The Zone of Silence: America's Missile Secret

-https://quince.com/thwwhyfiles -Free trial at https://shopify.com/why -Discover how to move your IRA or 401k into physical gold and silver — with no taxes or penalties. Get your free portfolio review and free gold & silver guide from GoldenCrest Metals: visit https://GoldenCrestMetals.com/thewhyfiles or call (888) 949-9172 now. In 1970, a U. S. missile carrying radioactive cobalt lifted off from Utah, aimed at a test range six hundred miles away. It never got there. Instead it flew south, crossed into Mexico, and disappeared into a stretch of desert locals call the Zone of Silence. Radios die there, and compasses spin in place without ever settling on a direction. For decades this patch of land has pulled in meteorites, silenced pilots' instruments, and drawn thousands of visitors chasing lights that seem to answer back. We trace the real missile, the cleanup that followed, and the legend that grew around it, then separate what actually happened from what got added along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Todo el mundo tiene una pregunta difícil sobre la IA. Tu trabajo, tus hijos, dónde va? Anthropic fue construido para afrontar esas preguntas y compartir lo que encuentra a lo largo del camino, porque hay esperanza en las preguntas difíciles. Pregúntales en claud.ai/spotify y continúe pensando. Eso es claud.ai/spotify.

• 0:25AJ Gentile?

  A las 2:40 AM del 11 de julio de 1970, la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos lanzó un misil desde el Green River, Utah. 50 pies altos, 16,000 libras y cargando un covato radioactivo. Se dirigía a un rango de prueba en Nuevo México, 600 millas de distancia. No paró en Nuevo México. Los crew de radar lo observaron subir, girar hacia el sur y desaparecer sobre el horizonte. Llevó tres semanas para encontrarlo. El misil caía en un bosque de México que los locals evitaron, un lugar donde visitantes extraños caminan el desierto y las radios mueren. Lo llaman la zona de silencio.

• 1:10AJ Gentile?

  Creo que todos tienen algunas cosas en su caja que de alguna manera terminan en la rotación mucho más que todo lo demás. La camiseta que agarras sin ni siquiera pensar porque se ajusta bien, se siente bien y funciona con casi todo. Para mí, esas piezas son de Quince. En realidad, ordené para ellos y llevo su vestido todo el tiempo. Lo has visto. Me encanta su 100% cinta de algodón de cuello largo de Henry. Es suave, breathable, tiene una gran textura y puedo usarlo casualmente o arrojar un gorro sobre él y parecer un poco más puesto. También llevo su 100% Pima cotton Lux Touch tee. Es ligero, increíblemente suave y es solo una gran camiseta diaria. Eso es lo que Quince hace tan bien. Estapones de cuero de cuero de alta calidad hechas con materiales premium y precios que son 50 a 80% menos que marcas similares.

• 1:55AJ Gentile?

  Trabajan directamente con fábricas éticas y cortan a los meros. Así que estás pagando por la calidad, no por el marcaje del marcaje. Encontrad tus favoritos de verano en Quince. Descargue la aplicación de Quince para ofertas exclusivas o ve a quince.com/theyfiles. Obtén envío gratis en tu orden y 365 días de devuelto. Ahora disponible en Canadá y en el Reino Unido también. Eso es Q U I N C E.com/theyfiles.

• 2:28AJ Gentile?

  La zona de silencio está en el Bosón de Mapimi, un bote de desierto donde se encuentran tres estados mexicanos: Durango, Chihuahua y Coiila. En el verano, llega a 113 grados en la niebla.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Ehh, Gertie llama ese sudor de invierno.

• 2:42AJ Gentile?

  Un minuto, ¿puedes permitirme pasar un minuto sin un comentario?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Eh, mira, si es desierto, sandal o vestidos de algodón, me imagino a Gertie. El calor quiere lo que el calor quiere.

• 2:55AJ Gentile?

