Speaker 1: Usually when we talk about government secrets, there's this implicit
promise of a payoff at the.
Speaker 2: End, right final answer exactly.
Speaker 1: We're sort of conditioned by movies, by books to expect
that grand reveal. You know, the scene the hero breaks
into some dusty archive, finds the file stamped top.
Speaker 2: Secret, close the dust off.
Speaker 1: And boom, there it is the answer key, the smoking gun,
the alien autopsy photos, whatever it is, the big secret
is revealed.
Speaker 2: It's the narrative closure that we all crave. It's a
very human thing. I think we want to believe that,
even if the public is in the dark, there's a
competent adult in.
Speaker 1: The room somewhere, someone who knows what's going on.
Speaker 2: Yes, we want the conspiracy to be organized, to have
a plan. There's a strange comfort in.
Speaker 1: That idea, a very strange comfort. But what happens when
that top secret stamp is finally lifted, when the Freedom
of Information Act request finally goes through, and the big
secret revealed inside is just we have no idea.
Speaker 2: Well, that is often infinitely more terrifying than a cover up.
A cover up implies a strategy, it implies control.
Speaker 1: And these files suggest the opposite.
Speaker 2: Complete chaos, confusion, and frankly, a terrifying lack of control.
It suggests that the people behind the curtain were just
as baffled or maybe even as reckless as the rest of.
Speaker 1: Us, and that is absolutely the vibe for today.
Speaker 2: Welcome everyone to thrilling Threads. I am so ready to
get into this because the stack of documents we have
today is and I really don't say this lightly, it's haunting.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about Reddit rumors here, We're not doing
four Chan leaks or tin foil hat theories. We are
diving straight into the gray zone of history.
Speaker 1: This is all official, all of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're looking at confirmed facts, release documents, and official
admissions from the powers that bee that are I mean,
they're stranger than any fiction I've ever read.
Speaker 1: And I think it's important to set the stage here.
The documents we're discussing today, they range from the bottom
of the Greenland ice sheets wow, to the edges of
our atmosphere, and even into the darkest recesses of the
human mind. But the common thread isn't just mystery.
Speaker 2: It's a profound lack of oversight. It's about the hard
limits of our technology and just the terrifying reality of
what has been done in the name of national security
when no one was watching.
Speaker 1: It is a heavy lineup. We're going to be looking
at the official UFO investigations where the government basically just
threw up its hands and said we give up.
Speaker 2: Then there's the nuclear city, a.
Speaker 1: Nuclear city buried and currently failing under the ice in Greenland.
We have mind control experiments where the only real proof
left is stack of financial receipts because the rest was shredded.
Speaker 2: And perhaps the most sobering of all, a doomsday machine that,
for all we know, might still be listening, just waiting
for a signal to end the world.
Speaker 1: So just a light afternoon chat.
Speaker 2: Though, Oh absolutely, just the usual light reading for the
end of civilization.
Speaker 1: All right, let's unpack this. I think we have to
start with the skies because for decades the cultural narrative
the official government on UFOs was pretty much just swamp
gas and weather balloons.
Speaker 2: Oh completely. If you saw something, you were mistaken, or
you were drunk, or you were looking at the planet Venus.
Speaker 1: That was always the big one Venus.
Speaker 2: Publicly, yes, that was the stance. Nothing to see here,
move along. It was a clear strategy of dismissal, and
it was designed to quell any potential panic. I mean,
if you can't explain it, you ridicule it.
Speaker 1: But then we have Project blue Book. This was the
United States Air Forces massive and I mean massive program
to investigate UFOs. It ran from nineteen fifty two all
the way to nineteen sixty nine. And I think people
know the name Blue Book, you know it's in pop culture,
but they don't realize the sheer scale of the data
involved here. This wasn't two guys in a basement with
a phone.
Speaker 2: It was huge. They investigated twelve thousand, six hundred and
eighteen separate sightings over that period. Now, to be fair
to the skeptics, and we should be grounded here, the
vast majority of those were in fact identified. Sure, there
were planes, they were stars, experimental aircraft, clouds, sometimes just
straight up hoaxes. The Air Force did its job in
explaining most of them. They closed the book on thousands
and thousands of cases.
Speaker 1: But and this is the big butt. This is where
it gets really interesting. When they shut the program down
in nineteen sixty nine, the public message was we figured
it out, there's no threat, go home. Case closed but
if you dig into the actual files, the ones released
to the National Archives, there's this stubborn little number that
they couldn't just scrub away, seven.
