Travel with us, fellow conspiracy realist, back to October of twenty twelve. In tonight's classic episode, there's a little known government compounds out there in Louisiana. It's called Camp Minden. Do you guys remember this one?
I remember it got rocked by an explosion. Ooh yeah, yeah.
There were a lot of questions. This is one of those episodes where sometimes something will pop up in the news or people be talking about a very specific incident on social.
We'll be talking.
They always be talking. Well, yeah, and theories start popping up just as fast as they can possibly be generated. I remember this being one of those things. There was a lot of uncertainty. And what do we say about uncertainty.
Oh, in the absence of transparency, speculation thrives.
Indeed it does. So let's let's get our speculation on with this classic episode about the Camp Menden conspiracy.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government into conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained defense. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is MaTx.
My name is noa.
They call me Ben. We are joined as always with our super producer Paul. Mission control decands. Most importantly, you are you, and you are here that makes this stuff. They don't want you to know. A quick check in, Matt, how's it going, How you doing? Hey?
Doing well?
Hey?
You like the fons over here?
Yeah? Things? Yeah, things are going well. I had this weird hair last night where I noticed on the back fence and my property there's just a ton of junk growing up around the fence and through the fence and on its old chain link fence, and it's mostly like vines of some sort, and I just I couldn't help it. I just started destroying all the vines and just clasping them out.
Did you show the earth with salt? Oh?
I did?
Nice?
Nice.
I've always wanted literally to literally do that.
Yeah.
Is that where the expression salt of the earth comes from? Or is that different?
I'm not familiar with the etymology there. Yeah.
In this case, it's killing all this stuff that's trying to grow out.
You're doing more of a scorched earth approach.
Yeah.
Yeah, what about you? Noel? Checking in? How's it going?
Doing well? Thanks? Ben? I got to piggyback a business trip with family vacation. I brought my kid with me to New York City and she hung out with her godmother for a couple ds while I worked and we had adventures and it was a lot of fun.
Awesome, And the check in that we liked institute applies to you as well listening. So if you have an event in your life that you would like to to tell us and your fellow listeners about, feel free. You don't have to wait till the episode is over. You could just pause it and give us a call.
Now we are one eight STDWITK.
And today we are off to camp. No, not a summer camp, not a religious camp, none of those sorts of camps. We're going to a camp that is much more dangerous. We're exploring a genuine, literally explosive conspiracy as well as a conspiracy theory. How can both of those exist concurrently? Well, we will tell you ter Camp Menden. Here are the facts. So there's a place called Webster Parish. It's off of US Highway eighty near Doyline, Louisiana, between Minden,
Louisiana and Bossier or Bossier City, probably Bossier City. Louisiana. This thing, Camp Minden is part of a larger compound called the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant or LAP LAAP.
Yeah, and the history of this place goes all the way back to the beginning of nineteen thirty nine and the government. That is, when the government used eminent domain, which you were mentioning off air Ben. We have yet to do an episode on. I think we might need to correct that they used this concept of eminent domain to acquire the land before the United States entered World War Two.
Yeah, this compound is just under fifteen thousand acres. Originally it had a couple of different names. It was the Louisiana Ordnance Plant or it was called the Shell Plant, alluding to of course, artillery shells. And for the entirety of its time, since it was fully acquired beginning in thirty nine, going to forty one, it has been owned by Uncle Sam. But this is an important distinction, it has been operated by private contractors. So back to this history, right.
LAAP was completed in just eleven months under the direction of a contractor, Silas Mason. At the time, this was middle of nowhere country.
It was.
Well, we're a Family Show. It was just east of bumble F, if you know what I mean. Yeah, and there were very few people here. So from a congressional or state pork budget kind of perspective, it makes sense to have this kind of operation there, especially if you're dealing with ordnance or something that might be dangerous. You don't want that in downtown New Orleans, right, Yeah.
And it also makes sense. The time that they needed a lot of ammunition was right around World War Two. Right, So in May nineteen forty two, there were a total of eight production lines that were opened, and then by December nineteen forty four, the number of employees hit its peak at just under eleven thousand, ten thousand, seven hundred and fifty four. And that was in the month of the Battle of the Bulge.
That is a major operation.
Yeah. Well, I mean, think about all the ammunition that was deployed during that conflict during World War Two. You needed a lot of it. They were not they were certainly not creating all of the ammunition, but a good portion of it.
