Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey, Laron, Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. It is time for a tech Stuff Classic episode. This episode is actually a continuation of last week's classic episode. This one published on September two, thousand fourteen. It is titled The History of Area fifty one, Part two. So if you haven't listened to last week's classic episode, you should probably do that first. Area fifty one is it feels it feels like it's ironic to say this a famous secret facility, And so we kind of go through more about how Area fifty history unfolded in reality and really focusing on the well documented events that occurred at and around Area fifty one. Hope you enjoy The way history works is we like to think of it as there's a beginning, middle, and end of each thing, and then the next thing has a beginning, middle, and end when really everything is overlapping everything else. Yeah, it's that's that's exactly right. And I'm glad you said that. I was thinking about that earlier this week. If you've ever looked up historical characters who who lived in the same time period. It's it's fascinating. Yeah, and it can get really confusing really fast. Right, It's it's hard. It's hard to communicate how complex history is because we work really well understanding narratives. Right, but when you when you weave in so many narratives, that becomes like the ultimate Quentin Tarantino film. You can get lost. Yeah, but you are an explainer, extraordinary, how about that? So, so, I think that you can easily guide us through some stuff that might be might be a little confusing if you get it all at once, but take us through point by point, because I'll be honest with you, man, we're getting to my favorite part of the story. Yeah, here's here's where things get a little weird. Um. So, we had talked about the A twelve that had started. The first A twelve arrived at Are fifty one in nineteen sixty two and wouldn't really be tested until the following year. That's when pilots trained by the c i A or pilots who had joined the CIA, began to test these these aircraft at that same time, all the way back in nineteen sixty two. You had a project that ended up being called the D twenty one. That twenty one, by the way, where that number come from, Well, they had the A twelve and they figured having like an A twelve and a D twelve would be really confusing, so they just they just transpose those numbers to the A twelve and the D twenty one. This is when you realize how capricious the naming systems are. It's just you eventually like, ah, you know, I always thought those letters of numbers really had special designation. Not all the time. Oh, here's an idea, Jonathan. We if we end up ever doing top secret government work, I I hope that you and I could both threw our names in the hat to be the people who make up the code names. That'd be fantastic. And yeah, and and ultimately people will fear us because they know that if they if they do not please us, we will give them the worst code names. Yeah. Yeah, Also, uh, going back to it, sorry for that. Uh it's called the D twenty one instead of the A twelve. Then we know they transpose numbers to avoid, uh, to avoid too much similarity. But what's this D twenty one about? So this is this is where things are are pretty amazing. And the D twenty one was an unmanned vehicle. It was meant to be a spy plane that would not require a human pilot behind the controls. I mean, there would be a pilot controlling it, but they'd be controlling it remotely on the ound. So we are talking about this not an autonomous vehicle. I don't want to go so far as to say it's like some sort of robotic super thing that happened in two but we're talking about a remote controlled aerial vehicle that was essentially a jet. I mean, it's it was not like it was that much smaller than some of the other aircraft were talking about. It wasn't It wasn't like the size of a drone. You might go and get one of those little quad copters. It was significantly larger than that. It was amazing to me that it was this early. Now the reasons behind developing it make a lot of sense, because if you have a manned vehicle, then clearly you have a human life at risk whenever that vehicles in operation. Even if first we have to consider the fact that flying is can be dangerous. Flying a spy plane in particular, can be dangerous because the design may mean that it's difficult for you to have it take off or land safely, even if there's no enemy uh interference whatsoever during the mission, right, Yeah, and if you have to conduct evasive maneuvers, then there's not really a nice way to say it. You're in a lot of trouble. Yeah, I mean the we already mentioned in the previous episode that the YouTube plane is notoriously difficult to fly. So just with that alone, if you were able to have an unmanned version where you could get that same sort of reconnaissance ability but you don't put a pilot's life in danger, that's good. But on top of that, there's another reason that's that goes back to safety, but it's more about the safety of the country and not the pilot. Yeah, which means that if you have one of these aircraft and it's unmanned and it's shot down, there's no pilot. For the folks who shot down the aircraft, there's no pilot for them to capture and interrogate, so they're not going to get any other information apart from the actual workings of whatever the device was. So they might see that, you know, what kind of engine you're using or whatever, what sort of technology made it work, But they're not going to have a person that they can say, all right, how many other operatives are in the area, where did you fly from? Yeah, so that