Selects: How Area 51 Works

Summary

Stuff You Should Know - "Selects: How Area 51 Works"

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant
Date: September 27, 2025 (original from June 13, 2019)
Theme: A deep dive into the history, facts, and mythos of Area 51, separating government secrecy from extraterrestrial speculation.

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Episode Overview

In this lively and detail-rich episode, Josh and Chuck unravel the mysteries, facts, and pop-culture legends surrounding Area 51. From its beginnings as a military testing ground to the engine of America's UFO conspiracy culture, the hosts illuminate the mundane and the fantastical. They dig into military aviation history, the roots and spread of alien rumors, security protocols, and the rare instances when the U.S. government publicly acknowledged Area 51's existence. The tone bounces between humor, skepticism, and open curiosity, always aiming to demystify, while never robbing the subject of its intrigue.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. What is Area 51? (02:22)

• Location: Less than 100 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada; the area is part of a larger 600 sq mile restricted airspace but the installation itself is likely just 60 sq miles.
• Purpose: Originally a military bombing and testing range, bordering on the Nevada Test Site, used for nuclear experiments.
• Name Origin:
  • Chuck: "Seems, I don't know about arbitrary, but no one knows if it really matters why it was named Area 51." (05:49)
  • Josh: "The area where Area 51 is located was denoted as Area 51, between.” (05:54)

2. The Aviation Connection (06:10)

• WWII Arms Race: U.S. lagged behind Germany in jet development.
• Lockheed Skunk Works: Led by Kelly Johnson, who delivered the P-80 Shooting Star and pioneered agile defense project management.
  • Josh on Skunk Works: "They were the first ones to kind of basically develop agile project management from what I understand." (07:55)
• Need for Secrecy: The U2 spy plane (Project Aquatone) required a secret location—hence, Area 51.

3. Founding of Area 51 (08:52)

• Site Selection: Attracted by Groom Lake, a dry salt bed, selected for its natural and regulatory isolation.
• Cover Story: Operation was disguised as "bomb experts cleaning up unexploded munitions."
• Executive Legality: Eisenhower's 1955 Executive Order 10633 expanded restricted airspace; by 1958, it was unlisted on maps.

4. Secrecy & Security (13:06)

• Strict Secrecy Measures: Workers underwent harsh interrogations, loyalty tests, and intra-base security partitions.
  • Josh: "...to even be on the base or in Area 51, you had to have the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have." (14:57)

5. The Spy Plane Era (15:26)

• End of U2 Secrecy: Downing of Gary Powers' U2 in 1960 revealed the U.S. did clandestine projects. Led to Project Oxcart.
• Project Oxcart & SR-71 Blackbird: Ultra-secret "black project" resulting in the legendary high-speed reconnaissance jets.
  • Chuck: “This kind of started the era that we still live in today in which the military just dumps money into secret projects.” (17:56)
• Infrastructure Boom: Facilities expanded, airspace restricted further.

6. From Planes to Aliens: How Area 51 Became UFO Central (25:01)

• Pop Culture Ties: "Extraterrestrial Highway" (Sign renaming the road to Area 51).
• Origins of Alien Association:
  • Tipping Point: In 1989, Bob Lazar went public on Las Vegas TV, claiming to work on alien tech at “S4”—a subsite near Area 51.
  • Bob Lazar's Credibility: Despite no evidence of his MIT/Caltech credentials, his stories included seemingly accurate details about security tech and resulted in observed UFO "test flights."
    • Chuck: “He just doesn't seem like some crackpot or a weirdo or like, he would be lying...he hasn't, like, made money off of this.” (26:34)
  • Josh: "Everything you hear about and think about from about Area 51 today did not exist pre-1989, pre-Bob Lazar." (29:01)

7. Disentangling Roswell and Area 51 (37:04)

• Roswell Myth: Roswell crash in 1947 is often conflated with Area 51, but at the time, Area 51 wasn't operational (nor even a secret site yet).
• Distance Fact: They're 800 miles apart; their linkage arose post-1980s UFO enthusiasm.

8. Other Conspiracies and Theories (39:00)

• Level 1: Alien corpses and tech, time/light-speed/interdimensional travel.
• Level 2: Alien-Human collaboration; Majestic 12 ruling government from underground.
• Level 3 (Wildest): Nazis and Soviets built a spaceship with mutant children to fake a UFO scare (Annie Jacobsen's book).
• File Room Loyalty Test: Multiple supposed insiders (including Lazar) said they were "tested" via being left alone with wild alien-related files—possibly a psychological loyalty test.

9. What actually happens at Area 51? (47:35)

• Most Likely: Ongoing black projects in aviation and electronic warfare; ongoing physical expansion is visible in satellite imagery.
• Security: Heavy surveillance; guards on-site and legal authority for deadly force, but trespassers are typically just fined.
• Staffing: Civilian workers are flown in secretly on "JANET" jets (Just Another Non Existent Terminal); highest security clearance required.
  • Josh: "They have to have everything from food services to custodial services..." (47:35)

10. Government Acknowledgement and Lawsuits (49:03)

• First Official "Acknowledgment": 1990s lawsuits by poisoned workers forced admission that Area 51 exists, though operational details still withheld.
  • Josh: "In court... the government representatives were saying, like, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry." (50:30)
• Mosaic Theory: Rationale for total secrecy—any detail could be fit into a bigger intelligence puzzle.
• Environmental Catastrophe: Hazardous waste disposal made workers ill, but secrecy trumped safety.

