How Area 51 Works

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dylan the guest producer again. And this is it's the podcast about Chuck. Some pretty heavy stuff. Yeah. I could have sworn we did this one. What do we do roswell no UFOs? Yes, we did that at a comicconn or something, right, Yeah we did. We did alive. I've never been satisfied with that one. I agree. Maybe we'll redo it one day. Yeah, this is good. This this this area fifty one. UM. I think this kind

of covers some ground that I didn't think. I was surprised by. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, me too. And I think the thing that I would wager you were surprised about, which I was definitely surprised about, was just how mundane the explanations for what goes on at Area fifty one probably is secret government research the end, right, but it probably doesn't have anything to do with reverse engineering alien technology, and the secret seat of the one

World Government, the Majestic twelve, probably isn't located there. Probably just bombs and planes. Probably it makes sense. And the if there is a conspiracy going on, the one conspiracy theory I saw for Area fifty one that made the most sense to me is that it's actually meant to be a distress action or has developed into a distraction for some other place that no one even knows about. A maybe maybe hopefully they're not quite that on the nose,

but it's possible. All right. So let's go back in time, I guess, um to World War two, and well, first of all, Area fifty one, just to geographically level set, it's um less than a hundred miles from Las Vegas in Nevada, South South Nevada. Yeah, it's six hundred square miles um. And it's basically if you look at it

on Google Earth. It looks like a you know, a big air field with a bunch of buildings, so that I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of like the test range and the air base and all of that stuff that are the Area fifty one is located in. I think that's six square miles. I'm pretty sure Area fifty one itself is no more than sixties square miles. Oh yeah, sure, just that, like the it's not like

they're six centered square miles of buildings, right, it's just that. Yeah, the the installation that people think of as Area fifty one is part of a larger, huge, big chunk of the American desert in Nevada, right. So, uh, next to Area fifty one is what's what you were kind of

talking about, the Nevada Test Site. And this is where for about ten or eleven years, the Atomic Energy Commission UM was setting off nuclear bombs um underground, above ground and really sort of figuring out how to kill a lot of people very easily and sort of the most

dangerous way you could imagine. Yeah, and you could see this from Vegas like they would have parties when they were doing the test because Vegas is like eighty miles away or something like that, and they would have like atomic cocktails and viewing parties and stuff like that, and

people would watch them shoot off bombs. Right. Um, but this is obviously a part of the country that the government would be very interested in keeping people away from, not just for the bombs, but because of the um the fallout, the radiation, but also the fact that they're testing like supersensitive military equipment and um weapons, right, like atomic bombs. Yeah. Like, previous to this, it was just land. It was there were silver mines, it was cattle and wildlife.

But then the government said no, this is ours, and we're going to train bombers here. Uh. And there was a big bombing range and they were split into different numbers, and that's where the number Area fifty one comes from, which seems I don't know about arbitrary, but no one knows if it really matters why it was named area one. No, I think it was. If you look at old bombing range maps, just the area where Area fifty one is located was denoted as area between fifty and fifty two

is probably the answer. Yeah, that's basically from what I saw, that was it. Yeah, so uh, there's another part to this story. With World War two and this is Germany. Um, they were a bit ahead of us as far as jets go. Um, jet airplanes. Um. The United States is like, this won't do it all. So we're gonna get um kind of put the gas on our jet development. And in nineteen forty three, lock keyed Um said was was tasked with developing a jet fighter plane you can use

a British jet engine. Uh, And they tasked engineer Kelly Johnson said get a team together. He got a team together and they delivered the P eight Shooting Star, which is one of the coolest looking old jets all the all these planes are just amazing looking. Agreed. It's a good idea when we talk about a new jet or something, go look it up as we're talking about because most of them are pretty boss looking. Yeah. I've never been a plane guy, but I'm getting more and more into it.

