Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from stuff Com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, everyone, welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: and joining me once again is Mr Ben Bolan of
Speaker 1: Stuff they Don't Want You to Know, as well as
Speaker 1: a myriad of other projects. Here at how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: then welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited
Speaker 1: to reach the last installment of this trilogy, but I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit sad too. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's
Speaker 1: always that moment of elation because you have the the
Speaker 1: the conclusion, right. But it's okay. I'm here to tell
Speaker 1: you right now that just like Return of the King
Speaker 1: and Laura the Rings, there are going to be nine
Speaker 1: separate endings to this podcast. So so the farewells will
Speaker 1: not be you know, sudden, It'll be nice and drawn
Speaker 1: out over a painful length of time. We are, in
Speaker 1: fact going to be concluding our trilogy. You have episodes
Speaker 1: about Area fifty one in parts one and two if
Speaker 1: you haven't listened to them already. We really went over
Speaker 1: the history of the facility and what actually goes on
Speaker 1: there and covered everything from the reason why it was
Speaker 1: built in the first place, to the various spy planes
Speaker 1: and different technologies that were tested at that facility. This episode,
Speaker 1: we're looking at the crazy yes, sir, we are looking
Speaker 1: at all of the rumors, conspiracy theories and uh, let's
Speaker 1: just say unsupported anecdotes to be diplomatic. That's very diplomatic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So so quick rundown, Just so that we're all on
Speaker 1: the same page. Area fifty one, also known as Groom Lake,
Speaker 1: is a facility. It's out in Nevada. It's near the
Speaker 1: what Well. It's near the Nevada Test site where a
Speaker 1: lot of nuclear tests were held, in fact, some during
Speaker 1: the lifetime of Very fifty one. Uh. It is uh
Speaker 1: run by the CIA and the Air Force. Lockheed is
Speaker 1: essentially the main contractor that does work there. It's not
Speaker 1: the only one. We've seen some other aircraft from different
Speaker 1: companies tested at that facility as well. And the whole
Speaker 1: purpose of it is to be remote from everywhere else
Speaker 1: so that secret tests of top secret spy technology can
Speaker 1: happen without anyone learning about it. Because, as we've said,
Speaker 1: if you want to be an effective spy, part of
Speaker 1: that means people can't be aware of the tools that
Speaker 1: you have at your disposal, right. Yeah, And which, as
Speaker 1: we say, that's why it is in a goldilock zone
Speaker 1: for its for its purpose, right. Yeah. One of my
Speaker 1: favorite points that you made in the previous episode I
Speaker 1: believe was the first installment, was that this was just
Speaker 1: far enough away to be so inconvenient to get to
Speaker 1: that people people wouldn't try. Yeah, it was. It's a
Speaker 1: remote desert location on a dry lake bed, and so
Speaker 1: it was close enough where you could get supplies from
Speaker 1: places like Las Vegas, which is less than a hundred
Speaker 1: miles away, but far enough away where you know your
Speaker 1: your casual traveler is unlikely to stumble upon it, especially
Speaker 1: once you start posting lots of warning signs with scary
Speaker 1: wording on it warning people away. Now, the fact that
Speaker 1: it is remote, the fact that you do have these
Speaker 1: signs that warn people away, uh, the fact that you
Speaker 1: have to bring people in to work at this facility,
Speaker 1: and most of them are commuting in maybe on a
Speaker 1: weekly basis, which means you have to figure out how
Speaker 1: do you transport them from some place like Las Vegas
Speaker 1: to the actual facility itself. All that means that you're
Speaker 1: leaving just enough traces to really start to peak people's interests, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's tantalizing. Oh and uh, point of order for the
Speaker 1: listeners out there, Jonathan, we should probably tell everybody check
Speaker 1: out the first two episodes of this before you listen
Speaker 1: to this one, right, It will make this make I
Speaker 1: can't say more sense, but you'll at least understand the references. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, we've got just enough information for the
Speaker 1: typical person to say, I really want to know what's
Speaker 1: happening there. And because of the security uh features that
Speaker 1: are in place, including roving bands, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: a little bit later, of security personnel, uh, it means
Speaker 1: that you end up having to fill in a lot
Speaker 1: of gaps. And when that happens, when people are given
Speaker 1: the leeway to try and fill in like that, there's
Speaker 1: the big here. There be dragons on the map. That's
Speaker 1: where you get the dragons, right, You're like, well, I
Speaker 1: don't know what's out there. It's probably dangerous, so we're
Speaker 1: just gonna slap dragons on it and call it a day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is you know, at heart of valuable instinct to have, right,
Speaker 1: it's it's caution. But what's happened here is that as
Speaker 1: we're gonna see um, one thing with a grain of
Speaker 1: truth such as oh there's something I'm not allowed to
Speaker 1: go see. Uh, became embellished and then exaggerated. And many
Speaker 1: times the people saying these things sincerely do believe this.
Speaker 1: They're not hucksters, right, Yeah, this this isn't necessarily someone
Speaker 1: who's trying to get a book deal or trying to
Speaker 1: get on the talk show circuit. It maybe someone who
Speaker 1: has just enough information to leap to some conclusions that
Speaker 1: are not supportable. And also we should say there are
Speaker 1: times where people make guesses where either they latch onto
Speaker 1: something that is actually true or they've got part of
Speaker 1: the story. So just because something is a theory or
Speaker 1: a rumor or a conspiracy of some sort doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that there's nothing there. Right. So here's a great example,
Speaker 1: and it's one of the more grounded, no pun intended,
Speaker 1: examples of the mythology around the Area one. There's the
Speaker 1: men that there is a giant subterranean network of UH
Speaker 1: tunnels and facilities that are underneath the ground. So that way,
Speaker 1: when you get that overhead view of Area fifty one,
Speaker 1: keep in mind Area fifty one is restricted airspace. It
Speaker 1: goes all the way up into space, but there are
Speaker 1: satellites since the nineteen eighties that have taken multiple images
Speaker 1: of that area. So if you know that, in fact,
Speaker 1: you're going to be photographed from space there, that seems
Speaker 1: logical that you would want to go underground, right, So
Speaker 1: you can understand why people would say, oh, well, it
Speaker 1: makes sense. You you want to have that secrecy. You
Speaker 1: can no longer depend upon it above ground, so you
Speaker 1: have to go below. But this raises some logistical issues, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how do you build an underground base and keep it quiet?
Speaker 1: Especially as we said in the history podcast, Uh, the
Speaker 1: construction workers that were taken out there probably would have
Speaker 1: known something about it because they would have been the
Speaker 1: ones digging. Yeah, I mean, and digging is a big deal.
Speaker 1: You're talking about subterranean network. That's a lot of earth
Speaker 1: that you have to move. And not only do you
Speaker 1: have to move it, you then have to figure out
Speaker 1: what do you do with the earth you have taken.