Speaker 2: Oh one, the unidentified seven oh one, right, And.
Speaker 1: I feel like we need to define unidentified in this
context because a skeptic might hear that and say, oh,
unidentified just means someone saw a blurry light and couldn't
tell if it was a sessna or a meteor.
Speaker 2: And that's a crucial distinction to make. In the context
of Blue Book, unidentified did not mean insufficient data. It
meant the exact opposite.
Speaker 1: It meant they had the data.
Speaker 2: They had the data, they had credible witnesses, they had
the trajectory, and it still didn't make any sense. These
weren't vague reports from you know, random people backyard stargazing.
A significant number of these reports came from military pilots
and radar operators.
Speaker 1: And these are professionals. These are people whose entire career,
whose life depends on correctly identifying silhouettes in the sky.
If you're a fighter pilot, you have to know if
that dot on the horizon is a Russian meg or
a commercial airliner exactly.
Speaker 2: I mean if a military pilot can't tell the difference
between a weather balloon and an aircraft, they really shouldn't
be flying a multimillion dollar jet.
Speaker 1: So when these people said, I don't know what that is,
it carried immense weight, it did.
Speaker 2: And the descriptions in these seven hundred and one cases
are remarkably consistent, and they're just baffling.
Speaker 1: So what kind of characteristics are we talking about here?
I have to imagine it's more than just it was shiny.
Speaker 2: Oh way more. We're talking about what are now called
the five observables, a term that gets used a lot
in modern UAP studies, but you can see the roots
of it way back then, like what sudden instantaneous acceleration.
We're talking about going from a dead stock from much
yer to my ten in a second.
Speaker 1: Which from a physics standpoint is a huge problem. Right
the G forces alone, I remember reading about GOCG force
induced loss of consciousness. Humans can handle what maybe nine
g's in a suit for a few seconds.
Speaker 2: Maybe a highly trained pilot in a G suit can
handle nine g's for a few seconds before passing out.
But the structural limit of the aircraft itself is also
a major factor.
Speaker 1: The plane would fall apart.
Speaker 2: The wings would rip right off the airframe. If a
human pilot tried to make a perfect ninety degree turn
while moving at supersonic speeds, the inertia the g forces
would turn their internal organs into soup. These objects were doing.
Speaker 1: It effortlessly, and they're just hovering.
Speaker 2: Hovering in mid air with no visible engines, no exhaust plumes,
no wings providing lift, just sitting there, silent.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just what people were seeing, right, That's
the part that always prevents me from just dismissing this
as mass hysteria or you know, some kind of optical illusion.
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't just visual.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to see something weird. It's another thing
entirely when the technology backs you up.
Speaker 2: That is the key differentiator In a lot of these
seven oh one cases. Ground radar was picking up the
exact same objects that pilots were seeing.
Speaker 1: With their eyes, so you have visual and electronic conformation.
Speaker 2: You can't just wave that away as a reflection or
a hallucination. When the radar scope is pinging the same
anomaly at the same coordinates, with the same impossible flight characteristics.
The technology was confirming the witness accounts.
Speaker 1: So you have the Air Force officially publicly saying these
cases show no thread and no evidence of advanced technology.
But then you read the internal file and it's just
an investigator hitting a brick wall.
Speaker 2: The files literally show investigators running into dead ends and
having to stamp it unidentified because they had no other choice.
They could not explain it.
Speaker 1: So Blue Book didn't prove that little green men were visiting,
not at all.
Speaker 2: But it certainly didn't disprove that something extraordinary was happening
in our skies. It just proved the government couldn't identify it.
Speaker 1: And speaking of extraordinary, we have to talk about the
summer of nineteen fifty two, the Washington, DC incident. This one,
it just feels like a movie script. If you wrote
this today, people would say it's two on the nose.
Speaker 2: It really does feel cinematic. July nineteen fifty two. And
this wasn't happening out in the Nevada desert or over
the empty Atlantic where no one was watching. This was
over the capital of the United States.
Speaker 1: Over the White House, the Capitol build, the.
Speaker 2: Most restricted airspace on the planet.
Speaker 1: The timeline is just wild. It starts on a Saturday night,
July nineteenth, unidentified objects appear on the radar screens at Washington.
Speaker 2: National Airport, which is now Reagan National right.
Speaker 1: And at the same time they pop up at Andrews
Air Force Bace.