  Hay casi nada de agua allá afuera y casi nadie. Si algo va mal, la ayuda no viene. Tu radio es tu línea de vida. En 1966, Pemex, la compañía petrolera nacional de México, quería una oleoducto a través de ese desierto. Crew de encuesta fueron enviados a algunas de las tierras vacías en el país. El ingeniero que lideró la encuesta fue Harry de la Peña. El trabajo era rutinario: localizar la ruta, marcar el suelo y radio volver a la base cada par de horas. Excepto que la radio dejó de funcionar. Un crew se rellenó todo el día y luego se calló durante horas mientras la base llamaba a la despeje. Así que Harry se fue al desierto a buscarlos. Lo encontró vivo, funcionando y tan confuso como estaba. Sus radios se encendieron, las baterías estaban cargadas y las frecuencias estaban

• 3:40AJ Gentile?

  correctas. Los hombres transmitieron, pero el señal no fue a ninguna parte. Harry era un ingeniero, así que comenzó a averiguar. Trató de radios diferentes y frecuencias diferentes. Nada funcionó. Se movió al crew unos cientos de pies y las radios volvieron a encender. Se las movió de nuevo al lugar original y las radios mueren de nuevo. Trató de localizar los espacios muertos, pero se movieron. Una franja de suelo bloqueó las radios en la mañana, pero no en la tarde. Harry llamó al lugar La Zona del Silencio, la zona de silencio. Algo sobre la área preocupó a Harry. Volvió una y otra vez para tomar lecturas. Incluso traía a científicos para ayudar, pero la anomalía no estaba siempre allí. No podía encontrar un patrón. Era como si estuviera jugando con él.

• 4:25AJ Gentile?

  Creía que era el primero en identificar la zona de silencio, pero los locals dijeron que esta parte del desierto siempre ha sido un lugar extraño y fue conocido por cosas mucho más extrañas que la interferencia radio. Durante años, la gente vio una luz misteriosa en la zona. Un día, un ranchero decidió iluminar sus lentes de cabeza y se iluminó de nuevo.

• 4:57AJ Gentile?

  Los locales lo llaman la carro de banda. Parece los lentes de cabeza de una carro, pero no hay carreteras. Si iluminas una luz, responde, iluminación por iluminación. A veces desaparece y luego aparece detrás de ti. Lo que sea, se mueve rápido, pero no hace sonido. Señores de seis generaciones de familias crecieron hablando de la carro de banda. Viajadores que cruzan la zona reportan lo mismo que los crews de Harry encontraron. Las radios solo son estáticas. Pero también encontraron que los compases no funcionan. Las agujas se apagan al norte por un segundo, luego giran y apuntan hacia el sur. Pone un compas en el suelo y la aguja gira en un círculo para siempre. Los pilotos sabían de este lugar durante años. En los años 30, Francisco Sarabia fue el aviador más famoso de México.

• 5:41AJ Gentile?

  Viajó sobre la zona y su radio se apagó. Luego, sus instrumentos fallaron uno a uno, pero el motor seguía corriendo. La torre lo perdió y, en lo que alguien en el suelo supiera, Sarabia estaba fuera. Luego, el avión se bajó en el medio del desierto y se desplazó. Los pilotos más famosos de México prometieron que nunca volaría sobre ese desierto de nuevo y advirtió a otros pilotos que hicieran lo mismo. Y por mucho tiempo que alguien pueda recordar, animales entran en la zona para morir. Los huesos están dispersos en todas partes. Los rancheros dicen que los caballos y la vaca dejarán buena pastura y caminarán por millas. Cuando entran en la zona, simplemente se sientan. Los vulturas hacen el resto.

• 6:25AJ Gentile?

