Panic World - What Area 51 can teach us about the drones in NJ (with Dylan Thuras)

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Americans love not believing anything the government tells us, and it seems likely we’ll just keep coming up with stories to explain what is probably really boring in real life. The latest of these is the mysterious drones that descended upon New Jersey and then vanished without a trace. Dylan Thuras joins us to shed light on Americans’ love of conspiracy theories, which naturally begins with Area 51. Our guest Dylan Thuras is the co-founder of Atlas Obscura. Follow his work at https://www.atlasobscura.com/users/dylan, and you can hear more of his stories on the Atlas Obscura Podcast wherever you listen to ‘em. Catch the extended conversation and plenty of other great bonus content, plus ad-free episodes, by joining our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we start today's episode, I just want to put a little note here saying that our Patreon discount is ending very shortly. And I just want to also thank everyone who supported the show on Patreon. It looks like, you know, this is tax season. So we're doing the books right now. And it looks like we have enough funding to easily take this show into the summer, you know, Q2, Q3 of 2025. So hopefully with your support, we'll be bringing you moral panic. and viral freakouts until the end of time. So once again, if you want to support the show,

go to patreon.com slash panic world. For a couple more days now, you can use the discount code panic in all caps to checkout to get it for 50 cents for the first month. Wow, amazing. And yeah, see you guys behind the paywall. Dylan, can you please explain for our audience what's been going on with drones in New Jersey recently?

This is a dangerous question to ask me, Ryan. I have lots to say about this. How deep do you want to go? Well, yeah, like when you send up your hundreds of drones into the night sky above New Jersey, like what are you trying to get out of it, you know? Well, I'm trying to take out other people's drones. That seems to be what a lot of people are doing. This is drone-on-dron action above the skies of New Jersey.

I'm not going to say there's nothing to talk about. Right. But I will say that the New Jersey drone panic of 2024 reminds me a lot of other previous drone panics and and this thing that happened in the 1950s called the windshield pitting panic. Okay. I'll tell you this story. In the 1950s, somebody noticed that their car windshield was covered in teeny, tiny little dense and pits.

Right. And they looked and they were like, I'd never seen this before. Like, what's going on? And someone wrote a story about this and everyone started looking. And they found that there were tiny little pits. on all of their windshields as well. And then the theories that behind it were everything from nuclear test fallout

to cosmic rays to all kinds of, you know, it's sort of just like weird science stuff is happening. Sure. This is showing up in our car windshields. And of course, it just turned out that this is exactly what every windshield has always looked like, but no one had taken the time to look very closely.

That is an interesting take, Yeah, especially when applied to the New Jersey drone panic. I see where you're going. I have a better angle, though. And this comes from a Washington Post article from December 17th. This is the reason the government wants TikTok banned, so we can't see what they're doing. And that was a TikTok user who wrote that in a comment that has 20,000 likes. So yours is fine, but I think this random TikTok user might be onto something.

Ah, yes, TikTok, famously controlled by the U.S. government. This is why they don't want us on there. And the article continues. On Facebook, more than 73,000 people have joined a group titled New Jersey mystery drones. Let's solve it. Unconfirmed explanations have ranged from secret military activities to mass psychological operation. In the wake of the high-profile murder of a health care CEO, others have pointed to an unsubstantiated

theory known as Project Blue Beam, which reports that the government will launch a fake alien invasion to clear a path for installing an all-powerful savior figure. The post talked to a guy named Kip, who saw the drones in real life. And this is one last quote I'm going to throw at you here. The moment the federal agencies were like, there's nothing to worry about, I was like, oh, we should be worried, he told the post. For now, Kip said he'll keep following the thread on social media and waiting for real answers.

Honestly, I'm hoping it's aliens. And they come and get me, he said. Like, please, get me the hell out of here. Nice, nice, good one, Kip. Yeah, Kip is on to something. I think that's right. Yeah. But I think it's a really important example of how Americans love not believing anything

the government tells us. Yeah. And this is nothing new. We're probably just going to constantly be making up stories to explain what is probably very boring in real life. And that brings us to today's topic, which is Area 51. I'm Ryan Broderick. Welcome to Panic World, a show about the immoral panics and viral

recouts bubbling up out of the darkest corners of the internet. And today, in honor of our drone panic, we figured we look back into how Area 51, the place, an idea that we all sort of think about as sort of the hub viralian activity in America, became a cluster fuck of lore and conspiracy theories. And joining me, the expert on weird places, I believe, Atlas Obscura's co-founder, Dylan Thuris. Dylan, how are you? And more importantly, do you want to believe? Of course I want to believe. I mean, I'm a child of the X-Files. I mean, you know. And yeah, I do, I do want to believe.

Thanks for having me. So I'm sure you have like an encyclopeak knowledge of all the various places that are haunted or otherwise occupied by alien invading forces, you know, hiding in the corners of our world. But do you have a favorite? Like, what's your favorite spooky place? Besides Area 51? Yeah.

Besides Area 51? Yeah. So what would be your second favorite spooky place? I mean, honestly, it's actually, it's not that far away from there. It's on the other side near the Tonapa test and training range. Another secret government location. But the actual place is the clown motel in Tonapa, Nevada. What in the fuck is the clown motel?

Oh, baby. So Tonopah is about four hours away from Las Vegas. It's at the very edge of the desert. You know, in that part of Nevada, you really are skirting around an area the size of Connecticut. That's all military off-limits property. And right at the edge, right as you're like headed into the absolute desert, there's nothing for hundreds of miles going forward. There's a little motel called the clown motel.

And it's like a two-story roadside motel. And it is themed with hundreds, hundreds of clowns, 700 clowns in the lobby check-in room alone. Can you stay there? Oh, yeah. I have stayed there. Oh. Each room comes equipped with a portrait of a clown.

And obviously, of course. Yeah, naturally. I mean, these are the basic amenities you would expect. I would expect that at the clown motel, yeah. Yeah. But the best part about it is when you walk out of your room and you're like on the little balcony there, the site you see directly next to the clown motel is this abandoned minor cemetery, 100-year-old abandoned minor cemetery.

You know, I should have guessed that the clown motel is next to an old cemetery. That's obviously. Obviously. You know, it's all these little like wooden grave markers and they're marked with what people died of and it's just stuff like, you know, gave up on living. Relatable. Had an altercation. Yeah.