Speaker 1: You know, when you when you create a whole, that
Speaker 1: dirt doesn't just magically disappear, right, you have to put
Speaker 1: it someplace. And so that's that's a logistical issue, and
Speaker 1: it's an enormous type of endeavor to undertake. I mean,
Speaker 1: imagine having to create something a network of tunnels that
Speaker 1: is stable enough to support the weight of whatever is
Speaker 1: above it. Uh not to mention the idea of like
Speaker 1: level upon level of subterranean layer like Dr Evil style.
Speaker 1: It's it's an enormous task and it would have required
Speaker 1: such a huge investment and manpower let alone. I don't
Speaker 1: even think about the cost financially, just the practical manpower
Speaker 1: necessary to make it. It's not likely. And there there
Speaker 1: as some rumors that go so far as to suggest
Speaker 1: that there are there's an entire underground network of tunnels
Speaker 1: that connect various bases together. Yeah, and really, when you
Speaker 1: think of the engineering challenge that represents and the construction
Speaker 1: that is required, you realize that while it might be
Speaker 1: technologically possible for us to do it, it is not
Speaker 1: really feasible to do it secretly where you have not
Speaker 1: left any trace at all in the whole process right now,
Speaker 1: And I think that's really good distinction, because it's not
Speaker 1: just plausible, but it is probable that there is some
Speaker 1: sort of below the ground construction at Roswell in excuse me,
Speaker 1: at area fifty one in that when you build things
Speaker 1: there might be a basement, there might be a safe
Speaker 1: room something like that. But that is a far far
Speaker 1: cry from uh, what what do we have here? What's
Speaker 1: what's the big record? Jonathan fifty stories stories. Yeah, imagine
Speaker 1: a fifty story skyscraper, but underground. I mean, if you've
Speaker 1: ever seen a skyscraper being built, you know this is
Speaker 1: a process that takes some time. And we we hear
Speaker 1: at hell stuff works. We moved into this. You know,
Speaker 1: we're in an office that has recently, over the last
Speaker 1: maybe five or six years, seen a lot of growth
Speaker 1: with the buildings around us, and so we've actually watched
Speaker 1: year over year as skyscrapers were being built, and it
Speaker 1: takes a really long time. Uh. And I know people
Speaker 1: would say, yeah, but this is a top secret establishment,
Speaker 1: you know, you they'd really pour a lot into it.
Speaker 1: If you've ever seen the government at work, the US
Speaker 1: government at work, speed is not one of the adjectives
Speaker 1: you would typically use. If the US everyone is a superhero,
Speaker 1: it would probably not be the Flash. Everyone knows that
Speaker 1: maybe the Blob. Yeah, I was going to go safe
Speaker 1: with Captain America. Well, all right, I was he I
Speaker 1: was merely going to all the villain. So I was
Speaker 1: thinking of Blob or maybe the juggernat you know the Juggernauts.
Speaker 1: Cool though that's a different podcast. We We've got to
Speaker 1: get to one of the one of the biggest things here,
Speaker 1: the biggest conspiracies we hear about with Area fifty one. Well,
Speaker 1: first off, spoiler alert, the real conspiracy is are their
Speaker 1: secret spy planes? Yes, yeah, and that's that's exactly what
Speaker 1: it's for. And that's crazy. Yeah, I mean that is
Speaker 1: the first off, the fact that that can even be possible. Right.
Speaker 1: We talked in the last couple of podcasts about some
Speaker 1: of the the aircraft that were under development there that
Speaker 1: remains secret a good twenty years after they had finished testing,
Speaker 1: and that's when they were unveiled. Uh. There was one
Speaker 1: that that I think had a run from eighty three
Speaker 1: to eighty five something like that, and it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't acknowledged by the government until ninety six, which was
Speaker 1: the first time anyone outside of that that program had
Speaker 1: seen it. Um and I think that was maybe Tacit Blue,
Speaker 1: but it was one of those that just when you
Speaker 1: saw the aircraft, you thought, Wow, what a weird looking thing.
Speaker 1: I can't believe that this remained secret. Granted they only
Speaker 1: built two of them, and they were under strict rap
Speaker 1: over at one. It never got further out from from
Speaker 1: that area, like even the tests would be done at night,
Speaker 1: so it limited when the potential of even being spotted.
Speaker 1: But they were, the genuine articles of conspiracy were indeed
Speaker 1: spotted in the sky. And that brings us to, as
Speaker 1: we were saying, the biggest part of the area fifty
Speaker 1: are you talking us? Yeah, yeah, officially unidentified flying objects
Speaker 1: UFOs more often than not, uh, they are attributed to
Speaker 1: being alien as an extraterrestrial in nature. Area fifty one
Speaker 1: features heavily and tons of different alien stories, both both
Speaker 1: the kind that we see on the big screen, like
Speaker 1: Independence Day, the famous sequence where they go down to
Speaker 1: Area fifty one where they have uh, not just aliens,
Speaker 1: but they're they're hardware that has been studied for years,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's revealed that a lot of technology
Speaker 1: we depend upon today has been reverse engineered from this
Speaker 1: alien technology. Still can't build a decent spaceship. Though now
Speaker 1: we can't build a decent spaceship. However, we have figured
Speaker 1: out that you can introduce a computer virus as long
Speaker 1: as you have an Apple MacBook laptop, which to this
Speaker 1: day to this day, my friend, that's still that still
Speaker 1: bothered me. Uh yeah, spoiler alert again, guys. But but yeah, so,
Speaker 1: so people people started seeing UFOs, and it is correct
Speaker 1: to call them that because I think there's one of
Speaker 1: the distinctions that we're about to make, right. A UFO
Speaker 1: unidentified flying object is simply that. Yeah, it just means
Speaker 1: that you personally cannot identify what that object is. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's unidentify a ball. It may very well
Speaker 1: be that there's a small group of people who know
Speaker 1: exactly what that object is, like the like the stealth
Speaker 1: technology we were just talking about. Those stealth programs when
Speaker 1: they were under development were strict secrets and only a
Speaker 1: few people, relatively few people knew about them. Anyone outside
Speaker 1: that who would have seen one of these aircraft flying around, naturally,
Speaker 1: they would not be able to identify it. There was
Speaker 1: no correlative they could say, oh, this looked like a
Speaker 1: such and such. These things looked really crazy. So calling
Speaker 1: it a UFO is perfectly fine. You cannot identify it.
