THE UNKNOWN: Zone of Silence

Deep in the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico is an area known as The Zone of Silence. It’s a place where radio signals and communications are said to fail and compasses spin out of control. But local legends also say it had properties that draw in meteors, attract UFOs, and may be home to some unearthly creatures.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  We don't just alert, we help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime, in real time. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 0:32Rasha Pecoraro?

  As much as I hate to admit it, we depend on our smartphones for almost everything these days. Need a place to eat? You go on Yelp. Need directions? You go on Google Maps. Flat tire? You call AAA. Everything is right at our fingertips, all the time. I mean, I often say I could run the world with my little iPhone.

• 0:57Rasha Pecoraro?

  In fact, we as humans have become so dependent on this stuff that when we lose service for even a few minutes, we go into panic mode. Why won't my emails load? Why are my texts turning green? Oh my goodness, I hate that. We've also all uttered those famous words. Can you hear me now? Luckily, in this day and age, it's rare to find a place where you're totally without service for more than a few minutes or miles. But what if I told you there was one place on this planet where your precious cellphone would hardly work at all?

• 1:33Yvette Gentile?

  Raj is talking about a roughly 30-mile-wide spot in the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico, and it's called La Zona del Silencio. And while not having service is definitely a terrifying thought, there are actually stranger things going on in this part of the country.

• 1:53Rasha Pecoraro?

  And we'd like to give a small disclaimer here. We will be saying a lot of names in Spanish because our story today takes place in Mexico. So please forgive us if our pronunciation isn't perfect, but no, we will do our very best. I know I want to make my Argentine wife proud. Muchas gracias.

• 2:15Yvette Gentile?

  Yes, please give us grace, y'all. La zona del silencio is a blackout spot for radios. Compasses go askew. Satellite communications don't work. Even car engines reportedly have a hard time starting here. Not only that, it seems to be a place that meteorites are attracted to. A place where a super rare species of plants and animals roam. And where UFOs are seen in abundance. I'm Yvette Gentile.

• 2:51Rasha Pecoraro?

  And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecoraro.

• 2:54Yvette Gentile?

  Get ready for another hush-hush episode of So Supernatural. Because today, we're talking about the zone of silence.

• 3:35Rasha Pecoraro?

  I think, deep down, all of us have this innate fear of being out in the middle of nowhere, all by ourselves, completely and totally lost. You know, walking in circles, sun beating down, shimmering mirages in the distance. No one can hear us if we cry for help. And there's no way to call for it, even if we wanted to.

• 3:58Yvette Gentile?

  I think it taps into this ancestral fear that we all have. I mean, I think about like last summer when Gino and I were in Vegas and we were driving from Vegas to Palm Desert. We stopped at a gas station, got gas, and then all of a sudden our GPS rerouted us, right? We weren't really paying attention. We thought we were getting on the 15 heading to Vegas, but it took us through the frickin' desert. And when I say we were out in the middle of nowhere, I'm talking no gas stations, no cell service. All I could think was, what if the car breaks down? Like, what are we gonna do? There's nobody here.

• 4:40Yvette Gentile?

  You kind of get desperate in those times, you know, of what could possibly go wrong. I think it taps into this ancestral fear we all have. And if you think about centuries ago, if you got lost, most likely it was a death sentence. Maybe you stumbled into an enemy tribe, or maybe you wandered into a den with a wild beast. Maybe you strayed far from civilization. You couldn't find food, firewood, or water. Or worse, you came across a threat you couldn't quite explain.

• 5:17Rasha Pecoraro?

  But now, getting lost rarely happens because we are so connected. We're always at an arm's reach from our smartphone, our GPS, or having some way to call for help, except in the Zone of Silence.

• 5:33Yvette Gentile?

  The Zone of Silence sits in a remote region of northern Mexico called the Chihuahua Desert. It's about 475 miles south of El Paso, Texas, and over 700 miles north of Mexico City. Temperatures can get above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and all roads are few and far between. There's a handful of people who live on the outer edges of the zone, mostly brave ranchers and a few hardy "sonatos," a term for visitors seeking paranormal experiences. And these folks live in small towns like Mapimí.

• 6:13Yvette Gentile?

  An old mining village with a population of about 6,000 people that sits about 90 miles away. The zone also overlaps with the Mapimy Biosphere Reserve, an ecological reserve spanning over 1,300 square miles. So despite being in a searing desert, the zone has an abundance of wildlife, something like 400 plant species, 31 of which are only found in this region of Mexico, like the purple-tinted nopal, which is a prickly pear cactus. And there's also about 500 species of reptiles, with supposedly a high concentration of them being albino.