Speaker 2: Simultaneous radar confirmation from two separate highly secure locations. And
the air traffic controllers, these are seasoned professionals. They were
watching these blips move in ways that just defied physics.
Speaker 1: What kind of speeds are we talking?
Speaker 2: They were clocking them at speeds over seven thousand miles
per hour. Then they would just stop dead, go from
thousands of miles an hour to a complete standstill in
an instant.
Speaker 1: So naturally panic sets in. I mean, this is the
absolute height of the Cold War. The fear wasn't necessarily Martians,
it was Russians. It was a potential Soviet bomber.
Speaker 2: That was the immediate concern.
Speaker 1: So they scrambled the jets and they did this on
two separate weekends.
Speaker 2: They did f ninety four starfire interceptors go up. And
this is where it turns from a simple sighting into
this bizarre game of cat and mouse.
Speaker 1: The reports are just incredible. They say, the objects which
just vanished from radar the moment the jets got close,
and then.
Speaker 2: As soon as the jets turned back to base low
on fuel, the objects would reappear.
Speaker 1: It feels intelligent, it feels reactive, like they knew the
jets were coming.
Speaker 2: It certainly suggests a high level of awareness. And it
wasn't just radar. Civilian pilots in the area were also
calling in reporting these strange bright lights hovering and moving
erratically in that same restricted airspace.
Speaker 1: You can just imagine the tension in the Pentagon. The
capital is potentially vulnerable to a completely un.
Speaker 2: Force, so they do something unprecedented. The Pentagon holds its
biggest press conference since the end of World War Two.
Speaker 1: I can just picture that room thick with smoke, flash
bulbs popping everywhere, generals sweating under the lights. And what
do they tell the American public?
Speaker 2: Temperature inversions?
Speaker 1: The weather? Yeah, was the weather?
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, they claimed the unusual atmospheric conditions, a layer
of warm air on top of cool air, were causing
radar beams to bend and hit ground objects like cars
or buildings, creating these ghost blips on the.
Speaker 1: Screen, which, Okay, I know radar can be finicky. But
the files show that the people who should know, the
people in the room, the radar operators, the scientists, they
weren't buying it for a second.
Speaker 2: No, they were not. Temperature and versions were a known phenomenon.
Radar operators knew exactly what those look like on their scopes.
Speaker 1: What do they look like?
Speaker 2: They're messy, they're like static, they're diffuse returns. They don't
typically fly in organize formations, they don't react to military
innerc and they certainly don't appear as solid, coordinated targets
across multiple different radar systems simultaneously.
Speaker 1: It's the classic don't look up moment, isn't it. The
government is telling you it's the weather, but the pilots
are on record saying, no, I saw it move. It
just highlights that huge gap between what's really happening and
what we're being told is happening.
Speaker 2: And that gap only gets wider when we jump forward
in time, Because if you think the nineteen fifty two
incident is strange, the modern updates to this whole phenomenon
are even more perplexed. Oh.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, we have to fast forward to nineteen ninety. Let's
go across the Pond to the UK. The Calvine photo.
This is a personal favorite of mine just because it
feels so tangible. It's not a blip on a screen.
Speaker 2: This is a fascinating case because it involves actual physical
evidence that was actively suppressed for decades, not just witness testimony.
Speaker 1: So the story goes August fourth, nineteen ninety two, hikers
are out walking near Calvine in Scotland. They look up
and they see this massive, silent, diamond shaped object just
hanging in the sky. And it's not alone.
Speaker 2: No, there's a military jet, a harrier jump jet, circling it.
And that detail is crucial because it gives you an
immediate sense of scale. You know how big a harrier is.
This thing was huge. It was estimated at about one
hundred feet across.
Speaker 1: The hikers, who were chefs at a local hotel, they
snapped six photos. They send them to the local newspaper,
the Daily Record. The newspaper does what any good newspaper does.
They reach out to the Ministry of Defense for a comment,
and then.
Speaker 2: Poof the photos vanish. The newspaper hands over the negatives
and the prints to the mod and they just disappear
into the archives. For decades, the Calvine incident was just
a legend. It only existed in Witten mentions and declassified files.
The officials admitted the photos were real, but they claimed
they didn't have them anymore. They were lost.
Speaker 1: Until twenty twenty two. Thirty two years later.
Speaker 2: A former Ministry of Defense press officer, a man named
Craig Lindsay, had kept a copy of the original print.
He'd held onto it all that time, and he finally
released it to the public and the images it's striking.