Speaker 1: Calling making the leap from UFO to alien is a
Speaker 1: little bit of a problem. So this brings us to
Speaker 1: probably the most famous alien UH incident in all of
Speaker 1: United States history, something that that factors into numerous I'd
Speaker 1: say dozens, if not hundreds, of different conspiracy theories the
Speaker 1: Roswell incident. Now, Roswell is in New Mexico, which, for
Speaker 1: those of you who are not in the United States,
Speaker 1: is a completely separate state from Nevada. It's in a
Speaker 1: completely different place. And you know, sometimes it's a pet
Speaker 1: peeve of mine, Jonathan, is that people often conflate Area
Speaker 1: fifty one or Groom Lake and the incident in Roswell, Right,
Speaker 1: and so two things that these are incidence, separated both
Speaker 1: in space and time. Right, Roswell, New Mexico is hundreds
Speaker 1: of miles away from Area fifty one, like almost a
Speaker 1: thousand miles away. I think it's somewhere around eight hundred
Speaker 1: miles away and actually one thousand, four hundred sixteen kilometers
Speaker 1: according to Google Maps. Thank you Google Maps for letting
Speaker 1: me know how far apart Roswell, New Mexico in Area
Speaker 1: fifty one are. That's exactly it. So, by the wait,
Speaker 1: don't don't rely upon Google Maps for turn by turn
Speaker 1: directions to Area fifty one. You know you'll just end
Speaker 1: up in Las Vegas. Did you? Did you do it.
Speaker 1: I did it by by driving. All the walking would
Speaker 1: have been hilarious. Walking would have been like, at this
Speaker 1: point people are going to ask you to turn around,
Speaker 1: uh so, or at this point you've probably died of dehydration.
Speaker 1: So the other thing I said was that their separated
Speaker 1: by time. The Roswell Incident happened on July second, nineteen
Speaker 1: forties seven. So for those of you who listened to
Speaker 1: our first episode about Area fifty one, you remember that
Speaker 1: it was the mid nineteen fifties when the CIA settled
Speaker 1: on Groom Lake as the the future home of Area
Speaker 1: fifty one. It was like the nive was when construction began.
Speaker 1: So this is almost a decade apart when of these
Speaker 1: two events. So then you have the The actual story
Speaker 1: of the Roswell incident is that some people in Roswell,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, I saw some strange floating objects that they
Speaker 1: could not identify on identified flying objects. Sometimes they're referred
Speaker 1: to as being kind of disc shaped. But part of
Speaker 1: the problem is that we're so far distanced from the
Speaker 1: initial event that the story has not remained consistent through
Speaker 1: all the different retellings. Yeah, and I can speak to
Speaker 1: a little bit of that because we have we have
Speaker 1: some copies of the newspaper articles that changed, and because
Speaker 1: they changed. Uh, there's a very interesting thing here. It's
Speaker 1: the interpretation of that. Uh, people who believe that there
Speaker 1: was some sort of extraterrestrial incident. Somebody, somebody managed to
Speaker 1: drive a spacecraft well enough to get to Earth but
Speaker 1: not well enough to stay above Earth, right, and then uh,
Speaker 1: the news found out about it and they got shut down.
Speaker 1: They had to change their story. Or did they just
Speaker 1: correct the reporting when they had more information. That's a
Speaker 1: that's a good question, like did did some gentlemen wearing
Speaker 1: black suits and sunglasses show up at the newspaper and
Speaker 1: say you need to you need to address this, I mean, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: that's but if it happened, it wasn't because of aliens,
Speaker 1: That's right. So get moving on. We're talking about the crash.
Speaker 1: Just spotting these objects in the air wasn't the only
Speaker 1: thing that happened with Roswell incident. What specifically went on
Speaker 1: from there was that some people found debris on the
Speaker 1: ground and it was described as being shiny and metallic
Speaker 1: in nature. No one was really sure what it was
Speaker 1: actually made of at the time. UM, and so this,
Speaker 1: this incident started to become embellished upon over time. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's some versions of the story where they didn't just
Speaker 1: find physical debris from some flying object, but also bodies.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get into the alien stuff,
Speaker 1: where supposedly there were these bodies of creatures that had
Speaker 1: unusual features and they were whisked away by the government. Uh.
Speaker 1: And ultimately some people say that that's they went to
Speaker 1: Area fifty one. The purpose was not to study strange materials,
Speaker 1: although we did eventually get some Soviet aircraft at Area
Speaker 1: fifty one where they were tested like the bigs. But
Speaker 1: it's not meant to be a scientific laboratory. That's not
Speaker 1: the purpose of Every fifty one. So it would make
Speaker 1: no sense to send any kind of extraterrestrials there. It
Speaker 1: also doesn't make sense to send extra terrestrial bodies to
Speaker 1: a place that hasn't been built yet. That's a that's
Speaker 1: a big one. That's a it's a bump in the road. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit of a little bit of a
Speaker 1: problem with the story. Now what the official story from
Speaker 1: the government was that the debris came from weather balloons
Speaker 1: and that there were no bodies in fact that we
Speaker 1: should stay right now, there's no evidence at all that
Speaker 1: anyone ever came across a body. That was something that
Speaker 1: was added to this story over time. Yeah, sorry, guys,
Speaker 1: that autopsy on YouTube is most likely a hope it's
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, there there are special effects uh experts
Speaker 1: who have actually commented on it, and somewhat derisively. So
Speaker 1: we're like, like, they should have hired me. I could
Speaker 1: have done a much better job. But there is there
Speaker 1: There is no no hard evidence that there was even
Speaker 1: from the debris they found when they were looking at it,
Speaker 1: because there really was debris, right, and they really did
Speaker 1: find it, but they didn't find enough to have built
Speaker 1: an entire thing, Yeah, to carry a person, you know.
Speaker 1: Now this so the official story from the government was
Speaker 1: at these were weather balloons. They were meant specifically to uh,
Speaker 1: to study the weather at high altitudes. Now, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, that's not the real story, but we will
Speaker 1: get to there in a second. So, uh, this was
Speaker 1: one of those things where people were saying, it doesn't
Speaker 1: look like any weather balloon I've ever seen, which is true,
Speaker 1: it didn't. I've seen both balloons and the weather. This
Speaker 1: is neither of those two things. So moving on to
Speaker 1: the the you know, kind of looking at the story
Speaker 1: another way. One version of this that I was not
Speaker 1: aware of until a friend of the show, Nate Lenkson,
Speaker 1: he's the editor of Wired dot Code dot uk uh.
Speaker 1: He he turned me on to this. I had never
Speaker 1: heard about this. It's a book written by Annie Jacobson
Speaker 1: called Area fifty one and Uncensored History of America's top
Speaker 1: secret military base. Now full disclosure, I have not read
Speaker 1: this book yet. I read a synopsis of the book
Speaker 1: and a synopsis of the story we're about the cover,
Speaker 1: So this may not actually be accurate to the book itself.
Speaker 1: I want to make that clear. I've also heard that
Speaker 1: most of the book is pretty much what we covered
Speaker 1: in our first two episodes of the podcast, a very
Speaker 1: thorough description of the history of Very fifty one. But
Speaker 1: there's a section apparently devoted to the Roswell incident and
Speaker 1: Every fifty one supposed involvement in that, in which the
Speaker 1: story gets even weirder, I think than alien And this
Speaker 1: story involves Nazis and Communists, so you know, it's only
Speaker 1: missing Indiana Jones to make it really a Hollywood film.
