that
an economy is a Ponzi scheme or capitalism is, but
stress at the very least, right, it's the snake eating
its own tail, and as long as it continues the cycle,
then it will continue to exist. I'm probably oversimplifying it,
but it certainly feels a little bit like a fairy
(13:43):
tale kind of you know, yeah, this, I agree, and
I don't think you're oversimplifying it very much. You know,
this is what was happening, and even now some people
will look back at that and ignore all the domestic
problems were occurring and say those were the good old days.
(14:04):
But this dream had a dark side because despite the
measurable improvements and the lives of so many Americans, experts
both domestic and abroad, knew that there were storms gathering
on the horizon. Nuclear weaponry the other big advantage of
the US the Pandora's jar, and now the lid was unscrewed,
(14:25):
the seal was broken, that radioactive jin wasn't going back
in the bottle anytime soon. So the average American, whatever
you want to take that to mean, was basking this
moment of unprecedented prosperity, but US politicians, military officials, and
scientists were racing against the clock to prevent their enemies
(14:47):
from acquiring nuclear weapons. They ultimately failed in this pursuit.
They also continued to experiment with nukes. They were desperate
to maintain this strategic edge for as long as possible.
Consequences be damned, because you know, we use the phrase
allies right when we're talking about that World War two alliance,
(15:11):
but history proves it might be better to call them
the frenemies, because you know, the Cold War basically started
like the day after World War Two ended. I think
I think maybe the US Russia took it afternoon off
and then they were like, all right, back at it,
but quieter this time. Yes, it's so quiet, it's almost silent,
(15:34):
and there's a desperation behind it, you guys. And it
leads us to what we're gonna talk about today, an
actual dag um conspiracy for real, really really, yes, ever, ever,
forever ever. Because Uncle Sam, the government of the United
States of America wasn't fit to just sit with those
(15:56):
nuclear weapons and say we are king now of just instruction,
we win ha ha. They wanted to see what else
could be done with these weapons? How far could this
be taken? What else can be done with this technology?
And oh boy, yeah, well, I mean it's understandable, right
(16:16):
because they knew that the number one goal of every
other country capable of doing so was to get nukes.
Everybody wants the new toy. Everybody wants the biggest gun,
you know, Like imagine if you were in the universe
of Ghostbusters and you found out that you could build
your own Goes or the Destroyer. That's that's what people
(16:38):
were doing. And this is dangerous because in a very
real way, this means that the world as we knew
it could end at any given moment. And although everyone
at this time was very much aware of the devastating
impact a nuclear weapon could create. Everyone knew about Hiroshima
(16:59):
and Nagasa Hockey, but no one, not even the experts,
understood the full extent of fallout. How did it affect
the atmosphere? How long did it stay? Could dropping a
bomb in you know, Nepal later create fallout in Europe?
Things like that, These questions whereas things you could model
(17:21):
and you could try to test, and they definitely did,
but they were also racing to learn more about how
this affected ecosystems and organisms. They were driven, we have
to say, by desperation, and as we continue, that's that's
something everybody needs to remember. These people did not see
themselves as villains, but that desperation is how we ended
(17:45):
up with a ghoulish plan called Project Sunshine. We'll be
back after the break. Here's where it gets crazy. So
you know, um, you've got these nuclear weapons. You know
(18:06):
what they do in theory, You've tested them on you know,
you've you've done nuclear test detonations, etcetera. But what do
they do to people? What do they do to human
flesh and human bodies? You can do them with animals
and in various environments lacking humans. Honestly, there were a
lot more animals back than ben you pointed out, So
(18:27):
the ethics of this was not as much of a
concern as it certainly would be today. But it's again
about how it affects that human tissue. Was it going
to do? Uh? The U s Atomic Energy Commission created
something called Project Gabriel, which was an investigation to figure
out the full impact on the human population in a
(18:51):
nuclear fallout zone. Through this project, the government concluded that
the most dangerous part of this whole situation was the
radio act the isotope known as trontium ninety um, which
is a calcium like radioactive substance that is produced when
nuclear explosions occur um. It can be absorbed by plants
(19:13):
and animals, and it passes through food to humans, and
humans bones can absorb it too. And if I'm not mistaken,
this is where a certain form of is it iodine
or there's some some pill you can ingest that will
block the absorption of that isotope. Well, I don't know.
The first thing you have to do to figure out
(19:34):
if something like that would function is you need to
get those isotopes into human bones, exactly right. You gotta
test them. You gotta test it out. Did it go
from that cattle into Bill? It's a Bill. Yes, Bill
drew the short end of the straw at the lab.