And then the plant was deactivated after the summer of nineteen forty five, right with VJ Day. But here is a spooky fact. This is one of my favorite things from the research this place. Camp Minden and laap are used interchangeably, so let's just call it Camp Minden. Camp Minden is built on not one, but nine cemeteries.
Are any of those Native American burial grounds?
No, No, there may be some people from Native American populations buried there, but they were rural cemeteries that date through different time periods and they are now. You know, they got a little bit better treatment than the stories we hear about things like Poultergeist. Right, they weren't just paved over. They are under the care of the US government, so you can see existing grave markers they took out.
There were these wooden grave markers, right, which you're not going to hold up very well in the human environment of Louisiana, and they were replaced with small concrete slabs. But the thing is the slabs don't have the names of the deceased listed on the markers. They're just slabs,
which is pretty sad. Right. The cemeteries are Allentown, Crow, Jim Davis, Keene, Nottingham, Rain, Richardson, Van Oorsdell, and Walker, and the people who are buried there have their dates of birth and death and maybe a little bit of other information. But the problem is, even if you are a descendant and you know where your ancestor is buried there, you can't visit the grounds to look for the grave cat You can't find them by the name, you know
what I mean. So it is the it is the site of nine cemeteries that the public is largely prohibited from visiting. That doesn't have a ton of stuff to do ostensibly with today's episode. But it's weird.
It is very weird that somehow, through eminent Domain, the government just purchased without really realizing it, nine cemeteries.
Stole the dead. They stole your dead. If you if you are descended from someone buried in those cemeteries.
And they're manufacturing ammunition that steals life.
That's wow. Yeah, maybe maybe we have an episode in the future on the strangest cemeteries. We've never done that.
Let's do it.
Let's do it.
I like it.
I'm keeping count Eminent Domain strangest cemeteries. But anyway that that's a little bit of a side note. We do know that to your point, Matt, we see we see production wax and wane with this uh with global conflict, right, the thing is not always open and pumping out bullets twenty four to seven.
Yeah, it was restored after World War two during the Korean conflict, and this was under Remington Rand I'm assuming the company that actually was there producing the stuff at the facility, and that was in nineteen fifty one. Then employment at that time went from roughly zero to five thousand in nineteen fifty three, I guess, from zero before nineteen fifty one then up to five thousand and nineteen
fifty three. Now at Campmndon there was a metal forging and machining plant area and it was known as the y Line Chromic Acid Etching Facility, the y Line Chromic Acid Etching.
Facility, Oh y'ld cave.
And it's fun to say even just in full, but it manufactured these specific one fifty five millimeter projectiles.
Would that be? What kind of weapon?
Would this?
Is that just like a specific caliber of bullet or is this like almost like a large.
That seems like they're certainly projectiles, my friend, And there are one hundred and fifty five millimeters, Okay.
A quick Google search indicated that these would have fed an M seven to seven seven howitzer, which is one of those cannon looking things that are on wheels.
Yeah, yeah, they're also I think they're kind of an all purpose standard, at least in NATO. I don't know about on the other side of the curtain at this time as they called it, but yeah, these are yeah, these are not for handguns or not not for handguns that you could actually use.
These howitzers are the ones that you have to click, click, click and get them to go up at an angle and they shoot. They kind of lobb these this ordinance and has a nice arc trajectory and then comes down almost like a mortar round. I don't think it's quite a more round, but it's definitely not something you would fire point blanket something you would shoot it and have.
It arc sounds terrifying, it does. So the plant is again reactivated during the Vietnam conflict, the Vietnam War that was September nineteen six sixty one, and this time by a different Rand Sperry Rand, and this contractor held it until nineteen seventy five as that conflict was continuing. It produced all kinds of things mines, fuses, shaped charges, bombs, boosters, demolition blocks, projectiles, really all the hits, all the things
that make humans no longer humans. And during this time, there were a couple of things that went wrong in the facility, a couple of tragic accidental explosions in nineteen sixty two and then again in nineteen sixty eight.
But the show must go on, whether we're talking war or Broadway musical, right, So over the next few decades, employment waxed waned in this facility, as we said, depending upon the ammunition needs of the military. This, by the way, played economic havoc with the local community because this was one of the primary sources of employment for the surrounding area.
There are a lot of towns in Mississippi, in Louisiana and even in Alabama as well where the primary employer is a contractor or a federal agency of some sort. I used to in another life being close contact with people who would role play for military training in Louisiana, and their job was to act either as you know, terrified civilians or belligerent civilians in case of urban warfare reenactments. And it was terrible. They were paid like six bucks an hour.