Speaker 1: So the story that she tells according to a source,
Speaker 1: I don't know what her source was. I don't yeah,
Speaker 1: a source. I don't know if she names the source
Speaker 1: in the book the synopsis, I said, said anonymous. But
Speaker 1: again I haven't read the book. But according to the synopsis,
Speaker 1: the story is that a Nazi doctor, Joseph Mingola, actually
Speaker 1: the s S officer who survived the World War two
Speaker 1: and then and then eventually escaped to South America. That
Speaker 1: Mingola had worked on behalf of Joseph Stalin doing these
Speaker 1: horrific procedures on children, resulting in children around the age
Speaker 1: of twelve with abnormally shaped heads, large eyes that are
Speaker 1: of an odd shape, and that the whole idea was
Speaker 1: that they were going to pilot some simple full aircraft
Speaker 1: to fly around the United States and land and essentially
Speaker 1: star crap up yeah, scare people, Yeah, exactly, this idea
Speaker 1: that they would this idea that they would fake aliens, yeah,
Speaker 1: in order to create a panic, essentially doing a War
Speaker 1: of the World's type event. Uh, one step closer to
Speaker 1: reality for War of the Worlds. For those who don't
Speaker 1: remember or don't know what this is, um, it was
Speaker 1: a an Orson Wells project, a radio program that was
Speaker 1: portrayed in such a way that people who tuned in
Speaker 1: without knowing that it was actually a fictionalized radio program,
Speaker 1: began to think that there was actually, uh, an alien
Speaker 1: invasion happening. It was this sort of famous little blip
Speaker 1: on the radar of of people freaking out because they
Speaker 1: weren't aware that, in fact, it was a fictional account, uh,
Speaker 1: something that we still see today with things like Mermaids.
Speaker 1: At any rate, that's enough commentary on that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: the uh, the story that she relays is that Mingola
Speaker 1: had done these these horror horrific procedures and that the
Speaker 1: bodies found at the Roswal incident, which remember, there was
Speaker 1: never any evidence that bodies were found were in fact
Speaker 1: human children that then were whisked away. I think there's
Speaker 1: some big problems with this particular story. Problem Number one,
Speaker 1: Mingola was on the run from the Soviets. He did not,
Speaker 1: I mean, the Soviets were the ones who were who
Speaker 1: were approaching when Hitler committed suicide, right, they'd rather than
Speaker 1: be captured by the Soviets. Um Hitler committed suicide, and
Speaker 1: Mingola was trying to escape with records that he had uh,
Speaker 1: he had created an at Auschwitz. Um, so he eventually
Speaker 1: escaped Germany. He did at one point go back into
Speaker 1: Soviet occupied territory in order to trieve some of these documents,
Speaker 1: but he evaded capture and eventually escaped to South America
Speaker 1: and then moved around quite a bit while on the run. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was being he was being pursued by agents both
Speaker 1: Soviet and American. And so it's unlikely that he would
Speaker 1: have collaborated with Joseph Stalin and certainly unlikely that he
Speaker 1: would have been allowed to escape. Yeah. Um, so that
Speaker 1: already is a problem. Secondly, it would be a real
Speaker 1: problem the idea of people being fooled long enough to
Speaker 1: not realize these were humans, right, Yeah. And then there's
Speaker 1: the other there's the other question. Why would they crash
Speaker 1: there and not in a more occupied place. Why not
Speaker 1: in New York City or something like that. Why, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, they probably get spotted. But then also, and
Speaker 1: this this is a cruel thing to say, but why
Speaker 1: would you secifically need that one very evil man to
Speaker 1: do that sort of operation? Right? Right exactly, It's not
Speaker 1: like if you're going to if you're going to do
Speaker 1: something so inhuman. Uh, is there I mean, narratively, it's
Speaker 1: a great story in the sense that there only one
Speaker 1: person is this twisted to pull this off? But in
Speaker 1: reality we know, unfortunately that's not the case. That if
Speaker 1: you really did have the the will to do something
Speaker 1: this horrible, you could probably do it without having to
Speaker 1: to go after the devil himself, right. I mean, the
Speaker 1: whole story is is meant to appeal to our dark imaginations,
Speaker 1: and it's a terrible thing, but it's also one of
Speaker 1: those things that you could say, yeah, I can imagine
Speaker 1: this actually playing out in some way. Ultimately, you also
Speaker 1: have to ask the question, what's the effect you're going for.
Speaker 1: If the effect you're going for is to cause a panic,
Speaker 1: I can't think of anything that would have caused a
Speaker 1: bigger panic than having Soviet airmen being able to land
Speaker 1: in US territory without any alien cover story. You don't
Speaker 1: need that to cause a scare. There's really no benefit here.
Speaker 1: Like the the the entire operation does not seem to
Speaker 1: have an actual return on investments, so it doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense from that perspective either. The Nazis that are involved
Speaker 1: in in some other conspiracy theories about Area fifty one,
Speaker 1: like the the UFOs that are seen are product of
Speaker 1: you know, Nazi experiments towards the close of the war,
Speaker 1: and a lot of that comes from a very real,
Speaker 1: uh and kind of frightening thing that the United States
Speaker 1: did with Operation paper Clip, which you know about when
Speaker 1: they brought over some surviving scientists from Germany right right
Speaker 1: right when you're when you're when you get the rockets
Speaker 1: scientists specifically who worked over in Germany to then come
Speaker 1: to the United States and continue their work and science
Speaker 1: and and rocketry and specifically, but now they're working for
Speaker 1: a different boss. They're working for the United States government. Uh,
Speaker 1: and partly because they're getting guarantees from the US government
Speaker 1: that they won't be tried as criminals for their work
Speaker 1: for the Nazi regime. So yeah, there's certain reality, real
Speaker 1: things that were happening in history that we're probably enough
Speaker 1: to help fuel this kind of conspiracy here in the
Speaker 1: United States. But you know, you didn't have to look
Speaker 1: far to see real instances of some pretty shady dealings
Speaker 1: on both sides, uh, but without having to make stuff
Speaker 1: upright and now, Also one thing that didn't help the
Speaker 1: government's case, and as far as their official story goes,
Speaker 1: is that it turned out they they were telling the
Speaker 1: truth but telling its slant, as Emily Dickinson would say, right,
Speaker 1: they were. They were not weather balloons that were being
Speaker 1: uh deployed out over in New Mexico. Yeah, there were
Speaker 1: balloons that were part of a spy program called Project Mogul,
Speaker 1: which was a top secret experiment using high altitude balloons
Speaker 1: that were carrying microphones. And the idea was the microphones
Speaker 1: would be able to detect sounds from Soviet nuclear tests,
Speaker 1: so that we in the United States would have a
Speaker 1: clue when that was going on, and we that would
Speaker 1: help us kind of know how far along the Soviets
Speaker 1: were with their nuclear program compared to our own nuclear program.