So he's out there, you know, drinking milk straight from
(19:57):
the utter, just to see if he can get radiation
through it. It was. It was a weird, weird gig
for Bill. But but you're right. They needed this data.
They needed to figure out what happened when the radioactive
rubber hit the road, which means they needed human test subjects.
They needed human tissue. The a e C. Commissioner at
(20:20):
the time, a guy named Dr Willard Libby, complained about
this constantly because he knew the score, he knew what
was up. He was like, look, it's ugly, but we're
trying to save the world here. We need people because
they remember, they're not They're not just worried about their bombs.
They're worried about other countries developing the tech and then
dropping on them. Exactly. Yeah, so they so at the
(20:43):
very least, they need to figure out how that stuff,
uh interacts with the human body so that maybe they
can figure out some mitigation, you know, procedures or whatever,
like that pill that I can't remember the name, but
definitely is a thing that we'll probably get to. We
have to mention this part, folks. Obviously, the government could
illegally experiment on disadvantaged populations. They have certainly done so
(21:07):
in the past, and there are people who will assure
you that the experiments like this continue in the modern day.
But there's a problem with those experiments. Sometimes they have survivors,
and survivors have a tendency to, you know, talk to
people about the horrible things that happened to them, and
so Project Gabriel led to a classified program called Project
(21:29):
Sunshine in ninety three. It started out as just another
secret investigation, which is a weird sentence to say, but accurate,
and then it quickly took a dark turn. Do not
let the name fool you. In fact, let's let Dr
Libby himself introduce his project with this infamous quote. This
(21:50):
comes from a secret meeting in nineteen fifty five when
he was talking about the importance of getting humans to
experiment on. I don't know how to get um, but
I do say that it is a matter of prime
importance to get them, and particularly in the young age group.
So human samples are often of prime importance. And if
(22:11):
anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching,
they will really be serving their country hand hand nudge, nudge,
wink wink. We need young bodies. Let's go snatch some
anyone good. Yes, we got your back, We got your back.
And the bluntness, the candid nature of that statement really
(22:32):
stood out to me. I I hope it stands out
to everybody listening, because with that, the US government got
into the business of stealing the corpses of children. That
is what today's episode is about, and that's part away.
It got to me this wasn't a small operation. This
was a global network. Sunshine created an invisible army of
(22:55):
modern day resurrection men, literal corpse thieves. And we we
talked about resurrection in the past, but somebody give us
the quick and dirty just because it's such a cool
term for such a horrible thing. Yeah, I mean it was.
It was especially um during early days of say medical experimentation,
you know, when um surgeons were trying to figure out
(23:19):
how you know, the human body and the human anatomy functioned.
Uh So in order to do that, they would often
grave rob and then dig up corpses and cut them
open to see what what's what? Yeah, nailed it. It's
just like a well I think we talked about it
at length in our episode on whether or not Benjamin
Franklin was serial killer. The resurrection men came about because
(23:44):
of gaps and loopholes in the laws at the time,
Like it was legal to conduct medical experiments on cadavers,
but it was illegal to buy them, so you just
have plausible deniability, get some creepy and were desperate person
to like Will said, rob a grave for you, and
then you just pretend like, well, I don't know where
(24:06):
this body came from, officer, I'm just trying to learn
about kidneys. What do they just have like a body
drop off repository like the return thing and a library
like I mean what I mean, I know we're gonna
get there, but jeezus, this is bleak. Yeah, it's true.
This was a massive operation, even if even if it
was just sort of an implied operation. Right, Um, there
(24:29):
were project managers who didn't want to disclose the actual
nature of the research that was being done because if
they did, then it could put their personal contacts and
the people that were helping them out who were pimply
breaking the law at risk. Um. So they decided to
have researchers use people that they knew to recruit other
(24:52):
people to do more of this stuff. Degrees of separation.