Well, and that's a really important skill because after the war ends you've got a pretty lucrative career as a reenactor on your hands.
There you go.
It does remind me of the Lake City Quiet Pills episode that we did.
Yes, Yes, which I was thinking of earlier. That that's a real thing and that we did. Okay, that was pretty well done. Yeah, thanks for everyone who wrote in to check on that, because that while that particular team, we don't want to spoil this for you. But while that particular team associated with Lake City Quiet Pills is largely out of the running now, from what we understand, there are multiple other let's call them independent operatives, independent
post military operatives out there with surprisingly affordable rates. This is not a recommendation to hire them. Just want you to know that it's a real thing. So anyway, the whole roleplane thing that I'm mentioning is just to show how reliant many rural communities can become on these things. So imagine that the only solid job you can get in your town is making ammunition for the army, and then the war stops and your job stops. What are you gonna do?
You know?
So let's fast forward to the present. This pattern exists right, this waxing, this waning this up and down frequency and explosions aren't going to stop the show. On August twenty fourth, two thousand and six, there's another explosion, and this is during a time where the areas run by Enough It creatively named Explode Systems Incorporated. They had a site that was leased, a Camp Mendon, and bombs there were disassembled and recycled in theory. This explosion in two thousand and
six led to the evacuation of six hundred school children nearby. Luckily, there were no injuries or fatalities that time around. However, this was still not the last explosion. Maybe we can hate mission control. Can we throw to a clip here?
First I saw the sky light up in the west, just allowed and I wasn't no noise now, just lit up.
And I caught my eye.
I loved and out to the west, and then the light died down.
Looked boys, hey, what was that?
He looked up?
Now, I saw that and it lit up again. And then next time we heard the lyle boom. It was like a sun set, it was so bright.
So what's that guy describing in that clip.
Well, he is describing a massive explosion that he saw take place at the plant.
But yeah, and this is the one in twenty twelve, or is that this and this is the one that was It was huge, just fifteen million pounds of this stuff called M six propellant. And this is again that Explode Systems Incorporated, the company that's operating it. It was.
Huge.
I mean the way he's talking about it, it sounds like a nuclear explosion. When you see the old footage of those or maybe one of the ones at a chemical plant in China that I think many of us have probably seen videos of, it sounds massive it and it was. It just just rocked Camp Mendon. It shattered windows up to four miles away, and it created a seven thousand foot mushroom cloud that ended up like the stuff that's in that cloud ended up contaminating much of the surrounding area.
We were talking a little bit about this off air, and I'm no spoilers for anyone, but this is something that really happened. Reminds me of the Chrene incident when
which is Fantastic series on HBO right now. When that explosion took place, people could see it from miles away in the city and it didn't create a mushroom cloud, but it created this crazy like light shining up in the sky and people were just remarking upon it about how beautiful it was, very upsetting the way it's portrayed in the show.
So the vast majority of people in twenty twelve and today, and if we're being honest, anytime after World War two are going to equate a mushroom cloud with what a nuclear detonation? So the question immediately becomes, what the hell happened in camp menton? We'll explore the answers after a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. So
remember those contractors we mentioned earlier. That's probably one of the most important points of the first part of our show is that while this is an Uncle Sam production, well Uncle Sam is you know the studio or whatever. The people doing the work are these private contractors, you know, a panopoly of rans, a number of any other contractors. Explo Systems was one of the most prominent. So those of us are hearing this name are starting to put
the pieces together. Right Explo Systems. Yeah, not the most brilliant, the most brilliant or creative naming, but like Explo short for explosion, right or maybe exploration. Maybe I'm profiling. But what is SLASH was explo Systems.
They were a private company whose primary business operations evolved the demilitarization of military munitions and then of course selling those things again like the recovered explosive materials that you'll find and operate, Well, you'll find it, Okay. Let's put it this way. You find munitions that were used in war or meant for war, and then you're gonna resell or repurpose those for mining.
Oh okay, all right, so maybe mining, maybe also construction such as the creation of roadways that cut through mountains where you have to blast rock or through or tunnel through rock.
Exactly for mining like that. You can even imagine using it for demolition of something that you need for a house or for a big facility something like that.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you have you guys seen actual demolition in real life?
I yeah, you have.
