Speaker 1: I want you to put yourself in a very specific
scenario for a second. Imagine you're helping clean out your
grandparents' house.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, a classic weekend project exactly.
Speaker 1: So you climb those creaky pull down stairs up into
the attic. It's sweltering hot. It smells like, you know,
fiberglass insulation and decades of accumulated dust, right.
Speaker 2: Just that very specific old house smell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And tucked away in the absolute darkest corner, behind
I don't know boxes of old holiday decorations, you find
this heavy, locked metal foot locker.
Speaker 2: Okay, color me intrigued.
Speaker 1: Right, So you managed to pry it open, and you're
expecting maybe some old tax returns or faded photograph, maybe
war metals, But instead you find stacks and stacks of
official government documents.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, that is not what you expect to find
next to the Christmas ornaments.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. And as you sit there on
the dusty floorboards reading them, your blood just runs completely.
Speaker 2: Cold because of what's on the pages.
Speaker 1: Exactly, because you realize that every paranoid tinfoil hat rumor
you ever heard whispered at family gatherings, the ones you
explicitly laughed off as absolute unhinged nonsense was actually true.
Speaker 2: And worse, you're holding the evidence.
Speaker 1: Yes, the box is full of the actual receipts proving it.
Speaker 2: You know. It's the ultimate paradigm shift. It forces a
complete recalibration of your worldview. It really does, because you
suddenly realize the historical foundation you've been standing on is
to a large extent, a completely sanitized construction.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and that visceral feeling, that profound ground shifting realization
that the adults in the room were actually the monsters
in the closet. Yeah, that is exactly what happens when
a global superpower is finally forced, usually kicking and screaming,
to declassify its darkest secrets. So welcome to thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: Thrilled to be here.
Speaker 1: I am incredibly bunked you're here with us because our
mission today is massive. We are meticulously unpacking a towering,
sprawling stack of freshly unearthed.
Speaker 2: File It really is a mountainwork, it is.
Speaker 1: We're looking at sealed records and declassified documents that expose
the unsettling mechanical truths of government operations over the last century.
Speaker 2: We're getting into the weeds today we really are.
Speaker 1: I mean, we are talking about the granular logistics of
literal mind control, the funding of psychic spies, and bringing
it all the way up to the deeply controversial twenty
twenty six Epstein files drop. We are pulling the thread
on all of it.
Speaker 2: But before we pull that first thread, it is vital
that we established the framework for how we are analyzing
these sources.
Speaker 1: Ground rules are important here, definitely.
Speaker 2: As we navigate this declassified material, we are going to
encounter highly politically charged operations, very charged. We'll be examining
the mpi's historical targeting of domestic civil rights leaders, deeply
controversial foreign policy decisions at devastated communities, and modern Department
of Justice data dumps involving incredibly powerful elite networks.
Speaker 1: And people have strong feelings about all of those exactly.
Speaker 2: So I want to be absolutely clear to you the
listener Thrilling Threads operates with complete impartiality. We are not
taking sides, we are not endorsing any political viewpoints, and
we are not here to pass partisan judgment.
Speaker 1: We just follow the documents right.
Speaker 2: Our sole purpose is to act as your analytical guides.
We are here to report, dissect and synthesize the factual
contents of these newly available historical records, explaining the mechanics
of how and why these events occurred.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we are just looking at the ink on the paper,
examining the bureaucratic machinery and asking how it.
Speaker 2: Actually functioned precisely.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this, and to do that we need
to step into a very specific psychological environment.
Speaker 2: We really have to set the scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we are going back to the paranoid, sweat soaked
heights of the nineteen fifties. The intelligence community of the
United States government is utterly terrified of two existential.
Speaker 2: Threats, atomic annihilation and communist infiltration.
Speaker 1: Exactly and fight these threats, they decided they needed to
map the absolute limits of the human body and the
human mind. Let's start with the physical. Let's talk about
Project Sunshine.
Speaker 2: Project Sunshine, which was initiated in nineteen fifty three by
the Atomic Energy Commission, where the AEC is the perfect
starting point.
Speaker 1: It really sets the tone for everything else it.
Speaker 2: Does because it brilliantly illustrates how a bureaucracy operationalizes panic.
The government was they were detonating nuclear weapons at an
unprecedented rate, creating immense radioactive fallout.
Speaker 1: Right, just blowing things up left and right in the
desert exactly.
Speaker 2: But they realized they had a massive scientific blind spot.
They didn't fully understand how that fallout, specifically a radioactive
isotope called strontium ninety, was globally dispersing, and.
Speaker 1: More importantly, how it was getting into the food chain.
Speaker 2: Yes, how it was accumulating in the human biosphere.
Speaker 1: And the biology of strontium ninety is what makes this
so insidious. I was looking into the mechanism of this,
and the best way to understand strontium ninety is to
think of it like a master counterfeitter slipping fate one
hundred dollars bills into a bank vault.
Speaker 2: That's an interesting way to look at it.
Speaker 1: Right, because chemically, strontium ninety is incredibly similar to calcium.
Speaker 2: It mimics it almost perfectly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So if a human being ingests it through contaminated
milk or crops or water, the human body, acting as
the bank teller, doesn't recognize it as a toxic radioactive invader.
Speaker 2: The body just sees a building block exactly.
Speaker 1: The body thinks, great, calcium, we need this to build bone.
So it takes this highly radioactive material and locks it
directly into the skeletal.
Speaker 2: Structure, right into the vault, right into.
Speaker 1: The vault, where it just sits there, radiating the host
from the inside out, causing bone cancer and leukemia.
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that the body's own biological efficiency
becomes its downfall. That's a highly accurate analogy.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying when you think about it.
Speaker 2: It really is. Now to understand the global spread of
this specific isotope. The AEC needed data, and to get data,
they needed bones.
Speaker 1: But they didn't just need any bones, did they.
Speaker 2: No, they didn't. The mechanics of human growth meant they
needed young bones. Infants in children are rapidly absorbing calcium
to grow their.
Speaker 1: Skeleton because they're growing so fast.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which means they would absorb proportionally higher concentrations of
strontium ninety. So the declassified transcripts of the secret AEC
meetings reveal that they initiated a clandestine global logistical.
