What Area 51 can teach us about the drones in NJ (with Dylan Thuras)

Americans love not believing anything the government tells us, and it seems likely we’ll just keep coming up with stories to explain what is probably really boring in real life. The latest of these is the mysterious drones that descended upon New Jersey and then vanished without a trace. Dylan Thuras joins us to shed light on Americans’ love of conspiracy theories, which naturally begins with Area 51. Our guest Dylan Thuras is the co-founder of Atlas Obscura. Follow his work at https://www.atlasobscura.com/users/dylan, and you can hear more of his stories on the Atlas Obscura Podcast wherever you listen to ‘em. Catch the extended conversation and plenty of other great bonus content, plus ad-free episodes, by joining our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  Before we start today's episode, I just want to put a little note here saying that our Patreon discount is ending very shortly. And I just want to also thank everyone who's supported the show on Patreon. It looks like, you know, this is tax season, so we're doing the books right now, and it looks like we have enough funding to easily take this show into the summer, you know, Q2, Q3 of 2025. So hopefully with your support, we'll be bringing you moral panics and viral freakouts until the end of time. So once again, if you want to support the show, go to patreon.com/panicworld. For a couple more days now, you can use the discount code PANIC in all caps at checkout to get it for 50 cents for the

• 0:43Ryan Broderick?

  first month. Wow, amazing. And yeah, see you guys behind the paywall. Dylan, can you please explain for our audience, what's been going on with drones in New Jersey recently?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  This is a dangerous question to ask me, Ryan. I have, I have lots to say about this. How deep do you want to go?

• 1:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, yeah, like when you send up your hundreds of drones into the night sky above New Jersey, like what are you trying to get out of it, you know?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying to take out other people's drones.

• 1:11Ryan Broderick?

  That seems to be what a lot of people are doing.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  This is drone on drone action above the skies of New Jersey. Um, I'm not gonna say there's nothing to talk about, but I will say that the New Jersey drone panic of 2024 reminds me a lot of other previous drone panics and, and this thing that happened in the 1950s called the windshield pitting panic.

• 1:38Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I'll tell you this story. In the 1950s, somebody noticed that their car windshield was covered in teeny tiny little dents and pits.

• 1:48Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  And they looked and they were like, I'd never seen this before. Like, what's going on? And someone wrote a story about this and everyone started looking. And they they found that there were tiny little pits on all of their windshields as well. And then the theories behind it were everything from nuclear test fallout to cosmic rays to all kinds of, you know, it's sort of just like weird science stuff is happening. And this is showing up in our in our car windshields. And of course, it just turned out that this is exactly what every windshield has always looked like, but no one had taken the time to look very closely.

• 2:41Ryan Broderick?

  That is an interesting take, especially when applied to the New Jersey drone panic. I see where you're going. I have a better angle, though. This comes from a Washington Post article from December 17. This is the reason the government wants TikTok banned, so we can't see what they're doing. And that was a TikTok user who wrote that in a comment and it has 20,000 likes. So yours is fine, but I think this random TikTok user might be on to something.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Ah, yes. TikTok famously controlled by the US government.

• 3:13Ryan Broderick?

  This is why they don't want us on there. And the article continues, on Facebook, more than 73,000 people have joined a group titled New Jersey Mystery Drones, Let's Solve It. Unconfirmed explanations have ranged from secret military activities to mass psychological operation. In the wake of the high profile murder of a healthcare CEO, others have pointed to an unsubstantiated theory known as Project Blue Beam, which reports that the government will launch a fake alien invasion to clear a path for installing an all powerful savior figure. The Post talked to a guy named Kip, who saw the drones in real life. And this is one last quote I'm going to throw at you here. The moment the federal agencies were like, there's nothing to worry about.

• 3:57Ryan Broderick?

  I was like, oh, we should be worried, he told the Post. For now, Kip said he'll keep following the thread on social media and waiting for real answers. Honestly, I'm hoping it's aliens and they come and get me, he said. Like, please, get me the hell out of here.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Nice, nice. Good one, Kip.

• 4:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Kip is on to something. I think that's right.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:20Ryan Broderick?

  But I think it's a really important example of how Americans love not believing anything the government tells us.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26Ryan Broderick?

  And this is nothing new. We're probably just gonna constantly be making up stories to explain what is probably very boring in real life. And that brings us to today's topic, which is Area 51. I'm Ryan Broderick. Welcome to Panic World, a show about the moral panics and viral freakouts bubbling up out of the darkest corners of the internet. And today, in honor of our drone panic, we figured we'd look back into how Area 51, the place and idea that we all sort of think about as sort of the hub for alien activity in America, became a clusterfuck of lore and conspiracy theories. And joining me, the expert on weird places, I believe, Atlas Obscurist co-founder Dylan Thuras. Dylan, how are you? And more importantly, do you want to believe?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Of course I want to believe. I mean, I'm a child of the X-Files. I mean,

• 5:13Ryan Broderick?

  Me too.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  You know, and yeah, I do, I do want to believe. Thanks for having me.

• 5:20Ryan Broderick?

  So I'm sure you have like an encyclopedia knowledge of all the various places that are haunted or otherwise occupied by alien invading forces, you know, hiding in the corners of our world. But do you have a favorite? Like, what's your favorite spooky place?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Besides Area 51?

• 5:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, besides Area 51. Yeah, I guess. So what would be your second favorite spooky?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  I mean, honestly, it's actually, it's not that far away from there. It's, it's on the other side, near the Tonopah Test and Training Range, another secret government location. But the actual place is the Clown Motel in Tonopah, Nevada.

• 5:53Ryan Broderick?

  What in the fuck is the Clown Motel?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Oh, baby. It's, uh, so Tonopah is about four hours away from Las Vegas. It's the very edge of the desert. You know, in that part of Nevada, you really are skirting around an area the size of Connecticut. That's all military off limits property. And right at the edge, right as you're like headed into the absolute desert, there's no, nothing for hundreds of miles going forward. There's a little motel called the Clown Motel. And it's like a two-story roadside motel. And it is themed with hundreds, hundreds of clowns, 700 clowns in the, in the lobby check-in room alone.

• 6:30Ryan Broderick?

  Can you stay there?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I have stayed there.

• 6:33Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Each room comes equipped with a Portrait of a clown and

• 6:38Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, of course, yeah, naturally.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, these are the basic amenities you would expect of

• 6:43Ryan Broderick?

  I would expect that at the clown motel, yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And but the best part about it is when you walk out of your room and you like on the little balcony there, the the site you see directly next to the clown motel is this abandoned minor cemetery, 100 year old abandoned minor cemetery.

• 7:00Ryan Broderick?

  You know, I should have guessed that the clown motel is next to an old cemetery. That's obviously.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Obviously, you know, it's all these little like wooden grave markers and they're marked with what people died of. And it's just stuff like, you know, gave up on living, like.

• 7:14Ryan Broderick?

  Relatable, very 2025.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, I really, I love that place. That's a, that's a spooky spot. I really enjoy.

• 7:22Ryan Broderick?

