Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - CONSPIRACY: What Is Denver Airport Hiding?

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Since it opened in 1995, Denver International Airport has been the subject of some of the most enduring conspiracy theories in America. Built years behind schedule and wildly over budget, the airport is famous for its unsettling apocalyptic murals, a towering demonic horse statue with glowing red eyes, cryptic dedication plaques, and a sprawling network of underground tunnels. To believers, these details point to secret bunkers for the elite, headquarters for shadowy organizations, or something even stranger hidden beneath the runways. Officials insist the tunnels are mundane and the art is simply misunderstood, but the speculation has only grown over the decades, embraced even by the airport itself. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the many theories surrounding Denver International Airport, the strange design choices that started it all, and the question of why one airport became a magnet for suspicion about hidden power and secret agendas.For more, follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1828469754If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this. Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe

at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. In the spring of 1994, the city of Denver invited a group of reporters into a tunnel underneath a brand new airport out on the Colorado Prairie. They were there because the airport was supposed to have opened months earlier. It hadn't. City officials kept promising an opening date, then taking it back, and nobody would say why. So Denver decided to stop talking and start showing. It turned out the reason for the delay was down there in the tunnel.

There was an automated baggage system, 10 times the size of any that had ever been built. It had 17 miles of track, 4,000 little carts running on radio control, and more than 100 computers wired together to run the whole thing. The idea was that you could check. your bag at the curb, and the machine would deliver it to your plane without a single person touching it. Now it was showtime. After months of stalling, the machine was switched on, and the cameras started rolling,

capturing every single moment. The chaos was immediate. The carts flung the suitcases off the track, bags jammed the rails and piled up behind each other, and the machine sliced some of them open. Clothes and other belongings spilled out across the tunnel floor, in front of every, every reporter in the room. People across the country watched that footage on the news, and a lot of them felt like something wasn't adding up, because if a brand-new airport that had already cost billions couldn't move a suitcase 30 feet, then maybe moving suitcases was never the point. Maybe the truth was something else entirely, and by the time the doors opened, plenty of people had a theory. They didn't think the tunnels stopped where the baggage system did. They

kept going, eight levels down into the headquarters of a coming world government, or a colony of lizard people, or a bunker where the world's elite would wait out the end of everything. To this day, none of those theories have ever been proven, but the catch is almost no one has been allowed down there to check. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors. These aren't just theories, they're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious

organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crimehouse lineup, ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes show page. Today, I'm Tucking all things, DIA, also known as Denver International Airport. It covers more ground than any other airport in North America.

In 2025, more than 82 million people passed through it, making it the fourth busiest in the United States and the 10th busiest in the world. It's also attracted more conspiracy theories than any other building in America, and when you dig under the surface, you can see why. There's the horse with the red eyes. There's a stone by the south entrance stamped with a masonic symbol. They're the murals with the dead children in them. And the underground tunnels that seem to lead nowhere.

I'm going to go through all of it and tell you what the documents show. But I'll also tell you what it cost the three artists whose work got turned into evidence. One of them had her art broken up and thrown away. Another got death threats. and the other was killed by his own sculpture before he could explain it. All that and more coming up. If you fly out of Denver today, the first thing you notice is how long the drive is and how huge the airport is. It sits 25 miles northeast of downtown on a prairie that's bigger than the entire city of Boston.

You come in on a highway called Peña Boulevard, and for 11 miles there's not much out the window. then off to the right, you see it. There's a blue horse that's 32 feet tall and weighs 9,000 pounds. It's up on its hind legs with its mouth open and veins popping out on its neck. Its eyes glow red, and they stay lit all night. Its actual name is Mustang, but almost nobody in Colorado calls it that. They call it Blucifer, because the sculpture killed the man who made it. Inside the main terminal, named for the aviation pioneer El Ray Jepison, a room called