Is that right? Yeah? I want to do a stealth bomber episode one day. Okay, possibly the coolest plane. Yeah. So um, Kelly Johnson is a that that just that right there. Delivering America's first jet on like under time and under budget was huge and he became a legendary engineer right off the bat UM and they, I think Lockheed said, hey, how would you like to keep this

pace up. We'll give you your team of elite engineers, whatever funding you need, whatever resources you need, just ask you can have it UM and you just keep developing stuff really quickly for us UM and we will put

you at the cutting edge of aviation research. And so Kelly Johnson and his team eventually became known as the Skunk Works, which is legendary in aviation engineering because they developed a whole bunch of really cool stuff, but also they had a pretty great name too that was fairly intriguing. But they were the first ones to kind of basically

develop agile project management from what I understand, YEA. And this was all out of the what was known as Site One, which was in Burbank, California, UM just sort of a suburb of l A. But then in nineteen fifty four they said, you know what we need now is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spy plane. We want something that can fly above radar um and

photograph Soviet military bases, missile installations. We're gonna name it because we name everything Project aquatone, and that's where Johnson and his team developed the U two UM the skunk Works team, but they couldn't do this at Site one anymore because it had to be super super secret obviously because it was a spy plane, so they needed a different place. And that's where that sort of all converges

onto this testing site in Nevada. Yeah, Kelly Johnson, uh CIA officer named Richard Bissell and a couple of pilots started scouting locations for where they could develop this in super super secret and they went to look at the old um out of test range, and specifically, the thing that attracted them was a dry salt lake called Groom Lake, and one of the pilots recounted taking some like sixteen pounds shot put balls and dropping him on the ground to see just how sandy the ground was and it

he said, it was solid as a tabletop. This lake was the dry lake there like this will probably do. And there's a lot of reasons why it would do, not just because there was a dry lake bed that was as hard as concrete, but because it was in an area that was already off limits to the public. Um the airspace was already restricted. It was remote. UM. There are two mountain ranges that shield the UM the

test site from view. So this area, what became known as Area fifty one, was just perfect for developing a super secret spy plane in super secret and so the CIA and UM the Skunkworks team said this will do.

Let's take this place over. Well, tell you about one of the most fun things I ever got to do as a p A. What wait, didn't weren't you arrested by Ericastrada as you're gonna say, oh no, that stopped in UM we did a car shoot on a dry lake bed in Death Valley and they had like a big, huge line of cars in a row, all driving in perfect synchronicity, and the director wasn't happy, and they were like, we want all the dust is behind them. He went,

I want dust in front of them. So the a d ran and grabbed the keys to a mustang, threw them to me and he said, get in that mustang and drive a hundred feet in front of them as fast as you can, fish tailing and doing donuts and stuff. That was like me, yeah, oh man, it was so much fun because it's a dry lake bed it's like there's just no fear of hitting anything or flipping, Like you could just do whatever you wanted. It was wonderful. It was so much fun. Did you didn't hit a

jack rabbit or anything? Did you, uh, just a couple? No, it was fine, it was It was a lot of fun. So well was the last thing he said, Yeah, the last thing while I was talking about how amazingly perfect one is for developing a super secret spy plane. Yeah. So they called it Paradise Ranch, and the locals around there they were used to because of all the atomic

bomb testing. It kind of worked out because they weren't gonna first of all, it was in the middle of nowhere, but even the nearby communities, the ones that were close enough, it just wasn't on anyone's radar because they had always been doing weird things out there, so it's not like it it pricked up anyone's ears. So it was kind of the perfect cover to be there at Paradise Ranch doing these development of these spy planes and stuff, right, right,

they so. But in addition to that, the cover story initially that the CIA produced was that they were a team of um bomb experts who were cleaning up unexploded munitions from the time when it was used as a bombing range. So that was why that was the story that used for why there's a sudden appearance of like trucks and people when there there hadn't been really much of anything there before. Yeah, they're they're also natural barriers. There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of

shielded it from view. Um, it was already remote, the airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and signed Executive Order UH one zero six N which basically extended the airspace over area, and then in ninety eight a public land order made this basically said that this area doesn't exist anymore. It's not on maps, it's not acknowledged.

And this is one of the huge reasons why site to the Ranch Area fifty one has been so um and and we'll see later things have changed a little bit in recent years. But just for the government to say, like, I don't know what you're talking about over and over again, it's sort of crazy making it is, but they would as we'll see you later. They will they would say an open court, this the the place where this person

claims to work does not exist. Like in court, and um, the judge would just be like, what do you how what how are we going to get around this? This is a real problem. Um. But that from what I read, Chuck, originally Area fifty one was CIA installation, and around seventy it transferred hands to the Air Force. But from from what I could tell, up until that point, or at least the first several years in the mid to late fifties and early sixties, UM, no one had any idea

that Area fifty one existed. They did a really good job of keeping that place a genuine secret, not an open secret like it became later on, but a real secret. And one of the ways that they did that was they they from from what workers later said in like testimony in court cases, is that like they would be interrogated at gum point to see if they were actually spies.

