Oh this one, you guys, Matt Nole fellow conspiracy realists. Every so often some of the craziest conspiracy theories do turn out to be true. Not all of them, and maybe not most of them, but some of them, some of them, Yeah.
Some of them are in this episode.
Indeed, we always talk about how the concept of a conspiracy theory is like this thought terminating cliche, designed to, you know, have whatever topic gets attached to be viewed with skepticism. But oftentimes they're worthy of a little bit more digging, and sometimes when you dig deep enough, you find that grain of truth.
I can't remember which ones exactly are in here, but I can't wait to re listen and find out.
Yeah, we're right there with you.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Name is Norman.
They call me Ben. You are you, and you are here that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. As always, we are accompanied by our super producer, Paul Decant, who we nod to with great gratitude as always, thanks for saving the show.
Paul. You drop the mission control.
I feel like, you know, if you want to keep it, you can call them that.
It's a seasonal beast. You bring it out, you know, around the holidays.
We can just call him mission critical.
Here you go.
His names are Legion.
Paul, Big crit, Decade, Paul, show saver, decade, show stopper.
Even it's ok if you wanted to stop it.
That's true, Paul. What what we'll do is we'll ask the listeners to submit some nicknames. If you're okay with.
That, that's great, okay, and then we'll put up a poll on here's where it gets crazy, the Facebook group and have people vote on their favorite ones.
Yeah, like Matt like you and I did with Agent Scully or Alex Bones.
Yeah that's true almost Alex Bones.
Almost Alex Bones. Everything that we just said at the top of the show, folks, turns out to be true, although they may sound like rumors. We can substantiate all of those things. Speaking of fantastic segues, that's what this episode is about.
Some segue jitsu right there.
Man, it was matrix level. I'll admit not my best work. That's true, but this is an important episode and it's a little bit of a collection, a little bit of a mixtape. In the first part of what we are aiming to make a continuing series conspiracies that turned out
to be true. This first part will focus on some of the biggest government oriented conspiracy theories, that genre of conspiracy theory, and these will be stories that for years or decades were dismissed as absolute tomfoolery, tinfoil hat country, but later it turned out to be partially or in
several cases, entirely true. So while we're focusing on some government conspiracies in this episode, we'd like as you listen along, to take stock of the things that you have read personally and let us know through the various means of contacting us about conspiracies that you found to be absolutely true. They don't have to be government oriented, just anything that was depicted as utter hogwash and later turned out to be absolutely factual.
And yeah, when we say factual, we mean there are some type of documents to back it up, there's some type of acceptance in whatever field or community this play, this thing took place.
What they call in theaw enforcement world, an eyeball witness.
I'm sure, an eyeball witness or corroborating evidence of some sort of that yes, this was true.
Or an eyewit Yeah we didn't. We hear that in an earlier episode. Some I refer to people as eyewits. That's the portmanteau for it.
I'm all about brevity, yeah, the soul of wit or just you know wit. There you go, fa, No, that's great.
No.
Yeah.
So to do this episode justice, we have to explore a little bit about how conspiracy theories are depicted in your neck of the global woods today. So, in many ways, the average English speaking person is taught a very particular interpretation of the phrase conspiracy theory, and it's a It's an interpretation that is at best disingenuous and at wors
purposely misleading. The idea of a conspiracy theory is a term is often conflated with the idea of deception or delusion or a This goes back to the concept of what a certain psychologists call a thought terminating cliche a buzzword. Right, So we see buzzwords in so much of mass media. If you want to find the most succinct way to encapsulate a thought of phenomenon or a group, you try to distill it into a single word. That's why people who think there was more to the story about the
nine to eleven attacks became called truthers. You could just say truthers, and that means whatever you think it means.
And the people that believe President Barack Obama was not of this country originally were called birthers exactly.
Yeah, that's a great example. And these examples are not just limited to the realm of conspiracy theory. You hear it refer to in so many different ways. Hipsters. What's a hipster, right, It's like.
A flannel were in American spirits? Can what is it? What are the shoes they wear? That's a hippie? Hipsters wear like like Tom's Tom's Tom's wearing asymmetrical haircut, have in just the mustache, having just the mustache.
I feel like you're describing me. So I really appreciate this.
Now you're what they call King of the mods.
It's good to be king, though, so a thought terminating cliche. The reason this can be dangerous is because in that effort to succinctly describe something. A lot of important stuff gets left out of the conversation. We have discussed in the past, how calling uh the idea that the UK is run by reptilian aliens who eat souls, calling that a conspiracy theory, and calling the fact that HSBC laundered money for drug cartels for years a conspiracy theory makes
them sound like they're equal when they're clearly not. Because one of those things actually happened, it is true.
Well, it's a tool to smear people whose opinions you do not agree with or are counter to your agenda. Right, you label them conspiracy theorists, you label you, you equate those two things that you just said, or things like that, and then people do the thing that everyone does where you kind of distill everything down and look at that one word, and that's my narrative.
And we've discussed before that it was designed that way. At least, conspiracy theory as a buzzword was designed that way after the jfk assassination for any alternate ideas as to what occurred.
And by gum, we're taking it back.
Yeah, it's often used to the term conspiracy theory is often used to dismiss a claim without having to investigates merit its authenticity, or importantly, it's lack thereof. This bias is something that has crept out of the realm of mass media and intruded academic literature as well. For example, you can find easily find multiple studies constructed with the purpose of discovering or manufacturing a link between mental illness and what the study makers call conspiracy theory, and the
difficulty here hinges on definition. What makes one thing a conspiracy theory the way we would understand it in mass discourse and the other or another an out and out actual case of people conspiring in secret to do something sketchy. The difference is what's often referred to as a conspiracy theory and what exists as a legitimate conspiracy often takes a back seat to the exploration of the psychological processes involved as individuals and groups compare, analyze, and prioritize certain
forms of evidence. So we have two examples of genres of conspiracies versus genres of conspiracy theory. So let's take one of the most popular out there conspiracy theories around now, just to look at it real quick. That is the flat Earth meme. Otherwise known as earthers, otherwise known as earthers.