the Great Hall opens up under a white fabric roof with 34 separate peaks. It's held up by 10 miles of steel cable, and at its highest point, it stands 126 feet off the ground. You keep walking, and at the south end of the terminal, there's a polished granite stone set into the floor, dated March 19, 1994. It's carved with a square and compasses, the emblem of the Freemasons, and the names of two Colorado Grand Lodges. The stone says there's a time capsule underneath it, addressed to the people of Colorado in the year 1994. Above that, there's a plaque that credits an organization called the New World Airport Commission for the creation of the airport. Keep going on to a baggage claim, and you'll see a bronze gargoyle crouched inside an open suitcase looking down at the

carousel. And then there are the murals, two enormous multi-panel paintings that are the most famous artworks in the building. And the reason a lot of people have heard of this airport at all, except they're not there anymore. They came off the walls in June of 2018 and went into climate controlled storage. Eight years later, the airport says they'll be back, but the date keeps moving. And that's just the stuff you can see or should be able to see. Below the floor you're standing on, there's a network of tunnels that covers 3.5 million square feet. It's hot and loud down there. Carts and small industrial vehicles run along roads that are wide enough to need their own intersections and stop signs.

None of that is a secret. It's a public airport owned by the city, and 43,000 people work there. You can look up the budget. You can read the artist's own statements about what they painted. Despite all that, plenty of people are certain it's all just a cover story, and that story began decades earlier with the airport Denver already had. Stapleton International Airport opened in 1929, six miles from downtown Denver, and by the 1980s, it was in trouble. Neighborhoods had sprung up all around it, and its runways sat too close together to land planes on two of them at once. So when the weather got bad, flights backed up.

Now, that's a problem for any airport, but especially one like Denver. It sits in the middle of the country, with so much traffic connecting through it that a snowstorm in Colorado could wreck flight schedules nationwide and sometimes overseas. In 1983, Denver elected a new mayor named Federico Pena, who campaigned on fixing the problem by expanding Stapleton onto federal land next door at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Adams County, right next to the site, threatened to sue him over the noise. So Pena sat down with the Adams County Commissioners and the mayors of Brighton and Commerce City and came up with something much bigger. Forget expanding Stapleton, Denver would build an entirely new airport from nothing 25 miles out into the prairie.

There was a legal problem, though. A Colorado measure called the Poundstone Amendment kept Denver from annexing land without a public vote. So the deal had to go to the people who lived there. In May of 1988, Adams County voters agreed to let Denver annex roughly 53 square miles of their county. The following year, Denver's own voters approved the project two to one. Part of the deal was that the airport would not be named after Peña, though he did end up with the boulevard. On September 28, 1989, Peña stood in a wheat field for the groundbreaking and told the evening news that the largest airport in the world would open there in May of the United States. 1993. But there was another issue. Almost nobody in the airline business wanted it. Continental and

United both threatened to sue to stop construction, arguing the airport wasn't needed and would saddle them with enormous landing fees. And they had a point. Two of Stapleton's five concourses were sitting nearly empty because passenger traffic had been falling since 1986. Critics also pointed out that the $1.9 billion price tag Denver was advertising didn't include the highways, the rail line, the airline's own equipment, or cleaning up the airport the city was about to abandon. Denver started building it anyway. The first order of business was deciding what the airport would look like. Peña had put together a committee to pick the design, and the job went to two Denver architects, Curtis Fentris and Jim Bradburn. Later, Bradburn talked about how

the approval process went. He said the panel loved the peaked fabric tents right away, but Peña was worried about one thing. People had openly compared the shape to Native American TEPIs, and he thought that comparison might offend somebody, so they settled on an official story that the tents were supposed to look like the Rocky Mountains. That didn't stop people from making the Tee comparison, but that's not what really drew suspicion. The budget did. When Denver initially struck the land deal in 1988, the estimate for the whole airport was only $1.34 billion, well under what it would soon advertise. That was a conceptual number, worked up before anyone had drawn final plans. In May of 1990, the first real construction budget came in at $2.08 billion.