We had a big one here in town recently. That was an old archive building that they took down, and that's they kind of do it from the bottom down.
I guess. Yeah.
I went to see that and one of our friends of the show, a producer here named Ramsey Yunt, was filming it. It was weird. We've met the governor who is dressed like a leather cowboy at the time, is very very strange. Also very early in the morning, because they don't want to mess up traffic.
So he was wearing his demolition outfit.
You know, yeah, perhaps that was it. Perhaps that was it. But I asked that I mentioned that just because you know, these are legitimate uses for this kind of substance, right, you know, there's nothing against law about demolition building. There are actually quite a few laws about how to do it correctly.
And just a little background on the substance in question. This M six propellant. It's a military grade explosive propellant that's used for triggering firing off this heavy artillery like those howitzers and we were talking about, And it actually comes in bags and these grains that are different shapes and sizes, and they're very large. They could be up to an inch long, and the bags almost picture it as like an explosive bean bag that's packed into the
bottom of the gun. Depending on how far the projectile needs to go, so there's different they're graded differently for distance.
Right right, right, And there are different formulations of propellant. Right, M six is only one of these. But the thing about it is that this is one of the most common you know, because it's it's easier when you manufacture its scale. It's easier to manufacture the same thing repeatedly, right, rather than a mixed fruit cup, I should probably launch itself. So so, yes, the US Army wanted Explode to take all of this unused propellant and to store it and
then resell it. And they're already kind of sitting pretty right. We're paying you, We're paying you millions of dollars for this stuff that we're giving you. You just have to pay to store it. But then you resell it. And the Explode says, Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna sell it to to you know, like that Chicago poem by Carl Samberg. We're gonna we're gonna sell it to the construction workers. We're gonna sell it to the butcher's, the hogstackers, or whatever of the world.
Anybody needs to blow something up.
Anyone who needs to blow something up in a lawful way get some of this. In six everything must go. So the contract had all the basic requirements right Xplode needed to document the sale of everything, they needed to certify its compliance with federal law and submit official certificates to the Army, just by the book, the way you would have to handle any transaction with any hazardous material. Right spoiler alert. They did not do that, not once, not never.
So what did they do? Okay, So let's just recap. The US Army actually spent eight points say they awarded Explow when to right here, explo what's the what's the second part, explo systems. I think of that Tenacious D song Explocivo nice every time, So I'm just gonna call it Explosivo from now on. Yeah, they gave they awarded explow eight point six million dollars in contract funds to demilitarize one point three to five million propelling charges that
contained this M six propeller. Okay, just to recap. So they didn't do that. What did they do? Okay? It turns out they entered into a very very real life conspiracy, which we love here on stuff they don't want you to know. Uh, the management of Explode didn't even make an attempt at reselling any of these explosives. Instead, they stockpiled them super weirdly.
Stockpiling, and I would say is a very generous term. Yeah, stockpiling makes it sound orderly or labeled.
Let's call it hoarded.
The yes, that's it. Yeah, very unsafely, right, because the bags we mentioned that containing the M six are opened, they're opened to the air. They're laying around in corners, and they're intentionally hidden, you know, like in episodes of Hoarders where someone says, all right, this pile of papers, this pile of entertainment weeklies from the early nineteen ninety is fine, but I don't want them to know how
many dead cats I have. So I'm going to put those in a corner behind the used diapers, which are perfectly respectable things to hoard. So they treat these things like dead cats, right. They hide them in these various corners, They hide them away from the places where they would legally be required to put them because officially now these stockpiles do not exist. From January twenty ten to November twenty twelve, Explode ran a con game on the United
States of America. They submitted false certificates to the US Army. They were supposed to submit real certificates. They under cover of night, if we want to be dramatic. They transported hazardous waste to facilities where it was illegal to store them, and then they stored them, you know, like just tossing bags around into the corner and some If anything, it's
a surprise that this stuff didn't explode earlier. And the reason they did it this way is because they were able to continue milking the government for money by by saying, Okay, we've sold this to these people, or but you know, just keep paying these invisible things that we have set up. They even said that they even made up sales. They just completely said, okay, we sold this to this other company that may or may not exist.
Wait a minute, Ben, are you telling me that a company that has like a name that sounds like it's straight out of like idiocrasy was not only up and up and then a company called XPLO Court or whatever systems systems was gonna make stuff that would go boom?
