There Are Places on this planet that you and I will never get to see with our own eyes even if you were to One Day become the president of the United States you would still struggle with getting access to all of them places where they're studying experimental maybe even extraterrestrial technology contingency plans for rebuilding a post-apocalyptic World Islands with thousands of the world's most venomous snakes and some of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth where the use of lethal force is guaranteed the one thing that you and I have in common is that we have
pretty curious minds and there is nothing that makes me more Curious than somewhere I'm not allowed to go so I spent hours researching some of the most forbidden places on this planet so you and I could learn about them together what I didn't expect is just how connected a lot of them are and a lot of their stories can be traced back to one lady and one place 69 years ago let's be a little bit more [Music] mature year is 1955 it had been 10 years since Hiroshima and the cold war was just ramping up
but this wasn't a war of violence this was a war of information whoever can outsmart and outs spy their competition takes control of the world so the US government tasks CIA officer Richard Bell and three others with the top secret development of the Ultimate Spy tool the Dragon Lady today this plane now formerly known as the loed U2 is not only the most iconic the longest serving aircraft in the United States spy plane program but as any good spy knows if you're secretly gathering information on your enemies the odds are they're probably doing the same
to you so if you're going to build the perfect spy tool you have to do it where no one is going to see you and no one is going to find you this is exactly what Richard Bell and his team had in mind in 1955 on their scouting Mission over the American southwest almost immediately afterwards under public land order 16 62 the US Atomic energy commission withdrew over 38,000 acres of land from public use the CIA had found the perfect location to build the world's most sophisticated spy tool and Kelly Johnson the chief engineer of
the Lockheed Corporation was commissioned to build it this top secret facility was given the name Paradise Ranch in an effort to make the location sound as appealing as possible to lockheed's top engineers and for 8 months Johnson and his team worked only under the cover of night covertly assembling what was being disclosed as a new form of weather detection plane up until this point what I would like to know is if at the time they had any idea that this plot of land that they would choose to build their dragon on would still be shadowed
in conspiracy and urban legend all of these years later and it would kick off a chain of events that led Humanity to the closest we have ever been to complete Annihilation because if you haven't guessed already this area in the American desert 200 km Northwest of Las Vegas Vegas may have started with the nickname Paradise Ranch is now more commonly referred to as Area 51 since it's Inception in 1955 this highly classified US Air Force facility has long been associated with UFOs government coverups extraterrestrial technology time travel and of course the aliens themselves but where
did this reputation come from and what is actually going on at Area 51 today making it one of the most heavily guarded places in the United States well to answer that question we're going to have to jump back one more time in the last 6 months of 1947 there were over 300 claims of UFO sightings in the US but none more famous than the Roswell incident now whether you are a skeptic or a Believer there is one thing that everyone agrees on that summer something crashed in the fields of foster Ranch just outside of Roswell
New Mexico the official timeline goes like this June 14th while driving across their Ranch Land ma Brazil and his son Vernon stumble across something they've never seen before it was in Brazil's words a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips tin foil rather tough paper and sticks brazel decides to leave the wreckage as is while giving himself some time to figure out what he should do July 4th a few weeks after discovering the debris while the rest of the country is celebrating independence Day Brazil collects as much of the debris as he
can and puts it in the back of his truck July 7th 3 days later he makes the 2-hour drive to Roswell New Mexico delivering what he found to sheriff Wilcox who seem to be just as confused as he was the first of many calls up the government arm is made when Sheriff Wilcox calls Colonel Blanchard the commander of the Roswell Army airfields 509th composite group if you don't know who these guys are I need you to remember the name because who they are and what they did comes back into play later on in this video
again Colonel Blanchard can't identify what Brazil has found on his Ranch and once again a call is made up the chain of command trying to find anyone who might have some answers one of the men sent to investigate is intelligence officer Jesse Marcel who collects all of the evidence and makes the first public statement since the Rex's Discovery Roswell Army Airfield captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell one of the most famous quotes from this article was the intelligence officer of the 509th bombardment group at Roswell Army Airfield announced at noon today that the field
had come into possession of a flying saucer 2 years after the first atomic bomb had been used as a weapon of war the nuclear arms race by the two Global superpowers was in full swing again a game of information the need to increase your military resources while also staying one step ahead of your opposition Maurice Ewing an American geophysicist who had done a lot of research on deep sound channels in the ocean theorized that a similar sound channel existed in the upper atmosphere which led him to the idea for project Mogul a top secret military
operation whose primary objective was to detect sound waves generated by Soviet bomb tests the operation was carried out from 1947 to 1949 and involved attaching special microphones to high altitude weather balloons that could pick up the soundwaves of a nuclear explosion from tip to tail these balloons stretched over 650 ft or about twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty and today since all of the documents have been Declassified we now know if you choose to believe that it was one of the project Mogul weather balloons that crashed in the Brazil's Ranch but at the
