Hello, everybody, Chuck here, take me to your leader. Other things ets might say, Happy Saturday. This episode is called how Area fifty one Works. It's from June thirteenth, twenty nineteen, and you know, we get into it. We chop it up, as they say, all about Area fifty one.
I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Brian over there, and there's Dylan the guest producer again. And this is stop should Know, the podcast about Chuck some pretty heady stuff.
Yeah.
I could have sworn we did this one. No, what do we do roswell no UFOs?
Yes we did that at a comic con or something, right.
Yeah we did. We did it live. I've never been satisfied with that one.
I agree.
Maybe we'll redo it one day.
Yeah, this is good, this Area fifty one.
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 yeah, 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.
No, probably just bombs and planes.
Probably it makes sense. And 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 distraction or has developed into a distraction for some other place that no one even.
Knows about Area fifty Maybe, yeah.
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.
To World War two, and well, first of all, Area fifty one, just to geographically level set, it's less than one hundred miles from Las Vegas in.
Nevada, South South Nevada.
Yeah, it's six hundred square miles and it's basically if you look at it on Google Earth, it looks like a you know, big airfield with a bunch of buildings.
So the I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of like the test range and the air base and all of that stuff. Yeah, the Area fifty one is located in. I think that's six hundred square miles. I'm pretty sure Area fifty one itself is no more than sixty square miles.
Oh yeah, sure, just like the It's not like they're six hundred square miles of buildings.
Right, it's just what Yeah, 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.
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 was setting off nuclear bombs 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 watch them shoot off bombs. Unbelievable, right, 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 fallout the radiation, but also the fact that they're testing like super sensitive military equipment and weapons, right, like atomic bombs.
Yeah.
Like previous to this, it was just land. There were silver mines, there was cattle and wildlife. But then in nineteen forty the government said no, this is ours, and we're going to train bombers here.
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 fifty one.
No, I think it was. If you look at old bombing range maps, the area where Area fifty one is located was denoted as area fifty.
One Between fifty and fifty two, it is probably the answer.
Yeah, it's basically from what I saw, that was it.
Yeah.
So there's another part of this story. With World War two, and this is Germany. They were a bit ahead of US as far as jets go, jet airplanes, the United States is like, this won't do it all. So we're going to get kind of put the gas on our jet development. And in nineteen forty three, Lockheed said was tasked with developing a jet fighter plane you can use a British jet engine, and they tasked engineer Kelly Johnson said,
get a team together. He got a team together and they delivered the P eighty Shooting Star, which is one of the coolest looking old jets.
All these planes are just amazing looking.
Agreed, very very cool. 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 Kelly Johnson was just that right there. Delivering America's first jet on like undertime and under budget was huge and he became a legendary engineer right off the bat. 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, and you just keep developing stuff really quickly for us, 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.
Yeah, and this was all out of the what was own a Site one, which was in Burbank, California, just sort of a suburb of LA But then in nineteen fifty four they said, you know what we need now is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spyplane. We want something that can fly above radar and photograph Soviet military bases missile installations. We're going to name it, because we name everything Project aquatone. And that's where Johnson and
his team developed the U two. The Skunkworks 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, CIA officer named Richard Bissel and a couple of pilots started scouting locations for where they could develop this in super super secret and they they went to look at the old Nevada 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 them on the ground to see just how sandy the ground was, and he said it was solid as a tabletop. This
lake was the dry lake. They were 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. The airspace was already restricted, it was remote, there were two mountain ranges that shield 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 the skunk Works team say this will do. Let's take this place over.
Did I ever tell you about one of the most fun things I ever got to do as a PA?
What wait, didn't were you arrested by Eric a Strada?
Is you're gonna say, oh no, that's stop. Ten Okay.
We did a car shoot on a dry like bed and death Valley nice 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 ad ran and grabbed the keys to a Mustang, threw them to me, and he said, get in that Mustang and drive one hundred feet in front of them as fast as you can, fish tailing and doing donuts and stuff.
Awesome.
I was like me, yeah, oh man, it was so much fun because this is 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.
That's cool.
It was so much fun.
Did you didn't hit a jack rabbit or anything, just a couple.
No, it was fine. It was a lot of fun. So what was the last thing he said.
Yeah, the last thing, Well, I was talking about how amazingly perfect Area fifty 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, I 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 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.
So, but in addition to that, the cover story initially that the CIA produced was that they were a team of bomb experts, yeah, 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 they used for why there was a sudden appearance of like trucks and people when there hadn't been really much of anything there before.