That's how it works. I mean, that's that's the brilliant
part about surveillance programs like five Eyes. This network operated
everywhere from Australia to Europe through various means, and we
still don't know the extent of this. We still don't
(25:12):
know the specifics, but through various means, by hook or
by crook, pieces of dead human beings were being stolen
and they were being shipped off to the US. It
seems that many of the governments of countries involved had
no idea what was happening. Um. And that's that in
itself is pretty distressing. And it's an important point, uh,
(25:36):
that that you make here. Because some of these people
were gathering samples, Like you said, they were contacted informally,
you know, kind of off the books operation like agent
between us. You want to help me steal somebodies. What
are you doing Wednesday? Uh. They were given different reasons
for this too, because the folks in charge of Projects
(25:57):
Sunshine didn't want every and to know this was a
program related to nuclear weaponry, so they made up a
couple of different reasons. And that means that not all
the people involved in this network understood exactly why they
were shipping these samples to the US. And there were
(26:19):
a lot of samples. This was not a one and
done thing. This was not tragic case of like half
a dozen very unfortunate families. Was way deeper and way
more extreme. Yeah, according to the documents available that you know,
are declassified on this stuff. There were at least fifteen hundred,
(26:39):
I believe samples. I'm not doing the sound because I
keep I'm going back and forth between whether or not
to do that sound, just depending on the listeners reactions.
Sometimes it's like I love it, give me some swish swish.
Sometimes this man leave me alone with that swish wish. Yeah,
but Matt, you just described like the internet, you know,
I mean, people are okay, educate yourself. Oh dang, no,
(27:04):
the tables have turned okay, So let's get back seriousness.
There were over fifteen hundred samples of human flesh tissue.
A lot of them were from babies and young children,
as was stated by Dr Libby, that was important. Um again,
they were stolen from all around the world. And here's
(27:26):
the weird thing, and I we can't tell you if
it's just what was reported, you know, and what was
put in official documents by people who were keeping track
of this stuff or or not. But allegedly only five
hundred of those samples, so one third, were actually tested
for the purposes of Project Sunshine, which in itself it's
(27:47):
its own kind of heartbreak, you know what I mean?
All this for nothing for so little. It reminds me
of our discussions about Unit seven thirty one in Japan,
or some of the atrocities committed by German scientists during
World War Two. There was some useful science that came
(28:09):
from this, but the big misconception that a lot of
people have is that this science was incredibly impactful or
even good science. The events of seven thirty one were
it was an APPATOI. It wasn't allowed. It was a
chartl house. Yeah, and the parents, you know of of
of these children had no idea what was going on. Look,
(28:33):
it's one of these things where it's like do the
means justify the ends. It's sort of like black ops
and stuff, where clearly laws are broken, uh, to the
greater good, for the greater good. But then when you
start seeing things like only five samples were analyzed, you
start to be like, well, why why do they need
so many? And why was it such a widespread operation?
(28:53):
Because it really is absolutely abominable behavior, at least for
people that are religious. Can you imagine finding out that
your child's you know, body was desecrated, dug up used
for science experimentation. Well, that that's actually kind of where
I want to go. I will will hit it more
(29:16):
at the end here, But I wonder if transparency would
have changed people's thinking. There's a there's a lot of
patriotism going around for a long time in the United
States after the Second World War, and I wonder if
instead of doing it, you know, in the dark, surreptitiously
stealing bodies, it was, Hey, we we really need to
(29:38):
test this powerful weapon and the effects of it for
the safety of national security, for ours, the strength as
a union. We need you, or children's corpses, because because
you know, at least they're not asking for your firstborn
or you're young the way, or they're not killing children
(29:59):
and torturing children and people as in Unit one, they
are definitely experimenting on the thing that was once a
loved one. Yeah, um, call it Project HEROD. Sure you
gotta wonder too. I'm picturing the scenario in my mind
where you know, like a representative comes and Knox and says,
Mrs Jones, we we have your country needs you. There's
(30:21):
a thing you can do to really help us out. Um,
We're here to ask if we can you know, honor
the memory of your child by having it serve and
potentially save the lives of millions, right, good line. Yeah,
that's it's something that occurred to me as well, and
it's one of the one of the closing things we
(30:41):
can really dive into towards the end of this episode.
So let's pause for a moment for word from our sponsors,
and then we'll return with some examples of how this
process occurred. And we're back. Uh. There's a British documentary
(31:07):
we'd like to draw your attention to came out in
n It's called Deadly Experiments. In Deadly Experiments, one of
the people interviewed is a woman named Jane Pritchard. She
is British. She had a child that was still born
in nine seven, and she learned that when her child
(31:31):
when when she gave birth, the doctors who spirited the
child away removed its legs and sent those legs off
to the US for Projects Sunshine. She was forbidden to
dress her daughter for the funeral because the doctors knew
that if she did, she would find out what happened
(31:52):
to literally half of her child. She also continues and
she says, I asked if I could put her christening
robe honor, but I wasn't allowed to and that upset
me terribly because she wasn't christened. No one asked me
about doing things like that, taking bits and pieces from her,
and that, you know, that goes that ties in exactly
(32:14):
to what you're talking about with the idea of religious practices.