Yes, flat earthers, but i'd like to, you know, in the in the in the spirit of brevity, let's call them earthers.
Sure that's better than flatters. Yeah, that's that's confusing me a lot of things.
Yeah, and you know, Mission Critical p Decand actually has a friend who was creating a documentary right now all about flatter You.
Talked about it, maybe having them appre on the show.
Well, we're going to look into it. And much like uh, you know, the minds of the flatters and the earthers. Uh, Paul Paul Decan is currently absent. So wait a minute, that was a while to get.
That was worth it. So so this idea, this flat earth idea, it fits the general mass media definition of a conspiracy theory easily just proven, easily dismissed. There are mountains of evidence, or should we say, vast horizons, indicating the Earth, as well as all of the rest of the planets our species has been able to observe, are
in fact spherical. This evidence includes astronomical observation. This evidence also includes on the ground, easily reproducible experiments that you can do right now in the comfort of your own home.
It sounds like disinformation to me.
Ben, yeah, right, because the shadow on the moon is a total, total, high production value David Blaine esque.
Oh but dude, but there was like proof for this, disproof of this before we even have the technology that we have today. I mean, guys like Galileo observed through very simple, comparatively telescopes and could observe celestial bodies that indicated this was not the case.
Right, Yeah, And ancient civilizations also knew the Earth was round, and you could do it today even with the technology that they would have had at that time. You can stick a stick in the ground and watch the shadow move as time passes with a little bit of simple math actually which you know what, don't even bother with the math. Just get another stick. Cool, We matrix dodged
that one. All you have to do is get two sticks and then stick them some distance apart and realize that if the Earth were flat, then two sticks in different locations would produce the same shadow. They don't. They never have, they never will. It just doesn't happen because the Earth is not flat.
It sounds like hearsay to me.
I don't know that you're being such a pill today.
You guys know, NASA is controlled just the way the sticks, all the sticks are working together to try and you know, fool, you.
Don't believe big stick.
Yeah. My theory is that people that really espouse this belief, it's just like a super super hipster throwback thing that they're doing. It's like, I want to like live my life like I'm a chromagnet or.
Something ironic perhaps in some way. And then there is a group I think we cover this in a previous episode on Flat Earth. There is a group that is arguing it entirely to be pedantic, and their real argument is that one can argue anything effectively if you use the correct rules of rhetoric.
People on the internet being pedantic imagine, that's insane.
It would be the coolest conspiracy ever though, if that would be living under the guys.
But I asked this question before you guys, to what end right right? Did this accomplish too? For whom who is getting rich off of this? How is this keeping us in the dark in some way that is actually valuable to literally anyone?
Yeah, so hold on a second, because we get to that. So additionally, the rules of our observable universe seem to be exceedingly consistent, and all the proof we have there is no evidence that any observable planet has been, is, or will be quote unquote flat, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. This is a great example for those of us in the crowd who consider ourselves be
hardcore skeptics. There's nothing that can distion proved the notion of a spherical Earth, and to combat this dearth of proof for the idea that Earth is not in fact spherical, adherents of this belief system, like the ones who really really hook line and sync or went for it, they're forced to constantly widen the net of perceived collusion. So
there's a worldview where in confirmation bias is king. That means that not only is the bulk of scientific consensus from ancient times to twenty eighteen been a huge consistent snow job, but millions of people across the span of civilization have somehow consistently cooperated in covering up the truth. For as you alluded to earlier, nol one reason or another.
But that's the final red flag here. Differing camps of flat Earth, people who really believe in this, people who really advocate for this belief system still can't agree on exactly why this would happen.
Which is funny because to me, the conspiracy theories, the weird ones, usually flow from some dis like disproportionate thing that people perceive as being wrong, or like they're looking for a boogeyman to explain a phenomenon, or like a inequality of some kind. So there's that that is absent here entirely. So what's the what's the reasoning for like seeking out this h clearly disprovable way of thinking.
Well, the problem is that most of the academic literature doesn't center on those concepts themselves. They center on the psychological processes of the believers. And that's that's missing the mark. It's interesting, but it's it's treating symptoms more so, I would argue, And we have to remember this example, Okay, easily disproven. That's what mass media means when they say
conspiracy theory. This example will come into play later. But let's take another more more complicated example for comparison, like secret government programs.
We're familiar with those, right, how familiar? Well, I mean they occur all the time at least throughout history and our system of allowing documentation to be put out into the public domain after a certain amount of time. It just shows us that there have been rolling secret government projects and programs and experiments and research throughout time and they're still going. We just we are within that time bubble before any of this stuff can become public.
It's think it's declassified. We find out the flavor of the types of secret programs there are. But I just feel like now it's worse than it ever was. Whatever's going on now is super dark and super weird.
But here's the thing. There are claims, unsubstantiated claims of even crazier stuff that we don't have documentation for, and that has also existed in time memoriam.
Right, yeah, yeah, we've got This is a genre of conspiracy theory, and like you said, Matt, the way it typically happens is that there will be outrageous allegations of the legal conduct some and it will say, where's the proof, show me the money. There's a lack of hard evidence.