Is that what you're telling me? And on it they were not going to let that stuff go. It makes you wonder who they were really going to sell it to, what they were actually going to do with it.
Possibly some sort of strange foreign deal with military militant groups, right, I'm just conjecture.
Well, we're gonna look into some of that, and it definitely feels like they wanted to make more money on it, or they at least should have, because that's just more money on top if you're you're already got a contract to sell it and now you're selling it. But that's officially what those false certificates are doing, right, They're getting paid for nothing.
Weren't they supposed to decommission it though? Am I misunderstanding here?
Like?
Weren't they supposed to render it inert or get rid of it?
Like?
I don't understand why were they holding onto it?
Capitalism, baby, Kip the Turkey, go straight for the gravy.
Yeah.
Demilitarizing it would mean that they remove the propellant from any associated paraphernalia equipment. That would make it a weapon of war, right, pet. So it's like it's like, yeah, maybe it's illegal to sell cars, but it's legal to sell gasoline, right, That's what makes a car go. So their job is to take the gasoline out of the
car and just sell the gas there you go. And what they did instead they took the casts out and then you know again, they put it in open bags and threw it in the corner on top of it, and then they said they sold it. It's I mean, it's and laughing because it's ridiculous. It's catch twenty two level or idiocracy level, to your point, no kind of stuff.
So the explo officials, including vice president of operations, a guy named William Terry Wright, in addition to making up these sales, they also did not tell the people in these third parties that they were allegedly buying this stuff, so these other companies have no idea what the hell's
going on. They also had their signatures forged or fabricated, and then the people at the top of the chain, the executives, order lower level employees to not only move this stuff once, but to move it multiple times whenever government officials come around to check in on things. Imagine you get the call and say, okay, we need to move again. Like to your point, Matt, it's millions of pounds of explosives or propellants.
Yeah, and highly dangerous and just continually moving it around in this big facility. It just seems like a recipe for disaster totally. And the.
Forgery doesn't stop there. This con game, like a lot of con games, is not sustainable over the long term, so it quickly kind of spirals downward and they have to create more and more false documents to try to cover up their original lie or their mistake or their oversight or whatever you want to call it, depending on how charitable you feel about the human condition as you
hear this today. So one other example would be that they started making fake paperwork for landfills in Louisiana and Arkansas to say that the stuff they did they did actually ship two landfills, was not hazardous. It was spoiler alert. So all of this added up to you said, millions of pounds, that's literally seven eight hundred something tons of M six propellant that is just hidden at Camp Minden, and eventually they get discovered because of that enormous explosion.
And we played that clip to take to take us all back in that in that time and space, you know, imagine where you live, whatever when you hear the word home, whatever you think of when you hear the word home, Imagine that one one afternoon, you know, one night, whatever you hear this, you don't even hear a sound the ground beneath you, shakes, the windows shatter, You hear ten
thousand car alarms go off at once. Right, dogs and cats are going crazy, and then the sky lights up and you see things flying through the sky, which is a detail that becomes very important later. Of course, you think that it's an act of violence, right, It doesn't feel like an accident.
It's a violent act that feels like an act of violence.
Hey, that was very well done, man. A violent act that feels like an act of violence. Yes, Just so, so the news goes crazy, right, they're trying to figure out what happened. They're asking all these questions. We'll bracket that for a second, so let's just go to what the authorities initially said. Captain Doug Kane, who was a spokesman for the State Police, said that the surprise, surprise, the cause of this massive explosion was all this M six propellant used as as you had noted nol in
Howitzer's and other artillery. The pellets are mainly this compressed substance called nitro cellulose. It's also sometimes called guncotton. Authorities initially said there was a total four hundred and fifty tons after an investigator looking into that October fifteenth explosion saw cardboard boxes and rows and rows of pallets just chilling behind a building. But then they found more stacked in sheds and warehouses, and they started trying to move.
They started trying to move it, and it wasn't. The problem they had was that, for a minute, this hoarding or hiding away of the stuff actually worked legally. They were supposed to put this in a thing called a storage magazine, and they had instead hidden it away because they wanted it to look like they were selling this stuff.
This stuff is also known as flash paper. You might have heard it referred to as such.