Speaker 1: Operation to harvest bones.
Speaker 2: Yes, to harvest bones and tissues from the dead.
Speaker 1: And this is where the bureaucratic language in the source
documents just absolutely chilled me.
Speaker 2: The phrasing is incredibly clinical.
Speaker 1: It is they literally referred to this as a baby
sampling program.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that phrases hard to stomach.
Speaker 1: There's a specific quote in the declassified meeting transcripts where
researchers coldly complain about the logistics of acquiring samples. They
state that the bones of very young children were easy
to obtain in the United States, but they needed international
samples to track the global fallout Cloudy.
Speaker 2: The logistical network they built is just astounding. They utilized
a sprawling web of hospitals, morgues, and international scientific partners
across Europe, Australia, and South America.
Speaker 1: Just a massive global dragnet.
Speaker 2: Right all to funnel these tissue samples back to labs
in Chicago, New York. And the critical horrifying component here
is that they did this almost entirely without the knowledge
or consent of the grieving families.
Speaker 1: That's the part that just breaks my heart.
Speaker 2: They were taking limbs, vertebrae, and sometimes entire cadaurers of
stillborn infants under the guise of routine medical procedures.
Speaker 1: I just I can't get past the disconnect. It's like
stealing the foundational beams out of someone's house just to
see if the soil in the neighborhood is settling.
Speaker 2: It's very apt comparison.
Speaker 1: It violates the most sacred, intimate boundary imaginable. I just
keep asking myself, how does a scientist, a doctor who
took the Hippocratic oath justify running a covert international body
snatching ring.
Speaker 2: It requires an understanding of the macro level mindset of
the Cold War era. You have to place yourself in
the boardroom with these AEC commissioners.
Speaker 1: Okay, put me in the room. What are they thinking?
Speaker 2: They genuinely believed the world might end in therm nuclear
fire at any given moment.
Speaker 1: So they were basically in a constant state.
Speaker 2: Of panic, a profound existential dread, and that dread warped
their ethical calculus. In their minds, they were trying to
calculate the survivability of the human species on a post nuclear.
Speaker 1: Earth, big picture survival.
Speaker 2: Exactly when you are doing the math on the potential
extinction of billions of people, the sanctity of a single
grieving family in a morgue suddenly registers as a statistical zero.
Speaker 1: Wow, a statistical zero.
Speaker 2: It's a chilling calculus, but it's a purely utilitarian one.
The greater good completely devoured individual rights.
Speaker 1: But the danger of that utilitarian math is that the
slope is infinitely slippery. Oh absolutely, Because once a government
establishes that the physical human body is just raw material,
just anset to be harvested for the defense apparatus, the
psychological mind is obviously the next logical target.
Speaker 2: You made from the bones right to the brain exactly.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a program that sounds so cartoonishly evil.
I almost didn't believe the files were real.
Speaker 2: Project M Cultra. The jump from Project Sunshine to M
Culture is indeed a dark logical progression. If Sunshine was
about measuring physical damage and Culture was about exerting psychological control.
Speaker 1: And it was authorized at the highest.
Speaker 2: Levels, Yes, authorized by CIA Director Alan DoLS in April
nineteen fifty three. N Culture was this massive umbrella project
encompassing over one hundred and forty nine subprojects.
Speaker 1: That is a lot of subprojects.
Speaker 2: It was huge. It was driven primarily by a chemist
named Sidney Gottlieb. And we have to be clear here,
this wasn't just a few rogue scientists testing drugs in
a basement.
Speaker 1: Right, This was official policy.
Speaker 2: It was a highly structured, heavily funded network of experiments
exploring coercion, behavior modification, and the literal dismantling of the
human psyche.
Speaker 1: The machic of how they went about this or terrifying
the files detail methods including profound sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, hypnosis,
and most infamously, massive non consensual doses of LSD.
Speaker 2: The LSD experiments get the most attention for good reason
they do.
Speaker 1: But I want to zero in on one specific subproject
that really illustrates the mechanics of this psychological dismantling. The
work of doctor Ewan Cameron at the Allen Memorial Institute
in Montreal.
Speaker 2: Yes, Cameron's work is incredibly.
Speaker 1: Grim, it really is. And before we get into what
he actually did, I think it's crucial to point out
how the CIA funded him because they knew this was
highly illegal, so they didn't just write him a check
from Langley.
Speaker 2: No, they needed a layer of deniability exactly.
Speaker 1: They used a sophisticated front organization called the Society for
the Investigation of Human Ecology to funnel grants to his institute.
It was entirely designed to eliminate the paper trail exactly.
Speaker 2: The bureaucracy of secrecy was just as sophisticated as the
experiments themselves. Now regarding doctor Cameron's actual methodology, he was
exploring a concept he termed deep patterning.
Speaker 1: Patterning it sounds so harmless.
Speaker 2: It is an incredibly clinical, sterile term for what was
in practice, the systematic annihilation of a person's existing personality.
Speaker 1: Annihilation is the right word.
Speaker 2: Cameron theorized that to cure profound mental illness, you had
to wipe the slave completely clean.
Speaker 1: But the wiping wasn't therapy, it was torture.
Speaker 2: From a modern medical standpoint, unequivocally, yes, the mechanics of
deep patterning involved inducing prolonged pharmacological comas. He would use
heavy barbiturates to keep patients asleep from up to fifteen
to thirty.
Speaker 1: Days a month long coma just imagine that.
Speaker 2: And while they were in this chemically indued twilight state,
they were subjected to severe electroconvulsive.
Speaker 1: Therapy shock therapy, yes.
Speaker 2: But sometimes administering shocks at a voltage and frequency vastly
exceeding any standard medical practice to the point of inducing
profound amnesia.
Speaker 1: They were just from their brains.
Speaker 2: They would forget how to walk, how to talk, who
their parents were.
Speaker 1: And once he had effectively erased their hard drives, he
instituted phase two, which he called psychic driving.
Speaker 2: Yes, psychic driving was the reprogramming phase. Cameron would place
football helmets equipped with headphones on these deeply traumatized amnisiac patients.