You know what I mean? These are these are some
of the most important sacred traditions in a lot of
belief systems. And words like we're three guys who were
paid to talk, and words fail me to try to
(32:35):
describe the profundity of that experience. I mean, imagine you
have you have a stillborn child. That is an emotional
trauma that will follow you like a shadow for the
rest of your days. And then on top of that tragedy,
you learn that your child's body has been desecrated in
(33:00):
the name of nuclear war. So and he continues, So okay.
Even Canada and the UK for a number of years
had alleged that deaths like this occurred, but there wasn't
an official investigation for decades. It wasn't even until two
thousand and one. Remember this stuff was happening to fifty six.
(33:23):
It wasn't until two thousand and one that Britain's atomic
Energy Agency acknowledged that they were stealing the bones of children,
which you know to to the point of fairy tale.
This sounds like a fable, This sounds like folklore. This
sounds like a boogeyman, a monster from ages past. Now
(33:45):
you're absolutely right. So what happens to the bodies of
the people that we love when they're gone? Um? There
are obviously options, you have things like cremation and burial,
em bombing, um. But it's not like h and deup
with some sort of inventory or a checklist of what
happens to organs. I'll only say this because I've been
(34:08):
watching six ft Under a lot lately. Apparently when a
body is picked up from the morgue or after an autopsy,
you know, by a an embalming um service or or
company or uh funeral home, there is absolutely a checklist,
like if, for example, if someone was in a you know,
accident where parts were severed. Um, there is a checklist
(34:31):
for things an episode involving a severed foot that points
that out in six ft Under, But we don't get that.
We could probably request it, but we don't. So it's
not like most of us would actually have some sort
of checklist as to where the organs especially end up, uh,
and where different body parts might turn up right, Yeah, absolutely,
(34:52):
I mean and and also think about, you know, think
about the grief that someone is going through. Uh. It's
it's easy to understand how figuring out what happened to
specific body parts wouldn't be the highest priority because you're
just trying to make it from one day to the next.
(35:14):
And regulatory agencies exist in multiple countries to monitor these processes,
but the average person doesn't really have a way to
learn whether their loved ones body parts are being given
a dignified burial in accordance to their religious statutes, or
whether they're being illicitly taken for other purposes. A few
(35:36):
years back here in our home state of Georgia, authorities
discovered this funeral home north of Atlanta was being paid to,
you know, do a typical burial service, but they were
taking the bodies and just like throwing them in freezers
and in the woods. It's um, these are you know,
this is taking advantage of very vulnerable people at one
(35:58):
of the worst moments in their lives. And that that's
one of the most frightening lessons about Project Sunshine that's
I think that's one of the two big things we
should keep in mind here. Something like this conspiracy could
easily happen again in the modern day. The only reason
(36:18):
it's if it's not happening now. The only reason stuff
like this is not happening is because people haven't found
a rationalization that they felt was noble enough. We're one
excuse away from something like this happening again, and and
and wasn't necessary back to thirty one, it's I mean,
it is crucial to understand the effects of nuclear fallout,
(36:42):
nuclear waste. Were there better ways to go about it?
Like what you guys were saying earlier, That's what I
keep thinking, Like what if you what if you phrased
it as this is a way for your family to
serve not only your country, but the world, you know
what I mean? Yeah, I mean I don't like, if
you check organ donor or something like that on your
(37:05):
on your registration and your you know, your license or whatever,
does that mean does this qualify? I don't know, it's
it's sort of silly question, but I'm not intending it
to be. I just mean, you know, this is obviously
extenuating circumstances when you know, desperate times and all of that.
(37:25):
I'm just wondering if there would be a way to
kind of like interpret that as you're an organ donor
or you know, when people say they're doing in their
body the science, I always like, what does that actually mean?
Is that some sort of like writ that you have
to create that says which you know exactly which research
lab you want to donate your body too for a
specific project? Or is it just more like what do
(37:46):
you need here? I am excuse me, right? I I
imagine there's some way uh to there there's some way
to specify uh cause or an experiment or an institution
to which you donate your body or parts of your body,
But I I don't know. The closest experience I have
(38:07):
had with consensual donation of body parts has been I
went through a phase where I really wanted to donate
my left eye to uh to someone. But they're they're
understandably there there's some there's some legal hurdles. If you're
a guy who's just like I want to give away
one of my eyes, first question is like, well, who
(38:30):
do you want to give this cornea too? And if
your answer is I d k L O L. Then
they're understandably going to be a little bit weirded out.