By February of 1992, it was $2.7 billion, mostly because United Airlines had negotiated wider and longer concourses. By February of 1994, it had ballooned to $2.92 billion. When the airport finally opened years later, the construction had cost about $3 billion. Add in 15 years of bond interest, plus the land and the planning, and the all-in figure came to about $4.8 billion. Those are federal auditor's numbers from the General Accounting Office, and every single one of them is a real, documented cost increase. To be clear, that is not a crime. It's an arithmetic issue. Denver underestimated the construction of this airport by a lot. A big reason for that overspending was one system, and it was sitting underground. Denver had planned to open with a conventional system,

tugs, pulling carts, and people loading them, but this airport was enormous, and the distances were brutal. The nearest concourse sits 1,300 feet from the terminal, and tugs and carts would take as long as 50 minutes to get a bag where it needed to go. That would have blown up every connection, and Denver has a lot of them. So the city changed course and gambled on full automation. The projected cost of the baggage system alone climbed from $195 million to more than $290 million. Not only was it expensive, but it was incredibly ambitious. and making it come to life was a lot more challenging than anyone expected. Soon, Peña's May 1993 target had slipped to October. Then that day got pushed four separate times.

Denver was paying interest on construction loans and maintenance on an empty airport the entire time, and the 16-month delay added roughly $300 million in capitalized interest by itself, which brings us back to that tunnel in the spring of 19. and the reporters standing there watching the suitcases come apart. Less than a year after that demonstration, Denver International Airport finally opened. It was February 28, 1995. Pena wasn't there to run it. He had left for Washington two years earlier in January of 1993

when President Bill Clinton made him U.S. Secretary of Transportation. Conspiracy theorists would later point to that promoting as evidence of something. The simpler reading is that he'd just pushed through the biggest airport project in the country, but that didn't mean things were running smoothly back at DIA. On opening day, the automated baggage system was only partly running, and the city had already spent $51 million on a conventional backup to cover for it, and the problems weren't just mechanical. The Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into whether Denver had told its bondholders

the truth about the baggage system. Five separate lawsuits were filed on behalf of investors. None of it ever produced a fraud finding against the city. And despite all the drama, the airport worked. In its first year, 31 million people flew through it. But something else had started before the doors ever opened, and it had nothing to do with runways or bonds. A story about this airport was already circulating in 1994,

and the first person to feel it wasn't a politician or an engineer. He was a 53-year-old muralist standing in a studio on the west side of Denver when a van pulled up outside. I'm Josh Maykowitz, and I hope you'll join us for Season 5 of Dateline Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing person's case, and hear from the families, the friends, and the investigators, all desperate to find them. Maybe you could help solve a mystery. Search Dateline missing in America

to listen completely free or subscribe to Dateline premium to unlock new episodes early. Denver International Airport opened on February 28, 1995, 16 months late and about a billion dollars over its construction estimate. But even then, the work wasn't finished. Back in 1988, Mayor Peña had signed an executive order creating a public art program for the city of Denver. The city council wrote it into ordinance in 1991. The rule was simple. Any city capital project, costing over $1 million, had to set aside 1% of its budget for art. For the Denver airport, that came to about $7.5 million across some 30 separate commissions. At the time, it was the largest public art program at any airport on Earth.

The man in charge of spending it was Charles Ansbacher. He was a symphony conductor, chaired Colorado's Council on the Arts and Humanities, and sat on the panel that picked the tent design. By the time he was done, the airport would hold more than 200 separate pieces of art. One of those commissions went to a painter named Leo Tanguma, and it would cause more trouble than all the others put together. Tanguma was born in 1941 in Beaville, Texas, a farm town between Corpus, in San Antonio. His parents were migrant farm workers, and some of his earliest drawings were of the two of them out in the cotton fields. But by the time he was 11, he was drawing something else. Waiting in his fifth grade classroom, he drew a picture on the blackboard of his classmates killing the local sheriff. He got punished for it, but he didn't care. He'd drawn it because he thought that same sheriff had killed seven Mexican Americans in their town, and two of them were his mother's cousins.

Tanguma has called that blackboard his first mural. He left school a year later in the sixth grade to work the fields. He moved away from home at 14. Later, he served in the army. The whole time, he never forgot his art. He painted murals while he was stationed in California and Germany, then studied art at Texas Southern University under the muralist John Biggers. Then in 1972, in Mexico City, he met David Alfaro Cicero.

