Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Area 51 Works

Episode Date: September 27, 2025

The secret military base Area 51 is inextricably linked to every secret, shady project the US government is rumored to be involved in – from reverse-engineering alien technology to coordinating a one-world government. The truth is much more mundane. Listen to this classic episode as Josh and Chuck break it down.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Kitchen. Listen to the new season of the Overcombered podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, everybody. Chuck here. Take me to your leader. Other things ETs might say. Happy Saturday. This episode is called how Area 51 works. It's from June 13th, 2019. And, you know, we get into it. We chop it up, as they say. All about Area 51. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and there's Dylan, the guest producer again. And this is, Stuff You Should Know. The podcast.

About Chuck, some pretty heady stuff. Yeah, I could have sworn we did this one. No. What did we do, Roswell? No. UFOs? Yes. We did that at a Comic-Con or something, right?

Yeah, we did it live. I've never been satisfied with that one. I agree. Maybe we'll redo it one day. Nah, this is good. This area 51. I think this kind of covers some ground that I didn't think, I was surprised by this is what I'm saying.

Yeah, me too. And I think the thing that I would wager you were surprised about, which I was definitely surprised about, was just how mundane the explanations for what goes on at Area 51 probably is. Yeah, secret government research. The end. Right. But it probably doesn't have anything to do with reverse engineering alien technology

and the secret seat of the one world government, the Majestic 12, probably isn't low. there. No, probably just bombs and planes. Probably. It makes sense. And if there is a conspiracy going on, the one conspiracy theory I saw for Area 51 that made the most sense to me is that it's actually meant to be a distraction or has developed into a distraction for some other place that no one even knows about. Area 50. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. Hopefully they're not quite that on the knows, but it's possible. All right, so let's go back in time, I guess, to World War II.

And, well, first of all, Area 51, just to geographically level set. It's less than 100 miles from Las Vegas in Nevada. South, South Nevada. Yeah, it's 600 square miles. And it's basically, if you look at it on Google Earth, it looks like a, you know, a big airfield with a bunch of buildings. So I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of like the test range and the air base and all of that stuff that area 51 is located in. I think that's 600 square miles.

I'm pretty sure area 51 itself is no more than 60 square miles. Oh, yeah, sure. Just like the, it's not like there's 600 square miles of buildings. Right. It's just, yeah. The installation that people think of as area 51 is part of a larger huge big chunk. of the American desert in Nevada. Right.

So next to Area 51 is what you were kind of talking about, the Nevada test site. And this is where for about 10 or 11 years, the Atomic Energy Commission was setting off nuclear bombs, underground, above ground, and really sort of figuring out how to kill a lot of people very easily. in sort of the most dangerous way you could imagine.

Yeah, and you could see this from Vegas. Like they would have parties when they were doing the test because Vegas is like 80 miles away or something like that. And they would have like atomic cocktails and viewing parties and stuff like that. And people would watch them shoot off bombs. Unbelievable. Right. But this is obviously a part of the country

that the government would be very interested in keeping people away from. Not just for the bombs, but because of the... the fallout, the radiation, but also the fact that they're testing like super sensitive military equipment and weapons, right? Like atomic bombs. Yeah, like previous to this, it was just land.

It was, there were silver mines, there was cattle and wildlife, but then in 1940, the government said, no, this is ours, and we're going to train bombers here. Right. And there was a big bombing range, and they were split into different numbers, and that's where the number area 51 comes from. which seems, I don't know about arbitrary, but no one knows if it really matters

why it was named Area 51. No, I think it was, if you look at old bombing range maps, the area where Area 51 is located was denoted as Area 51. Between 50 and 52 is probably the answer. Yeah, that's basically, from what I saw, that was it. Yeah, so there's another part to this story with World War II, and this is Germany.

They were a bit ahead of us as far as jets go. jet airplanes. Yeah. The United States was like, this won't do it all. So we're going to get kind of put the gas

on our jet development. And in 1943, Lockheed said, was tasked with developing a jet fighter plane. You can use a British jet engine and they tasked engineer

Kelly Johnson said, get a team together. He got a team together and they delivered the P80 shooting star, which is one of the coolest-looking old jets all these planes are just amazing looking.

Agreed. Very, very cool. It's a good idea. When we talk about a new jet or something, go look it up as we're talking about because most of them are pretty boss-looking. Yeah, I've never been a plane guy, but I'm getting more and more into it.