That's either due to the classification of documents proving that stuff, or to be fair, it could also be due to the fact that people who say these things are lying or diluted, or although I hesitate to use the word, maybe let's not say crazy, maybe let's say extremely misinformed. So what happens when this stuff comes true? When, as we pointed out, it is declassified, we see a hard
reset on the popular narrative. When leaked or declassified stuff proves the people who sounded crazy we're telling the truth the entire time.
Then everybody says, oh, well, yeah, I mean, obviously we knew that. We just you know whatever.
Everybody knows that.
Yeah, I'm not surprised.
And that's my favorite part, that sudden backpedal. I'm not surprised. I knew that was true.
It's not very helpful.
No, no, it's it's a weird cousin to one of the most unhelpful things you can say in any conversation. I told you so, that was it.
Talked about this the other day. Has anyone ever she said, your dad said that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not to throw you down into the bus. But that's the worst.
It's just not a it's it's not an addition to a conversation.
And it's probably not even true. I'm like, when when did you tell me so. How did that conversation go. I'm sorry, I'm getting up in arms of it's true.
The same people say I told you so. It's like, oh good, I'm glad you're into your earlier statements.
What do you want to talk about now?
Right?
Right?
Uh?
So we have to make an important note here too. Recent technological breakthroughs, primarily in the field of communication, have drastically increased the pace at which these types of conspiracies can be confirmed or debunked. And that goes to what
you were saying, Matt, about the bubble. The bubble is changing because the average person, if if the five of us us here in the studio and you listening, we're alive in the nineteen sixties, we might have one or two things absolutely confirmed in this genre of secret government programs, and we could easily go to our deathbeds not knowing about the other stuff, just wondering if that weird thing that hippie told us and hate Ashbury was true.
You met him too, Yeah, he told me a bunch of stuff.
Man, he's really he's on one.
He had a lot to say.
And in the twenty first century, though, where we live today, it's increasingly easy for a single individual, one person to play a tremendously important role in history. Someone like an Edward Snowden or Louise Elizondo can relay classified information of their own accord and share it out with the world before any of the old orthodox suppression methods can be deployed.
And that means, if we want to wax a little bit poetic about it, that all of us now have our hands on the lids of innumerable Pandora's jars, and each one of those cannot be closed once it's open. Now it just now. We used to have a situation where there would be maybe fifty five hundred people that
knew a secret, right and several of them die. One of them maybe tries to tell someone and they commit suicide, two shots to the back of their head, they fall off a building, they take a permanent vacation in Mexico.
Cini tablet under the tongue.
Cinai tablet under the tongue. But now, if we have fifty five hundred people have a secret, any one of them could just leak it easily and it will probably ruin their life. But there's no way to get that information back and Over the past few years, we've often discovered in the course of this show that there is a grain of truth behind some of the strangest sounding fringe theories. In some cases, we found these theories to be more or less absolutely true, such as mk ultra.
That's I mean, I don't even think we should spend time on that one today.
Yeah, you don't have to approve or disprove anything. It's just out there.
It happened. It happened. We paid for the government to give people LSD. But the weirdest thing about this is the rabbit hole continues. It's like looking into a fractal We keep finding more stuff, and we'd like to tell you about some of it. After a word from our sponsors. Here's where it gets crazy.
So we're gonna go through and kind of do a round up, go down a list in a way of a couple of these government conspiracies that we found. Remember we're in the genre of government here, we're not branching out into everything. We'll do that in a later date.
We'll have ourselves little conspiracy rodeo.
Yes, that's that's right, it's conspiracy round up. I've been watching a lot of toy story too lately with the sun. Oh my gosh. Okay, the old problem specter is an important character in the second of that.
I haven't watched it skipped right to three.
Oh man, I'm not kidding.
I haven't seen seen.
I haven't I saw the first one.
You see too.
Now Pau hasn't seen too either, Really conversation, isn't that funny?
Cool?
Guys all secret ghost? Paul said he's seen one in three, but not too so hush your mouth, Frederick, But it's too late.
You unscrewed the jar. Everyone knows about the prospect.
Badgers are everywhere.
The badgers are out of the bag.
It's true.
But but yeah, okay, so we're gonna we're gonna intentionally skip some of the things we covered in depth on previous episodes. As you were saying, Matt, this is about the government one of the maybe we maybe we look at this in terms of what it was originally portrayed as and what was actually true about it.
That's good.
So okay, So what's our first one.
Our first one has to do well, let's let's say the conspiracy theory. If you were walking up on the street and somebody grabbed you by the shirt and said, hey, the government is spying on us right now.
You met that guy too. You met that guy, I met him. Yeah. Originally this was seen as the classic conspiratorial belief, someone who had maybe read nineteen eighty four a few times too many and became paranoid, and they became assured that the government was watching them. This is
a complicated thing because paranoia is inherently narcissistic. Paranoia inherently comes from the axiom that I, the person being observed, am somehow so important that eyes from afar, people in high places are obsessed with me and what I'm doing.
It sounds like you've telled a little bit of that before, Ben, I know I have well a little narcissism slash paranoia. Yeah. Oh yeah, see Paul too. I can can feel it. No, I'm not okay, Well I don't.
Just for the I'd like to go on record and say I don't like the way that you're looking at both of us and nodding.
But with a smile, like a genuine heavy smile while we're talking about something so dark.
So that's the thing, though, This mental illness is a serious issue, and we don't mean to deride at all anyone who is suffering from it. But this belief, this paranoid belief the government is watching my every move used to dovetail very well with some symptoms of mental illness, and it made that person ran up to you on the street seem like a crackpot and easily dismissed until that is.
Yeah, the news came out like the actual news. Oh yeah, yeah, and they said, hey, everybody, so the government is spying on all of us.