Speaker 1: I've stared at this image for hours. It's unsettling. It's
this incredibly sharp edged, metallic looking diamond shaped thing. There
are no wings, no tail, no visible engines or exhaust.
It doesn't look like a plane. It doesn't look like
any drawn have ever seen.
Speaker 2: It doesn't match any known aircraft from nineteen ninety or
frankly from today. For years, the Aurora spyplane theory was
thrown around, that this was some secret US project, but
that technology has never been confirmed to exist, and the
aerodynamics of a giant diamond shape at high speed are
problematic to say the.
Speaker 1: Least, and the official stance from the UK government remains
baffling to this day. They admit the photo is real,
they've confirmed it's not a hoax, but they continue to
say it posed no threat and therefore didn't need further investigation.
Speaker 2: No threat. A massive one hundred foot unidentified diamond is
hovering over your country with one of your military jets
suckling it. How is that not a threat or at
least a major flight safety issue.
Speaker 1: It just raises the obvious question. If it's not ours,
and it's not the Russians, and it's not a threat,
then what in the world is it?
Speaker 2: And that question brings us right up to the present day.
The twenty twenty and twenty twenty one uap declassifications from
the US Department of Defense. This felt like a huge
cultural shift.
Speaker 1: It was a paradigm shift. For the first time, the
US government wasn't just releasing dusty old files from fifty
years ago. They were officially releasing recent high resolution gun
camera footage from Navy fighter jets, the tic TAC videos,
the gimbal video, the go Fast video exactly.
Speaker 2: And this isn't just pilot testimony anymore. We're talking about
fel IR forward looking infrared cameras and advanced an ASKEW
two twenty eight ATFLIR targeting pods. These are encounters where
objects are recorded dropping from space from eighty thousand feet
down to sea level in less than a second.
Speaker 1: Again, the physics just don't make sense. It's the pingpong
ball and a glass analogy. I've heard pilots use the
energy required the g forces. Nothing we have can do that.
Speaker 2: A gimbal video you can hear the pilots reacting in
real time. Look at that thing, dude, it's rotating against
the wind. These objects were recorded hovering motionless and hurricane
force winds, then moving against those winds, all with no
visible means of propulsion.
Speaker 1: And the government's admission here was so different, wasn't it.
They didn't fall back on swamp gas or temperature inversions.
Speaker 2: No. In the preliminary assessment that was released by the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, they were very,
very careful with their words. They didn't claim it was aliens,
but they explicitly admitted that there are unidentified aerial phenomena
UAPs in restricted military airspace, sometimes right near our aircraft carriers,
that they cannot.
Speaker 1: Identify, which feels like a massive public admission of vulnerability.
Speaker 2: It's a security nightmare. If that is foreign technology, if
China or Russia has somehow leapfrogged us that significantly in
propulsion and material science, it's a strategic disaster. It means
our entire air defense system could be obsolete.
Speaker 1: But if it isn't foreign technology.
Speaker 2: And we are right back to the unidentified seven oh
one from Project Blue Book, what is it?
Speaker 1: It connects back so perfectly. We have better sensors, better cameras,
better radar, more data than ever before, and we still
have the exact same answer they had in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 2: We don't know, And that profound unknown isn't just in
the sky. Sometimes the most shocking secrets are buried right
beneath our feet, or in this next case, buried deep
beneath the ice.
Speaker 1: Oh, this story absolutely blows my mind. We're going deep
into the Cold War underground now, Project ice Worm.
Speaker 2: This is such a classic example of boundless Cold War
ambition colliding head on with the unforgiving reality of nature.
Speaker 1: The setting is Camp Century, Greenland, nineteen fifty nine. Publicly,
the US Army taels world, Hey, we're building a peaceful
science research station under the ice. We're going to study
snow cores and weather patterns. It sounds so wholesome.
Speaker 2: It was a fantastic cover story, and to be fair,
they did do some real science there. The first ice
core samples that helped us understand ancient climate and atmospheric
conditions actually came from Camp Centry, So the.
Speaker 1: Documents that were declassified much later revealed the true secret purpose.
It was all a cover for something called Project ice Worm.
Speaker 2: Which sounds like a villain's diabolical plan in a Jamis
Bond movie.
Speaker 1: It really does. The plan was to use these new
tunnel boring machines to dig thousands of miles of tunnels
under the Greenland ice sheet, and the purpose of those
tunnels was to hide up to six hundred nuclear missiles.
Speaker 2: Six hundred nuclear missiles in tunnels deep inside a glacier.