Is that right? Yeah. I want to do a stealth bomber episode one day, okay? Possibly the coolest plane. Yeah. So Kelly Johnson was a, just that right there, delivering America's first jet on, like,

under time and under budget, was huge and he became a legendary engineer right off the bat and they i think lockheed said hey how would you like to keep this pace up we'll give you your team of elite engineers whatever funding you need whatever resources you need just ask you can have it um and you just keep developing stuff really quickly for us um and we will put you at the cutting edge of aviation research and so kelly Johnson and his team eventually became known as the skunk works, which is legendary in aviation engineering because they developed a whole bunch of really cool stuff. But also they had a pretty great name, too. That was fairly intriguing. But they were the first ones to kind of basically

develop agile project management from what I understand. Yeah, and this was all out of the, what was known as Site 1, which was in Burbank, California, just sort of a suburb of L.A. But then in 1954, they said, you know what we need now is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spy plane. We want something that can fly above radar and photograph Soviet military bases, missile installations. We're going to name it because we name everything. Project Aquitone. And that's where Johnson and his team developed the U-2, the Skunk Works team.

Right. But they couldn't do this at Site 1 anymore because it, had to be super, super secret, obviously, because it was a spy plane, so they needed a different place, and that's where that sort of all converges onto this testing site in Nevada. Yeah, Kelly Johnson, CIA officer named Richard Bissell, and a couple of pilots started scouting locations for where they could develop this in super, super secret. And they went to look at the old Nevada test range, and specifically the thing that it attracted them was a dry salt lake called groom lake and one of the pilots were counted taking

some like 16 pound shot put balls and dropping them on the ground to see just how sandy the ground was and it he said it was solid as a tabletop this lake was the dry lake yeah they're like this will probably do and there's a lot of reasons why it would do not just because there was a dry lake bed that was as hard as concrete but because it was in an area that was already limits to the public. The airspace was already restricted. It was remote. There were two mountain ranges that shield the test site from view.

So this area, what became known as Area 51, was just perfect for developing a super secret spy plane in super secret. And so the CIA and the Skunk Works team said, this will do. Let's take this place over. Did I ever tell you about one of the most fun things ever got to do as a PA? What? Wait, weren't you arrested by Eric Estrada? Is that what you're going to say? Oh, no.

That's top ten. Okay. We did a car shoot on a dry lake bed in Death Valley. Nice. And they had like a big huge line of cars in a row all driving in perfect synchronicity. And the director wasn't happy and they were like, we want all the dust is behind them. He went, I want dust in front of them. So the AD ran and grabbed the keys to a Mustang, threw them to me.

and he said, get in that Mustang and drive 100 feet in front of them as fast as you can, fish tailing and doing donuts and stuff. Awesome. And I was like, me? Yeah. Oh, man, it was so much fun because this is a dry lake pet. It's like there's just no fear of hitting anything or flipping. Like, you could just do whatever you wanted.

It was wonderful. That's cool. It was so much fun. You didn't hit a jackrabbit or anything, did you? Just a couple. No, it was fine. It was a lot of fun. So what was the last thing you said?

The last thing, yeah, the last thing I was talking about how amazingly perfect Area 51 is for developing a super secret spy plane. Yeah, so they called it Paradise Ranch. And the locals around there, they were used to because of all the atomic bomb testing. It kind of worked out because they weren't going to, first of all, it was in the middle of nowhere. But even the nearby communities, the ones that were close enough, it just wasn't on anyone's radar because they had always been doing weird things out there. So it's not like it pricked up anyone's ears. So it was kind of the perfect cover to be there at Paradise Ranch doing these development of these spy planes and stuff.

Right, right. But in addition to that, the cover story initially that the CIA produced was that they were a team of bomb experts who were cleaning up unexploded munitions from the time when it was used as a bombing range. So that was the story they used for why there was a sudden appearance of like trucks and people when there hadn't been

really much of anything there before. Yeah, there were also natural barriers. There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of shielded it from view. It was already remote. The airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and signed executive order 10633 in 1955,

which basically extended the airspace over Area 51. And then in 1958, a public land order, made this, basically said this area doesn't exist anymore. Right. It's not on maps. It's not acknowledged. And this is one of the huge reasons why site to the ranch, Area 51, has been so

and we'll see later, things have changed a little bit in recent years, but just for the government to say, like, I don't know what you're talking about over and over again. It's sort of crazy making. It is, but like they would as we'll see later, they would say in open court the place where this person claims to work does not exist.

Like in court. And the judge would just be like, what are you, how are we going to get around this? This is a real problem. But from what I read, Chuck, originally, Area 51 was CIA installation. Yeah.

And around 1970, it transferred hands to the Air Force. but from what I could tell up until that point or at least the first several years in the mid to late 50s and early 60s, no one had any idea that Area 51 existed. They did a really good job of keeping that place a genuine secret, not an open secret like it became later on, but a real secret. And one of the ways that they did that was from what workers later said in testimony in court cases is that they would be, interrogated at gunpoint to see if they were actually spies. There were all

sorts of weird loyalty tests and things like that. And while they were working on the U2 spy plane in particular, they kept that secret so serious that if you were out there working and you had nothing to do with the U2 program, you were

just a worker or you were working on a different program, they would move you indoors, close the doors, close the blinds on the windows before rolling the U2 out or testing it. Like you were not allowed to be outside or look. Yeah, that was pretty, like, remarkable. Like, within Area 51, they even had sub-security protocols in place.

