Speaker 1: Welcome listeners to Tales, a podcast that brings your short
stories to life. Do narrations, sound effects, and more. These
stories will be brought to you by different authors with
different writing styles, but with the same spooky vibes. So
lock your doors, check your closets, make certain there's nothing
lurking under your bed, and enjol there are your tail.
Speaker 2: In early twenty twenty two, a reporter who will remain
nameless to request the documents from the United States Government
through the Freedom of Information Act. When the reporter received
these documents, they found that there was an additional, unrelated
memorandum included with the other papers. This is that memorandum.
March seventeenth, twenty twenty one. Memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership,
Defense Agency and DoD Head of Field Activities subject Project
FREA Field Test Williams, Arizona. This memorandum serves as a
documentation of field tests of Project FRIA that have taken
place over the past twenty eight days in Williams, Arizona.
Project Frea was created to test the effects of sound
waves on the human body and mind. Laboratory testing on
both humans and animal subjects has shown that sound waves
of various intensities and pitches can be used to cause
different effects, including nausea, pain, and changes in personality. Doctor
Deval Veradka, the project lead, believes that he had found
a way to produce a specific type of sound wave
that makes test subjects more open to suggestion and obey
in direct commands. When laboratory testing had finished and field
testing was authorized, the town of Williams, Arizona was chosen
due to its population size, population diversity, remote location, and
the ability to control the tests inside without interfering with
the experiments. During February twenty twenty one, four radio towers
were constructed just outside of the town of Williams, Arizona.
These towers were built according to the specification provided by
doctor Verradka. The towers were concealed among local rock formations
and flora would one be in place at each corner
of the town. A fifth tower was constructed the third
week of February twenty twenty one at the suggestion of
David Pike, a contractor and expert in broadcast and receiving technology.
At six fifteen am on February eighteen, twenty twenty one,
the towers were activated remotely by field operatives. Each was
set to a specific strength, frequency, and pitch per doctor
Verradka instructions. These parameters would be changed each time a
new test was started. Hundreds of tests were performed over
the next four weeks before cultivating in what has been
referred to as the Williams Incident. The documentation and results
of these indivis vial can be found in a following report.
Hobbes Doctor Gloria Williams, Arizona Testing Information Complication thirty one
July twenty twenty one, Classified location. Please find attached a
transcript of testimony of David Marshall Pike, obtained March twenty third,
twenty twenty one at fourth Wachuka Army Base Co Cheese, Arizona.
So there's a story about an incident that happened at
Disney back in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, I know, I'm
not here to tell you ancient stories from the golden.
Speaker 1: Era of animation. I get that. I know exactly why
I'm sitting in this chair with you. Three fine gentlemen's
looming over me. Just indulge me for a moment, though,
I promised there's a point back in the fifties Disney
wasn't entertainment juggernaut they are today. At that point, they
were almost exclusively concerned with turning out cartoons. Most people
are under the impression that all of the company's film
was successful, but the truth of the matter was that
Disney was in trouble. A number of their films had
failed financially, even some of the ones that are seen
today as classics, and it was really the television and
newspaper cartoons that were keeping the lights on. Small film
strips too, the kind that used to play before the
feature presentations. A couple of cartoonists were working on a
short when they realized that they needed a particular sound
effect to make a scene work. It wasn't one that
they had used before, and after going through the sound archives,
they didn't find anything that was quite right. One of
them realized that they could get what they wanted by
slowing down the noise of a soldering iron at work.
They tinkered around with it for a while and at
one point put it down all the way to twelve hurtz.
They didn't understand what sound can do if you're not careful.
The cartoonists were sick for days after they created the effect.
Rumor has it that Walt Disney happened to be there
with them at the time that they fell ill as well.
Having a twelve heard sound run through your body is
roughly the equivalent of sitting an office chair and letting
your coworkers spin you around for hours. When the body
is exposed to sound, just like when it's exposed to
anything else, there's a reaction. This is especially true with
low frequency call infrasounds. Our ears can't hear them, but
they can do a number on us. Did you know
that noise around nineteen herts can cause people to hallucinate.
That's because it's the resonant frequency for the human eye.
The vibrations can cause us to see all kinds of
crazy things. And you know what they say seeing is believing.
The real dangerous one is seven hurts. That's the resonant
frequency for your brain and other internal organs. You crank
that up if you really want to get the party started.
Ausia disorientation, you start to get paranoid like everyone in
the world that's watching. Let it go long enough and
your organ start to tear open. Just a bit longer
and that's it the end. You're done. Do not pass go,
do not collect two hundred dollars. I'm telling you all
of this because you need to understand that the science
behind what doctor Vradka attempted with sound no pun intended.
