Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with a classic episode this evening, a true story. A while back, we looked around the world and we realized we mentioned this on the show in episodes or even strange news or listener mail or interviews earlier. The majority of human beings now live in urban areas. Most people live in cities. That trend is probably going to continue. But you can't go to every city.
Yeah, that's right. Not all cities are created equal. In fact, countries throughout the world are home to cities that, in one way or another, don't exist.
One of these is Oakridge, Tennessee. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to mention that because it is in the United States, these are not as far flung nor as rare as one might assume.
Yeah, so let's explore hidden cities that you can't go to in this classic episode of Stuff they Don't want you to Know.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
They call me Ben we are joined as always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decond. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Got a confession for you, Matt. All right, I did my quarterly dive into our podcast reviews about every three months. I do that.
I noticed your Twitter request for reviews.
Oh yeah, and following me on Twitter.
Yeah yeah, No, I just saw it through the conspiracy stuff.
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. I wanted to thank everybody who took the time to make or to write a review, whether good or bad or simply middling. We really do appreciate it, and shout out to our longtime listeners, many of whom I recognize just based on the way you talk. In the review especially, there were a couple of great ones where someone said, hey, I hope this gets you guys one step further away from being fired, and I thought, wow,
you have been listening a long time. People like great stuff to say about you, Matt, and about Noel, and about you as well, Paul Mission Control Decands. So thanks to everybody sincerely who checked in and gave us a rating, even the people who for one reason or another gave us one star because the facts that we presented about a specific issue did not jibe with their opinions. Got you, Thank you for taking the time.
Just feels like two dudes at a bar kicking it one star. That sounds terrible.
Did you pull them up? Are you reading what?
Yeah?
No, seriously, I mean, without spending too much time on it. It's uh, We're very fortunate for every listener, and we're grateful for your time. I have to ask, and this is something that you and I have talked about, I think a little bit before off air. I have to ask, Matt, are you, in your personal life a fan of maps, cartography stuff like that.
Yeah? I mean my wall is just covered with maps of video game worlds. Really yeah, But you know, in the real world it's for some reason not as appealing to me, though I do love knowing, let's say, within the world of Skyrim, like where particular towns are with relation to the Giant Mountain.
This is so ridiculous. I have been playing. I'm at the level of Skyrim on my replay where I am just trying to find every location.
Oh yeah, no, I you have to do that.
Have you found on every location?
Yeah?
I don't know if I have every so often, like the numbers don't jive up yet.
Yeah, I remember taking that it's not an achievement. What is it called the skill or whatever? At some point where it reveals all locations on the map to you. That was one of one of my.
First playthroughs, though in Skyrim.
I think it is Skyrim. Maybe it's a different one. I don't know. I've played so many at this point.
Yeah, I don't know if it's on Skyrim, but if it is, I am excited.
I'm also fallout. That's a fallout.
That's a Fallout thing, but still Bethesda, right, Yeah, I like you. I'm a fan of maps, a fan of cartography, and I think a lot of our fellow listeners are as well. I'm one of those people who has you know. At my house, I have a world map where I can put the little pins in. Shout out to Mitch Hedberg for his brilliant world map joke, which I will not impersonate here. I'm also a fan of very old maps.
I have prints of the Perie Reese map that you and I covered in a previous episode, and I have a collection of out of date globes which are also very interesting once you get to the Middle East, once you get to Russia, the Balkan areas and so on.
You you are a fascinating person.
Ben, What do you mean, Well, we have some of those some of those globes still here in the office today.
Oh.
Sure, it's an interesting way to look at the story of humanity. And regardless of what kind of trends we see in maps and on globes over time, we do see one specific trend which has never been violated, as never abated. It is the trend of our species to construct increasingly larger, more dense urban areas. As we record today's episode, humanity is officially an urban species.
Right, Yeah, we are. We move towards those places, even if it's on the outskirts, in the suburban areas. As of twenty sixteen, more than four billion people lived in these things that we would consider to be urban areas, and there are only three point four billion people living in what we would consider to be rural areas outside of these bigger, established places.
Oh, and we should we should retroactively say this is the here are the facts part of the show. That's right, Everything that you're hearing for this part of for this act of today's episode is indeed true. You're absolutely right, Matt. As of twenty sixteen, there are already more people living
in cities than there were in rural areas. This explosive migrational trend is set to continue by twenty fifty, assuming we don't blow ourselves up or encounter like a pandemic, right, assuming that we don't find ourselves in the midst of a catastrophic water war.
We will, but let's pretend.
Let's pretend, Okay, let's be let's be a little bit naive about it. So everything goes okay until twenty fifty. If everything goes more or less alright, then by twenty to fifty, two thirds of our species will live in urban areas, technically about sixty eight percent. So, whether you love them or whether you hate them, it seems cities are set to become one of humanity's most popular inventions. And it's interesting to think of a city as an invention.
We don't because it's so normalized, it's so ancient. A city is now just a place, But at some point people invented it, you know what I mean.