• 6:59Yvette Gentile?

  This is so difficult to come out of my mouth because, just wait for it, there's even accounts of foot-long insects, centipedes with purple heads and other super-sized form of bugs. You will not find me in the Zone of Silence, nowhere to be found. Okay, I'm just saying. But when most people talk about the Zone of Silence, they aren't telling stories about the wildlife. Those who've spent time there say there's something almost, let's just say, supernatural about the area. It's said that compasses spin wildly, like I said before, electronics go haywire.

• 7:42Yvette Gentile?

  According to one reputable travel site, engines even stop working there. And not just on the ground, but in the skies above too.

• 7:55Rasha Pecoraro?

  That's how the Zone of Silence was basically discovered. It nearly killed an airplane pilot named Francisco Saravia. Francisco was a famous Mexican pilot and adventurer back in the 1930s. He was on par with the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. And he was obsessed with breaking long-distance flight records. One day, now, we don't know exactly when, but he took off from a local airstrip near the Zone of Silence. Sarabia was training to break Amelia Earhart's non-stop speed record from Mexico City to New York. So while we don't know where he was headed, we believe it could have been New York. But that afternoon, as soon as he reached the airspace

• 8:40Rasha Pecoraro?

  over the Zone of Silence, he lost contact with air traffic controllers and people on the ground. Even worse, his equipment was going crazy, supposedly spinning completely out of control. We don't know if he was flying during the day or in cloudy conditions, but whatever the case was, this could have been deadly. Miraculously, Francisco made it through and survived. Again, we don't know exactly where he landed, but apparently, he told everyone about his bizarre experience flying over the area. And that was the first documented encounter with the Zone of Silence. Though at the time,

• 9:23Rasha Pecoraro?

  it hadn't received its ominous name just yet. That didn't happen for another 30 years, when a scientist visited and was absolutely shocked by what he found there.

• 9:35Yvette Gentile?

  In 1966, a respected chemist named Augusto de la Peña organized an expedition to the creepy patch of desert in northern Mexico. De la Peña was teaching chemistry at the Institute of Technology of Laguna at the time, about 100 miles from the Zone. There are conflicting explanations for what first drove him to the Zone of Silence. One source said it was a photographic safari to document the area's unique, some say, alien purple cacti. Other accounts claim it was to scout for petroleum for a Mexican oil company called Paymax.

• 10:18Yvette Gentile?

  Either way, De La Peña and a well-outfitted crew headed out there with handheld walkie-talkies, cameras, and maybe even oil-surveilling equipment. But as soon as they turned off the main road and started trekking deeper into the desert, something strange happened. Their radios cut out. At first, De La Peña assumed the batteries were dead. Maybe he had forgotten to replace the old batteries with the new ones. So they tossed the unusable radios in the back of their trucks and continued on, further into the desert. Until that night, when things got a bit weirder.

• 10:58Yvette Gentile?

  After a long day of research, the team left the zone when suddenly, those seemingly-dead radios started crackling back to life. Now they knew the batteries weren't the problem. Something else was affecting their devices. And De La Peña, being a scientist, wanted to get to the bottom of what it was. So he came up with some experiments to figure it out. He and his team roamed around the zone, testing where the radios worked and where they didn't. They went up to the top of the hills and they went to the bottom of the valleys and the basins. And there was no rhyme or reason for the loss of signal.

• 11:40Yvette Gentile?

  De La Peña's team theorized it might have been caused by deposits of iron or another heavy element in the ground. But the radio blackouts weren't the only strange thing De La Peña found in the desert. At times, their other equipment stopped working too. Their trucks, the compasses, TVs, and so forth. When they finally made it out of the zone, De La Peña officially dubbed the area Zona del Silencio, or "The Zone of Silence." From that moment on, the area became synonymous with the tales of strange encounters.

• 12:23Yvette Gentile?

  Including, another shocking story that came three years later.

• 12:30Rasha Pecoraro?

  On February 8th, 1969, around 1 o'clock in the morning, in the nearby town of Sabayos, a young woman named Maria Sanchez woke to a thunder rumbling outside her adobe home. After a moment, it evolved into a hissing, crackling sound. Suddenly, the night sky lit up, bright as day. It flooded through the windows of Maria's home. She was convinced that the world was about to end. She fell to her knees, gathering her children around her to pray. They closed their eyes and waited to be taken to heaven. Then, far in the distance, a giant explosion detonated.

