It Came From Outer Space

stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. It lies in a time between now and then, in the long shadow of doubt. The sign on the door reads the last archive step across the threshold to the Apollo eleven command module, hurtling at ten thousand, one hundred and

ninety five ft per second towards the surface of the Earth. Okay, a follow eleven remains the prime story, with the world awaiting your landing today at about the eleven forty nine am Houston time, July twenty fourth, nineteen sixty nine, four days after six hundred and fifty million people on Earth Watch, Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon. Now that looked like the easy part. The hard part would be getting the

three astronauts home. Mission Control in Houston was updating the astronauts with the latest news from Earth and cracking a few jokes. Air Canada says it has accepted twenty three hundred reservations for flights to the Moon in the past five days. It might be noted that more than one hundred have been made by men for their mothers in law.

I guess that's Houston trying to keep things late, because after all, the Apollo eleven astronauts were about to pierce the atmosphere at about a thousand degrees fahrenheit and splash down into the ocean. Nashville, Tennessee now reports it is being flooded by Moon's songs. A song at the top of the bestseller's list this week is in the year

twenty five twenty five. I like to imagine to hear in my head NASA Command in Houston playing that song while guiding the astronaut's reentry, preparing them for what's to come in twenty five twenty five. If man is still alive, if woman can servive, they may find eleven and at eleven Horn at Quadri Flag Dot are over our better train there WI the water r right right. The Apollo eleven modules splashed down into the Pacific Ocean, not too far from Hawaii, where the astronauts were to be retrieved

by waiting swimmers. This is where the story often ends. The astronauts safely returned to Earth. Our world knit closer together. We went to the Moon. They went to the Moon, and they came back. But let that mission control tape roll just a few seconds longer after splash down, and things start to get a little strange, And the first astronaut has been scrubbed down, and now the astronauts are

scrubbing down the swimmer. Immediately after contact, the astronauts were scrubbed down by a swimmer, washed from head to toe while floating in the middle of the ocean, because NASA was worried about a moon plague. Nobody had ever been to the Moon before, and NASA had to wonder what if there was life there? Not aliens with big eyes

and weird shaped skulls, but bacteria viruses. No one knew what the astronauts might bring back with them, So after the astronauts came back to Earth, they did something we day in the age of masks and COVID tests know all too well they quarantined. Most extraordinary part of the Apollo eleven flight to the Moon will start after they get back, the beginning of the most rigorous three weeks

quarantine any human beings have ever had to endure. Welcome to the Last Archive, the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This episode picks up where our last one left off, the end of the Moon mission. I think the Apollo mission is a rift in history, a hinge where everything changed, a fracture in time and space.

We used to look at the stars and wonder. After Apollo, we'd seen space as something else, cold, lifeless, a vacuum, or if there was life out there was dangerous. That splashdown led to waves of doubt, doubt about science, a wave we're still riding today, a tidal wave still crashing. When the astronauts landed safely on Earth, or at least in the ocean, President Richard Nixon celebrated, this is the greatest week, and the history of the world has the creation,

but the danger hadn't entirely passed. Even before the astronauts went to the Moon, scientists had begun to plan for the risk, however small, that the astronauts might bring something back. Do you think there really is any chance of bringing back banks from the Moon. It's an exceedingly unlikely event. Indeed, sure it was exceedingly unlikely. But what if it did happen, And what if normal disinfectants couldn't kill it, what if

medicine couldn't cure it? Scientists painted a picture frightening enough that NASA built the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston, where the returning astronauts were whisked after splashdown to quarantine for twenty one days. NASA kind of made a big show of it all, rather than Nixon waving to the astronauts, the curtains have been drawn. There they are in the rear window. The curtains have been drawn. I love that.

It's as if the window is a little theater. Today people use the term hygiene theater to talk about the things we do to protect against coronavirus, when a lot of those things probably don't make any difference, Like a rental car agency that vacuums the car in front of you, or a hotel with elevator operators who pressed the buttons with gloves on and then wipe down the buttons after each press. Anyway, did these things really do anything to

protect against COVID nineteen? Probably not, but it makes some people more comfortable with the risks they've already decided to take. Neil Armstrong celebrated his birthday in the quarantine tank. They had a cake and everything. The astronauts waved at their wives from behind plate glass. Everyone took the quarantine seriously,