Yeah, the concept of having one centralized area where people can coexist generally with you know, some kind of castle or stronghold or something to protect near the center, right, or at least somewhere strategically within that place, and then the homes and everything in the places of business all shoot up around it.
Right, Yeah, exactly. And this is this is an interesting distinction too, because what is the difference between you know, an agglomeration of longhouses and a town or a town and a village or a village. And of course it's big because in the city, regardless of how you want to classify a city or an urban area, and there are a couple of different definitions out there, we do have enough of a grasp on this phenomenon that we
can describe it on a global scale. Currently, the North American continent is the most industrialized out of all the continents. As of twenty eighteen, about eighty two percent of this continent's population lives in an urbanized area. Eighty two percent. So if you are listening to this show and you happen to not be living in one of those dense agglomerations, and congratulations, because you are an increasingly rare person generally speaking on this continent.
Yeah, well, and then if let's say you're living in Latin America or somewhere in the Caribbean, you are not far behind, only one percent less at eighty two percent people within those populations live in something you know called an urban area. And you know what makes sense, interestingly enough in places in the Caribbean, because if you think of the amount of land mass that you actually have there, you can imagine how people would just end up moving towards some of the more populated areas.
That's a really good point.
And for especially for the types of businesses that exist in a lot of in a lot of those areas, you need other people to be around to sell things too.
Yeah, that's a really good point. And surprisingly, only about seventy four percent of Europeans can say the same, which shocked me because the you know, the rise of industry began earlier in Europe than it did in the US. It's just surprising that only seventy four percent. I guess because of the circumstances of my travels in Europe, I've always seen it as a place with little wilderness, and I know that's not true, especially the further east you go.
Yeah, well, you know, all of this is it's not discounting, but it's not taking into account micro trends that occur, you know, within like one city, Oh yeah, some people migrating away from that city or more people then like for a period of time and then getting an injection. I'm thinking of a place like Detroit.
Exactly, the depopulation of Detroit.
Yeah, but then then kind of a repopulation in certain areas of Detroit, and then as that's gonna you know, hopefully flourish in the coming decades.
Yeah, here's hoping. I would love to see the rise of Detroit, you know, a reboot of the city. But people will also tell you that rumors of Detroit's demise have been greatly exaggerated. You know, sometimes the terrible things we see on the news are just purposely made to be terrible things because that's what keeps people's attention, right.
Yeah, I don't have much to add on that, agreed.
I feel like we're on the same page with that one. But it may also surprise you go into your earlier statement, Matt, it may surprise some of our listeners to know that about sixty eight percent of Oceana's population is urbanized and there you know, I think back to what you were saying about the Caribbean archipelagoes and islands. You know, it's a matter of scarcity of land in Oceana at least.
Yeah, and yeah, the natural wonders of a lot of those places you want to protect as well. So you end up just kind of squished together in one major area.
That makes sense. And now, of course, for our finale in this in this list, we have to mention the two biggest populated continents, Asia and Africa. They come in second and last place, respectively. Around half of Asia's population lives in cities, forty three percent of Africa's population live in urban areas. And as you know, as we like to point out, both Asia and Africa are huge, huge places filled with this incredible variety of ethnicity, of community,
of culture. It's beyond apples and oranges, you know what I mean. So these numbers only count as a cohesive thing if we're looking at the metric of just people on a continent.
Yeah, it's about seventeen full fruit stands worth, right, per per continent.
Yeah, Matt did the math of this, The fruit.
Math worked it out.
So obviously this is not a static number, and it shouldn't surprise anybody to learn that those last two continents, renamed Asia and Africa, are also projected to experience the largest growth in urbanization as we approach twenty fifty. And this leads us, This leads us back to you, our hypothetical but hopefully real listener, who has grown up in or has moved to a rural area. We have to ask, what is the future of these increasingly abandoned rural areas.
That's a story for another day, but today we're going to give you this look at cities across the world as a way of a pro another question. As we hurtle toward the extinction of privacy, the normalization of mass surveillance, and a future where opulence may well be defined as simply having a decent view from your apartment or a
small backyard with a garden. It seems we will soon live in a world without strangers, a crowded cognitive space where everything is public, everything is urban, and the maps of the future show us small concentrations of humanity, islands of concrete and steel, separated by vast gulfs of what would appear to be nothing to a city dwell er. Of course it will be biodiversity. Hopefully there will be agriculture things of that nature.
Yeah, it's going to be wastes of fire and acid water, right, I'm digging it right, But the domes over the cities will protect us at least temporarily.
All praise the dome m h yeah.
Yeah. Well here's the thing though, there are all those maps that we're like talking about, that we're thinking about in the future. They're gonna have the big places. You know, you're gonna your your London's are still going to be on there.
Uh, you know, your your Mumbais.
You know for sure your Mumbais, all all your different places that are massive known entities will be there. But there's one thing that probably won't be on your on your maps then even twenty five years, thousand years in the future. Mill maybe in a thousand years, but in the future, there are still gonna be places that will never make it to a map, places that would be considered an urban area, a city even but won't show up.