also, I mean, it's not completely um, it's not just something that's in concern for the pilot's well being. Uh, it's also a national security issue, which you know, it's not pleasant to talk about, but it's certainly something they had to keep in mind. And at this point sixty two, they're developing this early nineteen sixties. Uh, the USS are already knows about the you tube, and they're on the lookout for these vehicles I almost say creatures, but look out for these planes absolutely. And so this one in particular, was it was an an ambitious project. It wasn't just an unmanned drone, which already like I always think of the quad copters. It's just because the quad copters is such a popular consumer drone right now, and it's also kind of the design that we're seeing for stuff like the proposed Amazon delivery drones. This was this was a ramjet engine drone. We're talking about a super sonic vehicle. It's not meant to travel and speeds lower than that. In fact, you couldn't have this take off from a regular landing strip, you know, or or a runway. You had this mounted to a separate vehicle, like an A twelve. The A twelve would travel and start to reach supersonic speeds, and from that point you would then launch the D twenty one, which would already be traveling at a superspeed, know, a sonic supersonic speed, and it would just go from there. So this meant that they had a pretty risky launch sequence. I mean it meant you already had an aircraft that was manned that had to be traveling at this incredible speed before you even launched the unmanned vehicle during the test that the drones would actually land slash crash, usually on a nearby mountain, uh near Groom Lake during the actual tests, and so to retrieve it, they would send out another aircraft, usually I guess a helicopter, because it had to have some hovering capabilities, and they had para jumpers, but the jumpers wouldn't parachute. What they would do is they would lower down on lines from the aircraft hook the drone. You know, it had some you know, they would attach the line to the drone in some way, and then they would essentially tow the drones back to the facility so that you just didn't have these unmanned vehicles crashed on the side of mountains, which I'm sure would fuel even more speculation if they had been found by civilians, yeah, or god forbid, a rival government. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So so they were a cool idea, but like I said, it was really dangerous and kind of impractical. There's a high rate of attrition for these vehicles, just because I mean, think about it. We just named four big ifs in the takeoff, if the twelve survived, if the pilots cool, if it reaches the you know, if it reaches the speed sufficient to deploy, and if it deploys successfully. Yeah. And unfortunately, there was an accident in nineteen sixty six. It was a catastrophic failure. The drone, which I believe was top mounted onto an A twelve uh, ended up tilting downwards instead of upwards when it took off and cut the plane in half. Now, the two pilots inside that plane at this point, the the twelve was over the Pacific Ocean. It had flown out over the coast of California. The two pilots aboard the A twelve were able to eject successfully. However, one of the two tragically got caught up in his parachute line and drowned in the ocean. The other one had been rescued successfully. And the story is that Kelly Johnson, we talked about him in the first episode about Area fifty one. He's the guy from Lockheed who very much was the head of development at Area fifty one, this guy who designed the YouTube plane. Well, Kelly Johnson was so horrified at this accident. I mean, he really personally took it very very hard. That he reportedly shut down the project and then returned the project funding to the Air Force and the CIA, which is sort of unheard of in the world of contracting. Yeah, that I had heard that. The phrase I read was emotionally and impulsively returned the funding. So I mean it was clear that he truly cared about the people who were working for him. So um, And that's something I think that's also important to remember is that we often in these stories we d personalized, dehumanize the folks who are involved in it. Because so much secrecy is there, we don't really know that much about the people involved. But these are people, right, and they're probably friends. They hang out, they probably eat together, things like you would do with your friends. Yeah, So it's it's good to have this, this touchstone to just remind ourselves that while we're talking about this, and while it lends itself to the whole discussion of shadowy government projects, ultimately we're not talking about these giant organizations that are somehow sentient on their own and acting without direction, their actual people behind, not some faceless octopus. But no, that's that's the S four facility, not area right, faceless octopus lake. Look it up, you know the that got a little love Craft dift. That's fair. So in nineteen six seven, a big thing happens, right, because the mission that we have always been trying to avoid in the United States at this time is to never have an aircraft captured, right. But conversely, we want to capture aircraft, right, and in fact we were able to do that. The very first MiG twenty one plane arrived at Groom Lake. So that's a Soviet aircraft. This is then the era of the USSR UM. You know, I I grew up in the eighties, so I grew up when the USSR was still a thing. And even at that point, even maybe especially in the eighties, something like the thought of a MiG twenty one being in US hands was a big big deal because it meant that we could see what are our opponent