  That is a spooky spot. I like that. That's, that's good. I'm, I've always been a sucker for the Bermuda Triangle.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:27Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like it's just classic weird and I enjoy reading about it. But we're going to be dealing with, I think you and I, our favorite spooky place, our favorite conspiratorial hub of nonsense, which is Area 51. But we're going to be doing something a bit different today. I'm going to be going over how Area 51 gained its reputation to start. But then after the break, Dylan is going to take over the show and you're going to tell us about the place itself. And then we're going to finish the episode by doing a sort of Dragon Ball Z fusion dance and combining forces to discuss the impacts of Area 51 on conspiracy tourism and sort of the broader paranoia of modern America. But let's start with the internet having real world consequences and the panic that ensued because

• 8:08Ryan Broderick?

  that's what this show is about. And after decades of conspiracy theories all about Area 51 in 2019, some bored little Gen Z internet kids started a movement to storm Area 51. Are you familiar with the storming of Area 51? Do you remember this?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I am, I am very familiar, yes.

• 8:27Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Well, I want to open with a quote from Know Your Meme for people who might not remember this. I think this is a pretty succinct summary of what happened here. On June 27, 2019, three anonymous Facebook users in a group called Shit Posting Because I'm in Shambles.

• 8:41Ryan Broderick?

  Smiley Koon and the Hidden Sound created the event page Storm Area 51 They Can't All Stop Us, which was scheduled to commence at 3 a.m. on September 20th, 2019. The description reads, "We will all meet up at Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry if we Nerudo run," which for people who don't know that, it's where you put your arms behind you so you can run really fast.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:11Ryan Broderick?

  If you're so fast, you become aerodynamic.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  It's why you see in the Olympics, you always see everyone running like that, right?

• 9:17Ryan Broderick?

  Most, they should have a Nerudo run competition at the Olympics. I think that would get people interested again. But it continues, "If we Nerudo run, we can move faster than their bullets. Let's see them aliens." So do you think that this is a solid plan to get into Area 51?

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure, for sure. What, what, what could stop this plan, honestly? I don't really see. It, it feels like it's, they've thought out every, you know, the government's only had, what, you know, almost 70 years to figure out like how to keep people out and create probably one of the most secure places on planet Earth? I don't see why this doesn't meet that challenge.

• 10:01Ryan Broderick?

  Well, you know, if enough, if enough Gen Z brain rotted internet users show up, who knows what could happen?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:09Ryan Broderick?

  And I do want to point out very quickly, as we start getting into this, that this was a joke. Like this was funny, but jokes on the internet don't really stay jokes for long. And in many ways, this is a microcosm for how we've treated Area 51 in this country since its inception. A quirky, cultural oddity shrouded in mystery that after enough time, has spun out into a conspiracy that will never die. Every new generation stumbles across it and reignites our weird obsession with the things we can't explain that are always more outlandish than what's actually going on, whether we're talking about aliens or drones or Gen Z kids running around like Nerudo.

• 10:55Ryan Broderick?

  And they sort of metastasize into stranger things as they go on. And on July 5th, a username Jackson Barnes posted on the page, the following quote. The basic idea is that the Kyles form the front line. Are you familiar with the term? This is kind of an older, pre-COVID term. Are you familiar with a Kyle? Do you know what a Kyle is?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Is it, is it adjacent to a Chad? Like, what is a Kyle?

• 11:20Ryan Broderick?

  Basically, in every small town, there's like a guy whose name is usually Kyle.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:25Ryan Broderick?

  He smokes a lot of weed. He might get like really angry and like punch a hole in your wall.

• 11:31Ryan Broderick?

  If you invite him to like a house party, he's gonna like smoke inside. He's like a dirtbag.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I, I understand who this is. Yeah, okay.

• 11:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, okay. So that's a Kyle, and they're meant to form the front line of the invasion here. And then it continues. If we feed them enough psilocybin and monster energy, you kind of get the idea of what a Kyle is all about. It's the kind of guy that has like blunt guts on his coffee table all the time.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 11:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Uh, and yeah, so if we feed them enough psilocybin and monster energy and say that anyone in camouflage is their stepdad. Obviously, Kyles have stepdads. That's a big thing. The entire base is made of drywall, and then they will go berserk, and they will become an impenetrable wall. Uh, then the rock throwers will throw pebbles at the inevitable resistance. We don't want to hurt them. We just want to annoy them enough not to shoot the Kyles as often. While this is all happening, two Naruto Runner battalions will run full speed around the north and south flank. And shadow clone jujitsu, uh, I think that's a typo. They're gonna do shadow clone jujitsu, which is like, I think that's a Naruto term as well.

• 12:34Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's a type of, hold on, I don't want to get yelled at by anime fans, but let me just double check this. Uh, yes, shadow clone technique is from Naruto. So that would effectively triple our numbers, this goes on, and overwhelm the base.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I, I mean, the shadow clone jujitsu does seem promising. I don't understand how it triples their numbers, but obviously it's a powerful technique.

• 12:55Ryan Broderick?

  So as the name would imply, you create sort of mirrors of yourself.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Right, of course.

• 12:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's what you're doing there. So you would, yeah, shadow clones, obviously.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:03Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and then the post ends with, PS, hello, US government. This is a joke. I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan. I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies, you know, like likes on the internet. I'm not responsible. People decide to actually storm Area 51. What do you think happened immediately after this post went live?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  You know, uh,

• 13:27Speaker 01

  the logical conclusion is that this spun terribly out of control.

• 13:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. According to Washington Post, seven days later, half a million people had signed up to the Facebook page.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:37Ryan Broderick?

  I do love that this is like an incredible snapshot of like a very early kind of Gen Z humor that I think has been memory holed a bit. Like this was kind of the earliest examples of the world realizing that people who had grown up as online as Gen Z had, had a very different sense of irony and a very different sense of humor. And it was a real shock. So an Air Force spokesperson went on record basically saying like, don't do that. It's a really bad idea. Please don't do that. And like most things on the internet, it felt very random. It felt very stupid, but it was like gaining real critical mass over the summer of 2019.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I mean, can I, like, the write-up is actually really funny. I mean, the like tiles on the front lines, the like, and even the fact that it's like disclaimed at the end, like, it's a funny thing to write. It really is.

• 14:28Ryan Broderick?

  So you might be wondering at this point, why in 2019, Gen Z kids are rediscovering Area 51? Well, it all starts with a little podcast, not this one, because it didn't exist yet. But an equally big and important podcast, Panic World,

• 14:45Ryan Broderick?

  had a very interesting guest on that year. Can you guess which podcast we're talking about?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  I should get.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Why don't you tell me, Ryan?

• 14:58Ryan Broderick?

  I, I. Little man named Joe Rogan.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Who could have guessed it?

• 15:04Ryan Broderick?

  So Joe Rogan had, does an episode where he has Bob Lazar on. Let's take a listen.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  I've seen pretty much every interview you've ever given. I've followed the story incredibly closely, but for people who don't know the story, you. Used to work at Area 51. I mean, I would imagine the moment you actually make contact with something that's extraterrestrial, whether it's an object or a being, your whole paradigm, the whole world you live in, is now a different place.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  The excitement kind of turned to dread at some point because the amount of power we're dealing with is astronomical.

• 15:45Ryan Broderick?