So I really, I love that place. That's a spooky spot I really enjoy. That is a spooky spot. I like that. That's good. I've always been a sucker for the Bermuda Triangle. Oh, yeah. I feel like it's just classic, weird, and I enjoy reading about it.

But we're going to be dealing with, I think, you and I, our favorite spooky place, our favorite conspiratorial hub of nonsense, which is. Area 51, but we're going to be doing something a bit different today. I'm going to be going to be going over how Area 51 gained its reputation to start. But then after the break, Dylan is going to take over the show, and you're going to tell us about the place itself. And then we're going to finish the episode by doing a sort of Dragon Ballsy Fusion Dance and combining forces to discuss the impacts of Area 51 on conspiracy, tourism, and sort of the broader paranoia of modern America. But let's start with the Internet having real world consequences and the panic that ensued,

because that's what this show is about. And after decades of conspiracy theories all about Area 51 in 2019, some bored little Gen Z Internet kids started a movement to storm Area 51. Are you familiar with the storming of Area 51? Do you remember this? I am very familiar, yes. Okay. Well, I want to open with a quote from Know Your Meme for people who might not remember this.

I think there's a pretty succinct summary of what happened here. On June 27, 2019, three anonymous Facebook. users in a group called ship posting because I'm in shambles. Smiley Coon and the Hidden Sound created the event page Storm Area 51. They Can't All Stop Us, which was scheduled to commence at 3am on September 20th, 2019. The description reads, we will all meet up at Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we Naruto run, which for people who don't know that, it's a lot.

where you put your arms behind you so you can run really fast. Yeah. If you're so fast, you become aerodynamic. It's why you see in the Olympics, you always see everyone running like that, right? Most, they should have a Naruto run competition at the Olympics. I think that would get people interested again. But it continues, if we, Naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let's see them aliens.

So do you think that this is a solid plan to get into Area 51? Oh, for sure. For sure. What could stop this plan, honestly? I don't really see. It feels like they've thought out every, you know, the government's only had, what, you know, almost 70 years to figure out like how to keep people out and create probably one of the most secure places on planet Earth.

I don't see why this doesn't meet that challenge. Well, you know, if enough, if enough Gen Z brain-rodded, internet users show up, who knows what could happen. Yeah. And I do want to point out very quickly as we start getting into this, that this was a joke. Like, this was funny. But jokes on the internet don't really stay jokes for long. And in many ways, this is a microcosm for how we've treated Area 51 in this country since its inception.

A quirky cultural oddity shrouded in mystery that after enough time has spun out into a conspiracy that will never die. Every new generation stumbles across it and reignites our weird obsession with the things we can't explain that are always more outlandish

than what's actually going on, whether we're talking about aliens or drones or Gen Z kids running around like Naruto. And they sort of metastasize into stranger things as they go on. And on July 5th, a username Jackson Barnes

posted on the page the following quote. the basic idea is that the kiles form the front line are you familiar with the this is kind of an older pre-covid term are you familiar with a kyle do you know what a kyle is is it is it adjacent to a chad like what is the kyle basically in every small town there's like a guy whose name is usually kyle yeah he smokes a lot of weed he might get like really angry and like punch a hole in your wall if you invite him to like a house party he's going to like smoke inside he's like a dirt bag i i understand understand who this is. Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. So that's a Kyle, and they're meant to form the front line of the invasion here. And then it continues. If we feed them enough scyllivan and monster energy,

you kind of get the idea of what a Kyle is all about. It's the kind of guy that has, like, blunt guts on his coffee table all the time. Cool. Yeah. And yeah, so we feed them enough Syllabin and monster energy and say that anyone in camouflages their stepdad. Obviously, Kyle's have stepdad's. That's a big thing. The entire base is made of drywall, and then they go berserk and they will become an impenetrable wall. Then the rock throwers were throw pebbles at the inevitable resistance. We don't want to hurt them. We just want to annoy them enough not to shoot the Kyle's as often.

While this is all happening, two Naruto runner battalions will run full speed around the north and south flank and shadow clone jiuitsu. I think that's a typo. They're going to do shadow clone jihitsu, which is like, I think that's a Naruto term as well. I think it's a type of, hold on. I don't want to get yelled up by anime fans, but let me just double check this. Yes, shadow clone technique is from Naruto.

So that would effectively triple our numbers, this goes on, and overwhelm the base. I mean, the shadow clone jihitsu does seem promising. I don't understand how it triples their numbers, but obviously it's powerful technique. So as the name would imply, you create sort of mirrors of yourself. Right, of course. Yeah, that's what you're doing there.

Right. Shadow clones, obviously. Right. And then the post ends with, P.S., hello, U.S. government. This is a joke. I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan. I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies, you know, like likes on the internet. I'm not responsible. People decide to actually storm air 51. What do you think happened immediately after this postman life? You know, the logical conclusion is that this spun terribly out of control. Yeah, according to The Washington Post, seven days later, half a million. people had signed up to the Facebook page to Stormer every 251.

Yeah, yeah. I do love that this is like an incredible snapshot of like a very early kind of Gen Z humor that I think has been memory hold a bit. Like this was kind of the earliest examples of the world realizing that people who had had grown up as online as Gen Z had a very different sense of irony and a very different sense of humor. And it was a real shock. So an Air Force spokesperson went on record basis.

he's saying like don't do that it's a really bad idea please don't do that and like most things on the internet it felt very random it felt very stupid but it was like gaining real critical mass over the summer of 2019 i mean can i like the write-up is actually really funny i mean the like hiles on the front lines the like and even the fact that it's like disclaimed at the end like it's a funny thing to write it really is so you might be wondering at this point why in 2019 Gen Z kids are rediscovering Area 51. Well, it all starts with little podcast, not this one, because it didn't exist yet, but an equally big and important podcast, a Panic World, had a very interesting guest on that year.

Can you guess which podcast we're talking about? I'm kidding. Why don't you tell me, Ryan? It's a little man named Joe Rogan. Who could have guessed it? So Joe Rogan does an episode where he has Bob Lazar on. Let's take a listen. I've seen pretty much every interview you've ever given.