11. Modern Day Area 51 (53:10)

• Public Knowledge: Satellite imagery now openly shows Area 51's expansion.
• Status Quo: “Yes, that something’s there. No, you can’t know what’s going on.”
• Josh: “Sorry, we kind of took the government tack here and didn’t really go all in on the alien theories, But I just don’t think that’s what it is.” (53:51)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Secrecy:
  • Josh (14:57): “To even be on the base or in Area 51, you had to have the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have... and even if you had that, you still couldn't see the U2 spy plane or know that it existed.”
• On Bob Lazar:
  • Chuck (26:34): “When you listen to Bob Lazar talk today, he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or a weirdo or like, he would be lying... he's basically like, listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't attached to my name...”
• On Conspiracies:
  • Josh (39:28): “Don't forget interdimensional travel too. Why not another one I saw. There's some pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The moon landing was faked there.”
• On the Cult Status of Area 51:
  • Josh (25:22): “As synonymous as this base is with aliens and UFOs, that's actually relatively recent. It was operating for a good 25, 35 years... before aliens became tied to Area 51.”
• On Security:
  • Josh (46:12): “There's mics that listen to your conversation... like you were under as close surveillance as you've ever been in your life, from what I understand.”
• On JANET flights:
  • Josh (48:13): “You can see them on the tarmac… just look for the giant 737s that are white with the red stripe and pretty cool. No logo, no nothing.”
• On Government Denial:
  • Josh (50:30): “...the government representatives were saying, like, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:42 — Episode begins; setting the stage for Area 51’s mystique
• 02:28 — Geographic and historic overview of Area 51’s location and purpose
• 06:50 — Skunk Works and the birth of high-speed, secret jet engineering
• 08:39 — Project Aquatone and the U2 spy plane’s secret development
• 13:06 — Extreme security protocols and air base culture
• 15:26 — U2 downed, cold war secrecy pivots to blacker projects (Oxcart, SR-71)
• 25:01 — How Area 51 and aliens first got linked (Bob Lazar’s impact)
• 37:04 — Debunking the Roswell–Area 51 connection
• 39:00 — “Alien layers" of theories, from plausible to wildest
• 47:35 — What’s really happening at Area 51 today; logistics, workers, security
• 49:03 — 1990s lawsuits, hazards, government’s first public nod to Area 51
• 53:10 — Satellite imagery and the new, semi-transparent era

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Summary in a Nutshell

Stuff You Should Know’s examination of Area 51 reveals a story of American secrecy, cutting-edge aviation, and the lavish imagination of a culture ready for conspiracies. Josh and Chuck lay out how a real-world military site spawned decades of rumors, the influence of witness testimony (notably Bob Lazar), and why, even after the government is forced to admit its existence, the mystique lingers. The real Area 51 is a place of innovation, danger, and tightly held secrets—alien or otherwise. But if you’re hoping for definitive proof of flying saucers, you’ll need to keep waiting.

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Additional Resources

• For more on Area 51:
  • Annie Jacobsen's Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base
  • CIA declassified documents on Project Oxcart and U2
• For skepticism or UFO lore:
  • “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers” documentary (for context, not endorsement)
  • Skeptoid podcast episodes on Roswell and Area 51

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Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Chuck Bryant]

Hello everybody. Chuck here. Take me to your leader. Other things ETs might say. Happy Saturday. This episode is called how Area 51 works. It's from June 13, 2019. And you know, we get into it, we chop it up, as they say, all about Area 51. I hope you enjoy.

[Stuff You Should Know Intro/Outro]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and there's Dylan, the guest producer. Again, this is Stuff you should know, the podcast about Chuck. Some pretty heady stuff.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I could have sworn we did this one.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

What did we do? Roswell.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

UFOs.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

We did that at a Comic Con or something, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we did. We did it live. I've never been satisfied with that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

I agree.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe we'll redo it one day.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nah, this is good, this area 51. I think this kind of covers some ground that I didn't think I was surprised by, this is what I'm saying.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, me too. And I think the thing that I would wager you were surprised about, which I was definitely surprised about, was just how mundane the explanations for what goes on at Area 51 probably is.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, secret government research, the end, right?

[Josh Clark]

But it probably doesn't have anything to do with reverse engineering alien technology. And the secret seat of the One World government, the Majestic 12 probably isn't located there.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Probably just bombs and planes.

[Josh Clark]

Probably. It makes sense. And if there is a conspiracy going on, the one conspiracy theory I saw for Area 51 that made the most sense to me is that it's actually Meant to be a distraction or has developed into a distraction for some. Some other place that no one even knows about.

[Chuck Bryant]

Area 50, maybe.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, maybe. Hopefully they're not quite that on the nose, but it's possible.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so let's go back in time, I guess, to World War II. And. Well, first of all, Area 51, just to geographically level set, it's less than 100 miles from Las Vegas in Nevada, South Nevada. Yeah, it's 600 square miles. And it's basically, if you look at it on Google Earth, it looks like a big airfield with a bunch of buildings.

[Josh Clark]

So I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of the test range and the air base and all of that stuff that Area 51 is located in, I think that's 600 square miles. I'm pretty sure Area 51 itself is no more than 60 square miles.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, sure. Just, it's not like there's 600 square miles of building buildings.

[Josh Clark]

Right. It's just. Yeah. The installation that people think of as Area 51 is part of a larger, huge, big chunk of the American desert in Nevada.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So next to Area 51 is what you were kind of talking about, the Nevada Test Site. And this is where for about 10 or 11 years, the atomic Energy Commission was setting off nuclear bombs underground, above ground, and really sort of figuring out how to kill a lot of people very easily in sort of the most dangerous way you could imagine.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and you could see this from Vegas. Like, they would have parties when they were doing the test, because Vegas is like 80 miles away or something like that. And they would have like atomic cocktails and viewing parties and stuff like that. And people would watch them shoot off bombs.

[Chuck Bryant]

Unbelievable.