Sikeros was one of the three giants of Mexican muralism, the generation that included Diego Rivera, and he gave Tanguma one piece of advice, don't just paint folklore and cultural identity, paint the political fight too. Sikikikikatos has been doing that ever since, but making that kind of art came at a price. Tanguma said he was eventually blacklisted in Houston, and his studio there burned down. Fire investigators suspected arson, and sadly, the hits just kept coming. Around the same time, Tanguma's wife died of cancer. By the 1980s, he was ready for a fresh start, so he moved his family to Colorado.

He continued painting, and in 1989, the Denver Art Museum hired him to create a huge mural about the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, right inside the building. He called it the Torch of Ketzalcoatl, an estimated 89,000, people came to watch him work on it over four months. A few years later, DIA hired him, and he took the same approach. He painted in a room at a shopping mall on the west side of town, on and off, between 1992 and 1995. He played Mexican music while he worked, and the doors were open, so shoppers wandered in to watch. The painting was full of children, seen from a child's point of view, so parents who came in started asking whether their kids could be in it. Tanguma said,

He asked each family what country they came from, and he painted their kids in the traditional clothing of that country. By the time he was done, kids from as many as 70 countries were up on those walls. Some of the parents who asked were grieving. One mother asked him to paint her son who had recently died. Another woman's daughter had been killed helping a friend escape an abusive relationship. Other families had lost children to gang violence. Tanguma put all of them in. His own granddaughters in there, along with her cousins and their classmates.

Tanguma created the mural with two collaborators, his daughter, Leticia Darlina Tanguma, and a family friend named Cheryl Detweiler Mihaka. He said both of them had lived through violent relationships. He thinks that's why the painting came out as compassionate as it did. In the end, they created two different murals, in peace and harmony with nature, and children of the world dream. of peace. Each one comes in halves. The first half of children of the world dream of peace shows a soldier in a gas mask holding a rifle and a sword. He's standing over sleeping children,

and he's run the sword through a dove. Behind him is a bombed out city. The first half of the other mural shows a burning forest, animals sealed in glass cases, and a girl lying in a coffin while children run and cry. The second half of the first mural shows the soldier dead on the ground, doves perched on his gun, and a child taking his sword apart with a hammer. In the other, the forest is coming back, and the children of 70 countries are standing together singing. But something happened before the murals actually went up in the airport,

and it nearly derailed the whole project. Tanguma was still painting in 1994 when a van pulled up outside his studio. A group of strangers got out and came inside. They asked him a lot of questions. He answered them the way he answered everybody. He said the first halves showed the destruction. The second showed the healing. But the whole point was the second half.

According to his daughter, some of them told him he shouldn't be painting it. Then they said something about a new world order. Neither she nor her father had any idea what those words meant. So they ignored the strangers and kept working. They finished in 1995, and the murals went up in the Great Hall in Jeppison Terminal. But because of where those panels hung, most travelers only ever saw one half. They came off an airplane, walked toward the carousel for their bag, looked up and saw a dead child and a man in a gas mask.

The backlash was almost immediate. Tanguma lost two other commissions. People harassed him and Dadina. Some of them sent death threats saying somebody should destroy the art, and the artist along with it. A minister publicly called the murals satanic. Other people claimed they could see demons in them. Tanguma didn't mince words about the critics. He said, quote,

I thought and I still think that these people are deranged. Dalina tried a different approach. She got the airport to install plaques next to the murals, explaining what they meant. It didn't change anything. The second artist in this story never got to defend his work at all. In 1992, three years before the airport opened, a city commissioned a sculptor named Luis Jimenez to make something for the entrance. Jimenez was a Chicano artist from El Paso, Texas.