• 13:15Rasha Pecoraro?

  Moments later, a shockwave blasted across the countryside, shattering the glass windows in Maria's home. When the dusk cleared, Maria and others in town realized they were still alive. It wasn't the end of the world. It was a meteorite, one that had crashed near the Zone of Silence. It was dubbed the Allende Meteorite, after the name of another nearby town. Scientists determined the hunk of rock hurtling towards Earth was about the size of a car and going more than 36,000 miles per hour. And this wasn't the first time a huge space rock had impacted the zone.

• 13:58Rasha Pecoraro?

  There had been others reported in 1938 and in 1954. There are limited details about those crashes, but what we do know is the first two landed in almost the exact same spot on a farmer's ranch. And the Allende Meteorite landed nearby, just a bit to the west.

• 14:20Yvette Gentile?

  To say that's rare is a total understatement.

• 14:24Rasha Pecoraro?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 14:26Yvette Gentile?

  And even though there are thousands of meteors that hit our atmosphere yearly, I mean, most burn up before they hit the Earth's surface. And some studies show that only a handful of larger meteorites make it to the ground each year. And considering the Earth has over 5 billion square feet of surface area, the chances of three meteorites landing in the same area are minuscule.

• 14:56Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yeah, that's not a coincidence. Well, within days of the collision, scientists flocked to the zone to hunt for pieces of the Allende meteorite, probably hoping to find why these space rocks kept crashing there. According to the Mexican publication El Siglo, one of those experts was a notorious figure we've mentioned in recent So Supernatural episodes: Nazi rocket scientist Werner von Braun. After World War II, von Braun was brought to the US and helped the government build its space program. We also talked about how he may have helped build the Vatican's chronovisor. But now, he had his sights set on the Zone of Silence.

• 15:42Rasha Pecoraro?

  In May 1970, a private plane carrying von Braun touched down on a dirt airstrip near Ceballos. A local journalist got wind of it and made some calls to the US Embassy in Mexico City to learn more. According to the American spokespeople, von Braun was there to see the Allende meteorite impact in person. Apparently, the journalist found this wasn't von Braun's first trip to the Zone of Silence, though details on any of his previous trips are pretty much nonexistent. During that 1970 trip, however, we do know that he stayed for about 24 hours and then left. We don't know what he found, what he was looking for,

• 16:26Rasha Pecoraro?

  or even why he was there. But we do know it wouldn't be the last time von Braun went to the Zone of Silence. In fact, he'd return in only a few short months, because there was another object on a collision course with the zone, this time from the American military.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  And I'm Britt. And if you're on the edge of your seat listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into. From lesser-known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines. And I'm gonna walk you through it the way I tell my best friend, because, well, that's what I'm doing.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the questions.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  And I'm gonna have the answers, because we have case files. We're talking to detectives and family members, and we're gonna stay focused on the facts.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  And you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:50Yvette Gentile?

  On July 11, 1970, a year and a half after the Allende meteorite, the US Air Force fired a missile into the sky. At 2:40 a.m. in the dead of night, the rocket took off from the Green River Launch Complex in southern Utah. Even though it was in the middle of the Cold War, the target wasn't the Soviet Union, North Vietnam, or any other enemy. It was the US. The rocket was supposed to be headed for the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, 650 miles south. And it wasn't just any rocket. It was an Athena missile.

• 18:32Yvette Gentile?

  Basically, a scaled-down nuclear projectile. Plus, the Athena had real radioactive material onboard: two small pellets of Cobalt-57, which is a radioactive isotope. But the mission did not see the intended results.

• 18:52Rasha Pecoraro?

  What should have been a routine flight of only a few minutes went totally sideways. An in-flight malfunction caused the projectile to veer off course. Instead of heading for White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, it appeared to be headed for an area in the country of Mexico. Military engineers and flight staff tried everything to redirect the missile, but to no avail. The only question now was, where would it land? Hopefully not in a populated city or in a town. Military radar tracked it for a while, but then lost it when it disappeared over the horizon. Engineers' screens went dark.

• 19:35Rasha Pecoraro?