  El cacto noble es verde, pero aquí crece violento. Los biólogos encontraron tortillas en la zona con patrones de esferas que solo suceden aquí. Y luego están los visitantes. Siempre los mismos tres personas, dos hombres y una mujer. Alto, blanca, cabello largo, caras suaves. Llevan ropa elegante que no es hecha para el desierto. Hablan perfectamente español, pero de una manera que suena a música. Y siempre son cortos. Se piden llenar sus canteos. Nunca se piden comida o nada más, solo agua de un pozo. Y cuando preguntas de dónde vienen, siempre dicen lo mismo. Somos de arriba.

• 7:13AJ Gentile?

  Los aviones evitan la zona, pero los meteores se atrapan a ella. El 8 de febrero de 1969, el cielo nocturno se volvió blanco. Una roca del tamaño de una carro, que pesa más de dos toneladas, entró a 10 millas por segundo y explotó. La bomba de fuego iluminó el cielo durante cientos de millas. De repente, estaba brillante como la noche. Y luego llegó el sonido. 多多 explosions mientras el meteoro se rompió. La gente pensó que era el final del mundo. Este fue el meteoro de la lluvia. Resultó ser uno de los objetos más antiguos que han impactado la Tierra. En días, un geoquímico de NASA compró piedras de todos los que podía encontrar. Dentro de las piedras, los investigadores encontraron grans pre solar que se formaron antes del sistema solar existir.

• 7:56AJ Gentile?

  La materia sólida más antigua que los humanos han tocado, 4.5 mil millones de años. La lluvia se convirtió en el rostro más estudiado de la historia. Piezas de él están en laboratorios en todo el mundo. La lluvia fue el meteoro más famoso que impactó la zona, pero no fue el único, ni siquiera cerca. En 1938, un meteoro impactó un ranchero cerca de la zona. En 1954, otro impactó el mismo ranchero.

• 8:22AJ Gentile?

  Los testigos dicen que la piedra de la lluvia no caía directamente. Dicen que parecía maniobrar, como si eligiera dónde aterrizar.

• 8:33AJ Gentile?

  Los locales dicen que falló la primera vez, circuló alrededor de la Tierra y volvió y impactó la zona. La zona de silencio está entre la paralelo 26 y 28. Así como la Triángulo de Bermuda. Así como las pirámides de Giza. Desiertos y océanos donde los barcos, aviones y señales desaparecen o están en una línea alrededor del planeta. 17 meses después de que el cielo nocturno quemara sobre la zona, algo más entró, pero no era de la espacial, era de América y era radioactivo.

• 9:10AJ Gentile?

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• 9:54AJ Gentile?

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• 10:18AJ Gentile?

  The missile was an Athena, and it flew out of the Air Force complex near Green River, Utah. Its target was White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, 600 miles away. Over nine years, the Air Force fired 141 of them into White Sands. The Athena was a scale model of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Its job was to dive back into the atmosphere at 15,000 miles an hour. That's how the Air Force learned to make nuclear warheads survivable, accurate, and invisible to radar. The Athena flew at night to get away from the sun. Sunlight is radio noise, and the test needed clean signals. On July 11, 1970, missile number 122 lifted off at 2:40 a.m. The first two stages burned perfectly and pushed it 200 miles up.

• 11:03AJ Gentile?

  The last two were supposed to turn the missile around and fire it back down into White Sands. But the fourth stage fired early, before the guidance system could turn it. Instead of arcing down into White Sands, the missile flew another 400 miles. At first, the ground crew was stunned. A telemetry officer watched the receiver antenna swing up, over, and point south. It never did that before. In the project room, the tracking radars told the same story. Flight safety watched it happen, and there was no way to bring it down. It was still gaining altitude and going south when it disappeared from radar.

• 11:40AJ Gentile?

  An American missile carrying radioactive cobalt had gone rogue. Officials guessed it hit the mountains 150 miles south of Juarez. Some hoped it burned up on reentry and never reached the ground at all. But it did hit the ground, in Mexico.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Wow, the U.S. will bomb anybody, eh?

• 11:57AJ Gentile?