I kind of just figured, like, if you were in there, then you had access to the alien room, you know, all the good stuff. Right, but think about that, because to even be on the base or in Area 51, you had to have the highest level of security clearance. you could possibly have, just to work on there. And even if you had that, you still couldn't see the U2 spy plane or know that it existed or hear people talk about it. They wouldn't even let Bono in on it.

Nope. So that was a terrible joke. It was really bad. I was really hoping we can get around that one. So the U2 spy plane was great until it wasn't. And that was when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, and the plane was all of a sudden in the hand of the Soviets. And they basically were like, well, that's the end of that.

You can't have a secret spy plane anymore once it's in the hand of the Soviets. And it was also a big deal because the American people all of a sudden knew that the U.S. government is definitely doing things in total secret and developing technology that no one knows about. It was a surprise to everybody,

not just the Soviets, but also the American public, like you were saying too. And I look to see if this was looked upon by historians as like the point where Americans realized that the government did things in secret that the American public didn't know about. And I didn't see anything like this. I don't know if this is an Ed comment or what,

but it makes sense. And certainly people didn't know that the U2 spy plane existed. The CIA did a really good job of keeping it secret. But when it was out, it was pretty humiliating for the U.S. And it was also a big deal that this spy plane was shot down because Eisenhower had approached Khrushchev and said, hey, why don't we maintain an open airspace policy to one another so we can keep tabs to make sure that either side is keeping our word

with our, you know, armament treaties and the stuff we're doing. Like we're enemies, but maybe we should kind of be able to keep tabs on one another. And Khrushchev said, no, there's not going to be any open airspace policy. And so the United States went and developed this U-2 spy plane instead. And when it got shot down, flying over restricted airspace of an enemy, that's an act of war. And it could have gone way differently than it did. But instead, it was a big humiliation for the United States. And instead of just kind of tucking tail and running, the guy who was in charge of it for the CIA, Richard Bissell,

went to the government and said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's get even more secret and develop an even more secretive, under an even more secretive project. And that, the government said, hey, let's do it. We're scared of the Russians. We'll double down. We'll triple down if you want, buddy. And that became Project Ox Cart.

That's right. And that was a black project. And it was so secret and so concealed that no one was even allowed to know how much money was being spent. Yeah, this is a big turning point here. It was. I mean, this kind of started the era that we still live in today, in which the military just dumps money into secret projects where there's that don't exist as far as anyone knows

and that there's very little oversight for. Right, exactly. It's really interesting. Yeah, and apparently it was this Richard Bissell's idea. All right, well, let's take a break. Old Dick Bissell. We'll get back to Dick Bissell and the rest of Oxcart right after this. Learning things when chalk, yeah,

Josh, stuff you should know. I started trying to get pregnant about four years ago now. We're getting a little bit older, and it just kind of felt like the window could be closing. Bloomberg and IHeart Podcasts present. IVF Disrupted, the Kind Body Story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. Introducing Kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care.

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Emma Watson. Emma Watson has apparently quit acting. Emma Watson has announced she's retiring from acting. Has anyone else noticed that we haven't seen Emma Watson in anything in several years? Emma Watson is opening up the truth behind her five-year break from acting. Watson said she wasn't very happy. Was acting always something you were going to do? I was using acting as a way of escaping to feel free. My parents, it wasn't just the divorce, it was just like the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values. The career and the life that looks like the dream.

But are you really happy? Fame has given me this extraordinary power. It's also given me a lot of responsibility. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. When news broke earlier this year that Baby KJ, a newborn in Philadelphia, had successfully received the world's first personalized gene editing treatment. It represented a milestone for both researchers and patients. But there's a gripping tale of discovery behind this accomplishment and its creators. I'm Evan Ratliff, and together with biographer Walter Isaacson,

We're delving into the story of Nobel Prize winner, Jennifer Doudna, the woman who's helped change the trajectory of humanity. Listen to Aunt CRISPR, the story of Jennifer Doudna with Walter Isaacson on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So one of the problems with, I guess it's not a problem if you're comfortable with dumping money into a project. But one of the, I guess, expenses of a super, super secret project is that it just cost a lot more. Background checks take time and cost money. Putting something in a super remote location costs money, having extra security forces, and it all just cost a lot more money. I mean, it's a serious multiplier on cost to do something that, quote, unquote, doesn't exist.

Right. But in addition to that, Chuck, too, is just the fact that the technology, that was being developed was so cutting edge, it just by definition required even more money on top of the extra money for it being so super secret. Yeah, so Oxcart eventually led to the SR-71 Blackbird, another amazingly cool plane. Probably the coolest of all time, if you ask me.