  Can you give us a quick little spark notes on Bob Lazar?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Spark notes are Bob Lazar basically kicks off, in large part, the modern cultural phenomenon of Area 51 in the late 80s. He comes out and he says, "I worked at Area 51." I saw-- the stories are actually really funny. They're basically like Ralph from The Symptoms. He was like, "I opened the closet, I saw an alien, the alien looked at me." And he goes on, he like does a whole, you know, he goes on the news. There's suddenly just a name that hasn't really barely been in the public consciousness, Area 51, is suddenly now incredibly at everyone's like, "What is this? What's going on there? They have aliens?" And I mean, I will say, anyone who's at all seriously interested in Area

• 16:31Speaker 01

  51 is not a Bob Lazar fan.

• 16:34Ryan Broderick?

  Interested.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  He has almost no credibility.

• 16:37Ryan Broderick?

  So Tom DeLonge is not a Bob Lazar fan?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I can't speak for Tom DeLonge. I don't know what Tom DeLonge's sense is.

• 16:43Ryan Broderick?

  Noted, noted alien investigator, Tom DeLonge.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  UFO lover. I don't, but I feel like among the people who are like legitimate, like, yeah, Lazar's not a, but he kick-started this whole thing.

• 16:55Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Yeah. So The Nevada Current wrote a little about Lazar in 2021. And yeah, as you said, he kind of pops up around 1989. He goes on local Vegas news claiming that he used to work at Area 51. And this is how The Nevada Current describes kind of his early press appearance. "At first Lazar spoke only in silhouette and he used the pseudonym Dennis. Later, he came forward under his own name with no disguise. Lazar's claims were fantastic, that the US government had in its possession nine crashed or captive spacecraft from another world. At least one of them shaped like an actual saucer. Lazar claimed he'd been part of a team hired by the government to reverse engineer the craft, which would unlock for American scientists the propulsion secrets they needed to pave a path to the stars."

• 17:40Ryan Broderick?

  Legit, I think we can all agree that that's probably, I mean, I've seen the X-Files. That sounds right.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  It does sound almost exactly like something from the X-Files, doesn't it?

• 17:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, as you said, he doesn't have a lot of credibility. He claimed that he went to MIT. MIT has said that he never went to MIT.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:56Ryan Broderick?

  It's also not even clear if he worked at Area 51. As the Nevada Current found, one of the few bits of physical evidence that he'd worked at a secret base in Nevada was a W-2 form reflecting income of less than $1,000 purportedly paid to him by the Department of Naval Intelligence. Even that form was questioned over its authenticity. Skeptics have pointed out that there is an Office of Naval Intelligence within the Department of the Navy, but not a Department of Naval Intelligence.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  It's crazy that he's still out there, man. It's wild that he was like, he went on Rogan and like is still doing the shtick because the whole thing is just, there's so little, there's so little there.

• 18:36Ryan Broderick?

  So I always kind of think of the process of pulling pre-internet culture online as kind of an upload, right? Like uploading, you know, we upload Flat Earth and then it becomes an internet thing. We upload eating disorders and then they become an internet thing. They're like, we're uploading culture. And I think Alex Jones starts this process of uploading Cranks. Like he kind of creates a bunch of viral celebrities out of these guys who were just like on public access or on some pirate radio station. And Joe Rogan, I think, has taken that torch and now he's the guy that is like introducing Cranks to massive online audiences now.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also think this period in the late 80s and early 90s, right? Okay, so Bob Lazar is like 88, 89. X-Files comes out in 93. This is like, internet exists, but it's not what it is today. But it also, that's like 80, 1988 is when Coast to Coast AM starts. And so in a kind of pre-internet era,

• 19:32Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  You get the first shapings of the kind of conspiracy media complex. And I think that that complex, like, as you said, as it, when it gets uploaded to the internet, it's sort of, it goes from whatever, whatever step it was at, like, Pre Coast to Coast AM, kind of truly fringey. It takes one step towards the mainstream and then the internet is just this like very convenient escalator into like absolute mainstream.

• 20:02Ryan Broderick?

  I think that's exactly right. And just to knock down Lazar's credibility even more, he in 1990 went to prison for running one of the first digital prostitution services. Hmm, very ahead of his time.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Ryan Broderick?

  He would have, he would have loved OnlyFans. Uh, I mean, I guess maybe he does love OnlyFans. He's still around. Um, but then once he was out of prison, he tried to monetize the Area 51 UFO thing as much as possible. So he had, he got book deals. Obviously a Netflix show. I mean, I would never question the, uh, the, the rigor that goes into a Netflix documentary.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:35Ryan Broderick?

  But perhaps they're not exactly as scrupulous as you might think. And then he obviously gets tight with Joe Rogan.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I also, it may be off topic, but I also kind of think, I have this, this conspiracy theory, theory that, that we go through these kind of like cultural, it's like a sine wave or waves of sort of what I would call like fantasy horror conspiracies. So that's like things like the Satanic Panic in the eighties, right? It's like fantasy horror. It's very like morally coded. There's just like, there's good, there's evil. There's, you know, this is a fight. It's religious essentially in its, in its core nature. I think QAnon was, was a lot like that actually, kind of religious in its core nature.

• 21:16Ryan Broderick?

  Absolutely.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  And then you get these shifts from that kind of fantasy horror genre into what more sort of aliens, technology, governments. It's, it's a little shadier. It's a little more pulls from actual historical fact. So it's like a little more muddled with like the real and the unreal. Um, you know, Area 51 like exists, it's a place. Uh, and, and, and then people get, that's like, that goes on for a while. And then like something comes back and it's like back to kind of moral panics. And like, I think there's this weird. Just sort of sine wave of those two things. I think we're leaving the kind of horror fantasy and going back into like more weird drone panic, government, alien, black helicopter stuff.

• 22:00Ryan Broderick?

  That is such an interesting idea. I think I agree with you. That's like a really, that's a really good way of thinking about it. That we're kind of constantly switching between the two. The internet sort of incentivizes different kinds depending on, you know, what's

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Ryan Broderick?

  how we're using the internet this, at that time period. So for instance, like if we talk about the raid of Area 51, the mainstream news has picked it up. Military officials are talking about it. The Twitter account for Kool-Aid posts a Photoshop of the Kool-Aid man bursting into Area 51.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:29Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, brands have to get involved, right? Even crazier, Pornhub sees a surge of activity around A Area 51 as a search term. So it goes from zero to 160,000 searches in four days. And this is the moment where the kid who started all this, he gets unmasked. His name is Matty Roberts and he realizes that things have spun out of control. And I'm going to send you a video and I want you to watch the first minute or so of this and tell the audience, you know, your general impressions of this Matty Roberts character. What do you, what do you think? So I just dropped it in the chat. I've never seen this guy.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  13 Action News, elevating Las Vegas live at 11.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Tonight, the man who had the viral idea to storm Area 51's secret and heavily guarded military site in the Nevada desert is hoping that no one gets hurt. Good evening, everybody. I'm Trisha Keen.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  And I'm Todd Cignotas. Now, he says people have written to him on Facebook saying that they are willing to die to get on that base. It's about two hours north of the valley.

• 23:41Speaker 06

  It started out, it's just from a pure stroke of imagination. It's just meant to be funny. I want to do something cool out there now that we have a bunch of people, but I don't want anybody to get hurt.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Oh, this guy's cute, honestly. Like, he's just, he's just some dumb kid. He's like, he's like a goof. He's dressed up in like goofy outfit.

