It Could Happen Here - Area 51 and the Surveillance Industrial Complex: Spooky Week #3

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

What's more dangerous that UFOs? What REALLY goes on at Area 51? Join us as we watch the CIA and Air Force repeatedly bring us to the brink of nuclear war Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kill them all! This has been It Could Happen Here,

the show where I just kill them all. Harrison? Chris? you wanna take over oh boy i just woke up i haven't had coffee yet that is incredibly spooky emerging murder well it is spooky you're right this is true i am i didn't realize that until just now but retroactively that makes it fine see extremely spooky yeah what are we doing who are we we're we're doing we're we're but retroactively that makes it fine. See? Extremely spooky. Yeah. What are we doing? Who are we? We're doing... Where it could happen here, we're doing... This is a podcast where we talk about spooky stuff

that happens around Halloween. And today we are doing the spookiest thing of all, which will be revealed shortly. Oh, boy. I hope it's Wil Wheaton. It's not Wil Wheaton. Well, that's the spookiest thing. I really should have looked for that tie-in, because there might

be one. Is Wil Wheaton a CIA asset? We might get there. I don't know. See, I'm hacking a fraud and I didn't actually look into this. The Wil Wheaton connection? Nope. We missed it. You and most journalists.

Yeah. Alright, what are we doing? What are we doing? On June 14th, 1947, a rancher named W.W. Mack Brazel and his son Vernon were driving across their property when they encountered, quote, a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber

strips tinfoil and rather tough paper and sticks yeah me too it's just a regular night in in in oregon but yeah yeah yeah well brazil's back in a time where people are baffled when weird things happened instead of going oh it's tuesday yeah so oh man what a time yeah so they didn't just go straight to twitter no no he he you know he doesn't think that was actually you know i i kind of like reasonably a reasonably responsible thing to do in 1947 which is that he spends about a week like picking up all of the scraps that he can and like putting them in a box and then he drives it to the sheriff okay and the sheriff's name is george i love that says a lot about the difference in urgency back then where it's like oh this is important i'll spend a week getting

everything together before i take it off to the sheriff like before the internet you could really afford to sit on some shit take your time it was an era in which like if you had a busy life three things happened okay yeah so so george wilcox the sheriff looks at this and is like i have no idea what any of this crap is like what is happening so he takes it to roswell air force base for further investigation ah now colonel butch blanchard the the commander of roswell airfield's 509th composite group you know it sends a team out to analyze the wreckage which includes an air force intelligence officer named major major jesse marcel now marcel gives a now infamous series of quotes to the media that results in the roswell daily record running the sentence quote the intelligence office of the

509th bombardmentment Group at Roswell Airfield announced at noon that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer. Now, this is the birth of modern UFOlogy but this is one of their most important er events.

The pictures do rule. All of the Roswell pictures are super rad because it's just random shit in a field. And they're like, it's aliens! There's random shit in the field! Now, this is all happening in just scattered reports of UFOs

that have been cropping up throughout the post-war era. And the next day, the Air Force releases a statement saying there's no flying saucer in the wreckage, it's just an air balloon. sort of like the post-war era yeah and the next day the air force releases a statement saying there's no flying saucer in the wreckage it's just an air balloon it's just you know it's it's just why the balloon is fine yeah yeah so the air force sure sure air force weather balloon yeah yeah they're lying everyone knows they're lying but this is where things get bad because what mark brazel really discovered was something even spookier and more sinister than

aliens mark brazel had discovered was the american military industrial complex that is the wreck it turned out that's what's really spooky oh it's it's it's real spooky it's yeah by the end of this episode they will have i had to cut two times they almost killed everyone on earth okay well all right so we're gonna be judging folks for almost killing everyone on earth like you haven't almost killed everyone on earth come on that's true that's true podcasting saves me from a life of mass extinction of the entire human race and will eventually end all life on this planet i believe in podcasting's potential to kill absolutely everyone yeah it's great it's it's a time it's yeah actually you know this part part of this is actually going to be

about how we get to the point where everyone is podcasting on the internet about things that that runs through this this does absolutely play in to the roswell incident yeah because there's a there's a strong line between shit like coast to coast fm and the old like conspiracy you know the precursors to that uh uh alien ufo whatever radio shows and shit on the uh on the wide band back in the day and uh and podcasts where we are right now yep it's great it's it's a good time we're descended from great media we're going to continue to produce great media we're uh totally not just like an extremely large a much larger version of the the radio broadcast you get right before genocide that's like that's not what's happening here it's all in fact good and cool i mean this

is why i tell people to get machetes. It's true. That was a bad. Yeah. Made that comment. Look, we just got to make sure. Let's continue. Only way is to blaze on. Let's move right ahead. Now, the Air Force is lying out of its ass, but the Air Force isn't lying out of its ass because they have a flying saucer the air force knows precisely what they've got in their hands on here because the the the unidentified flying object that has crashed at roswell is

actually something called project mogul now to understand project mogul we need to go back a little bit yeah in in 1945 the u.s drops two nuclear bombs on japan and this does a lot of things literally all of which are bad yeah um and what one of which is that it sets off a sort of, it sets off, you know, the thing that we all live in now, which is the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR, who, you know,

pretty quickly after World War II are just bitter enemies. And, you know, by 1947, there's just wars raging across the world between communist and anti-communist forces. There's wars in China. I mean, in Greece, which I think people know, there's just wars raging across the world between communist anti-communist forces this is what is war in china i mean in greece which i think people know people know more about the chinese civil war uh people know less about greece we're just like the british the british are like oh the communists

are going to take power so they just like give all the guns back to the fascists and they start doing the holocaust again and that you know sets off this own another civil war there and you know as as europe becomes you know divided between the two great powers the u.s becomes increasingly worried about the ussr acquiring their own nuclear weapons so to detect a potential soviet nuclear test the u.s embarked on project mogul project mogul sent 657 foot balloons these are like massive balloons they're twice the size of the statue of liberty yeah those balloons are bigger than a balloon needs to be yeah they're they're too large it's too big for balloons and they so they load these balloons with like sensor and listening equipment to like detecting nuclear detonation they like