in the Cold War was capable of. You could see what the military capabilities of this aircraft were. And it meant that the Area fifty one became a testing ground not just for developing technology here in the United States, but also for foreign technology, so that we could really understand what the capabilities were and therefore design our stuff to meet and exceed those capabilities. So it becomes kind of this this game of uh, they get one square ahead, then we have to jump two squares ahead, and and what are they able to do? In what can't they do? And we're continually verse engineering. Right. So, with the arrival of Soviet aircraft at the Groom Lake facility, because this MiG would not be the only one, there would be other Soviet aircraft that would join it throughout the years, the pilots begin to have a new name for the restricted airspace, which in our last episode you may remember we talked about being the groom box or just the box. Now it's called Red Square because now it is the space the one place in the United States where you might see Soviet aircraft lying overhead. And again that starts to fuel a lot of conspiracy theories, because you'd see a jet that doesn't look like anything you would have seen here in the US, and you see it fly overhead, and you wonder, what the heck was that thing, and and that starts to you know, you start to fill in the blanks as much as you can. And if you're a veteran, then you say, uhlane, you go back to your to your your house, and you sit down your typewriter and you type up the first draft of Red Dawn, which one of us would reach that first. But of course with this they immediately begin uh retooling and working on new iterations of stealth craft. Right, right, so they're earlier there. Earlier plan had been reduced radar footprint, but mainly go go so fast that people can't shoot you down right. You know, that's a pretty simple plan, but it can be really effective. However, it can mean also that the aircraft itself is really dangerous, so they start looking at other ways of creating stealth technology, and engineers over at Lockheeds start to develop something called Have Blue which was a stealth aircraft, and it was a proof of concept aircraft. It wasn't meant to be a full production vehicle. Only to Have Blue aircraft were ever made, and they started as kind of ended up being a predecessor to the F one seventeen Nighthawk, which has another name that became famous in the early nineties that would be the stealth fighter. So this is the even though it was not really a fighter by the way, just the seal craft it was meant to. It was meant it was that air took around combat vehicle, not an air to air vehicle, which is what you would typically call a fighter, versus what the stealth what the Nighthawk actually was. So, and this is the one that if you look at the pictures that has all those crazy funky angles on it that are meant to deflect radar so that the returning radar signals don't go back to the receiving station, which means that the receiving station doesn't get an accurate representation of where the aircraft is. Right, they get something, but it's not anything you can concretely trace, and hopefully in theory, not something you can shoot at. Right, right, that's the whole point of it. So they have blue aircraft, uh, is that that predecessor, And so a lot of stealth technology was pioneered at Area fifty one Spade in the testing phase, because again a lot of this stuff would end up being built at Lockheed's other facilities and then transported over to Area fifty one for testing. We'll be back with more about the history of Area fifty one in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. Now we're gonna skip ahead quite a bit. That was seventy seven with they have blue aircraft and eight two you have Tacit Blue, which it does? It does Tacit Blue. Come on, let's go fight the kaiju um. It's a still aircraft that was developed by Northrop. So this one was not a Lockheed aircraft, was a Northrop aircraft and that's also tested room like. Only one was ever built and it was retired in nineteen eighty five. So from two to eighty five this thing existed. Now we didn't know about it until nineties six, so this thing had been out of commission for more than a decade before the government said, oh, by the way, yeah we had this thing. It was a forerunner of the stealth technology that we use today. It's called Tacit Blue, and guys, you know, this is an audio podcast, which in some ways is great because it means you can listen to it whenever you're doing anything like jogging or driving and you're not missing it out on anything. But it also means that we can't do it justice by saying this thing looks weird. Go google tacit Blue and take a look at this aircraft, because it does not look like other aircraft. It just it's very oddly designed and shaped. So it certainly can tell you that the experiments and stealth technology were uh, they went in all sorts of you're looking at it right now, aren't you, isn't it? Yeah? It looks like if you've seen a sci fi film made in the seventies about how crazy the two thousands, so you're gonna be yea they would fly. You could see that plane flying overhead during clockwork orange. Oh yeah, because with all the white uh, the white furniture that's in that. Yeah. So in nineteen eighty four, Area fifty one, the Groom Lake Facility petitions Congress for an additional eighty nine thousand acres of land. Meanwhile, you've got armed guards who patrol the area, essentially patrolling that additional eighty nine thousand acres, turning people away, even though it wouldn't be till seven that the request would actually be approved by Congress. So technically they