time as Roger L says it was better from the Air Force's perspective that there was a crashed alien spacecraft out there than to tell the truth because a flying saucer was easier to admit than project Mogul and with that we were Off to the Races the Flying Saucer enthusiasm spread all over the world what started as a convenient lie became the perfect distraction for the US government who was now deep into their nuclear monitoring program but after a while the alien craze died down and it was back to business as usual for the time being
at least at any time by looking at a wristwatch and looking down at the Earth we knew what was underneath the clouds and it aided Us in some ways and picking out what uh what we should be seeing it's now widely believed that the interview given by Jesse Marcel in 1978 cemented the Legacy and lore surrounding area 51 the intelligence officer from the 509th who had made the first public statement on the Roswell incident 30 years earlier claiming the US government had retrieved a flying saucer Flash Forward and he's being interviewed by Stanton fredman a
professional nuclear physicist turned UFO researcher their interview completely reignites the controversy surrounding the Roswell incident when he revealed he still believed that the wreckage was definitely not a weather balloon he stated and I quote it felt like you had nothing in your hands it wasn't any thicker than the foil out of a pack of cigarettes but the thing about it that got me is that you couldn't even bend it you couldn't even Dent it even a sledgehammer would bounce off of it I knew that I had never seen anything like that before it was not
anything from this Earth that I am quite sure of being an intelligence officer I was familiar with just about all of the materials used in aircraft and or air travel this was nothing like that it could not have been this interview could not have come at a more perfect time almost like someone had planned it but what do I know I'm just a guy with a mini mic the very first Star Wars movie had just come out becoming the highest grossing movie of all time and Aliens were definitely at the Forefront of pop culture once
again all of a sudden there were rumors of regular alien visits to Earth and crash spaceships and before long any secret government property from nuclear sites to engineering locations were suspected of housing deceased or imprisoned aliens this was most evident at Area 51 the off-limits aircraft facility inside the Nevada Test Site the rumored final resting place of the aliens and their spacecraft from the 1947 Roswell incident now whether all of that is actually going on down there or not I can't be the one to say but the closest that any of us will ever get
is 25 M away where you will be met with no trespassing signs often with the reminder that the use of deadly force is authorized remember a few minutes ago when we talked about the 509th composite group and I told you that they were important to this story well 2 years before they were tasked with investigating the Roswell incident the 509th became the first Army unit in history to deploy nuclear weapons at 8:15 a.m. on the morning of August 6th 1945 for the first time in human history an atomic bomb was used as a weapon of
War forever changing our geopolitical landscape the ACT resulted in the end of World War II and ushered the world into the atomic age with their display of force in Japan the Soviets realized that the US had gained the upper hand with the development of the atomic bomb and set out to make their own this is what started the nuclear arms race and in the 79 years since the first nuclear weapon was used on civilians the nine nuclear Powers the United States Russia France China the United Kingdom Pakistan India Israel and North Korea have created 125,000
more the most powerful nuclear bomb ever tested which also created the largest man-made explosion ever recorded was 3,800 times more power ful than what was used in Hiroshima the explosion could be seen from 620 M away everything within a 34 M radius was leveled anyone within a 62m radius would have received third Dee Burns and buildings over 100 m away were damaged now that is just one bomb but the thing with nuclear war today is that if you're going to send one you might as well send them all and if that were to happen all
life on Earth would go extinct if the full arsenal of the world's nuclear Supply was released even the International Space Station would be destroyed theoretically you could survive in an underground bunker Fallout style but it would take millions of years for the world to become habitable again and for any life forms to reemerge it's not worth it they knew this in 1945 once the first bomb had been used that when the day comes and Humanity eventually goes extinct the odds are it'll be at the hands of nuclear weapons no one knew this more than the
team behind the Manhattan Project the group of scientists who developed the first atomic bomb but protested using it against people shortly after the war ended they formed the bulletin of atomic scientists a nonprofit organization built to inform the public about the dangers of a nuclear arms race and the destruction a nuclear war would bring about to really drive this message home they introduced the world to the Doomsday Clock a warning of how many metaphorical Minutes to Midnight Humanity had left every year since it has been readjusted by 18 experts in diplomacy policy military history and
nuclear science in 1947 the year it was introduced The Clock Was set at 7 Minutes to Midnight the farthest it has ever been was 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of the Strategic Arms Treaty in 2007 the bulletin recognized climate change as one of the greatest threats to humanity and started taking it into consideration when making their ruling up until recently the closest it had ever been set was 2 Minutes to Midnight once in 1953 when the US and the Soviet Union both tested thermonuclear weapons