they like float them into the upper jet stream and the jet stream will like push them to russia is sort of the plan behind it and this sort of works except the russians don't have nukes yet so yeah this by the way is also why the song 99 red balloons was not just a banger but also uh very realistic because we absolutely could have had a nuclear exchange over some fucking balloons oh yeah yeah actually i don, I'm not sure there's any direct balloon-related near-nuclear exchanges in this episode. No, but it could have happened. And what it did actually do was set off the modern UFO thing because one these balloons like fails and it spews the records around and you know there's yeah this this you know this is this then you see a bunch of the problems that are going to happen with sort of the rest of how the course of ufos go because you know you have initially the government's like we have a flying saucer and then

they turn around and do this like incredibly half-assed cover-up that like everyone knows is fake and you know so you know because americans are americans they don't assume that like the u.s is you know creating a devastating new surveillance and intelligence program that would be used to further total nuclear war instead they go it's aliens yeah because we're great at occam's razor yeah yeah it's it's a time but i think what's really important here is that what brazil had actually made first contact with was america's new thermonuclear monarchy and this is something that i think more people should talk about which is that having nukes just as a thing massively centralizes power into sort of individual people and into the executive

branch because you know so if you have nuclear weapons right the theory is that you have to have one person who presses the button to shoot them and you can't have like you know there's not enough time for like a parliament or deliberative body to like set the nukes off and so this becomes this rationale for enormously centralizing the power of the executive branch. And this produces an absolutely terrifying new age of state secrecy filled with increasingly powerful and clandestine government agencies and bureaucracies ranging from the CIA, our good friends, to the much lesser known Atomic Energy Commission. And these agencies, the power of their secrecy is so strong that, I mean, by the 1990s, the Atomic Energy Commission's going to be a problem because in a democracy, people presumably get to make choices. And if you don't want them to decide not to continue making weird shit to throw into the sky, then, you know, you probably should just not tell anybody anything. Yeah, well, and that that particular story is also grim.

The particular story is also grim. This is one of the things I was debating covering. They're covering up the fact that they deliberately poisoned hundreds and hundreds of people with radiation to do human testing on them. Yeah. And they're like, the president doesn't need to know this. He doesn't need to know about our- You know, I mean, it's like we don't tell Sophie, guys, a lot of the things that we do with our budget. Like when we irradiated all those people for a podcast. We're still not telling Sophie that.

Yeah, it could happen here. Black budget will remain secret. Yeah. It is a lot of money. Please continue. Now, all of the secrecy around this and the fact that these cover-ups are like the most half-assed shit anyone has ever seen,

you know, it fuels this rampant speculation around ufos and the conspiracy theorists are also aided by the fact that people keep seeing weird flying objects we sure do we love we love to see weird shit in the sky we are very good at it yeah yeah it's we're we're incredible at seeing and the sky is full of weird it's true's true. I saw a crow the other day. Anyway. Yeah. In 1955, hundreds of people who are on airplanes start seeing these just enormous flaming crosses flying impossibly high and impossibly fast in the sky. And publicly... Oh no, the KKK's gained space flight.

It's worse than that. The people doing this are worse than the KKK, which is fun. What a sentence, Chris. It's great. In public, the US government's like, whatever, these aren't a thing, they're fake, whatever, they're meteorological disturbances.

In private, the passengers who are on these jets that see these flaming crosses are all detained by the fbi and sworn to secrecy after providing accounts of what they'd seen awesome and yeah and this this is also part of the sort of ufo mythology and this does actually happen like the fbi does actually show up to these people well that's who you send in when you want people to stop wondering if something shady is going on yeah Yeah, yeah, it's great. When I hear the FBI is telling people to shut up about something, I think, well, that's not worth looking into at all.

When you have five men in suits and sunglasses show up at your door and tell them you're not talking about something, you know that means everything is fine and normal. Yeah, it's great. You know what I don't think of when I think of the FBI? UFO cover-ups.

It's great. Yeah, and this isica's first contact with yet another new part of its clandestine military military bureaucracy area 51 area 51 is a secret military aeronautics research and development facility built on a salt flat called lake groom inside the massive nevada test and training range um this place by the way this place is massive this place is massive. This place is like the size of Connecticut. It's like larger than Connecticut.

It's larger than most of the eastern states. Yeah, yeah. It's enormous. But, you know, something I think is very interesting about this is that for all its mystique, Area 51 is not the most dangerous facility on the Nevada test and training range. No, that's Area 52,

the sub-level below where they store the real weird shit. Yeah, I don't care. Okay, so the funny part is. I watched a few YouTube videos. I think I know what I'm talking about. Well, that's funny. So we are actually going to get to Area 52 when we get to this. All right. Yeah, but the thing that's actually really dangerous is Areas 12, 19, and 20.

Okay. Because that's the Nevada test site. How many areas do these motherfuckers need? There's like a hundred. God damn it. They like sectioned off all these things. Yeah, all this. Because I mean, this is like a state-sized testing facility, right?

Okay, they get all these fucking areas, but the Branch Davidians have one compound where they don't even do very many illegal things, and suddenly it's a problem? Well, because the thing, the Branch Davidians never had nukes. That's like... Could you imagine, though? That would have been pretty amazing.

You know what? If they'd had nukes, about 80 people would still be alive. Maybe. They might have accidentally nuked themselves. Or everyone would be dead. One of the two. Yeah, those are the two. 80 people would be alive, or everyone on Earth would be dead.

So Area 51 is the partner of the nevada test site which is which is areas uh 12 19 and 20 and that's where the real dangerous shit happens which is the u.s test nuclear weapons there okay but we i need to make it clear at the outset uh we should not be underestimating area 51 that place has done irreparable harm to the cause of world peace and very nearly like caused us all to go extinct several times. So do not underestimate the power of, of, of military spy airplanes.

Yeah. No, those aren't lead us all to destruction. Those are honestly way more, way more spooky than any little gray creature. Yeah. Oh yeah. I can think of various planes just with cameras on them have gotten us closer to the extermination of all life on Earth than basically anything else.