Speaker 1: Football helmets seriously.
Speaker 2: Yes, Or he'd wire speakers under their pillows. He would
then play repetitive recorded audio messages to them.
Speaker 1: We are talking about tape loops, playing a single phrase
hundreds of thousands of times over days and weeks.
Speaker 2: Just playing over and over and.
Speaker 1: Over, exactly attempting to implant new thoughts, behaviors, and personality
traits into the void he had created.
Speaker 2: I was reading the first hand accounts from the survivors
of the Allen Institute, and it is just gut wrenching.
One patient described the aftermath by saying, I feel like
my mind has been completely invaded.
Speaker 1: To trauma was permanent.
Speaker 2: Imagine waking up and realizing that the very essence of
who you are, your memories, your quirks, your identity has
been tampered with, scrambled and stolen by an intelligence agency
operating through a cutout.
Speaker 1: It's a profound violation.
Speaker 2: Well, look, if Cameron's work was the clinical hospital setting
side of him CULTRA, Operation Midnight Climax was the absolute
descent into operational madness.
Speaker 1: Oh, Midnight Climax is entirely different territory. Please explain the
mechanics of Midnight Climax to me, because when I read
this section of the declassified files, the sheer logistics of
it brew my mind.
Speaker 2: Operation Midnight Climax is where the clinical mask of the
CIA falls completely away, revealing pure, unadulterated espionage theater theaters. Right.
Starting around nineteen fifty four, under the direction of an
operative named George White, the CIA set up literal slighte
houses in cities like San Francisco, New York City, and
Mill Valley.
Speaker 1: But they didn't look like government buildings.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. They were decorated to look like lavish,
bohemian bordellos. The CIA hired sex workers to act as
essentially field agents.
Speaker 1: The CIA was paying sex workers.
Speaker 2: Yes, these women would lure unsuspecting men off the streets
and into these safe houses.
Speaker 1: Right, and once the mark was inside. The mechanics of
the trap spring. The men were secretly dosed with LSD
and other mind altering substances, usually slipped into a.
Speaker 2: Cocktail, unknowingly consuming massive doses of.
Speaker 1: Psychedelics, and then the CIA agents, these federal employees with
security clearances would sit behind custom installed two way mirrors,
sipping drinks, taking notes on a portable toilet they had
repurposed as an observation chair, Yes, the infamous toilet chair,
and they're just watching the ensuing drug fueled chaos.
Speaker 2: That is the exact logistical setup and the justification for
this massive expenditure of time and taxpayer money.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was the excuse?
Speaker 2: The official internal documentation claimed they were studying the intersection
of intoxicated behavior, sexual blackmail, and interrogation techniques.
Speaker 1: So they claimed it was for national security.
Speaker 2: Right, they wanted to know if a man who thought
he was having a private illiciting count could be chemically
manipulated into revealing secrets.
Speaker 1: I have to push back on that official justification, though,
Go ahead, because watching unsuspecting, non consenting civilians hallucinate from
behind a mirror in a fake brothel feels less like
a rigorous scientific study on national security and way more
like a frat house run by unchecked voyeurs with a
black budget.
Speaker 2: It's hard to argue with that assessment.
Speaker 1: There is no control group, there is no scientific rigor.
It's just chaos.
Speaker 2: Your pushback is entirely valid, and it highlights the operational
drift within M cultra. To understand how they got to
a fake brothel in San Francisco, you have to trace
the trajectory of the paranoia.
Speaker 1: Okay, trace it for me.
Speaker 2: M Cultra initially started as defensive panic in the early
nineteen fifties. The CIA was terrified that the Soviets and
the Chinese had mastered brainwashing because of the Korean War exactly.
They saw American POWs returning from the Korean War making bizarre,
seemingly programmed anti American statements, and they thought, the Communists
have a chemical gaps up on us. We need to
figure out what they're using and how to defend against it.
Speaker 1: But it didn't stay defensive for long.
Speaker 2: Rarely does anything in the intelligence world stay purely defensive.
It quickly morphed into offensive ambition.
Speaker 1: So they wanted to use it themselves.
Speaker 2: Right. The bureaucratic question shifted from how do we protect
our agents from mind control to how can we weaponize LSD?
Can we slip this into the soup of a foreign
leader to make him appear insane during a speech. Can
we use this to crack a captured spy.
Speaker 1: They were looking for a weapon.
Speaker 2: They were searching for a chemical magic bullet for behavioral coercion.
But what they ultimately found was that LSD is wildly unpredictable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't exactly steer a bad trip, exactly.
Speaker 2: You can't control a hallucinating asset. And that realization of
chemical unreliability is exactly what forced the intelligence community to
pivot their methodology.
Speaker 1: Which transitions us perfectly to the next stack of files.
Because if you are an intelligence agency and you realize
you cannot reliably manipulate the chemical biology of the brain
to get the secrets you want, what do you do?
Speaker 2: You look for a different vector.
Speaker 1: Exactly, And in the case of the US government, they
decided to completely disregard the laws of conventional physics and
reality itself.
Speaker 2: They cast a very wide net.
Speaker 1: There, really did. The government didn't just stop at drugs.
They went full paranormal.
Speaker 2: You're referring to the shift toward parapsychology. Most notably housed
under Project Stargate.
Speaker 1: I am Project Stargate. This wasn't a brief weekend experiment either.
This program ran from the late nineteen seventies all the
way to nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2: That's a very long run for a program like this.
Speaker 1: It is the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency the
DA officially funded a foray into psychic spying. The bureaucratic
term they coined was remote viewing.
Speaker 2: Remote viewing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The underlying premise was that certain individuals possessed the anomaloust
cognitive ability to project their consciousness across the globe bypassing
all physical barriers to observe and describe distant places, objects,
or events like astral projection exactly. And they weren't just
practicing on guessing what's inside a sealed envelope and a lab.
They were actively targeting the most heavily fortified enemies.
Speaker 2: Of the state, Soviet submarine yards, Chinese nuclear facilities.
Speaker 1: Hostage situations in the Middle East. They were trying to
use psychics for real time intelligence gathering.