were kind of acting like the land was theirs before it officially had become theirs. And you might wonder, well, why were they asking for all this land? I mean, besides being able to expand outward for the testing purposes. Part of it was that Area fifty one, by the eighties was starting to become one of those things that people were getting more and more interested in. Right exactly because at this time we see as some of the what will later become the big known conspiracy theories about Area fifty one or about Groom Lake. We see these taking roots route because there are now people who are able to say, well, I heard some rumors, I live nearby, I drove out there, and sure enough somebody showed up, uh and they'll say, I don't know, was that the United Nations or was that the US government? And they and they drove me away, And so now it begins to look like a real thing, and you still don't know exactly what's going on. Yeah, and there were a couple of of points, like natural um hills, natural ledges that were not too far from the facility that originally we're not we're not within that that border, right, so you could crawl up there. Yeah, if you hiked out there, which would be quite a hike anyway, but because you know, and you'd have to be pretty well equipped to do it, but you could, in theory, go and hike out it one of these little points of interest, set up a telescope or binoculars, and maybe not get a real good idea of what was going on, but at least see that there's activity going on. And especially if you're there towards dusk and you're looking out I mean, if you're looking out in the daytime, it's hard anyway, because you get a lot of distortion from the heat, sound, the desert. But at nighttime, if you're out there looking at it and everything's lit up, you could you can see that stuff is going on. You might even see aircraft taking off and landing, although you know, you might not have a real good look at what they how they're shaped. But it was one of those things that became a concern. And so while they didn't have official ownership of that land, they were discouraging people from being there. And by day, I mean, uh, some folks in camouflage. We'll talk about them in the Mythology episode because because they have they have a reputation, like they're called the Camo dudes. We'll talk about that. And it's not just not just a couple, there's actually quite a few of Almo. Yeah, it's our teaser for part three exactly. So some citizens also point out that it's not strictly legal for them to be told to leave land that doesn't belong to the facility. You know, it's like the land has belong to you, so therefore, what what authority do you have to tell me to leave this place? Um, which that would end up fueling the facility really petitioning to get access to this this right. And and you know, realistically, if somebody were to go to uh Quarter or to local law enforcement and say, hey, what's going on here. There is no chance that it would go anywhere, and the those suspicions is very interesting. Those suspicions and those concerns were finally verified in Yeah. So all through this time the government is still saying there's nothing out there, or that they cannot comment on it, or that it's a weather station, that anything other than what it actually is. Right, and internally, at the same time, they're telling each other, we have to keep security at the maximum level, the most unreasonable level, because people cannot find out about this, and if we slip at all, someone will, yeah, and then lives. National security, everything's at stake. So that included telling companies that operated satellites, hey, this this area of Nevada, you can't photograph that. You cannot image that, and either they would prevent companies from imaging that whole area of Nevada, or if those images were gathered, they would demand to have them censored so that the facility itself would not show up on satellite photography, which worked fine until when a Soviet satellite flew overhead and took images of very fifty one. Here's the thing that the CIA finds a little frustrating. They do not have authority over the of the union. If they did, their jobs would be so much easier during this time. But because the Soviets ended up flying a satellite overhead taking images, it meant that the cat was out of the bag. So those images would end up being published in an article for Popular Science, which was the first time that most people got a real look and granted a far overhead look of what area fifty one actually looks like. You haven't had a few people try and sneak some photos here and there from a great distance. But one thing, if you're really far out and you're taking a picture of a facility that's way the heck out there, you have no sense of scale. You have no real idea of what you know. You just see a bunch of bumps and you're like, yeah, there's clearly something there, but I don't have any feel for what it is. This gave you an idea of what the actual layout was. You could see hangars, you could see where the housing units where, you could see the the the runways, so it actually showed what the general layout was. Now, granted, that's not good enough for some people. We'll talk about that in the Mythology and a lot of people saying, well, what do you not see? So now though as you as you said, uh, the Pandora boxes open, the cat is out of the bag, and this is the beginning of a well, depending on what you what perspective you're looking at this from, is either a watershed moment or a disastrous moment because now we see, uh, people who are not Soviets start to go public. Yeah. Yeah, in this case, it's a story that that involves tragedy. So in nine there was an Area