Yeah, I said the stealth bomber earlier, but the SR-71 was pretty awesome. Although there is another one later on that I'll mention, well, I'll go ahead and say the bird of prey stealth jet. like that one, huh? That's pretty cool. It looks a little bit like a super cool tongue depressor. You know what I'm talking about?

I know what a tongue depressor is. This looks like that, like a flying gray tongue depressor. That's like a popsicle stick, though, right? Yeah, but wider. Okay. But the SR 71 Blackbird, definitely not a popsicle stick. No, no, it's just cool. Plus, it doesn't hurt the fact that G.I. Joe, well, Cobra, technically, had the SR71

on Blackbird is one of their planes. That's funny. So Oxgart, they needed better infrastructure, basically, and they couldn't just pour money into the development of the jet at this point. They had to really update all the facilities expanding on land, expanding more restricted airspace, even that happened in 1962,

and it just sort of, I think, ingrained the super permanence of Area 51. And also, like, the fact that, like, the government said, no, okay, this was a humiliating thing to have our U-2 shot down. Rather than maybe we'll just kind of take another tack, they really went further down the path of just completely secret black projects. And they developed some pretty amazing stuff there. The, I think you were saying, the bird of prey. That was from the 90s, right? Yeah, I think it's cool looking.

The F-117 Nighthawk, that's the one that's like a single. wing stealth bomber, I believe. Yes. And this is also where they take, like if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that to Area 51 to check out as well. Yeah, there's another program at Wright-Patterson base in Dayton that's like set up specifically for that,

but I wonder if this is like even more highly sensitive. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, they've captured Migs before, captured radar systems, and they reverse engineered them there, which will come in a play later on. And then there was another one called the Tasset Blue stealth bomber.

So basically any stealth aircraft, whether it was the stealth blackhawks or the stealth bombers that were developed from the 60s onward, it was probably developed and tested in super secrecy in Area 51. Right. So like I said, this made it just sort of, a shop that they wouldn't close, essentially, at this point. In 1993, there's an area known as Freedom Ridge,

a very ironic name because Freedom Ridge was taken by the government and closed off to the public. And this is where tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars to try and check out things. And they said, no more! Freedom Ridge is now ours. It's called Get Out of Here, Ridge. Yeah.

Shot on site, Ridge. right so um if you are like get to the aliens what are you guys even talking about the aliens in area 51 as synonymous as they are now and they are synonymous the highway that area 51 is off of that the road to area 51 is off of has been officially renamed by the state of nevada as the extraterrestrial highway it's highway 305 yeah as synonymous as this base is with aliens and UFOs. That's actually relatively recent. It was operating for a good 25, 35 years, I think, before aliens became tied to Area 51. And there's actually a moment in time that you can point to where it happened. And it happened on a broadcast in May of 1989, almost just past 30 years

ago on KLAS, the local Las Vegas TV network. I'm not sure what network affiliate they are, but they had like their 5 o'clock news and on it they interviewed a guy who was anonymous, went by the pseudonym Dennis, and he basically said, hey, I'm doing a lot of weird stuff out there at Area 51. Let me tell you all about it. Yeah, his name, his real name was Bob Lazar and he, have you seen interviews with this guy? Yeah.

Did you see the more recent one? no but the one where he said i think it was a good idea that one no i'm talking about there was one just from a few years ago no um it's i got to say i mean i'm not a conspiracy guy at all right but when you listen to bob lazar talk today he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or a weirdo or like he would be lying he hasn't like made money off of this or like he's he's basically like Listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't attached to my name because I'm trying to run a business in Michigan and it doesn't help that people think I'm some UFO kook.

Bob Lazar is alien apples. Oh, good. And he said, but he was like, you know, everything that I told you was true, though, and that's just the deal, you know, and I don't care if anyone believes me. He's kind of like that, though, too, in the early interviews At the very least, he's very calm and not at all kooky or anything like that.

It's specifically the stuff he was talking about that was so compelling. Yeah, so his story is, and you can go watch this stuff for yourself and see it all, but he basically explains how he's an engineer and he was working on reverse engineering, flying saucers, essentially, alien spacecraft and alien technology. And at one point, he was in a room, and they left him alone with all these files that describe alien technology and alien autopsies and all of this stuff.

And it's pretty remarkable to listen to. It didn't make the hugest waves because it was 1989, it was a local news station. At first, it didn't. Yeah, and then it was picked up by Japan, oddly enough. And after it went to Japan, it went kind of worldwide. and before you know it the whole area

just sort of became alien central and this is we should point out this also has a lot to do with the fact that in the 70s and 80s the United States kind of went UFO nuts oh yeah man there were so many great books at the time that were coming out that claimed everything from like

UFOs were responsible for the Bermuda Triangle or Atlantis was populated by UFOs or the NASCAR lines were for UFOs or the Egyptians built the pyramids with the UFOs, all that stuff came out of the 70s and 80s. Yeah. So this all kind of coincided with Lazar having

his news interview, and it really just kind of changed everything. It did, right? So he kind of like came out at a time when America was primed to really believe it. But if you think about it, like everything you hear about and think about from Area 51 today did not exist pre-1989,

pre-Bob Lazar. It all started with Bob Lazar. And the reason why everybody wasn't just like, so he's just some nut who came out and said this stuff, who cares? How did that become truly cemented with Area 51? Is that weirdly, some of the stuff he talked about kind of held water. Like, he would talk about just mundane day-to-day stuff that went on in Area 51 that seemed to be able to be correlated from locals. Yeah. Like, it held up. There was a scanner once.