Speaker 1: The strategic idea was all about proximity and survivability. From Greenland,
they could strike the Soviet Union with almost no warning
time The ice would hide the missile sites, protect them
from a Soviet counterstrike, and a plan to move the
missiles around on a subterranean rail system so the Soviets
could never accurately target them.
Speaker 2: A nuclear shell game under the ice.
Speaker 1: So they build this city. They use a technique called
cut and cover, basically digging these huge trenches in the
ice and then covering them with arched steel roofs. They
have a portable nuclear reactor down there at the PM
two A to provide all the power.
Speaker 2: And it was a real city. They had barracks for
over two hundred soldiers, hospital, a movie theater, a library,
even a chapel, all under the ice.
Speaker 1: It was an incredible engineering marvel. But there was one
massive fatal flaw on their plan that they just didn't
account for mature the ice itself.
Speaker 2: The Army engineers assumed the ice sheet was static. They
treated it like a solid block of geology, like granite
that they could just bore into and it would stay put.
But glaciers are not static, they are visco elastic. They moved.
Speaker 1: They're rivers of ice.
Speaker 2: Slow moving rivers of ice. The Greenland ice sheet is
constantly slowly flowing from the center toward the coast, and
this movement put incredible pressure on the base.
Speaker 1: So the tunnels started shrinking.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the ice started deforming and crushing the tunnels. It
twisted the rail lines they had built for the missiles.
The walls that the barracks started closing in. It became
a constant losing battle against.
Speaker 1: The ice, a maintenance nightmare.
Speaker 2: They were constantly having to shave back the ice with
Swiss made rotary plows just to keep the walls from
crushing the buildings.
Speaker 1: So by nineteen sixty seven they finally realize, Okay, this
is never gonna work, and they just leave.
Speaker 2: They abandoned the entire base. They did take the nuclear
reactor core out, thankfully, but they left almost everything else behind,
the entire infrastructure. And their assumption was what their assumption
was that the constant snowfall would just keep falling bury
the base deeper and deeper and entumbit forever as a
frozen time capsule.
Speaker 1: Of the Cold War, Out of sight, out of.
Speaker 2: Mind, precisely. But again they completely underestimated nature. And this
is where the story becomes urgent and relevant for.
Speaker 1: Us today because of climate change.
Speaker 2: Correct studies that came out in twenty sixteen and have
been updated since, confirmed that with the accelerated melting of
the Greenland ice sheet, Camp Century is not being buried deeper,
it's moving closer to.
Speaker 1: The surface that was gonna be exposed.
Speaker 2: It is, and it's not just empty tunnels and old
buildings down there.
Speaker 1: What exactly did they leave behind.
Speaker 2: A lot of hazardous waste. We're talking about low level
radioactive cooling water from the reactor and estimated two hundred
thousand liters of diesel fuel, over two hundred and forty
thousand liters of sewage, both treated and untreated, and a
significant amount of PCB's polychlorinated bifunels, which are highly toxic
industrial coolants. It is quite literally a toxic time bomb.
Speaker 1: So the ice is melting and eventually all this cold
war garbage is going to get fleshed out into the
North Atlantic.
Speaker 2: That is the current trajectory. It's an environmental and diplomatic
nightmare waiting to happen. And it's a stark reminder of
the incredible hubris of that era. They thought they could
conquer the environment to build a weapon.
Speaker 1: And now the environment is spitting it right back out
at us.
Speaker 2: It's a recurring theme in so many of these declassified files,
short term security goals creating these massive long term disasters.
And if you think the physical experiments they ran were bad,
the psychological ones were even darker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the part of the show where we
have to give a bit of a content warning. We're
going into the darkest corners of the intelligence agencies now
we're talking about MK Ultra.
Speaker 2: This is a program that is so often dismissed as
a wild conspiracy theory by people who just don't know
the history, but it is a matter of very clear,
very disturbing public record.
Speaker 1: It was confirmed in nineteen seventy five the Church Committee
hearings in Congress. The CIA director at the time, William Colby,
went before Congress and under oath, basically said yes, we
did this.
Speaker 2: He admitted that the agency ran a secret, illegal mind
control research program for more than twenty years, from nineteen
fifty three all the way to nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: And the details, I mean, we're talking about dosing people
with high potency LSD, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, psycho psychological torture,
verbal and sexual abuse. What was the ultimate goal? Were
they really trying to achieve mind control?