That was a big indication for a lot of people.
Was yeah, it really was. And this is around the time specifically, well, I mean there have been smaller stories about things like Echelon and some of the other projects around the around the countries in the world where they discuss how, yes, there are massive surveillance programs going on. Sure, but when you know Edward Snowden came forth and said, guys, it's bigger than that. It's a lot more than that, and it's everybody.
Know what that hippie hyde Ashbury said, I told you so. Oh yeah, yeah, he's got like shut up, man, that's not helpful.
He's got some stuff to work on with himself, I.
Think, And well that's not the only thing.
Yeah. Yeah, So this came out in increments. First, the news broke that yes, the US government was indeed spying on people, but only certain high value targets. Their spying on Leonard Peltier in the American Indian movement, right, who they considered a domestic terrorist. Their spying on Martin Luther King, whom they consider a destabilizing factor, John Lennon, Their spying on John Lennon because of what, because of his perceived left wing beliefs.
Yeah, and then with coin pro counterintelligence program, they're going through and actually doing this all like consistently a lot.
And then the next big milestone is the news breaks about monitoring international communication, so only certain high value possibly destabilizing domestic individuals or only international you know, phone calls and stuff, because we want to stop terrorism. And those existed as rumors, but they became substantiated by the acknowledgment of stuff like Echelon or five Eyes, where a lot of where five anglosphere countries agreed to pass the buck and find loopholes in their own surveillance laws.
Right, So for the average American citizen, it's okay, Well, if I travel to another country, maybe I'm being looked at. Maybe if I'm a really important person in a movement somewhere, I'm being looked at.
Right.
Maybe if I attended the same you know, Democratic Socialist Party of America meeting with a celebrity or a musician, I might be on a list. Yeah.
Maybe maybe if I went to Kent State University for any reason whatsoever.
But otherwise, normal Jane or John dosif they don't have any they don't have any appeal, why would the FEDS go to the massive trouble of putting them under a microscope. It turns out, actually, yes, uh, they do have appeal, And yes we did attract the attention. And yes, uncle Sam was and is monitoring you. The same technological advances that allow people to leak classified information very easily also allow domestic surveillance to extend widely without exception. I mean, okay,
virtually without exception. These surveillance techniques depend on partnerships with private businesses telecoms you know, AT and T, Verizon comcasts, and social media platforms Instagram, Facebook.
What are the same company?
Same company? Yeah, there we go. I needed a different one, Thank.
You, Tumblr, tumbl Tumbsnapchat.
Is legislation that was pushed through in the wake of public unease over terrorism that allowed, for the first time in human history, the first time in human history allowed the majority of a population to be intimately traced should they catch the attention of the US government right now
when don't be too paranoid. We don't want to be too alarmist right about this, but right now, if you somehow rose to the level where you got personal attention from the intelligence agencies in the US in a very short amount of time, they could know more about you than your loved ones know about you, which is a spooky, spooky thing. And it doesn't matter whether or not you have secrets.
Yeah, that's well. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're a liar.
I'm just an enigma dog. Okay, I'm not a liar.
I was looking at keep it just keep it close to the vest man. So that's okay. So that's one. That's one thing that turned out to be absolutely true. And this is happening as we record this episode. Not for nothing have we made that running joke where we well, I guess it's time to do it again, where we apologize to that poor hypothetical Nessay, intern, who has to listen to this show? I hope it's going all right, man, haven't heard from you in a while.
I think he's listening to the show or monitoring our personal phone calls.
He might be doing both. I mean, it's tough to be an intern. He probably has like a transcript on one thing and he's listening to the audio one.
On one side, yea yeah, and then another on the other and wait, a multitask. Do we have a name for him?
We used to call him Steve, but interns turnover so quickly. I wonder if it's a new guy now.
Or he's a pretty common name, though it could be a different guy named Steve at this point.
Yeah, maybe he has a maybe as a government assigned name, and it's just like Johnny Blank.
He's just a Russian bot now, maybe it is.
And can we call our intern Ricky that way? It could be.
Yeah, okay, Ricky. Well, we hope school is going well for you and school school. Stick with it, Van, I hope your summer is going all right. Feel free to write to us conspiracy HowStuffWorks dot Com. On that note, there's another subgenre of what we're often called conspiracy theories that turned out to be absolutely and in this case,
horrifically true. In the years of World War Two leading up to it and during the war, the American public was sold this fantastic, idealistic, shining image of what the US was and what the US would become. The United States. Okay, everybody on, here's where it gets crazy. I'm trying to hit the t the US. Oh man, Yeah, it's gonna it's the battle has been fought. Yeah, I accept that. I think it's hilarious. I appreciate it.
Don't don't don't justify these monsters.
It Wasn't it better though, when it was YouTube commenters with just awful screen names saying it's because it made it feel yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I loved it because there would be very salient points. There would be people writing four paragraph essays that had fantastic, fantastic perspectives, and then their names would be like surfer Boy booty Time twelve. Yeah, I'm like, wow, that's a great point. Surfer Boy booty time.
There it is Traveler twelve.
Yeah, like that. That should be like a raunchy comedy.
It's one heck of a weird pickup line. But so the the US and the Allies were portrayed as inarguably the good guys, with a nation united behind them. Every red blooded Jane and John Doseph was doing their part, whether you're at home or you're on the front, to prevent the dastardly Axis powers from sowing chaos and atrocity
across Europe, North Africa, Asia, and possibly beyond. And there was propaganda that came out, propaganda plenty that portrayed the Axis as insanely violent powers, raping, pillaging, murdering, and even experimenting on innocent people in their possession. Of course, the weird thing about the propaganda was the racist stuff was completely inaccurate, obviously, but the propaganda about the violence was
largely accurate in a very disturbing way. And by implication, what this propaganda did was say that the US and the Allies were the polar opposite of Axis forces, fighting for the safety and dignity of these strangers oceans away, just because we're good people, Yeah.