[Josh Clark]

Right. But this is obviously a part of the country that the government would be very interested in keeping people away from. Not just for the bombs, but because of the fallout, the radiation, but also the fact that they're testing, like super sensitive military equipment and weapons. Right, like atomic bombs.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like, previous to this, it was just land. There were silver mines, there was cattle and wildlife. But then in 1940, the government said, no, this is ours, and we're going to train bombers here. And there was a big bombing range, and they were split into different numbers. And that's where the number Area 51 comes from, which seems, I don't know about arbitrary, but no one knows if it really matters why it was named Area 51.

[Josh Clark]

No, I think it was. If you look at old bombing range maps, the area where Area 51 is located was denoted as Area 51, between.

[Chuck Bryant]

50 and 52 is probably the answer.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's basically 50 from what I saw. That was it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So there's another part to this story with World War II and this is Germany. They were a bit ahead of us as far as jets go, jet airplanes. The United States was like, this won't do it all. So we're gonna get kind of put the gas on our jet development. And in 1943, Lockheed was tasked with developing a jet fighter plane. You can use a British jet engine. And they tasked engineer Kelly Johnson said, get a team together. He got a team together and they delivered the P80 Shooting Star, which is one of the coolest looking old jets. All these planes are just amazing looking.

[Josh Clark]

Agreed. Very, very cool. It's a good idea when we talk about a new jet or something, go look it up as we're talking about because most of them are pretty boss looking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I've never been a plane guy, but I'm getting more and more into it.

[Josh Clark]

Is that right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I want to do a stealth bomber episode one day. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Possibly the coolest plane.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So Kelly Johnson was a, that, that just that right there. Delivering America's first jet on like under time and under budget was huge. And he became a legendary engineer right off the bat. And they, I think Lockheed said, hey, how would you like to keep this pace up? We'll give you, your team of elite engineers, whatever funding you need, whatever resources you need, just ask, you can have it. And you just keep developing stuff really quickly for us and we will put you at the cutting edge of aviation research. And so Kelly Johnson and his team eventually became known as the Skunk Works, which is legendary in aviation engineering because they developed a whole bunch of really cool stuff. But also they had a pretty great name too that was fairly intriguing. But they were the first ones to kind of basically develop agile project management from what I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this was all out of the. What was known as Site 1, which was in Burbank, California, just sort of a suburb of LA. But then in 1954 they said, you know what we need now is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spy plane. We want something that can fly above radar and photograph Soviet military bases, missile installations. We're going to name it because we name everything Project Aquatone. And that's where Johnson and his team developed the U2, the skunk works team.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they couldn't do this at site 1 anymore because it had to be super, super secret, obviously, because it was a spy plane. So they needed a different place. And that's where it sort of all converges onto this testing site in Nevada.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Kelly Johnson, CIA officer named Richard Bissell and a couple of pilots started scouting locations for where they could develop this in super, super secret. And they went to look at the old Nevada test range. And specifically the thing that attracted them was a dry salt lake called Groom Lake. And one of the pilots recounted taking some like 16 pound shot put balls and dropping them on the ground to see just how sandy the ground was. And he said it was solid as a tabletop. This lake was the dry lake.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

They're like, this will probably do. And there's a lot of reasons why it would do. Not just because there was a dry lake bed that was as hard as concrete, but because it was in an area that was already off limits to the public. The airspace was already restricted. It was remote. There are two mountain ranges that shield the test site from view. So this area, what became known as Area 51, was just perfect for developing a super secret spy plane in super secret. And so the CIA and the Skunk Works team said, this will do. Let's take this place over.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did I ever tell you about one of the most fun things I ever got to do as a P.A.

[Josh Clark]

What? Wait, weren't you arrested by Eric Estrada? Is that what you're gonna say?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, no, that stopped in.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

We did a car shoot on a dry lake bed.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

In Death Valley.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they had like a big, huge line of cars in a row all driving in perfect synchronicity. And the director wasn't happy. And they were like, we want all the dust is behind them. He went, I want dust in front of them. So the AD ran and grabbed the keys to a Mustang, threw them to me, and he said, get in that Mustang and drive 100ft in front of them as fast as you can. Fishtailing and doing donuts and stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Awesome.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was like, me?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man. It was so much fun. Because it's a dry lake bed. It's like there's just no fear of hitting anything or flipping. Like you could just do whatever you wanted. It was wonderful.

[Josh Clark]

That's cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was so much fun.

[Josh Clark]

You didn't hit a jackrabbit or anything, did you?

[Chuck Bryant]

Just a couple. No, it was fine. It was a lot of fun. So what was the last thing you said?

[Josh Clark]

Super secret? Yeah, the last thing. Well, I was talking about how amazingly perfect area 51 is for developing a super secret spy plane.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So they called it Paradise Ranch. And the locals around there, they were used to because of all the atomic bomb testing. It kind of worked out because they weren't going to. First of all, it was in the middle of nowher. But even the nearby communities, the ones that were close enough, it just wasn't on anyone's radar because they had always been doing weird things out there. So it's not like it pricked up anyone's ears. So it was kind of the perfect cover to be there at Paradise Ranch doing these development of these spy planes and stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Right, right. But in addition to that, the COVID story initially that the CIA produced was that they were a team of bomb experts who were cleaning up unexploded munitions from the time when it was used as a bombing range. So that was the story they used for why there was a sudden appearance of, like, trucks and people when there hadn't been really much of anything there before.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There were also natural barriers. There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of shielded it from view. It was already remote. The airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and signed Executive Order 10633 in 1955, which basically extended the airspace over Area 51. And then in 1958, a public land order made this basically said, this area doesn't exist anymore.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's not on maps. It's not acknowledged. And this is one of the huge reasons why site two, the ranch, area 51, has been so. And we'll see later, things have changed a little bit in recent years. But just for the government to say, like, I don't know what you're talking about over and over again is sort of crazy.