He worked in fiberglass, finished with automotive paint, and he made things that were impossible to ignore. For the airport, he designed a rearing blue Mustang with glowing red eyes. He said it was supposed to represent the wildest, spirit of the American West. And according to Jimenez, the eyes were a tribute to his father, who ran a neon sign shop where Luis had learned to weld and paint as a kid. But Jimenez's wife thinks there was a second reason. One night, he heard a noise in the house and went to look. A pair of glowing red eyes was staring back at him out of his own living room. It was his

horse, blackjack, who had gotten inside somehow. She thinks that was the point Jimenez was making with the sculpture, that something can look monstrous when the only problem is that you weren't expecting it. Blackjack was also the model for the sculpture itself. The horse was a blue-rohn Appaloosa, a breed whose mix of black and white hairs looks blue from a distance. That's where the color came from. By 2006, Jimenez had been working on the horse for 14 years, and he was badly behind schedule. On June 13, 2006, he was in his studio in Ando, New Mexico. His daughter, Sochi, was there, and so was one employee. The three of them were using a hoist to move one of the horse's three sections when it slipped. It swung down and

pinned Jimenez against a steel support and severed an artery in his leg. They got him to a nearby hospital, but it was too late. He died there at 65 years old. The governor of New Mexico ordered flags flown at half staff. His sons finished the horse. It went up outside the airport on February 11, 2008, and has been standing there ever since. Although Jimenez named it Mustang, the city of Denver calls it Lucifer. Jimenez isn't around to correct them anymore, but I will. The third artist I want to talk about made something every traveler walked across from the day the airport opened, but almost nobody ever looked down at it.

The main terminal's original floor was a Tarasso surface with bronze inlays, designed by Ken Iwamasa and Jean Quick to See Smith. A river pattern ran through it, standing in for the rivers that come off Colorado's continental divide. Some of those inlays are words. For years, people online insisted they were a secret language known only to initiates. In reality, they're Navajo. One is the word for white metal, which is silver. One means the white mountain.

Another is the Navajo name for a branch of the South Platte River that runs near the airport, and the last one is a peak that's sacred to the Navajo, marking the eastern edge of their homeland. There was also a small picture of a mine cart with two letters next to it, A.U and A.G., gold and silver, in a state built on mining. The woman who put those words into the floor was a serious artist. Jean-Quick-to-See Smith was a citizen of the Confederate, Salish, and Coutney tribes.

Over five decades, she became one of the best-known native American artists in the country. Her work hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney. In 2018, when the airport started tearing out the terminal for a renovation, the murals and most of the other art went into storage. The floor couldn't be moved. So the airport de-excessioned it, which is the museum word for taking something out of a collection for good. They broke it up and wrote it off. Jean-quipped to see Smith died on January 24, 2025 at the 8th.5. At the 8th,000, age of 85. Her floor never came back, and the renovation that took out her floor still isn't finished. In 2017, Denver hired a consortium led by the Spanish company Ferro Villal to rebuild

the Great Hall. Construction was priced at $650 million. The company would also run the terminal's shops for 34 years after that, which is what made the deal worth up to $1.8 billion. The contract was 13 months in when it projected $311 million in overruns and delays of up to three years. In August of 2019, the airport fired them. One of the things that broke the deal was the concrete. When Cruz tested the terminal floor, they found the concrete poured back in 1991 wasn't as strong as it was supposed to be. That meant more testing, more redesign, and more money. Denver brought in new contractors and the bus.

budget for the work climbed from $770 million toward $1.9 billion. From the inside, every strange thing in that terminal has an explanation, but from the outside, Denver had walled off half its own terminal, taken down the art everybody was arguing about, and kept moving the date it would all come back. When you looked at it that way, none of the explanations mattered, because people didn't actually care about the art or the construction costs or the bad concrete. What they really wanted to talk about was the ground underneath all that and the secrets that were supposedly hiding under the surface. Three artists made the things Denver International Airport is famous for. Leo Tanguma got death threats for two murals about

peace. The sculpture Luis Jimenez was building for the entrance killed him in 2006, and a 2018 renovation destroyed Jean Quick to See Smith's terminal floor, and nobody ever put it back. But none of them started the rumors about what was hiding under the airport itself. The claim about what was down there mostly traces back to one man, and he made it almost as soon as the doors opened. In May of 1995, with the airport about two months old, a man named Phil Schneider stood up in front of an audience and said he had spent 17 years building secret deep underground