I've followed the story incredibly closely. But for people who don't know the story, you used to work at Area 51. I mean, I would imagine the moment you actually make contact with something that's extraterrestrial, whether it's an object or a being. your whole paradigm, the whole world you live in, is now a different place. The excitement kind of turned to dread at some point because the amount of power we're dealing with is astronomical. Can you give us a quick little spark notes on Bob Lazar? Spark notes are Bob Lazar basically kicks off, in large part, the modern cultural phenomenon of Area 51 in the late 80s. He comes out and he says, I worked at Area 51.

I saw the stories are actually really funny they're basically like ralph from the symptoms he was like i opened the closet i saw an alien the alien looked at me and uh and he goes on and he like does a whole you know he goes on the news there's suddenly just a name that hasn't really barely been in the public consciousness area 51 is suddenly now incredibly at everyone's like what is this what's going on there are they have aliens and uh i mean i will say anyone who's at all all seriously interested in Area 51 is not a Bob Lazar fan. Interesting. He has almost no credibility.

So Tom DeLong is not a Bob Lazzar fan. I can't speak for Tom DeLong. I don't know what Tom DeLong. Noted alien investigator, Tom Lerun. You have a bo lover. I don't know, but I feel like among the people who are like legitimate, like, yeah, Lazar is not a, uh, uh, but he kickstart this whole thing. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So the Nevada current wrote a little about Lazar in 2021. And yeah, as you said, he kind of pops up around 1989. He goes on local Vegas news claiming that he used to work at Area 51. And this is how the Nevada current describes kind of his early press appearance. At first, Lazar spoke only in silhouette and used the pseudonym Dennis. Later, he came forward under his own name with no disguise.

Lazars claims were fantastic that the U.S. government had, in its possession, nine crashed or captive spacecraft from another world. At least one of them shaped like an actual saucer. Lizar claimed he'd been part of a team hired by the government to reverse engineer the craft, which would unlock for American scientists their propulsion secrets they needed to pave a path to the stars. Legit, I think we can all agree that that's probably. I mean, I've seen the X-Files. That sounds right. It does sound almost exactly like something from the X-Files, doesn't it?

Yeah, as you said, he doesn't have a lot of credibility. He claimed that he went to MIT. MIT has said that he never went to MIT. Yeah. It's also not even clear if he worked at Area 51, as the Novotica. current found one of the few bits of physical evidence that he'd worked at a secret base in Nevada was a W-2 form, reflecting income of less than $1,000, purportedly paid to him by the Department of Naval Intelligence. Even that form was questioned over its authenticity.

Skeptics have pointed out that there is an Office of Naval Intelligence within the Department of the Navy, but not a Department of Naval Intelligence. It's crazy that he's still out there, man. It's wild that he was like, he went on Rogan and like is still doing the shtick because the whole thing is just there's so little there's so little there's so little there so little there so little there so i always kind of think of the process of pulling pre-internet culture online is kind of an upload right like uploading you know we upload flat earth and then it becomes an internet thing we upload eating disorders and then they become an internet they're uploading culture and i think Alex jones starts this process of uploading cranks like he kind of

creates a bunch of viral celebrities out of these guys who were just like on public access or on some pirate radio station. And Joe Rogan, I think, has taken that torch. And now he's the guy that is like introducing cranks to massive online audiences now. Yeah. I also think this period in the late 80s and early 90s, right? Okay. So Bob Lazar is like 88, 89.

X-Files comes out in 93. This is like internet exists, but it's not what it is today. But it also, that's like 80, 1980 is when coast to coast AM starts. And so in a kind of pre-internet era, you get the first shapings of the kind of conspiracy media complex. And I think that that complex, like, as you said, as it when it gets uploaded to the internet, it sort of, it goes from whatever, whatever step it was at like pre-coast-to-coast AM, kind of truly fringy. takes one step towards the mainstream. And then the internet is just this, like, very convenient escalator into, like, absolute

mainstream. I think that's exactly right. And just to knock down Lazare's credibility even more, he in 1990 went to prison for running one of the first digital prostitution services. Very ahead of his time. He would have loved Onlyfans. I mean, I guess maybe he does love Onlyfans. He's still around.

But then once he was out of prison, he tried to monetize the Area 51 UFO. thing as much as possible. So he had, he got book deals, obviously in Netflix show. I mean, I would never question the, uh, the, the, the rigor that goes into a Netflix documentary. Yeah. But perhaps they're not exactly as scrupulous as you might think. And then he obviously gets tight with Joe Rogan. Yeah. Yeah. I also, it may be off topic, but I also kind of think, I have this, this conspiracy theory theory that, that we go through these kind of like cultural, it's like a sine wave or waves of sort of what I would call like fantasy horror conspiracies. So that's like things like the satanic panic in the 80s, right? It's like fantasy horror. It's very like morally coded.

There's just like there's good. There's evil. There's, you know, this is a fight. It's religious, essentially. And it's in its core nature. I think QAnon was was a lot like that actually, kind of religious in its core nature. And then you get these shifts from that kind of fantasy horror genre into what more sort of aliens technology governments it's it's little shadier it's a little more pulls from actual historical fact so it's like a little more muddled with like the real and the unreal you know area 51 like exists it's a place uh and and and and and then people get that's like that goes on for a while and then like something comes back and it's like back to kind of moral panics and like i think there's this weird just sort of sign wave of

those two things. I think we're leaving the kind of horror fantasy and going back into like more weird drone panic government alien black helicopter stuff. That is such an interesting idea. I think I agree with you. That's like a really, that's a really good way of thinking about it. They're kind of constantly switching between the two. The internet sort of incentivizes different kinds depending on, you know, what's how we're using the internet at this at the time period. So for instance, like if we talk about the raid of Area 51, the mainstream news has picked it up, military officials are talking about it. The Twitter account for Kool-Aid posts a Photoshop of the Kool-Aid man bursting into Area 51. Obviously, brands have to get involved, right?

Even crazier, Pornhub sees a surge of activity around Area 51 as a search term. So it goes from zero to 160,000 searches in four days. And this is the moment where the kid who started all this, he gets unmasked. His name is Maddie Roberts. And he realizes that things have spun out of control. And I'm going to send you a video. And I want you to watch the first minute or so of this and tell the audience, you know, your general impressions of this Maddie Roberts character.