[Josh Clark]

Making it is. But, like, they would, as we'll see later, they would say in open court, the place where this person claims to work does not exist, like in court. And the judge would just be like, what are you. How are we going to get around this? This is a real problem. But from what I read, Chuck, originally, Area 51 was a CIA installation. And around 1970, it transferred hands to the Air Force. But from what I could tell up until that point, or at least the first several years in the mid to late 50s and early 60s, no one had any idea that Area 51 existed. They did a really good job of keeping that place a genuine secret. Not an open secret like it became later on, but a real secret. And one of the ways that they did that was from what workers later said in testimony in court cases, is that they would be interrogated at gunpoint to see if they were actually spies. There were all sorts of, like, weird loyalty tests and things like that. And while they were working on the U2 spy plane in particular, they kept that secret so serious that if you were out there working and you had nothing to do with the U2 program, you were just a worker, you were working on a different program. They would move you indoors, close the doors, close the blinds, on the windows before rolling the U2 out or testing it. Like you were not allowed to be outside or look.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was pretty remarkable. Within Area 51, they even had subsecurity protocols in place. I kind of just figured, like, if you were in there, then you had access to the alien room, all the good stuff, Right?

[Josh Clark]

But think about that, because to even be on the base or in Area 51, you had to have the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have just to work on there. And even if you had that, you still couldn't see the U2 spy plane or know that it existed or hear people talk about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

They wouldn't even let Bono in on it.

[Josh Clark]

Nope.

[Chuck Bryant]

So that was a terrible joke.

[Josh Clark]

It was really bad. I was really hoping we can get around that one.

[Chuck Bryant]

So the U2 spy plane was great until it wasn't. And that was when France's Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. And the plane was all of a sudden in the hand of the Soviets. And they basically were like, well, that's the end of that. You can't have a secret spy plane anymore once it's in the hand of the Soviets. And it was also a big deal because the American people all of a sudden knew that the US Government is definitely doing things in total secret and developing technology that no one knows about.

[Josh Clark]

It was a surprise to everybody, not just the Soviets, but also the American public, like you were saying, too. And I looked to see if this was looked upon by historians as, like, the point where Americans realized that the government did things in secret that the American public didn't know about. And I didn't see anything like that. So I don't know if this is an ed comment or what, but it makes sense. And certainly people didn't know that the U2 spy plane existed. The CIA did a really good job of keeping it secret, but. But when it was out, it was pretty humiliating for the us and it was also a big deal that this spy plane was shot down because Eisenhower had approached Khrushchev and said, hey, why don't we maintain an open airspace policy to one another so we can keep tabs to make sure that either side is keeping our word with our armament treaties and the stuff we're doing, like we're enemies, but maybe we should kind of be able to keep tabs on one another. And Khrushchev said, no, there's not gonna be any open space policy. And so the United States went and developed this U2 spy plane instead. And when it got shot down, flying over restricted airspace of an enemy, that's an act of war. And it could have gone way differently than it did. But instead, it was a big humiliation for the United States. And instead of just kind of tucking tail and running, the guy who was in charge of it for the CIA, Richard Bissell, went to the government and said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's get even more secret and develop an even more secretive plane under an even more secretive project. And that the government said, hey, let's do it. We're scared of the Russians. We'll double down. We'll triple down if you want, buddy. And that became Project Oxcart.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And that was a black project. And it was so secret and so concealed that no one was even allowed to know how much money was being spent.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, this is a big. A big turning point here.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was. I mean, this kind of started the era that we still live in today in which the military just dumps money into secret projects where there's. That don't exist as far as anyone knows. And there's very little oversight for.

[Josh Clark]

Right, exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. And apparently it was this Richard Bissell's idea.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well, let's take a break, old Dick Bissell. And we'll get back to Dick Bissell and the rest of Oxcart right after this. Learning things when you should know.

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[Chuck Bryant]

So one of the problems with, I guess it's not a problem if you're comfortable with dumping money into a project, but one of the, I guess expenses of a super, super secret project is that it just cost a lot more. Background checks take time and cost money. Putting something in a super remote location costs money having extra security forces and it all just costs a lot more money. I mean, it's a serious multiplier on cost to do something that quote unquote doesn't exist.

[Josh Clark]

Right, but in addition to that, Chuck too is just the fact that the technology that was being developed was so cutting edge, it just by definition required even more money on top of the extra money for it being so super secret.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So Oxcart eventually led to the SR71 Blackbird, another amazingly cool plane.

[Josh Clark]

Probably the coolest of all time if you ask me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I said the stealth bomber earlier, but the SR71 is, it was pretty awesome. Although there is another one later on that I'll mention. Well, I'll go ahead and say the Bird of Prey stealth jet.

[Josh Clark]

You like that one, huh?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's pretty cool.

[Josh Clark]

It looks a little bit like a super cool tongue depressor. You know what I'm talking about?

[Chuck Bryant]

I know what a tongue depressor is.

[Josh Clark]

This looks like that, like a flying gray tongue depressor.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's like a popsicle stick though, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but wider.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, but the SR71 Blackbird, definitely not a popsicle stick.

[Josh Clark]

No, no, it's just cool. Plus it doesn't hurt the fact that GI Joe, well, Cobra technically had the SR71 Blackbird as one of their planes.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's funny. So Oxcart, they needed better infrastructure, basically, and they couldn't just pour money into the development of the jet at this point. They had to really update all the facilities. Expanding on land, expanding more restricted airspace. Even that happened in 1962. And it just sort of, I think, ingrained the super permanence of Area 51.

[Josh Clark]

And also like the fact that like, the government said, no, okay, this was a humiliating thing to have our U2 shot down rather than maybe we'll just kind of take another tack. They really went further down the path of just completely secret black projects. And they developed some pretty, pretty amazing stuff there. The. I think you were saying the bird of prey, that was from the 90s, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think it's cool looking.