Yep, yep. Except for that one computer bug that the Russians had that would have killed us all if not for Petrov, I think his name was. I forget his last name. That one guy who was like, no, we're not going to have a nuclear war right now. Oh, there's a lot. This is weirdly the the soviets come out looking like oh yeah not bad in this episode yeah it's like like every every time there's almost a nuclear war it's like it doesn't happen because the soviets are like no and the americans are like we want this war and the soviets are like no there's a general rule when it comes to atomic apocalypse stories if you if you if you tally

up all the columns because the Soviets definitely have a few in their side but it winds up way more fucked up nuke incidents on the US side of things than the Soviet side of things although there was that time they built a bomb so big that it might have changed the tilt of the earth if they made it and at

the last moment they were like let's take half of the fissile material out of this this seems like a bad idea it's great yeah so so speaking of bad ideas involving uh involving nuclear weapons so area 51 services oh no i thought you were doing an ad break it is time for an ad so So yeah, speaking of... Bad ideas. You know what else will change the tilt of the earth? The products and services. Their quality is so intent that it's like the Tsar Bomba. It is just like that.

And it's explosive potential. Okay, here's some ads. Yeah. Okay, here's some ads. Yeah. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Area 51 was founded in 1951 by the Atomic Energy Commission, a federal agency established as a successor to the mother of all black projects, manhattan project ah now black projects are secret off the books military defense projects the existence of which are kept secret even from congress which is a totally cool and normal thing to have in a democracy when your representative body does not know what anyone

else what the military is doing now area 51 is interesting because it's basically like a black project of a black project it's so secret that like the vice president lbj who is like not a fuck off vice president right it is this is lbj no like lbj wields some power he's yeah he's like a cheney type yeah yeah and cheney's also gonna show up in the story briefly yeah but yeah like even he didn't actually really know what was going on there until like JFK was assassinated. So this place is really secret. And as best we can tell, in its first four years, it was essentially the Atomic Energy Commission basically wanted a place to do off-the-books pilot and aircraft testing.

And they were able to do this successfully that we basically don't know what they did for four years. Oh, that's good. But in 1955, the facility is taken over by an even spookier organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. Ah, our old friends. Woo!

Yeah. Now, the CIA... This is 1955. And the CIA has spent the early years of the Cold War getting just its absolute ass handed to it in Europe because, you know, this is what happens when a bunch of dipshit Harvard grads in, like, aristocratic war profiteers. Yeah, because they keep poisoning people with acid and that's all they're doing. Yeah, yeah, but, you know, the problem is they're running into a real intelligence agency, which is the KGB, who, like, those guys do not fuck around. They don't just poison people with acid they do they they're they're much much more intense than than the early 50s the cia yeah yeah and so they

have this real problem which is that they the cia basically can't get intelligence out of eastern europe which is bad when your whole like your entire like state is based off of like fighting eastern europe so yeah that's kind of your main target yeah yeah so the solution is to fly a plane really high over russia and use it to take pictures uh-huh now seems good yeah like i think like this sounds like i think kind of banal to us in the 21st century we're like yeah this is this is like this is like this is like pre-satellite yeah yeah and you know like like we we're all just sort of used to the fact that like the government is spying on

us at all times we sure are but you know in in in 1955 this is incredibly radical like the u.s the u.s has only had intelligence agencies for like 10 years and there there is no precedent at all there's none no precedent for flying surveillance over a country you aren't actively at war with like the only reason you fly an airplane over countries if you're about to bomb them people should note also that like the first 10 years or so that we had an intelligence industry every single or that we had an intent like intelligence agencies every single vote for funding them every single like vote for giving them new powers was like universally supported by both parties there was

there was zero dissent about whether or not we should have a cia and they should have a giant black budget to do all sorts of scary shit that might provoke a nuclear war yeah like people were just like well of course it's really bad and And I think this is what Area 51 actually is. Area 51 is the place where the development of the permanent intelligence industrial complex is permanently solidified. And this all starts with the U-2. Now, the CIA brings in Lockheed Martin and a little known but very powerful and influential defense contractor called EG&G who I mean they do a lot of stuff but

that's such a defense contractor name it's like it's the ultimate defense contractor name and nobody knows who they are because they make like cameras and like film equipment and stuff but like you know so these are the people who like made the cameras that could take pictures of nuclear explosions yeah yeah yeah

and you know and so the CIA brings them all to this like remote testing range in So these are the people who made the cameras that could take pictures of nuclear explosions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so the CIA brings them all to this remote testing range in Nevada to work on a secret project called Dragon Lady. Now, in its early stages, Area 51 is so secret that even the Air Force doesn't know about it. And this really pisses off the Air force's senior senior generals in particular a guy who was going to become very important to the story uh air force general curtis lemay who like that man like that i i don't say this very often about historical figures but like if someone had assassinated general curtis lemay the world's like we would like the the amount safer that the world would have been. The architects of saturation bombing started World War Two and continuing in from up to now. We didn't stop. And that is that is not the worst thing he's involved in.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, but in LeMay is extremely pissed off that the CIA doesn't tell him about this. And he's going to remember that. That's going to become important later in the story. But eventually the CIA is forced to bring the Air Force into Area 51 for a number of reasons. Partially because they're flying airplanes. And partially because the U-2 is kind of a piece of shit.

And part of it is, okay, so they're learning how to fly planes really high for the first time. But, you know, the U-22 if you fly it too slowly it stalls which is like okay that's kind of a normal airplane yeah the u the u2 is an amazing aircraft because it just is one of the most absurd pieces of aviation equipment ever designed and like watching those things take off and land is the most funny thing i'm it's wild like the other problem is the thing okay so like yeah so it has a stalling problem but it also has a problem if you fly it too fast the wings will fall off okay it's so fragile you build a plane chris it's so it's so massive and so fragile the wings are so heavy and so large it's one of the most ridiculous pieces of equipment ever designed it's it's it's incredible

so yeah so the cia needs help to get this thing working and so the result is that area 51 at this point is staffed by about it's one third cia one third air force and one third locking martin what a what a combination yeah these are the god can you imagine that cafeteria the conversations yeah it's wild too because it's like okay so you have a bunch of just like spooks right a bunch of just like people and then there's just like a bunch of test pilots who are like just nuts and have been like yeah absolutely like people who are like genuine war heroes who like fought in world war ii but then went turned around and like did horrible war crimes in like korea and it's yeah that's how it works yeah 20 20 like tom Cruise from Top Gun, but with horrible PTSD and 80% Michael Douglas from Falling Down.