• 23:57Ryan Broderick?

  He's dressed like, he's dressed like Naruto.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  He's dressed up like Naruto. Oh, obviously. This like, I'm showing my age right here. I'm just like, oh, he's in some kind of homemade costume. I really enjoy that.

• 24:07Ryan Broderick?

  He's dressed like a ninja from Naruto.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Naruto ninja, obviously.

• 24:10Ryan Broderick?

  So, yeah, he's from California. He was 21, worked at a, he worked at a vape shop.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Of course, obviously.

• 24:17Ryan Broderick?

  Um, and he likes Joe Rogan and World of Warcraft. And he suddenly found himself getting a visit from the FBI.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 24:25Ryan Broderick?

  What do you think happens next in this story?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Two million people show up to Area 51. They are never seen again.

• 24:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they all just disappeared.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  This is just, you know, that friend you lost back in 2019? I think we know where.

• 24:42Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. So Roberts tries to get ahead of this. He changes things up and he suggests that instead of going to Area 51, they have like a music festival in the desert called Alien Stock on the same weekend. And the Alien Research Center decides to throw their own event in Nevada. So at this point now, there are just a bunch of Area 51 themed events all happening around Area 51.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  What happens to our boy Matty?

• 25:11Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you for asking. He decides he doesn't want to be involved in any of this anymore. The quote that, uh, comes out of a Guardian story written about this is, "He wanted no involvement in Fire Fest 2.0. The local authorities feared potential calamity, people dying of dehydration in the desert, angry landowners and mad men with guns." So the whole thing kind of fizzles out. By the end, there are some weirdos in Vegas and a couple of groups in the desert all gathered around to dance. Uh, there's a bunch of Pepe the Frog cosplayers involved, obviously, because it's 2019.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Obviously.

• 25:46Ryan Broderick?

  Bunch of conspiracy theories. And that's kind of it. What's your sort of general take on this whole little shaggy dog tale? Like, do you feel like it says anything larger about kind of the place of Area 51 in our, in our minds?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  I, I just, I want to start by saying, I honestly have such heart for this kid, Matty. I mean, he wrote like such a funny dumb goof on the internet and like, he just happened to make it an event page that you could actually like, be like, yes, I'm coming, right? Like if he had wrote this on his feed or something, there'd be comments, there'd be jokes, like we would not be talking about this at all. Like, he doesn't want this to happen. He says in the first post, like, I, I'm just joking, guys. I'm just having a goof, man. And the fact that like the media ecosystem basically just starts like churning around this poor kid until the point that it's like way out of his control. And, and I'll say that town of like 5,000 people was panicked.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  About this. They and they ended up spending like 350 grand or 300 grand in like security, like additional stuff. They were just, they were absolutely terrified that 2 million people were going to descend on a town that like doesn't have the infrastructure for like

• 27:01Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  A couple hundred tourists, right? And that like people were going to be there without water. There was going to be like, people were going to riot when they realized like they really couldn't get in. It was just gonna, apparently it caused like great stress and strain on the town, on relationships between people in the town, because some people were like, we should take advantage of this. We're going to make a lot of money. Other people were like this is, like, it was really bad for this tiny little town of Rachel, Nevada, like really bad. And so, again, I don't blame that kid, Matt. He didn't, he barely did anything at all. He was just like having an internet goof. It's like being the, the butterfly that flapped your wings and like made the media hurricane that then consumed you.

• 27:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, I, I think you're, you're exactly right. I, I have looked at this story for years. It's kind of the, the moment we realized Gen Z were different.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 27:55Ryan Broderick?

  Like, they, they have such a fascination with using the internet to meet each other in real life, you know, even now amid all of the like celebrity lookalike contests that are happening. They're very interested in these collaborative, uh, you know, you know about the gentle minions thing?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yes, I do know the gentle minions.

• 28:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. So like, like there's just every couple of months, there's like something weird that a bunch of Gen Z kids are doing, using the internet to meet in real life. And it's, it's such a departure from, I think, how millennials are using the internet, where we had that kind of brief moment with like flash mobs and stuff, and then we were kind of like, enough. We're way too, you know, millennials are way too like neurotic and individualistic to like ever work together on something. Whereas Gen Z is very fascinated with like collaborative uses for social media. And this is the story, I think, that made me realize that we are not, we were not prepared for it.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:47Ryan Broderick?

  Because like the media is taking this super seriously. The military is taking this super, towns are taking this thing. Everyone is taking this seriously. But then the people at the center are like, no, this is just like a meme.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, like, Ryan, you're a millennial.

• 29:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I am also, I'm very

• 29:02Ryan Broderick?

  Pathologically, unfortunately.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Old millennial, but I think that's why, like, flash mobs seem so novel to us. Because it was like, oh, my God, the internet made something happen and like, people came together and they did a thing. And that's, that's cool. And like, I feel like for anyone a generation below us, like, the dividing line between the, like, the internet, like, the idea that the internet is not real or not connected to the real world is just like, it's a, it's, it's a dumb idea for anyone to hold. But like, that smoothness, the smoothness by which things flow out of the internet into real life is like, it's a steeper gradient.

• 29:38Speaker 07

  It's also just the prime example of, it was just a joke and oh shit, like, this joke could be catastrophic. Just how quickly that can happen. It really captures both sides of that.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Then no one came, basically. I mean, that's the interesting thing, right? Is it like, it generated this enormous amount of fear and concern and ultimately, like, a thousand people came and wandered around and kind of like, it also, the internet is such a frictionless place and the internet is full of friction, but we're never quite sure what's going to transfer and what won't. So there's always this kind of like, what's actually gonna, you know, January 6th was also planned on the internet.

• 30:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, because I was gonna say, like, I had a similar experience to Dylan Roberts when I set up this page called Stop the Steal in 2020. And I didn't think anyone was going to sign up to it, but things just got really out of control.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Just a little joke?

• 30:28Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, just a little, hey, dear FBI agent that has to listen to my podcast, that is a little joke I'm making. I do remember a video of kids in Aruda running in front of, like, Area 51.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  A couple people did.

• 30:42Ryan Broderick?

  People did do it.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  A handful of people got arrested by the security force that was just waiting there to arrest them. And they just wait for you to cross the border and then they like calmly arrest you and like, you go to the sheriffs. There's no like, you don't go to some secret, they just call the local

• 30:57Ryan Broderick?

  No, they kill you and then they clone you and they put you clone back in the general population.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 31:01Ryan Broderick?

  So for once, we have a conspiracy that the internet ran with ending, at least for the moment, in something that was fairly harmless. You know, so folks showed up, it was kind of goofy and silly, but that was it. But Area 51 as a concept, as this conspiratorial nucleus of strange

• 31:18Ryan Broderick?

  Rumblings and bizarre, sort of like hidden experiments and alien abductions and all that, will never die. And after the break, Dylan is going to tell us all about why this place has lasted so long in the American imagination.

• 31:40Ryan Broderick?

  All right, so Area 51 is this thing that we keep coming back to time and time again. We see mysterious things in the sky, and we assume that there's some connection to shadowy government figures that are behind all of it, whether it's aliens, or drones, or what have you, right? But Dylan, how the heck did this start? Like, where does all of this come from?