  The missile, along with its nuclear payload, were gone. At least until the next day. That's when National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote a classified memo to then-President Richard Nixon. It advised the president that the Athena had landed about 200 miles off course, in a "sparsely populated area in Mexican territory." Over the next several weeks, a team was assembled to find and recover the missile. An airplane sensor detected the radioactive signature of the Cobalt 57 two weeks later, and a ground crew was dispatched to the scene.

• 20:15Rasha Pecoraro?

  That included engineers, soldiers, and interpreter, and you guessed it, Wernher von Braun. Which meant von Braun was headed back to the Zone of Silence. The team was hopeful they'd be in and out quickly. After all, this was the US military. Finding a missile in the desert and cleaning up the debris should be an easy job for them, right?

• 20:40Yvette Gentile?

  Well, not exactly. It turns out either the Zone of Silence had other plans for them, or there were covert government decisions happening behind the scenes. Because the mission stretched from days to weeks to a couple of months. And from the start, the team encountered strange electronic malfunctions.

• 21:03Yvette Gentile?

  Search pilots lost contact with ground crews, staff on the ground lost contact with each other, and it wasn't only radio communications, but satellite signals and TV monitors as well. It felt like something or someone was hacking their connection to the outside world. And yet, in spite of the setbacks, Von Braun's team kept searching for that rocket, until finally, they located the debris. The impact zone was relatively small, and radiation from the Cobalt 57 was isolated. I mean, it should have been a quick cleanup, but it didn't turn out that way at all.

• 21:45Rasha Pecoraro?

  The team hired 300 workers, many of them locals, to build a 10-mile train track into the Zone of Silence to help out. They constructed dormitories, labs, kitchens, and medical facilities. They even hired locals to guard the crash site. It no longer seemed like a simple cleanup. This now looked like a full-on research mission to study the Zone of Silence. But why?

• 22:14Yvette Gentile?

  Well, some think Von Braun discovered something huge during his scouting mission that previous February. Maybe when he returned to the US, he and the Pentagon came up with a plot to launch a missile there, basically, as a decoy.

• 22:29Rasha Pecoraro?

  What, like a government cover-up?

• 22:32Yvette Gentile?

  Well, who would have thought, right? I mean, that way, Von Braun could go back and he could spend months hunting in the desert without raising any red flags. And not for the rocket, though. His mission would be to collect something else. The question was, what? Some people think it was a meteorite, which can contain valuable materials: iron ores, platinum, iridium, and gold. The Ayende meteorite was reported to contain substances that were 193 million years older than the oldest rocks on the Earth. So, let's just say,

• 23:16Yvette Gentile?

  those would be priceless scientific specimens.

• 23:21Yvette Gentile?

  Regardless of what they were searching for, one thing was certain. The longer they stayed, the stranger things got.

• 23:30Rasha Pecoraro?

  The locals who were hired to guard the crash site reported sightings of mutated animals and plants, magnetic rocks, and strange lights in the sky. It's not clear if these reports were true. Maybe the locals were just trying to scare away the Americans, or maybe trying to bolster the legend of the Zone of Silence so they could attract more visitors. Regardless, the US military soon wrapped up their mission. In October 1970, three months after the Athena crashed, the "cleanup" was said to be complete. Officially, 60 barrels of material from the desert were loaded onto a train. A local newspaper claimed

• 24:15Rasha Pecoraro?

  that 200,000 tons of dirt from the Zone of Silence were removed, though that may have been an exaggeration. But you have to wonder, was that contaminated soil from the Athena rocket? Some rare element from a crashed meteorite? Or something even more rare? Like UFO technology?

• 24:38Yvette Gentile?

  Yeah, Rasha, you know what I'm thinking. You know what they're doing. They're doing some reverse engineering. That is my thought on it.

• 24:45Rasha Pecoraro?

  You always jump to alien technology, reverse engineering.

• 24:50Yvette Gentile?

  Why would you need... What are you searching for?

• 24:52Rasha Pecoraro?

  Right.

• 24:53Yvette Gentile?

  Anyhow, the Zone of Silence has had numerous reports of strange flying objects. Ranchers living near the zone have spoken of bizarre lights in the sky, and there have been eyewitness accounts of mysterious flying objects often described as "dislike." I mean, some locals have even reported finding physical evidence of these UFOs, like burnt plants and weird rock formations that seem melted by, let's just say, an alien propulsion system. The problem is, details and actual sources, again, are far and few between.

• 25:35Yvette Gentile?