He said that you would get in and out of rooms by scanning your hands and it would scan the bone structure of your hand. That was how you were identified and could come in and out of rooms. And supposedly somebody found, like 30 years later, mention of something like that and some declassified report about Area 51.

He also, and this is what really kind of legitimized him, He would take people out on Wednesday nights, and at the time he would say, I never saw what time it was, but at the time he said it would happen, lights would rise up in the sky and they would do all sorts of UFO-e kind of stuff. And the fact that he knew about these schedules

really kind of added legitimacy to his claims. Yeah, and the new interview that I saw, he was explaining some of the anti-gravitational propulsion technology that the aliens had supposedly used, that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer. Right. And he was sort of walking the person through it that was in the room. And he was like, oh, yeah.

And he said, we had this thing. It was sort of like half a basketball. And when you went to put your hand on it, he was like there was this, he was like bringing two magnets, you know, opposite poles to, there's opposite poles that repel? Mm-hmm. And he said, that's kind of what it felt like. And he said, so we would drop like a golf ball and it would just, you know,

skirt off to the side without hitting it. and like as if it had bounced and the way he was describing it i was just like this guy just seemed so credible right it was so like shocking i didn't know what to expect i thought he was i thought he was not going to be credible i guess right um i didn't see the the interview with him but um i read about that technology and um and by the way everybody you can erase your email it's like poles that repel each other, Chuck, not opposite. Okay, all right. The anti-gravity technology was talking about

I was basically saying like around the craft or whatever that they were reverse engineering, it would bend gravity so this could just move right through space basically at light speed. Yeah. That's the big suspicion among UFOologists who follow this stuff is that they were reverse engineering light-speed aircraft that was propelled using anti-gravity technology

on engines that were matter, anti-matter engines. And back in 1989, there wasn't an internet to start with, but even if there was, you couldn't find stuff like descriptions of anti-gravity craft at the time. So for this guy to just come out and start talking about this in an authoritative way, he's an enigmatic figure for sure. But he was also one whose credibility was questioned right out of the gate too, right? Yeah, I mean, he said that he went to MIT and to Caltech.

there are no records of him being a student the conspiracy theorist will say you know how easy it is for the government to wipe that clean do you yeah I'm like I don't know is that easy so that's what they will say

they will also say that they also got in touch with his professors to make sure they never talked and stuff like that but yeah that's when I get a little bit like you can't you can't have hundreds of people or thousands of people involved in some big massive cover-up like someone's going to talk yeah you're just not thinking big enough i i agree with you that's when it kind of starts to get hinky for me but he did disappear

and so i mean not disappear disappear disappear but he uh i mean it's not like he was like all right and now i'm going to go make all the money on this right exactly like he moved and tried to start like a regular business and try to just not be in the public eye. Yeah, he did, which I think adds to his credibility even more, you know? A little bit. Let's take our last break and then come back, shall we? Let's do it. But let's promise we're going to come back.

Okay. All right. Learning things with Chuck and Josh, stuff you should know. I started trying to get pregnant about four years ago now. We're getting a little bit older, and it just kind of felt like the window could be closing. Bloomberg and IHeart Podcasts present. IVF disrupted. The Kind Body Story. A podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care.

Introducing Kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care. Backed by millions in venture capital and private equity. it grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients. You think you're finally like with the right people in the right hands, and then to find out again

that you're just not. Don't be fooled. By what? All the bright and shiny. Listen to IVF disrupted, the Kind Body story, starting September 19, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jay Chetty, and I'm the host of the on-purpose podcast. Today, I'm joined by Emma Watson. Emma Watson. Emma Watson has apparently quit acting. Emma Watson has announced she's retiring from acting. Has anyone else noticed that we haven't seen Emma Watson in anything in several years? Emma Watson is opening up the truth behind her five-year break from acting. Watson said she wasn't very happy.