There were all sorts of like weird loyalty tests and things like that, and UM, while they were working on the you Tube spy plane in particular, they kept that secret so serious that if you were out there working, um, and you had nothing to do with the YouTube program, you were just a worker. You were working on a different program. They would move you indoors, close the doors, closed the blinds on the windows before rolling the You two out or testing it, like you were not allowed

to be outside or look. Yeah, that that was pretty like remarkable. Like within Area fifty one they even had subsecurity protocols in place. Um, I kind of just figured like if you were in there, then you had access to the alien room, right, you know, all the good stuff. Right. But but think about that, because to even be on the base or in Area one, you had to have the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have

just to work on there. And even if you had that, you still couldn't see the You two Spy plane or know that it existed or hear people talk about it. They wouldn't even let Bono in on it. So that was a terrible joke. It was really bad. I was really hoping we can't get around that one. So the You two Spy plane was great until it wasn't. And that was when Francis gary Powers was shot down in nineteen sixty and the plane was all of a sudden in the hand of the Soviets, and uh, they basically

were like, well that's the end of that. You can't have a secret spy plane anymore once it's in the hand of the Soviets. And it was also a big deal because, uh, the American people all of a sudden knew that the US government is definitely doing things in total secret and developing technology that no one knows about. It was a surprise to everybody, not just the Soviets, but also the American public, like you were saying too. And I looked to see if this was looked upon

by historians. Is like the point where Americans realized that the government did things in secret that the American public didn't know about. And I didn't see anything like that. So I don't know if this is an ed comment or what, but it makes sense. And certainly people didn't know that the U two spy plane existed. The CIA did a really good job of keeping it secret, but when it was out, um, it was pretty humiliating for

the US. And it was also a big deal that this spy plane was shot down because I Eisenhower had approached Kruschev Krischev and said, hey, why don't we maintain an open air space policy to one another so we can keep tabs to make sure that either side is keeping our word with our you know, armament treaties and the stuff we're doing like we're enemies, but um, maybe we should kind of be able to keep tabs on one another. And Krischev said, no, there's not gonna be

any open air space policy. And so that the United States went and developed this you two spy plane instead, and when it got shot down flying over restricted airspace of an enemy, that's an act of war and it could have gone way differently than it did, but instead it was a big humiliation for the United States. And instead of this kind of tucking tail and running, the guy who was in charge of it for the CIA, Richard Bissell, went to the government and said, Hey, I've

got an idea. Let's get even more secret and develop an even more secretive plane under an even more secretive project. And that the government said, hey, let's do it. We're scared of the Russians. Will double down. We'll triple down if you want, buddy, And that became Project ox Cart. That's right, uh, And that was a black project, and it was so secret and so concealed that no one was even allowed to know how much money was being spent. Yeah,

this is a big, big turning point here. It was, I mean, this kind of started the era that we still live in today, which in which the military just dumps money into secret projects where there's um that that don't exist as far as anyone is, and that there's very little oversight for right, exactly interesting. Yeah, and apparently it was this Richard Bissell's idea. All right, well, let's take a break old Dick Bissell and we'll we'll get back to Dick Bissell and the rest of ox Cart

right after this. So one of the problems with I guess it's not a problem if you're comfortable with dumping money into a project. But one of the I guess expenses of a super super secret project is that it just costs a lot more. Um. Background checks take time and cost money. Uh, putting something in a super remote location cost money, um, having extra security forces and it all just cost a lot more money. I mean, it's a it's a serious multiplier on cost to do something

that quote unquote doesn't exist. Right. But in addition to that, Chuck two is just the fact that, uh, the technology that was being developed was so cutting edge, it's just by definition required even more money on top of the extra money for it being so super secret. Yeah. So ox Card eventually led to the SR seventy one Blackbird, another amazingly cool plane, probably the coolest of all time

if you ask me. Yeah, I said the stealth Barmber earlier, but the SR seventy one is that it was pretty awesome, although there is another one later on that I'll I'll mention. Uh well, I'll go ahead and say the Bird of Prey stealth jet. You like that one, Huh, that's pretty cool. It looks a little bit like a super cool tongue depressor. You know what I'm talking about. I know what a tongue depressor is. This looks like that, like a flying