military bases for the government. He said the airport in Denver was connected to one of them. He described eight levels, an underground city of 4.5 square miles and a base covering 88.5 square miles. He never produced a document, a photograph, or a co-worker who could confirm any of it, and he didn't have long to make his case. In January of 1996, Phil Schneider was found dead in his apartment in Oregon. The Clackamas County Medical Examines, ruled it as a suicide. His ex-wife never accepted that ruling. She said Phil had told friends and family for years that if anyone ever called his death a suicide, it really meant he'd been murdered. She believed someone had killed him to keep him quiet. But there's a piece of Schneider's

story his supporters tend to leave out. Federal records show he had a long documented history of serious mental illness, going back decades before he ever stood on a stage talking about secret bases. Whatever really happened to Schneider, his theory didn't die with him. Later that year, a writer named Alex Christopher put Schneider's Denver claims into a self-published book that was mostly photographs. From there, the idea of the tunnels spread. In 1999, the British writer David Ike put DIA in his book the biggest secret. Ike claimed the airport would be the Western headquarters of a global government once marked. law arrived, and he added the reptilian material his work is known for. Then in June of 2007,

the syndicated late-night radio program, Coast-to-Coast AM, handed over four straight hours to DIA, and the theories went national. Let's take the claims one at a time, because there are a lot of them. I'll start with the tunnels themselves, because there are actually tunnels. They were dug to hold the automated baggage system, and once the airport opened, every airline, except United, refused to use it. United kept paying $60 million a year to lease it and eventually gave up, too. On Labor Day of 2005, United shut the system off for good and went back to tugs and carts. The equipment was headed for scrap at somewhere between $60 and $90 a ton. One aviation consultant said the thing couldn't move a Barbie doll efficiently. So today,

the tunnels are empty, because a $290 million machine, failed, and nobody replaced it. But that's not where the tunnel theory ends. Some people think there's a tunnel between the airport and NORAD, the military command post, dug into Cheyenne Mountain. That one doesn't add up. Cheyenne Mountain is about 90 miles away, just outside of Colorado Springs. The longest road tunnel on Earth is in Norway, and it runs a little over 15 miles. A tunnel to NORAD would need to be six times longer than the longest one humans have ever dug. And as for the underground city that Schneider was talking about, DIA's communications director, Stacey Stegman, has made the obvious point. Thousands of employees are down in those tunnels every working day. Someone would have said something

about an entire city. There's also a story about five buried buildings. Cruise supposedly put them up during construction, realized they were in the wrong place and buried them instead of tearing them down. A construction worker supposedly came forward about it. I couldn't find the worker. Nobody can. The testimony, the blueprints, the name of the person who supposedly blew the whistle. None of it traces back to an original source. Reporters who've gone looking have said the same thing. The claim exists because it keeps getting repeated, and that's all. So here I am repeating it, but I'm just the messenger. But another theory is more subjective.

The airport says the runways look like a pinwheel, but from above, some people see a swastika. That might be because they fan out from the terminal so that several can be used at the same time, and a bad crosswind doesn't close the whole field. But if you actually try to trace the swastika, you have to ignore most of the layout to make it work, so that one doesn't really hold up either. One of the most interesting theories doesn't start at the airport at all. It comes out of a movie. In Stephen Spielberg's 1977 alien contact film,

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens transmit a set of map coordinates, 40 degrees, 36 minutes north, and 104 degrees, 44 minutes west. Some people say those numbers point to the site where the airport was built. But if you plot them, you land about a mile and a half outside Alt, Colorado.

It's a farming town of a couple thousand people, roughly 51 miles due north of the airport. In the movie, those numbers are supposed to lead somewhere else entirely. They're the aliens telling the characters where to meet. And the place they lead to is Devil's Tower, the rock formation in Wyoming, where the ship lands at the end of the film. Spoiler alert, sorry. And the longitude gets there.

It comes within about a mile of the real Devil's Tower. It's the latitude that misses by almost exactly four degrees, which looks a lot like somebody writing 40, where they meant 44. A typo in a movie prop. Not a prophecy. The floor of the Jeppison Terminal supposedly has a code in it, too. Instead of gold and silver, those two letters on the mind cart we talked about earlier, A.U. and A.G. Allegedly stand for Australia antigen, a bioweapon meant to thin out the population. But the Australia antigen isn't real. It's a marker doctors used to diagnose hepatitis B.

and an antigen is the thing that triggers your immune response, not the disease itself. Still, not everything people point at is small or hidden. For a while, a 22-foot statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, really did stand outside the terminal. Photos of it still circulate as proof that something occult is going on there. It went up in June of 2010, and it was an ad for the King Tut exhibition running over at the Denver Art Museum. It came down when the exhibit left town. And then there's the land under all of it. People say the site is an ancient burial ground, which would explain all the construction disasters.