Speaker 2: The mechanics of how this was operationalized are fascinating. The
declassified files detailed millions of dollars in funding provided to
the Stanford Research Institute or SRI in Menlo Park, California
to rigorously test these purported psychics.
Speaker 1: And there are some really prominent names in these files.
Speaker 2: Yes, specifically individuals like Ingo Swan and Pat Price. The
protocols they developed were strict.
Speaker 1: How did it actually work? In practice?
Speaker 2: A remote viewer would sit in a sterile room and
a handler would give them a set of geographic coordinates, nothing.
Speaker 1: Else, just numbers, just.
Speaker 2: Latitude and longitude. The viewer would then sketch or verbally
describe whatever their minds supposedly saw at those coordinates.
Speaker 1: The claims in these files are wild. Ingo Swann, who
was a New York artist and self proclaimed psychic, claimed
he could project his consciousness up to the ceiling to
look down into hidden boxes during the initial testing protocols, and.
Speaker 2: The military took him seriously they did.
Speaker 1: And Pat Price, a former police commissioner, supposedly accurately sketched
the massive cranes at a secret Soviet research facility in
Semi Palatins.
Speaker 2: That was one of their biggest purported successes.
Speaker 1: Right, So look, I have to ask you this directly
because I guarantee you the listener's thinking the exact same
thing right now.
Speaker 2: Late on me.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at these formal stamped government reports on astral projection.
So what does this all mean? Was this just classic
Cold War wish casting? Were they just so desperate they'd
believe anything, or do they actually find an exploitable anomaly?
Speaker 2: The declassified post mortems of the program suggest it was
primarily the former, driven by an almost suffocating intelligence deficits,
So is desperation almost entirely. To understand why they funded this,
you have to understand the mechanics of espionage before the
modern digital age.
Speaker 1: Paint a picture of that era for US.
Speaker 2: Today, the intelligence community relies on constellations of satellites that
can read a license plate from low Earth orbit and
signals intelligence that vacuums up terabytes of digital communications instantly.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: They see everything now.
Speaker 2: But in the nineteen seventies, the Soviet Union was a massive,
impenetrable geographic and informational black hole. Human intelligent skies on
the ground was incredibly difficult and dangerous to maintain.
Speaker 1: So they were basically starved for data, completely starved.
Speaker 2: They were operating in such darkness that even a vague,
completely unverifiable psychic claim was deemed a worthy investment portfolio.
Speaker 1: That's wild.
Speaker 2: Think of it as venture capitalism for espionage.
Speaker 1: Oh, I like that, venture capitalism for espionage.
Speaker 2: If a remote viewer had even a one percent chance
of accurately describing the interior of a new Soviet submarine class,
the CIA figured it was worth throwing a few million
dollars at SRI to see if it panned.
Speaker 1: Out high risk, massive reward Exactly the.
Speaker 2: Files showed deeply mixed results. Believers within the agency champion
the oddly specific hits like Pat Price's crane sketches, while
skeptics pointed to the mountains of vague, inaccurate misses that
could be chalked up to educated guessing or the Barnum effect.
Speaker 1: Throw enough darts, you'll hit the bull's eye ends slightly.
Speaker 2: But the sheer fact that the military intelligence complex kept
the lights on for Project Stargate until nineteen ninety five
proves how deeply the desperate desire for an edge penetrated
the government. They wanted omniscience.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate pursuit of the all seeing eye, and
if Stargate was the government attempting to forcefully project its
vision outward, to pierce the unknown. The next set of
files is the exact inverse.
Speaker 2: The unknown coming to us.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is the unknown, forcefully piercing our reality and
the government scrambling to cover its own eyes. We have
to talk about Project blue Book.
Speaker 2: Project blue Book is a crucial pillar in understanding the
government's relationship with the unknown.
Speaker 1: It's the granddaddy of all UFO files.
Speaker 2: It is. It was the United States Air Force's official
systematic investigation into unidentified flying objects, head quartered at Wright
Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. It ran from nineteen
fifty two until December nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Over a decade and a half of official UFO hunting.
Speaker 2: Yes, the final official public conclusion of blue Book, which
was heavily influenced by a CIA convened group called the
Robertson Panel, was famously dismissive.
Speaker 1: They basically said nothing to see here, folks.
Speaker 2: Exactly. They stated unequivocally that there was no evidence of
extraterrestrial vehicles, no evidence of technology beyond modern science, and importantly,
no threat to national security. It was a neat, tidy,
bureaucratic bow designed to reassure a jittery public, but.
Speaker 1: The actual declassified files till a vastly different, much more
stubborn story than the public relations summary.
Speaker 2: The raw data is much messier, way messier.
Speaker 1: Out of the twelve thousand, six hundred and eighteen sightings
officially reported to and investigated by Blue Book, seven hundred
oh one remain stubbornly definitively classified as unidentified. That's a
significant number of unknowns, it is, And I want to
be clear about the mechanics of these sightings for you
listening right now, we aren't talking about a lone farmer
saying swamp gas or a weather balloon reflecting venus.
Speaker 2: Now, the truly compelling cases involve trained observers.
Speaker 1: Right The files detail high fidelity multisensor encounters. Take the
May nineteen sixty four sightings at the Asheville School for Boys.
You had multiple credible witnesses, detailed sketches, and corroborating accounts,
and that's.
Speaker 2: Just a civilian case exactly.
Speaker 1: Then you have the truly chilling incident involving an Air
Force pilot into Cooma, Washington, who engaged with a set
of unknown lights, resulting in a catastrophic loss of control
of his aircraft and his subsequent death. We are talking
about visual confirmation backed up by hard radar returns.
Speaker 2: And that intersection of visual and radar confirmation is where
the true gravity of the Bluebook files lies. If we
connect this to the bigger picture of Cold War geopolitics,
the question of whether these seven hundred and one unsolved
files proved the existence of extraterrestrial life is almost beside
the point.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, how are aliens beside the point? I mean,
if these craft are extraterrestrial, that feels like the entire
point of human history.
Speaker 2: It's beside the point. From the perspective of the Pentagon's
internal logic, think about the mechanics of power.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm tracking.
Speaker 2: You had the United States military in the mid twentieth century.