Was acting always something you were going to do? I was using acting as a way of escaping. to feel free. My parents, it wasn't just the divorce, it was just like the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values,

the career and the life that looks like the dream. But are you really happy? Fame has given me this extraordinary power. It's also given me a lot of responsibility. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. news broke earlier this year that baby KJ, a newborn in Philadelphia, had successfully received

the world's first personalized gene editing treatment. It represented a milestone for both researchers and patients. But there's a gripping tale of discovery behind this accomplishment and its creators. I'm Evan Ratliff, and together with biographer Walter Isaacson, we're delving into the story of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Dowdna, the woman who's helped change the trajectory of humanity. Listen to Aunt CRISPR, the story of Jennifer Dowdna with Walter Isaacson on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, Chuck, so Bob Lazar comes along, just starts spouting out at the mouth about all the crazy alien stuff that's going on in Area 51.

And then he kind of like fades into the background for a while. And everybody else kind of took it from there. If you have anything to do with government conspiracies or, believe in UFOs or aliens or whatever, all that stuff started to get saddled little by little onto Area 51. And one of the things that pretty early on got connected to Area 51,

but almost across the board, any reasonable source or skeptical source will say, like the two have nothing to do with one another, is Roswell and Area 51. Yeah, the Roswell crash in 1947, when something. crashed. A gentleman found pieces of an air, well, pieces of some kind of unidentified object. And it became UFO Central. Later, it was said to be a weather balloon.

But first the Army said it was a flying disc. Right. That kind of changed things. You've seen the pictures, right? Sure. I mean, it looks like, I've seen that one famous picture of the guy crouching with what looks like just some balloon material. Yeah. Right. But, you know, he was just a stooge for the government, and that was just a prop that they came up with.

So the Roswell crash happens in 1947. There's no way Area 51 would have been associated with it. The whole mythos around Roswell is that there was a UFO crash that happened. Some aliens survived, or at the very least, their bodies were recovered, depending on who you ask. And the UFO and the aliens, alive or dead, were taken for further study. to where area 51 right area 51 back in 1947 when the roswell crash happened um was not even on the CIA's radar it was a that basically a defunct airstrip and a nuclear testing range still so there wouldn't have been any place to take the aliens in the first place and then secondly after the roswell crash happened um the idea of the an alien um an alien crash having taken place there, that didn't come about until, like, the 80s, too.

So really, people started to kind of catch on to this a little late. So probably Area 51 and Roswell have nothing to do with one another. And let's not forget that they're, like, 800 miles apart too. Yeah. Even though to everyone in America, and really the rest of the world, outside of the southwest, thinks they're, like, right next to each other. I think so. You know?

Yeah, so there have been a lot of crazy theories over the years. the very most basic are like you just said like there's alien corpses there there's alien technology there and the U.S. military has been studying this stuff and trying to perfect everything

from time travel to light speed travel. Right. That's the basic ground zero approach. Don't forget interdimensional travel too. No, why not? Another one I saw, there's some pretty low-hanging fruit

that I love. The moon landing was fake there. Sure. And then after that, right? But then after that, Kubrick was executed on site and replaced by a clone. Well, that clone did some great work. He did. Better than Barry Lyndon, right? Oh, I love Barry Lyndon.

I've never seen it, so I can't really hate on it. Oh, it's amazing. Weather control experiments? That's probably the most believable for me. Sure. Cloudseating? Sure. Why not? Why not? And then there's, like, stage two of conspiracy theories yes that is uh there are aliens that clock in every day at area 51 and work side by side with us in harmony in harmony in harmony in order to build like an alien human

hybrid race maybe um and if all this sounds familiar i will bet that you watched a pretty hefty amount of x-5s oh yes because they really tapped into this stuff. They basically just appropriated it for plot lines. Which is great. I love the X-Files. But it was just, I guess Chris Carter used to hang out with

like euphologists or something just to get ideas. Did he really? He had two of. Yeah, or he has one himself. I don't know much about it. Maybe so. Maybe so. So, and then, of course, if you even ramp that up a little bit more, that this is all

a part of a giant conspiracy to create a one world government that is human, alien, run. Right. And that's where that majestic 12 I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They are supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists. There's 12 of them who were impaneled by Eisenhower after the Roswell crash. Or I guess it would have been Truman, I think, still. And they were put together just the cream of the crop to basically.

go contact the aliens and basically broker a meeting, I guess, between the president and the aliens and they manage to leverage this to catapult themselves into the status of actual people

who run the world. So they're the ones who are forming this one world government and that is where Area 51, or that's where it's located, the seat of this government is located underground in Area 51. Yeah, this next one is a little more recent and very

kooky and it's the notion that Hitler and Stalin got together and hatched a plan to undermine the United States in World War II by distracting us about the threat of an impending alien invasion and they would do this by building a fake spaceship filling it with mutant children

that Joseph Mingala created and fill the spaceship with those kids and then the craft crashed in a storm and that was the Roswell incident. Right, it was meant to land and then these mutant children come out. Speaking German. Right, supposedly the mutant children

who were the aliens that were found in the Roswell crash had huge heads and giant eyes. They were basically like the grays of alien legend. Right. and that Stalin and Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to the War of the World's broadcast. They wanted to incite that kind of panic by actually creating this fake alien invasion.