Speaker 1: So there was again this need for secrecy. We didn't
Speaker 1: want the Soviets to know that we, in fact had
Speaker 1: developed this technology to listen out for uh, these these
Speaker 1: sound waves, um, because we didn't want them to try
Speaker 1: and come up with different ways of testing their nuclear
Speaker 1: arms and therefore hiding it from us, so engineering it
Speaker 1: and hearing what we're doing exactly. That's also another another
Speaker 1: good point. So the cover story of weather balloons was
Speaker 1: necessary to protect the secrecy of the spy program, but
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with aliens. It had everything
Speaker 1: to do with spying it. Maybe it might have even
Speaker 1: been to the government's benefit that people were latching on
Speaker 1: to the aliens story because it took attention away from
Speaker 1: what it was really meant to do. So there's not
Speaker 1: a whole lot of incentive upon the government's part to
Speaker 1: come out and say specifically, guys, no, it's not aliens,
Speaker 1: because it helped keep the attention away. But you don't
Speaker 1: want it to You don't want that story to run
Speaker 1: rampant either, because it could legitimately start causing either a
Speaker 1: panic or just a growing distrust in the government itself. Sure,
Speaker 1: and they don't need any help. That's regardless of what
Speaker 1: what uh what your political beliefs are we speaking of beliefs.
Speaker 1: This is going to be a lot of fun for
Speaker 1: me personally, I think for YouTube because one thing that
Speaker 1: always keeps the area fifty one legends alive is that there.
Speaker 1: It seems like every year there's someone who comes out
Speaker 1: and says, well, I was person exit place, why I
Speaker 1: know the truth right, and now I will finally reveal it.
Speaker 1: And you're thinking of someone specific in this case, right,
Speaker 1: and specifically thinking of Bob Lazar, Yeah, Robert Lazar or
Speaker 1: Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on a project
Speaker 1: in which the military had come into possession of alien technology,
Speaker 1: and his job was to reverse engineer that alien technology
Speaker 1: to learn how it works so that we could take
Speaker 1: advantage of that tech here on Earth and thus kind
Speaker 1: of leap forward what would normally be the process of
Speaker 1: developing tech. So instead of you know, constantly testing and
Speaker 1: improving and refining, we could jump straight ahead, you know,
Speaker 1: skip eight steps in that process and jump straight to
Speaker 1: you know, miraculous smartphones that react to our touch, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And so he claimed that he had
Speaker 1: worked at a facil that was near Groom Lake, so
Speaker 1: not technically at Area fifty one, but adjacent to it.
Speaker 1: It was the real secret place. It's called S four. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's so secret that it didn't even get a
Speaker 1: full name. Um, it just gets a letter and a
Speaker 1: number of designation. And it's he said that it housed
Speaker 1: no fewer than nine spacecraft. Uh. Here's the thing that
Speaker 1: a lot of his his claims to his background don't
Speaker 1: check out right. Like he he claims to have advanced
Speaker 1: degrees from M I T and from Cal tech, but
Speaker 1: there's no record of him there. Now. Granted, some people
Speaker 1: say that that's evidence of the conspiracy. Yeah that In fact,
Speaker 1: this shows that the government was so interested in keeping
Speaker 1: it a secret that they have wiped clean his background.
Speaker 1: Although to do that you would also have to white
Speaker 1: clean the memories of every professor and every student who
Speaker 1: would have also attended. And you see that this this
Speaker 1: kind of domino effect. How how wide those ripples would
Speaker 1: have to go in order for this to remain an
Speaker 1: effective secret. It becomes unmanageable at some point. Wouldn't it
Speaker 1: be easier at this point? My question would be for
Speaker 1: many of these cases is why did someone go to
Speaker 1: so such great links to keep you alive? Because from
Speaker 1: from a government's perspective, we know that if they're picking
Speaker 1: one kind of skull degree, they'll pick the easier one,
Speaker 1: which is usually an assisted fall off a building or
Speaker 1: something like that. You know, assassination is just off the table, right,
Speaker 1: that can never be done, Like, yeah, how do you
Speaker 1: how do you uh? If it did come down to
Speaker 1: there's this one person who has tons of information, like
Speaker 1: it's essentially Snowden. Yeah, there's there's an Edward Snowden of
Speaker 1: area fifty one, who is ready. He has access to
Speaker 1: all the information, he's ready to spill the beans. Um,
Speaker 1: and you want to discredit him, you don't go to
Speaker 1: every single person in his past. Don't tell anybody about this, right,
Speaker 1: It's just it's just not practical, right, It's it's it
Speaker 1: would be a monumental task. So essentially, what we're getting
Speaker 1: around two is that Lazar's his claims to his his
Speaker 1: credentials are suspect, right, and that that is a very
Speaker 1: diplomatic way to put it. Of course, you know, we're
Speaker 1: also showing that his side of it is that someone
Speaker 1: is racing his past to discredit him. As as you said,
Speaker 1: you know, Jonathan, recently, Mr Lazar in the past few
Speaker 1: years went back into the public eye now I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess more into the mainstream public eye, and he
Speaker 1: was asked to react to the CIA's official admittance, uh
Speaker 1: of Area fifty ones existence, which as we know, it
Speaker 1: didn't happen for a little while. And uh he said
Speaker 1: he was not impressed because this was a very tiny
Speaker 1: baby step forward. I think that's the quote he used.
Speaker 1: And uh, he was waiting for them to reveal S four,
Speaker 1: which is the site he says he worked at reverse
Speaker 1: engineering these things. Now, he has many, many claims. He
Speaker 1: speaks at length about interspecial politics, about injuries he's suffered
Speaker 1: by technology that we won't hear about for several decades. Uh.
Speaker 1: But I I really like the point you made that Um.
Speaker 1: One of the other things people who believe him see
Speaker 1: his proof is um what they perceive as a inexplicable
Speaker 1: jump in technology, right. Well, the truth is that if
Speaker 1: you look at any technology closely enough, you will see
Speaker 1: incremental improvements. It's very very rare that we have someone
Speaker 1: come out with a brand new piece of technology that
Speaker 1: has no precedent to it. Yeah, exactly, television, perfect example.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you look at these things like television was
Speaker 1: really building upon the developments of radio, and you think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: what about Tesla and Marconi, Well, they were working on
Speaker 1: research that had preceded them as well. These are all
Speaker 1: if you if you really dig down into it, you know,
Speaker 1: you look at the invention of the light bulb, you
Speaker 1: look at all of these sort of inventions that we
Speaker 1: we take for granted. We liked the stories that say
Speaker 1: this inventor came up with this idea and implemented it
Speaker 1: and now it exists, and before it never did. Usually
Speaker 1: the truth is much more complicated, with lots of different
Speaker 1: things leading into that invention, including earlier inventions that may
Speaker 1: not have been practical but showed a working concept, and
Speaker 1: then this other inventor like Thomas Edison comes along and
Speaker 1: takes that takes that concept and makes it practical. So
Speaker 1: now it's something that we can actually use as opposed
Speaker 1: to just a cool idea, but we didn't know how
Speaker 1: to to you know, capitalize on it. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I think most of the advances we've seen over the
Speaker 1: over the decades have been examples of this where people
Speaker 1: have made incremental improvements and maybe grab together multiple pieces
Speaker 1: of technology and then and then package them in such
Speaker 1: a way that it's a really compelling piece of tech.