What do you think? So I just dropped it in the chat. I've never seen this guy. 13 action news. Elevating Los Angeles. Vegas live at 11. Tonight, the man is a viral idea to storm.

Area 51 is secret and heavily guarded military site in the Nevada desert is hoping that no one gets hurt. Good evening, everybody. I'm Trisha Keene. And I'm Ty Kinyas. Now, he says people have written to him on Facebook saying that they are willing to die to get on that base. It's about two

hours north of the valley. It started out as just from a pure stroke of imagination. It's just meant to be funny. I want to do something cool out there now that we have a bunch of people, but I don't anybody to get hurt. Oh, this guy's cute, honestly. Like, he's just some dumb kid. He's like, he's like a goof.

He's dressed up in, like, goofy outfit. He's dressed like, he's dressed like, Neruda. He's dressed like Nerudo. Oh, obviously. This, like, I'm showing my age right here. I'm just like, oh, he's in some kind of homemade costume. I really enjoy that. He's dressed like a ninja. Of course, he's dressed like a Naruto ninja, obviously.

So, yeah, he's from California. He was 21. He worked at a, he worked at a vape shop. Of course, obviously. And he likes Joe Rogan and World Warcraft. And he suddenly found himself getting a visit from the FBI. Oh, boy. What do you think happens next in this story?

Two million people show up to Area 51. They are never seen again. Yeah. They all just disappear. This is just, you know, that friend you lost back in 2019? He was kidnapped by the government. Yep, exactly. So Roberts tries to get ahead of this.

He changes things up and he suggests that instead, of going to Area 51, they have like a music festival in the desert called Alien Stock on the same weekend. And the Alien Research Center decides to throw their own event Nevada. So at this point now, there are just a bunch of Area 51 themed events all happening around Area 51. What happens to our boy, Maddie? Thank you for asking. He decides he doesn't want to be involved in any of this anymore. The quote that comes out of a Guardian story written about this is he wanted no involvement in Fire Fest 2.0.

The local authorities feared potential calamity, people dying of dehydration in the desert, angry landowners, and madmen with guns. So the whole thing kind of fizzles out. By the end, there are some weirdos in Vegas and a couple groups in the desert, all gather around to dance. There's a bunch of Pepe the Frog cosplay involved. obviously because it's 2019. Obviously.

A bunch of conspiracy theories. And that's kind of it. What's your sort of general take on this whole little shaggy dog tail? Like, do you feel like it says anything larger about kind of the place of Avery 51 in our minds? I just, I want to start by saying I honestly have such heart for this kid, Maddie. I mean, he wrote like such a funny, dumb goof on the internet. And like, he just happened to make it an event page that you could actually like, like, yes, I'm coming.

Right. Like if he had wrote this on his feed or something, there'd be comments, there'd be jokes. Like, we would not be talking about this at all. Like, he doesn't want this to happen. He says in the first post, like, I'm just joking, guys. I'm just having a goof, man. And the fact that, like, the media ecosystem basically just starts, like, churning around this poor kid until the point that it's, like, way out of his control. And I'll say that town of, like, 5,000 people was panicked. about this. They ended up spending like 350 grand or 300 grand in like security like additional stuff. They were just, they were absolutely terrified

that two million people were gonna descend on a town that like doesn't have the infrastructure for like, sure a couple hundred tourists, right? And that like people were gonna be there without water. There was gonna be like people were gonna riot when they realized like they really couldn't get in. It was just gonna, apparently it caused like, great stress and strain on the town, on relationships between people in the town,

because some people were like, we should take advantage of this. We're going to make a lot of money. Other people were like this. Like, it was really bad for this tiny little town of Rachel Nevada, like really bad. And so, again, I don't blame that kid Matt. He barely did anything at all. He was just like having an internet goof. It's like being the butterfly that flapped your wings and like made the,

the media hurricane that then consumed you. Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. I have looked at this story for years as kind of the moment we realized Gen Z were different. Like, they have such a fascination with using the internet to meet each other in real life. You know, even now amid all of the like celebrity lookalike contests that are happening, they're very interested in these collaborative, you know, do you know about the gentle minions thing? Yes, I do know the gentle minions. So like, like there's just every couple months, there's like something weird that a bunch of Gen Z kids are doing using the internet to meet in real life.

And it's it's such a departure from, I think, how millennials are using the internet where we had that kind of brief moment with like flash mobs and stuff. And then we were kind of like enough. We're way too, you know, millennials are way too like neurotic and individualistic to like ever work together on something. Whereas Gen Z is very fascinated with like collaborative uses for social media. and this is the story, I think, that made me realize that we are not, we were not prepared for it. Yeah. Because, like, the media is taking this super seriously. The military is taking this super.

Towns are taking this thing. Everyone is taking this seriously. But then the people at the center are like, no, this is just like a meme. Yeah. Well, like, Ryan, you're a millennial. Yes. I am also. I'm very old.

Pathologically, unfortunately. Old millennial. But I think that's why, like, FlashMob seemed so novel to us. Because it was like, oh, my God. The Internet. made something happen and people came together and they did a thing and that's that's cool and like I feel like for anyone a generation below us like the dividing line between the like the internet like the idea that the internet is not real or not connected to the real world it's just like it's it's a dumb idea for

anyone to hold but like that smoothness the smoothness by which things flow out of the internet into real life is like it's a steeper gradient it's also just the prime example of It was just a joke. And oh, shit, like, this joke could be catastrophic. Just how quickly that can happen. It really captures both sides of that. Then no one came, basically. I mean, that's the interesting thing, right? Is it, like, it generated this enormous amount of fear and concern. And ultimately, like, a thousand people came and wandered around and kind of like, it also, the internet is such a frictionless place and the internet is full of friction, but we're never quite sure what's going to transfer and what won't. So there's always this kind of like what's actually going to, you know, January 6th was also planned on the internet.

Yeah, because I was going to say, like, I had a similar experience to Dylan Roberts when I set up this page called Stop the Steel in 2020. And I didn't think anyone was going to sign up to it, but things just got really out of control. Just a little joke. Yeah, just a little, dear FBI agent that has to listen to my podcast, that is a little joke I'm making. I do remember a video of kids Neruda running in front. of like area 51. A couple people did. People did do it.