That's right, there's a bit of a bait and switch. We're not talking about normal cities. Now, what are we talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. That's correct, as conspiratorial as it may sound, the world is full of secret cities, and attempting to enter these cities may cost you your life. Picture this. There are entire cities, metropolis level cities that
are not villages. They're not puttering communes where everybody follows one person who had some sort of purported spiritual experience.
We're talking about large collections of multiple story buildings, huge buildings that are just somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
With populations of hundreds of thousands of people. In some cases, these are cities that do not officially exist in one capacity or another. And what's more, we've been building these cities for longer than you might want to think. Some cities started off as secrets, only to be classified later. Others remain closed to the majority of humanity as we record today. Let's start with a safe, kind of bucolic historic example, something relatively innocuous nowadays, and it'll be close
to home for a lot of our fellow listeners. That is a little place called oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Oh yes, oak Ridge, that has connections to New York in some weird way. We'll get to that in a moment. So, about seventy five years ago, the government in these here United States, they took possession of around sixty thousand acres in East Tennessee. Now officially this occurred on September nineteenth, nineteen forty two. There was a kernel there Leslie Groves.
This guy just kind of looked at the map, maybe took it, had some people take a trip out, and then said, yeah, this is it, this is what we want. And there wasn't anything, you know, particularly extraordinary about this area, this huge swath of land. Even today, you know, if you're looking back, you're reading about this, historians try and figure out exactly like what this guy saw, but they're still unsure.
Yeah, they can make a couple of guesses. We know that this site and what would become Oakridge, Tennessee, was chosen out of a short list of several other sites across the contiguous US. Our guesses tend to be things like, well, we needed maybe a source of water, we needed a rural area that was removed from the hustle and bustle of a city. Because at the time, if you wanted something spooky done, or you wanted something done in secret. You could just go to the great wilds of the United.
States, but you still needed to have access to infrastructure and shipping if.
You needed it right, right, so you would want to be able to contact the rest of the world when necessary. Anyhow, whatever the logic was, that's what General Groves chose sixty thousand acres there in East Tennessee. The area started out with a few different names and the relatively sparse official documentation. Sometimes it was called Site X, great name for a town. Other times it was referred to as Clinton Engineering Works.
That is, as far as we could find, not a reference to the later Clinton political dynasty.
Yeah, it is like a company name that just stood for a location.
Yeah, there was a town named Clinton nearby near Knoxville, Tennessee, and that's what they were named at naming this thing after. But eventually it became oak Ridge. And while the name of this place may have undergone some iterations, its purpose was always crystal clear to those in the No. You see, Groves was overseeing what we call the Manhattan Project today,
that's the New York connect right, Yeah. Yeah, And the town that would become oak Ridge was built for the express purpose of helping Uncle Sam build the first atomic bomb.
Oh yeah, And we have some information here coming from the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History resonance there on the land. The people who actually lived in Oak Ridge, A lot of the families lived in the area really on just in poverty or on the brink of poverty for generations, and then all of a sudden, when this land was purchased, all of them were just kicked out just by you have to leave. The government is moving
in apologies, but not really just get out. And the Feds came through the federal government and they condemned the land and they paid the residents like really nothing, just to get them the heck out of there as quickly as power possible.
Right According to the New Hope Center, one resident at the time received nine hundred dollars for forty acres of land. That's about twenty two dollars and fifty cents per acre.
That's crazy.
If we adjust for inflation, that's about fourteen one hundred and seventy seven dollars total, which works out to about three hundred and fifty four dollars and forty three cents per acre today. Talk about a steal. You know what? I mean, yeah, so let's keep the timeline here too. If you look into the Center for Oakridge Oral History, you'll see stories from people recalling that as children, the principal called everybody into the school and told them they
had received a special or special contact from the federal government. Yeah, it was September nineteen forty two. They all had to be out by December nineteen forty two. Uproot your entire life, right, and the logic here is solid and it is also ruthless. It's very important to again emphasize this happened in the United States not very long ago.
Yeah, you have to imagine what the residents were going through, what their lives were like, in order to really understand.
Right.
First, a lot of the rural residents would doubtlessly accept this lump sum of cash. It's a windfall, you know, it could literally be a life changing amount of scratch for a population where running water and indoor plumbing were often a pipe dream. Terrible choice of words. Wow on the level of science fiction. But there's a second, more disturbing fact it played too well.
Yeah, a lot of the folks living around there didn't have the education, let alone. You know, someone with enough money to come through and mount any kind of legal protest or action against what the federal government was doing to them. And it was very clear that no matter what, the federal government was moving in and you could either essentially take them money or just leave. Right, You're gonna take the money and leave, or you're just gonna leave right.
They you know this is this is kind of an eminent domain thing too, right. They could say for the greater good, you have to leave this place. Yeah, we'll give you a little bit of money, you have to leave this place. And being impoverished, they simply do not have the recourse to legal action, even if they could find someone who would represent them. This is all happening, by the way, under strict secrecy, so there's not going to be any kind of public trial. It will get quashed.
By nineteen forty five, just a few years later, Oakridge, Tennessee, has seventy five thousand people living and working in the area. Very few of those seventy five thousand people knew the ultimate purpose of the secret city. Many had no idea what they were working on until the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and the local paper said, you know Oakridge delivers something to the Japanese.