Speaker 2: The goals were complex and they shifted over time. Initially
it was framed as defensive. They were terrified that the
Soviets and the Chinese had developed brainwashing techniques they were
using on captured.
Speaker 1: Spies, but it quickly became offensive.
Speaker 2: Very quickly. They wanted to see if they could reprogram
a human mind. Could they create a Manchurian candidate, a
hypnotized assassin. Could they develop a perfect truth serum? Could
they erase memories?
Speaker 1: The scope was just horrific. And I think the most
disturbing part for me is who the victims were. These
weren't enemy combatants captured on a battlefield.
Speaker 2: No, they were American and Canadian citizens, prisoners, patients and
mental hospitals, even just regular people.
Speaker 1: Off the street, unwitting subjects.
Speaker 2: That is the cold legal term for it. People who
did not consent and often had no idea what was
happening to them. Some were dowed with powerful psychedelics for
days or weeks straight without ever being told.
Speaker 1: And there's the famous case of Frank Olsen.
Speaker 2: Yes, doctor Frank Olsen was an Army bacteriologist who was
working on biological warfare programs for the CIA. In nineteen
fifty three, at a work retreat, his CIA colleagues, led
by Sidney Gottlieb, the of mk Ultra, slipped a large
dose of LSD into his quantro liqueur.
Speaker 1: He had no idea none.
Speaker 2: He had a severe psychotic break. He became paranoid and
deeply depressed. Nine days later, he fell or was pushed
from the window of his tenth floor hotel room in
New York City.
Speaker 1: And for decades the CIA covered it up. They told
his family it was a suicide brought on by work stress.
Speaker 2: Exactly. And here's the ultimate frustration with the mk Ultra story.
We know what happened, we know it was awful, but
we don't really know what they found out. We don't
know what worked.
Speaker 1: And what didn't because the files are gone.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventy three, as the Watergate scandal was really
heating up and congressional investigations were looming, the CIO director
Richard Helms, ordered the destruction of all mk ultrafiles. He
knew investigators were coming and he wanted to wipe the
slate clean.
Speaker 1: He shredded the evidence of two decades of illegal human experimentation.
Speaker 2: Almost all of it. The only reason we know as
much as we do today is because of a completely random,
bureaucratic fluke.
Speaker 1: The financial records.
Speaker 2: You always follow the money. In nineteen seventy seven, a
new CIA director ordered to search and a cash of
about twenty thousand financial documents was found in a different
storage facility. They had been misfiled. Helms destroyed the operational files,
but he forgot about the accounting department.
Speaker 1: So we have the receipts.
Speaker 2: Literally, we have the receipts, We have the expense reports.
We know who was paid, what chemicals were bought, where
the secret safe houses were set up. But the operational files,
the data, the results, the scientific conclusions, the lists of victims,
those are gone forever.
Speaker 1: So we have this confirmed program that ran for two
decades that hurt and potentially killed people, and we will
never really know if it even worked.
Speaker 2: Congress admitted as much in their final report. They stated
that we will never know the full scope of MK Ultra.
It's just a black hole in American history.
Speaker 1: It's chilling. Yeah, And it wasn't just mind control. The
CIA was busy with all sorts of things during this era,
which brings us to another great name, the Family Jewels.
Speaker 2: A very evocative name for a very damaging set of documents.
Speaker 1: This was in nineteen seventy three, again post water Gate.
The CIA leadership is panicking that all their secrets are
going to get out, so the director, James Schlesner, decides
to compile an internal list of all the illegal or
improper things the agency had done over the years, just
to get ahead of it.
Speaker 2: The A skeletons in the Closet Report. Essentially, these files
were finally declassified heavily redacted in two thousand and seven,
and they confirmed what many had suspected for years, domestic spying.
Widespread domestic spying Operation Caaos, which spied on the anti
war movement, opening people's mail wiretapping US citizens, including journalists
without warrants. The CIA is legally forbidden from operating on
US soil against US citizens. That's the FBI's jurisdiction, but
the Family Jewels proved they disregarded that prohibition for years.
Speaker 1: And then, on the flip side of the dark domestic spying,
you have the just absolutely absurd plots to assassinate foreign leaders,
specifically Fidel Castro.
Speaker 2: The Castro plots read like a rejected script for Roadrunner cartoon.
It just shows this level of sheer desperation to eliminate him.
Speaker 1: Poison cigars, that's the one everyone knows.
Speaker 2: They also had a plan to deliver a pen with
a hypodermic needle so fine he wouldn't feel the injection.