but it really was hygie theater. I mean, after the splashdown as the module bobbed in the water, the astronauts inside had opened the hatch and let all the air out, and after the swimmer wiped the astronauts down, he threw the rag in the ocean. If there really had been a moon plague, we'd all be dead by now. Later, when people started claiming the whole mission had been a hoax, the quarantine was one of those fishy details that they

fixated on. Why were the first astronauts held in quarantine so long after their first trip when most scientists agree that the Moon is sterile and there's no chance of disease transmission. That's the Queen of conspiracy, May Brussel on our community radio show in nineteen seventy seven. Was it because they needed a period of reconditioning after the spurious trip? Or could they not bear to face hordes of cheering people so soon after playing their role in this show

on Earth? Seriously? Anyway back to nineteen sixty nine, cover protective garments. These voyagers to and from the Moon went into isolation. They were remained in this mobile quarantine facility. One person watching all this, the reentry the quarantine was a twenty six year old recent medical school graduate, Michael Crechton. This guy, he was hard to miss. He was six foot nine. Crichton would go on to write some of the biggest bestsellers of the twentieth century, books and films

like Jurassic Park. He created the TV show Er. One of his less successful projects was Westworld, released as a film in nineteen seventy three, the decades later became an HBO series. Pretty early in his prolific career, Crechton got invited onto late night TV the Dick Cavett Show. My next guest is Michael Crichton, he's an unusual young man. During the four years that he spent at tim Medical School, he suddenly got the writing bug, wrote seven novels, a

couple of movies, and became a doctor the writing bug. Yes, they haven't cured that. Crichton got the writing bug at Harvard, where he was an English major. One time he turned in an essay that had actually been written by George Orwell. When the professor gave him a B minus, Crechton quit English and moved to anthropology. After graduation, he taught at Cambridge University, doing research on skulls from the British Museum.

He went back to Harvard for medical school, but then he started thinking about writing seriously as a way to make some money. And my purpose was really to see if I could write something that the average reader could come away with a little information. Normally books didn't take him long, but there was one story he wanted to write and couldn't quite crack. It was a story about a disease that came from space. He'd been poking at

it for years, but it just felt implausible to him. Then, a while before the Apollo astronauts came crashing back down to Earth. Word spread about Nassa's plan for the quarantine. Crechton heard about it, and that's when everything clicked. He haven't read The Andromedistrain. It's a science fiction book about a giant, hearnie it. The Andromedist Strain is not about

a giant Hernia. But it is the book that truly launched Crechton as a bestselling author, and it did that by crystallizing all kinds of fears about science run a muck. The Andromedist Strain opens with a government satellite called Scoop seven crash landing in a town in Arizona. So far so plausible satellites do fall to Earth. Crechton had done his research anyway. Some scientists go to recover the satellite, only to find that nearly everyone in the town is dead.

The scientists die to it. Turns out the satellite was carrying a highly contagious pathogen from space Andromeda. Michael Creton is always at great timing. The novel came out two months before the Apollo eleve, an astronaut, splashed down in the ocean. It was a blockbuster even while Neil Armstrong and those guys were in quarantine eating Armstrong's birthday cake. Americans were devouring the Andromedist Strain. Two years later, Universal

released it as a movie. This is a recording. State your name and your message, and hang up Major zor Manchik Scoop Mission Control A twelve. We have evidence here on film of a natural death caused by Scoop seven Returning to Earth. Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain like a piece of very learned science journalism. He filled the book with real facts. He even included a fake appendix and a fake bibliography. The makers of the movie took the queue.

They set the film in an elaborate, scientifically plausible disease laboratory called Wildfire. An actual journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published an actual article calling Andromeda Strain the most significant, scientifically accurate and prototypic film of its kind. Until now, Wildfire has been like a game, never believe this could really happen. The point of the novel is that this really could happen. After the satellite crash lands on Earth, the government calls

in five top scientists. They're moved to that secret lab Wildfire burrowed deep underground. They're meant to study Andromeda, to learn its secrets and how to stop it. What they discover, though, is that Andromeda isn't like a normal Earth organism. It's not a virus, it's not some kind of bacteria. It was exactly what Carl Sagan and other scientists had been so worried about, an entirely unknown alien organism potentially infecting all of us, dividing and mutating at the same time,

and nothing to stop it. Normal checks and balances don't exist for it. In the Andromeda strain, scientists find themselves in a scenario where the laws of nature, centuries of scientific inquiry are moot. That fear just radiates out of America in the late nineteen sixties, the Adam Bomb pollution Computer's gone rogue. Crechton is a key to understanding this fear of the future. So I decided to call a Michael Crechton expert. So, just backing up, can you tell