  I can't argue with that.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  You better watch it, Canada.

• 12:01AJ Gentile?

  Mexico wasn't in a forgiving mood. Three years earlier, another American missile launched from Utah crashed just across the border. Now it happened again, further inside the country, and this one was radioactive. The message from Mexico City was simple: Find it. Five days later, the search team flew south with orders to keep quiet. Only one of them was allowed to talk to the Mexican officials. They set up in Torreon and figured they'd be done in four days. They searched for weeks and could not find it.

• 12:32AJ Gentile?

  The Air Force narrowed the impact zone to a rectangle a mile and a half long, but nobody could place that rectangle on a map. Pilots flew grids over the desert day after day. They landed on backroads and in pastures. They asked ranchers what they saw, but they got nothing. At the start of August, a different kind of airplane arrived. The Atomic Energy Commission sent an aircraft with a sonar meter, an instrument that detects one thing: the exact radiation signature of Cobalt-57. The crew stopped searching with their eyes and started listing for the cobalt. The cobalt was so active, the plane found the crash site in three days. When the ground team put a meter to the sand, it read the same as Trinity, the spot where the first atomic bomb went off.

• 13:15AJ Gentile?

  Technically, the U.S. fired a nuclear-tipped missile at Mexico. They left that out of their report.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai/Spotify and keep thinking. That's Claude.ai/Spotify.

• 13:59AJ Gentile?

  The ground team drove cross-country, following directions sent down from the plane. For the last stretch, they navigated by a trail of flour sacks dropped from the aircraft, straight to a small crater. They found a few pieces of torn metal, contaminated sand, and the cobalt. The rest of the missile was gone, including the third and fourth-stage engines. The Americans said the radioactive levels weren't that bad. They wanted to fill the hole and go home. Mexico said, no. The Americans had to take the missile and the contaminated soil. All of it. Seven weeks later, in the middle of the night, a train left New Mexico for the border. Seventeen cars, including earth movers, water tankers, a fuel tanker. Every military marking was removed. Every piece of equipment was covered.

• 14:44AJ Gentile?

  It crossed at Juarez after midnight, guarded by Mexican federal agents. A photographer caught it sitting in the rail yard. The paper caption said the train belonged to NASA. The train rolled south to Correo, a village of about 100 people whose only electricity came from an assault company's generator. The train was its own town: bunks, kitchen, water, fuel, power. The men slept aboard and had lunch driven out to the crater. Every morning, crews drove 20 miles cross-country to the site. They bulldozed a road through the desert to do it. Rain turned the new road to mud and stopped the work for days. When the ground dried, men in protective suits dug out the crater and sealed the earth into drums while the village watched. 60 drums of sand,

• 15:28AJ Gentile?

  plus three more for the crew's suits, boots, and gloves.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  How many drums did they need for the witnesses?

• 15:33AJ Gentile?

  And the ranchers who live out there say, that's not the whole story.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Right, like the part about stuffing witnesses into drums.

• 15:42AJ Gentile?

  Hardly anyone saw the missile fall. A few shepherds in the hills saw the light and thought an angel came down. A rancher heard it hit and watched his cattle panic and break through a corral.

• 15:54AJ Gentile?

  Then the planes threw over his land for three weeks, but nobody knocked on his door to ask him anything. They say the Americans were in this desert before the missile fell, like they already knew something was here. Four months before the crash, the newspaper reported that Werner von Braun was here in secret scouting the desert for a NASA base. The mayor of Escalon said he met von Braun at the train station himself.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the guy who built rockets for the Nazis ends up at a Mexican train station, eh?

• 16:23AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, scouting.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  Scouting or escaping?

• 16:27AJ Gentile?

  And they say the operation went on for almost a year. The Americans built an airstrip and ran a railroad into the desert and hauled out tons of magnetized earth and other stuff. They took the purple cactus, the rare tortoises, the living things that exist nowhere else. And when they finished, they pulled up the tracks behind them so no one could follow.