That decent, you know, we're fighting for justice for all.
Now, there were a few outliers, anti war activists, or anyone who had the goal to suggest that the US was not as clean and un besmirched as it would have its citizens believe. They were at best dismissed. They were most often accused of being spies or traders, and in some occasions they were completely blackballed from their own industries, or they were persecuted by the government up to and including criminal charges and jail time.
Or you know, they were put into prison camps like most of the Japanese American citizens.
Right, or they were put into asylums because they were crazy. How could you say this stuff about Uncle Sam?
Hey? Ugh, isn't he like a fictional character?
He is based on a real person?
Is right?
Yeah?
An episode on that maybe yet I don't know if.
But what what actually happened? Though?
Well? Actually turns out that the US was conducting illegal experiments on its own citizens, yes, as well as foreign populations. For decades. During World War Two and the years following, the government paid particularly close attention to the effects of radiation on human beings. I wonder why, Ben, Yeah, I wonder why looking to see how things might pan out in some sort of dystopian future.
Ding Ding give them that. As cigar passim in Omaha, Steak used to win this round. It is absolutely true. It's a good thing. They volunteered, right kidding. They had no idea, They had no idea what was happening. They were unsuspecting. Beginning roughly nineteen forty five, scientists working directly for the US government conducted at least at least thirty separate programs in which they knowingly and purposely exposed innocent US citizens to life changing or in many cases, life
ending amounts of radiation. This is shortly after the discovery of plutonium in the early nineteen forties. In one case, they directly shot people up with plutonium just to see what would happen.
Didn't give them like superpowers instantly.
If pain is a superpower, then they were like they they took eighteen people who had terminal illnesses and they said, we were going to give you experimental treatments. We are going to we may not be able to save your life, and we cannot predict the side effects. Both of those things were technically true. They said, but it may lengthen your lifespan. And this gets really dirty, really quick.
Because that wasn't even sort of true. The lengthening of the lifespan thing, that was just sort of like a hook.
Yeah yeah, and Deadpool, yeah exactly exactly. So what they were doing, what they were actually doing, that is, was they were hoping to take the information they gained, just like you had said, and use it to plan for scenarios where the US suffered a direct nuclear hit conditions. And they also gave children and pregnant mothers food and drink riddled with a radiation because they said, well, how will there'll be pregnant women when the nukes hit? What
will happen. Let's sacrifice you know, a handful of actual children now, with the rationale being that we're doing it so we can save kids later.
I remember that guy we talked about on the other show, Ridiculous History had the poison squad who purposefully ate poison contaminants and food. Yeah, that was volunteer Harvey. Yeah, Harvey. But this is way more nefarious and terrifying.
It comes from the same mindset though, you know. So here's the other part. They took active soldiers that they would later send the war, and they marched them over radioactive dirt at active test sites. And then when these non consenting patients died with no knowledge that they were dying, of radiation poisoning. The US government would go back in secret and rob their graves to study their remains, including infants. So we're talking digging up children, cutting off limbs, seeing what happens.
Well, who was doing the digging? Was it just low level like office cross Well?
Okay, so there one thing we know about for sure is this thing called Project Sunshine.
That sounds like fun.
Yeah, it's nice, doesn't It sounds wonderful. I think it has more to do with the brightness of an atomic blast than anything else.
Or the fact that sunshine gives you cancer.
Yeah, that's very true. So in this it was the United States Atomic Energy Commission along with the thing that would eventually become the RAND Corporation, working together. So it was somebody employed by them, either direct employees or contract workers. And what they would do this is, let's say, what they wanted to do. They wanted to study the effects of strontium ninety, which was the most dangerous isotope radioactive isotope that exists as nuclear fallout. And they knew this
from a previous project. And in this case they wanted to stuff especially young human flesh, and the effects of strontium ninety. So, as Ben was saying, like looking at people who they had already kind of dosed with or experimented with and then dug up their bodies. In this case, they're trying to find recently deceased bodies, specifically infants, young children, and that kind of thing, get tissue samples, and then
test those samples. So they would do everything from go to a morgue and take an arm of a you know, a child that had recently deceased without asking their family members, without asking anyone if they could use it, and then testing it and then disposing of it later. And they there were at least fifteen hundred test subjects in Project Sunshine geese or just deceased victims became or pieces of them.
Yeah, and you would say many, most, if not all, of those came from the act of grave robbing.
It's not a lot of It wasn't grave robbing, it was it was it.
Was sneaking samples from more glifting more glift.
Yeah, there is a there's a place you can go just really quickly if you want to check this out on rand dot org. Actually you can find it and it is Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons Project Sunshine in its dated August sixth, nineteen fifty three.
Oh go, I know I figured out the worst phrase for this, morg mooching. Oh yeah, that's a rough one. On a side note, with this, we find an interesting biographical tale here. It is the tale of Albert Stevens. Albert Stevens was someone who fell into the web of illegal government radiation experiments in the US in nineteen forty five. He was a fifty eight year old house painter. He had been told that he was suffering from terminal cancer
with only months to live. The truth is that he was suffering from a severe gastric but he had doctors tell him it was cancer. So he was admitted to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center to treat the cancer that he did not have to get cough cough treatment.
Cough cough, what's cough cough treatment?
Cough cough treatment? Is me really pointing out that they were lying.
To Oh I see how I got.