  For the most part, it feels like, I don't know, folk tales and rumors, until you hear the more detailed stories, like this next one.

• 25:48Rasha Pecoraro?

  Benjamin Palacios Periches was a retired lawyer, teacher, and politician who lived on a ranch near the Zone of Silence. According to him, when he was 13 years old, he and his 15-year-old brother, Raimundo, went to see a movie in a nearby town. After the movie ended, they headed home. Halfway back, around 1:30 in the morning, a bright light swooped down from the heavens and hovered right in front of their car. The light was so blinding, the two brothers had to shield their eyes. As their eyes adjusted, they were able to make out some sort of glowing orb. It hovered in front of them and then shot into the distance

• 26:32Rasha Pecoraro?

  at an unimaginable speed before disappearing. The brothers were left in total shock. They couldn't believe what they had just witnessed. Had it been an experimental aircraft? A UFO? Or something else altogether? They continued on their way home, probably wondering what they were going to tell their parents. But when they finally walked in the door, they saw on the clock, it was close to 5 o'clock in the morning. They had experienced a huge gap of missing time, which, as we know, with our conspiracy UFO so supernatural hats on, this is commonly reported and it's a phenomenon that happens

• 27:16Rasha Pecoraro?

  a lot of times when someone encounters a UFO, right?

• 27:20Yvette Gentile?

  Totally, yes. No one really knows what the Periches brothers saw that night, but they weren't alone. In September 1976, a giant aircraft was seen hovering over the town of Sabayos, outside the Zone. Locals estimated it to be 200 feet long. They described it as rectangular with a curve at the top. Unlike man-made jets, this one glowed and was dotted with white, blue, and green lights around the edge. The thing that stood out the most to witnesses was how quiet it was. There were no whooshing engines or the roar of jets.

• 28:04Yvette Gentile?

  It was utterly silent. And we have heard this statement many times before. The Sabayos UFO was noteworthy for another reason, though. It wasn't just witnessed by one or two people. Twenty residents gathered on the town's main street to see the craft. Even the chief of police and mayor saw it. And the mayor said, this is a quote, "It was like we were being watched." And after two or three minutes, people became very worried. It was a very frightening experience. That's really interesting to me because there are so many people in the different cases that we've covered that say the opposite thing.

• 28:49Yvette Gentile?

  They say that it's like it puts them in this awe moment, right? And not so much frightening.

• 28:56Rasha Pecoraro?

  Right, but the 20 people that saw it felt fear, it seemed like.

• 29:00Yvette Gentile?

  Right, yeah.

• 29:02Rasha Pecoraro?

  Well, scientists who have gone and studied the Zone of Silence have also reported strange things from above. An astronomer named Isaac Ramos said, "We have witnessed lights in the sky that don't behave like a satellite, airplane, shooting star, or helicopter. We don't know what it is. We have no explanation, and it falls into the category of a UFO." Some have even reported seeing these UFOs parked on the ground. Dr. Luis Maeda, a botanist and zoologist, claimed to witness a six-mile-long rectangular-shaped object in the zone.

• 29:45Rasha Pecoraro?

  And he claimed it was intelligently made. It's unclear how old the structure was, who built it, or what it represented. But there's speculation it might have been some sort of landing pad or even navigation lines for alien spacecraft. But it's not just flying discs and man-made structures people are spotting in the Zone of Silence. Some claim to have seen real-life aliens there, too.

• 30:16Yvette Gentile?

  This story predates Augusto de la Peña's expedition to the zone, so it must have happened before 1966. And it goes something like this. A respected local rancher named Rosendo Aguilera went camping in the zone with a few of his ranch hands. One night, as the men bedded down in their canvas tents, Aguilera claimed he was attacked by a humanoid-like monster. It was dark and the ranchers didn't have flashlights, only the dying glow of their campfire, so they didn't get a good look at it. What they did see was the beast seemed to have otherworldly strength.

• 30:59Yvette Gentile?

  It took the help of several cowboys to get it off of Aguilera. Once the rancher was free of the monster's clutches, he and his men chased the beast away from the camp, pursuing it until they lost it in the darkness. And according to one Mexican government official, "There are lots of stories of aliens in the zone. People often get lost in the zone. And when this happens, sometimes tall blond beings appear out of nowhere." And to be clear, this official wasn't talking about a group of Scandinavian tourists. He is talking about extraterrestrials.

• 31:41Rasha Pecoraro?