fifty one employee named Robert Frost who passed away, and he wasn't the only one. There were other There was another employee who passed away and several who reported having serious health issues because what they had. Their story was that what they had to do was deal with um uh various pieces of equipment and fuel and things like that and destroy them by incinerating the incinerating them by essentially burning them in a pile, and then sifting through all of that pile, burning anything that was left over because the smallest trace could give someone an indication of what was going on at the facility. So they couldn't keep anything. They couldn't they couldn't send anything out to be destroyed. They had to destroy it all on site. Well, a lot of those materials were toxic, and even if they weren't toxic before you set them on fire, they became toxic once they were burning. So it meant that a lot of these employees were exposed to toxic elements. And they apparently according to the allegations laid by the former employees and and there's you know, their former spouses who lost their spouses as that part of this, Mrs Frost in this case. Yeah, so they have at least alleged that the workers were not given access to appropriate gear that would protect them from the toxicity. And in fact, they were essentially told, we don't have anything for you. This has to be burned. Burn it. So they ended up grouping together and filing a lawsuit against the government and they said, you know, this is unconscionable that this happened, these these conditions existed, and they sought damages against the government. Well, the government's response was that because of the nature of what goes on at this facility, they could not go forward with this um this lawsuit because it would it would mean revealing things that were state secrets that could endanger national security, and the judges have agreed with this and dismissed cases on the basis that pursuing such a case would be a danger to national security, which has led critics to point out, and I think rightfully so, that this gives the government a get out of jail free card, get out of accountability free cards. Sure, if you are able to claim that whatever you did you did in the name of national security and that having to defend yourself would put that security at risk, and that means you are no longer accountable, that's a terrible precedent. Yeah, it's it's dangerous. And also on the other side, there is a legitimate concern because I think this is a big misstep on Uncle Sam's part because let's just construct the speculative situation here. How did these people end up getting exposed these toxic chemicals? They said they did not have informed consent. Essentially, does that tie into the need to know stuff? Were they concerned that if they said what these chemicals are and their toxicity, this would somehow get back to a foreign power. Yeah, and we've gotten to a point now where everyone knows what is going on at a high level at a right. You know, Area fifty one is a testing grounds for new technology, specifically aircraft technology, whether it's manned or unmanned. We know that that's a fact. So the question then becomes, well, couldn't we have this case framed in such a way where that where the specifics remain top secret. We don't need to get into the specifics of what the vehicles were. We we just need to address whether or not in fact workers were exposed to toxic conditions without without sufficient resources to deal with it. Law. Yeah, that that's really all we have to to focus on, and then these sort of questions could be answered that way. But that's not how it played out, and in fact, uh, these things have become even more of a concern in the post nine eleven world where transparency is even harder to come by in certain fields of government. So, you know, you do have to balance out the transparency to the national security, But when it comes down to people's lives and saying well, you know this, this is this is an example of where we could say the government is wronging the citizens that it's supposed to represent. Then that that's a whole other question. Now, it could end up being that the government ends up accommodating various workers and families and other ways that are very quiet that we don't know about. That could happen, but we don't know that, right, and the the implications I've seen suggest that that had not happened. But moving on, Uh, you know, it's it's I certainly don't want to be the one who has to make the decisions, so I argue like this is a simple thing, but clearly it's a very complex matter. So in every fifty one would acquire two sites. These are two of those sites that I had talked about being kind of a problem for Area fifty one. Uh, there was Freedom Ridge and white Side's Peak. Both of those had been popular spots for people, and by popular, I mean a few times a year, so folks would go out there with binoculars. Um, these have been spots where people would go and try and get a distant look. Yeah, I think the closest you can get to Area fifty one right now. And I may even be wrong about this, It might not be that accurate at this point, but I believe it's twenty six miles away right so you cannot snatch a photograph and that's what you mean, there's legally yeah, yeah, yeah, if you were to trespass, it would be really stupid. And we're saying, we're not saying do it. In fact, Jonathan, both you and I are emphatically saying, don't ever go there unless you are specifically invited told by someone who is in charge. If you work there, go ahead and go. It's your job. So um yeah, But at any rate, it's it's definitely one of those things where if you are not invited, you