You got it? So this guy, this poor guy, Albert, he, as he says, given a few months to live. On May tenth of that year, scientists working for Uncle Sam, pretending to treat the cancer that he did not have secretly shot him up with the single largest amount of plutonium a human being has ever received to the modern day is just under one microgram.
You know.
The sample had two different isotopes of plutonium, was a cocktail. One of the isotopes was weekly radioactive, so still dangerous, but not an immediate death sentence. It had a half life of twenty four one hundred years. Yeah, and then the other highly radioactive isotope had a half life of
about eighty seven a little less than eighty eight years. He received free medical and additional testing for the rest of his life from the same group that riddled his body with radiation, and his family thought this experimental cancer treatment was working because he didn't have cancer and he lived more than a few months. In fact, he lived twenty one years suffering the effects of this cartoonish amount of plutonium that stayed in his system, in his bones, in
his skin, in his organs. His spine was degrading at a horrific rate. His eyes were fighting a losing battle with cataracts. And he was still there with the doctors who were cough cough treating kauf cough him and they conducted operations while he was alive to remove parts of his organs to see what was happening to them, took his spleen, parts of his liver, as pancreas, his lymph nodes. His family the whole time is saying, Wow, it's amazing
that you have survived cancer. Thank you for this experimental treatment. He died twenty one years later on January ninth, nineteen sixty six, of a heart attack. So during those twenty one years he was alive, he received more radiation than any other living human being, sixty times the government's maximum
safe lifetime exposure threshold, which turns out is a real thing. Yeah, and now it feels like a ticking clock every time you have to go through the airport's security line or use a microwave, wow, or get an X ray.
Yeah. So it's a ton of radiation that this gentleman had pumped into his body. And here's the thing. We've been talking about all these radiation experiments, but we're about to get into something that is a very different kind of horror, and we're going to get into that. After a quick word from our sponsoro.
We're back. We hope you had an enjoyable break we did. Yeah, we had to take a second too. We had to take a second to reset because this is the darkest part of today's episode, Like you know the scene in Willy Wonka where everything gets very spooky and terrifying and disturbing as the as the boat goes through the tunnel. This is the dark tunnel of the show and it's
unfortunately a serious thing. There was for a long time conspiracy theory roundly dismissed throughout the United Kingdom in Europe as a whole, and for decades, people like David Ike, musicians like Johnny Rotten, and various former members of Britain's entertainment industry or even its government alluded to this conspiracy and they were ignored. They were roundly ignored. Depending on their social standing, they were simply dismissed or they were ridiculed.
And the conspiracy was this that there was an active, ongoing child abuse network in the UK, and furthermore that members of the entertainment industry and the government, the people with their hands at the levers of power, were colluding to cover this up. Not to cover it up and stop it, but to stop people from reporting it as it continued.
Yeah, So.
These people who alluded to this, many of them were convinced that there was this child abuse network and that it was being actively covered up. Some of them, like David Ike, were dismissed as crack or Johnny Rotten was dismissed sometimes as their version of an Internet troll, just intentionally poking the bear, attempting to be edgy through making controversial statements.
From the pistols. Yeah.
Yeah. There were a couple of interviews where he would hint at knowing people high up in the entertainment industry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, John Leiden, it's his name, yes, yes, when you and you originally said Johnny Rotten, I thought maybe this was like a screen name or something. They didn't realize it was actual the Johnny Rotten. I didn't know this part of his story. Yeah.
And the same dismissal went for people who alleged their careers have been threatened not just in the entertainment industry, but in law enforcement as well when they attempted to blow the whistle on what they saw as an intergenerational
cycle of crime. The people named as criminals and frankly monsters in this situation included numerous MP's government officials, aristocrats, perhaps most notoriously the one that we know about in the US, the very creepy children's entertainer and DJ, the late Jimmy Seville.
Ye like this story just to point out here, members of Parliament is MPs just in case. Oh yeah, yeah, I don't know why that just came to mind.
That's a good point.
I was thinking military police in my head for a moment.
I was like, no, sull parliament funkadelic.
Yes, members of parliament funkadelic who also make laws in the audit Kingdom?
Funk.
Is there a venn diagram here? Yeah?
No.
I think it's good to point that out because remember, we thought everyone knew about Matt Libb.
I know now I'm paranoid about everything.
Oh you didn't get them at the book fair, you guys. I mean, I don't know. We can't assume that everyone had the same upbringing, right he did. We all kind of grew up in this part of the neck of the woods. So I don't even know if they have scholastic book fairs everywhere else in the country.
I don't know everywhere really, Yep.
It was a touring thing they had, like road cases full of these books.
Yeah, what they didn't have everywhere is Jimmy Seville dancing around on stage talking to children and being completely not creepy.
Top of the pops right, and people was yes, So here's what actually happened. Here's what gave truth to what was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, sometimes so vehemently that it ruined people's careers if they said they thought any part of it was true. As several of these people were universally men passed away after they were dead. This is important, after they were beyond the bounds of mortal judgment or a human legal system. The press was finally
allowed to admit. Oh yes, turns out that is true. People like Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith were admitted and proven to be serial abusers and quite prolific. Jimmy Seville in particular, was not just sexually assaulting children, who was also purposely targeting disabled children. And to add a a little bit of uh morbid icing on the cake here, there's pretty compelling evidence that he was sexually assaulting corpses as well at one of the non at one of
the hospitals. Yeah, he was I think on the board of Is.
There any sense that he had like people colluding with him on this or oh my god, yeah.
If not, if not actively participating these things with him the way.