• 32:05Speaker 01

  I do feel like I'm gonna drag your show to a place like it doesn't want to go.

• 32:10Ryan Broderick?

  That's fine. Break the show. Break it.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Talking about Area 51, yeah, Area 51 has this feeling of being this kind of like boomer-y Gen X conspiracy.

• 32:21Ryan Broderick?

  Very much so.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  But it is like really a real thing. It's not a thing that feels comfortable to bring up at a party. Like, now I'm gonna be a guy at a party who's like, "Do you want it?"

• 32:31Ryan Broderick?

  You want to hear about Area 51? You want to go into my van full of black lights and talk about Area 51?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yes. It's both, it makes you sound both like a loon and a fuddy duddy simultaneously.

• 32:42Ryan Broderick?

  So what is it?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  That's what we're gonna do. Here's what Area 51 is. Area 51 actually did manage to stay basically, effectively, secret, out of people's awareness, for 30 years, you know, from 1955 to about the mid to late 80s. It is, Area 51 is a real place. It's about 85 miles north of Las Vegas. It's also something that does show up. It's, you know, it leaks here and there. Little bits of it show up in the public. There's an old article that's like, "Area 51 baseball team does it again," you know?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  And it's like, those are military-

• 33:21Ryan Broderick?

  America's so fucking stupid. I love it.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, where just like little bits sneak out there and there. But I other think the thing that people don't understand about Area 51 is it is a, it is a relatively tiny little chunk. Of an area the size of Connecticut. It is the size of Connecticut, the Nevada test and training range. And it's, it's a bunch of different stuff. It was primarily.

• 33:46Ryan Broderick?

  Is it 51 areas inside of the testing range?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of areas. There are more than area. There's, I mean, yes, there is, there is, there's lots of areas. Okay. 13, area six.

• 33:57Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Probably there are at least 51.

• 34:00Ryan Broderick?

  I would have to imagine. It'd be funny if there weren't.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:03Ryan Broderick?

  It'd be funny if they were just random numbered areas, but.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It's a little wonky too, because the areas come from like survey grid maps and like, they were not calling it area 51. Like this is kind of a thing that got applied from the outside, not internally.

• 34:18Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, right. Because like you're looking at a map and it's like zoning areas and they're like, this is the 51st area of this area. And so, okay, and there's a base there.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Area 51 is like where groom, I mean, probably it did have that name at some point internally, but it would like, call it groom lake. They call all the kinds of stuff. But first we should talk about, so, so, so it's part of.

• 34:40Ryan Broderick?

  The government's running something called groomer lake. That's interesting. I can't wait to tell QAnon about this.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah, yeah, it is called groom lake. It really, yeah, that's where it is. So we basically, we, we, we, we take this enormous area in Nevada and we make it secret. We make it non-public. You can't go there. You can't fly over it. Um, and so to situate area 51 and kind of space and time, we're going to go back to 1945, because this is when all of this starts. Uh, so we, we test our first atomic bomb in New Mexico. This is basically, this is the largest secret black ops government project to ever exist by like a, a factor of 10. Like it's just bigger and more expensive and more secret than anything we've ever done.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And a month later, we drop a bomb on Hiroshima. And less than a year after we bombed Hiroshima, we blow up another giant atomic bomb in, well, it's a thousand times bigger than Hiroshima. It's still, they get a lot bigger than that, but we blow up a big bomb in the Bikini Atoll.

• 35:46Ryan Broderick?

  I've, yes, I, I'm also a Godzilla fan, so I'm familiar with this as well.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 35:51Ryan Broderick?

  Checking all my boxes.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so we're starting a lot of lore here. Right. Godzilla is going to come out of this.

• 35:56Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Also, this is where we get the name the bikini.

• 36:00Ryan Broderick?

  Because of Godzilla, I understand, sure.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yes, because of the famous swimsuit issue.

• 36:05Ryan Broderick?

  Because of Godzilla's swimsuit, yeah, no, absolutely.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  That's right. Okay, this is all background, but basically shortly after all of this is going on, 1947, this is like an important year. 1947 is the year the CIA starts, uh, is previously the, the OSS, but it becomes officially the CIA. So when we start the National Security Act, we create the Department of Defense. It's the year we start the Air Force. It's also the year Roswell crashes.

• 36:29Ryan Broderick?

  Hmm.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. We are spinning up. We are basically going out of the Manhattan Project and we're gonna keep the party going, man.

• 36:36Ryan Broderick?

  Modern America is being born.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Our security state, the security state you know and love.

• 36:41Ryan Broderick?

  The modern security state.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  It is being born.

• 36:44Ryan Broderick?

  The thing that everyone loves is starting right now. Okay.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  It's fun. If you look up the Roswell crash too, and you look up like the things that they found, it's also really funny because the like, it's like tinfoil, thin wooden beams, paper, like, it's not.

• 36:58Ryan Broderick?

  Tinfoil, a hollowed out light bulb.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:02Ryan Broderick?

  Like a metal tube.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  It's not quite the things that you feel like an interstellar species is like flying. You're like, oh, you flew in something with thin wooden beams?

• 37:12Ryan Broderick?

  I, yeah, I, I wouldn't imagine you could get very far in space with a wooden spaceship, but I don't really know.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so we spin up the big security state. All right, Ryan, you, you, you're a government. What kind of government are you?

• 37:24Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, clearly, I'm a, personally, I mean, I would be an authoritarian government for sure, but like a wacky one. Yeah, I'd be a wacky despot, you know? Um, but okay, wait, so.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  You're like a Turkmenistan.

• 37:34Ryan Broderick?

  Fully, yeah, just like golden statues to me and just no, no one on the streets. Yeah, that's me.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Awesome. Empty, empty, but very authoritarian.

• 37:46Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  That's how I like it.

• 37:48Ryan Broderick?

  That's me.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  All right. So you've got this government and you've got this new security state and, you know, you got this cool thing, the CIA, uh, Air Force, giant bombs. How are you gonna test all these giant bombs?

• 38:01Ryan Broderick?

  Well, you have to test them secretly or outside of the country.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  That's, that, well, yeah, we were doing it outside of the country. We were going to the Bikini Atoll.

• 38:08Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  And basically everyone was just like, gah. It takes forever to get there.

• 38:13Ryan Broderick?

  What a commute.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  What a commute. No joke, quite literally. Edward Teller, the creator of the hydrogen bomb, was like, "Look, I just want to have somewhere where I can do a mushroom cloud in the morning and like be in Vegas with some showgirls in the evening."

• 38:28Ryan Broderick?

  I work remote for this very reason. Like, I just don't want to go into the office. I understand.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  People did not want to do the commute. So basically, we were like, "All right, yeah, yeah, yeah. We need a, we need a homegrown place to blow up 900 atomic bombs."