Yeah, there were also natural barriers. There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of shielded it from view. It was already remote, the airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and signed Executive Order one zero, six, three, three and nineteen fifty five, which basically extended the airspace over Area fifty one, and then in nineteen fifty eight a public Land Order made this basically said that this area doesn't exist anymore. Right, it's not on maps, it's
not acknowledged. And this is one of the huge reasons why cite to the ranch Area fifty one has been so 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 like they would, as we'll see later, they will they would say an open court, the place where this person claims to work does not exist, like in court, and the judge would just be like, what do you what? How are we going to get around this? This is a real problem. But from what I read, Chuck originally Area fifty one was a CIA installation, and around nineteen
seventy it transferred hands to the Air Force. But 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, 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 from what workers later said in like testimony in court cases, is that like they would be interrogated at gunpoint to see if they were actually spies. There were all sorts of like weird loyalty tests and things like that.
And while they were working on the U two spyplane in particular, they kept that secret so serious that if you were out there working and you had nothing to do with the utube program, you were just a worker, you were working on a different program, they would move you indoors, close the doors, close the blinds on the windows before rolling the U two out or testing it, like you were not allowed to be outside or look.
Yeah, that was pretty like remarkable. Like within Area fifty one. They even had.
Subsecurity protocols in place.
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 think about that, because to even be on the base or in Area fifty one, you had to have the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have, yeah, just to work on there. And even if you had that, you still couldn't see the U two spy plane or know that it existed or hear people talk about it.
They wouldn't even let Bono in on it.
Nope.
So that was a terrible joke.
It was really bad. I was really home. We can get around that one.
So the U 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 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 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, look 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 spyplane existed. The CIA did a really good job of keeping it secret, but when it was out, it was pretty humiliating for the US. And it was also a big deal that this spy plane was shot down because Eisenhower had approached Krutchev Khrushchev and said, hey, why don't we maintain an open airspace policy to one another so we can keep tabs to make sure that either side is keeping our word with our armament treaties
and the stuff we're doing. Like we're enemies, but maybe we should kind of be able to keep tabs one another, and Khrushchev said, no, there's not going to be any open airspace policy, and so the United States went and developed this U 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 just kind of tucking tail and running, the guy who was in charge of it for the CIA, Richard Bissel, 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. We'll double down. We'll triple down if you want, buddy, And that became Project ox Cart.
That's right, 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 turning point here.
It was.
I mean, this kind of started the era that we still live in today, in which the military just dumps money into secret projects where there's that that don't exist as far as anyone knows, and that there's very little oversight for right, exactly interesting.
Yea, And apparently it was this Richard Bissell's idea.
All right, well, let's take a break old Dick Bissell and we'll get back to Dick Bissell and the rest of.
Ox Cart right after this.
Stop.
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 background checks, take time, and cost money. Putting something in a super remote location costs money having extra security forces, and it all just costs a lot more money. I mean, it's a serious multiplier on costs to do something that quote unquote doesn't exist.
Right. But in addition to that, chuck too, is just the fact that the technology that was being developed was so cutting edge 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 mention.
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 depresser. You know what I'm talking about.
I know what a tongue depresser is.
This looks like that, a flying gray tongue depressor. It's like a popsicle stick though, right, 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 Gi Joe Well Cobra technically had the SR seventy one Blackbird as one of their planes.
That's funny.
So Oxcart 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 more restricted airspace. Even that happened in nineteen sixty 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 ever you two 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 amazing stuff there. The uh I think you were saying, they Bird of Prey that was from the nineties.
Right, Yeah, I think it's cool looking.
The F one to 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 like if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that to Area fifty one to check out as well.
Yeah, there's another program at Wright 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. I don't know, but yeah, they've captured MiGs before, captured radar systems and they reverse engineered them there, which will come in a play later on. And then there was
another one called the Tacit Blue Stealth Bomber. So basically any stealth aircraft, whether it was the stealth Blackhawks or the stealth bombers that were developed from the sixties onward it was probably developed and tested in super secrecy in Area fifty one.
Right, So, like I said, this made it just sort of a shop that they that wouldn't close. Essentially at this point in nineteen ninety three, 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 tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars to try and check out things.
And they said to no more. Freedom Ridge is now ours.
It's called get out of here Ridge. Yeah, shot on site Ridge.
That's right.
So if you are like get to the aliens, what are you guys even talking about the aliens in Area fifty one as synonymous as they are now, and they are synonymous. The highway that Area fifty one one is off of, that the road to 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 twenty five thirty five years, I think, before aliens became tied to Area fifty one, And there's actually a moment in time that you can point to where it happened. And it happened on a broadcast in May of nineteen eighty nine, almost just passed thirty years ago on KLAS,
the local Las Vegas 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.
His name, his real name was Bob Lazar, and he Have you seen interviews with this guy?
Yeah?
Did you see the more recent one?
No, 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.
No, it's I gotta say.
I mean, I'm not a 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 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 kook.