and again in 2018 citing a breakdown in the international order of nuclear actors as well as a continuing lack of action on climate change in 2020 the clock moved to 100 seconds to midnight and remain there until 2023 where it was pushed even closer 90 seconds to midnight even though it's not the nicest thought the potential elimination of the human race is something that world leaders need to and are planning for because the best case of the worst case scenario is that there are some survivors and they have the tools necessary to rebuild our world
but if that day comes the survivors are going to have to make their way to one of the most remote locations on Earth an island that is so cold no one is allowed to be born there and no one is allowed to die there but what they keep behind a heavily secured Vault could one day save Humanity from Extinction today spelar Norway is the world's northernmost permanent settlement a place that's so cold even during the summer the ground never thaws out this is such a serious problem that their graveyard stopped accepting newcomers out of fear
that all of the cryogenically frozen bodies still contain traces of the Spanish flu and somehow all of that and the fact that the island has armed polar bear guards walking around the town isn't the most interesting thing about it 100 50 m deep within the mountains of spelar there is a highly secure building known as the Doomsday Vault the world's largest collection of agricultural biodiversity the Doomsday Vault holds over 900,000 varieties of crops and 13,000 years of agricultural history from all over the world the food that we eat the clothes that we wear the nature
around us that cleans our atmosphere all rely on seeds and all of these seeds can be found in the Doomsday Vault I want you to think about something homo sapiens as a species have only existed on this planet for 300,000 years that is only 109 million days in 109 million days we learned to speak with one another we split the atom landed on the moon discovered more than we ever thought possible about the universe around us and so much more the human race gets a lot of flak but personally I think what we've been able
to accomplish in such a short amount of time it's pretty cool it is so crazy to think that if it wasn't for one guy the world would have ended on October 27th 1962 that was the day Humanity came closer than we ever have and hopefully closer than we ever will to an allout nuclear war and it all started with the dragon lady in the early days of October 1962 a lcky youw took this picture which to you and I probably doesn't look like much but to the US government this was concrete evidence of the Soviet
Union placing offensive nucle missiles in Cuba less than 100 miles away from the United States immediately after receiving this picture President John F Kennedy orders a quarantine of Cuba which basically means we're going to surround that ships to prevent any more weapons from being brought into Cuba and to Strongarm the USSR into removing the missiles that were already there as this is all happening incomes submarine b59 now the US government didn't know this but submarine b59 had lost all forms of communication and and Central Power this meant they couldn't communicate with any of the Soviet
or American ships surrounding them I need you to understand what the conditions were like on this boat they had lost all Lighting on board except for one emergency light the air conditioning was broken and temperatures inside had risen to over 60° C and on top of that CO2 levels were so high that officers on board were falling like dominoes and the US ships could not communicate with them so they surrounded it with 11 naval ships and began dropping depth charges these are essentially underwater bombs used to create shock waves that bend submarine pressure Halls forcing
them to surface but without power the men on board the submarine had no idea of what was actually going on and they had every reason to believe the US was trying to sink them and World War III had already begun another piece of crucial information that the US did not have was that on board submarine b59 there was a 10 kiloton nuclear torpedo they had permission to launch without authorization from Moscow it was a three key authorization system and two of the three officers including the captain of the submarine agreed to launch with the captain
famously saying we're going to blast them now we will die but we will sink them all we will not become the shame of the fleet the third and final officer they needed approval from before launching the nuke Villi aripov refused making him the sole person responsible for preventing World War iiii over 60 years later and the world hasn't forgotten just how close we came and the very real possibility that one day Humanity might be the cause of our own destruction heavily inspired by the Doomsday Vault the Arctic World archive was created in 2017 to preserve
human culture and Heritage forever without the risk of out-of-date Technology data loss or corruption the company behind it says that a large number of factors related to technological change Wars and potential natural disasters make it ex extremely important to preserve digital memories for the long term the memory bank provides an opportunity to pass information onto future Generations so that those with knowledge of their past can have a meaningful present and future some of the information preserved in the vault is the court orders decision and judgments made by the judicial branch of the state of Mexico
experimental research on Big Data by the University of Hong Kong over 30 years of Earth observation data from the European Space Agency satellite images Focus on our understanding and exploration of planet Earth the Museum of the person in Brazil submitted over 187 interviews and 915 pictures from the years 1988 to 1992 meant to represent the life stories of people in Brazil and its cultural diversity ancient manuscripts from the Vatican a historic Global photograph collection the higs Boston scientific breakthrough the First Recording made on the Edison cylinders Spike Jones musical catalog 25 years of travel history
from Central Europe's largest travel agency Brazilian football holy scriptures from Hinduism the fall of the Berlin Wall The Divine Comedy the scream ancient Egyptian manuscripts the independence Act of the Mexican Empire Microsoft Office and Adobe suite and the Norwegian Health archive one day these items might be all that's left of humanity waiting for thousands to millions of years to shed light on a distant and forgotten past but in the meantime you can't go there