do not go are So in two thousand thirteen, there was a declassified ci A document, actually a group of documents that referred to Area fifty one by that very name. Again, may have been a mistake that that part hadn't been just blacked out. But Jonathan, this this two thousand thirteen thing, which is very recent. It happened several several years after another point, a legislative point that I think is very important to underline. With some people's favorite presidents, some people's least favorite president, our boy saxophonist extraordinaire, William Clinton, Yeah, good old Bill So Clinton had signed an act into law that puts Area fifty one beyond investigation and legislation to preserve national security, which means there were a lot of different organizations that were trying to get access out of out of various concerns. You had people who were concerned for the health of the workers, like the lawsuits that we had mentioned. There are also environmental all concerns, so environmentalists and environmental agencies that wanted to make sure that the facility was following appropriate measures to make to make sure it wasn't polluting the area, wasn't affecting water tables, wasn't affecting the ecosystem. Because when you hear here things like they're burning toxic materials, that raises a lot of flags. And Clinton's Act essentially said it doesn't matter. You're not gonna You're not gonna get the clearance to investigate this, So whether something is going on or not, you're never gonna know. And essentially every president since then has backed that up, because again, it's one of those national security issues where you say, all right, I have to make a call. Do I call it on the side of national security, which a lot of people think is kind of a cop out answer. Yeah, Like it's again, like it's a way to just avoid accountability. That's how it can often be perceived. And maybe the truth is that, no, it really is a matter of national security. It's just hard to appreciate when you don't know, right and you can't know because if you did know, it would no longer be safe. And you don't know what you don't know, the old unknown unknown, Yeah, exactly, So, Uh, well, we I don't know. I'm pretty I'm pretty firm on what I don't know. It's it's a lot your authority on what you Yeah, I could write a book on what I don't know. But what you do know. Um, what we have we've looked at here so far is that, um, hopefully we've we've done a pretty bang up job of going through the facts. You know enough, I think to give us a hypothetical or high level look at what it would be like if Jonathan Strickland worked at Groom Lake and and and just uncle Sam, if you're listening, he doesn't I do not know. But here here's kind of what it would sound like according to the few accounts that we have that seemed credible. Keep in mind there are a lot of people who have claimed to have worked at Groom Lake at one time or another who may or may not have actually worked at Groom Lake. But let's say that. Let's say i'm i'm I'm working there. This is kind of what the perhaps the the orientation video would go. Hi, so you've decided to work at Groom Lake. Welcome to the team. When you turn in on Monday morning at the McCarron Airport in Las Vegas, you'll go straight to a secret area. Well, you'll board a Janet aircraft. Janet is the call sign. It's just a white plane with a red stripe. Then it's just a quick johnt to the airport over at Area fifty one. You'll get off the aircraft and go straight to work. Don't look around because all that other stuff is secret. You will work exactly on the projects you've been assigned and on nothing else. In your spare time, maybe you'd like to play some baseball, perhaps tennis, go for a swim, or visit a wonderful cafeteria. All the amenities you can imagine are available at Area fifty one. So that would be kind of the beginning. Yeah, that was great. I hope I wasn't, but um, but yeah, everything you're saying is is spot on? These seven thirty seven's are always called Janets. Yeah, it's it's that's the call sign, so people refer to it as Janet Airlines, But these are that's not an official company name, it's that they contracted seven thirty seven's. If you want to be a flight attendant on one of these, you have to go through the same sort of background check you would if you were to work at Area one. In fact, you would have to make sure that you got that top secret classification clearance because you were going to come into contact with folks who are working on top secret projects. So you have to be you have to prove that you're trustworthy. It's time for another quick break, but we will be right back with more about the history of Area fifty one. There are, like I said, some amenities. They have a gym, they've got a movie theater. The pool they use is mostly used for training purposes for pilots to train for what would happen if they eject over water. Yea, So things like new flight suits that are designed for high altitude flying. You know, they had to make new flight suits because people, pilots were suddenly flying at altitudes that no human had ever gone to before, or at least not I had gone to for a sustained amount of time. Yeah, so they had to they had to say, well, what happens if they have to eject over water? Can they get out? Is those suit going to weigh them down? And the way they tested is they'd essentially have pilots fall from a great height into a pool while wearing one of those bots, and they've tested out that way, so um so, probably not going for a pleasure swim, although from what I understand, some of the some of the people who are running who are running the programs, actually did have their pilots go for a swim