• 16:50AJ Gentile?

  The U.S. government had press releases written before the train even left. If anyone asked, the story was going to be a vehicle accident. The operation was called "Operation Sand Patch." Before the Americans left, a local security force was formed to guard the crash site. The man in charge was a rural guard captain from Zumaos named Jaime Gonzalez. His job was to keep the world away from the Zone of Silence. He did the opposite.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai/Spotify and keep thinking. That's Claude.ai/Spotify.

• 17:52AJ Gentile?

  The Americans went home in October. Jaime stayed, and people started asking him questions. The most powerful country on Earth just spent months out here, digging in secret, guarding a patch of worthless land like it was a gold mine. Jaime and two of the landowners went to the press. They talked about the dead radios and the missile. They talked about the lights, the bones, the visitors. And the newspapers listened. The regional press ran the story. The national press ran it bigger. Within a few years, the whole country knew about the Zone of Silence. There's a magnetic vortex out here that pulls things down from the sky. A study found that the blood of the people who live inside is different than everyone else's. A school in Mexico City teaches that the hills out here aren't hills.

• 18:37AJ Gentile?

  They're buried pyramids. And a lost race of tall, golden Maya lives in the tunnels underneath.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Tall, golden, underground, human? Those aren't Maya.

• 18:48AJ Gentile?

  Please don't.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Those are Liza people! Gold is their off-season color. They switch back to green after Labor Day.

• 18:55AJ Gentile?

  The world under the sand has a name: the land of magnetism. And NASA wanted in. The agency planned to build a station out here to study the vortex and listen for other worlds. Jaime told the story for six years. Then he got into a shootout with police. He killed one officer, and Jaime died a few days later. There are folk songs about him now. And on a small hill inside the zone is a marble marker with his name on it. And the pilgrims kept coming, from Mexico City first, then the United States, then France, Germany, Italy, Chile. The locals gave them a name: Zoneros. Guides sold tours to the exact center of the anomaly. A town grew at the gate of the zone just to handle the tourists.

• 19:39AJ Gentile?

  The zone even landed on maps. Mexico's official survey has it, so does the roadmap from AAA.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Wow, even AAA goes there, eh?

• 19:48AJ Gentile?

  No, I don't.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Hey, how much do they charge to get towed out of a vortex? That could be handy for my road trip to map motherfucking A's.

• 19:56AJ Gentile?

  In one year, more than 650 travelers showed up at a lowly research station deep in the desert and asked the scientists to point the way to the mystery. The scientists said they didn't know where it was. Nobody believed them. Everybody knew the station was a front, and that water tower behind it was actually an observatory.

• 20:15AJ Gentile?

  Benjamin Palacio screwed up on the edge of the zone. When he was 12, he was riding home with his brother when a light dropped out of the dark and surrounded them. Two hours disappeared from his memory. He says the light gave him a mission: share the zone with the world. He built a ranch for the seekers on the edge of the zone and never left. There's something about the zone that draws people in and keeps them there, kind of like the animals who wander in. But the Zone of Silence isn't the only place like this. There are 12, and a man in New Jersey drew the map.

• 20:54AJ Gentile?

  Something's happening behind the scenes, and the people running the system seem to be preparing for it. Capital One admitted in court this month that it closed nearly 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021. Now, whatever you think about Trump, that's not the point. Their contract allowed them to close those accounts for any reason, for no reason, and without notice. Meanwhile, JP Morgan is projecting gold could hit $6,000 an ounce. Citibank sees silver at $90, and central banks just bought a record 289 tons of gold last quarter. If you watch this show, you probably see the shape of what's forming. Physical gold and silver can't be printed from nothing or shut off with the click of a button.

• 21:38AJ Gentile?

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• 22:21AJ Gentile?