He hasn't picked up a gun yet. We can mention this now. So the reason that Top Gun exists is actually also Area 51. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because at one point the U.S. Like, so the Israelis managed to convince a big 23 pilot to defect. And then they gave the airplane to the U.S.

And so the U.S. spent a bunch of time like flying this big 23 around and figuring out how it worked. And that's how they like trains. They basically train other pilots because they suddenly do how the Migs worked. And that's that's the origin of the Top Gun program. But then also hilariously, the MGs got their revenge when an Air Force general whose name is, I am not making this up, his name is General Bond. And he was like, he shows up to Air 51 and he's like,

I want to fly a MiG-18. And they're like, and then he just flew into a mountain and died. Which is great. Okay, well, alright, never mind. That's extremely funny. Was he killing himself? No, no, he was just flying it. That's incredibly base. never mind that's extremely funny we have turned my opinion was he killing himself or was he no no

he was just flying it yeah but he was that is that's incredibly wow which is like a really really fast difficult to control plane just that rules that rules so hard i see i was very funny you just completely changed my opinion of this man wow it was amazing that is that is the that is incredibly based i'm so happy unfortunately uh there's a lot of other way more depressing plane crashes that happens here. All right. Part of the reason it's bad is because this whole thing is a black project. I have trouble. Imagine being depressed about anyone there dying.

Oh, it's kind of. So there's a. I don't really care so much about the people. But like. So there's a bunch of like 14 of the people who are flying U2sos like die and they like they they they crash into a mountain oh well that's fine about it's like whatever yeah but but the thing that sucks about it is that like like the u.s government lies to their families for like half a century about how they died it's like this sucks but then it gets even worse because again like this is you know this this is the black

project of like all black projects. And that means that they have a bunch of people from Operation Paperclip because, again, this is a facility run by the CIA in the 1950s. God. And so they let a bunch of literal Nazi doctors run endurance tests on potential U-2 pilots. Now, these doctors are Nazi concentration camp doctors who had performed horrific human experiments on people in the camps. So naturally, when they do endurance tests, they torture people.

So they would do things like, they would force pilots to hold their arms under ice water for extremely long times. They would strap them to chairs, just randomly electrocute different parts of their body. And it was like, it's a nightmare. This is what happens when you give the nazis free reign over a completely secret testing facility where no one can even talk about what people did to them it's great it's great it's

it's this is this is why you don't have black projects because the nazis wind up in charge of them and they torture people yeah i think we're pretty we're pretty all on the same page and not having really any projects bad now the cia has another problem which is which is a much weirder and funnier problem which is that people keep seeing their spy planes they should yeah and you know it's a part of this is the original you choose were silver which means that uh they reflected the sun and i didn't know that flaming cross yeah the the very first u2s are now they're right yeah because like now they're all matte black yeah imagine like a chromed a chromed out yeah you too well this is a thing like it looks like it does sound incredible yeah and it's but you know like this this is the this causes like a huge number of the ufo settings just people seeing this

thing and eventually they're like wait we have to make this black because like having a spy plane that glows in the sun yes bad idea no and worse yet so you know the u-2 can fly at like 65 000 feet which is it's way outside the range of anti-aircraft guns it is ridiculously high how far how high that plane can go but the cia in their eternal hubris assumes that it's also too high for the soviet radar to work and so what happens instead is that they fly a u-2 directly over the kremlin to like take pictures of where khrushchev is sleeping and the soviets just immediately see it and they get really pissed off because again like there's no precedent for flying a spy plane over a country you're not at war with and they're like what the fuck why are you flying planes the problem is they can't actually like shoot them down because the plane's too high up

so they're just sort of simpering and getting mad they can just see it yeah yeah and but but the u.s is like okay this is not provocative enough right like we've we've now flown we've now flown planes over the house of like a guy who can fire nuclear weapons that's not enough no that's incredibly funny actually it is very funny but they're like yeah so curtis lemay who's also reminds me of some things that anyway we don't need to talk about alleged actions in front of russian embassies continue yes so lemay is this guy this guy is a threat to all humanity and he has this idea okay he wants to figure out how the he want to figure out how the USSR's radar system works

and so his plan is he's going to get the USSR to trigger their radar system and he's going to do this by flying a thousand B-47 bombers over Alaska and fly them right at Soviet airspace and then turn around the moment before they get in guys, come on

there's other ways to- Yeah, no, that's based. There's other ways to do trolling. No, there's not. You don't need to risk the entire population with your trolls. Yeah, you do. Garrison, see, this is why you're not an A-level troll. The A-level trolls know that if you're not risking the entire future

of possibly all life in the known universe, then you're just, you're not even really trolling. That's just cuck shit, Garrison. Make some friends! Make some friends and troll your friends. It's not that hard. Come on, guys. Troll the world by playing chicken with its

continued ability to afford any life above the microbial level. The thing that's incredible about this too is the only reason any of this works is that the soviets like i mean soviets are not good but the soviets aren't who the americans say they are no they're sure not like if if if the u.s had done this against the u.s everyone on earth would have died yeah on the end of it and and lemay like like, you get a sense of, like, who LeMay is. LeMay, someone asked him about this afterwards,

and he says, and I quote, with a little bit more luck, we could have started World War III. Oh, man. This guy's a fucking, like, this is a monster.

They are all just... This is so bad that, like, the CIA sends a panel of, like, advisors to the president telling him that, like, you can't do this again because the cia sends a panel of like advisors to the president telling him that like you can't do this again because the soviets will think it's an actual attack when the cia is calling you out then yeah i think it's time to it's time to wrap up shop yeah i think we're done but the thing is like this is not like the only just absolutely psychotic thing going on in this period around Area 51.