us how you got interested in Michael Gryton? Did you read you know? Did you see Jurassic Park as a kid? Jurassic Park was, in fact the first movie that I saw in the theater without parental supervision, and I remember going to the theater and being like, I guess I'm not going to be a paleontologist because that career will be obsolete. Joanna Rayden is an amazing historian of science

at Yale. She's writing a book about Michael Creighton. In the course of studying post war ideas about science, she started seeing Creton everywhere, not just in science fiction, but interacting with and criticizing actual science and scientists. He goes to medical school and it becomes disgruntled with what he observes as a culture that has embraced new technology but hasn't updated its morality, that they're not willing to or able to take seriously the consequences of what it's going

to mean to manipulate life. Creighton was only a toddler when the at M bombs fell on Hiroshima in Nagasaki. He grew up watching science change in the shadow of the bomb. Science it seemed had won the war, so the government began investing massively in research, and scientists had a lot of say and where the money went. They became close government advisors and popular heroes. In nineteen sixty, Time magazine named scientists just scientists in general, the men

of the year. Six years later, Time released an issue with the cover story is God Dead? The answer yeah, because now we have scientists. The US government had spent fifty million dollars on scientific research in nineteen thirty nine. In nineteen seventy it spent almost fifteen billion dollars. Most of that was for the Department of Defense. M I seen is more than one hundred million dollars a year from the federal government to a conductor a search. Most

of it relates to the raging of rule. Scientists had the power of gods, and like God, the things they did were often mysterious, secret and a little menacing. The nineteen forty six Atomic Energy Act had been introduced by a senator who called the bombing of Hiroshima the greatest event in world history since the birth of Jesus Christ, and treated atomic science as a kind of religious secret.

You couldn't really be sure what scientists were doing, but chances were it had to do with war, and by Crechton's adulthood, the Vietnam War had called the worship of science into question, knocked the scientists off their plints. All of this finds a place in the paranoid plot of the Andromeda strain. Crechton was very upset about that kind

of secrecy. This is Hallmark. What he's so effective at doing is taking the kind of incoate emotions about emerging science and technology and telling readers what they should be afraid of what specifically. During the years Crechton was in college and medical school, his fellow students were afraid of the secrets being kept from them, the things their professors did in the name of national security. Students protested at universities across the country. They tried to hold their universities

to account. The year Crechton finished Harvard Medical School nineteen sixty nine, Harvard undergraduates occupied university Hall and kicked out the president and the deans. They clashed with police officers violently. On the day Crechton graduated, the mood was tense. This commencement isn't a property, it is an obstanity. Our interested students do not lie in the key party with these criminals,

these fewty benets and rocket fallers. It lies in fighting them, in alliance with the people, and we should get out of here. NBC News reported that for the first time in Harvard's history, students walked out of their own graduation ceremony. Some threatened to burn their diplomas. I don't know if Michael Crechton walked out or not, but that tension, that skepticism of the establishment and especially of the secrecy of

government science, it's all over his work. In the Andromeda Strain, most of the scientists don't even know the original purpose of that Scoops satellite. They came crashing back down to Earth. We don't know much more than when we got here. We know about Scoop now, it's possible, but Scoop found was no accident. I suspect they were looking for the

ultimate biological weapon. The Andromedis Strain is about a world where the government pays scientists to develop weapons that could wipe out life on Earth, and it's all done in secret. At Harvard an mit. In nineteen sixty nine, when students found out the kind of work their professors were doing for the war in Vietnam, napalm, psychological warfare, they held protests and even staged mock trials. In the Andromedis Strain, the scientists themselves come to realize what their work is

really for. Wildfire was built for jerm warfare, wildfire and Scoop's not true, Ruth, I learned about Scoop the same time you did. The purpose of Scoop was to find new biological weapons in outer space and then used wildfire to develop them. It's stink Stall, you're clawing your tops. We have no another giant leap from any kind. I wish I could believe you. The SCOOP satellite hadn't just accidentally brought home this terrible pathogen. It had been sent

to search for possible biological weapons. Crichton was raising an alarm, and a lot of people shared his fears, not least because of all the revelations about chemical warfare in Vietnam. Hear the androministran came out in theaters. Crechton published an op ed in The New York Times decrying scientific secrecy. He believes that there are lessons from physics that life science.