It is most well funded, technologically advanced, and heavily armed
organization in the history of human.
Speaker 1: Civilization, absolute global dominance.
Speaker 2: They possess nuclear weapons, elite fighter squadrons, and state of
the art radar networks designed to detect a Soviet bomber
fleet thousands of miles away. And yet the truly eerie
takeaway from the raw blue Book data is that this
supreme military force routinely encountered physical objects operating in their
own sovereign airspace, that they were utterly powerless to explain,
intercept or control.
Speaker 1: They were getting out maneuvered in their own backyard.
Speaker 2: Exactly. The objects whatever they were routinely demonstrated kinematic speeds
and maneuvers that defied the known laws of aerodynamics.
Speaker 1: Doing things that our best jets just couldn't do.
Speaker 2: For a global superpower, that level of impotence is terrifying.
The systemic secrecy and the dismissive public conclusions of Project
Bluebook weren't necessarily about hiding the existence of aliens. They
were about hiding the reality of vulnerability.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, they couldn't admit they were helpless precisely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the military could not afford to let the Soviets
or the American tax paying public know that the United
States Air Force did not have total control of the skies.
It was an exercise in maintaining the illusion of absolute supremacy.
Speaker 1: Wow, that actually reframes the entire UFO debate. For me,
It's not necessarily a cosmic cover up. It's a bureaucratic
ego defense mechanism.
Speaker 2: That's a very good way to summarize it.
Speaker 1: But you know, while psychic spies and anomalous radar returns
feel very sci fi and esoteric, The government's pursuit of
supremacy wasn't always directed at the cloud.
Speaker 2: No, much of it was very grounded.
Speaker 1: It had incredibly dark, grounded, and tangible consequences here on Earth.
Because to ensure they beat their enemies, the US government
routinely decided that the ends justified the means they were
willing to get into bed with the very monsters they
had just finished fighting. The morality of empire is a
brutal thing to examine, and there.
Speaker 2: Is perhaps no starker historical example of trading ethics for
geopolitical supremacy than Operation paper Clip.
Speaker 1: The timeline here is critical. It's September nineteen forty six.
President Harry S. Truman secretly signs off on a program
that would ultimately funnel over sixteen hundred Nazi scientists, engineers,
and technicians out of the ruins of Germany and into
the United.
Speaker 2: States, right at the dawn of the Cold War.
Speaker 1: World War II had barely ended, the ashes of Europe
were still smoldering. The Nuremberg Trials were exposing the absolute
depths of human depravity and the US government made a
calculated decision acquiring German scientific expertise before the Soviets could
get their head hands on. It was vastly more important
than historical justice.
Speaker 2: The mechanical rationale behind paper click was entirely pragmatic, driven
by the looming shadow of the Cold War. The German
war machine had made terrifying, unprecedented advancements in rocketry, aerospace, engineering,
and chemical weapons.
Speaker 1: They had the V two rockets exactly.
Speaker 2: The US military inductrial complex determined that they needed that
intellectual property, so they initiated a covert program run largely
by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency or JIOA, to actively
scrub the records of these scientists.
Speaker 1: They just erased their pass.
Speaker 2: They circumvented Truman's explicit order not to recruit ardent Nazis.
The most famous figure to emerge from this pipeline, of course,
was Werner von Braun.
Speaker 1: The face of the American space program.
Speaker 2: He became the towering, celebrated architect of NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center and the man who helped build the Saturn
V rocket that took humanity to the Moon.
Speaker 1: But here's where it gets really interesting and deeply disturbing.
All I grew up with this highly sanitized history, right,
this mythology of the good German.
Speaker 2: The idea that they were just a political scientists exactly.
Speaker 1: The narrative was that these guys were just brilliant engineers
who were unfortunately caught up in a bad regime, just
keeping their heads down and doing math. But the declassified
files absolutely shatter that myth.
Speaker 2: The reality was far darker.
Speaker 1: Let's look at the mechanics of von Braun's V two
rocket program in Germany. It didn't exist in a sparrow laboratory.
It relied entirely on horrific forced labor.
Speaker 2: Slave labor to be precise, Yes, they.
Speaker 1: Utilized prisoners from the Middle Bowdra concentration camp. Tens of
thousands of human beings were starved, beaten, and worked to
death in freezing, lightless underground tunnels to build the physical
rockets that von Braun designed. And von Braun was fully
aware of this, and another key paper clip figure, Arthur Rudolph,
was the operations director of that exact underground facility. He
was directly implicated in the utilization of that slave labor.
Speaker 2: And Rudolph was late brought to the US, worked for
NASA and helped develop the Pershing missile and the Saturn.
Speaker 1: V until he finally had to flee YES.
Speaker 2: Before quietly leaving the country decades later when the DOJ
finally started asking questions.
Speaker 1: It's infuriating to use an analogy. It's like a police
department arresting a notorious, prolific serial killer, but instead of
putting him in a maximum security prison, the chief of
police hands him the keys to the precinct and gives
him a six figure salary because the killer happens to
be a world class IT guy and they need their
servers updated.
Speaker 2: That analogy hits the nail on the head regarding the
moral compromise.
Speaker 1: We wanted the top German minds, and the cold hard
reality is that the pop Germans were the ones who
had been coveted, promoted, and utilized by Hitler and Himler.
You didn't get to run the V two program by
being a wallflower.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate exercise in institutional historical whitewashing. The
JIOA literally put paper clips on the immigration files of
the scientists they wanted, signaling to the evaluators to ignore
their not ZA affiliations.
Speaker 1: Hence, the name Operation Paper Club.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We took the logistical architects of a nightmare, scrubbed
their resumes, granted them security clearances, and eventually put them
on the covers of American magazines as heroes of the
space race.
Speaker 1: It's hard to reconcile that with our national narrative.
Speaker 2: It forces anyone reading these files to confront an incredibly
uncomfortable truth. The soaring, inspirational triumphs of the American Space Program,
one of the crowning achievements of human history, were built
at least in part, on a foundation of sanitized, unprosecuted
war crimes.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: When national security is played as the ultimate trump card,
morality is immediately categorized as an operational liability.