gray tongue depressor. It's like a opsacle stick though, right, um, yeah, but wider. Okay, But the SR seventy one Blackbird definitely not a popsicle stick. No, No, it's just cool. Plus, it doesn't hurt the fact that G. I. Joe Well Cobra technically had the SR seventy one Blackbird as one of their planes. That's funny. Uh So oxcart um they needed better infrastructure basically, and it was they couldn't just

pour money into the development of the jet. At this point, they had to really update all the facilities, expanding on land, expanding and more restricted airspace. Even that happened in nineteen two, and it just sort of, I think, ingrained the super permanence of Area fifty one. And also like the fact that, like the government said, no, okay, this was a humiliating

thing to have a YouTube shot down. Rather than maybe we'll just kind of take another tack, they really went further down the path of just completely secret black projects and they developed some pretty pretty amazing stuff there. Um the uh I think you were saying the Bird of Prey that was from the nineties, right, Yeah, I think it's cool looking. The F one seventeen Nighthawk, that's the one that's like a single wing stealth bomber. I believe, yes.

And this is also where they take and um, like if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that to area to check out as well. Yeah, there's another program at right Patterson Base in Dayton that's like set up specifically for that. But I wonder if this is like even more highly sensitive. I don't know, Um, but yeah, they've captured Miggs before, captured radar systems and they reverse

engineered him there, which will come into play you later on. Um. And then there was another one called the Tacit Blue stealth Bombers. So basically, any stealth aircraft, whether it was the stealth black Hawks or the stealth bombers that were developed from the sixties onward, Um, it was probably developed and tested in super secrecy in area right. So, like I said, this made it just sort of a shop that they would that wouldn't close essentially at this point, um,

in that there's an area known as Freedom Ridge. Very ironic name because Freedom Ridge was taken by the government right and closed off to the public. And this is where uh tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars to try and check out things, and they said no more, Freedom Ridge is now ours. It's called get out of

here Ridge. Yeah, shot on site Ridge. That's right. So, um, if you are like get to the Aliens, what are you guys even talking about the aliens and Area fifty one as synonymous as they are now, and they are synonymous. The highway that Area fifty one is off of the road Area fifty one is off of has been officially renamed by the state of Nevada as the Extraterrestrial Highway. It's Highway three oh five, as synonymous as this base

is with aliens and UFOs. That's actually relatively recent. It was operating for a good thirty five years, I think, um before Aliens became tied to Area fifty one. And there's actually a moment in time that you can point to where it happened. Then it happened on a broadcast in May of nine, almost just past thirty years ago on k l as, the local Las Vegas um TV network.

I'm not sure what network affiliate they are, but they had like their five o'clock news, and on it they interviewed a guy who was anonymous, went by the pseudonym Dennis, and he basically said, Hey, I'm doing a lot of weird stuff out there at Area fifty one. Let me tell you all about it. Yeah, his name, his real name was Bob Lazar and he, uh, have you seen interviews with this guy? Did you see the more recent one? No, the but the one where he said I think it

was a good idea. That one. No, I'm talking about there was one just from a few years ago. Um, it's I gotta say, I mean, I'm not uh conspiracy guy at all. But when you listen to Bob Blazar talk today, he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or

a weirdo, or like he would be lying. He hasn't like made money off of this or like he's He's basically like, listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't attached to my name because I'm trying to run a business in Michigan and it doesn't help that people think i'm some ufo kok Bob blazars alien apples and oh good, and he said, but he was like, you know, everything that I told you was true though, and that's just the deal. Uh, you know, and I don't care if

anyone believes me. He's kind of like that though. Two. In the early interviews, Um, at the very least, he's very calm and not at all kookie or anything like. It's specifically the stuff he was talking about that was so compelling. Yeah, so his story is, Um, then you can go watch this stuff for yourself and see it all. But he basically explains how he's an engineer and he was working on reverse engineering um uh, flying saucers essentially

alien spacecraft and alien technology. And at one point he was in a room and they left him alone with all these files that describe alien technology and alien autopsies and all of this stuff. And uh, it's pretty remarkable to listen to. It didn't make the hugest waves because it was it was a local news station. At first, it didn't, Yeah, and then it was picked up by Japan, oddly enough, and and after it went to Japan, it went kind of worldwide and before you know it, um,

the whole area just sort of became alien central. And this is we should point out. This also has a lot to do with the fact that in the seventies and eighties did the United States kind of went ufo nuts. Oh yeah, man. There are so many great books at the time that were coming out that claimed everything from like UFOs were responsible for them you to Triangle, or Atlantis was populated by UFOs, or the Nasca Lines were for UFOs, or the Egyptians built the Pyramids with the UFOs.