Bob Lazar is alien apples.
And he's.
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, you know, and I don't care if anyone believes me.
He's kind of like that though too. In the early interviews, at the very least, he's very calm and not at all kookie or anything like that. It's specifically the stuff he was talking about that was, yeah, so compelling.
Yeah.
So his story is 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 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 it's pretty remarkable to listen to. It didn't make
the hugest waves because it was nineteen eighty nine. It was a local news station at first, it didn't, yeah, and then it was picked up by Japan oddly enough, and after it went to Japan, it went kind of worldwide, and before you know it, 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 the Muta Triangle, or Atlantis was populated by UFOs, or the Nazca 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 Lazarre having his news interview 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 if you think about it, like everything you hear about and think about from about Area fifty one today did not exist pre nineteen eighty nine, Pre Bob Blazar. It all started with Bob Blazar, 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 at Area fifty one that seemed to be able to be correlated from locals like it held up. There was a 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 in some declassified report about Area fifty one. He also this is it 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 ufoi 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 anti gravitational propulsion technology that the Aliens had supposedly used that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer, and he was sort of 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 It was like bringing two magnets, you know, opposite poles to 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 as if it had bounced. And the way he was describing 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. I didn't see the interview with him, but I read about that technology. And by the way, everybody, you can erase your email. It's like poles that repel each other. Chuck, Not, okay, 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 were reverse engineering light speed aircraft that was propelled using anti gravity technology on engines that were matter antimatter engines. And back in nineteen eighty nine you couldn't There wasn't an Internet to start with, but even if there was, you couldn't 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'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 MIT and to Caltech.
There are no records of him being a student.
The conspiracy theorists will say, like, you know how easy it is for the government to wipe that clean?
Do you.
Yeah, I'm like, I don't know, is that easy. So that's what they will say.
They will also say that they also got in touch with his professors to make sure they never.
Talked and stuff like that.
But yeah, that's when I get a little bit like, 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 thinking big enough. I agree with you. That's when it kind of starts to get hinky for me.
But he did disappear, and I mean not disappear, disappear, disappear, but he uh, I mean, it's not like he was like, all right and now I'm going to 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. Uh, let's take our last break and then come back, shall we. Let's do it, but let's promise we're going to come back. Okay, 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 at 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 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 nineteen forty seven, when something crashed a gentlemen found pieces of an air well, pieces of some kind of unidentified object, and it became ufosnrol.
Later it was said to be a weather balloon, but first.
The army said it was a flying disc. Right, that kind of change things.
You've seen the pictures, right.
Sure, I mean it looks like I've seen that one famous picture of the guy crouching with what looks like just some balloon material. Yeah, right, But you know, he was just a stooge for the government, and that was just a prop that they came up with. So the Roswell crash happens in nineteen forty seven, there's no way
Area fifty one would have been associated with it. The whole mythos around Roswell is that 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 nineteen forty seven, when the Roswell
crash happened, was not even on the CIA's radar. It was a that basically a defunct airstrip and a 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 crash happened, the idea of an alien 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 on to 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 too, 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. The very most basic are, like you just said, like, there's alien corpses there, alien technology there, and the US military has been studying the stuff and trying to perfect everything from time travel to light speed travel. Right, fine, that's the basic ground zero approach.
Don't forget interdimensional travel too. Why not another one? I saw? There's some pretty pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The moon landing was faked.
There, ah, sure?
And then after that, right, but then after that Kubrick was executed on site and replaced by a clone.
Well, that clon did some great work.
He did better than Barry Linden.
Right, Oh, I love Berry Linden.
I've never seen it, so I currently hate on it. It's amazing weather control experiments. That's probably the most believable for me.
Sure, clouds eating sure, why not?
Well? Why not? And then there's like stage two of conspiracy theories.
Yes, that is, there are aliens that clock in every day at Area fifty one and work side by side with us in harmony.
In harm many in order to build like an alien human hybrid race. Maybe sure. And if all this sounds familiar, I will bet that you watched a pretty hefty amount of X Files. Oh yes, because they really tapped into this stuff. They basically just appropriated it for plot lines. Oh yeah, which is great. I love the X Files. But it was just I guess Chris Carter used to hang out with like uphologists or something just to get ideas.
Did he really he had two of yeah, or he is one himself. I don't know much about it. Maybe so, maybe so so. And then of course, if you even ramp that up a little bit more, 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 that Majestic twelve I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They are supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists. There's twelve of them who were impaneled by Eisenhower after the Roswell crash, or I guess it would have been Truman, I think still, and they were put together just the cream of the crop to basically go contact the aliens and basically broker a meeting I guess
between the President and the aliens. And they managed to leverage this to catapult themselves into status of actual people who run the world. So they're the ones who are forming this one world government. And that is where Area fifty one, or that's where it's located. The seat of this government is located underground in Area fifty one.