Speaker 1: But if you break it down component by component, you
Speaker 1: start to see the actual process of this creating something,
Speaker 1: refining it, tweaking and putting it out again, refining it again.
Speaker 1: I don't see any enormous leaps where someone has jumped
Speaker 1: well ahead of everywhere else. Maybe Claude Shannon and his
Speaker 1: uh his computer science with using binary logic. His approach
Speaker 1: to computer science was pretty much fully formed, but that's
Speaker 1: kind of similar to Albert Einstein and his theories of relativity.
Speaker 1: These were ideas that both men had developed over years,
Speaker 1: and then they presented them as complete pictures. So to us,
Speaker 1: the outsiders, it looks like a person just came up
Speaker 1: with a brilliant process, fully formed instantaneous sleep. The truth is,
Speaker 1: it actually took several years to build that up, and
Speaker 1: even then they were building on previous thoughts and knowledge.
Speaker 1: They were just incorporating it in a new way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but what about the lasers. Okay, so lasers are an issue, right, Um,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up lasers. One of the things
Speaker 1: that have has often been attributed to Area fifty one
Speaker 1: is energy weapons. So this ties into the strategic defense initiative,
Speaker 1: often referred to derisively as star Wars. Yeah, this was
Speaker 1: the program in the nineteen eighties. And I promise that
Speaker 1: I will do an episode about the Star Wars program
Speaker 1: that will go into full detail. I know, I've got
Speaker 1: a lot of listeners who have asked me to do it,
Speaker 1: and I really want to at some point, but it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a little bit further down the road. But
Speaker 1: it's um, you know, the whole idea was that it
Speaker 1: was going to be a system that would shoot down
Speaker 1: incoming i C b M S intercontinental ballistic missiles. This
Speaker 1: was the height of the Cold War nineteen eighties. I mean,
Speaker 1: propaganda was ridiculous in the Soviet Union and the United States.
Speaker 1: I grew up in that era, and I remember, like
Speaker 1: the Russians being the bad guys all the time, you know,
Speaker 1: from from uh everything from Red Dawn to Rocky four.
Speaker 1: So anyway, um or was it three? It might have
Speaker 1: been three Rocky three? At any rate. The the idea
Speaker 1: here was that the energy weapons that would shoot down
Speaker 1: these missiles were supposedly under development at Area fifty one.
Speaker 1: Again not really the purpose for Area fifty one. I
Speaker 1: mean you could you could understand them, uh testing such
Speaker 1: a device, because that is kind of what they were doing.
Speaker 1: But they were mostly testing airborne things, not not ground
Speaker 1: to air technology. It was mostly aircraft that they were
Speaker 1: really focusing on, and not offensive aircraft, just spycraft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're some of the drones they worked on
Speaker 1: probably had offensive kick, but yeah, it was it was
Speaker 1: mostly again, it was mostly reconnaissance type stuff. So then
Speaker 1: you have the weather control devices, another very popular conspirat
Speaker 1: c theory of it. So, first of all, we don't
Speaker 1: have any technology powerful enough to control the weather. Whether
Speaker 1: it is an incredibly chaotic system that we do not
Speaker 1: fully understand it. Before you can under before you can
Speaker 1: really control something, you have to at least have some
Speaker 1: understanding of how it works. Now, people have conducted experiments
Speaker 1: with weather manipulation, like seeding clouds, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: But even this, we can't be fully sure how effective
Speaker 1: they are, right, Because here's the problem is that you
Speaker 1: can't you can't have a scientific consensus on whether or
Speaker 1: not something is effective unless you're able to have a
Speaker 1: control group. And you can't really have a control group
Speaker 1: with weather. I mean you can you can have as
Speaker 1: close to the same uh kind of elements in play
Speaker 1: in two different and two different instances, and one you
Speaker 1: seed the cloud, in one you don't, and then you
Speaker 1: see how much rain results. But even then, again, whether
Speaker 1: it's such a complex system that you can't you can't
Speaker 1: be completely certain that the seating is the effective agent, right.
Speaker 1: And you know the problem with whether is it's a
Speaker 1: chaotic system that is one massive cluster of systems. So
Speaker 1: any two points you pick are ultimately in the same system,
Speaker 1: So are they really is there a control? It's tough
Speaker 1: and stuff. And then on top of that, you know
Speaker 1: things like HARP, which I'm sure you guys have talked about,
Speaker 1: which was designed to to actually look at interactions in
Speaker 1: the ionosphere. Now, the ionosphere around Earth can conduct electricity.
Speaker 1: In fact, when we get a big electrical impulse in
Speaker 1: there from something like a solar flare or coronal mass ejection,
Speaker 1: it can make the auroras at the polls really active
Speaker 1: because that's that's kind of the convergence point for this
Speaker 1: electric field. And uh, and so there's certainly things that
Speaker 1: interact with atmospheric um phenomena, but we still can't control
Speaker 1: the weather there. Now it doesn't help, I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: be honest with you, Jonathan. It does not help, uh
Speaker 1: to dispel any of the speculation about places like HARP,
Speaker 1: you know, when it was an operation, because the descriptions
Speaker 1: from from the government and from HARP about what they
Speaker 1: were doing we're just cartooniously vague in some ways. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a high frequency active auroral research program. Already you're
Speaker 1: you're thinking they're at least a couple of words in
Speaker 1: there that I'm not entirely sure what they're supposed to
Speaker 1: be UM. And it really was about beaming energy into
Speaker 1: the ionosphere too. The goal for HARP, at least on
Speaker 1: the government side, that the military funded side, was can
Speaker 1: we use the ionosphere as a conduit through which we
Speaker 1: can communicate with distant vehicles like submarines that are under
Speaker 1: the water. I mean, they really were hoping that this
Speaker 1: would be a way of doing that. The scientists at
Speaker 1: HARP were mostly thinking, if we can keep getting funding
Speaker 1: for what we want to do, which is to study
Speaker 1: the ionosphere, then we should try and keep that door
Speaker 1: open for the possibility that this could be a communications tool,
Speaker 1: even if we don't think it will really work. So um,
Speaker 1: which happens. Yeah, that's that's essentially what happened with HARP.