A handful of people got arrested by the security force that was just waiting there to arrest them. And they just wait for you to cross the border and then they like calmly arrest you and like you go to the sheriff. There's no like you don't go to some secret. They just call the local. No, they kill you and then they clone you. Right. You're clone back in the general population. That's correct.

So for once we have a conspiracy that the internet ran with ending at least for the moment in something that was fairly harmless. You know, so folk showed up. It was kind of goofy and civil. but that was it. But Area 51 as a concept, as this conspiratorial nucleus of strange rumblings and bizarre, sort of like hidden experiments and alien abductions and all that, we'll never die.

And after the break, Dylan is going to tell us all about why this place has lasted so long in the American imagination. All right. So, Area 51 is this thing that we can. keep coming back to time and time again. We see mysterious things in the sky, and we assume that there's some connection to shadowy government figures that are behind all of it, whether it's aliens or drones or what have you, right?

But Dylan, how the heck did this start? Like, where does all of this come from? I do feel like I'm going to drag your show to a place like it doesn't want to go. That's fine. Break the show. Break it. Talking about Area 51. Yeah, Area 51 has this feeling of being this kind of like boomery Gen X conspiracy.

Very much so. But it is like really a real thing. It's not a thing that feels comfortable to bring up at a party. Like now I'm going to be a guy at a party who's like, do you want it? You want to go into my van full of black lights and talk about Area 51? Yes. It's both, it makes you sound both like a loon and a fuddy-duddy simultaneously. So what is it?

That's what we're going to do. Here's what Area 51 is. Area 51 actually did manage to stay basically effectively secret out of people's awareness for 30 years, you know, from 1955 to about the mid to late 80s. It is, Area 51 is a real place. It's about 85 miles north of Las Vegas. It's also something that does show up. It's, you know, it leaks here and there. Little bits of it show up in the public.

There's an old article that's like, Area 51 baseball team does it again, you know? And it's like those are military. America's so fucking stupid. I love it. Yeah, we're just like little bits sneak out there and there. But I other think the thing that people don't understand about Area 51 is it is a relatively tiny little chunk of an area the size of Connecticut. It is the size of Connecticut.

It is the size of Connecticut, the Nevada test and training range. And it's a bunch of different stuff. It was primarily the place. Is it 51 areas inside of the testing range? There's a bunch of areas. There are more than area. I mean, yes, there is, there's lots of areas. Okay.

13, area six. Sure. Probably there are at least 51. I would have to imagine. There are more. It'd be funny if there weren't. Yeah. It'd be funny if they were just random numbered areas, but.

It's a little wonky too, because the areas, come from like survey grid maps and like they were not calling an area 51 like this is kind of a thing that got applied from the outside not internally oh right because like you're looking at a map and it's like zoning areas and they're like this is the 51st area of this area and so that okay there's a base there yes yes area 51 is like where groom i mean probably it did have that name at some point internally, but it would like call it Groom Lake. They call all the kinds of stuff. But first we should talk about. So, so it's part of- The government's running something called Groomer Lake. That's interesting. I can't wait to

tell Q-Anon about this. Yeah, yeah, it is called Groom Lake. Really? Yeah, that's where it is. So we basically, we take this enormous area in Nevada and we make it secret. We make it non-public, you can't go there, you can't fly over it. And so to situate Area 51 and kind of space and time, we're going to go back to 1945, because this is when all of this starts. So we test our first atomic bomb in New Mexico. This is basically, this is the largest secret black ops government project to ever exist by like a factor of 10.

Like it's just bigger and more expensive and more secret than anything we've ever done. and a month later we drop a bomb on Hiroshima. And less than a year after we bomb Hiroshima, we blow up another giant atomic bomb in, well, it's a thousand times bigger than Hiroshima. It's still, they get a lot bigger than that, but we blow up a big bomb in the bikini atoll. Yes, I'm also a Godzilla fan, so I'm familiar with this as well.

Yes, yes, yes. Check in all my boxes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're starting a lot of lore here. Right, Godzilla is going to come out of this. Sure. Also, this is where we get the name. the bikini. Because of Godzilla, I understand. Sure. Yes, because of the famous swimsuit issues.

Because of Godzilla's swimsuit. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. Okay, this is all background, but basically shortly after all of this is going on, 1947. This is like an important year. 1947 is the year the CIA starts. It's previously the OSS, but it becomes officially the CIA. So when we start the National Security Act, we create the Department of Defense. It's the year we start the Air Force. It's also the year Roswell crashed. Yeah. We are spinning up. We are basically going out of the Manhattan Project and we're going to keep the party going, man. Modern America is being born. Our security state, the security state you know and love is. The thing that everyone loves is starting right now. Okay. It's fun. If you look up the Roswell crash too and you look up like the things that they found, it's also really funny because it's like tin foil, thin wooden beams, paper. Like it's not.

Tinfoil, a hollowed out light bulb, like a metal tube. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's not quite the things that you feel like an interstellar species is like fly. You're like, oh, you flew in something with thin wooden beams? That's weird. I would imagine you could get very far in space with a wooden spaceship, but I don't really know. Okay, so we spin up the big security state.

All right, Ryan, you, you're a government. What kind of government are you? Clearly, I'm personally, I mean, I would be an authoritarian government. for sure, but like a wacky one. Yeah, I'd be a wacky despot, you know. But okay, wait, so... You're like a Turkmenistan. Fully, yeah, just like golden statues to me and just no, no one on the streets. Yeah, that's me. Awesome. Empty, empty, empty, but... Emacly, but very authoritarian. Exactly, yeah. That's how I like it.

That's me. All right. So you've got this government and you've got this new security state and, you know, you got this cool thing, the CIA, Air Force, giant bombs. How are you going to test all these giant bombs? Well, you have to test them secretly or outside of the country? That's that, well, yeah, we were doing it outside of the country. We were going to the bikini atoll. And basically everyone was just like, go, it takes forever to get there. What a commute. No joke, quite literally.