• 38:41Speaker 01

  And we create the, it's got a lot of different names, the Nevada Proving Grounds, the Nevada Test Site, whatever, but it's, it's the big patch that we start blowing up bombs in. And so that is the thing we do first. And then we, we got this cool site, used to be an animal preserve. Now we're, we're blowing up an atomic bomb like all the time. Like, we're doing so many atomic tests. And they're not, they're not actually secret. We have to tell the public. We have this whole thing. This is like, it's actually kind of public, but that's a, that's an issue. Like, let's say you also needed an enormous amount of area to test secret stuff. And you got this great desert site, but it's like, the atomic stuff's like a little too public.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  What you might do is find a nice spot right next to that that you can kind of file under like the Department of Energy. Um, and you can kind of just be like, "Ah, it's just like a thing." But it's like not, it doesn't, the same rules don't apply to it as apply to the sort of, some of the atomic testing stuff. But it's like, you've got the same infrastructure, you've got the same security, and you have this beautiful, flat lake, Groom Lake, where you can land and take off secret planes. And this is, this is a really attractive site. If what you want to do is not blow up atomic bombs, but instead... Build super secret planes that fly really, really, really high and really fast.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  And that is exactly what the CIA wants to do out at Groom Lake. So, uh, so they start Area 51 in 1955 was its official start.

• 40:22Ryan Broderick?

  That is interesting because one of the most believable explanations I've read for like the resurgence of Area 51 conspiracies in the eighties and nineties and, and the wider UFO fascination.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:36Ryan Broderick?

  Was that, you know, to tie it back to the kind of opening of today's episode about the drone panic was that Americans were probably seeing supersonic planes.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 40:49Ryan Broderick?

  And they were seeing them around Area 51.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:52Ryan Broderick?

  And then they were seeing them around the country and that's basically what this all was.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. The, the U2 in particular, the first plane was, it was not really a stealth plane. It flew really high and, and, and very fast. Um, but you know, it was a, it was a spy plane. It was meant to go and take pictures, but it didn't have some of the like radar evading technology yet. It actually was quite reflective and so flying super high, it could like catch the sun at certain times, it would look like this crazy like.

• 41:19Ryan Broderick?

  Of course.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Bright flying cross or this other stuff. So there really were things flying around in the sky in the, you know, late 1940s through the 1950s that would have looked nothing like what you thought of as an airplane.

• 41:35Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  And yes, this is, and so what's interesting, and I think this actually really applies to the current drone thing too, is the US government learned pretty quickly that this was sort of both a nuisance and potentially an opportunity. It was a nuisance in the sense that like, they didn't want people to see their super secret planes. And when people did see them, they kind of had to track it down and be like, okay, what did you see? Like, what do you know? Like, they kind of needed to take it seriously. I think they also became interested in. In whether people were spotting other governments, you know, technology.

• 42:14Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  And so they, they did really earnestly, they went and like, talked to people who saw stuff in the sky and like, asked them, what's going on?

• 42:22Ryan Broderick?

  This should be the beginning of like, the Men in Black idea.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  This really did happen. I think they also realized quite early on that this kind of hysteria, although it could be a little bit of a nuisance and like, a security risk, it also provided cover. It was so much noise and nonsense and all the talk about aliens and UFOs and flying saucers. They would much prefer everybody talking about that than being like, I think it's made of titanium. And like, I found a tiny piece of titanium. And like, are they flying planes made out of titanium that can go to 70,000 feet in the air? Like, they, they don't, the conversations they're trying to avoid are boring conversations. They don't want you to have boring conversations about Area 51 because that's what they are trying to not talk about.

• 43:07Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:08Speaker 07

  Was there an anecdote or an example you specifically came over where, where they were like, oh, people have nutty theories. Let's uh, let's, let's bolster those. Was it like, where, where are you pulling that from?

• 43:18Speaker 01

  At first, they disavowed it. Their first tactic was,

• 43:21Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  No, no, no. You're not seeing anything. You're seeing weather balloons. You're seeing stars. You're seeing whatever. You're, these are the, these, what's annoying about all this disinformation is like, the classic denials are also often correct. In fact, often people were seeing stars or normal airplanes or whatever. But that, they, at first, they denied everything. But later, it seems as if they maybe got more interested in kind of controlling the narrative. Less about kind of full denial and more about like, where it goes. And in fact, you know, I fell so deep into this rabbit hole, Ryan. I, I ended up talking to a guy who runs the Dreamland Resort site. It's like the premier Area 51 site.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  It's like, really the best. It's like, the research is strong. Uh, Georg, he's a German guy, like, moved to the West Coast, ended up living next to Area 51. He said that in the 90s, when this just became, Just like tourist bus going out every single night to Area 51 to look for, you know, look at the skies and see what they saw. You know, he, he also can't confirm this. This is just like rumors, but he's, what he said is he's heard that they would specifically like shine lights onto the mountainsides and like, they would just like make like, like make kind of distractions so that people would be like, oh my God, I saw, I did see an alien.

• 44:44Ryan Broderick?

  That's so funny.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Because it just like, again, you're diverting someone's attention from what you actually don't want them to see and pointing it towards somewhere that's basically like, not, it doesn't bother them at all that people talk about aliens and UFO.

• 44:58Ryan Broderick?

  It's good for them. It's good for them. Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It's covered, baby. And I, I.

• 45:02Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I should say in theory, it's good for them until enough time passes and then our own military starts investigating claims of alien activity.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  This, so, okay, here's, all right, Ryan, I'm going to give you my two genuine conspiracy theories right here, right now.

• 45:17Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Number one, the drone thing. But go back a year. There was a bizarro story about Langley Air Force Base, that there were like 17 drones parked over Langley Air Force Base.

• 45:30Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And the Pentagon came out, this was December 2023, came out and was like, yeah, we saw the drones, we know they're there, no, we can't shoot them down. Like, basically, don't worry about it. And this was reported by the Wall Street Journal. It was like, again, there's like, you know, White House Pentagon spokespeople came out to be like, yes, there were drones. No, I have no explanation for this, but I will say it was different from the New Jersey thing insofar as all of the reporting. So there was a famous problem and remains a famous problem, which is like, one of the ways to describe the story of Area 51 is as a fight between the CIA and the Air Force over resources.

• 46:12Ryan Broderick?

  Classic.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Classic. And there are plenty of examples of one branch of the government seeing the government do something, another branch of the government do something else, and no one's knowing what the fuck one hand is doing. And so there is this way in which something's going on that's weird and a little bit hard to understand. Again, I have no explanation for what those drones over Langley were, but you know, I don't know, that's a thing. Then it's immediately surrounded. Like, very shortly afterwards comes what is a genuine kind of nonsense drone panic, as far as I can tell. And it makes it almost impossible to talk about anything

• 46:56Speaker 01

  that's got more substance to it, because again, it's just surrounded with this kind of like ecosystem of nonsense and bullshit.

• 47:04Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I'm not going to go so far as to say that I even think that that's like was intentionally done, but it bears a very similar pattern. The drone stuff bears a eerily similar pattern to the sort of use of UFO disinformation, just like the idea that like, a lot of talking about UFOs and nonsense is helpful to not be talking about the thing that might actually be a little bit closer to reality.

• 47:29Ryan Broderick?

  Do you want to hear another conspiracy theory?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:32Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. And I don't know if it really counts as a conspiracy theory, but a friend of the podcast, Katie Notopoulos, she messaged me the other day while she was researching a story, which is now out on Business Insider, you can go check it out. She argues, and this is interesting because I hadn't really put this together. So she writes, "There's a history of silly panics in the headlines just before something big happens."