[Josh Clark]

The F117 Nighthawk, that's the one. That's like a single wing Stealth bomber, I believe.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. And this is also where they take, like, if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that to Area 51 to check out as well.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. There's another program at Wright Patterson Base in Dayton that's like set up specifically for that. But I wonder if this is like even more highly sensitive. I don't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

But yeah, they've captured MIGs before, captured radar systems, and they reverse engineered them there, which will come into play later on. And then there was another one called the Tacit Blue Stealth bomber. So basically any Stealth aircraft, whether it was the Stealth Blackhawks or the Stealth bombers that were developed from the 60s onward, it was probably developed and tested in super secrecy in Area 51.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. So like I said, this made it just sort of a shop that they would. That wouldn't close. Essentially at this point in 1993, there's an area known as Freedom Ridge. Very ironic name because Freedom Ridge was taken by the government and closed off to the public. And this is where tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars to try and check out things. And they said, no more. Freedom Ridge is now ours.

[Josh Clark]

It's called get out of here Ridge. Yeah, Shot on Sight Ridge.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

So if you are like, get to the aliens. What are you guys even talking about? The aliens in Area 51 as synonymous as they are now. And they are synonymous. The highway that Area 51 is off of, that the road to Area 51 is off of, has been officially renamed by the state of Nevada as the Extraterrestrial Highway. Highway 305.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

As synonymous as this base is with aliens and UFOs, that's actually relatively recent. It was operating for a good 25, 35 years, I think, before aliens became tied to Area 51. And there's actually a moment in time that you can point to where it happened. And it happened on a broadcast In May of 1989, almost just past 30 years ago on KLAS, the local Las Vegas TV network. I'm not sure what network affiliate they are, but they had, like, their 5 o' clock news. And on it, they interviewed a guy who was anonymous, went by the pseudonym Dennis. And he basically said, hey, I'm doing a lot of weird stuff out there at Area 51. Let me tell you all about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, his name, his real name was Bob Lazarus, and he. Have you seen interviews with this guy?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did you see the more recent one?

[Josh Clark]

No, but the one where he said, I think it was a good idea. That one.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I'm talking about. There was one just from a few years ago.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

I gotta say, I mean, I'm not a conspiracy guy at all. But when you listen to Bob Lazar talk today, he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or a weirdo or like, he would be lying. He hasn't, like, made money off of this, or like, he's basically like, listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't attached to my name because I'm trying to run a business in Michigan, and it doesn't help that people think I'm some UFO kook.

[Josh Clark]

Bob Lazar's alien apples.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he's. Oh, good. And he said. But he was like, you know, everything that I told you was true, though. And that's just the deal, you know, And I don't care if anyone believes me.

[Josh Clark]

He's kind of like that, though, too. In the early interviews, at the very least, he's very calm and not at all kooky or anything like that. It's specifically the stuff he was talking about that was so compelling.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So his story is. And you can go watch this stuff for yourself and see it all. But he basically explains how he's an engineer and he was working on reverse engineering flying saucers, essentially alien spacecraft and alien technology. And at one point, he was in a room and they left him alone with all these files that describe alien technology and alien autopsies and all of this stuff. And it's pretty remarkable to listen to. It didn't make the hugest waves because it was 1989. It was a local news station.

[Josh Clark]

At first it didn't.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And then it was picked up by Japan, oddly enough. And after it went to Japan, it went kind of worldwide. And before you know it, the whole area just sort of became alien central. And this is, we should point out, this also has a lot to do with the fact that in the 70s and 80s, the United States kind of went UFO nuts.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. Man, There were so many great books at the time that were coming out that claimed everything from like UFOs were responsible for the Bermuda Triangle, or Atlantis was populated by UFOs, or the Nazca lines were for UFOs. Or the Egyptians built the pyramids with UFOs. All that stuff came out of the 70s and 80s.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So this all kind of coincided with Lazarus having his news interview. And it really just kind of changed everything.

[Josh Clark]

It did. Right. So he kind of like came out at a time when America was primed to really believe it. But if you think about it, like everything you hear about and think about from about Area 51 today did not exist pre1989, pre Bob Lazar. It all started with Bob Lazar. And the reason why everybody wasn't just like. So he's just some nut who came out and said this stuff. Who cares? How did that, how did that become truly cemented with Area 51? Is that weirdly, some of the stuff he talked about kind of held water. Like he would talk about just mundane day to day stuff that went on at Area 51 that seemed to be able to be correlated from locals.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Like it held up. There is a. There was a scanner once. He said that you would get in and out of rooms by scanning your hands. And it would scan the bone structure of your hand. That was how you were identified and could come in and out of rooms. And supposedly somebody found like 30 years later mention of something like that in some declassified report about Area 51. He also, and this is what really kind of legitimized him, he would take people out on Wednesday nights and at the time he would say, I never saw what time it was. But at the time he said it would happen, lights would rise up in the sky and they would do all sorts of UFO y kind of stuff. And the fact that he knew about these schedules really kind of added legitimacy to his claims.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the new interview that I saw, he was explaining some of that anti gravitational propulsion technology that the aliens had supposedly used that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he was sort of walking, walking the person through it that was in the room. And he was like, oh yeah. And he said, we had this thing, it was sort of like half a basketball. And when you went to put your hand on it, he was like, there was this. He was like bringing two magnets, you know, opposite poles, or is it opposite poles that repel? And he said that's kind of what it felt like. And he said, so we would drop like a golf ball and it would just, you know, skirt off to the side without hitting it and as if it had bounced. And the way he was describing it, I was just like, this guy just seems so credible, right? It was so, like shocking. I didn't know what to expect. I thought he was not going to be credible, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I didn't see the interview with him, but I read about that technology. And by the way, everybody, you can erase your email. It's like poles that repel each other, Chuck, not oxy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