first before going on a a mission, just to help kind of kind of focus themselves. So it all depends. The food, like I said, was supposedly really good apparently, and I have no idea if this is true, but apparently if the test flight involved going to some remote location like Maine, the pilots would sometimes bring back lobsters and so you would end up being able to have fresh lobster them and caught that morning in a desert in Nevada. But now, of course, for people who are listening to the series, you notice that we've mentioned, the early planes were very, very difficult and in some cases impossible to land to stop over. So it just makes you think about how far this technology has gone, because it makes me think where did they land these planes? Where? If you're working on a top secret aircraft, where do you land in Maine where you could go pick up some lobster and come back. I mean I heard the story, but I just don't know how that worked. And how do you give a lobster security clearance? Right? I mean those guys loose mandible sink ships. But uh and and also I mentioned that Area fifty one has a black budget project. So there have been several people who have reported that the way they were paid was in cash, that they were not given a check, because a check would mean that it's traceable to a specific organization, whatever that might be, whether it's Lockheed or it's c I A or whatever. Which that that happens in Yeah, yeah, No, you have you have people who collect intelligence who just pour over paperwork. Not all spying involves dressing in a tuxedo and betting on black I mean some spying is pouring over countless documents trying to look for hints at what's going on underneath. In fact, yeah, yeah, a great deal. Of course, a lot of it now has been relegated to algorithms, which means that the poor clerks don't have to do it anymore, but at any rate. So you might get paid in cash, and you might be told that whenever you sign for anything, you have to use an assumed name Josh Clark. When I sign everything, Josh doesn't realize this be co signed alone from my house. So, um, that's totally not true. Uh so, yeah, the it's they take their secrecy seriously all the way from the very high level we're talking like all that that restricted airspace that goes all the way up to space to how they pay the employees. Now, that doesn't say that doesn't mean that everything we've said today is accurate for how things work at Area fifty one today. Most of the information we have dates from folks who are discussing things that happen back in the sixties or seventies. Because they take the secrecy so serious lee and because people are signing over oaths that say they will not under any circumstances share the information, it means that we don't have up to date information. Now, I imagine that most of what's going on at Area fifty one these days probably involves a lot more onmanned drones. I think that's probably one of the big things that are under development there, and it really since it is an aircraft facility, I imagine that that's mostly what we're seeing. You know, there are a lot of people who suggest that other types of UH technology are under development Area fifty one, but that's really not what it's set up to do, right. Yeah, when you set up a facility like that there, it goes back to us talking about the specialization of these various aircraft. The base is the same. A base has to specialize. It can't be all things to all projects. So, for instance, another an unmanned UH space project that's going on now, the X there five B. I think it is UH, and I'm gonna double check while we're talking here. UH. That is something that goes into space. It requires a platform capable of launching it into near Earth orbit, right, So it was how would you do that? You wouldn't be able to do that at a facility like Area fifty one that doesn't have it, and if it did have it, you would you know, you would have to be further out than twenty five miles to not notice exactly. So a lot of the I think a lot of the drones that you'll that would be under development at Area fifty one would either be lower altitude drones or they would be like the old D twenty one where it was launched from a larger vehicle. Right, Yeah, and we're talking about U A v. S at this point, the Predator or something. Yeah, but the which is a name for you A v folks, not the not the movie, right they that's actually uh, Area fifty one is where they conceived and shot the Predator. It's also the fantastic location for the film Into Pay Stay. Uh sorry, that's okay. So we are not done with Area fifty one yet. We have covered the history as much of the real history as is known that we can talk about. Um. There of course a lot more details on all of these stories, and there's some fantastic books that have been written about the subject where people have meticulously researched all the available information and piece together as much as they could to get as as close to a full story as you can get without being on the inside. But we aren't done there because in our next episode, Ben and I are going to uh, we're going to explore the mythology a Very fifty one and the fact that you know, in in pop culture, we think of it as not just a place where spy technology was tested or and is still tested, but a place where other worldly technology may resign. Right, yes, And that goes along with some of the some of the very very range things that you have probably heard in your own day to day life about Area fifty one. When we say otherworldly, we don't just mean this dimension either. Yeah, it could. It could be pretty weird, and they range from things that you you could say, I can see why people believe that