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:53Ryan Broderick?

  "A series of shark attacks dubbed 'The Summer of Shark' dominated the news in late summer 2001. There was the 'Summer of Clown Sightings' in 2016."

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 48:04Ryan Broderick?

  There, I mean, you could honestly say the rushing of Area 51 in 2019. There is this kind of thing that happens where we all get revved up.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:15Ryan Broderick?

  And we're, it's because like, we're clearly like, we're clearly reacting to something in the air, but like, we're putting our attention in the wrong direction.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  This goes back to my cyclical, like, moral panics versus kind of, um, like, QAnon and Satanic panic are panics about, like, the moral fabric of America, right? There are these kinds of, like, Christian-y, good and evil panics, whatever. And they happen in times of, like, internal social strife. Things like the windshield pitting panic, or I would argue, the drone panic right now, they're more outward-looking. They're like, we think something's happening in the geopolitics of the world that's making us very nervous. And we don't know how to talk about it or define it, but I think, like, a sense that we are actively in some kind of Cold War with China, that, like, I think this is providing a lot of fuel. Yeah, we're in a mode, we're in a mode right now.

• 49:08Ryan Broderick?

  It's a mode.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:09Ryan Broderick?

  It's a mode.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Our fears are being expressed, uh, via these, these panics.

• 49:15Ryan Broderick?

  And that explains why these things can go from innocent enough and kind of funny to dark and just never-ending. And since we always like to end this show on a really dour note, where me and my guests talk in circles about how nothing can ever get fixed or feel better, we're going to do just that, but about Area 51, right after the break. Remember, the truth is out there.

• 49:46Ryan Broderick?

  I wanna end today's episode back at the Area 51 raid, because I do think it is this perfect encapsulation of the entire Area 51 conspiracy theory played out in a matter of weeks. Something silly and quirky that is, you know, everyone's kind of in on the joke a little bit, everyone's kind of letting people run with it, whether it's government officials who don't want you to snoop around, or it's the press who are having some fun with a sensationalist story. And then, you know, by the time we get to the, the end of 2019 in our story, things have spun out of control.

• 50:24Ryan Broderick?

  Which is, I think, once again, a perfect metaphor for how we've dealt with Area 51 and the many sort of breakoff conspiracies that come from it ever since it was first set up in the, in the early 30s and 40s. So, okay, we're back in 2019.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:41Ryan Broderick?

  A reporter from The Guardian went to one of the events in Rachel, Nevada. Only a few thousand people showed up, but amongst the attendees, the reporter had this exchange, okay? So this is from the Guardian piece. "Under their frog heads, the Pepe's were two young Latino guys from California. When I asked them what they thought of the frogs' association with the alt-right, one seemed confused. The other nodded in recognition but claimed he thought the symbol was fun. He said, 'It's all about the memes,' finished the other. They both laughed. 'I mean, they're a little, like, extreme for me sometimes,' one said, 'but sometimes you feel like they're right about some stuff.'" I said, 'Like what?' 'Like clown world.' 'What?' 'Clown world.' 'What?' 'Like the idea that we're living in a world of clowns,' he clarified.

• 51:26Ryan Broderick?

  Now, clown world does not refer to the clown motel that you mentioned at the top of the episode, but I'm really happy that you did that because it is a, a great thematic link across the episode. Are you familiar with the, the alt-right concept of clown world?

• 51:39Speaker 01

  No, I don't know what clown world is. Which feels like a big error for me, considering how much I like the clown motel.

• 51:44Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't have a lot to do with actual clowns. It's a, it, it kind of like went out of fashion around the pandemic, but it was like, if you ever see like a Pepe the Frog wearing like a, a rainbow Afro with like a red nose, that's like the symbol for clown world. And it refers to the idea that once you take the black pill, uh, this idea that society cannot be fixed by anything other than accelerationist violence, that you realize that liberals and minorities and gay people and women and Jewish people control the world, quote unquote, and that's clown world.

• 52:25Ryan Broderick?

  And so the reason why everything is bad all the time is because it's clown world. Rational Wiki describes it as like a form of absurdist nihilism. By 2019, conspiracy theories and memes and extremism had all kind of mixed together in this like soup of culture that like no average person could really keep track of anymore.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:51Ryan Broderick?

  The Area 51 swarm is the first time I feel like we can see this. We can see that no one really knows anything anymore, that culture has been flattened in the sense that no one is in charge, no one is determining how important one thing is than the other.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:07Ryan Broderick?

  It's all just the same digital meme soup.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  The world feels really distinctly like that. And, and the ability of, like we were talking about sort of when things tip out of like internet world into real world feels like more unpredictable than ever. Like, I just don't know where the confinement lines exist. Like, they just don't, yes, it does feel like the first harbinger of that world.

• 53:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and it's, you know, in the, in the second section today, when you talked about how the people in charge don't mind the noise, because it gives them cover to do what they want. But if no one in charge is telling people what's going on, this is what happens.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:54Ryan Broderick?

  To basically have like a half century of government conspiracies kind of egged on by pop culture, and then once you go on, once you like turn on the internet, the whole thing just bottoms out. And now it's like the difference between Bob Lazar and an X-Files episode and an internet meme, there really isn't one. And, and we.

• 54:16Ryan Broderick?

  We found some really early evidence of like the way things are moving here. Speaking of 2001, so our researcher Adam found a message board thread from the X-Files forum on Google Groups on 9/11, and I want to read you some of it, alright?

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:34Ryan Broderick?

  So, one user writes, "Personally, I think it's just really tacky and misguided to blame Chris Carter or The Lone Gunmen for what happened today. For one thing, it was just a show." And then another user writes, "As long as fools like you think we do, we will have a liberal media far out of control and easy access by terrorists to our country. Hollywood loves to make money off terrorism but does absolutely nothing to stop it. In fact, Hollywood scum support terrorism by donating thousands if not millions to Middle Eastern quote-unquote activists." Another user writes, "For another thing, the World Trade Center is, parentheses, as evidenced by the big bombing eight years ago, an excellent terrorist target. Whether the terrorists watch The Lone Gunmen or not, the World Trade Center would still have

• 55:18Ryan Broderick?

  been a likely natural target." To which another user wrote, "Spoken like an armchair national security specialist." So this is essentially just X-Files viewers. Are you familiar with The Lone Gunmen 9/11?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  I am very familiar with The Lone Gunmen, yes. They're almost like, it's interesting. I mean, they became like, that's what we all became. Except, except they were kind of nice and innocent and like sort of sweet, and it got much darker, like The Lone Gunmen, like, yeah.

• 55:45Ryan Broderick?

  Spoilers for a 30-year-old TV show, they do die in the end of the X-Files, which I was always upset about. Kind of like off-camera, too. But the reason why these users are arguing about this on 9/11 is because there's an infamous episode of The Lone Gunmen where it essentially does the plot of 9/11 as the show, but it happened years before, months before, possibly. I think it was 2001. But what I think this is like a fantastic example of is that like, the defining mode of the 21st century is reckoning with the conspiratorial atmosphere of the 20th. And things have become so muddled that there is no real difference between a true government conspiracy, a pop culture artifact, or some random whack-job

• 56:27Ryan Broderick?

  on the internet's like fanfiction of reality. And that's what I think Area 51, you said it was a very retro idea, but I think the modern idea of Area 51 is like the moment when that starts.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Well, and for me, there is a real history of Area 51. And the real history is like boring aviation stuff and atomic tests and radar testing. And, you know, I, like I said, I went, I went really deep on this rabbit hole. So I talked to this guy, Jorg, the webmaster of dreamlandresort.com, which is like-

• 57:00Ryan Broderick?