Yeah.
This next one is a little more recent and very kooky, and 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 filled 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 Germans.
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 right, and that Stalin and Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to the World War of the World's broadcast. They wanted to incite that kind of panic by actually creating this fake alien invasion.
With all the drugs. Hitler was on after we know this now, who knows?
He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. It's a great idea. Man, what else you got? What else you got? What else can we do? Slands like mellow he tried CBD.
He's like, no, that's the one thing I haven't tried.
He got any right, I'll be I'll mix well with everything else.
So this is this is obviously not a thing either.
Well, this is from a book by an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe, and she this book came out in twenty 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 that had to do with this somehow, some way, but that this was where all this alien stuff came from. It was a it was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets.
Weird thing is is there is another guy out there who supposedly has a different source who tells the same story. But this other source 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 to 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. 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's you probably failed the test.
You 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 Area fifty one.
Yeah, but you 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.
Yeah, So Area fifty one today as it truly exists. 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 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 areas, sort of like close encounters type stuff. There will be cameras and sensors everywhere, so don't think you're like getting away with anything.
No, there's mics that listen to your conversation. 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, then you will get arrested.
If you're around the perimeter area kind of walking around with your binoculars, they will probably come and take your binoculars and tell you to leave, or drive you back to the highway, or maybe smash your face in and bury you in the desert.
Well, there's a sign that says use of deadly forth forces authorized.
Oh, I'm sure, 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 dollars fine, sure, 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 are, obviously, I mean, there are civilian workers that work there. It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing because you can look at satellite photographs and year by year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with more buildings. If you work there, and 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. They go to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and they all get on a big basically air taxi. It's a seven thirty seven passenger jet that fly. They call them the Janet Jets. It's under the cassign Janet. They're white with 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 seven that are white with the red strip.
And pretty cool.
No logo, no nothing. They don't actually have a name, like you said, They fly under callsign Janet. So 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 her 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 nineteen sixty nine to seventy one, and he chose his wife's name, Janet to identify the commuter shuttles. That's sweet, and that's that's the most romantic, super secret government story of all.
So we kind of teased earlier on that the government is no longer saying like, I don't know what you're talking about, Like, no, this satellite image that we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything but dirt.
That's all changed a little bit now because a lawsuit in the mid nineteen nineties there were a group of workers from Area fifty one 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 in trenches
and people were there just inhaling these fumes, right and getting really sick. And a guy named Robert Frost that worked there in employee had a lot of really bad health problems. Doctor said, you were suffering 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, and he died.
He died, and some other coworkers filed this lawsuit. One of them ended up dying too, and they finally got to like a Nevada I think, a federal circuit court that said, no, you guys don't have a right to know what you've been exposed to.
Yeah, they weren't looking for money. They just wanted to know what was killing them.
And the reason that they had no legal right to know was and this is that trial that I was referring to earlier, where the government representatives were saying, 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 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 or hands on could be fit together with other information to provide a larger picture of what's being done at Area fifty one. And as a result, nothing can come out of Area fifty.
One 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 doused with jet fuel. It's set on fire with road flares, amazing, and whatever is in that smoke the workers get exposed to because for some reason, they built the trenches upwind of this 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, anti radar paint. The jet
fuel that they're using is an accelerant. I'm sure wasn't helping, but just all sorts of exotic materials that was super super classified. This is what was killing these people, making them sick exactly, And the government said, no, this is just too classify. These people can't know. They're just going to have to go off and die untreated because we're not going to say publicly what they were exposed to.
Yeah, and that's where it stood that case.
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's really all we can say, sorry, is there's a thing there.
But that was the very first sort of.
Insight into the just that admission that there was something there was the first time that had ever happened, which is in the mid nineteen nineties.
Yeah, and you were saying, like people would point the satellite images of the place and you can see that it's growing now, like you can see it on like Google Maps.
Yeah, 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 area fifty one, but as private firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible. So just little by little, 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 tack here and didn't really go all in on the alien theories. But I just don't think that's what it is. If you want to know more about Area fifty one, 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, I love this one.
Hey guys, my name is Rob Bob, Rob and Bob combined into a singular form 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 in the ninety ninth percentile for weight. They felt like no other nickname like Robbie or Bobby fit, so they started calling me Rob Bob. 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. 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 Rickdick, all in three generations
of awesomeness. Wife does not approve and thinks we should look elsewhere for name ideas.
With great admiration Rob Bob and Rachel.
Nice. Thanks Rob Bob, good luck with that with your quest.
Yeah, I don't think Rick Dick is going to fly in your household.
I don't think so either. Rachel 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 youshould Know dot com check out our social links there, or you can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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