Life scientists should be learning, that they should be integrating an effort to deal with accountability and social responsibility into the mainstream of science. And he's upset because he sees that possibility slipping away. Do you want to cultivate a humility and self reflection? Absolutely? In some ways, Crichton's critique caught on, or at least public support for government funded scientific research seemed to fall, which wasn't really a good thing. Gradually,

the Apollo Missians lost the public support. In nineteen seventy two, NASA terminated the program. We went to the Moon, we came back, and then we stayed home and confronted a different plague. Seventy you've got to come and be automating. Five. Maybe you around it, so Fa Shafe gives time, or the judgments, day's gonna shake his money? Where has been? Or Carrots down and Strong. Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain came out in nineteen sixty nine. In nineteen seventy six,

another disease appeared to be in the air. It didn't come from space. It came, it seemed from pigs. Joe brought it home from the office. He gave it to Betty and one of these kids, and to Betty's mother, But Betty's mother went back to California the next day. On her way to the airport, she gave it to a cab driver, a ticket engine and one of the charming stewards at Scoop Joe's kid gave it to some other kids, and missus Merrill got it and gave it

to her husband In California. Betty's mother gave it to her best friend Dotty, but Dotty had a heart condition and she died before she died. This uncanny and really hard to listen to public service announcement is part of a much forgotten moment in public health history, the nineteen seventy six swine flu scare. If a swine flu epidemic comes, this is how it could spread. You will want to be protected, especially if you're elderly or chronically ill. Get

a shot of protection, a swine flu shot. The story begins just after New Year's Day nineteen seventy six. Fort Dix, an army base in New Jersey. The barracks filled up with new recruits. A couple of weeks later, some of them started to get sick. It looked like the flu, a bad flu. People went to the hospital. One man died. Doctors from the Centers for Disease Control were sent samples of the virus. By mid February, they'd run their tests, four came back positive for swine flu. Today, there is

news of a new potentially very dangerous influenza strain. Health officials say it may be related to the strain that killed so many people in nineteen eighteen. In nineteen eighteen, an influenza pandemic took the lives of fifty million people worldwide. That was a flu strain that jumped species and infected humans. So in nineteen seventy six, swine flu wasn't a completely novel virus, But scientists believe if you hadn't been alive

in nineteen eighteen, you wouldn't have immunity. There's no vaccine for the new swine virus, but one could be developed if there's an epidemic. Antibody tests seemed to indicate that as many as five hundred recruits at Fort Dix had been infected by swine flu. It hadn't been detected outside the base yet, but it could be silently spreading. The head of the CDC, doctor David Sensor, wanted a vaccine made, and he wanted as many Americans as possible to get it.

He said it was unacceptable to plan for less than one hundred percent coverage. He made his urgently to President Gerald Ford. Implementing this vaccination program would cost one hundred and thirty four million dollars, but without it, Ford's advisers projected that as many as a million Americans could die from the flu in nineteen seventy six alone. Ford faced two bad options. He would look terrible if he spent

the money and no pandemic came. If he didn't pull the trigger and the pandemic did come, he would look even worse. In in nineteen seventy six, he was facing an election. I am asking each and every American to make certain he or she receives an inoculation this fall. The facts that have been presented to me in the last few days have come from many of the best medical minds in this country. Ford approved the massive inoculation budget.

The vaccine was to be grown in chicken eggs. The Secretary of Agriculture got involved, telling everyone the roosters of America are ready to do their duty. Pretty much immediately though, a lot of Americans were suspicious of the national vaccine plan. As you know if you listen to the first season of The Last Archive, Americans have historically always been suspicious

of national vaccine plans. Also, think about for his awkward position, he'd become president in nineteen seventy four, when Nixon resigned, and then, despite all the criminality the Watergate hearings had exposed, Ford had pardoned Nixon. Some people thought this vaccine program looked more political than scientific, as if either Ford were getting pressured by the scientists, or else he was pressuring

the scientists to make him look good. The administration's plan to inoculate nearly everybody against swine flu is in trouble. Quickly things got harry. Legal battles very nearly held up the whole vaccination project. Then when the vaccines were finally rolled out, it all went to hell. Now four thousand Americans acclaiming damages from Uncle Sam think to three and a half billion dollars because of what happened when they took that shot. That's from a sixteen minutes investigation that