Yeah, exactly what I've just mentioning there that seventy five thousand people lived in the area. It's not you know, we were talking about cities. We set this whole episode up talking about cities. Oakridge was not like one big facility where everyone went to work every day and then everybody just left the area. They built a city there.
Yeah. Yeah, schools, post office, shops, movie theater and some of the people who were originally kicked out by the Feds managed to get jobs later at Oakridge. Yeah, and they didn't know what they were doing. They did not know that they were processing and enriching uranium. Today, if you wish, you can visit Oakridge. It still processes uranium today. And while this is one of the more popular examples of a secret city, it is far from the only case of one. There are more closed cities and they
remain closed today. Will give an honorable mention to Mercury, Nevada, which spoiler alert I'd like to save for another episode.
Well then we won't say anything else about it. Thank you for you know, glancing across this episode Mercury Nevada. We look forward to seeing you again soon.
Radioactive ships in the night.
Well, you know we're mentioning this, yes, but we're talking about Oakridge and just it had a hand in the Manhattan Project, And I don't know if I want to spoil too much. We talked we made an episode on the Manhattan Project not too long ago, I believe, didn't we Maybe we didn't. Maybe it's just that other secret project we're working on.
Yeah, or maybe we're both remembering forward again.
I hate well, all right, Well, it's interesting that we're hitting Oakridge, Tennessee in the United States, kind of in the heartland where the Manhattan probably was being carried out, where nuclear testing in the first atomic bombs were developed in the United States, that were hitting that first and knowing where we're going in this episode.
That's right, where are we going? Indeed, where in the world will we find our next forbidden city? We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor. In what should not be a stunning plot twist to anybody was listened to this show in the past, we are of course headed to Russia.
Soviet Russia.
Yes, yes, like the US, the Soviet Union was also scrambling to event new terrifying weapons of war, and like the US, they decided secret cities were the best way to carry out their work.
Oh yeah, so there were several of actually numerous conspiratorial communities, communities that were off the books, forbidden secret. In nineteen ninety three, a little bit of the you know what would be considered the iron dome, the iron veil that
keeps information from linking out, was lifted. When these places were officially called they get they were given a name closed administrative territorial entities, and that translates to if you, if you take the cyrilliki translate it, it's Zato or Zato.
I was in my head for some reason as Zatto, but I think it's just because it seems like a cool name for someone to have. Is my friend Zatto.
It's very similar to a kiddi kat in Spanish.
Oh gotto.
Yeah, I don't know, that's where my head goes.
But before then, before nineteen ninety three, if you look at any government census, both in the Soviet Union and Russia proper and different members of the Soviet Union, you will see that these cities and the hundreds of thousands of people living and working in them simply do not exist. Closed cities were not marked on maps, and there were no road marks that could lead some ignorant, naive traveler
to the secret settlement. It was built such that you couldn't just accidentally be there and say, oh my god, look at me.
Well, especially if you were taking any kind of public transportation like a train or a bus or anything like that, you would not be able to find them. You would have to get in a vehicle and then like just explore until you got to the gates where generally they say attention, stay out, like you cannot come in here. And it's crazy were you know, we talked about this concept of the city itself was secret, so it was hidden away, which is kind of mind blowing thinking about
large buildings and everything being secret. But then also that the human beings that occupied the cities were taken, like you said, literally taken off of the census and families like when you have a child and you live in one of these places, that child ostensibly doesn't exist outside of the books for that closed city.
Right exactly, so strange and you can see that you can see the problem. Here's it sets up a slippery slope that's similar to the problem that the government of China is having with unregistered births. Right when they had the one child policy. What ended up happening because a lot of parents you know, of course, want to have
the children that they were going to have. There's been this rise of a population of human beings, female people in China who are unregistered, so they have no rights, they have no access to you know, healthcare, education, medicine. It's a terrible, terrible situation and it's all because of a couple the pieces of paper. How often does that happen with our species? You know, other animals don't do that.
I'm not saying other animals are better than our brand of animal, but I don't see, though nature's brutal, I don't see a lot of other intelligent creatures, you know, committing such horrific acts over paperwork.
Yeah, we can really get into this if you want to, but that's that's an intense discussion to have right there. Just the concept that a small paper that either proves that you are who you are or from a certain area has life or death consequences throughout time.
Like what we did that earlier. We definitely did a video in this the concept of statelessness. Yeah, people who do not have a country of origin, so strange. But in this case, the people in these closed cities in the USSR, as we'll come to find, they did not have a huge problem with living life as ghost people, according to the bureaucracy.
And actually according to some reporting that's come out fairly recently from and interviews from people who've lived inside these places, because they got.