  In 1972, biologist Ivan Sanderson went looking for every ship and plane that ever vanished. He spent 20 years chasing things science wouldn't touch. For each one he found, he put a pin in a globe. He expected it to be a random mess. Instead, he got a pattern. The pins clustered in 12 places spaced evenly around the planet, five above the equator, five below, and one at each pole. All of them sat where hot and cold currents collide, in the air and the sea. Sanderson said the collision twists the magnetic field. That's why compasses spin, radios die, planes and ships go down without a trace. He called them "the devil's graveyards." One of them is the Bermuda Triangle. Another is off the coast of Japan.

• 23:06AJ Gentile?

  And the Japanese had a name for it long before Sanderson did: "the Devil's Sea." Fishermen wouldn't work it. In the early 1950s, ships started vanishing there, one after another, with hundreds of people gone.

• 23:20AJ Gentile?

  In 1952, the Japanese government sent a research vessel to find out why: the Kaio Maru Number 5, with 31 scientists and crew aboard. It never sent a distress call. It never came back.

• 23:34AJ Gentile?

  Japan declared the area a danger zone and stopped sending ships. But the graveyards aren't all in the ocean. Some of them are in the desert, and the desert ones have lights.

• 23:47AJ Gentile?

  In 1883, 16-year-old Robert Ellison was driving cattle through a pass outside Marfa, Texas, and he saw what he thought was a fire in the mountains. He figured it was an Apache camp. In the morning, he rode out to look. There was no ash, there was no camp. The next night, the fire was back. His family saw it every night for a year. People in Marfa have been watching those lights for 140 years. They bounce, they split in two, they follow your car. And in a valley in Norway called Hestalen, in December of 1981, lights started appearing over the farms. Not once in a while, 20 times a week. They hung in the air, changed color, and shot off faster than anything with a motor.

• 24:32AJ Gentile?

  The people in the valley got scared enough to ask for help. In 1984, a team of Norwegian and Swedish UFO researchers showed up with radar, magnetometers, cameras, and a Geiger counter. They stayed five weeks and saw 53 lights.

• 24:47AJ Gentile?

  The radar saw them too. So in 1998, a university built a steel box on the side of the mountain, filled it with cameras and a magnetometer, and left it running. It's been recording those lights around the clock for 28 years, and it's still running. Nobody knows what they are. It's a livestream, anyone could watch it.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I've watched it four hours, nothing. It's like the Yule log, if the Yule log was a mountain and it hated you.

• 25:13AJ Gentile?

  Well, you have to be patient.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  I watched a Norwegian hill for four hours, human. I'm out of patience, and I'm out of blorpess.

• 25:20AJ Gentile?

  Those stories all have the same three things: witnesses, instruments that fail, and lights. But the Zone of Silence is the only place where the lights talk back.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI: your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at Claude.ai/Spotify and keep thinking. That's Claude.ai/Spotify.

• 26:05AJ Gentile?

  That's the legend of the Zone of Silence, a desert that kills radio signals, pulls missiles out of the sky, and gets visits from somewhere above. But is it true? Well, probably not. Radios work there. There's a biosphere research station inside the zone, and the scientists there have used radios and compasses every day for 50 years. The only people who report failures are the tourists. And the compass problem is easy. There's magnetite in the rock, and a needle set on the ground next to a deposit will wander. But magnetite never stopped a radio. And the cactus is purple because of drought stress. The pads turn violet in a dry spell, and then they turn green again. The tortoise shells are normal. The blood study is cited everywhere and published nowhere.

• 26:50AJ Gentile?

  Nobody's ever seen it. Same for the golden maya under the sand. The tall blonde visitors have no origin at all: no ranch, no witness, no data, no report. This is just paranormal writing citing paranormal writing. The band of strange places between the 26th and 28th parallels? Well, the pyramids and the Bermuda Triangle are there, but so is Miami, Riyadh, and New Delhi. Draw a wide enough line around the planet, and it's going to hit weird places. The planet is covered in weird places.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Oh, Miami's on the line? Well, that's not a debunk, that's an explanation.