Speaker 1: And that exact same playbook, making deals with the devil
to fight a shadow war and ignoring the collateral damage,
was dusted off and used again decades later. Let's fast
forward to the nineteen eighties, the Iran Contra era, Yes,
the height of the Reagan administration, and the explosive investigative
reporting of a journalist named Gary Webb. This is the
Dark Alliance series.
Speaker 2: Gary Webb was an investigative reporter for the San Jose
Mercury News who in nineteen ninety six published a deeply
controversial series of reports detailing a complex logistical pipeline.
Speaker 1: And what a pipeline it was.
Speaker 2: Web outlined how the CIA backed anti Congress rebel groups
in Nicaragua known as the Contras, were deeply linked to
the narcotics networks that fueled the crack cocaine epidemic in
the United.
Speaker 1: States right into our own cities.
Speaker 2: Specifically, he traced the pipeline directly into south central Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: The mechanics of this are a tragic collision of geopolitics
and chemistry. You have the CIA under the Reagan administration,
absolutely obsessed with overthrowing the left wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Speaker 2: It was their primary focus in Central America.
Speaker 1: But Congress passes the Bowland Amendment, which explicitly legally prohibits
the CIA or the Department of Defense from funding the Contras.
So the Contras suddenly have a massive cash flow problem.
Speaker 2: They needed alternative funding streams.
Speaker 1: They need money to buy guns to solve this. Figures
associated with the contrast partner with Colombian drug cartels to
smuggle massive quantities of incredibly cheap powder cocaine into the
US to raise funds.
Speaker 2: And that influx of cheap cocaine hit the streets at
the exact same moment that a chemical innovation occurred at
the street level.
Speaker 1: Exactly, drug dealers in Los Angeles figure out the mechanics
of cooking powder cocaine with baking soda and water to
create crack, a devastating innovation. It transforms an expensive luxury
drug into something highly addictive, easily transportable, and incredibly cheap.
The Contras get their shadow war funding, and the horrific
byproduct is that South central LA, and eventually urban centers
nationwide are absolutely devastated by the crack epidemic.
Speaker 2: The societal impact was catastrophic.
Speaker 1: Entire communities are destroyed, a generation is lost to addiction,
The ensuing gang violent skyrockets, and the mass incarceration era begins,
and the CIA, according to the documents, essentially look the
other way because the drug money served their geopulitay anti
communist goals.
Speaker 2: When Web initially published this, the blowback was fierce. His
reporting was heavily attacked and discredited by major media outlets,
and he was essentially ruined.
Speaker 1: Professionally they destroyed his career.
Speaker 2: He was pushed out of journalism. But the profound vindication
the declassified receipt came years later. In nineteen ninety eight,
the CIA's own Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, released a dense,
multi volume internal report.
Speaker 1: And what did that report say?
Speaker 2: Buried within the bureaucratic language of that report was a
quiet acknowledgment of the core truth web. It uncovered the
agency indeed had relationships with individuals and entities tied to
the contra effort who were heavily implicated in narconics trafficking.
Speaker 1: He knew.
Speaker 2: The report admitted the CIA knew about these activities, did
not prioritize stopping them, and in some cases actively intervened
to protect these individuals from law enforcement scrutiny because they
were valuable assets.
Speaker 1: So they admitted it. But why did it take a
decade for that truth to surface? Why did the institution
let Gary Webb take the fall and ruin his life
while they sat on the truth.
Speaker 2: It comes down to the bureaucratic concept of an issue
becoming radioactive. You have to understand the self preservation mechanisms
of a massive intelligence apparatus.
Speaker 1: How does that self preservation work.
Speaker 2: When an agency makes a covert operational decision to ignore
drug cartels to fund an illegal shadow war, retracting that
operation or genuinely investigating the fallout becomes virtually.
Speaker 1: Impossible because everyone is implicated.
Speaker 2: Exactly because the mechanics of the cover up are too intertwined,
Pulling that single thread threatens to unravel the entire institutional sweater.
Speaker 1: It's a domino effect.
Speaker 2: If an internal investigator exposes the drug runners, they expose
the contra's funding stream. If they expose the contras, they
exposed the CIA handlers who authorized it. If they expose
the handlers, they exposed the executive branch officials who bypass Congress.
Speaker 1: The whole house of cards comes down.
Speaker 2: The entire chain of command becomes radioactive. Nobody wants to
touch it, so the institution instinctively buries the truth, attacks
the accuser, and protects the ecosystem.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a devastating realization about how these
agencies operate. The weapons, the tactics, and the absolute paranoia
developed to fight overseas. Enemies don't stay overseas.
Speaker 2: They always come back.
Speaker 1: The imperial boomerang always returns. The tactics bleed onto American soil,
affecting everyday citizens and leaving scars that last for generations.
We've seen it with the crack epidemic destroying communities. But
let's look at how the government actively intentionally targeted its
own people. Let's talk about the mechanics of co intel pro.
Speaker 2: Co intel Pro, which is an acronym for counterintelligence program,
was a series of secret, often highly illegal projects conducted
by the FBI from nineteen fifty six in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: The j Edgar Hoover era.
Speaker 2: Yes, the stated purpose of the program, which was laid
bare and stunning detail by the Senate's Church Committee investigations
in the nineteen seventies, was to actively expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit,
or otherwise neutralize domestic groups and individuals the FBI deemed dangerous.
Speaker 1: And we really need to define who the FBI considered
dangerous in this context, because we aren't just talking about
violent extremists or foreign spies.
Speaker 2: No, the net was cast incredibly wide.
Speaker 1: They aggressively targeted mainstream civil rights groups, anti war activists,
black liberation movement, feminist organizations, and incredibly prominently, doctor Martin
Luther King Junior himself.
Speaker 2: MLKA was a primary target.
Speaker 1: And the mechanics of their tactics went far beyond simply
watching people. They were actively destructive. We're talking about widespread,
warrantless wiretapping, deploying agent provocateurs to incite violence within peaceful groups,
drafting forged letters to ruin marriages, and planting false stories
and friendly press outlets to turn allied groups against each
other from the inside out.