Speaker 1: And then eventually the military said, you know what, we're
Speaker 1: done and they pulled the funding. So that was the
Speaker 1: story of HARP. Well, a lot of those same stories
Speaker 1: apply to Area fifty one, but there's no evidence that
Speaker 1: there were any weather control systems under development. There's certainly
Speaker 1: no evidence that anything ever did any actual weather manipulation.
Speaker 1: So uh yeahh that just doesn't that doesn't really fly. UM.
Speaker 1: And then if there's a piece of tech and science fiction,
Speaker 1: there's a chance that there's at least some story out
Speaker 1: there that there's something like that underdevelopment at Area fifty one,
Speaker 1: you know, warp coils, teleporters, phasers, whatever you want to
Speaker 1: think about. I realized I was focusing mainly on Star
Speaker 1: Trek there, but but really all of that has at
Speaker 1: some time or another been attributed to area. Warp drive uh,
Speaker 1: teleportation devises, lightsabers, Yeah, okay, thank you. No, we've got stars,
Speaker 1: you know, we've got there. So moving on another another
Speaker 1: host of conspiracy theories around Area fifty one don't have
Speaker 1: so much to do with what was actually going on
Speaker 1: at the facility, but rather the mysterious shadowy organizations that
Speaker 1: were behind it all. Yeah, like the real life Smoking
Speaker 1: Man exactly. Yeah. So a lot of these conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: involve organizations that have no official um UH designation or
Speaker 1: they don't they aren't officially acknowledged by the government, right,
Speaker 1: So some of them have a designation, but they're not
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're not in any government files because
Speaker 1: that's how secret they are. In alleged designation. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: here the big one for Area fifty one at least
Speaker 1: is the Majestic Twelve. Majestic twelve is a group that
Speaker 1: existed many years ago a core to the conspiracy lore uh,
Speaker 1: and included people like President Truman as well as the
Speaker 1: head of CIA and also like top businessmen, like essentially
Speaker 1: the most powerful people in the United States at that time,
Speaker 1: and that their purpose was to solidify power and control worldwide,
Speaker 1: right like this was gonna be like. The Trilateral Commission
Speaker 1: was often referred to as being the secret organization for
Speaker 1: these sort of purposes, which is not what it was
Speaker 1: for um Uh. There are other organizations that are meant
Speaker 1: to be like think tanks that have often been kind
Speaker 1: of compared to this sort of ship. The Majestic twelve, however,
Speaker 1: is one that appears to have been completely fabricated. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was a UFO enthusiast named William L. Moore who
Speaker 1: produced papers that he claimed proved the group's existence, but
Speaker 1: a lot of people who have looked at these papers
Speaker 1: have said that they don't hold up to scrutiny. That
Speaker 1: the signatures that are there appeared to have been copied
Speaker 1: from other documents and then pasted into them into the
Speaker 1: Majestic twelve. The j twelve papers, uh, and that there
Speaker 1: does not appear to be any sort of evidence supporting
Speaker 1: the existence of such an organization. So if your organization
Speaker 1: isn't real, then chances are it's not actually the secret
Speaker 1: one behind are. But that's no fun. So the so,
Speaker 1: the the the idea that has become you know, common
Speaker 1: currency in a lot of these beliefs is that in
Speaker 1: JA twelve did exist, but was had its world rocked
Speaker 1: when news of the extraterrestrial crash in hit them. And
Speaker 1: then they've they've spent the next few decades, um, you
Speaker 1: know what, more and more. I think maybe X files
Speaker 1: was inspired some of the well, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: very like m J twelve shares a lot of the
Speaker 1: same kind of traits as other shadowy, conspiratorial uh most
Speaker 1: likely fictional organization. It's a trope. It's right up there
Speaker 1: with things like the Illuminati, for example. Uh. Then you
Speaker 1: have some real people who really do exist that have
Speaker 1: kind of helped fuel the mystique around Area fifty one,
Speaker 1: not necessarily, you know, purposefully setting out to define the mystique,
Speaker 1: but they're part of it. And those are the Camo dudes.
Speaker 1: That's that's what the folks in the Area fifty one
Speaker 1: U BIZ the people who like to watch Area fifty one,
Speaker 1: not the ones who are actually working there. What they
Speaker 1: referred to these guys as camo dudes because they tend
Speaker 1: to be wearing a desert camouflage outfits. You know, they're
Speaker 1: out in Nevada, so they're wearing these these kind of
Speaker 1: desert cam outfits. They travel in pairs, usually in in
Speaker 1: four wheel drive vehicles, and they are uh the perimeter
Speaker 1: guards essentially is what they serve as. So if someone
Speaker 1: starts to come close to the Area fifty one borders,
Speaker 1: then they may end up encountering a pair of these
Speaker 1: camo dudes who tend to not appear to be military.
Speaker 1: The best guests is in fact, they are probably part
Speaker 1: of some contract group that ends up doing security for
Speaker 1: things like military installations. So not not official military personnel,
Speaker 1: but rather private citizens who are part of a contractor
Speaker 1: and their job is to um to firmly suggest to
Speaker 1: people that they should go somewhere else rather than than
Speaker 1: try and get footage of the area. I have a
Speaker 1: quotation for you from an incident. This is published in
Speaker 1: the Huffington's Post. A UFO conspiracy film crew was detained
Speaker 1: at gunpoint at the air fifty one gate. Uh in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve. H here's here's the quotation. According to
Speaker 1: a crew member, a camouflage dress guard carrying an M
Speaker 1: sixteen told a member of this team, we could make
Speaker 1: you disappear and your body will never be found. Uh.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go ahead and say, maybe they're playing it up,
Speaker 1: but the point is that, yes, you're not supposed to
Speaker 1: be there. As we said in the first few podcast,
Speaker 1: don't don't try to go you guys. Yeah, most of
Speaker 1: the most of the reports I've read didn't have a
Speaker 1: point where the the Camo dudes were actively aiming weapons
Speaker 1: in their direction, but rather they were they were visibly armed,
Speaker 1: so that's one thing, you know, it was certainly they
Speaker 1: were armed, but they weren't. I don't remember reading a
Speaker 1: whole lot of them either brandishing their weapons, like as
Speaker 1: far as I recall, most of the incidents involved their
Speaker 1: weapons being holstered. But they have in the past, according
Speaker 1: to a lot of reports, confiscated film back when film
Speaker 1: was a thing, or demanded to have various equipment turned
Speaker 1: over to them. Because again, the facility is all about
Speaker 1: spy aircraft, so you don't want footage leaking of either
Speaker 1: the facility or the aircraft that are under development there. Um,
Speaker 1: So it's not necessarily that big of a mystery. But
Speaker 1: the fact that you have these guys who are not
Speaker 1: easily identifiable as belonging to a specific United States government organization, sure,
Speaker 1: that definitely adds to that mystery, and they're not identifying themselves.