Edward Teller, the creator of the hydrogen bomb, was like, look, I just want to have somewhere where I can do a mushroom cloud in the morning and like be in Vegas with some showgirls the evening. I work remote for this very reason. Like, I just don't want to go into the office. I understand. People did not want to do the commute. So basically we were like, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah, we need a homegrown place to blow up 900 atomic bombs. And we create the, it's got a lot of different names, the Nevada Proving Grounds, the Nevada test site, whatever. But it's the big patch that we start blowing up bombs in. And so that is the thing we do first. And then we got this cool site used to be an animal preserve. Now we're blowing up an atomic bomb like all the time. Like we're

doing so many atomic tests. And they're not, they're not actually secret. We have to tell the public. We have this whole thing. This is like, it's actually kind of public. But that's a, that's an issue. Like, let's say you also needed an enormous amount of area to test secret stuff. And you got this great desert site, but it's like, the atomic stuff's like a little too public. What you might do is find a nice spot right next to that that you can kind of file under like the Department of Energy and you can kind of just be like, ah, it's just like a thing.

It's like not, it doesn't, the same rules don't apply to it as apply to the sort of some of the atomic testing stuff. But it's like got, you've got the same infrastructure, you got the same security, and you have this beautiful flat lake, groom lake,

where you can land and take off secret planes. And this is, this is a really attractive site if what you want to do is not blow up atomic bombs but instead build super secret planes that fly really really really high and really fast and that is exactly what the CIA wants to do out at Groom Lake so so they start area 51 in 1955 was its official start that is interesting because one of the most believable explanations I've read for like the resurgence of Area 51 conspiracies in the 80s and 90s and the wider UFO fascination. Yeah.

Was that, you know, to tie it back to the kind of opening of today's episode about the drone panic, was that Americans were probably seeing supersonic planes. 100%. And they were seeing them around Area 51. And then they were seeing them around the country. And that's basically what this all was. That's exactly right. The U2 in particular, the first plane, was not really a stealth plane. It flew really high and very fast. But, you know, it was a spy plane. It was meant to go and take pictures. But it didn't have some of the like radar evading technology yet. It actually was quite reflective. And so flying super high, it could like catch the sun at certain times. It would look like this crazy, like bright flying cross or this other stuff. So there really were things flying around in the sky. in the, you know, late 1940s through the 1950s,

that would have looked nothing like what you thought of as an airplane. And yes, this is, and so what's interesting, and I think this actually really applies to the current drone thing too, is the U.S. government learned pretty quickly that this was sort of both a nuisance and potentially an opportunity.

It was a nuisance in the sense that, like, they didn't want people to see their super secret planes. And when people did see them, they kind of had to track it down and be like, okay, what did you see? Like, what do you know? Like, they kind of needed to take it seriously. I think they also became interested in whether people were spotting other governments, you know, technology.

And so they did really earnestly, they went and, like, talked to people who saw stuff in the sky and, like, asked them what's going on. This would be the beginning of, like, the men in black. idea. This really did happen. I think they also realized quite early on that this kind of hysteria, although it could be a little bit of a nuisance and like a security risk, it also provided cover. It was so much noise and nonsense and all the talk about aliens and UFOs and flying saucers. They would much prefer everybody talking about that than being like, I think it's made of titanium. And like, I found a tiny piece of titanium. And like, are they flying planes made out of titanium that can go to 70,

thousand feet in the air. Like they don't, the conversations are trying to avoid our boring conversations. They don't want you to have boring conversations about Area 51 because that's what they are trying to not talk about. Right. Was there an anecdote or an example you specifically came over where they were like, oh, people have nutty theories. Let's, let's bolster those. Was it like, where are you pulling that from? At first they disavowed it. Their first tactic was, right, no, no, no, you're not seeing anything. you're seeing weather balloons, you're seeing stars, you're seeing whatever. These are the, what's annoying about all this disinformation is like the classic denials are also often correct.

In fact, often people were seeing stars or normal airplanes or whatever. But at first they denied everything. But later, it seems as if they maybe got more interested in kind of controlling the narrative, less about kind of full denial and more about like where it goes. And in fact, you know, I fell so deep into this. rabbit hole, Ryan. I ended up talking to a guy who runs the Dreamland Resort site. It's like the premier Area 51 site. It's like really the best. It's like the research is strong. Georg, he's a German guy, like moved to the West Coast, ended up living next to Area 51. He said

that in the 90s, when this just became, they were just like tourist bus going out every single night to Era 51 to look for, you know, look at the skies and see what they saw. You know, he also can't confirm this. This is just, like, rumors. But what he said is he's heard that they would specifically, like, shine lights onto the mountain sides. And, like, they would just, like, make, like, make kind of distractions so that people would be like, oh, my God, I saw, I did see an alien.

That's so funny. Because it's just, like, again, you're diverting someone's attention from what you actually don't want them to see and pointing it towards somewhere that's basically like not it doesn't bother them at all that people talk about aliens and UFO they love that for them it's good for them yeah it's cover baby and i i well i should say in theory it's good for them until enough time passes and then our own military starts investigating claims of alien activity this so okay here's all right ryan i'm going to give you my two genuine conspiracy theories right here right now okay number one the drone thing but go back a year.

There was a bizarro story about Langley Air Force Base that there were like 17 drones parked over Langley Air Force Base. Sure. And the Pentagon came out. This was December 2020. It came out and was like, yeah,

we saw the drones. We know they're there. No, we can't shoot them down. Like, basically, don't worry about it. And this was reported by the Wall Street Journal. It was like, again, there's like, you know, White House Pentagon spokespeople came out to be like, yes, there were drones.

I have no explanation for this, but I will say it was different from the New Jersey thing insofar as all of the reporting. So there was a famous problem and remains a famous problem, which is like one of the ways to describe the story of Area 51 is as a fight between the CIA and the Air Force over resources. Classic.

Classic. And there are plenty of examples of one branch of the government seeing the government do something, another branch of the government do something else. And no one's knowing what the fact one hand is doing. And so there is this way in which something's going on that's weird and a little bit hard to understand. Again, I have no explanation for what those drones over Langley were.

