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