Speaker 2: This raises an important question about intent. The declassified memos
from Cointel Pro raise a profound question about the fundamental
philosophy of domestic intelligence.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: When you analyze the files, it becomes clear that Cointel
pro wasn't about law enforcement in the traditional sense. Surveillance
implies watching a subject to see if a crime occurs
and then prosecuting that crime.
Speaker 1: Right, that's what police are supposed to do.
Speaker 2: Cointel pro was entirely different. It was about the extra judicial,
unconstitutional destruction of progressive political movements in order to maintain
the existing social status quo.
Speaker 1: They were playing politics, not fighting crime.
Speaker 2: The FBI inherently viewed social change, even peaceful democratic social change,
as a threat to the national security. Apparatus.
Speaker 1: The single most sickening piece of paper in this entire
stack of documents is the anonymous letters sent to Martin
Luther King Junior in nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2: That letter is infamous.
Speaker 1: The FBI, operating under William Sullivan, Hoover's deputy, had illegally
wire tapped King's hotel rooms. They compiled an audio tape
of alleged sexual indiscretions, packaged it up, and mailed it
to his home, along with an anonymous threatening.
Speaker 2: Letter sent directly to his family.
Speaker 1: And when you read the unredacted draft of that letter,
the explicit, undeniable goal of the federal government was to
cause him such immense psychological torment that he would commit
suicide before accepting the Nobil Piece prize.
Speaker 2: It is remarkably cruel.
Speaker 1: The letter literally tells him there is only one thing
left for you to do. When you read that, you
realize there is no floor. There is no moral line
the institution wouldn't cross to protect itself.
Speaker 2: It demonstrates the terrifying, unchecked power of an agency operating
in total secrecy, devoid of congressional oversight. When a domestic
law enforcement bureau decides that it and not. The electorate
is the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes an acceptable political ideology.
The core mechanics of democracy are fundamentally compromised.
Speaker 1: They set themselves above the law.
Speaker 2: The agency becomes an entity unto itself.
Speaker 1: Its collateral damage of the highest order. And speaking of
collateral damage inflicted upon the citizen by its own government,
we have to examine a literal physical poison that the
military unleashed, not just on an enemy landscape, but on
its own soldiers. Let's look at the mechanics of Agent
Orange and Operation ranch Hand.
Speaker 2: Operation Ranchhand was the US military's defoliation program during the
Vietnam War, running from nineteen sixty two to nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: What was the goal there?
Speaker 2: The tactical military strategy was relatively straightforward. The Viet Cong
utilized the dense jungle canopy for camouflage and relied on
rural cross for sustenance right guerrilla warfare. The Pentagon decided
to strip away that advantage by chemically destroying the ecosystem.
To accomplish this, the Air Force sprayed nearly nineteen million
gallons of highly toxic herbicides over the jungles of Vietnam.
Speaker 1: Laos and Thailand nineteen million gallons.
Speaker 2: And of that total, at least eleven million gallons consisted
of the specific chemical cocktail known as agent orange.
Speaker 1: The military goal might have been a sterile strategic equation
on a map in Washington, but the biologic mechanics of
what they actually did resulted in an incalculable human cost.
Speaker 2: The health fallout was unprecedented.
Speaker 1: Because agent orange wasn't just a heavy duty weed killer.
During its expedited manufacturing process, it became heavily contaminated with
a byproduct called TCDD dioxin, and TCDD dioxin is one
of the most toxic, insidious chemical compounds known to science.
Speaker 2: It is incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: It is fat soluble, meaning once it enters the body,
it doesn't leave, and the fallout didn't stay confined to
the Vietnamese jungle, and it certainly didn't dissipate when the
Paris Peace Accords were signed.
Speaker 2: The exposure mechanism was inescapable for the people there. American
troops on the ground were marching through soaked foliage, drinking
contaminated water, and inhaling the mist. As the C one
twenty three transport planes sprayed it directly overhead.
Speaker 1: I want you, the listener, to really put yourself in
the boots of a veteran for a second. Imagine it's
nineteen sixty eight. You are drafted, you answer the call,
you serve your country, and you managed to survive the
visceral daily horrors of a brutal war in Vietnam or Thailand,
much like the veteran Fred Marshall mentioned in our source.
Speaker 2: Document, they went through hell.
Speaker 1: You come home, you kiss the tarmac, you think you're
finally safe. You start a family, build a life, and
then ten twenty years later, the biological time bomb goes off.
Speaker 2: The latency period is terrifying.
Speaker 1: You develop early on set Parkinson's or severe peripheral neuropathy
or a rare soft tissue sarcoma, and infinitely worse your children.
Your biological children born years after you left the jungle
are born with severe life altering birth defects like spina bifida.
Speaker 2: It passes to the next generation.
Speaker 1: You survived the sniper fire, only to realize years later
that you brought a chemical weapon home hidden inside your
very DNA. It is a living, transgenerational genetic curse.
Speaker 2: The profound sense of betrayal felt by those veterans cannot
be overstated because for decades after the war, the bureaucratic
mechanics of the government and the chemical manufacturers worked in
hand them to deny culpability.
Speaker 1: They fought the veterans tooth and nail.
Speaker 2: They aggressively dragged their feet on acknowledging the epidemiological link
between agent orange exposure and these horrifying health outcomes. They
demanded impossible burdens of proof from sick and dying.
Speaker 1: Men, just waiting for them to die so they wouldn't
have to pay.
Speaker 2: Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs does finally recognize a
long list of presumptive conditions tied to exposure, including providing
benefits for the children of veterans with spina bifida, But
that administrative recognition came far too late for thousands of
families who went bankrupt paying medical bills.
Speaker 1: Too little, too late.
Speaker 2: It is a stark mechanical reminder that the true cost
of war is never neatly confined to the battlefield timeline.
It is carried forward in the cellular biology and the
bloodlines of the people ordered to fight it.
Speaker 1: And you know we sit here dissecting the nineteen fifties,
the sixties, the seventies. It is so easy, almost comforting,
to view this as dusty, black and white history.
Speaker 2: You like to think we've evolved.
Speaker 1: Right to say, Okay, while we were naive back then,
the Cold War made people crazy, but we have congressional oversight.