  So we weren't able to track down many specifics about these particular encounters. But according to local legend, people have come across "tall, fair-haired aliens" out in the middle of the zone. And unlike the encounter Aguilera had, these beings are described as peaceful individuals who sometimes even speak perfect Spanish. If asked where they come from, the beings say "from above." And they've been spotted walking away without leaving so much as a footprint behind.

• 32:20Yvette Gentile?

  After hearing all of this, I mean, it's hard to argue that there isn't something strange going on in the zone of silence. But we beg to ask the question again. Why here? What gives this place its unique properties? And what makes it so special? And is it something that is naturally occurring? Or is it something more, let's just say, supernatural?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  We don't just alert. We help stop crime before it starts. Plans starting around a dollar a day. Right now, get 60% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime. SimpliSafe, ahead of crime in real time. Outdoor deterrence plans start at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  And I'm Britt. And if you're on the edge of your seat listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into. From lesser-known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines, and I'm gonna walk you through it the way I tell my best friend, because, well, that's what I'm doing.

• 33:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the questions.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  And I'm gonna have the answers, because we have case files, we're talking to detectives and family members, and we're gonna stay focused on the facts.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  And you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:20Yvette Gentile?

  Okay, we have dead radios, cataclysmic meteorites, top-secret military missions, aliens and UFOs. What is happening out in the Zone of Silence?

• 34:35Rasha Pecoraro?

  Some of these issues could be connected, or possibly just coincidences. So we're going to try our best to explain them one by one. Let's start with the dead radios and other electronics. This seems to be the most consistent phenomenon reported in the Zone, experienced by everyone, from pilot Francisco Sarabia, to Werner von Braun, to modern-day tourists. The most obvious explanation is that radio waves can be affected by natural geographic formations, meaning hills, valleys, and mountains. But out in the Zone, that doesn't seem to matter. According to accounts of Augusto de la Peña's expedition,

• 35:20Rasha Pecoraro?

  they tested their radios on the highest points around, and they still didn't work. So there must be something else affecting them, namely, heavy minerals. Two of those possibilities are iron ores and other magnetic minerals. Iron ores, especially one called magnetite, are the most magnetic naturally occurring minerals on Earth. The Zone has numerous deposits of it.

• 35:51Yvette Gentile?

  But there could be something else affecting the electronics. Dr. Sergio Flores is a Zone of Silence expert and chemist who studied at Stanford University. He theorized that there was another substance far beneath the Earth's crust that could be interfering with the radio waves in that area. Dr. Flores thinks that a giant pull of superheated plasma below the surface, either water, oil, or magma, could create magnetic vortexes and distort the normal magnetic pull on Earth. And it's possible that the zone's magnetic field could be what's causing more meteorites to land there.

• 36:36Yvette Gentile?

  Another offshoot of this theory is that the meteorites themselves could be creating a magnetic pull. And what happens when you put two very strong magnets next to each other? They attract and gravitate towards one another. As more meteorites hit the zone, they could be compounding, adding more magnetic pull and causing more to land there. So basically, it's a snowball effect. Each one adds to the mass of magnetic material drawing in more objects.

• 37:13Rasha Pecoraro?

  Like, say, maybe the Athena rocket? Could the magnetic properties of the zone have, A, thrown the missile off course, and/or, B, pulled it into the desert there?

• 37:26Yvette Gentile?

  I mean, anything's possible, but I would say it's unlikely the zone affected the electronics of the missile. I mean, when the missile went rogue, it was hundreds of miles from the zone, and radios even a few miles from the zone work fine. So I don't think it has enough power to affect a rocket that far away. However, let's just say the rocket lost navigation, and it was already headed into northern Mexico. Maybe the zone's magnetism pulled it in, just like the meteorites. I mean, we can think of it like a gentle force that seems to nudge objects to land there.

• 38:06Yvette Gentile?

  Though, there is still the theory that the US government meant for the rocket to crash there so they could just study the area more covertly. Werner von Braun had more than one trip to the zone, and within months of his scouting trips, an Athena rocket went off course exactly to the Zone of Silence. And what should have been a few days of cleanup turned into two to three months. And it seems odd that a cleanup mission would have needed dormitories and labs. I mean, maybe they were harvesting some kind of rare element from a meteorite.

• 38:49Yvette Gentile?

  And perhaps one that might have led to advancements in weapons, space travel, or other technologies. As we know, 60 barrels of material were shipped out. This has me putting on my silver cap, saying, "Conspiracy theory all over it."