came out a few years later. In nineteen seventy six. The government had mobilized the country with ads urging Americans to roll up your sleeves. Millions had obliged, But then came reports that a small number of people who were vaccinated had developed something called killone Baret syndrome, a sort of paralysis in that sixteen minutes documentary Mike Wallace quirrelled now XCDC head David Sensor about how much the public knew about the risks. You didn't feel it was necessary

to tell the con people that information. I think that over the years we have tried to inform the American people as fully as possible. It really did look as though the government had been lying, even though it hadn't. But the government had another problem. It turned out that the virus never spread past the army base. There was no swine flu pandemic. This, of course, wasn't really a problem. It was a good thing, it was a great thing, but it did make the government look terrible. The vaccine

program was suspended. It was a public relations disaster, and it was a time bomb for public health. The scientists had thought universal vaccination would be at worst a chance to educate the public about the wonders of preventative medicine, the power of scientific forethought, and at best it would stave off a pandemic, save millions of lives. But the public did not seem educated. The public seemed angry and scared.

Sixty minutes interviewed the husband of a woman who had become terribly sick a man with my government because they knew the facts, but they didn't release those facts because if they had releasing the people wouldn't have taken. And they can come out tomorrow and tell me there's going to be an epidemic, and they can drop off like lives makes me. I will not take another shot of my government tells me to take. This old sixty minutes documentary is now on the internet. Anti vaxers share it

all the time, again and again. That's the surviving legacy of the swine flu campaign of nineteen seventy six. A couple of years after the fiasco, the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare publish a report trying to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. Toward the end, the author shared

something they'd heard from a science reporter. The CDC was almost the last federal agency widely regarded by reporters and producers as a good thing, responsible, respectable, scientific, above suspicion. Now the CDC's lost its innocence. Innocence lost, and what would replace it? Disillusion and doubt. This episode started with a moon plague that never came. Instead came the Andromeda strain.

The book and the film, a story about why you can't trust government scientists who do their work in secret. In nineteen seventy six, that fear broke out into the real world with the swine flew pandemic that wasn't but hold onto your face mask because this virus is mutating one more time into the worst strain of all. In nineteen ninety, Michael Crichton, nearly fifty years old, was still

on top of the world. That year, his newest book, Jurassic Park, electrified readers with yet another tale of scientific hubris, reeking havoc, not by way of an alien biological weapon, but by way of dinosaur DNA. People hadn't forgotten Crechton's first book, though he said he'd begun to get phone calls. People wanted him to speak at medical conventions about a new disease from a pathogen that they claimed the US government had had a hand in creating, just like the

fictional Andromeda strain. In late nineteen eighty and early nineteen eighty one, five gay men in Los Angeles developed a series of strange, rare infections. Their immune systems weren't working. People began to die in September of nineteen eighty two, the CDC gave the sickness a name, Acquired Immune deficiency Syndrome AIDS. AIDS is caused by HIV, the human immuno deficiency virus. Most people catch HIV through sex, though it

can be transmitted through blood too. It originated in primates, then jumped to humans in West Central Africa in the nineteen seventies. While Americans worried about moon plagues, andromeda strains, and swine flus, HIV was already spreading, though it didn't yet have a name. Scientist f the National Centers for Disease Control and at LATA. They released the results of a study which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic of a rare form of cancer.

That's NBC News. In one of the earliest broadcast reports about AIDS in the United States, a lot remained unknown. There was confusion and discord. Then in July of nineteen eighty three, a newspaper in India ran on its front page an anonymous letter to the editor. AIDS, a deadly, mysterious disease which has caused HAVOC in the US, is believed to be the result of the Pentagon's experiments to

develop new and dangerous biological weapons. The letter writer claimed that the US government had created AIDS in a lab on a US base called Fort Petrich. This story is not true. It's Soviet disinformation. It came the KGB. We know this because a former top ranking intelligence official admitted as much. Years later, the Stasi called it Operation Denver. Americans came to call it Operation Infection. In nineteen eighty five,

the Soviets published another article promoting the myth. That same year, an East German scientist published a report supposedly proving that HIV was a man made virus. And then a KGB really got going, telegramming instructions about the project to their colleagues and places like Bulgaria. The goal of these measures is to create an opinion that this disease is the result of secret experiments with a new type of biological weapon by the secret services of the USA and the

Pentagon that spun out of control. The disinformation had been planted, cultivated, and now it was ready to harvest. Good Evening. This is the CBS Evening News Day and rather reporting. Nineteen eighty seven millions of Americans watched CBS News every night. A Soviet military publication claims the virus that causes AIDS leaked from a US Army laboratory conducting experiments in biological warfare.