They considered contaminating a diving suit with a fungus that
would cause a chronic skin disease.
Speaker 1: Wait a booby track seashell. Run that by me again.
They really tried to put an explosive in the seashell.
Speaker 2: They planned to. They knew Castro was an avid scuba dover,
so the Technical Services Division came up with the idea
to find a particularly spectacular conc shell, paint it with
bright colors to make it even more attractive, pack it
with explosives, and place it on the reef where he
often dived.
Speaker 1: And the hope was he just swim by and pick
it up.
Speaker 2: That was the hope. It's comical, but it's also terrifying
because these are the people in charge of national security
and they're coming up with exploding seashells.
Speaker 1: It highlights a complete lack of accountability, and just like
with MK Ultra, the Family Jewels documents are infuriatingly incomplete.
The documents will often describe and act like a break
in or a wire tap, but they don't say who
authorized it, or they'll mention a related file that was conveniently.
Speaker 2: Destroyed, so we see the crime, but not the criminal exactly.
Speaker 1: It proves the activity happened, but it hides the architects.
It hides the chain of command.
Speaker 2: And this theme of authorized but unaccountable action leads us
perfectly into our next thread. We're heading to Europe. Now
we have to talk about Operation Claudia.
Speaker 1: This is one of the most complex and controversial secrets
of the entire Cold War. It really changes how you
look at modern European history once you understand it.
Speaker 2: It does.
Speaker 1: So the premise when it starts out is it's kind
of understandable.
Speaker 2: I guess logically yes, within a Cold War context. After
World War Two, NATO countries were terrified of a massive
Soviet invasion of Western Europe. So, with the help of
the CIA and MI six, they created stay behind.
Speaker 1: Army, secret networks of soldiers and hidden weapons caches buried
all across Europe, Italy, Belgium, France, West Germany, Greece, all
all over.
Speaker 2: The idea was, if the Soviets invade and occupy Western Europe,
these secret soldiers activate, they become the resistance, a gorilla
force operating behind enemy lines. In theory, a purely defensive measure.
Speaker 1: But the twist is the Soviets never invaded.
Speaker 2: They didn't, But these secret armies, armed to the teeth,
didn't just sit still and gathered dust for forty years.
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets incredibly messy. We're talking
about documented links to domestic terrorism.
Speaker 2: Specifically in Italy. The whole controversy exploded in the nineteen
nineties when Italian investigators began connecting these Gladio groups, these
secret NATO backed soldiers to horrific acts of violence within
their own countries.
Speaker 1: There were bombings, shootings, it was called the Years of
Lead in Italy, dozens of attacks that were blamed on
communists or far left extremists at the time.
Speaker 2: But later a darker suspicion arose that these secret right
wing networks were involved in something called a strategy of tension.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: The idea was to create chaos, to carry out bombings
on civilians like the nineteen eighty Bolognia railway station bombing
that killed eighty five people, and then blamed the communists
in order to keep the public scared and ensure they
kept voting for anti communist governments, to destabilize democracy in
order to save it.
Speaker 1: Wait. Wait, so elements of the state, or at least
state sanctioned secret armies, were bombing their own people to
scare them into compliance.
Speaker 2: That is the very serious allegation, and in some cases
the conclusion of parliamentary and judicial inquiries. In nineteen ninety,
the Italian Prime Minister Julio Andretti went before Parliament and
confirmed the existence of the Gladio network in Italy.
Speaker 1: So they admitted it was real. But did the governments
ever admit responsibility for the violence?
Speaker 2: Generally no, They admitted the networks were real, but they
denied responsibility for the crimes. They'd say, yes, the network existed,
but those were rogue elements. They weren't acting on our orders.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate plausible deniability. But just think about the
implication here for a moment. You have secret soldiers funded
by the state, operating within democratic borders, with no public oversight,
no parliamentary control at all.
Speaker 2: It is a democratic nightmare. And just like our other files,
the records were redacted or destroyed. To this day, we
do not have a clear picture of who controlled what,
who gave the orders for these attacks, how much damage
did they actually cause across Europe?
Speaker 1: It's that same pattern again, the mechanism is revealed. We
know the secret army existed, but the specific actions, the
accountability are lost to history.
Speaker 2: And speaking of mechanisms that exist without our control, we
have to talk about the ultimate failsafe, the one that
I admit it keeps me up at night at hand,
the Soviet perimeter system. That's its official name.
Speaker 1: This is pure undiluted nightmare fuel. So during the Cold War,
the Soviets were paranoid about a US nuclear first strike.