Perks, Yeah, they had a pretty good There's a documentary and we'll talk about a little bit later where you can see some of these quotes, and there are people saying, we got everything that we wanted for the rest of our lives for staying here. So of course we would stay here. Don't screw this up for us outsiders. Residents of these close cities were given private apartments, right, and this is during the era of communism, so it's a big get for them. Decent healthcare, and they had jobs
for life, they had job security. And at a time when the much of the rest of the USSR was having a difficult time coming by the most base of staples, you know what I mean, wheat, milk, eggs, stuff like that, residents of these close cities were getting things that were exotic for the time, like bananas, condensed milk. They had a lot of meat products they could eat. Literally, caviar was available, literally caviar, yes, yes, literally caviar egg, although.
You probably would not want to eat the caviar.
Which is a spoiler depending on the city. So even today, here's the thing. Even today, most residents of these close cities consider themselves incredibly fortunate to be living in a zoto area. They're not bothered by the barbed wire fencing that surrounds them or the cognitive fencing and bureaucratic fencing
that also surrounds them. They are very mission oriented. Instead of diving into the numerous the numerous Cold War era closed cities that we know about today and speculating on the fifteen or twenty that are more or less certain to exist but remain secret, let's just look at a few, like high level examples.
What do you think, Oh yeah, absolutely, And you know, each of these that we're going to talk about coming up are their own thing. Everything we've been talking about before, this in relation to these Zato Zeto areas, it's similar, very similar, but each one of these is going to have its own tail and So let's take you to a place called I'm gonna try and pronounce this.
Zelenogorsk, Zelenogorsk, Zelenogorsk. Yeah, we are not Russian. Please send in, dear Russian speakers in the audience, please send in the correct pronunciations here we would always prefer to be correct rather than comfortable. So. Zelenogorsk is located in Russia by the Khan river Ka n It was built in the forties fifties era as part of the Soviet drive to
enrich uranium for the USSR nuclear program. Like Oakra, this city had a population of thousands, and although it existed for decades, it was not on official maps until nineteen ninety two. Imagine trying to get mail. Oh, by the way, when these things are in full swing, and some of them still operate this way today. These cities are not as you said, Matt on trade and bus routes. They're only known by a postal code, a name, and a number.
So what it would be like It would be like decad forty seven or something.
Yeah, yeah, exactly with that postal code. And the other thing here is just like oak Ridge. We're kind of comparing these two places. They this place still supplies a good amount of the uranium for Russia's production there. It's no, it's twenty nine percent of the enrichment capacity that exists within Russia. So the actual places with centrifugias that are enriching uranium. That's crazy to think, but even sends uranium to other countries, including the United States, just because you
know you need a little extra uranium. Sometimes Unkridge can't do all the production.
You get bye with a little help from your friends.
Yeah, exactly. And we're continuing with that trend here of a lot of these closed off cities were specifically meant to create or at least assist in the creation of weapons of war, like massive weapons of war, new technologies that could be used to establish dominance or at least hopefully right.
Let's go to one of the most famous examples, a town called Ozersk, also known as City forty. Oz Ersk is located in the Ural Mountains. It was founded in nineteen forty seven. First was known as Chileabinsk forty, then Chileabinsk sixty five. Like other closed cities, as you said, Matt, Ozersk was built to aid the Soviet nuclear probe. Unlike some other forbidden cities, Osairsk has received a great deal of media attention, notably in a documentary called City forty, which we highly recommend.
Yeah, seriously check it out if you possibly can, or at least read up on the contents of it, because there are so many fascinating stories and humans.
Involved, and it is a tragic story. Yeah. So the citizens of this place of City forty have a fairly unique dilemma, and I quite like the way the Guardian put it in an article on the closed city. It's this Their water is contaminated, their mushrooms and berries are poisoned, and their children may be sick. Ozersk and the surrounding region is one of the most contaminated places on the planet, referred to by some as the graveyard of Earth. Yet most of City forty's residents do not want to leave.
They take pride in their community. They still have that attitude of feeling that they have received immense privilege.
Yes, and they have in a lot of ways, and their families have benefited from that privilege. But their families have also in most cases, a family member or two or more have died because.
They have lived in that place, right, Yeah, they were heavily contaminated by industrial pollution from the nearby Mayak plutonium plant from the what the late nineteen forties on, this was an ongoing thing. This plant was one of the largest producers of weapons grade plutonium for the Soviet Union during a lot of the Cold War, particularly during the atomic bomb program, and it was built with once again the greater good in mind. You got to break a
few eggs. We want to get some atomic omelets, said the Soviet government. You know what I mean, what's a couple people in the great balance of life? You know what I mean? Hakuna matata, et cetera, they said, And then they built this with no regard for safety.
Well, yeah, that's that's the crazy thing. It's there have been several one major disaster that occurred at one of the major plants there that ended up irradiating I think it was like two hundred thousand people or something like that, or it was a crazy number of people in villages that just lived, you know, upstream or away from the actual plant. Because these they were dumping radioactive waste directly into the water into that river that we keep talking about there and we're.
Dumping solid waste, liquid waste, gaseous matter, all radioactive. And then we're doing this for more for not more than, but for around a decade, from nineteen four five to fifty seven.