So in 1956-1957, the US tests the first dirty bomb, and they really don't know what this thing is going to do. And it's like, this is extremely dangerous. They're detonating a bomb. It's placed plutonium everywhere. But just wait. Lest you think that detonating a dirty bomb

was not dangerous enough, in 1957 they dropped something called the Hood Bomb. And this bomb, like, the blast, okay, they dropped this bomb in Nevada, right? The blast of this bomb blows out windows in LA. People see, again, this is in Nevada. People see the explosion in Canada. Great. They see it in Mexico.

Like, you can see it from 800 miles out to sea. The funniest part is that it temporarily renders Area 51 uninhabitable and they forgot to tell the people in Area 51 to evacuate. That is incredibly funny. Just giving everybody cancer. That actually is incredibly funny. That actually is incredibly funny.

But the Area 51 people still want to work there. But the thing is, this is before they have hazmat suits. So they send a bunch of people out in lab coats with like magnets to go collect radioactive bomb fragments so people can go back to testing spy planes in Area 51. Great. That's extremely fun. Just killing all of their spook employees.

I have no, yeah, I have no problems with this. Yeah, this is fine. This is completely fine. We have probably saved a lot of lives, honestly. Yeah. Well, the problem is, though, Area 51 was allowed to resume, and that very nearly killed us all.

Yes, but the more people that die at Area 51 and get cancer, the probably odds are that that contributes to... It is slow death, I guess. That's what everyone says about radiation poisoning. It happens too slowly? Yeah. Now, okay, so Area 51's U-2s

are, like, continuing to do flights and pissing off the Soviets, but unbeknownst to the Americans, the Soviet anti-air capacity was rapidly improving. And on May Day 1960, the U.S. pushes it it too far and they send a pilot named gary powers to fly over the soviet union and the soviets just like shoot the shit out of him and there's actually this really cute moment where like he crashes and he survived and he's found by

some random soviet farmer and the soviet farmer just like is like oh hey cool just like gives him a cigarette with luckia the space dog on it. They have this very nice moment where they smoke a cigarette together and then Powers gets arrested by the Soviet government and put on trial for espionage. Now, the interesting part about this is that the US assumes that Powers is dead because when they designed the U-2,

the CIA was like, oh yeah, they didn't tell the pilots but they were the CIA. Everyone will die. You are done. But Powers lives through it. And so the US is claiming on live television that Powers was like,

oh, this wasn't a spy plane. He was collecting high altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Sure he was. Of course. Sure.

Khrushchev has his finest hour here. It's an incredible theatrical moment. He gives this incredible speech that's like, he's asking comrades, what would happen if Soviet planes flew over Detroit? An immediate war! And he goes on this thing about how

he's accusing, he's like, okay, so who said the spy plane? And he's like, well, it couldn't be the American people. It must have been the American militarists running the spy plane program without the knowledge of the commander-in-chief. And so the U.S. keeps denying it. And then Khrushchev, a a couple days later gets this another incredible line i'm going to quote from the speech because it rules comrades he said i must let you in on a secret when i made a report

two days ago i deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane and we also have the pilot who was quite alive and kicking and the u.s just like it gets owned because they've been... Oh my god. Yeah, I'm sure the States isn't thrilled. Oh, yeah. It's an enormous embarrassment for this. And there's a couple of other great lines.

So Gary Powers gets tried for espionage. And there's this incredible line in this trial where Sergei Rodenko, who's an Air Force general, and he's also part of the trial, and he calls area 51 quote a criminal conspiracy between quote a major american capitalist company an espionage and reconnaissance center and the military of the u.s and this is true you're right you're right

this is literally what area 51 is um you know, but this is where everything goes to shit because there, there was supposed to be a massive like us, USSR peace summit to like look at denuclearization. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and,

and, and Chris Jeff is like, okay, Eisenhower, you, you need to apologize for flying spy planes over our country. And Eisenhower is like, no.

And this, this, yeah, the, the, the conference is canceled and the world is plunged into mortal peril that will only barely survive and but barely i mean we did it it's fine oh yeah i we got extremely lucky um yeah all of this basically causes cruise ship to like start a military buildup in cuba

and oh you know you can see where this is going but but don't worry lest lest you think that area 51 is only indirectly responsible for this they are in fact directly responsible for the cuban missile crisis oh good you know they they they they they do a bunch of other stuff to like fuck with the cubans like they have this thing where they send in pilots like right up to right up to cuban airspace and like have them basically trade missile locks with soviet pilots so that they can test the soviets like electronic weapons capacity and it's again cool once again we only didn't die because the soviets didn't shoot after the u.s did some like just absolutely some shit we would have absolutely shot them for doing if they'd done it to us yeah yeah if a mig had buzzed like

washington dc we would have ended all humanity yeah we sure would have they fucking knew that god that has to be so frustrating yeah like not a lot of sympathy for the USSR in my book but just being like well this is unacceptable but if we do literally just what they're doing to us yeah

so I guess we have to be chill yeah it's like yeah well speaking of doing things, there's also an incredible Bay of Pigs connection, which is that Richard Bissell, who's the guy who did Bay of Pigs, was the guy who ran Area 51.

One of the reasons why it failed is that... Remember when I talked about how the CIA pissed off Curtis LeMay by not telling him about Area 51? LeMay is supposed to send a bunch of B-52 bombers to support the Bay of Pigs, and he doesn't do it.

His defense is that he fucked up the time zones, which I've missed. Hey, we've all missed meetings because of that. I'm late all the time because of time zones. You know what? Curtis LeMay did nothing wrong of time zones. It's that, that, you know what?

Curtis LeMay did nothing wrong. Yeah. In that instance. It's amazing. And this, this causes LaSalle, but yeah, it doesn't work because it's a clusterfuck. And yeah,

this, you know, this, this causes LaSalle to get kicked out of the security establishment, but it, it doesn't stop the U S fucking with Cuba. Of course not. So some more areas.