The anti gravity technology I was talking about was basically saying like around the craft or whatever that they were reverse engineering. It would bend gravity. So this could just move right through space, basically at light speed. That's the big suspicion among ufologists who follow this stuff is that they were reverse engineering light speed aircraft that was propelled using anti gravity technology on engines that were matter antimatter engines. And back in 1989 you couldn't. There wasn't an Internet to start with. But even if there was, you couldn't find stuff like descriptions of anti gravity craft at the time. So for this guy to just come out and start talking about this in an authoritative way. He's an enigmatic figure for sure. But he was also one whose credibility was questioned right out of the gate too. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, he said that he went to MIT and to Caltech. There are no records of him being a student. The conspiracy theorists will say, like, you know how easy it is for the government to wipe that clean?

[Josh Clark]

Do you?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I'm like, I don't know, is that easy? So that's what they will say. They will also say that they also like got in touch with his professors to make sure they never talked and stuff like that. But that's when I get a little bit like, you can't have hundreds of people or thousands of people involved in some big massive cover up. Like someone's gonna talk.

[Josh Clark]

You're just not thinking big enough. I agree with you. That's when it kinda starts to get hinky for me.

[Chuck Bryant]

But he did disappear. I mean, not disappear disappear, disappear, but he, I mean, it's not like he was like, all right, and now I'm gonna go make all the money on this, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like he moved and tried to start like a regular business and tried to just not be in the public eye.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he did. Which I think adds to his credibility even more, you know, a little bit. Let's take our last break and then come back, shall we?

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's do it.

[Josh Clark]

But let's promise we're gonna come back.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay?

[Josh Clark]

All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Learning things with Chuck and Josh Stuff you should know.

[Stuff You Should Know Intro/Outro]

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[Josh Clark]

App okay, Chuck, so Bob Lazar comes along. Just starts spouting out at the mouth about all the crazy alien stuff that's going on at Area 51. And then he kind of like Fades into the background for a while, and everybody else kind of took it from there. If you have anything to do with government conspiracies or believe in UFOs or aliens or whatever, all that stuff started to get saddled little by little onto Area 51. And one of the things that pretty early on got connected to Area 51, but almost across the board, any reasonable source or skeptical source will say, like the two have nothing to do with one another is Roswell and Area 51.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the Roswell crash. In 1947, when something crashed, a gentleman found pieces of an air. Well, pieces of some kind of unidentified object, and it became UFO central. Later it was said to be a.

[Josh Clark]

Weather balloon, but first the army said it was a flying disc.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

That kind of changed things.

[Chuck Bryant]

You've seen the pictures, right?

[Josh Clark]

Sure. I mean, it looks like I've seen that one famous picture of the guy crouching with what looks like just some balloon material.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, right.

[Josh Clark]

But, you know, he was just a stooge for the government and that was just a prop that they came up with. So the Roswell crash happens in 1947. There's no way Area 51 would have been associated with it. The whole mythos around Roswell is that there was a UFO crash that happened. Some aliens survived, or at the very least, their bodies were recovered, depending on who you ask. And the UFO and the aliens, alive or dead, were taken for further study. To where? Area 51.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Area 51, back in 1947 when the Roswell crash happened, was not even on the CIA's radar. It was basically a defunct airstrip and a nuclear testing range still. So there wouldn't have been any place to take the aliens in the first place. And then secondly, after the Roswell crash happened, the idea of an alien, an alien crash having taken place there, that didn't come about until, like the 80s too. So really people started to kind of catch on to this a little late. So probably Area 51 and Roswell have nothing to do with one another. And let's not forget that they're like 800 miles apart too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Even though to everyone in America and really the rest of the world outside of the Southwest thinks they're like right next to each other.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so.

[Josh Clark]

You know?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So there have been a lot of crazy theories over the years. The very most basic are, like you just said, like, there's alien corpses there, there's alien technology there. And the US military has been studying this stuff and trying to perfect everything from time travel to light speed Travel, Right. Fine. That's the basic ground zero approach.

[Josh Clark]

Don't forget interdimensional travel too. Why not another one I saw. There's some pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The moon landing was faked there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, sure.

[Josh Clark]

And then after that. Right, but then after that Kubrick was executed on site and replaced by a clone.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that clone did some great work.

[Josh Clark]

He did better than Barry Lyndon. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I love Barry Lyndon.

[Josh Clark]

I've never seen it, so I can't really hate on it.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's amazing.

[Josh Clark]

Weather control experiments. That's probably the most believable for me.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure. Cloud seeding. Sure, why not?

[Josh Clark]

Why not? And then there's like stage two of conspiracy theories.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes. That is, there are aliens that clock in every day at Area 51 and work side by side with us in harmony.

[Josh Clark]

In harmony. In order to build like an alien human hybrid race, maybe. Sure. And if all this sounds familiar, I will bet that you watched a pretty hefty amount of X Files.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh yes.

[Josh Clark]

Because they really tapped into this stuff. They basically just appropriated it for plot lines, which is great. I love the X Files. But it was just, I guess Chris Carter used to hang out with like ufologists or something just to get ideas.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did he really?

[Josh Clark]

Or he had two of.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or he has one himself. I don't know much about him.

[Josh Clark]

Maybe so. Maybe so.

[Chuck Bryant]

So. And then of course, if you even ramp that up a little bit more, that this is all part of a giant conspiracy to create a one world government that is human alien run.