Yeah, and here's here's the part that was mind blowing for me as I was learning about it. You know, when you imagine a nuclear accident or a disaster, what comes to mind. Chernobyl, right through that island is first, though Chernobyl always is at the top of the list. And over all this time when the waste was being dumped, the sum of contamination of radioactive contamination has been estimated to be two to three times the release from the
Chernobyl accident explosions. Now here's the deal. Chernobyl kind of occurred, exploded, Your your radioactive waste is you know, gone into the air and is spread out across a wide area. But for this they're literally pumping out the radioactive waste continually for a decade.
In nineteen fifty seven, this reaches ahead the MAAC plant is the site of an enormous disaster. An underground tank of highly irradiated liquid nuclear waste explodes and it contaminates thousands of square kilometers of territory. Nowadays, it's known as
the Eastern Eural Radioactive Trace or the urt EURT. The problem is that this disaster is quietly, efficiently and ruthlessly covered up, and very very few people inside or outside of the USSR we're aware of what actually happened until at least nineteen eighty and this has also been called the Kishtom disaster specifically, you know, this is September twenty ninth.
And I really appreciate what you're pointing out here, Matt, because we're all familiar with your noble, especially in the world of fiction in the recent day and age, because there was a masterful miniseries done that I think aired on HBO, but it didn't really address this. And can you imagine living here and you've been told that you are the sword and shield to save the world. Right, that's why you and your family are working and this great project to make this new weapon of war. You're
not doing it to sow chaos. You're doing it to guarantee peace.
Well and also be triumphant over those who want to do harm.
Right exactly, because everyone is a war of defense. Da da da da da da da. But didn't mean to sound so dismissive. I just don't believe it when people say that anymore, you know. But the kicker is imagine being that person. So you're ideologically on board, probably, And.
You learn.
Weeks after the fact, very least weeks after the fact, that you and your children have been irradiated, and you can't find anything about it, even in the news, even in the secret city newspaper it's supposed to give you
one of the inner circle. You know what happened. Why are you only seeing these vague reports, and why don't they jibe with the first hand sightings you're hearing of of people with skin falling off their faces, their body parts being exposed, their hair falling out along with their toenails, and so on.
Yeah, let me quickly paint a scenario, just for all of us sitting here and listening. Let's imagine that we're one of the minority few who live out somewhere in a rural area. And let's say we live in Russia. It's nineteen fifty seven, and our small family own some farmland and lots and lots of livestock, or at least enough livestock, you know, to survive as well as a
lot of crops, and we're just hanging out. We're doing all the strenuous work we have to do every day to maintain what we have, which is still very little, and then all of a sudden, you know, we don't notice anything. Really. We heard maybe about a big bang, a large bang that occurred somewhere, you know, southwest of here a couple of days ago, but that's all we've really heard about. There were some weird clouds that came over, like appeared to be smoke or something. We haven't thought
about any of that stuff since that day. Well, a big truck rolls through with a lot of our you know, countrymen, our military people. They're just coming through and they happen to stop by our farm and they let us know that today we have to slaughter all of our cattle. We have to uproot and then bury all of our crops. Then we have to plow all that over, and then we have to get the heck out because they're going to purchase our farm for almost nothing.
They're also wearing containment suits. Yeah, then they did not bring spares.
Yeah, just letting us know. And here's the other thing. Let's say that occurs and then years later after you know that went down, you know what's occurred. Nobody has put any record of this down. Nobody is talking about all the other farms like that were just in this giant line that I can look at a map and see, like I know, people lived in this line and they all had to sell their houses, their farms, but nobody's talking about it.
There's a beauty, the dark beauty to the brutal logic there. So the same way that rural people in the US could not fight back against the lad been taken, people who do not officially exist have no legal recourse because they are ghosts. It just now reached a point where their physical condition matched the condition of the paperwork, which is just insidious. I mean, it is unclean to do that to people. But I see the logic of it,
and there are plenty, plenty more. We could probably do an episode per city on close cities in Russia, but we don't want to just stay in the Cold War in the US and Russia or the USSR. Excuse me, Let's take a quick look at other cities, some of which might surprise you. In the mainland of China, there is a place called the nuclear town. It is in the Gobi Desert in the western part of Gansu Province. Officially, it's called the number four oh four Factory of China
National Nuclear Corporation. I love that it's called four oh four, right, pretty it's such a bad internet joke.
It's unknown.
I hope someone did it on purpose. It's not found yash so it's built back in nineteen fifty eight. So probably not a good joke unless the people who did four h four on the Internet were making a sideways reference to this fact. Probably not. Probably not. The world's not that convenient nor well written.
I say we go that until someone tells us it's for something else.
And then let's accuse them of covering it up. That's right, Well, that sounds like a plan in that. So this is the biggest nuclear industry base in the country that we know of. It's the country's first military nuclear reactor. Eighty percent of China's nuclear bomb core components are built there. For twenty years it was completely closed to outsiders. And that's not the only case in China. There are a couple of other more remote places where you have to
apply for what's called an alien travel document. In advance to visit, and you have to report to the police as soon as like your accommodations as soon as you stay somewhere, And if you don't follow everything to the letter, you get the boot. They will immediately take you out of the country.