• 39:14Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yeah, your sister agrees.

• 39:17Yvette Gentile?

  But sadly, there's no way to prove any of it unless the US government declassifies all of the files for the operation. For now, I guess, y'all, we just have to be content with this being a really strange story. You know, we are not content with just that.

• 39:35Rasha Pecoraro?

  We're not. Well, after the Athena rocket, we're left with the UFO and alien sightings, which are always tougher to explain away. For one, they're mostly older accounts from the 1960s and 1970s, so it's hard to corroborate. But some think the high number of accounts is due to more people being dehydrated and disoriented by the zone's environment. Some research has shown that people who report UFO encounters have a higher prevalence of hallucinations under extreme conditions, too. Since details about the encounters in the zone are so limited, it's challenging to

• 40:18Rasha Pecoraro?

  nail down exactly what happened. For example, let's take the story of Rosendo Aguilera. We heard that he and his men were out in the desert, and he was attacked. Perhaps they had ventured farther out than planned, maybe they ran out of water, uh, maybe they were drinking a little bit, or perhaps Aguilera accidentally ingested piote, which is a native Mexican plant with hallucinogenic properties, and it was very popular at the time. Current-day visitors to the Zone may be even more susceptible to psychological manifestations of UFOs and aliens, simply because

• 41:02Rasha Pecoraro?

  they've been conditioned to expect them there. Kind of like if you were going to a haunted house, you expect to see a ghost, right? When people visit the Zone of Silence, a place so isolated and vast, their minds can become hyperactive. In that void of stimuli, perhaps their imaginations run wild. And some psychological studies show that people who are unaccustomed to the wide-open spaces of deserts can feel heightened anxiety or even paranoia. There's also the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy or confirmation bias. People may want to believe that there's something going on

• 41:47Rasha Pecoraro?

  in the Zone of Silence so they can see anything that fits that belief. I get that.

• 41:53Yvette Gentile?

  I totally get that, like that heightened sense of anxiety. Because when we got lost, you know, going from Vegas to Palm Desert, and we were out in the middle of the desert, your mind goes to the worst-case scenario. So...

• 42:06Rasha Pecoraro?

  You couldn't call your sister to...

• 42:08Yvette Gentile?

  Yeah, yeah, there was no service. So I get that.

• 42:10Rasha Pecoraro?

  To freak out, yeah.

• 42:12Yvette Gentile?

  But there's also another factor at work, one that we mentioned earlier, that some people in the Zone also may have created, or at least perpetuated, myths to bolster business and tourism in the area. Life in the desert towns outside the Zone aren't always easy, and there aren't that many jobs for the locals. So, remember Ben Hamim Palacios Perchez? The guy who encountered a UFO on the way back from the movies? He plans to transform his modest homestead in the desert into a mecca for Zonero tourists. Basically, he hopes to make it into Mexico's Area 51 attracting tourists,

• 42:57Yvette Gentile?

  sightseers, and UFO enthusiasts year-round. But none of that changes the facts or explains all the strange phenomena at the Zone. I know that we both believe that if someone says they experienced a UFO or a strange supernatural experience, we like to believe that they are speaking their truth.

• 43:22Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yes, their truth is their truth. For me, the zone is a reminder that despite our technological advances, the world still has corners we can't fully map out or understand. Not just with GPS, but even in our own imaginations. The zone of silence is powerful because it's not just quiet, it's layered. There's the physical silence, but also cultural silence, mythical silence, and the silence of the unknown. It reminds us that some places aren't meant to be fully explained.

• 44:04Rasha Pecoraro?

  And maybe part of the magic is that we don't truly understand it. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be.

• 44:14Yvette Gentile?

  I like that. But it also is a deeper connection to our ancestral past. That desire to explore and learn more about what we don't know. So if you ever find yourself on a dusty road in northern Mexico, heading toward no cell service, take a deep breath, pause for a moment, ground yourself, show respect to the land, the people, and their stories, and simply savor the quiet and stillness all around you.

• 45:08Rasha Pecoraro?

  This is So Supernatural, an AudioChuck original, produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com. Join me and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

• 45:28Rasha Pecoraro?

  I think Chuck would approve.

• 45:33Speaker 06

  When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir. And that can only mean one thing. Full Body Chills is back. This season, step inside original tales where every doorway leads somewhere darker, every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful. You never know what might follow you home. So gather round, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.