Now we have the Internet. The system is modernized and transparent.
But the documents prove that is a dangerous, comforting illusion.
Speaker 2: The underlying architecture remains.
Speaker 1: The underlying mechanics of institutional self preservation haven't changed at all,
which brings us inevitably to the present day. We have
to unpack the mechanics of the twenty twenty six Epstein
files drop.
Speaker 2: The Jeffrey Epstein case has for over a decade served
as the ultimate focal point for public distrust regarding the
intersection of wealth, elite access, and the justice system.
Speaker 1: The ultimate symbol of corruption.
Speaker 2: But the specific event we are analyzing in these documents
is the massive Department of Justice release that occurred on
January thirty, twenty twenty six. After years of litigation and
public pressure, a judge ordered the unsealing of a monumental
data dump over three million pages of internal documents, flight logs,
two thousand videos, and one hundred and eighty thousand images
tied to the investigations to Epstein and his accomplice, Gislaine Maxwell.
Speaker 1: The public demanded transparency. They wanted the hidden architecture of
this horrific network exposed to the light. But what actually
happened when the DOJ hit.
Speaker 2: Public It was a disaster.
Speaker 1: The logistical rollout was an absolute chaotic disaster. The DOJ
was under strict legal orders to carefully redact the files
to protect the identities of the victims and the survivor's
people who had already suffered unimaginable trauma.
Speaker 2: That should have been the absolute priority.
Speaker 1: But instead the mechanics of the release failed catastrophically due
to what they called data processing errors. There were massive
redaction failures. The identities, real names, and in some cases
unredacted photos of nearly one hundred women out of a
protected list of three hundred and fifty survivors whose privacy
was legally guaranteed were improperly exposed to the entire Internet
in real time, which.
Speaker 2: Forces us to critically examine the mechanics of modern transparency.
When a failure of this magnitude occurs at the highest
levels of the Justice Department. You have to ask, is
this a case of persistent, staggering technical incompetence or is
it a manifestation of willful negligence? Right?
Speaker 1: How do you mess up that badly?
Speaker 2: How does an agency with billions of dollars in funding
fail to properly flatten the PDF or run a secure
redaction script. Even when the public successfully forces the system
to open its vault, the machinery of government bureaucracy remains
incredibly chaotic and fundamentally protective of its own ecosystem.
Speaker 1: It protects the elites and exposes the vulnerable.
Speaker 2: The mishandling of the twenty twenty six drop prove that
even in the modern digital era, with all our sophisticated
e diiscovery software, the system is fundamentally flawed or perhaps
working exactly as designed when it comes to handling the
secrets of the powerful while disregarding the vulnerable.
Speaker 1: And that right there is the overarching thematic mechanism of
everything we've talked about today. It's the terrifying realization that
the system isn't necessarily broken, It's functioning exactly as its architecture.
Speaker 2: Dictator, it's doing what it was built to do.
Speaker 1: Whether it's the cia A structurally covering up the contra's
drug running to protect its funding, or the DOJ botching
the protection of Epstein's victims while safeguarding the names of
elite clients, the bureaucracy will always reflexively shield itself first.
Speaker 3: The institution survives, at all costs the collateral damage, whether
they are m culture tests subjects stripped of their minds,
civil rights leaders driven to despair, Vietnam veterans carrying poison DNA,
or trafficked women exposed to the public, are always mathematically
secondary to the preservation of the institution itself.
Speaker 2: If we attempt a grand synthesis of all these disparate threads,
a very clear, highly unsettling picture of institutional mechanics emerges.
Speaker 1: Tie it all together for us, from the.
Speaker 2: Physical boundary violations of harvesting children's bones in Projects Sunshine,
to the psychological torture chambers designed by Ewen Cameron and Culture,
to the calculated historical whitewashing of Nazi engineers in Paperclip,
and right up to the modern digital chaos of the
Epstein records. The declassified documents consistently reveal a singular operational.
Speaker 1: Truth, and what is that truth?
Speaker 2: Large institutions, regardless of the era or the technology available,
will routinely cross the most profound moral and ethical lines
imaginal in the name of security, power, or mere bureaucratic convenience.
The mechanism of power prioritizes its own survival above all else.
Speaker 1: It's heavy. It is an incredibly heavy burden to process
all of this and realize what the machinery is capable of.
But we can't look away from the blueprints.
Speaker 2: We absolutely shouldn't look away. While parsing this information can
feel daunting or cynical, understanding the mechanics of these historical
events is the ultimate tool for critical thinking.
Speaker 1: It's how we defend ourselves.
Speaker 2: When you understand the logistical history of how governments manipulate truth,
how the operationalized shadow networks, and how they calculate human collateral,
you become immune to blind default. Trust Knowledge is the countermeasure.
Speaker 1: It shines a light in the bink corners.
Speaker 2: It prevents these historical collisions from remaining hidden in the dark,
and it allows us to demand rigorous accountability in the present.
Because we have the receipts of exactly what they are
capable of doing when they think no one is watching.
Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. Understanding the past is the only
way to decode the present. And as we wrap up
this deep dive into the archives, I want to leave
you the listener with one final, deeply chilling thought.
Speaker 2: Tom all Over, this is the part that keeps me
up at night.
Speaker 1: Think about the massive time delay we've been discussing today.
We are only just now in the last few decades
fully analyzing the unredacted declassified files from the nineteen fifties,
the sixties, and the seventies. It took half a century
for the mechanical truth about m CULTRA or the FBI's
vendetta against MLKA to fully see.
Speaker 2: The light of day, a fifty year leg.
Speaker 1: So ask yourself, what highly classified logic defying deeply unaccountable
programs do you think are running right now in this
very second, deep within the black budget that won't be
declassified until the year twenty seventy, When your grand some
kids are cleaning out the attic and prying open that
locked metal box. What receipts are they going to find
about our era?
Speaker 2: That is a question worth asking.
Speaker 1: What do you think which of these declassified operations fundamentally
shocked you the most, and what specific modern program do
you suspect is currently hiding behind the wall of classification.
Drop down and leave a comment below to answer. We
want to know exactly where you stand.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on thrilling threads, and remember, keep
questioning everything.