With all the drugs Hitler was on, after we know this now, who knows? I'm sure he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea, that's a great idea, man. What else you got? What else you got? What else can we do? Stalin's like mellow. He tried CBD? He's like, no, that's the one thing I haven't tried. You got any? Right.

But it'll mix well with everything else. So this is obviously not a thing either. Well, this is from a book by an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe. And she, this book came out in 2011. And she based this whole thing on an alleged Area 51 insider, who was her source, who said that he worked on a project. that had to do with this somehow some way but that this was where all of this alien stuff came from

it was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets the weird thing is is there is another guy out there who supposedly has a different source who tells the same story but this other source says that this is it was all fake that I saw the files myself

but I believe that it it was meant to be a test of loyalty or to see how I would react working at Area 51 to files like this and be like oh my God this is real this is real I can't believe this is actually real I guess to see how gullible you were

and therefore how trustworthy you were right which could explain Bob Lazar situation too because he was supposedly in a room full of files he probably shouldn't have seen either right so that he probably failed the test you got three different sources who supposedly worked at Area 51 technically

I should say, because we'll get email, Bob Lazar worked at S4, which is an even more secret installation that's attached to Area 51. Yeah. But you've got three people who allegedly worked in Area 51 who all tell a story

about basically being left in a room with files that contained information about aliens, whether it was a hoax or real or whatever. And maybe that is, because that kind of correlates with the idea that there were like gunpoint interrogations to verify your allegiance

to the government or the military or whatever. Maybe that is something they tried there. Yeah. It doesn't make the actual aliens real. It just makes the presence of the files real. That's true. Yeah. So Area 51 today, as it truly exists,

if you're driving down Highway 375, there's an unmarked dirt road between mile markers 29 and 30, or I guess 30 and 29. And you turn on that? road it's 12 miles on a dirt road and you'll get to a gate right and there'll be warning signs all along saying restricted area sort of like close encounters type stuff um there will there'll be cameras and sensors everywhere so don't think you're like getting away with anything no there's there's mics that listen to your conversation like you were you were under as close surveillance as you've ever been in

your life from what i understand yeah and there are guards of course and they will say i'm sorry turn around and drive back to the highway and if you persist a little bit then you will get arrested. If you're around the perimeter area kind of walking around with your binoculars, they will probably come and take your binoculars and tell you to leave or drive you back to the highway or maybe smash your face in and bury you in the desert.

Well, there's a sign that says use of deadly force is authorized. Oh, I'm sure. But from what I've seen, there's never been an incident where that actually happened, you're much more likely to get handed over to the local cops who will slap you with a several hundred dollar fine. Sure. If you give them any kind of guff and don't leave immediately when they tell you to.

So kind of the cool thing about Area 51, there are obviously, I mean, there are civilian workers that work there. It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing because you can look at satellite photographs and year by year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with more buildings. Right. If you work there, and I mean, they have to have everything from food services to custodial services to plumbing and electricians and stuff like that. And all of those people have the highest possible security clearance an American can have. Oh, sure. So they don't drive down that dirt road and just go to the gate and say, how you doing, Rick? And they go, come on in, Jane.

they go to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and they all get on a big basically air taxi it's a 737 passenger jet that fly they call them the Janet jets the send of the call sign Janet they're white the big thick red stripe you can look it up online and they that's how they get to work every day they fly everyone in on a 737

and you can see them on the tarmac they just get in with the regular planes it's just look for the giant 737s that are white with the red stripe and no logo no nothing they don't actually have a name like you said they fly under call sign Janet so people have tried to figure out forever what Janet means there's an idea that it's just another non-existent terminal stands for that or joint air network for employee transportation but if you go visit the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame they tell the story that there was a commander of

Area 51 named Richard A. Samson from 1969 to 71, and he chose his wife's name, Janet, to identify the commuter shuttles. That's sweet. And that's the most romantic, super secret government story of all. So we kind of teased earlier on that the government is no longer saying, like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, no, this satellite image that we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything but dirt. That's all changed. a little bit now because of a lawsuit. In the mid-1990s, there were a group of workers from Area 51 that sued the government because of the,

it's an environmental disaster there, or maybe this changing now, but it had been for many, many years because of the fact that it's a black project and so unregulated that they were just basically doing everything like dumping hazardous waste and burning it trenches and people were there just inhaling these fumes right and getting really sick and a guy named robert frost uh that worked there an employee um had a lot of really bad health problems doctor said you were suffering from some kind of a really bad chemical reaction and in order to treat it we need to know

what it is and the government said sorry we can't tell you that and he died he died and some other coworkers filed this lawsuit and one of them ended up dying too and they finally got to like a Nevada I think or a federal circuit court that said no you guys don't have a right to know what what you've been exposed to yeah they weren't looking for money they just wanted to know what was killing them and the reason that they had no legal right to know was and this is that that trial that I was referring to earlier where the government representatives were saying like we like the place that they're talking about doesn't exist sorry right so imagine like trying to just get past that barrier, right?