Yeah, if we're probably not going to go into a ton of the details about these guys. I think that's as detailed as we'll get as far as what they did. But if you have the stomach for it and you want to know what a real monster is, like, we were discussing off Mike Cyril Smith and stuff that he was known to be doing after the fact, so you can look it up if you wish, but we're probably not going to discuss it here, right.
So we bring this up, and this is very heavy stuff because it is important for this to be separated from that dismissive realm of conspiracy theory. Yes, okay, David Ike has said a lot of things that cannot be proven true. It turns out you can call it a you can call it that thing where maybe a broken clock is right twice a day or something like that, call it whatever you want. It turns out that this
cover up, at least partially is absolutely true. This is conspiracy fact, at least in the broad strokes of the claims and accusations these powerful men were literally getting away with incredibly violent, reprehensible crimes with the knowing and continual support of facets of the UK government.
And you might ask why why, knowing, how did the government know about that? You have to remember a lot of this is either an MP of some a part of the government, or somebody like Jimmy Seville who is working directly for the government through the British Broadcasting Corporation.
And hobnobbing with the aristocracy, receiving commendations of plenty. So we do have to acknowledge that while the broad strokes of this are true, the rumors went even further and continued to do so, claiming that there might be some sort of occult aspect to these crimes, claiming that absolutely everyone was involved or is involved, and we don't know,
We don't have proof of that. But what we do have proof of is that numerous files implicating living retired members of the UK government, some of whom may have passed away by now, have gone missing. And despite multiple calls for investigation from the British public and some less cynical government officials who are trying to do right by their constituents. This series of events seems set to play out like the notorious Detroux affair in Belgium. Yes, just troublingly similar.
Yeah and yeah wow, And we have to remember that it's also so here even in the US, not so much at a federal government level something like this occurring. But in nineteen eighty eight, something similar did happen in Omaha, Nebraska, where there was a community federal credit union that was it was raided by federal agents and it was found out that there was this guy named Lawrence E. Larry
King who was behind some serious things. There are allegations of child sex trafficking and prostitution and rape and all kinds of things with boys young boys that came out as an actual occurrence here within the United States. These kinds of things have happened over the years, and we just have to keep in mind that it's not always a conspiracy theory.
Right, And we have to also be respectful of the victims involved, whether those are the direct victims of the crimes or the people who who were somehow punished for bringing that stuff to light when it was occurring.
Even the people that get slandered on the sidelines that actually don't have anything to do with it, but they get caught up in maybe the larger parts or the fringes of the theory.
Because this is the kind of red meat that sells in tabloids, you know, so a news organization or a tabloid entertainment outfit would be incentivized to report this kind of stuff.
Well, look at this stuff with the Vatican that's been trickling out over the past few years. And we recently had the Pope come out and apologize for standing behind one of these archbishops that had like clearly covered up a lot of these sex crimes by you know, priests, and he, you know, our current are the current Pope came out and said, hey, I made a mistake. That's a big deal. And talk about a conspiracy. I mean, like that's something that's been going back generations and that's
just been covered up and covered up. And now finally in the wake of everything that's going on with all these sex abuse criminals being brought to justice or at least brought to light, it's this critical mass, you know. And then also have this pope that's a little bit more human than we're used to and will come out and own up to this stuff. It's interesting to.
See, it really is, and we can only hope, we can only hope that substantive change comes out about this. But for the case of the UK cover ups, the scariest part of the story is how much we don't know. We do not know if it stopped, We do not know if it continues today. We do not know who's involved, how they might be connected, or what people in the UK can do to try and prevent children in their country from falling into the clutches of this kind of thing.
If it's still happening. Again, it would be unfair for us to say it's definitely still happening. We don't know because all the reports about it keep disappearing. Yeah, but we can't end on that note. Nope, I need to don't go in a little long. But we can't end completely on that note. Maybe we can talk about a mad science conspiracy theory that turned out to be true.
That sounds fun, but is it government related?
It is?
Okay, well, then let's do it.
Okay, Okay, we'll do one more.
Matt will allow it.
Thank you, Matt. Here's the here's the gist. It sounded like something straight out of a dime store fiction novel. A brilliant, super villainous organization uses the weather patterns of Earth itself as a weapon. For years. Let's let's go back to that man on the street situation that Matt brought up earlier. For years, people would have situations where someone runs up to them and it's like, man, you know what they're doing up there in Alaska, up at
that harp. They're changing the weather man. Global warming is made by Uncle Sam.
Consistently, tornadoes come from harp and nast hurricanes.
It's a twister.
It turns out that.
Hey, wait, are they making hurricanes too? They're making hurricanes.
So let's throw in a British guy so it doesn't seem like.
We're we're Southern.
We can't do that.
We can. That's exactly That's exactly why we can think.
So I think, so, hey, did you hear them making blizzards too?
There we go sick of all these blizzards.
Blizzards everywhere I'm up here in New York City.
Were losing were like listeners, Hey have you heard of harp?
Hey, they're changing the weather like a mad bastard.
It's a delicious beverage.
HARP So okay, so hopefully we didn't rag off this off too much, but it was a very popular thing, often dismissed as a conspiracy theory, if not HARP, specifically the idea of weather modification. People were dismissed as total tinfoil hat nut jobs, and the mass media would say, no, one can control the weather, you guys, that's what's the next? What's next? Do they think we're being literal when we say it's raining cats and dogs? Back to you, Janis.
They were dismissed. But it turns out, actually, while there is no solid proof that HARP ever was intentionally affecting the weather, and a lot of HARP stuff is not once you dig into the files, it's not near as
mysterious or sexy as you might think. It is still pretty vague, admittedly, but if we bracket HARP out of there, there's absolutely proof that multiple governments, not just the US, also notably China, have experimented with weather and continue to experiment with it both as an agricultural tool and as a weapon. And guess which one our country used it for? Just you know, yeah, I mean, you guys already know what are.