  I would love to be an Area 51 webmaster.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  He's like, and he, he's been doing this for 25 years. He takes it really seriously. He doesn't talk about aliens or UFOs at all. He's like ultra nerd, very serious.

• 57:11Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Two years ago, he was raided by the FBI and the-

• 57:18Ryan Broderick?

  What?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  He was given warrants, but never charged with anything, but they took all of his equipment. He doesn't know why they raided him and he, and he's like a, he's like, he's never been on Area 51. He's like, I will never trespass. I will never fly a drone over it.

• 57:33Ryan Broderick?

  That's crazy.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  He's actually really patriotic. He's like, I, I think, you know, there's like important work that happens there that like keeps the country safe. I'm just interested, like I'm, I'm, it's interesting, the things they developed there. But like, his life actually played out like an X-Files episode. He's like a weird lone researcher, him and his buddies. He is the lone gunman. And then he actually gets raided by the real life FBI. This is not like some crank thing. This is, this happened. And so like, there is realness in the sense that there's stuff that the government wants to keep secret. And there's stuff that they're up to that we don't know about. That is true. It's just, has nothing to do really with the crazy cultural mythologies that most of

• 58:16Speaker 01

  us spend our time reading about and seeing on TikTok and all of this is just, there, there is this sense that there is kind of these two parallel existences. And one is this kind of media ecosphere that is so incredibly noisy. It's hard to kind of get to truth. And then whatever else is happening, that's kind of, you know, I, so I don't want to dismiss everything. Area 51 is not a joke. It's not going anywhere. There's so much infrastructure there. It will continue to, they just set up two FM radio stations. That play like smooth jazz and light rock. And

• 58:54Ryan Broderick?

  That's great.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Maybe people are listening to this.

• 58:57Ryan Broderick?

  Area 51.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but but they did no vocals, only music. And actually, what they're there for is to test something called passive radar. You can use normal radio stations to spot airplanes by using the bounce off the airplanes from like. So they set up radio stations. So they this is what area 51 is doing. It's stuff like that. That's not so sexy. It's not flying saucers.

• 59:18Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  But we live in a different world. We live in the we live in Matty's world, man. We live in the like Naruto run area 51 world, or at least that's the that's the media landscape we all live in now.

• 59:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I my advice for anyone who starts to find themselves kind of spinning out over some kind of government conspiracy, like just take a minute, close the laptop and just like walk into your local DMV and just be like, hmm, do you think the government could possibly do what you think they're doing? Like, do you think that they're run well enough to possibly be able to do what you think they're doing? Because chances are they're probably doing something incremental.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:56Ryan Broderick?

  Kind of boring.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:57Ryan Broderick?

  With a lot of paperwork.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:59Ryan Broderick?

  And a lot of people who don't like each other, but they can't get fired because it's a government job.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Ryan Broderick?

  And they're just sort of out in the desert, fucking around with radars and paint and all kinds of other things. And and like they are doing conspiratorial work, but it's it's not what you think it is.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  It's it's it's probably a lot more like, are they testing secret flying stuff? Like, yeah, they for sure are. Are there any aliens involved? For sure not.

• 1:00:24Ryan Broderick?

  Well, that actually takes me to my last question for the episode.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Ryan Broderick?

  It's very important. Do you think aliens are real? Do you believe in aliens?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:00:32Ryan Broderick?

  Me too.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I don't.

• 1:00:34Ryan Broderick?

  I like that we didn't. I'm glad that we didn't admit that to each other until the end of the episode.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  I do. I don't know that I think they've ever come to earth, though. I think that that's like, like. They're out there. University's a good place.

• 1:00:49Ryan Broderick?

  Go on YouTube.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Ryan Broderick?

  Search Carl Sagan Flatland.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Ryan Broderick?

  If you want to see my take on Alien Activity. I think that's a pretty good depiction.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:58Ryan Broderick?

  But I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was delightful. This is the furthest back in the timeline we've gone on Panic World. So that's actually pretty exciting.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 1:01:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  It feels like there's a lot here, like The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen. There's some kind of blueprint that we're still following.

• 1:01:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, this is great. I love living in a nightmare. In an absolute information nightmare. It's great. If people want to follow you, where can they do that, Dylan?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Oh, Atlas Obscura. We have a great podcast, the Atlas Obscura Podcast. And we talk about, there'll be an episode about Area 51 coming out on there. We'll dig into some of the historical details. And we put out an episode like five days a week, so just come and check one out.

• 1:01:40Ryan Broderick?

  This was fantastic. This was so good.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  It was really fun. It was really cool.

• 1:01:46Ryan Broderick?

  Want to plug our Patreon discount code one more time? Go to patreon.com/panicworld. You can type in PANIC in all caps at checkout. Get our delicious, wonderful content for 50 cents for the first month. Incredible. Wow. I wish food still cost that much. You know what I mean? It's too expensive now.

• 1:02:03Speaker 07

  For the price of one egg, you can listen to this conversation. Go on with Dylan where we...

• 1:02:08Ryan Broderick?

  For the price of a quarter of one egg. You can listen to wonderful bonus content from Panic World. And this week, you can listen to even more of Dylan talking about spooky scary conspiracy stuff behind our paywall in an extra large version of this episode.

• 1:02:28Speaker 07

  There's also a conversation I had with a UFO expert that is solely going to be on our Patreon.

• 1:02:35Ryan Broderick?

  Is it Tom DeLonge?

• 1:02:36Speaker 07

  No, but I talked to Tom DeLonge with this guy many years ago.

• 1:02:40Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:02:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Ryan Broderick?

  I'd like to ask Tom DeLonge why he's not better at playing guitar, seeing as how he's been doing it for 30 years.

• 1:02:47Speaker 07

  So I also have questions about Tom DeLonge's understanding of audio equipment, because when we interviewed him for a podcast, a professional musician called us from the... Line at Starbucks on his cell phone's Bluetooth.

• 1:03:00Ryan Broderick?

  I, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they recorded the new Blink-182 album, because the sound quality's not good on that one. I hope they're not trying to use that album to communicate with aliens across the vast gulf of space, because I'm not sure they'd be able to hear it with that kind of overly compressed drum sound that Travis Barker seems to be so happy with. Anyways, go to patreon.com/panicworld and type "PANIC" in all uppercase at checkout to get our content for 50 cents. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. It's written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by myself, with research from the always fantastic Adam Bumis. A huge thanks to Gabby Cash for designing the incredibly deranged art for this show. And a huge thank you to Kat Rijesk, our lovely video editor.

• 1:03:42Ryan Broderick?

  And if you'd like to sponsor an episode, you can reach out to Multitude, our wonderful partners, multitude-productions ads. We have a Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/panicworld. And I'd like to end this episode with an important reminder. Log off and touch grass while you still can.