All that stuff came out of the seventies and eighties. Yeah. So this all kind of coincided with lazar Um having his news interview and it and it really just kind of changed everything it did, right, So he kind of like came out at a time when America was primed to really believe it. But but if you think about it, like everything you hear about and think about from about Area fifty one today did not exist pre nine, pre

Bob Lazar. All started with Bob Lazar. And the reason why everybody wasn't just like so he's just some nut who came out and said this stuff. Who cares? How did that? How did that become truly cemented with Area fifty one? Is that Weirdly, some of the stuff he talked about kind of held water, Like he would talk about just mundane day to day stuff that went on Area fifty one UM that seemed to h be able to be correlated from locals like it held up um

there is a um. There was a scanner once. He said that you would get in and out of rooms by scanning your hands and it would scan the bone structure of your hand. That was how you were identified and could come in and out of rooms. And supposedly somebody found years like thirty years later, mentioned of something like that and some declassified report about Area fifty one UM. He also and this is what really kind of legitimized him.

He would take people out on Wednesday nights and at the time he would say, I never saw what time it was, but at the time he said it would happen, lights would rise up in the sky and they would do all sorts of UFO E kind of stuff. And the fact that he knew about these schedules really kind

of added legitimacy to his claims. Yeah, and the new interview that I saw, he was explaining some of that uh anti gravitational propulsion technology that the aliens had supposedly used that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer, and he was sort of walking, uh walking the person through it that was in the room, and he was like,

oh yeah, and he said, we had this thing. It was sort of like half a basketball and when you went to put your hand on it, he was like, there was this he was it was like bringing two magnets, you know, opposite poles too. There's opposite poles that repel. And he said, that's kind of what it felt like.

And he said, so we would drop like a golf ball and it would just you know, skirt off to the side without hitting it, and like as if it had bounced, and the way he was just scribing it, I was just like, this guy just seems so credible, right, it was so like shocking. I didn't know what to expect. I thought he was I thought he was not going to be credible. I guess right. UM. I didn't see the interview with them, but UM, I read about that technology and UM and by the way, everybody, you can

erase your email. It's like polls that repel each other chuck not o. UM. The the anti gravity technology was talking about it was basically saying, like around the craft or whatever that they were reverse engineering, it would bend gravity, so this could just move right through space basically at light speed. That's the big suspicion among ufologists who follow this stuff is that they reverse engineering light speed aircraft that was propelled using anti gravity technology on engines that

were matter anti matter engines. And in back in you couldn't There wasn't an Internet to start with, but even if there was, you could and find stuff like descriptions of anti gravity craft at the time. So for this guy to just come out and start talking about this in an authoritative way, yeah, he he's an enigmatic figure. For sure, but he was also one whose credibility was questioned right out of the gate too, right. Yeah, I mean he said that he went to m I t

into cal Tech. There are no records of him being a student. Um U. The conspiracy theorists will say, like, you know how easy it is for the government to wipe that glean? Um do you? Yeah? I'm like, I don't know, is that easy? Uh So that's what they will say. Um They will also say that they also like got in touch with his professors to make sure they never talked and stuff like that. But that's when

I get a little bit like, you can't. You can't have hundreds of people or thousands of people involved in some big, massive cover up like someone's gonna talk. You're just not aking big enough. I agree with you. That's when it kind of starts to get inky for me. But he did disappear, and so I mean not disappear, disappear, disappear.

But he uh, I mean, it's not like he was like, all right, and now I'm gonna go make all the money on this right exactly, Like he moved and tried to start like a regular business and tried to just not be in the public eye. Yeah, he did, which I think adds to his credibility even more. You know, a little bit, Let's take our last break and then come back, shall we Let's do it, but let's promise we're gonna come back. Okay, all right, stop, okay, Chuck.