But, you know, I don't know. That's a thing. Then it's immediately surrounded. Like very shortly afterwards comes what is a genuine kind of non. Dron Panic as far as I can tell. And it makes it almost impossible to talk about anything that's got more substance to it. Because again, it's just surrounded with this kind of like ecosystem of nonsense and bullshit. Right.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that I even think that that's like was intentionally done, but it bears a very similar pattern. The drone stuff bears a eerily similar pattern to the sort of use of UFO, disinformation, just like the idea that like a lot of talking about UFOs and nonsense is helpful to not be talking about the thing that might actually be a little bit closer to, to reality. Do you want to hear another conspiracy theory? Yeah. Okay. And I don't know if it really counts a conspiracy theory, but a friend of the podcast, Katie Natopoulos, she messaged me the other day while she was researching a story, which is now out on Business Insider. You can go check it out.

She argues, and this is interesting because I hadn't really put this together. So she writes, there's a history of silly panics in the headlines just before something big happens. Yeah. A series of shark attacks dubbed the summer of shark dominated the news in late summer 2001. There was the summer of clown sightings in 2016. Yes. Yes.

There, I mean, you could honestly say the rushing of Area 51 in 2019, there is this kind of thing that happens where we all get revved up. Yeah. And it's because like we're clearly like, we're clearly reacting to something in the air, but like we're putting our attention in the wrong direction. This goes back to my cyclical like moral panics versus kind of like QAnon and satanic panic are panics about like the moral fabric of America, right?

There are these kinds of like Christiane good and evil panics, whatever. And they happen in times of like internal social strife. Things like the windshield pitting panic or I would argue the drone panic right now. they're more outward looking. They're like, we think something's happening in the geopolitics of the world that's making us very nervous. And we don't know how to talk about it or define it. But I think like a sense that we are actively in some kind of Cold War with China,

like I think this is providing a lot of fuel. Yeah, we're in a mode. We're in a mode right now. It's a mode. Yes. It's a mode. Our fears are being expressed via these panics. And that explains why these things can go from innocent enough and kind of

funny to dark and just never ending. And since we always like to end this show on a really dower note where me and my guest talk in circles about how nothing can ever get fixed or feel better, we're going to do just that, but about Area 51 right after the break. Remember, the truth is out there. I want to end today's episode back at the Area 51 raid because I do think it is this perfect encapsulation of the entire Air 51 conspiracy theory played out in a matter of weeks. Something silly and quirky that is, you know, everyone's kind of in on the joke a little bit.

Everyone's kind of letting people run with it, whether it's government officials who don't want you to snoop around or it's the press who are having some fun with a sensationalist story. And then, you know, by the time we get to the end of 2019 in our story, things have spun out of control. which is, I think, once again, a perfect metaphor for how we've dealt with Area 51 and the many sort of breakoff conspiracies that come from it ever since it was first set up in the early 30s and 40s. So, okay, we're back in 2019. Yeah. A reporter from The Guardian went to one of the events in Rachel Nevada.

Only a few thousand people showed up, but amongst the attendees, the reporter had this exchange. Okay, so this is from the Guardian piece. under their frog heads, the Pepe's were two young Latino guys from California. When I asked them what they thought of the frogs association with the alt-right, one seemed confused. The other nodded in recognition but claimed he thought the symbol was fun. He said, it's all about the memes, finished the other. They both laughed. I mean, they're a little like extreme for me sometimes, one said, but sometimes you feel like they're right about some stuff.

I said, like what? Like clown world. What? Clown world. What? Like the idea that we're living in a world of clowns, he clarified. Now, clown world does not refer to the clown motel that you mentioned at the top of the episode, but I'm really happy that you did that because it is a great thematic link across the episode.

Are you familiar with the alt-right concept of clown world? No, I don't know what clown world is, which feels like a big error for me, considering how much I like the clown motel. It doesn't have a lot to do with actual clowns. It's a, it kind of like went out of fashion around the pandemic. But it was like, if you ever see like a Pepe the Frog wearing like a rainbow afro with like a red nose, that's like the symbol for clown world. And it refers to the idea that once you take the black pill, this idea that society cannot be fixed by anything other than accelerationist violence, that you realize that liberal. and minorities and gay people and women and Jewish people control the world, quote, unquote.

And that's clown world. And so the reason why everything is bad all the time is because it's clown world. Rational Wiki describes it as like a form of absurdist nihilism. By 2019, conspiracy theories and memes and extremism had all kind of mixed together in this like soup. of culture that like no average person could really keep track of anymore. Yeah. The Area 51 Swarm is the first time I feel like we can see this. We can see that no one really knows anything anymore,

that culture has been flattened in the sense that no one is in charge, no one is determining how important one thing is than the other. Yeah. It's all just the same digital meaning soup. The world feels really distinctly like that. And the ability of, like we were talking about sort of when, things tip out of like internet world into real world feels like more unpredictable than ever. Like I just don't know where the confinement lines exist. Like they just don't, yes, it does feel like

the first harbinger of that world. Yeah. And it's, you know, in the second section today, when you talked about how the people in charge don't mind the noise because it gives them cover to do what they want. But if no one in charge is telling people what's going on, this is what happens. Yeah. To basically have like a half century of government conspiracies kind of egged on by pop culture. And then once you go on, once you like turn on the internet, the whole thing just bottoms out. And now it's like the difference between Bob Lazar and an X-Files episode and an internet meme, there really isn't one. And we found some really early evidence of, like, the way things are moving here, speaking of 2001. So our researcher Adam found a message board thread from the X-Files forum on Google groups on 9-11.

And I want to read you some of it, all right? Okay. So one user writes, personally, I think it's just really tacky and misguided to blame Chris Carter or the lone gunman for what happened today. For one thing, it was just a show. And then another user writes, as long as fools like you think we do, we will have a liberal media far out of control and easy access by terrorists to our country.

Hollywood loves to make money off terrorism but does absolutely nothing to stop it. In fact, Hollywood scum support terrorism by donating thousands, if not millions, to Middle Eastern quote-unquote activists. Another user writes, for another thing, the World Trade Center is,

parentheses, as evidence, by the big bombing eight years ago, an excellent terrorist target. Whether the terrorists watch the lone gunman or not, the World Trade Center would still have been a likely natural target to which another user wrote, spoken like an armchair national security specialist. So this is essentially just X-Files viewers.