We still haven't stopped fucking with Cuba. Oh, yeah, no. We're, like, never going to. It's incredible. But this is the time that came closest to killing us all. Which is that... Well, Chris, you know what will also eventually kill us all? Products and services.

Yeah. That's not even a joke. That's just true. Yeah. All of these things that is being sold for fake money. So, yep. Bye, products. And this is when Garrison goes on a rant about fiat currency!

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. And we're talking about the Honda F fiat which is certainly a car i lost it i lost i lost it all to fiat please everyone everyone send me send me what you can i'll reinvest and

give you back your money in a few days you're gonna buy one of those fucking one of those eight bit illustration nfts that costs two million, aren't you, Garrison? Oh, you bet. See, no, wait, Robert, you can't... I heard now that they're making physical copies. This is a brand new phenomenon. They're making physical versions of an NFT so you can actually, like, have something. Yeah, it's amazing.

I'm sure it costs an extra fee. There's nothing else like this. It's like art, but you actually can have it. It's the first time. It's groundbreaking. Garrison, garrison robert you guys you can't you can't tell the public how our how how how how we funnel all of our money around for our black projects you're not allowed to explain our money laundering schemes on air you know one one surprising thing about all of this like Area 51 stuff is honestly the degree to which the government

does not deflect stuff by using alien shit more often. Well, we're going to get to that. They could just use alien shit more often to deflect any suspicion about what's actually happening. So they, I don't know, they go back and forth

on this and part of what's going on is that the the cia when when people start first reporting ufos like they have two like concerns one of which is that it's just going to cause panic in the u.s public and they don't want they're doing the sort of like elite panic thing and they're afraid yeah it's gonna go insane or whatever but the second thing that they're worried about is that they're really concerned that the the soviet union is going to uh block out the u.s's early warning system by sending a bunch of fake ufo reports which would be very funny yeah which would be very funny but you know but so so their initial line on ufos is like they're they try they spend a lot of time trying to get everyone to like not believe in them because they're like this is this is treading hysteria and it's like damaging our early warning capacity because people keep

reporting and also because people just keep seeing their spy planes and so they're just like guys there's no ufos yeah we'll get to in a little bit of some more about that because there's a lot of very weird stuff going on there but first we have to almost end the world all right let's let's just do that first and then we'll get to that in in 1962 the cia flies it flies a u2 over uh over cuba and they get a bunch of pictures of nuclear weapons and this this is basically the thing that starts a cuban missile crisis although i i also i also we need to talk about lemay one more time because before they get these pictures lemay is convinced there's there's no nukes there and lemay wants to do a preemptive strike on cuba to stop the soviets from bringing

missiles in which again literally would have killed us all okay yeah yeah but but lemay gets voted down so the cia you know sends the u2s in and this this is the thing that starts the the uh starts the cub Missile Crisis. You have the Soviets and Americans staring each other down at sea. But again, because these people are just like, because the Area 51 people and the CIA people are just nuts, they keep

sending UFOs. They keep sending U-2s over Cuba. And they're sending U-2s over Cuba, and the Americans line on the U u2s they send over is if they shoot down a u2 we're going to invade cool and so the soviets actually do shoot shoot down a u2 but for like the only time ever in history uh the u.s is like wait maybe we shouldn't end all like literally end all humanity and that's good like we we get this we get this moment we're just like you know you you get to actually so you have all the like just horrific leadership stuff that has

got you here but you you get a moment where like the soul of humanity is tested in like a very small number of people and it's like if if any one of these people on either side flinches or like decides that they want to end all life on earth. Everyone is going to die. And for one of like, this is like, this is like one of the only times ever that it has actually mattered that we're not all just like terrible pieces of shit and we didn't do it and we didn't end all humanity. And eventually the whole,

the whole thing is wound down. And alternatively, the people in charge realized that if they were doing this, they could no longer do whatever fun stuff they did in their spare time and it's only for selfish reasons oh yeah i mean yeah the the the lead let me say it's like the the the the the leaders get no credit here at all the people who do get credit are just like the random assholes on a ship who like got sent over to the other side of the world and had to just sit there knowing that they could be destroyed at any moment

and then didn't panic and held and kept everyone on Earth from dying by just not holding it together in a situation that would have just destroyed most people. So good on the crews of the ships for not killing us all. Yeah, that's always nice. Yeah.

I mean, depending on how I feel on a given day. Now, part of what's happening here is the E2 is getting shot down. Makes Area 51 people go, we need to build a faster plane. Sure. And so their solution to this is the A-12 Oxcart. faster plane sure uh-huh and so there's their solution to this is the a12 ox cart and the a12 oscar is interesting because this is another thing that everyone thinks is ufo but actually isn't and i mean there's a very famous ufo picture of like one of nasa's like x15 rocket jets and in the very like in the very corner of this rocket picture the rocket jet there's there's an a12

and everyone is like oh this is ufo this is a ufo it's like no it's not it's this but you know the cia keeps doing these like half ass cover-ups but like again like you can just see these out of passenger planes like if you're in a plane you'll just see it it's like oh this thing looks like a cigar just flew past and they try to do these they do looking they incredibly weird. Yeah, it just doesn't work. And eventually, in the mid-60s, Walter Cronkite goes on TV and tells the American public that the CIA had been doing a UFO cover-up.