No tribe or native organization has ever made that claim, and the archaeology suggests people hunted on that land. None of the remains you'd expect that a burial site are there. All of those claims have a clear, documented answer. But the last one is where DIA dug itself a whole, still hasn't been able to come out of. It's the stone at the south end of the terminal. The Masonic symbols are the easy part to explain. The capstone is dated March 19th, 1994, and it carries the square and compasses along with the names of two Colorado Grand Lodges. They're on there because

the masons are the ones who made it. Local lodges built the stone, set it over the time capsule, and put their emblem on their own work, the way Stone Masons have done on public buildings for centuries. What's kept this theory alive is the other line carved into that same stone. Under the Masonic emblem and the two lodge names, it credits an organization called the New World Airport Commission for building the airport. Over the years, the airport has given a few different answers about what the commission actually was. Sometimes it's that the group was a booster committee for local business and political leaders. Sometimes it's that the punctuation is wrong, and it should read, new, then-world-airport Commission. And more than once, it's that the group never existed at all. Denver's own tourism

website says it didn't. And in 2019, a travel publication reported that airport officials said the same thing. But here's the problem there. The New World Airport Commission was real. Charles Ansbacher put it together, and he took the name from Antonin Dvorzac's Ninth Symphony, subtitled From the New World. Its job was throw. the party, organizing the opening festivities and running an international air show in September of 1993. It broke up shortly after the airport opened. That's the whole reason nobody could find it.

And you can go read its files. There are 11 boxes of New World Airport Commission records in the Western History Collection at the Denver Public Library cataloged as WH. 858. Press releases, promotion plans, meeting minutes. even letters to and from Charles Ansbacher, the commission's president. Anybody could have walked in and asked for the boxes, but when you add everything up, it's not crazy that people have questions. Denver missed four opening dates. It came in about $1 billion over its own construction estimate.

Federal regulators investigated whether the city had been straight with the people who bought its bonds, and when the public asked a simple question about a stone in the floor, it got three different answers, one of which was clearly not true. A city that behaves like that burns through its own credibility. Once it's gone, people go looking for their own explanations, and eventually Denver stopped trying to win that argument. In October of 2016, DIA declared a conspiracy month and put up a gallery exhibit celebrating the wildest theories about itself. One of the pieces was a fake alien skull that employees had made and buried during construction of the airport. hotel. Two years later, the terminal renovation walled off half the great hall. The airport

covered the construction barriers and posters joking that the Illuminati headquarters was back there, or the Lizard People's Lair, or maybe some new restaurants. They pointed people to a website called denfiles.com. The reason they keep doing it is that it works. The airport says the construction barrier campaign alone produced around 200 news articles and more than 7,000 104 million impressions worth roughly $8 million in coverage. The airport spent nothing on advertising to get any of it. Not only that, but Denver is also about to settle the tunnel question permanently, and not as a joke this time.

In May of 2006, Denver International announced it would spend somewhere between $300 million and $700 million, turning the abandoned baggage tunnels into public walkways. Construction starts in 2027. The reason is practical. The concourses at DIA are separate buildings cut off from the terminal, and the underground train is the only way passengers can reach two of them. When that train stops, there's no second option, and people miss their flights. The airport's chief executive at the time, Phil Washington, called that the, quote,

original sin of DEN. Walkways would finally give the place a backup. He also wants them to be beautiful. with places to stop for coffee, so before the end of this decade, anybody who wants to see the most rumored basement in America can buy a ticket to Denver and go look. The murals are supposed to come back too. Denver's current estimate for finishing the Great Hall is 2027, which would put Leo Tanguma's paintings back on a wall nine years after they came off one. The man who built the place had made peace with it long before the marketing department did. In 2007, a dozen years

after the airport opened, Federico Pena was asked about all this. He said the theories have, quote, no basis in fact. Then he went further. He pointed out that nobody pays attention to a boring building at a minor airport, and he figured that people caring this much about his airport meant they understood it mattered. He thought that was a good thing.