too. How is how was this ever an idea that someone had? Uh, There's a pretty pretty dynamic range there, So I look forward to having that discussion with you. Ben. We're going to end our recording for today and and conclude, but um, just just out of curiosity before we close the door on the the as much of the real story of Very fifty one as we can know, what do you think? What do you think about? What are your thoughts when you hear Area fifty one? Okay, yeah, thank you? The the gist of Area fifty one. We've we've explored us some of the effects that secrecy have on people's the way they frame questions and the way they address you. UM, I think it's clear that there is a grain of truth to some of the beliefs, unfounded as they may be about Area fifty one. We do know that there is secret technology being tested there, absolutely right. We know that it is. UM. It's it's not unreasonable to assume that it is several years ahead of what we would consider current publicly known pioneering research. And I would add to that that UM, when we when we say that there is a grain of truth to these things, what we're talking about more is similar to a piece of sand getting inside of CShell building a pearl. There's so much embellishment that occurs that at some point people will consciously dismiss the actual explanation. Where there's so much excitement about the embellishment and people fall in love with these stories that it can be difficult at times for them to admit when we say, oh, we have found the grain of sand called Project Mogul or something like right, and so as a result, we we run into what really is a new mythology that perpetuates itself, and honestly, the government is not helping with that at all. But then, to be fair, I think the government has a vested interest in letting that go as long as it needs to go, because if that means that the attention is put on something that is not real while they can work on very real but very secret projects, it benefits, right, Like, there's there's not a whole lot of incentive to say you are completely wrong. And here's why when they could say we, you know, we have no comment on that, which gives them the benefit of saying we didn't. We didn't confirm it, we didn't really deny it strongly. I there, at the same time, we can continue our work on the very secret stuff that we actually need to develop. Um. I personally think that such a such a facility like Area fifty one, in a world where spying is uh necessary evil, that it's absolutely the perfect, the perfect facility for that because it has stood the test of time. I mean, you know, the idea of something that was built in the fifties still maintaining this level of mystique, you know, five more than five decades later, is pretty incredible, So it's it's pretty It's a fascinating subject to me. I love the idea of these engineers working to meet seemingly unachievable goals. I mean, the idea of the idea of creating an aircraft that could defy radar was was a real eye opener. And you know, you've got to keep in mind that the United States had that technology years before we ever had any public unveiling of it. So that's pretty exciting stuff. And uh, I love the idea of it. I do think that the operation of it lends itself to some potential misuses of power. I really do think that this, this use of national security to kind of um distance yourself from any culpability is a little distasteful. Well yeah, I mean, national security is the way I like to think of it. Often in the post nine eleven world, national security has been become the equivalent of hitting base in the Great Game of Tag than this national discourse. So one one other thing that I wanted to ask you, and again, as always, thank you for having me on the show. I wanted to ask you, do you think that people should be people who let me phrase this correctly, people I wanted to ask you, what do you think about the scrutiny regarding Area of Fife or Groom Lake, because it's pretty well known right now, so I think that the question is what else is out there? And my question is do you think that there are other lesser known places where um, not the bulk of the work, but other work is taking place? Absolutely? Oh yeah. I mean Area fifty one is really a testing ground. So if you're talking about actual research and development to the point of before you even built something, where you're just figuring out prototypes. There are facilities all over the United States that are involved in that in some way or another, Like Lockheed has has areas that they have famously disguised from the air so that you couldn't see what was going on or where where even a building was. But they're not the only one by a long shot. I mean there's their companies and organizations um, as well as as actual military facilities that are just as secretive as Area fifty one is, but perhaps don't have the same level of mystique, right. I mean, when you're talking about aircraft and you're seeing weird things fly overhead, that definitely brings some questions to mind. If it's a facility that you can't really see and all the stuff they do is ground related, it's not going to gain that same level of attention. And that wraps up this classic episode, the History of Area fifty one, Part two. Next week we're going to go into some of the more creative theories and hypotheses about what was going on at Area fifty one, So make sure you tune into that. And if you have suggestions for topics I should cover and current Tech Stuff episodes, reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. The handle for the show is Text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again. Release. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.