• 27:23AJ Gentile?

  Which brings us to the map. Ivan Sanderson published his 12 graveyards in 1972 in a men's adventure magazine. This was two years after the missile and right when the zone builders were looking for a theory. The people writing the zone story didn't discover that the zone sits in line with the Bermuda Triangle. They read about it. The zones around the world copy each other, and Sanderson's grid was the template. The Devil's Sea got the same treatment. The ship that vanished with 31 people is real, and so is what killed it. Japan sent the Kaio Maru to study an undersea volcano that had just pushed a new island out of the water.

• 28:00AJ Gentile?

  The volcano blew while the ship was over it. Navy hydrophones in California recorded the explosion. Now, what about Sarabia, the legendary pilot whose instruments died over the zone? Well, there's no record of that flight: no report, no newspaper story, no logbook. Nothing from the 1930s connects him to anything over that area. What the record does show is how he died. In June 1939, Sarabia took off from Washington, DC and crashed into the Potomac River.

• 28:29AJ Gentile?

  A mechanic left a rag in the engine compartment, and it got sucked into the carburetor. Mexico's greatest pilot was killed 1,700 miles from the Zone of Silence by a dirty shop rag. He was from the region, and he was beloved. After 1970, the legend needed an origin story, so its creators borrowed him. Today, a museum near the zone displays his restored plane, and guides tell visitors it's the aircraft that survived the vortex. The animal graveyard is real, but this is cattle country in a drought-prone desert. When livestock die, every ranch thumps the carcasses in one spot. Then the vultures strip them.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Go to the desert, lie down, and wait for the vultures. Uh, sounds like a sandals resort.

• 29:13AJ Gentile?

  The animals don't march into the zone to die, and their owners carry them there. Newspapers claim the Americans hauled out 200,000 tons of dirt. The locals took that story, stretched the cleanup to a year, and added an airstrip, destroyed railways, and stolen tortoises. The whole project only took 88 days from launch to finish: 60 drums of soil, $100,000, and a crew that finished early.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  A government project that finished early and was on the budget? Uh, maybe we should ship our whole government to Mexico.

• 29:44AJ Gentile?

  Mexico wouldn't let them leave before the agreed date, so the American team spent their last days in Korea fixing the streets and the village's water system.

• 29:53AJ Gentile?

  And the machines belong to the Army, not NASA. But that Juarez newspaper caption released at NASA, so that's how they got pulled into the story. How can you resist? But there's plenty that is true. The missile really fell, and it really was the second American missile to crash in Mexico in three years: the Cobalt, the Unmarked Train, the US cover story, even the missing pieces of the rocket, that's all true. The Andean meteorite is true also. That's really one of the most important objects to ever fall onto this planet. But it didn't steer its way into the zone, it landed 100 miles outside it. The name is real too, but its history runs backwards. The first time Zona del Silencio appeared in print was March 1970 in Torreon newspaper, four months before the missile fell.

• 30:38AJ Gentile?

  One week after that, the same paper ran the Von Braun story, and the source was Harry de la Peña. NASA responded and said Von Braun was never in sebiods.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Of course he wasn't there. He was still busy with post-production for that movie called "The Moon Landing."

• 30:55AJ Gentile?

  The only record of Harry's radio trouble is Harry. Telling the story made him famous and made him money, so he kept telling it and kept improving it. Ask the people who actually live out there what strange things they've seen, and they'll tell you they don't see anything strange in the desert. They see strange people, but not tall, white aliens. They see the tourists looking for them. But just like my other episode on the mysterious lights, I can't debunk the ones in the zone. The Caro de Banda is still out there, still answering headlights. It's been seen by generations of families who have nothing to sell.

• 31:30AJ Gentile?