The article offers no hard evidence, but claims to be reporting the conclusions of unnamed scientists in the United States, Britain, and East Germany last October of Soviet newspaper relays to this day, a not small number of people believed that AIDS is a man made disease. The US government made disease? What made so many Americans susceptible to a Soviet disinformation campaign?

What had so far weakened their immunity? In the nineteen seventies, Americans learned that the government had continued to do secret research long after the US withdrawal from Vietnam. In nineteen seventy five, journalists broke stories about MK Ultra, the CIA prom that tested psychedelics on unsuspecting military personnel, prisoners, and just ordinary citizens. These insanely unethical experiments were in the service of something even worse, drugs as a form of

mind control. Then came another revelation of horrible malfeasance, for forty years, government scientists had studied the effects of syphilis on black patients at Tuskegee. By failing to treat them, watching them suffer and die, the US government had committed horrible wrongs. Russian disinformation works weirdly a lot like a

Michael Crichton's story. Use real facts, real places, some fake studies that look real, and then spin them out into something unreal, but, depending on your point of view, just believable. Fort Dietrich, the lab that conspiracy theorists said manufactured aids, Well, it really was a Fort Dietrich, and it really did work on biological weapons. It also played a central role in MK Ultra. That lad continues to be in the headlines today, at least in the headlines of conspiracy theorists.

We have watched the news in horror as story after story unfolded revealing that the Army and the Central Intelligence Agency had released germs and viruses into the population to test their biological warfare capability. That's real. Audio from Milton William Cooper, one of history's most influential conspiracy theorists. He had a radio show called The Hour of the Time, broadcast out of his house on a hill in Arizona. He sounds like a computer. This is his version of

masculine scientific authority. But this is really his voice. Cover up has become standard operating procedure at all levels and in all departments of government. Do we dream reality or is reality a dream? Cooper worked from the same playbook as Russian disinformation and the Andromedist train. A seed of truth than a great big tree of doubt. He claimed the CDC had spread AIDS during vaccine trials in the late nineteen seventies, just after the swine flu vaccine debacle.

He claimed the CDC had looked for gay volunteers as part of a plan to target undesirable elements of society. And that's crazy, sure, But then listen to this notorious recording from nineteen eighty two, the first time AIDS came up in a White House press briefing. Because the President have any reactions to the announced from the Center for Disease Control of Atlanta that AIDS is now an epidemic in six hund six hundred cases. It's known as gay play.

Oh yes, I mean it's a pretty serious thing that one and every three people. Again, this shod died, and I wondered if the president are going to wear anything? I don't have it? Are you do you? You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved that you didn't answer my question. How do you know the White House looks on this is a great job now? I don't know a thing about it last year. Does anybody in the White House know about this epidemic? Laurie, I don't think so. I

don't think there's been no personal experience here Leicester. So yeah, there's no shortage of evidence. Homophobia played a real role in the government's negligent response. Reagan didn't say the word AIDS in public until nineteen eighty five. The federal government did virtually nothing to study it, nothing to halt it spread, nothing even to warn people about it. Activists made posters

that said silence equals death. There was no cabal of secret scientists, no biological warfare, just a conspiracy of disregard for human life. And if you were gay or black or both in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, you would know this. The government didn't seem to care if you died. This episode this season so far has been filled with a lot of bullshit. It's important to look at how bullshitters gained so much power in the twentieth

century down to our own day. But I just want to make space for a moment for the truth about AIDS. Since the start of the AIDS pandemic, over thirty three million people have died from the disease. At the end of twenty nineteen, thirty eight million people were still living with it. Meanwhile, all of us, all of us have been infected with this other disease that I've been trying to tell you about, the pathogen we're trying to isolate here in the last archive, the disease of being unable

any longer to know anything for sure. Operation infection never ended. It makes all the real diseases we face worse, and Lord knows there are real diseases. We want to begin with the latest coronavirus case numbers, as we often do, from Johns Hopkins University. Now more than one hundred and fifty point five coronavirus infections confirmed worldwide, deaths in the US now exceeding five hundred and seventy five thousand. Real diseases tangled up with imaginary ones, A slew of COVID