[Josh Clark]

Right. And that's where that Majestic 12 I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They are supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists. There's 12 of them who were empaneled by Eisenhower after the Roswell crash. Or I guess it would have been Truman, I think, still. And they were put together, just the cream of the crop to basically go contact the aliens and basically broker a meeting, I guess, between the President and the aliens. And they managed to leverage this to catapult themselves into status of actual people who run the world. So they're the ones who are forming this one world government. And that is where Area 51, or that's where it's located. The seat of this government is located underground in Area 51.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. This next one is a little more recent and very kooky. And it's the notion that Hitler and Stalin got together and hatched a plan to undermine the United States in World War II by distracting us about the threat of an impending alien invasion. And they would do this by building A fake spaceship, filling it with mutant children that Joseph Mengele created. And fill the spaceship with those kids. And then the craft crashed in a storm. And that was the Roswell incident, right?

[Josh Clark]

It was meant to land, and then these mutant children come out speaking German, right? Supposedly the mutant children who were the aliens that were found in the Roswell crash had huge heads and giant eyes. They were basically like the grays of alien legend.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right?

[Josh Clark]

And that Stalin and Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to the War of the Worlds broadcast. They wanted to incite that kind of panic by actually creating this fake alien.

[Chuck Bryant]

Invasion with all the drugs Hitler was on. After we know this now, who knows?

[Josh Clark]

I'm sure he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. That's a great idea, man. What else you got? What else you got? What else can we do? Stalin's like, mellow. Have you tried cbd?

[Chuck Bryant]

He's like, no, that's the one thing I haven't tried. You got any, right?

[Josh Clark]

I'll bet it'll mix well with everything else.

[Chuck Bryant]

So this is obviously not a thing either.

[Josh Clark]

Well, this is from a book by an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe. And this book came out in 2011, and she based this whole thing on an alleged Area 51 insider who was her source, who said that he worked on a project that had to do with this somehow, some way, but that this was where all this alien stuff came from. It was. It was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets. The weird thing is there is another guy out there who supposedly has a different source who tells the same story, but this other source says that it was all fake, that I saw the files myself. But I believe that it was meant to be a test of loyalty or to see how I would react working at Area 51 to files like this and be like, oh, my God, this is real. This is real. I can't believe this is actually real. I guess to see how gullible you were and therefore how trustworthy you were.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right, which could explain Bob Lazar's situation, too, because he was supposedly in a room full of files. He probably shouldn't have seen either.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he probably failed the Test.

[Josh Clark]

You got three different sources who supposedly worked at Area 51. Technically, I should say, because we'll get email. Bob Lazar worked at S4, which is an even more secret installation that's attached to Area 51.

[Chuck Bryant]

Ye.

[Josh Clark]

But you got three people who allegedly worked in Area 51 who all tell a story about basically being left In a room with files that contained information about aliens, whether it was a hoax or real or whatever. And maybe that is because that kind of correlates with the idea that there were like gunpoint interrogations to verify your allegiance to the government or the military or whatever. Maybe that is something they tried there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

It doesn't make the actual aliens real, it just makes the presence of the files real.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's true.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Area 51 today as it truly exists. If you're driving down Highway 375, there's an unmarked dirt road between mile markers 29 and 30, or I guess 30 and 29, and you turn on that road, it's 12 miles on a dirt road and you'll get to a gate and there'll be warning signs all along saying restricted area. Sort of like close encounters type stuff. There will be cameras and sensors everywhere. So don't think you're like getting away with anything.

[Josh Clark]

No. There's mics that listen to your conversation like you were under as close surveillance as you've ever been in your life, from what I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And there are guards, of course, and they will say, I'm sorry, turn around and drive back to the highway. And if you persist a little bit, then you will get arrested. If you're around the perimeter area, kind of walking around with your binoculars, they will probably come and take your binoculars and tell you to leave or drive you back to the highway or maybe smash your face in and bury you in the desert.

[Josh Clark]

Well, there's a sign that says use of deadly force is authorized.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I'm sure.

[Josh Clark]

But from what I've seen, there's never been an incident where that actually happened. You're much more likely to get handed over to the local cops who will slap you with a several hundred dollar fine.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

If you give them any kind of guff and don't leave immediately when they tell you to.

[Chuck Bryant]

So kind of the cool thing about Area 51, there are obviously, I mean, there are civilian workers that work there. It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing because you can look at satellite photographs and year by year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with more buildings.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

If you work there and I mean, they have to have everything from food services to custodial services to plumbing and electricians and stuff like that.

[Josh Clark]

And all of those people have the highest possible security clearance an American can have.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, sure. So they don't drive down that dirt road and just go to the gate and say, how you doing, Rick? And they go, come on in Jane. They go to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and they all get on a big basically air taxi. It's a 737 passenger jet that fly. They call them the JANET jets. It's under the call sign janet. They're white, the big thick red stripe. You can look it up online. And that's how they get to work every day. They fly everyone in on a 737.

[Josh Clark]

And you can see them on the tarmac. They just get in with the regular planes. It's just look for the giant 737s that are white with the red stripe and pretty cool. No logo, no nothing. They don't actually have a name like you said. They fly under call sign janet. People have tried to figure out forever what JANET means. There's an idea that it's just another non existent terminal. Stands for that or joint air network for employee transportation. But if you go visit the Nevada Aerospace hall of Fame, they tell the story that there was a Commander of Area 51 named Richard A. Sampson from 1969-71 and he chose his wife's name, Janet to identify the commuter shuttles.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's sweet.

[Josh Clark]

And that's the most romantic super secret government story of all.