Yeah, just get the heck out, man, We've got this running thing. We're gonna come back to it in the conclusion. But just if you're going to create facile material to be weaponized for any reason, or just let's say it's just to run a power plant, it's a lot of people that are doing that, are making these weird, hidden, creepy cities.
Yeah, it turns out to maybe be the best way to go about this, right because if you have because you can control more variables, if you have the entire city purpose built like we have. You know, we have military armament manufacturers that are based in or near large urban areas, but they no matter how well they secure their grounds, they cannot control the millions of people who live like you know, across the river or get through the woods, I don't know, whatever you want to say. Yep.
So this is a very common trend, and these secret cities are still around today and in some cases, Yes, the people who live in them do not technically exist on paper. We want to do one more example as something that is completely different. It's a closed city, closed part of a city that does not exist for nuclear research and does not exist for some kind of human rights abuse or concentration camp thing. Right, So let's travel to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. You've heard it before. This
is not the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KSA should not be a new thing to any of our life listeners. It is a unique country in the world of geopolitics for a number of reasons, and its most famous close city is no different. Unlike the majority of secret cities we've mentioned today, Mecca is not closed due to top secret military or industrial research. Instead, it's a partially closed city because every year millions and millions and millions of people visit and you can too, as long as you
like them. Are a practitioner of Islam. Because only Muslims are allowed in Mecca, it is the holiest, most important city in the religion. It has off limits under any circumstances to any non Muslims. Don't even try.
Yeah, if you do attempt, and you don't meet all of those requirements, you will immediately be deported and that will be it. Thank you for trying to come in, but we don't appreciate you. Why No, I'm just kidding. It's not that harsh, but you would definitely get deported immediately.
Well, you know, the penalty in practice maybe much harsher than deportation, And a lot of it depends on what kind of person who are your country of origin? Right, yes, and it could go up to and including assault, torture, murder. You just you don't know. And as a personal message to anybody else who enjoys traveling to the edges of the maps, to the places where normal people don't take vacation, I definitely want to warn every non Muslim person against
trying to sneak into Mecca. It's not like taking a quick illicit trip across the poorest Midwestern or Alaskan border between Canada and the US. Your chances of being caught are extremely high. If you feel that you must go to Mecca, you genuinely must go there. The most rational choice is to convert to Islam beforehand, actually do it. Attempting to fake a conversion will also by the way in all likelihood fail. I know that there are photographs of plenty of someone who said, like, oh, it's not
getting a mecca or whatever. There was a recent story about a guy who I think acquired his Israeli citizenship in twenty fourteen, and he visited and he said that it was on the up and up. But I have a tough time believing him. And also, you know, inherently it's the most important city in this religion, the millions of people follow. I don't know, man, this is a personal take. I want your opinion too, Matt. Should people
be able to do that? I feel like, personally would be disrespectful for me to say, well, I don't care about your core belief system. I need some selfies, you know what I mean. That just feels I don't know.
Yeah, no, yeah, it certainly doesn't feel like a good eye idea. I'm trying to find it, like something that would be the equivalent, But I don't know if there's anything in the world that's as close to that. There are I mean trying to imagine the whaling Wall or but it's not like it's restricted.
Well, in some religions in the West, like the Church of Latter day Saints, don't they not allow some people into the temple like people are not.
Yeah, I mean yeah, or scientology or any you know, a lot of these belief systems would have closed off areas, closed off things, right, that's like micro understandings. But a large place like Mecca, it's it's interesting, hmm. I'm trying to imagine for some Well, no, it's not the same.
Someone started a religion and it was based in Detroit. Yeah, and they said you can't go to Detroit unless you follow this religion.
Say, well, Detroit's pretty big.
Detroit is really no, no, no, no, no, that that callback just working live. You know, not all of these are going to be one hundred Sali goldhad no.
But it is. I think the core of what you're saying in that it's a bad idea to undermine this this rule that's in place, you know, for a reason, for a very popular belief system. That's probably a bad idea. But then, you know, I always imagine the spycraft that occurs in a place like Mecca, or in a place like Jerusalem or the Vatican. You know, there's probably fascinating deep spycraft occurring in all of those places from varying
countries with varying interests, you know. And that's just me assuming, but that's what I'm imagining when you're talking about something as closed off as Mecca is.
Yeah. Yeah, And of course you know, we have we have a lot of listeners who are very close to their faith, you know what I mean, and art and practitioners thereof just just to me, and again this is just my opinion. I do. I feel like it's completely okay to say, hey, out of respect for our belief system, just sorry, this one part of the world doesn't have to be yours. I think that's perfectly okay. Like Aluru or airs Rock as it's sometimes called in Australia, the
native population said, this is very important to us. Please just stop having yourself aggrandizing tourist adventures here.
The only problem is the moment you say you can't go here. I mean it's that old thing like don't touch that button.
Don't think of pink elephants, know, yeah, I.
Mean psychologically that that occurs in many of us.
Yeah, yeah, I mean I'm no different. Obviously.
What would be better is if you just kept it off the map. Nobody knew about it. You just had a postal code if you if you were aware of you know, Mecca. But that's it.