So Bob Blazar comes along, just starts spouting out at the mouth about all the crazy alien stuff that's going on in Area fifty one, and then he kind of like fades into the background for a while, and everybody else kind of took it from there. If you have anything to do with government conspiracies or believe in UFOs or aliens or whatever, all that stuff started to get saddled little by little onto Area fifty one. And one of the things, um that pretty early on got connected

to Area fifty one, but almost across the board. Any reasonable source or skeptical source will say, like the two have nothing to do with one another. Is Roswell and Area fifty one. Yeah, the Roswell crash in when something crashed, gentleman found pieces of an air pieces of some kind of unidentified object, and uh, it became UFO Central. Later it was it was said to be a weather balloon. But first the Army said it was a flying disk

that kind of right. Sure, I mean it looks like um, I've seen that that one famous picture of the guy crouching with what looks like just some balloon material, right, But you know he was just a stooge for the government and that was just a profit that came up with. So the Roswell crash happens in UM, there's no way Area forty one would have been associated with it. The whole, the whole mythos around Roswell is that Um, there was

a UFO crash that happened. Some aliens survived or at the very least their bodies were recovered, depending on who you ask, and the UFO and the aliens alive or dead were taken for further study to wear Area fifty one. Area fifty one back in seven when the Roswell crash happened, UM was not even on the CIA's radar. It was that basically a defunct air strip and day Um nuclear testing range still, so there wouldn't have been any place

to take the aliens in the first place. And then secondly, after the Roswell crush happened, UM, the idea of the an alien um, an alien crash having taken place there. That didn't come about until like the eighties too, so really people started to kind of catch onto this a little late. So probably Area fifty one in Roswell have

nothing to do with one another. And let's not forget that they're like eight hundred miles apart two even though to everyone in America and really the rest of the world outside of the Southwest thinks they're like right next to each other, I think, so, you know, yeah, So there have been a lot of crazy theories over the years. Um. The very most basic um are, like you just said, like,

there's alien corpses there, there's alien technology there. Uh, and the US military has been studying this stuff and trying to perfect everything from time travel to light speed travel. Right, that's that's the basic ground zero approach. Don't forget interdimensional travel too, why not? Um another one I saw, there's

some pretty pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The moon landing was faked there, and then after that, right, but then after that, Kubrick was executed on site and replaced by a clone that cloned did some great work. They did, um better than Barry Linden Right would love Barry Lindon. I've never seen it, so I can'tently hate on it. It's amazing. UM, weather control experiments. That's probably the most believable for me. Cloud seating, sure, why not?

Why not? Um? And then there's like stage two of of conspiracy theories. Yes, that is uh, there are aliens that clock in every day at Area fifty one and work side by side with us in harmony, in harmony in order to build like an alien human hybrid race. Um. And of all this sounds familiar. I will bet that you watched a pretty hefty amount of X files because they really tapped into this stuff. Um. They basically just appropriated it for plotlines, um, which is great. I love

the X Files. But it was just I guess Chris Carter used to hang out with like uthologists or something just to get ideas. Did he really or he had too of yeah, or he has one himself. I don't know much about maybe so uh. And then, of course, if you even ramp that up a little bit more, that that that this is all part of a giant conspiracy to create a one world government that is human alien run right. And that's where um, that majestic twelve I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They they are

supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists. There's twelve of them who were impaneled by Eisenhower after the Roswald crash um or I guess it would have been Truman, I think still um who and they were put together, just the cream of the crop to basically go contact the aliens and basically broke her a meeting I guess between the President and the aliens. And they managed to um leverage this to catapult themselves into the status of actual people who run the world. So they're the ones who

are forming this this one world government. And that is where Area one or that's where it's located. The seat of this government is located underground in Area Yeah. This next one is um a little more recent and very kookie um. And it's it's the notion that Hitler and Stalin got together and hatched a plan to undermine the United States in World War two by distracting us about

the threat of an impending alien invasion. And they would do this by building a fake spaceship filling it with mutant children that Joseph Mingola created and um fill the spaceship with those kids, and then the craft crashed in a storm, and that was the Roswell incident, right, it was meant to land, and then these mutant children come out speaking German supposed right. Supposedly the mutant children who were the aliens that were found in the Roswell crash

had huge heads and giant eyes. They were basically like the Grays of alien legend um and that Stalin and Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to the World the War of the World's broadcast. They wanted to incite that kind of panic um by actually creating this fake alien invasion with all the drugs. Hitler was on after we know this now who knows? I'm sure He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a create idea. It's a create idea. Man. Let's what else you got? What

else you got? What else can we do? Solents like mellow He tried CBD. He's like, no, that's the one thing I haven't right, he got anything right, but it'll mix well with everything else. So this is this is