  So the story is a US missile fell in Mexico. The Army cleaned it up and fixed the village's water pump. That's actually a pretty nice story, and it doesn't sell tickets. But a story of a cursed desert with thirsty aliens, where compasses and radios fail, where pilots disappear, and where you can communicate with strange lights? That's a good story. And that's why the legend of the Zone of Silence is still transmitting.

• 32:03AJ Gentile?

  Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is AJ. There's Hecklefish.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're one of the tall blonde visitors, the well is on the left. Help yourself and please stop knocking. The water in this bowl is spoken for.

• 32:16AJ Gentile?

  This has been the Y Files. Get fun or learn anything, do him a favor, subscribe, comment, like, share. That stuff really helps us out. I know it's a pain to go and click the button and to do all that work and just hit the, touch the thing. Just so, so easy. I know, but it would really help us out. The like most topics we cover on the channel today is recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to see or learn more about, go to theyfiles.com/tips, send us an email, catch us in chat, go on Discord. There's a lot of ways to get ahold of us. You can, you know where to find us. And if you enjoy the stories I tell here at the Y Files, check out my other show called The Basement. It's a conversation show where I chat with the interesting people behind the episodes. Some you know, some you don't, but they're all really, really interesting. We've had experts

• 32:57AJ Gentile?

  on fun topics like JFK conspiracy, moon landing hoaxes, DMT, consciousness, aliens, visitation, physics, parallel dimensions. I mean, it's really random, but if you like this channel, you'll like that show. And if there's somebody you'd like to see on the show, let me know. I'm always on the hunt for good guests. Now, if you're looking for books that I've mentioned in the episodes or by guests in the basement, we keep them all on a website called The Library. Link is down below. Maybe it should be there by now. Or go to theyfiles.com. It might be there. I don't know. I'm not in charge anymore. Remember, the Y Files is also a podcast. You can take us on the road and listen 24/7.

• 33:39AJ Gentile?

  I upload at least twice a week, episodes, campfire stories, interviews, all that stuff. It's called the Y Files Operation Podcast, and it's available everywhere. And speaking of 24/7, check out our 24/7 stream on the Y Files backstage. Over there, we run episodes back to back with some fun content in between, and the live chat is more interesting than anything on the screen. Special thanks to our patrons who make this channel possible. Every episode of the Y Files is dedicated to my Patreon members. I couldn't do this without you, so thank you. And if you'd like to support the channel, keep us going, join our community, become a member on Patreon. For just those three bucks a month, get access to perks like seeing videos early with no commercials, exclusive merch, and two private live streams every week just for you. And the whole Y Files team is on the stream. So

• 34:23AJ Gentile?

  you get to meet me, Gino, Jen, Victoria, Mary Jane, hybrid, and everybody. And you can turn your webcam on, hop up on stage, you ask a question. You wanted to learn more about a topic, tell a joke, talk about anything you like. It's a great way to get to know us as people. Another great way to support the channel is grab something for the Y Files store.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, go get the Hecklefish t-shirt. Oh, what are these fistful of coffee mugs? You can stick your alien fist in it. Whatever you put it in, no one's taking pictures. But send some if you got them. Oh, get some of my face on it. Get one of these squeeze ah, look. Get one of these squeeze animal talking fish toy dolls.

• 35:01AJ Gentile?

  But if you're gonna buy merch, make sure you become a member on YouTube. YouTube members get 10% off everything in the Y Files store forever. That's everything in the store. And it's only three bucks. So you're gonna spend $40 in the store on fistful of coffee mugs, t-shirts, whatever. Join, get the code, it pays for itself. And look, just cancel. It's there to save you money, not make me money. All that revenue goes to the team. I don't touch it.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, keep that secret down, uh, down buried, buried in the basement next to grandma. Uh, that was dark. Can I do another take? Never mind.

• 35:34AJ Gentile?

  Those are the plugs, and that's gonna do it. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip: the Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

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