Speaker 1: And also to be candid in in some cases, not all,
Speaker 1: but in some cases if you're making a film, then
Speaker 1: you want to have that sort of conflict. So it
Speaker 1: it's also possible that in some cases these are the
Speaker 1: threat as it is as it is, is um embellished,
Speaker 1: or it's possible that people are purposefully agitating the guards. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's definitely without being there, we can't say for
Speaker 1: sure but that but but both scenarios seem to be
Speaker 1: plausible to me. Right, I don't know what really unfolded.
Speaker 1: It may be that the truth is somewhere in between
Speaker 1: those two those two scenarios, right, But you can't accidentally
Speaker 1: end up there, No, you purposefully we're trying to get there.
Speaker 1: And this is clearly an area that is off limits. Uh,
Speaker 1: and is you know, is legally off limits some people are.
Speaker 1: And you know, we talked about that in the second
Speaker 1: episode of the history about how Area fifty one gets
Speaker 1: a whole lot of legal leeway um in in ways
Speaker 1: that other places in the United States simply do not,
Speaker 1: and that that also adds to this curiosity we have
Speaker 1: of Area fifty one. I think we've really covered kind
Speaker 1: of what drives that, the fact that, you know, human
Speaker 1: beings are curious, right, we want to know things. When
Speaker 1: we see something that we do not understand, often one
Speaker 1: of our earliest responses is how does that work? Or
Speaker 1: what is going on here? What's really happening unless it's
Speaker 1: really scary, and which is where's the closest exit? And
Speaker 1: can I run faster than ben um Because you don't
Speaker 1: have to run the fastest, just faster than the slowest person.
Speaker 1: As long as I'm not the slowest person in the office,
Speaker 1: I'm still got a chance. Yeah, so I can certainly
Speaker 1: see and I ll it too. I mean, I certainly
Speaker 1: have this curiosity about Area fifty one. Heck, just just
Speaker 1: going from the baseline most mundane description of what's going
Speaker 1: on there, there's still so many questions like how do
Speaker 1: they how do they really maintain that level of secrecy.
Speaker 1: How much does the typical worker at Area fifty one
Speaker 1: know about what's going on. How do they make sure
Speaker 1: that people working on one project remain oblivious to everything
Speaker 1: else that's happening. How do they schedule these things? What
Speaker 1: is it like being a pilot for one of these aircraft?
Speaker 1: I mean, there are a lot of questions that we
Speaker 1: don't have the answers too. So I think, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it was a lot of fun tackling this this subject,
Speaker 1: and I think it really did merit the three episodes
Speaker 1: because it is such a touchstone for everything from the
Speaker 1: political ideology from the nineteen fifties forward to just a
Speaker 1: pop culture you know, touchstone, right, It's it's like, that's
Speaker 1: that's the go to for science fiction for you. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: When and now that we have along with the rest
Speaker 1: of the text off audience explored, stim discerned, the the
Speaker 1: ideas and the reality and the mist Very fifty one,
Speaker 1: I have to ask you, now, what would you do
Speaker 1: if one of the you know, if one of the
Speaker 1: strangest things turned out to be true? H you know,
Speaker 1: I like to I would like to think that I'm
Speaker 1: the type of skeptic who when presented with incontrovertible evidence
Speaker 1: that something I believe to be true is in fact
Speaker 1: not true, and that something I thought was just purely
Speaker 1: made up is in fact the truth, that I would
Speaker 1: be able to accept it. Saying that and actually doing
Speaker 1: it are two different things, right, I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's how I would truly react. I'd like to think
Speaker 1: that if suddenly there was just pure evidence that in
Speaker 1: fact the Roswal incident involved aliens, and that the aliens
Speaker 1: were in fact Holstad area fifty one, and all of
Speaker 1: these easy conspiracy theories were actually true, I like to
Speaker 1: believe that I would be able to say, you know what,
Speaker 1: I never would have bought into this, but it turns
Speaker 1: out it was right and I was wrong. I'd like
Speaker 1: to think I could do that. I think you would.
Speaker 1: I like, Okay. Incontrovertible evidence then would have to be
Speaker 1: something like aliens landing at your house and saying like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: have you seen our buddies. They showed up maybe I
Speaker 1: don't know, you know, seventy earth years ago something around there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they checked their watch for seventy year years ago, and
Speaker 1: they're big fans of text stuff, and so they heard
Speaker 1: that we had done an episode. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: you're the kind of guy would go, huh, well yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I guess let me let me call my boss. I
Speaker 1: would be like some of them, all right, Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out I was a big fat head and I
Speaker 1: was wrong about everything. That's not everything. But also, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is true that there is at least there are
Speaker 1: several conspiracies that we're at work at Area fifty one,
Speaker 1: and we we've explored those, and I guess what what
Speaker 1: I would want people to take away from this is
Speaker 1: that there really is amazing strange science fiction action thriller
Speaker 1: movie level stuff there. It just may not be what
Speaker 1: people are claiming it is, right, That doesn't mean it's
Speaker 1: you know, not interesting. It certainly is, and it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's really again an evidence of human achievement for both
Speaker 1: an engineering side and just a secrecy keeping side, because
Speaker 1: it's really hard to keep those secrets. So I do
Speaker 1: suspect that they do that by managing how many people
Speaker 1: are allowed to know any one thing at any one time,
Speaker 1: otherwise you know, loose lips. So Ben, now that we've
Speaker 1: concluded these three episodes, please let our listeners know where
Speaker 1: they can find all of the things that you do
Speaker 1: here at how Stuff Works. Oh yeah, thank you Jonathan,
Speaker 1: and thank you Text Stuff listeners as well for having
Speaker 1: me over. Uh. You can find more of our episodes
Speaker 1: of Stuff they Don't Want You to Know on YouTube
Speaker 1: on iTunes, you can also find Jonathan and I on
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, which is our everyday science show. And you
Speaker 1: can find uh Scott who might be making appearance on
Speaker 1: here later, uh my compatriot on car Stuff and uh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, Jonathan and I are on a bunch of
Speaker 1: different shows. If you haven't checked out Forward Thinking or
Speaker 1: heard about it yet, then give give him a look.
Speaker 1: He's also on YouTube under that show Ben I ask
Speaker 1: you to plug your shows and you start plugging. Mind
Speaker 1: what a swell guy is there? There's no doubt. Well
Speaker 1: now why I have him on all the time? Right? Well,
Speaker 1: guys out there, if you have any questions about Area
Speaker 1: fifty one, or you have any stories you want to share,
Speaker 1: maybe your favorite conspiracy theory, or maybe you just want
Speaker 1: to know how something in the tech world works. You
Speaker 1: have an idea for a show that is is you know,
Speaker 1: just burning you up inside. You gotta let me know.
Speaker 1: Get in touch with me, My email address is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me
Speaker 1: a line on Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler. My handle at
Speaker 1: all three is tech stuff H s W and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com