So they had to move it back and forth. The authorities are trying to move the stuff that hadn't exploded, and that is the official narrative so far. That's the official That's what you will hear on the news. That's what you will hear when you read about the later court cases and stuff that come about because of this. However, there is more to the story. Some people you see allege that a cover up exists. What are we talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
So as we said, what we've explored thus far is the official story. That's the thing that comes across the news waves to you, the pr documentation. Let's you know, that's what's going on, and that's what goes down in the history books. But guess what, there are other explanations out there, some a little more odd than others, but almost all of them reek of some kind of cover up that was a foot here.
Right, Like we said before, given that massive Bushroom cloud, it's completely understandable that some people with fear a nuclear detonation, right, or.
Some kind of attack at least, or you know, something went wrong other than an.
Accident, right. And the idea of nuclear powered terrorism is at the forefront of a lot of people's minds due to active negotiations with the DPRK and the attempt to verify or just armed nukes, the concerns of quote unquote rogue nukes or suitcase nukes, the dirty bombs, dirty bombs, the dirty bombs, not to be confused with our local
dirty birds. Well also sometimes bomb sports jokes. So it's interesting because the Shreveport Times shortly after this report a number of what you could call conspiracy theories or alternative theories or at the very least contrad eyewitness reports that contradict the official narrative. But that article and subsequent related articles appear to have been scrubbed from the Internet. It could not find them even using one of our favorite tools, the way back machine.
Ow man, I love that thing.
One article that did survive is pretty fascinating. If not, well, let's present it first for everyone's consideration without commentary, and then maybe we can go back and pick it apart a little. This comes to us from Joe Quinn, who was writing at op EdNews dot com.
So in op EdNews dot com, Joe Quinn reports that folks across Texas, Louisiana, Amsissippi saw bright flashes in the sky, and he described them having seen fireball trails as well.
And then in.
Shreaveport, the Shreeport area of northwest Louisiana, a lot of folks heard earth shaking booms that caused houses to rattle in their foundations and windows were broken all throughout Minden. And so here's a quote from Amy Meely, who was one of the residents who lived just a couple of miles from Camp Mendon.
Yeah, she genuinely thought that she was being bombed. That's that's what she said. I honestly thought we were being bombed. And she said it was one of the scariest things that she's ever been through. And you know, she was like, she describes how she's checking some emails, right, she's about to go to bed. You look at your phone or whatever you can do your check your email, make sure everything's okay. And she said she had an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach. She said it was
quote like a rolling thunder in the distance. And then she said it was getting closer and closer, and she said she felt everything moving with me. I could literally feel it moving toward me. That's a that's pretty crazy, right, And and that's right before the actual explosion hit.
Ah See, the chronology becomes interesting here yet, because dozens of people this still from op ed News. Dozens of people Quinn Wrights, called the Webster Parish Sheriff's office, as well as the local news station KSLA News twelve, and they reported seeing flashes of light in the sky and hearing multiple loud booms that shook houses. The sheriff's office initially stated that there was a quote possibility that a
meteor hit the ground in the area. The following morning, however, they recanted, and the parish sheriff at the time, Gary Sexton, said that has Matt experts told him what people had seen and heard was an underground bunker containing explosives that
blew up that late night on October fifteenth. Not only was there nothing to see here, but the explosion quote worked exactly as it was designed to do, and the use of the phrase designed was somewhat unfortunate for the sheriff's department at that time because it left the door open for conjecture. Quinn and other people who doubt the official narratives still have questions. Quinn puts it this way beautifully.
He says, what are the odds that, at around the same time, as people across three states Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana and hundreds of miles apart, we're seeing what was clearly a meteorite comet fragment burning up in the lower earth atmosphere, a munitions dump would explode at the same time. More to the point, if a munition's dump did explode, what are the odds that a meteorite or comet fragment that many eyewitnesses believe hit the ground in the area
would be in no way connected to the explosion. So enticing, tantalizing, tempting, right, But we also have to we also have to think about how close the timeline can become. Here, it could seem like a meteor, right, depend on some where someone's standing and what they're seeing at the time. We talked about this before with Moufon and different UFO observations.
Right. Light, Yeah, light in the atmosphere can be tricky.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
The whole thing is one big shyamalant and the the problem is that someone could be far enough away that they see a light, but they don't hear a sound or necessarily feel a tremor. Right, Yes, so they could see debris from an explosion launched so high that they feel they're watching a meteor crash. So it could just be the explosion. But but that hasn't prevented people from saying, no, there is a cover up a meteor hit, and then they that's the thing for me, they blew up a military base.
The meteor did cover it up.