nineteen misinformation has been going viral on social media. One video making the rounds is called Plandemic. The documentary film Plandemic came out early in the coronavirus pandemic in twenty twenty. It was one of the most popular things on social media for a while, spreading faster than the virus. It features a scientist named Judy Mikeovitz. Mikeovitz worked at the National Cancer Institute and made her name with a paper in the journal Science that advanced suspect claims about the

root cause of the mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome. Science had to retract. The paper was a huge scandal. Then Mikeowitz was arrested and charged with allegedly stealing information from a former employer. The charges were dropped, but for a few years she pretty much vanished. In April twenty twenty, just a few months into the COVID nineteen pandemic, mike E. Fitz reappeared with a book called Plague of Corruption. Then

she appeared in Plandemic. She seemed to take on the scientific establishment like a character out of a Michael Crichton novel. Her popularity exploded. I think that's because this video, it's as if all the Apollo and Andromeda and AIDS are conspiracies and stories had all been edited together into one

giant ball of craziness. Think of how many people the entire continent of Africa you lost a generation as that virus was spread through because of the arrogance of a group of people, And it includes Robert Redfield, who's now the head of the CDC right along with Tony Fauci. They were working together to take credit and make money, and they had the patents on it, and had that not happened, millions wouldn't have died from HIV. Lie after lie after lie. This next stuff about Ebola more lies.

In nineteen ninety nine, I was working in Fort Dietrich in you Sam read there, and my job was to teach Ebola how to infect human cells without killing them. Ebola couldn't infect human cells until we took it in the laboratories and talking. This comes straight out of the soviets earlier disinformation campaign Fort Dietrich. That's the same lab where the Russians said the US cooked up the AIDS virus, and even at the start of the pandemic Michamitz didn't

hesitate to stoke fears about a potential vaccine. If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars that own the vaccines, and they'll kill millions, as they already have with their vaccines. There is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any RNA virus that works. Millions of people watched Plandemic. Even when the big social media platforms took it down. People kept reposting it as if they alone could stand up

to some vast conspiracy of secrecy. In the video, Mikerovitz encourages people not to wear masks. These are the kinds of ideas that spread like viruses and could kill like them too. In Plandemic, it's as if time stopped in some stagnant pool of the nineteen seventies. The nineteen seventies are over. Kip past it. Michael Crechton he never really

got past it. In the year two thousand and four, he published State of Fear, another hit, another story about science randomok, only this time it wasn't about Vietnam or German warfare or the perils of DNA research. It was about the science behind global warming and how Crechton didn't trust it, how he doubted it. President George W. Bush devoured the book. Crechton met him at the White House, and he testified before the Senate. What is an issue?

It's further the methodology of climate science. It is sufficiently rigorous to yield a reliable result. It seems to me that all his life Michael Crichton was just looking for something, anything to believe in, and not finding it. I asked the Crichton expert, Joanna Raidin, about that. She said, he'd been raised Presbyterian, but he is, as far as I know,

was not practicing. Was not a churchgoing person, but rather he really embraced the kind of new age, the sort of religious new age that is dawning when he's in college. But he goes on a number of like kind of vision quests. He learns how to read auras. But the whole time that he's doing this, he's you can sense that he feels the emptiness, the failures of the secular to give meaning to the ways that life is being transformed in the time that he's living. You feel almost

a desperateness in the way that he's seeking. Michael Crichton went on vision quests, he consulted with a parapsychologist. Like a lot of people, he was groping for the answer to what happens when God dies. All the people who deny science, who think AIDS was made in a lab, who say masks or a conspiracy, who watch wildfires burn in the West and doubt that there's something changing about

the climate. All those people descend from that moment that Michael Crichton never got past nineteen sixty nine, that moment when we raised science to the heavens and then watched it all come hurtling back down to Earth, not God's but humans. After all, Now it's been ten thousand years, Man has right a billion tears or what he never knew. Now Man's reign is true, but thrue eternal night, the

twinkling of starlight so very far away. Maybe it's only est game in the twenty five twenty five If Man Survive. This episode was written by me Jillapour with Ben Natt of Haffrey. It's produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon and Ben Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is milo'bell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Fact checking by Emy Gain's original music by Matthias Bossie and John Evans, Stillwagon Symfinette. Our research assistants are Kimanie Panthier

and Lily Richmond. Our full proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorn, Matthias Bossi, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Parella, Robert Ricotta, and Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. At Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostek, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and dan

Yella Lacan. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Jenette Junior in the Star Jenette Foundation Special thanks to Simon Leak. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share, and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor