Today Farz tells the once-secret story of the creation of the SR-71 Blackbird stealth plane. Fasten your seatbelts as we unveil the mysteries and stories behind the iconic SR-71 Blackbird. From its groundbreaking design to the classified missions that pushed the boundaries of aviation, we'll explore the high-altitude adventures and the brave pilots who soared into the pages of history. Get ready to soar at Mach 3 and beyond as we lift the veil on the Blackbird Chronicles.
Today Farz tells the once-secret story of the creation of the SR-71 Blackbird stealth plane. Fasten your seatbelts as we unveil the mysteries and stories behind the iconic SR-71 Blackbird. From its groundbreaking design to the classified missions that pushed the boundaries of aviation, we'll explore the high-altitude adventures and the brave pilots who soared into the pages of history. Get ready to soar at Mach 3 and beyond as we lift the veil on the Blackbird Chronicles.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
[Music] in a matter of the people of the State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09 and so my
fellow Americans ask not what your country can
do for you boom we're back on a presum presumably cold um Wednesday at this
point now I hope we don't have to like release this after you've been frozen to death so take care of yourself I have I
actually went got plenty of firewood good because in Texas the only assurance is caveman meat yes
so um sweet uh so I'm gonna go ahead and kick things off Taylor with my topic
which is GNA be a little weird for usual it's not be like the normal thing so
normal what is normal what even is normal I can't wait so I'm gonna have
you guess oh God I get what do the CIA Bill Clinton in the
mark Mariana Trench have in common they're all deep and dark and there's things in
there that we don't know what they are it always circles back to ep's list
um exactly so no no um I I saw a meme on
Instagram recently and it featured this specific aircraft that I think we've probably all seen and but like probably
don't even really think about very much anymore and it let me down a rabbit hole where I found like a ton of fascinating info and I thought it' be a pretty good
topic for discussion here so I'm going to be discussing the conception career
and the doomed to fail demise of the legendary aircraft the SR71 also known
as Blackbird you know what that is co no that's very exciting you look very excited too so I feel excited that
you're excited it is God like I feel like every kid growing up
like looked at postas was like I want to be in that thing one day yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I'm totally sure it looks so
cool um so I broke this down to several components like the first piece of it the First Act is going to be the
conception so okay I'm going down we're going we're going to take some wild turns here tayor just stick with me okay
I'm excited to get to the Mariana Trench because that feels like the opposite of where you want to be if you're in a plane that is the very last thing we're
going to cover so I'm Gonna Keep The Nail biters here until we're done okay so you're forced to listen to me can't
wait so I'm going to start the topic of the conception of the Blackbird by
starting with the US intelligence Community as a whole so the further you dig into funding and budgets for the
intelligence Community the more you realize how entirely opaque the whole process is and how little is exposed to
the public I have yet to find a reliable source on how budgets actually work with
the 18 agencies that comprise the US intelligence Community also that blw me away 18 agencies that's literally what
the totality of What's called the IC the intelligence commun of the United States compose of I think of mostly CIA FBI NS
but like there's uh SP 15s 15 others yeah um whoa
there was I just to to to interrupt we were watching Family Guy yesterday or
the other day and they talk about Harvard and they're like Harvard has you know illustrious alumni and then they
show um Ted Cruz Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon and they showed the unibomber and then they pause and they go we apologize
to Ted kazinski for putting you in that group but I was telling Juan how like Harvard ruined Ted
kazinski because yeah LSC yeah they broke his brain yeah um well actually I
think the CIA commission Harvard Harvard consented to doing it so I don't I don't
know I don't know who's more complicit there but someone El though so I started digging into this so basically the whole
this is all pretty common knowledge so the way that the federal government budget works is that agencies put together their budgets and they submit
it to Congress and Congress has to basically rubber stamp it and they say Yep this funding is appropriated and
things keep keep running it is way more complicated in that like what I learned is that actually it's a three-year
process so from when you submit a budget to Congress until those funds are
actually used it takes about three years so like the process for the money is
allocated this year started in 2022 like that's how long of a of a
cycle that is but what's really interesting and something that I cannot
figure out is how money for the community intelligence Community gets
allocated I I found this like Harvard research paper on it and it also was basically just citing the same other
stats and resources I found everywhere else but one thing that I noticed is that the more I dig into like every now
and then we'll do a topic and I can feel my own personal like political
affiliations kind of moving and shifting underneath me and that's kind of what I thought when I
when I dug deeper into this because to get to the bottom of how black budgets are spent you back your way into it by
looking at how overall budgets are spent so I I pulled up this stat which like blew me away so in
2022 the federal government budgeted 4 1 trillion for the year 2023 so last year
for mandatory spending of that of the 4.1 trillion 82%
or 3.4 trillion could be addressed by just fixing three societal problems we
have how health insurance Works yes our ability to save money for retirement and
student loans oh oh really that's it that's it like those three things
so again like I'm not advocating for this but by comparison all we ever talk about like societally is how much we
spend on our military and we spend a ton we spend more than the next like I forgot what it was it was like 20 30
countries combined or something um it is we spent five times more
addressing those three issues than we do on our military and it's not fixing it because because if
you look at it you're like okay so let me get this straight so because because there's no cap and limit to how
companies can how how much it costs to get basic medical procedures done and
because of a convoluted Insurance system that creates all this middleman process in the middle there we blow up our costs
on that front which means we all end up paying for it through tax dollars that we then tax to pay for the retirement of
Elders out of our own resources which going to go bankrupt anyways it's just like it's like it's so
crazy it's like it's like just literally just fix the health care problem it means people can save their own money
for retirement right it's just like and and then you get into like
schools and you're like wait so this turned into a business when this like L like $50,000 a a year for a [ __ ]
undergrad degree it's like crazy like so anyways I went agree agree to agree on
all those things I went through a whole feelings thing with this I'm very excited for in the next 10 minutes when
like the CIA bursts into your house so I know right the amount of Googling I did on this I was like yep that's being
tracked that's being tracked that got tracked that keyst stroke was tracked like just really the men and black are
gonna show up it's GNA be very exciting 100 100% so the intelligence community's funding
falls under a single umbrella um which so basically all 18 agencies it's
intelligence Community that's the budget that's where the budget goes so by all
accounts the rough approximation of how much was budgeted for the entire intelligence Community these 18 agencies
was 90 billion dollars um so basically for this for this year
you're saying for last year okay yeah it was two years ago but it was four last
year so if anybody looks into this like I know that there's two categories here
there's Military Intelligence programs there's National Intelligence programs I'm bucketing them all into one the military is significantly lower than the
National Intelligence but anyways like that's I just know that if you look this status up I'm just including them on to
one um this is part of our defense spending and is unique from the rest of
the budget process part because budgets aren't line item here so the obvious reason why that is is because they need
the ability to create what's called black budgets which is off the book spending that not even Congress has
access to so like it is very very like top secret National Intelligence and
stuff um and and that's the point of it the point of it is to be able to kind of create and run and operate um classified
projects so and I'm sure that I've been propagandized to be like yeah of course what do you mean like I've
watched a lot of like movies and like TV shows where I'm like of course they need a black budget you
know yeah well I mean like here's the thing I I would say that after learning what I've learned here I'm like yeah we
do we actually tangibly do um and this project is a really good case case study
of why that is and this is the only one that we really like I mean sure we know of a lot of them now but like I don't know what's being worked on right now
like what's being worked on right now might be like something we'll never we won't even know in our lifetimes right so um so it was from this budget What's
called the black budget that the Air Force and the CIA joined forces because they're part of the intelligence
Community um they joined forces to plan the creation of a plane which at the time was codeen named arcan which is rad
just absolutely rad so a little bit of background a little bit of history on this so in 1956
the US created a spy plane called the U2 it was built to fly incredibly high and
take incredibly high quality pictures of the train below during the height of the Cold War on May 1st 1960 one of these
planes was flying over the Soviet Union when it was shot down by a servac air missile the this was basically an
incredibly huge PR disaster for the United States and there was on one
account I remember I read um Eisenhower told this secretary that he was ready to quit his job like he was just like so
ashamed and embarrassed because at this time when Cru was essentially the grace
that the Soviets gave America was Alan Dulles the head of the CIA probably did this on his own and didn't even tell the
president so like let's not just throw everything out as far as our negotiations on a peace treaty here
because he's a b right dullas yeah dullas was definit bad yeah um so again
huge disaster for the US and Eisenhower and cruise shf agree that the US will
never fly spy planes over the Soviet Union again that was kind of the agreement like we're going to put an
ironclad treaty in place it's not gonna happen again so knowing this
obviously Allan dos was like cool we have a problem now we need a plan that just can't get can't ever be caught yeah
yeah yeah of course like of course they didn't really do that yeah of course not the pro the problem was that we can't do this it was like okay now we just got to
figure out how not to not to get caught doing this again so they approached the recipient of a ton of Black Project
money um Contracting L Martin to develop and build such an aircraft so in 1962
they signed a contract to build six planes that at the time had the designation and still do of SR71 that's
what I've been referring to as blackbird so SR71 Blackbird same thing I see it the basic requirements were three-fold
had to fly super high had to fly super fast and had to stay completely under wraps that's it that was the that was
the idea so Loy Martin had a division focused entirely on building projects like this it's called Skunk Works which
is now like a youthemism used by any sort of company that has like a like an in-house specialty projects thing but
all origin have lucky Martin yeah exactly and basically like if you look at the list of like the projects Skunk
Works has worked on it's it's like every insane plane that has ever
existed so for example any time you hear reports out of something happening or
someone citing something out of um Area 51 it's probably a Skunk Works plan like
to to that point even the initial test flights done for the SR71 they were all done Area 51 nice for context so so
creating a plane that can fly high and fast enough to basically outperform any other plane or Miss for that matter in
the world was a pretty tall order and what it essentially means is they had to basically invent all new processes and
Technologies and Manufacturing capabilities all it from the ground up
I'll go through what it takes to basically operate this thing later on but it's crazy the amount of work they
had to go into this they had to basically figure out how a new way for engines to work for fuel to be stored
how to ensure survivability a whole host of other stuff that will will will go into the details up have you looked have
you looked this plane up before Taylor I'm looking I'm looking at it right now it looks silly describe it it's like got like a
big front part and then it has like little engines and wings on the back but like
the the front part is very like oblong and big right yes yeah I think it looks silly it does look like a bird doesn't
not look like a bird Taylor looks more like a bird than other planes Taylor you say silly I say probably God ass um yes
let's figure out whoever wants please write in let's get we we'll do a poll is is it silly or badass we'll we'll see
what with the in our webs have have to say I do know that we have a military pilot who is a listener so yeah please
go if you've ever even seen one of these things in person like I would love to know um
so basically the reason it looks the way it looks isn't because it they were trying to make it look badass like the
goal is this thing for for could never be seen like literally the entire objective would never be seen and so
that's why it's designed the way that it's designed so I'm going to describe it a little bit so uh the front of the
plane to your point it's like a boom it comes to a point like a fighter jet does but then it sweeps down really rapidly
on the edges and from the top or the bottom it kind of looks almost like it's flat the cental fuselodge part of it and
that's all done because of its stealth capability so it was designed that it wouldn't be readable as a plane on um
traditional radar it would leave radar signature so the wings um and the
engines are integrated into the wings and they have this cone like structure the very very front of it which is
entirely a design component of how the engine was supposed to work to get it up to its Max Speed which we're going to
get into here in a second okay so what the plane was capable of doing no plane
no sorry no manned plane ever since has matched it so in 1964 they built a thing
that even today we not tried to replicate so it was capable of flying in
excess of mck 3.2 which is 2500 miles per hour so the
the the the in Access part was in short bursts some have um reported claims of 3.5 but it would sustain flight at 3.2
which is the fastest you can go well the fastest a man plane would be able to go did you watch Top Gun
too you mean Maverick or yeah yes great it's great but he he at a mock
a lot he FES at a mock a lot yeah well I mean that's thing like like these speeds are not that I mean this speed is
atypical but flying incredibly fast on one of those jet fles is not um the more
critical part of its functionality had to do with the fact that its service ceiling was 80,000 to 85,000 feet high
which is like super high like super super duper High um when when you look
at pictures of people in the cockpit of this thing they look like they're in outer space they do not even look like they're f a plane 100% I see that for
sure so the reason they had it designed this way was twofold one is because no
other plane outside of What's um called the it's called a Zuma scent or something something like those light no
other plane can actually sustainably fly this elevation a plane could occasionally get up there but it would
just be shooting straight up and then would lose all lift and just fall back down so occasionally they were able to
lock Targets on this thing in the in the later operational history they're never able to get close enough to actually do
anything about it but the other more important part I'm so sorry I know you're on a roll but I have a stupid question is this pre pre satellites or
like during satellites because aren't satellites like above this so wouldn't that not matter anymore I'm going to get to that okay yes that is a really good
point um thank you thank you for understanding my very scientific question no no I you're we we're talking
about this for a lot for a while later on um so the other part of it had to do with um the speed so the speed was also
meant to outrun missiles so even if even if there was a surface air missile launch this thing it could outpace a
missile so that's entirely how it was supposed to run also the idea was that given it service ceiling by the time a
missile actually got high enough to reach it it would then need to accelerate faster and by that point it
would have exhausted all propulsion so that was the idea uh the name the SR designation of it
stands for strategic reconnaissance the purpose of this plane was to fly up over or to the side of any Targets on the
ground to take incredibly high quality high resolution pictures all this be stored in the plane because this is 1964
and once the plane lands they would remove uh the components and then send it over to the CIA to analyze the data
interpret it and then run it up the ladder essentially so like I said a lot of
stuff around building this thing had to be unique I'm going to touch on just a few of them there's a ton that we could be talking about but we don't we don't
have forever so I'm going to touch on a few of the more interesting things one was that flying at this speed and
created a tremendous amount of resistance in the air which caused a tremendous amount of heat to be built up
so it was determined early on that they couldn't build this out of steel or any traditional materials that you would use
for airframe construction they would have to use titanium the problem was that the ore they would need to use for
the titanium was in short supply in the US but was an incredibly High Supply in the Soviet Union which is who they
literally were trying to build this plane against yeah so the CIA did what the CIA does exceptionally well and they
basically set up a ton of little shell companies across the entire country or the entire world and ordered in small
batches the titanium they would need to construct the plane so they wouldn't raise any alarms or anything and it took
years it took years like during the design phase like I mean they didn't even know if they were going to do this but they still design I mean man the
Ingenuity here is crazy I think we talked about that something we talked about something with that like but the
opposite way we're like oh it was helium it was how in the US we had all the helium and we wouldn't give it to
Germany to make their blimp yeah yeah so wild also because um because objects
that don't melt in heat expand in heat the body paneling of the plane was loose
it was loose fitting so when it was on the ground it wasn't actually fully secured as a as one cohesive structure
it would have to reach Mach 3.2 its cruising speed for all the pieces to
actually come together and fit where did I hear that about regular planes someone just told me that like planes are built
on a moving platform because they're meant to be moving well I mean I'm sure they are I'm
sure all of them are like I know that planes do um it's like Subs right they used to talk about how people in Subs
they would tie a string from one side of the sub to the other side of the sub on the inside and then as you go further
down you can see how much the string sags because the entire body is sh shifting and moving ples I'm sure do the
exact same thing yeah yeah so yeah that's that's the piece of how the construction side of it was one
interesting Quirk about the plane was that the fuel of for the plane was all housed in the airframe itself it was
like circulating around the plane which a lot of planes do this most of the time it's just in the wings but in this plane it had to be kind of all around because
it needed a ton of fuel and its wings weren't even that long were Delta wings like a little bit sloped so the problem
with that is because the um the skin of the plane is loose fitting and because
it expands and contracts so much this thing would just constantly leak fuel when it was on the ground right right
right there's only so many times you could compress and come back and the fuel cell wouldn't shatter and so basically maintenance workers devised a
count of how many drops a minute were okay versus now we have to actually
replace all this paneling replace air cell fuel cells and everything yeah so the other thing that was unique
about this was just the survivability of it so like again if you look at pictures you
think you're looking at an astronaut not a pilot inside of yeah yeah yeah the reason was that they couldn't pressurize
the cabin sufficiently at this height so what I read was that at this at the at
the cruising altitude of 85,000 ft the best they could really hope for was to um was to pressurize it to the
equivalent of 10 to 25,000 ft which you'd still pass out at like you're still not get any Oxygen at that at that
level and so what they had to do was create a pressure suit so they're inside
a pressurize suit that where all their life support is dependent on this suit itself not the cabin that you're
actually inside of um and the other part of it the other reason why they had to do this was in the event of a ejection
event which happened a lot in the events of an ejection given the speed and the
altitude a you die from just the fall
because You' be without oxygen for so long in in in a descent but the other
part of it was that if you were to eject the heat your body would experience be about 450 degrees that's how hot it
would be upon ejection so there's no time to Fumble for O mass or anything
why would it be hot when it's cold up there because of the speed because of the speed yeah because so what they were
saying was that the body itself would heat up to around a th degrees
Fahrenheit and the glass that that was in front of the pilot would be somewhere
in the 250 to 350 range wow it gets crazy crazy hot because the speed of the
resistance so going into a bit of of the operational history so the SR71 was
operational until its um well there's be two retirements its first retirement
happened 24 years after went to active service and during that time it was used in Vietnam Israel Lebanon and obviously
the Soviet Union basically any global conflict the US had any sort of interest in the stories around this and the
numbers that are thrown around of like some of the emissions that this thing went on are kind of inconceivable so one
of the quirks of the SR71 was that it would take off with its um fuel cells half full the idea being that the
lighter it is the better um and so it would take off also is leaking fuel
anyways so why waste on the ground so it take off its first stop upon takeoff was
meeting up with a midair refueling tanker and it would refuel it's very
first thing was stop and refuel so it would do that and then it would accelerate to full speed so like it's
actual cruising speed of 3. Mark 3.2 and it could only do this for about 90 minutes so about 90 minutes after Cru at
this altitud at this speed it would have to start looking for another tanker which would find refuel and then keep
going just like a constant thing it had to keep being refueled midair so it' be like wow the stories that
you'd hear about this from some of the pilots um that flew in it were you know they would take off from Sacramento and
they would basically do a loop around half the country where they would go from Sacramento up to Seattle turn back
around go over Albuquerque um down to San Diego back to Sacramento and they would refuel twice it would be like a
two-hour trip to do this whole thing wow there was one pilot there was a story I
read about One Pilot who he had dinner with his wife and kids at home everybody went went to sleep he goes to the air
base he suits up he flies to the North Pole where the CIA wanted photos to ascertain whether the Soviet Union was
planting lisening devices under the ice sheet to track the our nuclear submarines and then he flew back home
and it was just like a couple of hours and he went to bed some there yeah yeah and it actually
happened on Christmas Eve did it really that's delightful yeah um I also
remember like watching like one of the last man space missions that went up like they do a thing where at some point
they have like one more umac call it like one more chance to to bail and if
they did that they'd land in Dublin you know like oh oh they go
they're so high yeah but it's like six minutes so like six minutes after leaving Florida they could technically
land in Dublin but because they went crazy you know so crazy so fun similar
to this like this guy one of the stories that I read that one with the guy was going to Albuquerque doing doing like a loop
around 50% of the country basically in two hours he was talking about how when he was in Albuquerque um he could see
downtown LA on one side and Denver and the Rocky Mountains on the other side no way that's cool so cool yeah um and it
was also actually one interesting U Mission that it went on was that it actually was used to track the route that DB Cooper went on and took pictures
underneath it to figure out where he might have ditched um it didn't work they ran five missions trying to do this
and it didn't work because of cloud coverage um in the Pacific Northwest so that's what they want you to think
that's what they want you to think they did find his body it's me I'm D Cooper strange reveal um was weird so
finding tangible Mission history on this thing is really really hard because I'm sure all of it is classified the stuff
you know is the stuff that Pilots are talking about on YouTube and some grains
of detail come out when you look at like the U the planes that have been downed because then then you know okay so one
was down in the North China Sea we know that like something happened in the engine and then it you know like
the details are scarce um but uh so there's not a ton of detail around this
and so that's part of the reason why it went into its first premature retirement was because nobody really knew what it
did they just knew we spent a ton of money on this thing and like it looks cool and it goes high but like yeah yeah
exactly and to your point satellites which I'm going to get to in more detail here so the military was trying to find
places to cut its budget but also it had a shinier newer toy that it was trying to fund which is the B2 bomber more
commonly known as the stealth so at that point kind of like you mentioned
before global satellite coverage was becoming more pervasive and it was
definitely more pervasive than it was when the SR71 was initially in development so people in power had this
misconception on the cost of maintaining the program and how valuable the program
actually was in light of other competing interests so because of how secret it was and
because the planes uh planes like this get priced out based on how many how much it cost to operate them on an
hourly basis there was an assumption that this Fleet cost about $700 million to operate a year which comes out to
about $85,000 per flight hour but really it was closer to 300 million it was
flying a lot more than people actually knew because it was secre so so you don't know that those details so you
think it's more expensive than it actually was also $300 million in the scheme of the US budget is like I know a
quarter to you and me yeah so in late 1989 the plane was officially retired
just short of being involved in Operation Desert Storm which didn't matter really because the US won so so
decisively but it was noted because General Schwarz came out saying like hey we actually could have used this plane like it would have been really really
helpful to know how people were moving and how to position people um and that would self-perpetuate itself because in
1993 that's when really things started popping off like a lot more in the Middle East and with the war in Bosnia
and so the military requested that the that Congress allocate budget to
reactivate several of these sr71s so their argument on doing so was
that typically with a satellite to reposition a satellite to a specific point can take up to 24 hours
to do and the military was looking at this and saying like we can get from
here we can get from from a military base in the US to over Russia over
Bosnia over Lebanon in like two hours
yeah totally so time was kind of of the essence here also because the plane can
keep doing the same pass over and over again it was able to quickly determine the motion of things so what they were
talking about was in Bosnia they were trying to determine where um weapons were being transported to but a
satellite hits that spot and then passes and then hits it again and then again so
it doesn't show you the real time progression of things so so for a period of time a few
of them did return into active service and that was until 1997 when Bill Clinton famously used a power that he
thought he had which he did not called the line item veto so he struck the SR71 budget as a line item from the budget
for 94 98 and that went up to Supreme Court which suprem Court deemed was um
not a power the president actually has God can you imagine how quaint that was Taylor like that's what we were fighting
about as a country was like does the president have the power to do a on veto that's we were so cute back then when
the president like you know could read and like could read do stuff um
yeah what a lovely what a lovely time to be life lovely time um regardless at
that point it became clear that there was so much resistance now the president was getting involved on this project that a second retirement was ultimately
inevitable and that's what happened so in 1998 they went into permanent retirement status and now are basically
just exhibited in museums that's all they do I feel like that's fine they probably have new ones and better
ones so I want to ride in a plane from 1963 do you is that whatever so well the thing is it's not
that they have well you wouldn't be writing in that anymore so there is an Sr 72 in development um and what that is
is is a drone like everything's going to Dr you don't have to worry about like human survivability at all um which is
great helps a lot um and so that locky scotwork is working on currently and um
that is kind of the next stage of um unmanned aircraft so wow some fun facts
and interesting statistic so 32 sr71s were built in total 12 were lost
um One Pilot ended up dying as a result of the the plane crashing zero planes
though were lost due to enemy combat so the mission was the objectives were met like it was
never caught um it all went wrong due to you know issues with the engine or stuff
like that so it was all mechanical and in nature um it still holds the fastest
route by plane from New York to London at just uh under two hours so was 1 hour and 54 minutes
long what I thought that entire hour and 54 minutes you're like it's wild it's
wild yeah there was another one I saw that was um Kansas City Missouri to New York in
seven minutes hilarious like crazy yeah um it
maintained a flight at the highest altitude ever achieved consistently by man plane at 85,000 feet
and one fact that I promised at the very beginning that I'm going to go ahead and Del on and it's kind of a creepy one is
that in April of 1989 the last SR71 to be lost in a mission actually went down
and it was code named Ichibon and what happened was one of the engine bearings froze which basically caused the engine
to just disintegrate and tear itself apart midair the pilots ejected safely and
they were rescued and the Navy went to work to recover the plane from the Chinese see they did that they did their
investigation all that good stuff it was all done like on site it was deemed too
expensive in a security Hazard to transport this thing back to the US to have it scrapped so they decided the
best thing to do is to drop it somewhere where literally no other country could have the resources to pull it up whoa so
they dropped it in the ban trench today if you go down to the Marana trench you
might stumble on a 34-year-old SR71 Blackbird that was dope that's crazy
right fun so yeah so that is my story it all you know for me like the dfl part of
it just goes back to like how suponic planes are anyways like they're so crazy Advanced and so crazy expensive to
operate like I remember the Concord was one of where it was just like the pride of British Airways and eventually just
like yeah we're done with us like nobody needs to go to New York nobody needs to go from London London to New York that
fast yeah like fi we can just take a leisurely 10hour flight or whatever um
that's cool it's interesting I I think it's it's so fun that there's all those like secret you know I know I don't know
who knows my my dad is talking about how he was like oh yeah Palm Springs is where you know Eisenhower was supposed
to have met the aliens and they were like stop doing nuclear things and he was like No And like that was it I love
that and we know you and me know someone I won't say their name but some later but one of the engineers we used to work
with at our old job used to work at Area 51 and he told me that he would live in he lived in Las Vegas and they would
drive to a parking lot and then they go on a plane with no windows to work every day yeah I believe it yeah I believe it
yeah I looked up a bunch of pictures of area 512 and um it's uh it's really
creepy it's a really creepy spot yeah but day when they go there but I don't
think it's like alien creepy honestly like researching this and seeing how secretive the government is about stuff
like this like yeah of course like they're going to have to test this stuff somehow and so yeah like that that just
they're kill each other before anything else happens anyway you know yeah humans will annihilate ourselves in before
before we get to Intergalactic alien anything that's the that's the Paradox I
mean that's thing you look at the plane and again write to us if you think it's cool or silly looking but you look at a plane like that you like that's what we
developed like started working on in like 1958 so what the [ __ ] is out there now that
we don't know about like oh totally it's like invisible planes up here yeah yeah so so it's like what's more likely that
it's like aliens that are we're seeing over Groom Lake or Lo heed Martin is like creating the
next crazy thing yeah I bet 100% yeah there's a Cool Air and Space Museum in
Palm Springs also that is really fun has a bunch of old planes in it you can go into like a World War II bomber and
touch everything fun that's cool I like it yeah yeah um so that's our story for
today and if you have any thoughts or want to answer our question um write to
us dopod gmail.com or follow all the socials yeah all the socials I do to fill pod I have one listener
mail um Agnes my friend Agnes listened to the Chicago Fire episode and she
wanted a little bit more context which I totally understand for like what was happening in 187 one I definitely want
to like bring that back so just to pull us out of the the plane into back to the
Chicago Fire real fast um 1871 was the Franco Prussian War
ulyses as Grant was president and in London Queen Victoria was the queen and she just had opened Royal Al Albert Hall
in um memory of her husband and also the first photographs of Yellowstone were taking in
1871 whoa fun contacts other things that are happening during that time yeah lots
of fun stories so Russia was known as pressure back then uh no Prussia was more like Germany um that area and then
as we also learned today or Monday um you know Germany started to unify in
like the 1860s around 1871 so actually it's exactly the same time like Germany started to unify around the same time
with the Great Chicago Fire wild maybe they're related maybe probably not was that the
you know the other sweet cool um well thank you Taylor
thanks for hearing the story thanks everyone for listening and please do great subscribe do all the things and
we'll join you in a week we join you in a week awesome go and cut things
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