You're suing the government to find out what they were burning that made you sick. But the government's in court saying, like, the place that they're talking about doesn't even exist. That's, like, that's obstacle one. Yeah. But the whole reason that they were burning this stuff in the first place is because Area 51 operates under what's called the Mosaic Theory. And the Mosaic theory is that any little piece of information a spy gets his or hands on could be fit together with other information to provide a larger picture of what's being done at Area 51. And as a result, nothing can come out of Area 51.

Like the chemical that's killing the people. Right. Or computers that go in and are used. Once they get decommissioned, they get put in this pit in these trenches. And every two weeks, they go out there with jet fuel. And everything that's been put into the trenches over the last two weeks gets doused with jet fuel. and set on fire with road flares. Amazing. And whatever is in that smoke, the workers get exposed to because for some reason they built the trenches upwind

of this installation rather than downwind. And so people were exposed to this every two weeks for years and years and years. And things like, you know, anti-radar paint, the jet fuel that they were using as an accelerant, I'm sure wasn't helping. But just all sorts of exotic materials that was super, super classified.

This is what was killing these people Alien skin Or making them sick, exactly And the government said no This is just too classified These people can't know They're just going to have to go off And die untreated

Because we're not going to say publicly what they were exposed to And that's where it stood That case They did finally Finally in that case Say Okay, there's an area 51

I know The whole courtroom went out for beers that day afterward so there's a thing there and that's really all we can say sorry is there's a thing there but that was the very first sort of insight into the just that admission that there was something there was the first time that it ever happened right which is in the mid 1990s yeah and um you were saying like people would point to satellite images of the place and you can see that it's growing now like you can see it on like google maps yeah that is really new because it wasn't very long ago

where all the satellites in space were controlled by the government and the government could control what ended up in satellite images. So they blocked out anything, any image of Area 51, but as private firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible.

So just little by little, it's becoming to the point now where they're like, yes, they acknowledge something's there, no, you can't know what's going on there. It's basically the status quo now. Pretty much. So that's Area 51 And sorry we kind of took the government tack here

And didn't really go all in on the alien theories But I just don't think that's what it is No If you want to know more about Area 51 I guess just start reading about it There's some pretty interesting stuff out there And since I said that It's time for listener mail

This is about nicknames This is from Rob Bob Oh yeah, I love this one Hey guys, my name is Rob Bob, Rob and Bob combined into a singular form, like Jim Bob, but better. My mom has explained to me that it started when I was about six months old. It was a really chunky kid, like in the 99th percentile for weight. They felt like no other nickname like Robbie or Bobby Fit, so they started calling me Rob Bob. Many years later, I meet my wife, which is almost eight years ago now, and quickly found out that her favorite writers,

is Richard Wright. Since reading his novel, Native Son, has wanted to name her kid Richard to honor the impact he had on her life. She had visited

his grave in Paris and as every book he ever published. When she met me, I told her about my super nicknames that I'd wanted to call my kid

because, you see, my father is William, Bill for short, but now, since we came up with these weird names, I call my dad Will Bill to bug him.

This leads me to why I have always wanted to name my child Richard since high school. Then we would, in order have a Will Bill, a Rob Bob, and a Rick Dick, all in three generations of awesomeness. My wife does not approve and thinks we should look elsewhere for name ideas, with great admiration, Rob Bob, and Rachel. Thanks, Rob, Bob. Good luck with that, with your quest.

Yeah, I don't think Rick Dick is going to fly in your household. I don't think so either. Rachel may have the cooler head here. I think so. Well, if you want to get in touch of this like Rob Bob did, we would love that. You can go on to Stuff You Should Know.com. Check out our social links there, or you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of IHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Let's start with a quick puzzle. The answer is Ken Jennings' appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy-truthers believe in... I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. They gave you the answers and you still blew it.

The Puzzler. Listen on the I-Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or... wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Janica Lopez, and in the new season of the Over Comfort Podcast, I'm even more honest, more vulnerable, and more real than ever. Am I ready to enter this new part of my life? Like, am I ready to be in a relationship? Am I ready to have kids and to really just devote myself and my time? Join me for conversations about healing and growth,

all from one of my favorite spaces, The Kitchen. Listen to the new season of the Overcombered podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. When your car is making a strange noise, no matter what it is, you can't just pretend it's not happening. That's an interesting sound. It's like your mental health. If you're struggling and feeling overwhelmed,

it's important to do something about it. It can be as simple as talking to someone, or just taking a deep, calming breath to ground yourself. Because once you start to address the problem, you can go so much further. The Huntsman Mental Health Institute and the Ad Council have resources available for you at loveyourmind today.org. This is an IHeart podcast.