You talking about the rain making supervillain?
Ye, well that's one, but the US government in Vietnam used weather as a weapon to combat communist forces.
Okay, cool, because we know another story about a guy who tried to save San Diego from a drought and claimed that he could manipulate the weather by shooting this like special cocktail of chemicals up into the clouds that he had devised, and supposedly it worked so well that it flooded the reservoir and caused thousands of dollars of damages and they ran the guy out of town on a rail. Uh and he you know, didn't get paid a yeah.
Yeah, he did the work. Though he did do the work.
But then wasn't there a thing too where like this was used. Cloud seating technology was used like as a kind of a firework display at the Olympics.
Oh yeah, to prevent to prevent winter weather coming into Moscow a couple of times Moscow and a couple other places. Yeah.
For some reason, I thought I read that it was like used as part of the like some sort of like big showy display.
That's interesting. I mean, the thing is whether modification technology, specifically cloud seating, which is the most well known form of this this technology, we still don't know exactly what it is capable of. Just like all the mad scientists from those previously mentioned dime store sci fi novels, we're messing with things we don't understand. Maybe there is some
things man was not meant to do. Maybe we spend so much time asking ourselves if we could do something that we skip the part where we ask ourselves whether we should do a thing.
Just a quick aside, China did spend apparently thirty million dollars to make it rain in advance of the opening ceremony.
In two two thousand and eight.
Right, that's right, yes, exactly, And that's that's the one I had. Oh yeah, yeah, yah, I was misunderstanding it. I knew had to do with the opening ceremonies. But they were literally trying to control the weather so that it would would rain earlier and not when they wanted it to look nice and pretty.
So we still have the rain, just change the schedule exactly.
But it's controversial. And they used salt and mineral filled bullets they shot in the sky, much like our rain making super villain in San Diego.
They used cannons specifically. Yeah, and they still China still has a weather modification bureau. They're much more transparent about it than the US ever was, so kudos to them. They're also arguably largely using that as an agricultural technology. We used it as a weapon, hoping to trigger mud slides, disrupt trading, communication, and transit routes during the Vietnam War conflicts in Southeast Asia right now as we're recording this.
Both of these countries can reproduce these effects today at any given time. All they need is a place to set up the sky guns, the weather guns, and then they can let it roll. But the problem is this, you might ask yourself, well, if they can do that, why are we having so many reports of catastrophic climate related events occurring. The thing is, both of these countries can mess with the controls of the world's global weather system to a small degree, but neither of them can
control the consequences of what happens. Because don't think of the weather like a string that you can pull with that leads to a cloud that makes rain. When you pull the string, instead, it's a lot more like a web, and you pull a piece of the web you affect the rest of it.
Yeah. We also can't control any of the large mechanisms like the airflow around the Earth. We can't affect how the northern leaves are going to be affected. We can't do anything like that currently, at least, what we know about is just adding moisture or taking it away essentially.
Yeah, and we don't know how that affects things like So with the case that Nol just mentioned earlier with Charles Mallory Hatfield out in San Diego, the same thing happened. We can create the effect, but we have no means of controlling it. So imagine that you have this tremendously power like Okay, let's seene of it this way. Let's say you have a gigantic plane and you can do two things with the plane. You can make it so that it never flies, or you can start it and
you can get it up in the air. Once it's in the air, the controls don't work. You don't know what's going to happen. It goes where it wants, it crashes, it can drop a bomb who knows, it hits another plane who knows. And that may be one of the primary reasons that we don't see more weather modification happening now because the technology is the basis of it is pretty easy to understand, so other governments can do it.
There are a couple of international agreements where people say, oh, okay, we're not gonna use the weather as a weapon.
But not an exact science though. Right, it's kind of rolling the dice, like there's a lot of factors in play, like you're, you're, you're, you're making the initial you know, shot, but after that it's out of your hand. It's in in God's hands.
As they say, yeah, you can't, uh, you have no control, right, And this this is uh, this is just one example of a conspiracy theory based in science that turned out to be absolutely true. At this point, we are scratching the surface. We hope while you're listening you have taken note of other things that were once portrayed as conspiracy theories that turned out to be absolutely true.
If that is the.
Case, we'd like to hear from you. What what what events or phenomena have you found to be at least partially true. It doesn't have to be all the way true, because as we know, rumors accrete, they grow exponentially but have you found anything that people thought was other utter hogwash that had a pearl amid the amid the swine of deception or misinformation? And also also one thing, what do you guys think about doing some thank yous at
the end credits at the end. Sure well, First, thank you very much Paul, Mission Critical set for this episode, big big Chrit. Yes, no, thanks Paul, Thanks Paul, Thanks so much to super producer Paul. Thank you very much to our the person who does our write ups for our podcast, Diana Brown. Every time we have a podcast come out, you can find on how stuff works a quick summation of what's happening. You know. If you want to share it around with your friends, please do so.
Thanks to Sarah Glyme who takes care of a lot of that work for us too, working with them.
Yeah, and especially most importantly, thank you to you, and thank you to the folks who have joined Here's where it gets crazy in mass We were talking about this earlier today.
They have been just rolling in. Yeah, little doggies like little badgers, but good badgers, badgers of kindness and friendship.
Yeah, we appreciate you hanging out with us over there. We will be on there periodically to discuss things, post things. We'll be looking at your posts for sure, so join us.
Tell your friends keep your nose cleaner. We'll ban you.
Yes, we might just hate speech. Yeah, that's the big thing. Just don't be a chirk. Let's discuss things. Just don't be a jerk.
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