They thought, what if the Americans launched a surprise attack,
nuke the Kremlin and wipe out our entire political and
military leadership before we can give the order to fight back.
Speaker 2: It's a valid strategic fear in that era. It's called
a decapitation strike. If the head of this is cut off,
the body can't strike back. So they built a solution,
an automated.
Speaker 1: System, a machine to guarantee revenge.
Speaker 2: A computer system buried deep in a bunker, linked to
the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal. The concept was as simple
as it was horrifying.
Speaker 1: How did it work?
Speaker 2: The system would constantly monitor a network of sensors for
signs of a nuclear detonation on Soviet soil, seismic sensors,
radiation detectors. It would also check for a loss of
communication with the general staff. If it detected a nuclear strike,
and if no one in the leadership overrode it within
a certain timeframe, it would launch.
Speaker 1: It would automatically launch a full scale retaliatory nuclear.
Speaker 2: Strike without any human intervention. Specifically, it would launch a
special command rocket that would fly across the Soviet Union,
broadcasting the launch codes to all the silos and submarines below,
bypassing the need for human crews to even turn their keys.
Speaker 1: So if everyone is dead the machine wakes up.
Speaker 2: And ends the world, it completely moves the human element
from the apocalypse. It ensures that mutually assured destruction is
truly absolutely assured. Even if you kill the enemy leadership,
you still die.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just a rumor from a spy.
Speaker 2: Novel, No, not at all. It was confirmed by multiple
former high ranking Soviet officers after the USSRFL. A colonel
named Valerie Yurinich, who helped design and build the system,
gave extensive interviews confirming it was real and active for years.
Speaker 1: But here's the question that really haunts me. Is it
still on?
Speaker 2: That is the great unknown variable. The Russian government has
never fully confirmed if the perimeter system was ever turned off.
Given the current geopolitical climate and the massive modernization of
Russia's nuclear forces, many Western experts assume that it, or
a more advanced modern version of it, is still very
much active.
Speaker 1: So right now, as we're talking, somewhere in a bunker,
there could be a computer system just listening to the silence,
waiting for a reason to launch thousands of missiles.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate unknown, very still sitting there today.
Speaker 1: So after all of this, what does it all mean.
We've looked at unexplainable objects in the sky. We've looked
at secret bases under the ice, illegal mind control, secret armies,
and automated doomsday machines.
Speaker 2: If we try to connect this to the bigger picture,
the common theme isn't just secrets, it's missing information, crucially
missing information.
Speaker 1: Right in every single one of these stories, we got
the declassified file, but we didn't get the answer, not
the real one.
Speaker 2: We have the receipts for the LSD, but not the
results of the experiments. We have the photograph of the UFO,
but not the explanation of its propulsion system. We have
the government's confession about the secret army, but not the
accountability for what they did.
Speaker 1: It feels like the declassification itself is just the tip
of the iceberg. The top secret stamp comes off, but
the logic, the results, the key evidence, it's already gone,
shredded or lost.
Speaker 2: And that I think leads to a genuinely frightening conclusion.
The scariest part of all this isn't what the government
kept secret. It's that in many cases even the people
in charge often didn't know what was happening, or they
completely lost control of it.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. The engineers didn't know the ice
would move and crush their base. The CIA directors destroyed
the files, so even they wouldn't have to know the
full history. The radar operators in nineteen fifty two had
no idea what they were seeing.
Speaker 2: We assume there's a master plan, we assume competence, but
so often when you pull back the curtain, it's just
people reacting, improvising, covering their tracks, and leaving a huge
mess for the next generation to try and figure out.
Speaker 1: Well, that is a comforting thought to end on. I
do my best, but seriously, it really does make you think.
And I want to turn this over to you, to
everyone listening right now, which of these unsolved declassified files
unsettles you the most?
Speaker 2: Is it the objects in the sky that seemed to
defy our fundamental understanding of physics? Or is it the
very human, very deliberate decisions to experiment on citizens and
to build machines that can end civilization automatically.
Speaker 1: That is the real question. Isn't it is the unknown
scary because it might be alien? Or is it scarier
because we know it's all too human? Leave a comment
and let us know your theory. I genuinely want to
hear what you think about the Calvine photo or the
current status of the dead hand system.
Speaker 2: There is certainly plenty to ponder there.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining us on this edition of
Thrilling Threads. Keep pulling at those loose ends. You never
know what might unravel Until next time.