I don't know if he's right, but I want to know what you think. When the airport jokes about these theories, does that shut them down, or does it just convince people there's something to them? And be honest, do you believe any of it? And if you've been through DIA, tell me what you noticed. Did you go looking for the horse or the stone or the gargoyle in baggage claim? If you flew through before 2018, did you ever see Tanguma's murals in person? Let me know in the comments wherever you're listening.

I'd love to hear. Everything that made this airport famous was made by three people, two murals, a horse, and a floor. Leo Tanguma learned as a child that a painting could tell the truth about who was being killed in his town. Luis Jimenez built a rearing Mustang and gave it the red eyes he had learned to make in his father's neon shop. Jean-Quick to see Smith set Navajo words and the history of Colorado into a floor that millions of people crossed every year without looking down. None of the claims made against them has ever come with a document, a photograph, or a name. All three of them paid anyway.

Leo Tanguma is 85 now and still working. He kept painting after the threats, and he said the whole business only made him more determined to make art that means something. He's still putting murals up around Denver, including at a charter school on the north side of the city. His daughter, Dalina, works with community artists there too. She said the rumors were built to break the connection between people,

and her answer has been to keep making art that pulls them back together. So all these years later, the two of them are still working, still explaining themselves. Meanwhile, Denver did fine. It got the joke, the campaign, the impressions, and the gargoyle. Somebody else paid for it. So before we get out of here, I've got a brand new segment I'm bringing you at the end of each conspiracy episode, where I pull out one detail from the story that still doesn't line up for me. Welcome to the rabbit hole. Every claim you just heard has an answer. The tunnels held a baggage system. The horse was a tribute to a neon shop. The Masonic stone was cut by the masons themselves, and the words in the floor

are Navajo. The part that bugs me is smaller than any of that. It's that van. Remember that van? In 1994, Leo Tanguma was painting his murals in a room at a shopping mall on the west side of Denver. The doors were open and shoppers wandered in to watch. Then one day of Van pulled up outside, and a group of strangers walked in and started asking him about what he was painting. According to his daughter, Darlina, they told him he shouldn't be painting it. Then they said something about a new world order. Neither of them had any idea what that meant. My problem is the timeline. In 1994, there was no Denver Airport conspiracy theory to have heard about. Phil Schneider didn't start talking about eight underground levels until May of 1995, about two months after the

the airport opened. Alex Christopher's book came the year after that. David Ike added the reptilians in 1999. Close-to-coast AM didn't give DIA four hours until 2007. The van came first before all of it. Now, the words themselves weren't a secret. President George H.W. Bush stood in front of a joint session of Congress in September of 1990 and called for a new world order, then said it again when the Gulf War started. Pat Roberts, and published a book with that exact title in 1991, and it was a New York Times bestseller. Anybody watching television in the early 1990s had heard the phrase. The airport had it carved in stone, too.

The Capstone credits the New World Airport Commission, and it's dated March 19, 1994. But a phrase being in the air doesn't put a van outside a shopping mall. Whoever those people were, they knew what Tanguma was painting. They knew which mall he was painting it in, and they drove out there to tell him to stop. Every conspiracy claim in this episode is missing a document, a photograph, or a name. So is this one. The difference is that this one has a witness, and he's 85, and he's still waiting for somebody to tell him who was in that van. If you've got a better explanation for it than I do, I want to hear it.

Please, please write in the comments wherever you're listening. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies, and criminal acts. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crimehouse on TikTok and Instagram.

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and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzowski, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Sarah Camp, Mara de la Rosa, Claire Swartzlander, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for you. listening. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. How does a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without a trace? This is history's

greatest mysteries, a history channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas, the vanishings, the myths, the lost relics and the unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger. Follow history's greatest mysteries, available now wherever you listen to podcast. Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours?

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