But why did you not give away your eye? It
got too complicated, honestly, that's the reason, okay. Uh. And
(38:52):
and also you know it's something that would still be
interested in doing. I mean, giving giving someone power of
site is an amazing thing, you know. Um. But also
I wear contacts, so it's like it's like it's it's
like giving away a car, right is my is my
(39:15):
eyes so bad that it would be like giving someone
a lemon, a beat up car that they really don't
want to drive, you know, and it just sits in
the driveway of their skull. Uh. That phrase the driveway
of your skull. Then that's incredible. But but lets let
us know about that. No, I think your question about
(39:35):
organ donation is is really interesting. I haven't thought about
it in that way. I know, you know, I don't
know about you guys, but I think most people our
age in this state become organ donors because they knock
a couple of bucks off the license gate exactly. And again,
it's all does come down to um as as so
(39:56):
much so often burial does uh to religious belief and
I think that's the greatest betrayal. You know, is in
a country where supposedly we prize people's right to exercise
their religious you know, freedom so highly to betray that trust,
you know, is is this pretty pretty uh egregious? And
(40:19):
this goes to our second, perhaps the most important point.
No one in this conspiracy saw themselves as villains, right.
Everybody is the protagonist of their story. And these people
who consider themselves good people, through through a series of
(40:40):
slippery sloops, found themselves stealing corpses of children, Which makes
you think what lengths would you go to if you
genuinely thought you were saving the world. In this case,
it was not a hypothetical question, and it's something you know.
It's it's easy to say that these people were monstrous,
(41:04):
but then you have to ask yourself, what would you
do in that situation? If you thought that you could
save billions of people by breaking, by bending them breaking
some ethical rules, would you do it? I mean, what
would you prefer to be haunted by? Is another way
to put it. Would you prefer to spend the rest
of your life knowing that you literally still corpses? Or
(41:27):
would you prefer to be haunted by the idea that
you could have saved the world and decided not to.
I don't. I don't know an easy way out of that.
I don't know the solution there. It's a it's a
weird thing. I gotta tell you. I'm really torn. I'm
genuinely torn because I know if someone did that to
(41:47):
my son, like if he had just passed away and
parts of him were taken away, I would be furious.
I'd be I'd be going on a little hunt for
the hunt for the resurrection people who took parts of
my son. But it's also you know, scientifically, if you
take belief out of it, it's a dead body and
it really is something that you know could potentially help.
(42:10):
But at the same time, they're researching the effects of
nuclear weapons, uh, like these terrifying weapons that the research
isn't necessarily going to save anybody, right, I mean, if
it's a weapon and you just realize, well, we've got
to protect people from the effects of this weapon, you
don't you don't necessarily need to know how it affects
(42:33):
the human body. I don't know. Just like I said, though,
I mean, it's about like trying to figure out how
can we guard our population against the use of these
weapons by others? You know? And by the way, that
thing that I was struggling so desperately, remember, it's just
it's called uh potassium iodide, and it's just a pill
(42:54):
that blocks radioactive iodine from entering the thyroid. So not
quite the same thing. But you know, they might not
have known how that worked if they hadn't studied the
effects of that on the human body and knowing that
the thyroid absorbs that particular radioactive material. So I I
do get it. But also I'm when I wanted to
(43:15):
ask a question, ben, Um, did I miss this or why? So?
Why children specifically or was that just part of the
you know, part of the whole deal. They were just
some children involved. Yeah, it was just their vibe, I guess. No,
I'm kidding. I'm kidding. That's a horrible thing to say. Yeah.
The the issue was that children would be children of
(43:39):
this era, would be the first kids born after the
creation and deployment of nuclear weapons. So they like you
could if you took anybody was born before that time,
you would only see the effect of what happened to
them at that moment later in life when they were exposed,
you know, when then when they're like fifty years old
(44:01):
or something. But if you if you look at children,
you're looking at an organism that is new to the environment.
So it's it's kind of like the study of microplastics, right.
It was a big deal when scientists found out that
microplastics are occurring in human bodies while children are in
(44:22):
the womb, you know what I mean. That means that
it's already something that's with you from day zero. So
if you have a stillborn child and you're able to
test it for levels of things like strontium ninety, then
what you can learn is that you can learn basically
whether the radiation or the contamination is ubiquitous enough to
(44:47):
enter through another filter. So it's because remember kids just
being born. If it's born and it has traces of
contamination in it already, that means that this contaminant, ever
it is, be a microplastics or strontium ninety, has managed
to pass through another filter. It's gone from the environment,
(45:08):
maybe to an animal, a cow or whatever, into a
human that is burying a child, and then from that
human into the other human inside of them. So there's
there's a logic to it. But it's um, it's it's
kind of a soulless logic, I would argue, And you're right,
you know, it's hard to parse this. It's not something
(45:29):
with an easy answer, and it's startling. It should be
startling that investigations are kind of ongoing. You know, you
would think that this guy would get much more press coverage.
It was in it was in the New York Times
a couple of times. You would think that it got
um much more attention, or that the American public at
(45:52):
the very least, which would be putting more eyes on
these kind of classified projects that occur. But for now,
what we can say is it's a conspiracy. It really happened,
and something like this, based on what we know about
human psychology, could easily happen again. Uh, this is a
(46:15):
tragedy all around, you know what I mean. There's not
there's there's not an evil mad scientist in here. There's
there there's just like like it always is, there's there's
a massive terrified, frightened people who are doing their best
not to die. What a doubter. Okay, who's got jokes?
(46:36):
Oh yeah, no, I don't don't think I have any
jokes after that, doing their best not to die. That's
the most emo thing I've heard all week. But it's true.
It's all we're that's what we're all doing. Yeah, thankfully
it's gotten a little easier, I think. Ah, these days,
it's there's a lot of things trying to kill us,
no question about that. Um. But now I didn't know
(46:58):
about this project, and I have to say this, this
is such a cliche thing, but how come all of
these government projects that are like involving horrible things. I'll
have names like Operation Twinkle Toes and Operations Starfruit, Operations
capri Son, you know, like they're all horrible, horrible thing.
I understand why they do it. It's like to get
(47:21):
people off the set of like how absolutely horrible and
maniacal what's actually going on is? But it's it's definitely
an interesting dichotomy when you read about so many of these, right, Yeah,
I like to I know this is not true, but
I like to imagine that there is in every government
there's like one person, one lady, one guy, just some
(47:44):
generic dude whose entire job is to think up these names,
and like they get up, you know, they get to
the office eight or nine or whatever, and they've got
a list of crazy stuff that their government is doing.
And then they you know, like they lean back, they
have some coffee, and they're like, let's call this one
project Artichokes. I like artichokes, and then let's torture some people,
(48:08):
right right, And I, um, yeah, I don't know, I
don't know the process. I know it can change. You know,
sometimes they really like acronyms or initialisms and then yeah,
like like you said, no, sometimes it's it seems purposefully misleading.
Like if we ever hear about a top secret government
(48:29):
project that's been declassified and its name is like Project
Fuzzy Warm Times, and that's clearly evil, right, gotta be
gotta be the most evil one. The more snuggly the name,
the more evil of the project. Um, that's my theory. Um.
But no, no, this is something that I think everyone
(48:49):
should know about. Um, certainly a dark period and history
in general, but also in like weird government conspiracies. And
it's far from the only example. We'd like to know
what you think, what lengths would you go to if
you genuinely thought you were saving the world. Uh, let
us know if you have experience with other similar stories
(49:13):
in your neck of the global woods. Obviously being based
in the US, we see a lot of stuff that
emerges from the US specifically, but that doesn't mean that
other countries aren't also doing dastardly things. We want to
hear from you as always. You're the most important part
of the show, so let us know. We try to
(49:33):
be easy to find online. You can find us on
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review you know you want to, and if it makes
(49:54):
us all smile collectively in our hearts, um, then we
will read it on one of our our episodes. Yeah,
of course, I mean, if you if you feel like
if you feel like saying, I love how these guys
always ruined my day with these stories, probably not going
to read that one. Well maybe now that's a that's
a positive. I see what you did there, Ben, And
(50:14):
if you're not a person who really SIPs the social meds,
we totally get it. Why not give us a call
where one eight three three st d w y t
K three minutes. Those minutes belong to you. Let us
know what's on your mind, give us a cool nickname
to call you, and most importantly, let us know if
it's okay to use your voice or your name on air.
(50:38):
If you feel like three minutes is not enough time,
we totally get it. Please don't feel like you have
to censor or edit yourself. You can tell us your
story in full, write it out, send us a good
old fashioned email where we are conspiracy and I heart
radio dot com m m H. Stuff they don't want
(51:13):
you to know is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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