I guess yeah, yeah, there's the other part too. I would go on record saying that it's completely different if someone says, Okay, we have founded our new city or our new religion or belief system, and everybody who was living here before either convert or GTFO, I think that's very different.
Yes, you know what I mean. I agree I'm making I'm not trying to make light of out that situation. It's just anyway trying to make a callback that I think didn't work.
Oh gosh, Well, instead of calling back, maybe let's call forward. Because it seems the story continues for all of these places we just mentioned. In the case of Russia, currently, it's estimated they are about forty four closed cities in existence, about one point five million people live in these total, and there are also, according to rumors, around fifteen other closed cities that exist without their whereabouts or their names
being disclosed by the government. If you would like to visit a closed city, I'm very excited about giving this a shot one day. You are welcome to give it. The old college try getting into these places. Is if you look at the spectrum of difficult entries and exits, it's easier than entering North Sentinel Island, but it's still tougher than getting into a place like the DPRK North Korea.
Non residents who want to visit closed cities have to get a special pass from the Russian Security Service, the secret police essentially. So if you Matt, and you Paul, and I'm you listening, if we all, if we all got together and we requested these passes, depending on the city, and you know, Hinji, on the fact that we are not Russian nationals, we would almost certainly be rejected. And that's not that's not all. Applying for one of these things.
Even if you are a Russian national and you are related to someone who lives in a close city, applying for one of these things, whether or not you were accepted, puts you on a list with Russian intelligence for the rest of your life.
Yeah, you know what else, guess you on that list? What's that listening to an episode with the metadata Zato and Russia Secret Cities.
Oh no, it is in the metadata.
I'm pretty sure.
I had a depressing conversation with some of my old uh, some of my old colleagues about which countries can get into and out of, like the stands are pretty much no goes for me and my friends who were working in the PRC. We're saying, well, you know, it's okay. I guess as long as your podcast isn't it Mandarin whoa? And you know it makes you think, like what happened with those with those folks for Radio Free America? Did you hear about this?
I did?
We did? We talk about this here?
I don't know if we talked about on a conversations.
Yeah, yeah, so some weager journalists that we're working with Radio Free America, which is a US supported propaganda network, But it doesn't mean it's one hundred percent wrong all the time. Their families have been threatened, and there's an intense debate going on now about the situation western China, which we should report on more soon. We we got
there a little bit before it broke international news. Anyhow, if you want to visit this and if it is worth being on a list with Russian intelligence for the rest of your life not necessarily a bad thing, I guess, then yeah, you're more than welcome to apply. But keep in mind passes are only given to those who have relatives and closed cities, or people are traveling to closed
cities on a business trip. So for like ay, maybe we use different names, you know, like hey, I'm Johnny America and I'm Dimmy big Bucks and we're here for oil I don't know, the new kind of roller blade. Then maybe we can get in. But even then access isn't guaranteed. You can try to get a permanent pass, but it's more challenging. There are two ways to get them.
Basically you have to have been born there, yeah, or you have to work in one of the enterprises they need so be a nuclear scientist or be born.
There yeah, and get irradiated. Well, you hang out in City forty just like everybody else. So this is something I know we're wrapping up here, but really quickly something that struck me. We talked about that disaster that officially didn't occur within City forty, at least for a long time, it was not disclosed that that actually happened and that amount of radiation was released into the wild. It makes me think about Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the place where
the United States, you know, started its nuclear industry. Really, it makes me wonder if anything has occurred within that area that was never reported and was just covered up, and people and livestock and crops were dosed beyond you know, any sane amount and we just never found out about it, because if we were to find out about it, there would be such an uproar. I just it makes me wonder.
Yeah, I agreed.
Now, there's a side of me that says, if something like that did occur at Oak Ridge, then there's no way they could completely cover that up. Some paper somewhere, somebody would know, somebody would talk. But the other part of me thinks it was a time of war, and just like the people of City forty, we were told and we believed the people who lived there at the time,
that we were fighting the good fight. This is all in the name of the United States victory, This is all in the name of securing our family's futures, and we'll go along with it. And then they all died because they got dosed by radiation.
Yeah, they died. They died to a terminal condition known as the greater Good.
But that's all fabricated from my mind.
I'm just wondering. It's possible have occurred. Yeah, that's the disturbing thing. It's possible, you know what I mean, Like the Villa incidents where the nuclear bomb was tested. Right, these things happen. They may not happen in your backyard, but that doesn't make them any less terrifying. And now it gets to our final question. How long will these closed cities stay closed? Some are Cold war relics, but a surprising amount of them are still manufacturing fissile material. Right,
they're enriching uranium, they're making weapons grade plutonium. Business is booming, Business is good. Those cities may well stay closed. And what about the ones that we don't know, the ones that are still off of the maps. And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. It's right, let us know what you think. You can reach.
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook x and YouTube, on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
If you want to call us dial one eight three three STDWYTK that's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if we can use your name and message on the air. If you got more to say than can fit in that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old fashioned email.
We are the entities that read every single piece of correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.