[Chuck Bryant]

So we kind of teased earlier on that the government is no longer saying like I don't know what you're talking about. Like no, this satellite image that we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything but dirt. That's all changed a little bit now because of a lawsuit. In the mid-1990s. There were a group workers from Area 51 that sued the government because of the it's an environmental disaster there. Or you know, maybe that's changing now. But it had been for many, many years because of the fact that it's a black project and so unregulated that they were just basically doing everything like dumping hazardous waste and burning it in trenches. And people were there just inhaling these fumes and getting really sick. And a guy named Robert Frost that worked there, an employee had a lot of really bad health problems. Doctor said you were suffering from some kind of a really bad chemical reaction and in order to treat it, we need to know what it is. And the government said, sorry, we can't tell you that. And he died.

[Josh Clark]

He died. And some other co workers filed this lawsuit and one of them ended up dying too. And they finally got to like a Nevada, I think or a federal circuit court that said, no, you guys don't have a right to know what you've been exposed to.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they weren't looking for money. They just wanted to know what was killing them.

[Josh Clark]

And the reason that they had no legal right to know was. And this is that trial that I was referring to earlier, where the government representatives were saying, like, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So imagine like, trying to just get past that barrier. Right. You're suing the government to find out what they were burning that made you sick. But the government's in court saying, like, the place that they're talking about doesn't even exist. That's like. That's Obstacle One. Yeah, but the whole reason that they were burning this stuff in the first place is because Area 51 operates under what's called the Mosaic theory. And the Mosaic theory is that any little piece of information a spy gets his or her hands on could be fit together with other information to provide a larger picture of what. What's being done at Area 51. And as a result, nothing can come out of Area 51 like the chemical.

[Chuck Bryant]

That'S killing the people.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Or computers that go in and are used. Once they get decommissioned, they get put in this pit and these trenches, and every two weeks they go out there with jet fuel. And everything that's been put into the trenches over the last two weeks gets doused with jet fuel and set on fire with road flares.

[Chuck Bryant]

Amazing.

[Josh Clark]

And whatever is in that smoke, the workers get exposed to, because for some reason, they built the trenches upwind of this installation rather than downwind. And so people were exposed to this every two weeks for years and years and years. And things like anti radar paint, the jet fuel that they were using as an accelerant, I'm sure wasn't helping, but just all sorts of exotic materials that was super, super classified. This is what was killing these people. Alien scared or making them sick. Exactly. And the government said, no, this is just too classified. These people can't. They're just gonna have to go off and die untreated, because we're not going to say publicly what they were exposed to. And that's where it stood.

[Chuck Bryant]

That case, they did finally, finally, in that case, say, okay, there's an Area 51.

[Josh Clark]

I know the whole courtroom went out for beers that day afterward.

[Chuck Bryant]

So there's a thing there. And that's really all we can say, sorry, is there's a thing there. But that was the very first sort of insight into the. Just that admission that there was something there was the first time that had ever happened, which is in the mid-1990s.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And you were saying, like, people would point to satellite images of the place, and you can see that it's growing now. Like, you can see it on, like, Google Maps.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That is really new because it wasn't very long ago where all the satellites in space were controlled by the government, and the government could control what ended up in satellite images. So they blocked out anything, any image of Area 51. But as private firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible. So just little by little, it's becoming to the point now where they're like, yes, they acknowledge something's there. No, you can't know what's going on. There is basically the status quo now, pretty much. So that's Area 51. And sorry, we kind of took the government tack here and didn't really go all in on the alien theories, But I just don't think that's what it is.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to know more about Area 51, I guess just start reading about it. There's some pretty interesting stuff out there. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is about nicknames. This is from robbob.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah, I love this one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, guys. My name is Robbob. Rob and Bob combined into a singular form, like Jim Bob, but better. My mom has explained to me that it started when I was about six months old. I was a really chunky kid, like in the 99th percentile for weight. They felt like no other nickname, like Robbie or Bobby fit. So they started calling me Robbob. Many years later, I meet my wife, which is almost eight years ago now, and quickly found out that her favorite writer is Richard Wright. Since reading his novel Native Son has wanted to name her kid Richard to honor the impact he had on her life. She had visited his grave in Paris and has every book he ever published. When she met me, I told her about my super nicknames that I had wanted to call my kid. Because, you see, my father is William. Bill for short. But now, since we came up with these weird names, I call my dad Will Bill to bug him. This leads me to why I have always wanted to name my child Richard since high school. Then we would, in order, have a Will Bill, a Rob Bob, and a Rick Dick, all in three generations of awesomeness. My wife does not approve and thinks we should look elsewhere for name ideas. With great admiration, Rob Bob and Rachel.

[Josh Clark]

Nice. Thanks, Rob Bob, good luck with that, with your quest.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I don't think Rick Dick is gonna fly in your household.

[Josh Clark]

I don't think so either. Rachel may have the cooler hat here.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think so.

[Josh Clark]

Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Rob Bob did, we would love that. You can go on to stuffyouchouchouchouknow.com check out our social links there. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcastradio.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is.

[Stuff You Should Know Intro/Outro]

A production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

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[Mario Lopez]

Hey, what's up? It's Mario Lopez. Back to school is an exciting time, but it can also be overwhelming and kids may feel isolated, a vulnerability that human traffickers can exploit. Human trafficking doesn't always look like what you expect. Everyday moments can become opportunities for someone with bad intentions. Whether you're a parent, teacher, coach or neighbor, check in, ask questions, stay connected. Blue Campaign is a national awareness initiative that provides resources to help recognize suspected instances of human trafficking. Learn the signs and how to [e-mail] blue campaign.

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Check out the new season of Reasonable Doubt now Streaming on Hulu, L.A. s most successful attorney Jack Stewart, defends a young actor accused of murder. Follow Emma Yatsey Coronaldi, Morris Chestnut, Joseph Sakura and guest stars Kash Doll and Lori Harvey as they fight their personal battles in the spotlight of the year's most sincere sensational trial. In the pursuit of justice, every move counts. Reasonable Doubt Season 3 now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

[Josh Clark]

This is an I heart podcast.