As much as it sounds like something that came out
of a bad pulp science fiction novel, It's actually based
on one hundred years of scientific research. That's how he
got the government to agree to the funded I wasn't
a part of that pitch meeting, so I can only
imagine those suits licking their chops at what he was
presenting them, and it made sense.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If sound can be used to affect the human body,
it should be possible to use sound to make changes
to it as well. With the right frequency, volume, and condition,
it would be theoretically possible to make a person far
more susceptible to suggestion. Taking it a step further, it
would even be possible to basically rewrite how that person thinks.
The human body is, for all intent and purposes, a
biological machine, and sound can be used to hack that machine.
You know what happened next? The committee approved doctor verradko grant.
How could they not? He was telling them that he
was going to give them a way to directly influence
each and every member of the population on a silver platter,
even if they weren't going to use that technology an
American citizen. Let's be honest with our selves and acknowledged
that someone eventually would have tried to do just that.
It would be one hell of a weapon win a
war without firing a single shot by making every enemy
see things your way, whether they want to or not.
The committee went one step further, though, Varadka needed test subjects,
lots of them, and they needed to be highly varied,
different backgrounds, different biological makeups, different diets. All of that,
being able to adjust the thought process of a single
person wouldn't cut it. He needed to make sure that
he found universal sounds and frequency that anyone and everyone
would be affected. Because of this, the committee agreed to
allow for Radka to use an entire town as his
own personal playground. Even with everything that's happening, that's the
part I still can't get my head wrapped around. The
United States government turned over an entire town of its
own citizen to a single person so he can pope
and prod and experiment on it. As pretty much sums
up what our elected officials really think about us, regardless
of their party affiliation, doesn't it well. The town that
Veradka chose was Williams, Arizona. It was a perfect place
for Veradka's experiments. It had a varied enough population that
it would present a wide range of test subjects, but
it was also isolated from the main highway and had
very little in the way of outsiders passing through three thousand,
one hundred and eight brains to pump dangerous sounds into
three thousand, one hundred and eight men, women, and children
that didn't have a choice. The four towers that were constructed,
one in each direction outside of town were my design.
I even suggested the building of the fifth tower to
fill out the coverage area of gaps. I didn't know
what the experiment true perfect was at the time. In fact,
it was explained to me as something much different. Varaka
had told me that he was working on a new
warning system that would transmit a warted signal throughout a
large area by using particular tones on specific frequency. That's
not anything that's needed here, but it would be invaluable
in places where groups of people lived that they didn't
have the luxury of readily available cell phone service, people
could be warned about imminent floods and even the most
remote parts of the Middle East, for example, a specific
sound would be transmitted over a much larger distance than
say the sirens we use now to want people about tornadoes.
It would completely eliminate issues like language barriers. A person
here's a sound, and they know how to get somewhere safe.
Varadka said that what he was working on was a
series of tones that could be used as a universal system.
One tone for flood, another for sandstorm, a different for tornado,
and so on. He told me that once we had
the system figured out, he was going to work with
frequency to increase distance and reception. But a human body,
As crazy as it seems now, I actually did believe
that I was helping with some kind of humanitarian project.
Part of the project was to conceal the towers from view.
I did find that odd, but it was explained to
me that it was simply to not take away from
the natural beauty around the town. Yeah, I know, I
it was a bad reason, and I probably should have
questioned it further, but it really wasn't that strange of
a reason. I've been contracted by countless people that want
a system that works, but don't want to see it
when it's doing.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like I was unaccustomed to hiden some rich
person's giant satellite dish or transmitted towers in a stadium.
Vadka and I got along well enough during the building stage.
Once the towers were finished, he asked me to stay
on site in case any mechanical issue came up. I
think it's fair to say that my services are in
high demand, so at first I turned him down when
he showed me the figure that he was willing to
pay me for a few months work, though I decided
that I couldn't afford to turn it down. This next
part is what Varadka himself ended up telling me had happened.
I didn't find out about what he had really been
up to until later, And as much as I like
to say that I had a bad feeling or some
sneaking suspicion, the truth is that I didn't notice anything
that made me question what I had been told. What
I'm about to tell you is what he told me,
not what I witnessed firsthand. So take that for what
it's worth. Aradka and his team started small. They already
had a number of frequency that wouldn't make a person
feel anxious or disoriented, so they tried to see if
they could simply tweak those to make the test subjects
more open to suggestion. Nothing happened for the first few weeks.