Are you familiar with the lone gunman? I am very familiar with the lone gunman. They're almost like, it's interesting. I mean, they became like that's what we all became, except they were kind of nice and innocent and like sort of sweet and it got much darker like the lone gum like yeah spoilers for a 30 year old tv show they do die in the end of the exos which i was always upset about kind of like off camera too but um the the the reason why these users are arguing about this on nine eleven is because there's an infamous episode of the lone gum and where it essentially

does the plot of nine eleven as the show but it happened years before months before possibly i think it was 2001 but what i think this is like a fantastic example of is that that like the defining mode of the 21st century is reckoning with the conspiratorial atmosphere of the 20th. And things have become so muddled that there is no real difference between a true government conspiracy, a pop culture artifact, or some random whack job on the internet's like fan fiction of reality. And that's what I think, Area 51, you said it was a very retro idea. But I think the modern idea of Area 51 is like the moment when that starts. Well, and for me, there is a real history of Area 51. And the real history is like boring aviation stuff and atomic tests and radar testing.

And, you know, I, like I said, I went, I went really deep on this rabbit hole. So I talked to this guy, Jorg, the webmaster of Dreamlandresort.com, which is like... I would love to be an Area 51 webmaster. He's like, and he's been doing this. for 25 years, he takes it really seriously. He doesn't talk about aliens or UFOs at all. He's like ultra nerd, very serious. Sure.

Two years ago, he was raided by the FBI. And the... He was given warrants, but never charged with anything. But they took all of his equipment. He doesn't know why they rated him. And he's like a sweet... He's like... He's never been on Area 51.

He's like, I will never trespass. I will never fly a drone over it. That's great. He's actually really patriotic. He's like, I think, you know, there's, like, important work that happens there that, like, keeps the country safe. I'm just interested. Like, I'm, it's interesting the things they develop there. But, like, his life actually played out like an X-Files episode.

He's, like, a weird lone researcher, him and his buddies. He is the lone gunman. And then he actually gets raided by the real-life FBI. This is not, like, some crank thing. This is, this happened. And so, like, there is realness in the sense that there's stuff that the government wants to keep secret. And there's stuff that they're up to that we don't know about.

That is true. It just has nothing to do, really, with the crazy cultural mythologies that most of us spend our time reading about and seeing on TikTok and all of this. It's just there is this sense that there is kind of these two parallel existences. And one is this kind of media ecosphere that is so incredibly noisy. It's hard to kind of get to truth. and then whatever else is happening, that's kind of, you know. So I don't want to dismiss everything.

Area 51's not a joke. It's not going anywhere. There's so much infrastructure there. It will continue to, they just set up two FM radio stations that play like smooth jazz and light rock. That's great. Maybe people are listening to Area 51. Yeah, yeah. But they just, no vocals, only music.

And actually what they're there for is to test something called passive radar. You can use normal radio stations to spot airplanes by using the bounce off the airplanes from like, so they set up radio stations. So this is what Area 51 is doing. It's stuff like that that's not so sexy. It's not flying saucers. Right. But we live in a different world.

We live in the, we live in Maddie's world, man. We live in the like Naruto run Area 51 world. Or at least that's the media landscape we all live in now. Yeah. My advice for anyone who starts to find themselves kind of spinning out over some kind of government conspiracy, like just take a minute, close the laptop, and just like walk into your local DMV and just be like, hmm, do you think the government could possibly do what you think they're doing? Like, do you think that they're run well enough to possibly be able to do what you think they're doing? Because chances are they're probably doing something incremental, kind of boring, with a lot of paperwork. Yeah.

And a lot of people who don't like each other, but they can't get fired because it's a government job. Yeah. And they're just sort of out in the desert fucking around with radars and paint and all kinds of other things. And they are doing conspiratorial work, but it's not what you think it is. It's probably a lot more like, are they testing secret flying stuff? Like, yeah, they for sure are. Are there any aliens involved? For sure not.

Well, that actually takes me to my last question for the episode. Yeah. It's very important. do you think aliens are real? Do you believe in aliens? Yes. Me too. Yeah.

But I don't... I like that we didn't... I'm glad that we didn't admit that to each other until the end of the episode. I do. I don't know that I think they've ever come to Earth, though. I think that that's like... Like, they're out there. University of a big place.

Go on YouTube. Yeah. Search Carl Sagan Flatland. If you want to see my take on alien activity, I think that's a pretty good depiction. Okay. But I want to think you've come on the show. This was delightful. This is the furthest back in the timeline we've gone on Panic World.

So that's actually pretty exciting. That's cool. Yeah. It feels like there's a lot here. Like the X-Files, the lone gunmen, there's some kind of blueprint that we're still following. Yeah, no, this is great. I love living in a nightmare. In an absolute information nightmare.

It's great. If people want to follow you, where can they do that, Dylan? Oh, Atlas Obscira. We have a great podcast, the Atlas Obscira podcast. And we talk about, there'll be an episode about Area 51 coming out on there. We'll dig into some of the historical details. And we put out an episode like five days a week. So just come and check one out.

This was fantastic. This was so good. It was really fun. It was really cool. Want to plug our Patreon discount code one more time. Go to patreon.com slash Panic World. You can type in Panic in all caps to checkout. Get our delicious, wonderful content for 50 cents for the first month.

Incredible. Wow. I wish food still costs that much. You know what I mean? It's too expensive now. For the price of one egg, you can listen to this conversation. Go on with Dylan, where we... For the price of a quarter of one egg, you can listen to wonderful bonus content from Panic World. And this week, you can listen to even more of Dylan talking about spooky, scary, conspiracy stuff behind our paywall in an extra large version. of this episode. There's also a conversation I had with a UFO expert that is solely going to be on our Patreon. Is it Tom DeLong? No, but I talked to Tom DeLong with this guy many years ago. Oh, cool. I'd like to ask Tom DeLong why he's not better at playing guitar, seeing as how he's been doing it for 30 years. So I also have questions about Tom DeLong's understanding of audio

equipment, because when we interviewed him for a podcast, a professional musician called us from the line at Starbucks on his cell phone's Bluetooth. I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they recorded the new Blink 182 album, because the sound quality is not good on that one. I hope they're not trying to use that album to communicate with aliens across the vast gulf of space, because I'm not sure they'd be able to hear it with that kind of overly compressed drum sound that Travis Barker seems to be so happy with. Anyways, go to patreon.com slash Panic World and type Panic in all uppercase at checkout

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