obviously not a thing either. Well. This is from a book by um an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe, and she this book came out in two thousand and eleven, and she based this whole thing on an alleged Area fifty one insider who was her source, who said that he worked on a project UM that had to do with this somehow, some way, but that this this was where all of this alien stuff came from. It was

a it was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets. UM. Weird thing is is there's another guy out there who supposedly has a different source who tells the same story. But this other source UM says that this is it was all fake. That I saw the files myself, but I believe that it was meant to be a test of loyalty, or to see how I would react working at Area fifty one two files like this and be like, oh my god, this is real, this is real. I

can't believe this is this is actually real. So I guess to see how gullible you were and therefore how trustworthy you were, right, which could explain Bob blazar situation too, because he was supposedly in a room full of files he probably shouldn't have seen either, right, So that that you've got three different sources who supposedly worked at Area fifty one. Technically, I should say, because we'll get email. Bob Blazar worked at S four, which is an even

more secret installation that's attached to AREAT one. But you've got three people who allegedly worked in Area fifty one who all tell a story about basically being left in a room with files that contained information about aliens, whether it was a hoax or real or whatever. And maybe that is because that kind of correlates with the idea that there were like gunpoint interrogations to verify your allegiance to the government or the military or whatever. Maybe that

is something they tried there. Yeah, it doesn't make the actual aliens real, It just makes the presence of the files real. That's true. So Area fifty one today as it truly exists. Um, if you're driving down Highway three seventy five, there's an unmarked dirt road between mile markers twenty nine and thirty or I guess thirty and twenty nine, and uh, you turn on that road. It's twelve miles on a dirt road, and you'll get to a gate and there'll be warning signs all along saying restricted area

sort of like close encounters type stuff. Um, there will there will be cameras and censors everywhere, So don't think you're like getting away with anything. No, there's there's Mike's that listen to your conversation like you were. You were under as close surveillance as you've ever been in your life from what I understand. Yeah, and there are guards of course, and they will say I'm sorry, turn around and drive back to the highway. And if you persist

a little bit, um, then you will get arrested. Um. If you're around the perimeter area kind of walking around with your binoculars, um, they will probably come and take your binoculars and tell you to leave, or drive you, um back to the highway, or maybe smash your facing and bury you in the deserts. Well, there's a sign that says use of deadly fourth forces authorized. Um. But there's from what I've seen, there's never been an incident

that where that actually happened. You're much more likely to get handed over to the local cops, who will slap you with a several hundred dollar fine sure if you if you give them any kind of guff and don't leave immediately when they tell you to. So kind of the cool thing about Area fifty one there, Um obviously that I mean there are civilian workers that work there.

It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing, um because you can look at satellite photographs and year by year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with more buildings. Uh. If you work there, and um, I mean they have to have everything from food services to custodial services, to plumbing and electricians and stuff like that, and all of those people have the highest possible security

clearance an American can have. Oh sure, so they don't drive down that dirt road and just go to the gate and say how you doing, Rick, and they go come on in Jane. Uh, they go to mccarren Airport in Las Vegas and they all get on a big basically air taxi. Um, it's a seven thirty seven passenger jet that fly. They call him the Janet Jets at center. The call signed Janet. They're white, the big thick red stripe. You can look it up online and they that's how

they get to work every day. They fly everyone in on a seven thirty seven and you can see them on the tarmac. They just get in with the regular planes. It's just look for the Giant seven thirty sevens that are white with the red stripe and pretty cool. No logo, no nothing. They don't actually have a name, like you said. They fly under call signed Janet. People have tried to figure out forever what Janet means. There's an idea that it's just another non existent terminal stands for that or

joint air network for employee transportation. But if you go visit the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame, they tell the story that there was a commander of Area fifty one named Richard A. Sampson from v one and he chose his wife's name Janet to identify the commuter shuttles. And that's the that's the most romantic, super secret government story of all. So we kind of teased earlier on that. Um, the government is no longer saying like I don't know

what you're talking about. Like, no, the satellite image that we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything

but dirt. Um, that's all changed a little bit now because of a lawsuit in the mid nineteen nineties or a group of workers from Air that sued the government because of the it's an environmental disaster there, or you know, maybe that's changing now, but it had been for many, many years because of the fact that it's a black project and so unregulated that they were just basically doing everything like dumping hazardous waste and burning it and trenches

and people were there just inhaling these fumes and getting really sick. And a guy named Robert Frost that worked there, an employee UM had a lot of really bad health problems. Doctor said, you were sufferings from some kind of a really bad chemical reaction, and in order to treat it, we need to know what it is. And the government said, sorry,

we can't tell you that. He died. He died, and some other co workers filed this lawsuit and one of them ended up dying too, and they finally got to like a Nevada i think, or a federal circuit court that said, no, you gott don't have a right to know what what you've been exposed to. They weren't looking for money, they just wanted to know what was killing them.

And and and the reason that they had no legal right to know was and this is that that trial that I was referring to earlier where the government representatives were saying, like, we like, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry, So imagine like trying to just get past that barrier, right, You're suing the government to find out what they were burning that made you sick, But the government's in court saying, like,

the place that they're talking about doesn't even exist. That's like, that's obstacle one. But the whole reason that they were burning this stuff in the first place is because UM Area fifty one operates under what's called the mosaic theory, and the mosaic theory is that any little piece of information a spy gets his hands on could be fit together with other information to to provide a larger picture

of what what's being done at Area fifty one. And as a result, nothing can come out of Area fifty one UM like the chemical that's killing the people, right,

or computers that go in and are used. Once they get decommissioned, they get put in this pit and these trenches, and every two weeks they go out there with jet fuel and everything that's been put into the trenches over the last two weeks gets douse with jet fuel, it's set on fire with road flares and whatever is in that smoke the workers get exposed to because for some reason they built the trenches upwind of this um this installation rather than downwind, and so people were exposed to

this every two weeks for years and years and years, and things like you know, um anti radar paint, um. The jet fuel that they're using is an acceler and I'm sure wasn't helping, but just all sorts of exotic materials that was super super classified. The this is what was killing these people. We're making them sick exactly. And the government said, no, this is just to classify. These people can't know, they're just gonna have to go off and die on tree did because we're not going to

say publicly what what they were exposed to. And that's that's where it stood that case. Uh they did finally, finally in that case say okay, there's an area fifty one. I know, the whole courtroom went out for beers that day afterwards, so there's a thing there, and that that's really all we can say, sorry, is there's a thing there. But that was the very first sort of uh insight into the just that admission that there was something there was the first time that had ever happened, which is

in the mid nineties. Yeah, and um, you were saying, like people would point to satellite images of the place and you can see that it's growing now, like you

can see it on like Google Maps. That is really new because it wasn't very long ago where all the satellites in space were controlled by the government, and the government could control what ended up in satellite images, so they blocked out anything any image of But as private firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible.

So just a little by little, it's it's becoming to the point now where they're like, yes, they acknowledge something's there, No, you can't know what's going on there is basically the status quo now pretty much. So that's Area fifty one. And sorry, we kind of took the government tach here and uh didn't really go all in on the alien theories, but I just don't think that's what it is. Uh. If you want to know more about Area fifty one, UM, I guess just start reading about it. There's some pretty

interesting stuff out there. And since I said that it's time for a listener mail. This is about nicknames. This is from Rob Bob. Oh yeah this one. Hey guys, my name is Rob Bob, Rob and Bob combined into a singular form. Uh like Jim Bob, but better. My mom has explained to me that it started when I was about six months old. I was a really chunky kid, like and then ninety nine percentile for weight. They felt like no other nickname like Robbie or Bobby fits, so

they started calling me Rob Bob. Um. Many years later, I meet my wife, which is almost eight years ago now, and quickly found out that her favorite writer is Richard Wright. Since reading his novel Native Son, has wanted to name her kid Richard to honor the impact he had on her life. She had visited his grave in Parison as every book he ever published. Um. When she met me, I told her about my super nicknames that I had wanted to call my kid because you see, my father

is William Bill for short. But now since we came up with these weird names, I call my dad will Bill to bug him. This leads me to why I have always wanted to name my child Richard since high school. Then we would in order to have a will Bill, a Rob Bob, and a Rick Dick, all in three generations of awesomeness, my wife does not approve and things we should look else air for name ideas with great admiration Rob Bob and Rachel Nice. Thanks Robbob, good luck

with that with your your quest. Yeah, I don't think Rick Dick is going to fly in your household. I don't think so either. Rachel may may have the cooler head here, I think so. Well. If you want to get in touch with this, like Rob Bob did, we would love that. You can go on to stuff you Should Know dot com check out our social links there, or you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of i heeart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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