That may sound like a long time to be working
on such a small range of sounds, but you have
to understand just how precise a frequencies they were working with.
There is a lot of room between say, eight herts
and nine herts. Veradka was testing frequencies out to over
fifty decimal places. The majority of the time, the residents
didn't even realize anything was happening. We can't hear anything
below roughly twenty hertz, and he was working in ranges
much lower than that. He was also just using short
bursts in the beginning. It wasn't until he started to
extend the broadcast times that things began to go downhill
for the people of Williams. The number of people going
to the local hospital rose dramatically. A lot of people
were complaining about feeling sick, even though they didn't have
the usual symptoms of a cold or of the flu.
There were several cases involved in coughing of blood or
bleeding from various offices. A few heavily patients suffered heart attacks.
Veradka was aware of all this. Somehow he was getting
all of the medical records that were processed at the hospital.
Either someone was getting the information to him or he
was obtaining it himself. I'm not sure which it was. Like,
I said, this is just what I've pieced together from
what he told me and from things that I saw later.
I didn't see Varadka much during that time period. Since
the towers were working without issues, there wasn't much for
me to do, so I spent the majority of my
time in a trailer that I had been provided with.
Like the other trailers and the few buildings that had
been constructed, it was heavily soundproofed. I and all the
other staff on the side would be sent a text
message when a test was about to occur, and we'd
go into our designated areas to wait for it to
be over. I don't know what test number it was
when things started to get out of hand. My guess
is that it wasn't one single test, but a cumulative
effect from multiple ones. A dozen of assaults were reported
to the local police within a three hour window. We
were located miles outside of the city limits, but I
could still hear gunshots when I stood outside of my trailer.
I was listening to that distinct popping sound. When one
of the guards came into camp with the news that
a fire was burning on the east side of town.
Radka and his team came rushing out of the temporary
metal buildings they used as their base camp. I've never
seen anyone move as quickly as they were. He barked
a few harsh orders to his team and they piled
into a group of minivans and left. Once they were gone,
he yelled at the guards to begin breaking down the camp.
He then hurried over to me and grabbed me by
the shirt. The man and I tell him how to
turn off the towers. I was completely baffled by his shouting,
and you for the fact that he was aware of
how to shut them down. He had been doing just
that at the end of each test. I tried to
explain to him, but he kept saying that they were
still on, then I needed to turn them off. His
eyes were wild and they were spittle or foam at
the corners of his mouth. Normally he was calm and collected,
but now he looked like a maniac. He brought me
into the metal building and once again instructed me to
shut off the broadcast towers. As calmly as I could.
I told him that it was all done through the
main power switch, which was on the main computer board
underneath a series of a dozen monitors. He sneered at
me and pointed at the monitors, telling me that they
couldn't possibly be off if this was still happening in Williams.
I went over to the monitors to see what he
was referring to. I instantly regretted that decision, and I
have every minute since. The images depicted on the monitors
showed what I imagine hell to look like. Citizens of
the town were tearing themselves and each other apart the
atrocities being committed. It wasn't a riot. I know that's
a popular story, but I'm here to tell you that
it most definitely wasn't a riot. As strange as it sounds,
it wasn't organized enough to be one. It was like
everyone had suddenly decided that it was every man for himself.
I watches an older man of maybe sixty bruly clubbed
in the skull of a teenage boy with a tire iron.
I actually knew that man. I had gone into town
on several occasions to get food or simply to stretch
my legs when testin wasn't happening, so I recognized him
as the owner of a local deli. It was impossible
to tell who the boy was. He just there. There
wasn't enough of him left to even call him a
person anymore. On another monitor, two women were slowly driving
around the parking lot of a gas station and an
old beat up station wagon. A rope was tied around
the back bumper, and at the end of the rope
was a man with his neck tied in a loose
He was screaming as he was dragged across the pavement,
leaving smears of blood in a trail behind him. Sorry,
I needed a break. There were countless examples of the
property on display, but there's one that I just can't
get out of my head, no matter how hard I try.
A woman was standing directly in front of one of
the cameras. No doubt it was hidden, but somehow she
had managed to get into the very center of the frame.
She was just standing there in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt,
slowly peeling, slowly peeling chunks of skin off her face
with an almost bored expression. I tore my eyes away
from the monitor as but Radka once again demanded that
I shut off the towers. Feeling my stomach churning, I
looked down on the computer board on the desk. The
light that indicated when the towers were transmitting, well, it
was off. I checked the logs and verified that there
wasn't enough power running to them. They weren't sending out
a signal, and they hadn't been for several hours. When
I showed all of this to Veradka, he sat down
in one of the litther cheers and he just buried
his face in his hands. He looked tired, and he
seemed older somehow. I was close to Pannican at this point.