Cool. Which is true. But everyone assumes this is about aliens. But it's not about aliens. It's nothing to do with aliens. It has everything to do with the fact that people keep seeing the spy planes. And so, the Air Force gets put in charge of an investigation of UFOs. But the problem is that only a few top air force generals know about the a12 yeah they only a few people know about the existence of this aircraft yeah yeah and so the low-level

investigators are like oh the air force is doing a ufo cover-up which they are but they assume that it's about aliens and so a bunch of these people like turn into alien like ufo conspiracy theorists and yeah because this is you know And we're getting to see this. The U.S. basically threw it sort of like the secrecy around these programs. It keeps creating UFO conspiracies. And there's some question as to how deliberately they're doing this. So the head of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which is like the US's UFO study group, in 1969 is taken over by

Joseph Bryan III, who Joseph Bryan III was the CIA's first chief of political and psychological warfare. He seems like a solid dude to hang out with. Yeah. So I have no idea what that means. No one does. There's no way

to know. And there's some reports that there have been a couple of books and documentaries in the last 10 years that have reported that... Yes. But it basically reported that people in the CIA deliberately fed fake UFO information to people to cause people to go even deeper

into their conspiracy theories. Which I absolutely believe. Yeah. I will say this. Okay, so like, this is the kind of thing the CIA would do, but the people who are giving the evidence are sketchy, and, I mean,

of course, yeah, like that, that is, yeah, that is kind of how, that, I mean,

they probably feed it to a lot of people, and the people who talk about it, well, I mean, so the people who are testifying about it, are the people who allegedly did it. which is interesting. But,

but the thing that, well, the part of the thing that problem is weird about it is those people also just sort of, they're like, oh, I spread this conspiracy, but like they also want to get into the UFO scene. And so it's weird. It is a lot of weird conflicting interests going on. Yeah. And this is one of the problems with the CIA, which is that like, okay, so there's a couple of, there's like some important things you need to understand about the cia is like they're bad you don't need conspiracy theories for that

they're just they're bad they do a lot of bad things um the cia having done something is not in and of itself proof that they did another thing so for example like you can say the like you know you say something like the cia is a moon base right and someone asks you for evidence you can go oh well they did operation paperclip and they're involved in development of rocket technology but just because the cia did operation paperclip and they're involved in development of rocket technology but just because the cia did operation paperclip and had rocket does not mean they have a moon base right like this is yeah this is this is something this something happens all the time when people talk about the cia that is hard to avoid falling into yeah that is like a basic fallacy yeah you cannot you cannot

use something that the cia has done as direct evidence they did something else unless there's a direct tie between unless unless you have evidence that the other thing happened. There's other people who suck. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing is they're not omnipotent. And this is the example I always bring up because it's really funny. So the CIA just completely missed two two different Indian nuclear weapons tests like across two decades. Like not only did they not realize that that there were tests gonna be happening soon like they didn't even know that india was doing tests at all and then they they yeah so these nukes would go off and they would

learn that the india was doing tests when in the indian government announced on tv so like they're not actually omnipotent i think i think what is it also interesting people i'm not sure if you're in a tight i'm not sure if you bring this up shortly but like this sort of thing is definitely still happening in terms of Air Force pilots seeing weird stuff in the sky and then going to talk about it. This is some other aircraft usually dressed. Usually we're able to actually prove what these things are.

But military or Air Force people see stuff, they talk about it in the news, and the timing is always weird. It's always when some like civil arrest is happening when like yeah we get some weird piece of information about ufos you're like oh really what what a coincidence it's an interesting thing too big though because like there's this kind of like weird interplay because like a lot of like like like senators and presidents like actually believe that there's ufos and and this is like this is a weird thing because this is yes but like there's different do you mean like ufos or do you mean

like aliens well like like aliens like this like there are there are a lot of people in the government who do believe in aliens and and it's it's this weird tension because and a lot like everything is like like i don't know like harry reed for example was a big alien dude right but harry reed like i mean i know he's very powerful in nevada so like maybe he knew but like harry reed is not someone who knows what's happening in these black projects because they don't tell they don't tell congress right i mean he he might know because of how powerful he is but like again it's up in the even even the people who are supposed to be in charge don't know what's actually happening and that means they fall for conspiracy theories because yeah they fall for conspiracy theories

and at this point it's more of a it's more of a fandom than anything else yeah it's really easy to get sucked into a fandom like yeah so I can't I mean I don't trust any congressman on any level specifically around this issue because this is solely a fandom issue it's like it's like it's like

taking their opinion on like religion it's like I care zero amount because it's only a fandom. Yeah, and I think that the thing that is very dangerous about this, though, is that, again, Area 51 is, like, the existence of Area 51 is like an atrocity to anyone who thinks you live in a democracy. They have almost killed us, like, multiple, multiple times. And everyone is like, oh, it's the aliens. It's like, no like they they literally almost ended life on earth like four times and and yeah you know but we're gonna get into they they yeah we'll get into the other horrible stuff they do in a second but i do

want to talk about the one cool thing they did oh because oh okay they did one thing that was incredibly awesome that was the greatest thing the American Empire has ever produced, which is they made the SR-71. And the SR-71 is fucking sick. This is the coolest airplane anyone has. Just go Google a picture of it. It looks so cool. It can hit Mach 3.4. It's faster than bullets.

It doesn't have any weapons on it. And its defense strategy, if someone shoots a missile at it, is to outrun the missile. Yeah, it is the strategy. It's what the X-Men's plane is based off. It's the coolest thing ever. It's a fucking rad plane. It does look just like the X-Wing. It does look just like the X-Men's jet plane.

Well, yeah, it's specifically a modified SR-71. Yeah, it's the sickest thing ever. And that was like that was the pinnacle of the american empire when they made this this one just absolutely incredible machine and then uh they used to do war crimes in vietnam and then great they were like oh it's too expensive dick cheney who is a demon in human form who will one day return to the hell that spawned him and spend the rest of his days being torn apart by satan uh has the program killed because he wants to make b2 bombers he's like oh we gotta be able to drop nukes from weird triangle planes we can't run the coolest plane of all time

ever anymore so he kills it and it's depressing and it's it's everything is bad now and he will rot in hell eternally for yeah of his many crimes killing the sr-71 the only good thing the americans ever did he should have this is the only thing we should have ever spent money on as a country yeah but if look if no roads just a network of sr-71s it was almost 300 million dollars in today's money for one yeah sure but like the f-35 is like yeah it's like a trillion look at how much worse that plane looks than the sr-71 like every successive flying around in an f-35 they're so wet they're so bad because professor xavier has has fucking style unfortunately

so there's a the the other things they're building there are horrifying um one of the most important ones that i think people have sort of like forgotten the real impact of is is that the f-117 nighthawk and so so uh area 51 is basically where america's stealth technology is developed which really does sound like conspiracy but like no this is actually like yeah this this is this is what they're doing yeah they're doing self-technology and the night hawk the night hawk is really bad and the night hawk is really bad because it fundamentally changes the balance of power between anti-air weapons and bombers and this means that the u.s can just like i don't know for example just obliterate an army of fleeing iraqi conscripts without having to like worry

about someone shooting down their planes to To be fair, I do think the Nighthawk looks way better than the previous plane we mentioned. The SR-71? Ah, no, the SR-71's way cooler. The Nighthawk's not a bad-looking plane, but the SR-71's so cool. It is a horrible

killing machine. It's all it's designed for and it looks like it. It looks like death. The plane looks like death. It's true. That's why I like the SR-71 though because the SR-71 just looks like a race car that flies. The SR-71 looks like sexy death. Whereas the Nighthawk is like

we're going to murder you. Like a government put into a plane that is death. That is what it looks like. This is part of a transition. The Nighthawks actually, there's an interesting transition that's happening here, which is that, so the Nighthawks

tested at Area 51, but this is the first plane that can actually drop bombs that Area 51 ever made, because up until this point, they've been doing reconnaissance aircraft. They've been doing the U-2, the F-71, the A-12, which is like a worse F-71. Yeah, they're just capable of accidentally

ending the world by firstmanship. So they're deliberately ending it by dropping bombs. Yeah. And this is when the CIA gives control of Area 51 to the Air Force. It's 1971. Got it. Okay. Yeah. And this is also where Area 52 comes in

because Area 52, it's literally just a facility next to Area 51. And so Area 51 is like, sorry, Area 52 is built up basically to house the Nighthawks. It is interesting that the older Nighthawks look a lot more like UFOs than the newer Nighthawks. Yeah. The newer Nighthawks look more like the stupid, like, Tumblr Batmobile, but in a plane. The older Nighthawks look a lot more sci-fi.

And it is interesting looking at the difference. To be like, if I saw the older Nighthawk, I'd be like, oh, that's a UFO. If I saw the newer Nighthawk, I'm like, oh, that is like a military plane. Yeah. Well, and I will say this. So they start doing a lot of things to, like to reduce the number of UFO sightings they produce. So they start flying at night because it turns out it's actually really hard to see a black airplane at night. Yeah.

But the other thing that they're doing in Area 51, and they've been doing this really since the 60s, is Area 51 is where the US basically develops its drones. Yeah. And that is the modern thing that pilots see and then talk about on CBS or whatever. And it's interesting. So I've been sort of aware of this. I didn't fully understand it. The US had drones in the 60s. We've even had them for a long time.

Yeah, yeah. One of the things they do with the A-12 is they had this Ramjet drone on top of it, which like pretty sick like a ramjet drone is sick like that's like that's just like a cool thing i mean yeah if it wasn't used for killing people then all these things are cool yeah they're only designed to kill people well yeah but the fun part about the ramjet thing is they had to stop using it because it kept it kept just like like cutting the airplane they kept cutting the a12 in half okay well critical support critical support to the ramjet drone but yeah and i think the last thing we should talk about is that yeah so area

51s the the latest thing that we know that they did that is horrifying and awful is so up up until 9-11 there had been a line in the u.s military and that line was you do not put weapons on unarmed drones and after yeah yeah so after after 9-11 oh oh what a time yeah yeah and after 9-11 uh the air force and the cia basically get together and they're trying to draw up a plan to kill bin laden and so their their plan to do this is to put hellfire missiles on a drone and this is this is this is the origin of what a horrible series of events drone yeah it's awful they're like the few decisions that have impacted the course of humanity for the next century that are being responsible for so many so many bodies and this

thing you you can you can see where this is going in the initial thing. So when they're testing the missiles on this, right? In Area 51, they set up like a mock version of Bin Laden's house. And they're setting it up so that they can figure out how many children they're going to kill when they blow this thing up. Yeah. And yeah, that's been Area 51's modern consequence. No, the worst thing to come from places like this is putting guns on robots and drones this is like the worst thing almost almost almost almost ending the world with nuclear weapons and then now drones deciding to put deciding to put bombs and weapons on little

tiny things that fly and little and little robots that crawl around this is the worst thing imaginable that we could have just not done. But we're like, nope, let's do it, and now it sucks. The thing that's incredible about it is even the 70s CIA was like, this is a bad idea.

I know. It's one of the first laws of... It's one of the first laws of... Yeah, first law of robotics. The first law of robotics. Yep. Yeah, but we stopped talking about that years ago. Nope.

Decades ago, really. Now we have those fucking robot dogs with the fucking 5.56 rifles. No, no, no. That's 6.5 Creedmoor, Garrison. Oh, it's 6.5. Even worse. Even worse.

Yep, and that's the episode. Go buy a 6.5 creed more rifle it'll go right through a robot yeah I'm real excited for the robot wars and then you'll be able to take the robot's ammo it's gonna suck so bad we're already in the robot wars

yeah I know it's happened but you know what'll never happen it would've been so much better if it was just aliens god what it's not yeah But you know what'll never happen? It would've been so much better if it was just aliens. God, what? Nope. It's not, yeah.

I will say this, though. I will say this, though. If we ever do Storm Area 51, we should just destroy it. That place should be raised to the ground and left as a monument to the people it killed. Because, you know. I mean, that should be most of the states, to be honest.

Specifically Area 51. We fill every inch of it with concrete and we top it with a statue of Fox Mulder. You know what we do is we do the thing for the theoretical nuclear waste disposal sites. Oh, yeah. That is what we do. It is also still sort of irradiated. It is still also irradiated. So, yeah.

Nothing of value is kept here. also still sort of irradiated. It is still also irradiated. So yeah. Plutonian bombs there. Nothing of value is kept here. Turned away. Yeah. Well, I wish it was aliens. Nope. We all wish it was aliens.

All right. Well, the CIA. That's the episode. You can follow our CIA exploits at the Happen Here Pond on Twitter and Instagram. God, I hate social media. All right. That's the episode.

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