Yeah, it's kind of like the Titanic conspiracy, and they're like the best way to kill the people who don't like the Federal Reserve is to get them on this massive boat under false pretenses.
Exactly.
Yeah, So it seems that if we're exercising Occam's razor here, the idea between the two conspiracies, the idea that there's a cover up of a cover up. Right, it seems that maybe the mundane answer is the more accurate one, but it doesn't make it any less disgusting in terms of corruption. Luckily, there are two pieces of good news here. First, thankfully, no one that we know of was actually injured in
this in this debacle. And second, in a rare example of corporate justice, the higher ups and Explode did end up going to court. So it wasn't just, you know, the way it happens with banks. It wasn't just that the bank was fined some portion of their profits and was able to write it off as a cost of doing business. The individuals involved actually had legal consequences.
Yes, The co owner, a man named David Alan Smith, who was sixty three years old at the time. He was sentenced to fifty five months in prison because of all this yiche. Yeah and uh, and also three years of supervised I guess what is that super supervisor essentially. Yeah, and after he was released and he was also fined thirty four million dollars what yeah, almost.
Like almost like fine, well this guy a super rich man.
Well it was almost thirty five million. Again, he's he's the co owner of this company, right, and he was taking part in that conspiracy we were talking about, right of bilking the billion government.
There's a lot of rings of chernobyl in this story. You know, not to spoil anything, but it's like it's it's corruption, it's cover up, it's failure to do the right thing to protect the people that live in the vicinity of your facility with.
Very dangerous things. Products at the center, product at the center of it. Yeah. Well yeah, And here's the thing, Dave Allen Smith. He's not the only guy that went.
To prison, right. There was William Terry Wright. We mentioned him earlier. He was sentenced to sixty months in prison three years of supervised release. And he because he wasn't an owner, I guess.
He was the VP of operations right, right.
He had to pay just under one hundred and fifty thousand in restitution for participating in the criminal conspiracy and There were three other big names that also had to take a dive.
Yeah, there was the director of Support Technology, a man with Charles Ferris Callahan who was sixty nine from Shreveport. He got twenty four months in the clink, one year of supervised probation, and had to pay two hundred and seven five hundred ninety nine bucks in restitution for falsely representing facts in various documents.
Then, of course you get over to Kenneth Wayne Lambkin. He was the this is his title, M six demil like as in demolition program manager.
They're all about the little snappy you know, short shortenings.
Well, yeah, and he got himself forty five months in prison and three years of that old fun thing supervised release or probation, and he was fined and you know again similarly to William Terry Wright, one hundred and forty nine thousand dollars in restitution, and his was for specifically making false statements.
And last, but not least, there was Traffic and Inventory Control manager Lionel Wayne Coons with a K, who had to go with forty one months in prison, three years of supervised release, and he got off relatively easily in terms of restitution. He only had to pay ninety two nine and twenty one dollars only.
I mean, I don't have that sitting around. Don't know about you guys, but.
Well, it's kind of it's kind of like anchoring on menus, you know, the psychological thing where you show people a larger price first and then you get them to forget how high the lowest price. Thing is, Sure, we could, we should go into psychology menus one day.
That's smart.
So these people did actually go, they did go to court, they did get found guilty. It was a real conspiracy. The question for people who are out there a little more in the fringe of the reporting is whether or not there was a that was, whether or not this conspiracy is a cover up for something else at play. We did not find a ton of evidence for that. It seemed more like the fog of war and the
panic of trying to report things as they're happening. But hey, if you are from the area and you know something else that was a miss at the time, we would love to hear from you. And also, if you're not from the area, can you recall any other strange cases like this in your neck of the global woods. What popped up in the news only to disappear a few days later like one day true story. Long time listeners,
remember this. One day here in our fair semi metropolis of Atlanta, a piece of the highway just collapsed Interstate eighty five, And for several months afterwards, the story that the local government was pushing was that a homeless person who struggled with substance abuse problems had set a fire in a shopping cart and that that resulted in the bridge collapsing.
Yeah, because stone totally melts, you know, with garbage can fires.
Right, Well, I mean, you know, there was supposedly some other propellant down there, things that were used to bird.
Yeah under the bridge yet recently started an LLC.
He was a very explode party incorporated.
Well, they had to figure out some way to use all those demilitarized ordinance. You know, let's use it for a nice fireworks display on the downtown Atlanta skyline.
It is alias, of course, was bridge Blowington? Yes, yep, And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. We try to be easy to find online.
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