I knew that what was happening in Williams had to
be at least partially my fault, and I yelled at
him to tell me what was going on. He just
pointed at a clipboard sitting on one of the tables.
As I received the clipboard and started to read through
the documents. Verradka haughtantly told me what I told you earlier,
the real intention of the project, the comedee meeting, and
how the government had handed over an entire town to him.
He didn't sound remorseful, if anything, It was more like
he was trying to convince me that he had done
the right thing. The papers were a listing of test
numbers along with the test results of these tests. There
weren't any exact frequency listed, but there were reference numbers
that I assumed could be used to find that out.
The most recent test, the one that had happened a
few hours prior, was detailed on the top sheet. At first,
the team had thought that it was another failed test.
Nothing bad had happened, really, and the people that they
were observing didn't seem to be affected by it in
any way. About an hour after the test, however, a
man would observe hitting another man without any provocation. More
of these incidents had happened as time passed, until suddenly
the entire town had erupted in violence. Instead of things
growing calmer the further out they got from the tests,
they had instead inexplicitly ramped up. There was a handwritten
though at the bottom of the page that I read
several times to make sure that I was understanding it correctly.
One of the scientists had found that the test frequency
was still resonating in the brains of the subjects they
had monitors installed in. I'm gonna say this again, I
have no idea how they got monitors and people's brains.
I mean, there's no way that the people knew about it, right.
They would never have volunteered for that, and Veradko's group
wouldn't have told them what it was for anyway. Regardless
of how they did it. The scientists noticed that their
resonance was actually growing stronger as time passed, rather than fading.
That simply should not have been possible. That not how
it works. If you take away the source, there's nothing
to continue to cause the residence to happen. There could
be effects from the resonance, obviously, but it wouldn't just
continue on for it to keep getting stronger. I don't
have an explanation for it. There was more of it, though.
The vibration was actually passing on from person to person
when affected person was close to an unaffected one for
a long enough period of time, the brain of the
unaffected one would begin to display a synchronous vibration. To
put it simply, the madness was contagious. I put down
the clipboard and just stared at Veradka for a long time.
I don't know how long it was. I couldn't think
of anything to say. I mean, how do you put
the feelings you experience from reading something like that into words?
Baradko was the one that ended up speaking up. He
raised his head out of his hands and looked directly
at me. The expression on his face was one of
someone that had completely given up the devil's tone. He
said in a matter of fact voice that sent a
chill down my back. Before I knew what was happening,
he reached under his lap coat and pulled out a
gun from his belt. I hadn't noticed it before with
everything that was happening, He pointed at me. I stood
completely still, afraid that even the smallest movement might make
him shoot. Without even blinking, he turned a gun, put
it into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. It went
off with a roar, and his body slumped forward in
a chair as pieces of skin and blood and bone
splotted onto the wall. Behind him. That's when the guards
came into the building. You obviously know the rest. I
had a hood put over my head, and the next
time it came off was my and I got here
wherever here is. Look, I don't know what you're gonna
do to me, and quite frankly, I don't care. I
didn't know what I was a part of, but I
was still a part of it. None of that matters, though,
the Only thing that matters is that you figure out
how to stop that residence. There's no way that it
is just and Williams. At this point, there were hours
between the final tests and the outbreak of violence. How
many people left town during that time period without even
knowing what they were carrying inside of them. It's impossible
to know. You have to figure out how to stop
it before it keeps getting passed on and on and
on until we're all completely and totally fucked. Do you
understand me. You have to stop it now, and when
you do, you need to toss everything Veradka worked on
into a fire and burn it to ashes. Slam this
door to hell closed and make sure it never opens again.
Speaker 2: Final recommendation.
Speaker 1: It is my recommendation that the line of research pioneered
by doctor de Volveraka be continued through this apartment. The
results of the testing in Williams Arizona suggests that weaponizing
this specific sound referred to in the testimony as a
devil's tone, may be a viable and coarse effective solution
to the deployment of the United States resources in a
variety of hostile sentence. I further recommend that, due to
doctor Varaka's debt, his lead assistant, doctor Irene cold Water,
be promoted to the head of the project. A new
test and location should be located as soon as possible
so that research can continue. Containment protocols should be updated
to avoid the possibility of the results of such tests
and spread across United States soil. While necessary, the military
eradication of the so called devil's tone carriers an a resort,
brought unwanted attention to the area that Nelli exposed the
classified project. Philip Gazol, Special Advisor, United States Pentagon