Doomed to Fail - Ep 80 - Stratospheric Secrets: SR-71's Classified History

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Today Farz tells the once-secret story of the creation of the SR-71 Blackbird stealth plane. Fasten your seatbelts as we unveil the mysteries and stories behind the iconic SR-71 Blackbird. From its groundbreaking design to the classified missions that pushed the boundaries of aviation, we'll explore the high-altitude adventures and the brave pilots who soared into the pages of history. Get ready to soar at Mach 3 and beyond as we lift the veil on the Blackbird Chronicles.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Boom, and we're back on a presumably cold Wednesday at this point. You know, I hope I don't have to, like, release this after you've been frozen to death. So take care of yourself. I actually won't have plenty of firewood. Good.

Because in Texas, the only assurance is caveman meat. Yeah. So, sweet. So I'm going to go ahead and kick things off Taylor with my topic, which is going to be a little weird for usual. I'm excited. It's not going to be like the normal thing. So. What is normal?

What even is normal? I can't wait. So I'm going to have you guess. Oh, God. I can be here. What do the CIA, Bill Clinton, in the mariana trench have in common they're all deep and dark and there's things in there that we don't know what they are it always circles back to epstein's list um exactly so no no um i i saw a meme

on instagram recently and it featured this specific aircraft that i think we've probably all seen and but like probably don't even really think about very much anymore and it let me down a rabbit hole where I found like a ton of fascinating info and I thought it would be a pretty good topic for discussion here so I'm going to be discussing the conception career and the doomed to fail demise of the legendary aircraft the SR 71 also known as Blackbird you know what that is no that's very exciting you look very excited too so I feel excited that you're excited it is oh god like I feel like every kid growing up

looked in post so this thing was like I want to be in that thing one day yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm totally sure it looks so cool so I broke this down to several components like the first piece of it the first act is going to be the conception so I'm going down we're going we're going to take some wild turns here I'll just stick with me okay

I'm excited to get to the mariana trench because that feels like the opposite of where you want to be if you're in a plane That is a very last thing we're going to cover. So I'm going to keep the nail biters here until we're done. Okay. They're forced to listen to me. I can't wait.

So I'm going to start the topic of the conception of the Blackbird by starting with the U.S. Intelligence Community as a whole. So the further you dig into funding and budgets for the intelligence community, the more you realize how entirely opaque the whole process is and how little is exposed to the public, I have yet to find a reliable source on how budgets actually work with the 18 agencies that comprise the U.S. Intelligence Committee. Also, that blew me away, 18 agencies. That's literally what the totality of what's called the I see the intelligence community in the United States comprises of. I think mostly CIA, FBI, NSA, but like there's 15 others.

15 others, yeah. Whoa. There was, I was just to interrupt, we were watching filming. guy yesterday or the other day and they talk about Harvard and they're like Harvard has you know illustrious alumni and then they show um ted Cruz Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon and then they show the Unabomber and then they pause and they go we apologize to Ted Kaczynski for putting you in that group but I was telling Juan how like Harvard ruined Ted Kaczynski because of LSD yeah they broke his brain yeah um well actually I think the CIA commission

Harvard, Harvard consented to doing it. So I don't know. I don't know who's more complicit there. So I started thinking to this. So basically the whole, this is all pretty common knowledge. So the way that the federal government budget works is that agencies put together with their budgets and they submitted to Congress and Congress has to basically rubber stamp it and they say, yep, this funding is appropriated and things keep running.

It is way more complicated than that. Like what I learned is that actually it's a three-year problem. process. So from when you submit a budget to Congress until those funds are actually used, it takes about three years. So like the process for the money that is allocated this year started in 2022. That's how long of a cycle that is. But what's really interesting and something that I cannot figure out is how money for the community, intelligence community, gets allocated. I found this like Harvard research paper on it and it also was basically just citing the same other stats and resources I found everywhere else. But one thing that I noticed is that

the more I dig into like every now and then we'll do a topic and I can feel my own personal like political affiliations kind of moving and shifting underneath me. And that's kind of what I thought when I dug deep into this because to get to the bottom of how black budgets are spent you backed your way into it by looking at how overall budgets were spent so i pulled up this stat which like blew me away so in 2022 the federal government budgeted 4.1 trillion dollars for the year 23 so last year for mandatory spending of that of the 4.1 trillion 82% or 3.4 trillion could be addressed by just fixing three societal problems we have. have how health insurance works, our ability to save money for retirement in student loans.

Oh, oh, really? That's it. That's it. Those three things. So, again, like, I'm not advocating for this, but by comparison, all we ever talk about, like, societally is how much we spend it on military, and we spend a ton. We spend more than the next, like, I forgot what it was, like 20, 30 countries combined or something.

it is we spent five times more addressing those three issues than we do on our military and it's not fixing it because because if you look at it you're like okay so let me get this straight so because there's no cap and limit to how companies can how much it costs get basic medical procedures done and because of a convoluted insurance system that creates all this middleman process in the middle there, we blow up our costs on that front, which means we all end up paying for it through tax dollars, that we then taxed to pay for the retirement of elders out of our own resources, which is going to go bankrupt anyways. It's just like, it's like, it's so crazy. It's like, it's like just literally just fix the health care problem. It means people can save their own money for retirement. Right.

It's just like, and then you get into like schools and you're like, wait, so this turned into a business when? This is literally like $50,000 a year for a fucking undergrad degree. It's like crazy. Like, so anyways. No, agree to agree on all those things. I went through a whole feelings thing with this. I'm very excited for in the next 10 minutes when like the CIA

burst into your house. So. I know, right? The amount of Googling I did on this. I was like, yep, that's being tracked. That's being tracked. That got tracked. That key stroke was tracked. Like just literally. The men in black are going to show. up it's going to be very exciting 100 100 percent so the intelligence community's funding falls under a

single umbrella which so basically all 18 agencies it's intelligence community that's the budget that's where the budget goes so by all accounts the rough approximation of how much was budgeted for the entire intelligence community these 1880s was 90 billion dollars for this for this year you were saying for last year okay yeah it was two years ago but it was four last year so if anybody looks into this like i know that there's two categories here there's military intelligence programs as national intelligence programs i'm bucketing them all into one the military intelligence is significantly lower than the national intelligence but anyway it's like that's just know that if you look this status up i'm just including them into one um

this is part of our defense spending and is unique from the rest of the budget process part because budgets aren't line itemed here so the obvious reason why that is is because they need the ability to create what's called black budgets which is off the book spending that not even congress has access to so like it is very very like top secret national intelligence stuff and and that's the point of it the point is to be able to kind of create and run and operate classified projects so And I'm sure that I've been propagandized to be like, yeah, of course. What do you mean? Like, I've watched a lot of, like, movies and, like, TV shows where I'm like, of course they need a black budget, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, like, here's the thing. I would say that after learning what I've learned here, I'm like, yeah, we do. We actually tangibly do.

And this project is a really good case study of why that is. And this is the only one that we really, like, I mean, sure, we know of a lot of them now. But, like, I don't know what's being worked on right now. Like what's being worked on right now might be like something we'll never, we won't even know in our lifetimes, right? So it was from this budget, what's called the Black Budget, that the Air Force and the CIA joined forces because they're part of the intelligence community. They joined forces to plan the creation of a plane, which at the time was codenamed Archangel,

which is rad, just absolutely rad. So a little bit of background, a little bit of history on this. So in 1956, the U.S. created a spy plane called the U-2. It was built to fly incredibly high and take incredibly high-quality pictures of the train below. During the height of the Cold War on May 1, 1960, one of these planes was flying over the Soviet Union when it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile.

This was basically an incredibly huge PR disaster for the United States. And there was on one account, I remember I read Eisenhower told his secretary, that he was ready to quit his job. Like, he was just, like, so ashamed and embarrassed. Because at this time, when Krushchev was essentially the grace that the Soviets gave America was Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, probably did this on his own and didn't even tell the president.

So, like, let's not just throw everything out as far as our negotiations on a peace treaty here. Because he's a baddie, right? Dulles, yeah, Dulles was definitely a baddie. Yeah. So, again, huge disaster for the U.S. and Eisenhower and Cruise Chef agree that the U.S. will never fly spy planes over the Soviet Union again. That was kind of agreement. Like, we're going to put an ironclad treaty in place.

It's not going to happen again. So knowing this, obviously, Alan Dulles was like, cool, we have a problem. Now we need a plane that just can't get, can't ever be caught. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I was like, of course they didn't really do that. Yeah, of course. The problem was that we can't do this. It was like, okay, now we just got to figure out how.

not to get caught doing this again. So they approached the recipient of a ton of Black Project money contracting Lockheed Martin to develop and build such an aircraft. So in 1962, they signed a contract to build six planes that at a time had a designation and still do of SR 71. That's what I've been referring to as Blackbird. So SR 71, Blackboard, same thing. The basic requirements were threefold.

Had to fly super high, had to fly super fast, and it had to see. completely under wraps. That's it. That was the idea. So Lockheed Martin had a division focused entirely on building projects like this. It's called Skunkworks, which is now like a euphemism used by any sort of company

that has like an in-house specialty projects thing. But it all originally had Lockheed Martin. Yeah, exactly. And basically, like if you look at the list of like the project Skunkworks has worked on, it's like every insane plane that has ever existed. so for example any time you hear reports out of something happening or someone citing something out of area 51 it's probably a strong horse plane like to that point even the initial test flights done for the sr 71 they were all done area 51 for context so so creating a plane that can fly high and fast enough to basically outperform any other plane or missile for that matter in the world was a pretty tall order and would it essentially means is they had to basically invent all new processes and technologies and manufacturing

capabilities all from the ground up i'll go through what it takes to basically operate this thing later on but it's crazy the amount of work they had to go into this they had to basically figure out how a new way for engines to work for fuel to be stored how to ensure survivability a whole host of other stuff that we'll go into the details up have you looked have you looked this plane up before, Taylor? I'm looking at it right now. It looks silly. Describe it.

It's like a big front part, and then it has like little engines and wings on the back. But the front part is very like oblong and big, right? Yes. Yeah. I think it looks silly. It does look like a bird. It doesn't not like a bird. It looks more like a bird than other planes.

Taylor, you say silly. I say probably badass. Yes. Let's figure out. whoever wants please write in we'll do a poll is it's still your badass we'll see what would the

interwebs have to say I do know that we have a military pilot who is a listener so yeah please if you've ever even seen one of these things in person like I would love to know so

basically the reason it looks the way it looks isn't because they were trying to make it look badass like the goal is this thing for it can never be seen like literally the entire objective we're never seen

and so that's why it's designed the way that it's designed. Somebody described it a little bit. So the front of the plane to your point, it's like a boom. It comes to a point like a fighter jet does, but then it sweeps down really rapidly on the edges. And from the top or the bottom, it kind of looks almost like it's flat,

the central fuselage part of it. And that's all done because it's stealth capability. So it was designs that it wouldn't be readable as a plane on traditional radar, or leave a radar signature. So the wings and the engines are integrated into the wings and they have this cone-like structure of the very

front of it which is entirely a design component of how the engine was supposed to work to get it up to its max speed which we're going to get it to here in a second. So what the plane was capable of doing, no plane, sorry, no manned plane ever since has matched it.

So in 1964 they built a thing that even today we have not tried to replicate so it was capable of flying in excess of muck 3.2 which is 2,500 miles per hour so the the the in excess part was in short burst some have reported claims of 3.5 but it would sustain flight at 3.2 which is the fastest you can go well the fastest of man plane would be able to go do you watch top gun too you mean maverick or yeah yes it's great it's great but he flies at a mock a lot he flies in a mock a lot yeah well i mean that's the thing like these speeds are not that

i mean this speed is atypical but flying incredibly fast on one of those jet planes is not the more critical part of its functionality had to do with the fact that its service ceiling was 80,000 to 85,000 feet high which is like super high like super super super different eye. Yeah. When you look at pictures of people in the cockpit of this thing, they look like they're in outer space. They don't even look like they're flying a plane.

100%. I see that, for sure. So the reason they had to design it this way was twofold. One is because no other plane outside of what's called the, it's called the Zuma scent or something, something like those lights, no other plane can actually sustainably fly at this elevation. A plane could occasionally get up there, but it would just be shooting straight up. and then would lose all lift and just fall back down.

So occasionally, they were able to lock targets on this thing in the later operational history, but they're never able to get close enough to actually do anything about it. But the other more important part, you know, I'm so sorry. I know you're on a role, but I have a stupid question. Is this pre-satellites or like during satellites? Because aren't satellites like above this? So wouldn't that not matter anymore?

I'm going to get to that. Okay. Yes. That is a really good point. Thank you. Thank you for understanding my very scientific question. no no i you're we're we're talking about this for a lot for a while later on um so the other part of it had to do with um the speed so the speed was also meant to outrun missiles so even if even if

there was a surface to air missile launch this thing it could outpace a missile so that's entirely how it was supposed to run also the idea was they given it its service ceiling by the time a missile actually got high enough to reach it it would then need to accelerate faster and by that point it would of exhaustable propulsion. So that was the idea. The name, the SR designation of it stands for strategic reconnaissance. The purpose of this plane was to fly up over or to the side of any targets on the ground to take incredibly high quality, high resolution pictures.

All is being stored in the plane because this is 1964. And once the plane lands, they would remove the components and then send it over to the CIA to analyze the data, interpret it, and then run it up the ladder, essentially. So, like I said, a lot of stuff around building this thing had to be unique. I'm going to touch on just a few of them. There's a ton that we could be talking about, but we don't have forever. So I'm going to touch on a few of the more interesting things. One was that flying at this speed and created a tremendous amount of resistance in the air,

which caused a tremendous amount of heat to be built up. So it was determined early on that they couldn't build this out of steel or any traditional materials that you would use for airframe construction. they would have to use titanium. The problem was that the order they would need to use for the titanium was in short supply in the U.S., but was an incredibly high supply in the Soviet Union, which is who they literally were trying to build this plane against. Yeah. So the CIA did what the CIA does exceptionally well, and they basically set up a ton of little shell companies across the entire country or the entire world and ordered in small batches the titanium they would need to construct the plane so they wouldn't raise any alarms or anything.

and it took years it took years like during the design phase I mean they didn't even know if they're going to do this but they still design I mean that the ingenuity here is crazy I think we talked about that something we talked about something with that like the opposite way we're like oh it was helium

it was how in the U.S. we had all the helium and we wouldn't give it to Germany to make their blimp. Yeah yeah so wild also because because objects that don't melt and heat expand in heat the body paneling of the plane was loose fitting. So when it was

on the ground, it wasn't actually fully secured as one cohesive structure. It would have to reach Mach 3.2 its cruising speed for all the pieces to actually come together and fit. Where did I hear that about regular planes? Someone just told me that. Planes are built on a moving platform

because they're meant to be moving. I mean, I'm sure they are. I'm sure all of them are. like I know that planes do um it's like subs right they used to talk about how people in subs they would tie a string from one side of the sub to the other side of the sub on the inside and then as you go further down you can see how much the string sags because the entire body is shifting and moving planes I'm sure do the exact same thing yeah so yeah that's that's the piece about how the construction side of it was one interesting quirk about the plane was that the fuel for the plane was all housed in the airframe itself it was like circulating around the plane, which a lot of planes do this. Most of time it's just in the wings, but in this plane it had to be kind of all around because it needed a ton of fuel, and its wings weren't even that long. There were delta wings, like a little bit sloped. So the problem with that is because the skin of the plane is loose fitting, and because it expands and contracts so much, this thing

would just constantly leak fuel when it was on the ground. Right, right, right. There's only so many times you can compress and come back and the fuel cell wouldn't shatter. And so basically, maintenance workers devised a count of how many drops a minute were okay versus now we have to actually replace all this paneling, replace the air cell, fuel cells and everything. Yeah. So the other thing that was unique by this was just the survivability of it. So like, again, if you look at pictures, you think you're looking at an astronaut, not a pilot

inside of the reason was that they couldn't pressurize the cabin sufficiently at this height so what i read was that at this at the cruising altitude of 85 000 feet the best they could really hope for was to um was to pressurize it to the equivalent of 10 to 25 000 feet which you'd still pass out at but you're still not doing the auction at that level and so what they had to do was create a pressure suit so they're inside of pressurizing suit that where all their life support is dependent on this suit itself not the cabin that you're actually inside of um and the other part of it the other reason why they had to do this was in the event of a ejection event which happened a lot in the event of an ejection given the speed

and the altitude a you die from just the fall because you be without oxygen for so long in in a descent but the other part of it was that if you were to inject, the heat your body would experience would be about 450 degrees. That's how hot it would be upon ejection. So there's no time to fumble for oxygen or anything. Why would it be hot when it's cold up there? Because of the speed? Because of the speed, yeah. So what they were saying was that the body itself would heat up to around 1,000 degrees to Fahrenheit. And the glass that was in front of the pilot would be somewhere in the 250 to 350 range. Wow. You get It's crazy, crazy hot because it's the speed of the resistance.

So going into a bit of the operational history. So the SR-71 was operational until it's, well, there's going to be two retirements. Its first retirement happened 24 years after went to active service. And during that time, it was used in Vietnam, Israel, Lebanon, and obviously the Soviet Union. Basically, any global conflict, the U.S. had any sort of interest in. the stories around this and the numbers that are thrown around of like some of the emissions of this thing went on are kind of inconceivable. So one of the quirks of the SR-71 was that it would take off with its fuel cells half full. The idea being that the lighter it is, the better.

And so it would take off also leaking fuel anyways. So why waste on the ground? So takeoff, its first stop upon take-off was, meeting up with a mid-air refueling tanker and it would refuel it's the very first thing was to stop and refuel so it would do that and then it would accelerate to full speed so like it's actual cruising speed of three point two mock three point two and it could only do this for about 90 minutes so about 90 minutes after cruising at the south or at this speed it would have to start looking for another tanker which would find refuel and then keep going it just like a constant thing had to

keep being refueled mid-air so it would be like well The stories that you'd hear about this from some of the pilots that flew in it were, you know, they would take off from Sacramento and they would basically do a loop around half the country where they would go from Sacramento up to Seattle, turn back around, go over Albuquerque, down to San Diego, back to Sacramento, and they would refuel twice, it'll be like a two-hour trip to do this whole thing. Wow. There was one pilot, there was a story I read about one pilot who he had dinner with his wife and kids at home. everybody went to sleep he goes to air base he suits up he flies to the north pole where the CIA wanted photos to ascertain whether the Soviet Union

was planting listening devices under the ice sheet to track the our nuclear submarines and then he flew back home and it was just a couple of hours and he went to bed that's some some sandy shit there yeah yeah and it actually happened on

Christmas scene didn't really that's delightful yeah um I also remember like watching like one of the last manned space missions that went up like they do a thing where at some point they have like one more um i should call it like one more chance to to bail and if they did that they'd land in dublin you know like oh oh because they like go they're so high yeah but it's like six minutes so like six minutes after leaving florida they could technically land in dublin but because they went up you know so crazy yeah so fun someone

of this like this guy one of the stories that I read that one with the guy was going out Albuquerque doing like a loop around 50% of the country basically in two hours. He was talking about how when he was in Albuquerque, he could see downtown L.A. on one side and

Denver and the Rocky Mountains on the other side. No way. That's cool. So cool. Yeah. And it was also actually one interesting mission that it went on was that it actually was used to track the route that D.B. Cooper went on and took pictures

underneath it to figure out where he might have ditched. it didn't work they ran five missions trying to do this and it didn't work because of cloud coverage in the Pacific Northwest so they want you to think that's what they want you to think they did find his body it's me i'm dby cooper strange reveal um that's weird so finding tangible mission history on this thing is really really hard because i'm sure all that is classified the stuff you know is the stuff that pilots are talking about on youtube and some grains of detail come out

when you look at like the the planes that have been downed because then you know okay so one was down in the North China Sea we know that like something happened in the engine and then the details are scarce

but so there's not a ton of detail around this and so that's part of the reason why it went into its first premature retirement was because nobody really knew what it did they just knew we spent a ton of money on this thing it looks cool and it goes high but like yeah yeah exactly and to your point satellites

which I'm going to get to in more detail here so the military was trying to find places to cut its budget but also it had a shinier newer toy that it was trying to fund which is the B2 bomber more commonly known as the stealth so at that point kind of like you mentioned before global satellite coverage was becoming more pervasive

and it would definitely more pervasive than it was when the SR-71 was initially in development. So people in power had this misconception on the cost to maintain the program and how valuable the program actually was in light of other competing interests. So because of how secret it was and because the planes like this get priced out based on how many how much it cost to operate them on an hourly basis, there was an assumption that this fleet cost about $700 million to operate a year, which comes out to about $85,000 per flight hour. But really, it was closer to $300 million. It was flying a lot more than people actually knew because it was secret. So you don't know that, those details. So you think it's more expensive than it actually was. Also, $300 million in the scheme of the U.S. budget is like, you know, a quarter to you and me. Yeah. So in late 1989, the plane was officially retired just short of being involved in Operation Desert Storm, which didn't matter really because the U.S. won so decisively,

but it was noted because General Schwartzcoff came out saying, like, hey, we actually could have used this plane. Like, it would have been really, really helpful to know how people were moving and how to position people. And that would self-perpetuate itself because in 1993, that's when really things started popping off, like, a lot more in the Middle East and with the war in Bosnia. And so the military requested that the, that Congress allocate budget. to reactivate several of these SR 71s.

So their argument on doing so was that typically with a satellite, to reposition a satellite to a specific point, can take up to 24 hours to do. And the military was looking at this and saying, like, we can get from here, we can get from a military base in the U.S. to over Russia, over Bosnia, over Lebanon, in like two hours.

yeah totally so time was kind of of the essence here also because the plane can keep doing you the same pass over and over again it was able to quickly determine the motion of things so what they were talking about was in bosnia they were trying to determine where um weapons were being transported to but a satellite hits that spot and then passes and then hits it again and then again so it doesn't show you the real time progression of things the way yeah So for a period of time, a few of them did return into active service, and that was until 1997 when Bill Clinton famously used the power that he thought he had, which he did not, called the line item veto. So he struck the SR 71 budget as a line item from the budget for 98, and that went up to the Supreme Court, which Supreme Court deemed was not a power the president actually has. can you imagine how quaint that was taylor like that's what we were fighting about as a country was like does the president have the power to do a line item veto that's we were so cute back then when the president like you know could read and like adducive um yeah what a lovely what a lovely time to be alive lovely time um regardless at that point it became clear that there was so much resistance now the president was getting involved on this project that a second retirement was

ultimately inevitable and that's what happens so in 1998 they went into permanent retirement status and now are basically just exhibited in museums that's all they do um i feel like that's fine they probably have new ones the better ones so i don't want to ride on a plane from 1963 do you is that whatever so well the thing is it's not that they have well you wouldn't be writing in that anymore so there is an SR 72 in development. And what that is is a drone. Like, everything's going to drone. Yes, you're right.

You don't have to worry about, like, human survivability at all, which is great. Helps a lot. And so that Lockheed Scott Quark is working on currently, and that is kind of the next stage of unmanned aircraft. So, wow. Some fun facts and interesting statistic. So 32 SR71s were built in total. 12 were lost

One pilot ended up dying As a result of the plane crashing Zero planes though were lost due to enemy combat So the mission was The objectives were mad Like it was never caught It all went wrong due to You know issues with

The engine or stuff like that So it was all mechanical in nature It still holds the fastest route by plane from New York to London at just under two hours. So it was one hour and 54 minutes long. Did that route? So the entire hour of 54 minutes, you're like, ah. It's wild.

It's wild. Yeah, there was another one I saw that was Kansas City, Missouri to New York in seven minutes. There you is. They're crazy. Yeah. It maintained a flight at the highest altitude ever achieved consistently by a man plane. at 85,000 feet.

And one fact that I promised at the very beginning that I'm going to go ahead to LeBron, and it's kind of a creepy one, is that in April of 1989, the last SR-71 to be lost in a mission actually went down.

And it was codenamed Ichibon. And what happened was one of the engine bearings froze, which basically caused the engine to just disintegrate and tear itself apart mid-air. The pilots ejected safely,

and they were rescued, and the Navy went to work to recover the plane from the China Sea. They did that. They did their investigation, all that good stuff. It was all done, like, on-site. It was deemed too expensive in a security hazard to transport this thing back to the U.S. to have it scrapped.

So they decided the best thing to do is to drop it somewhere where literally no other country could have the resources to pull it up. Whoa. So they dropped it in the Mariana Trench? Today, if you go down to the Mariana Trench, you might stumble on a 34-year-old S.R. 71 Blackbird. That's dope.

That's crazy, right? Mm-hmm. Fun. So, yeah. So that is my story. It all, you know, for me, like, the Duna fell part of it just goes back to, like, how supersonic planes are anyways. Like, they're so crazy advanced and so crazy expensive opera.

Like, I remember the Concord was one of the air. It was just, like, the pride of British Airways and eventually it's like, yeah, we're done with us. Like, nobody needs to go to New York. Nobody needs to go from London to New York. fast. Yeah, like, we're fine. We can just to leisurely 10-hour flight or whatever. That's cool. It's interesting.

I think it's so fun that there's all those, like, secret, you know, I know, I don't know. Who knows? My dad was talking about how he was like, well, yeah, Palm Springs is where, you know, Eisenhower was supposed to have met the aliens and they were like, stop doing nuclear things. And he was like, no. And then, like, that was it. I love that. And we know, you and me know someone, I won't say their name, but I'll tell you later. But one of the engineers we used to work with at our old job used to work at Area 51. And he told me that he would live in, he lived in Las Vegas, and they would drive to a parking lot. And then they go on a plane with no windows to work every day.

Yeah, I believe it. Yeah. I believe it. Yeah, I looked at a bunch of pictures of Area 51, too. And it's, it's really creepy. It's a really creepy spot. Yeah. But, but it's, but it's, when they go there.

but I don't think it's like alien creepy honestly like research in this and seeing how secretive the government is about stuff like this is like yeah of course like they're gonna have to test this stuff somehow and so yeah like we're gonna kill each other before anything else happens anyway you know yeah humans will annihilate ourselves in before before we get to intergalactic alien anything that's the that's the paradox I mean that's thing you look at the plane and again right to us if you think it's cool or silly looking But you look at a plane like that, you know, like, that's what we developed, like, started working on in, like, 1958. So what the fuck is out there now that we don't know about? Oh, totally. It's like invisible planes up here. Yeah. So it's like, what's more likely that it's like aliens that are, we're seeing over room lake or Lockheed Martin is like creating the next crazy thing? Yeah, I bet 100%.

Yeah. There's a cool air and space museum in Palm Springs also that is really fun. It has a bunch of old planes in it. You can go into like a World War II bomber and touch everything. That's fun. That's cool. I like it. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's our story for today. And if you have any thoughts or want to answer our question, write to us, Dumb to Feltpod at Chippel.com or all of socials. Yeah, all the socials. I have one listener mail. Agnes, my friend Agnes, listened to the Chicago Fire episode. and she wanted a little bit more context.

She totally understand, like, what was happening in 1871. I definitely want to, like, bring that back. So just to pull us out of the plane into, back to the Chicago fire real fast, 1871 was the Franco-Pression War. Ulysses-S. Grant was president. And in London, Queen Victoria was the Queen, and she just had opened Royal Albert Hall in memory of her husband. And also the first photographs of Yellowstone were taken in 1871.

fun context other things that are happening during that time yeah lots of fun stories so Russia was known as Prussia back then no pressure was more like Germany that area and then as we also learned today or Monday you know Germany started to unify in like the 1860s

unified around 1871 so actually it's exactly the same time like Germany started to unify around the same time with the Great Chicago Fire wild maybe they're wilded maybe was that yeah the other sweet

well thank you Taylor thanks for hearing the story thanks everyone for listening and please do rate subscribe do all the things and we'll join you in a week we join you in a week awesome

we'll go ahead and cut things off 3.