When you think of hidden alien technology, where's the first place that comes to mind?Area 51, right?Yeah, me too.I mean, Americans have been obsessed with this place for decades, myself included, probably because for years the U.S.
government refused to admit that it existed.Nothing to see here, they said, while simultaneously threatening to shoot anyone who came within feet of the fence line. Well, I have news for you.
Area 51 is fascinating and all, but it might be a red herring.A kind of magician's trick.Look at this hand while the other one does all the work. What I'm saying is the U.S.
government has had another hand in the alien game all along, and when I found out about it, I nearly fainted and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.Tucked neatly inside a very seemingly normal Air Force base in Ohio, hiding in plain sight
is a place called Hangar 18.
Not only have very high-ranking officials tried to gain access to the hangar and been denied, those who've gotten clearance have never been the same after seeing what's inside, things that make Area 51 look like child's play.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural.
So I'm so excited about our topic today because, like Ashley, I have been obsessed with aliens and UFOs since I was a little girl.I second that.Yes.
And today we are covering what may be one of the most mysterious places on Earth, Hangar 18 at White Patterson Air Force Base. Back in 1905, in an empty field in Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers experimented with the world's first airplanes.
Twelve years later, the U.S.Army bought the field, which became Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.And if allegations are to be believed, it's still making Earth-shattering history today.
Because it might be where the military ran top-secret tests on crashed UFOs and alien bodies.And for all we know, those tests are still going.Full steam ahead.
We've all had weird days at work, right?Like when you show up and only to find that the power's out or no one can get anything done or so everybody just starts screwing around.We've all had those days, yeah?
Or someone pulls the fire alarm and you find yourself standing outside the building for hours wondering what's going on.
But there's weird days at work? and then there's really weird days at work.When something happens that's so out there, so off the wall, it feels like things around the office will never be the same again.
As I was digging into this, I just kept thinking that's exactly what the folks at Wright-Patterson Airfield dealt with for decades.
Weird is an understatement when it comes to this place.But before we get into that, I think you need to hear the origin story that really sparked Wright-Patterson's lore.It's a warm summer's day, specifically June 14th, 1947.A farmer named W.W.
Mack Brazel is busy working on his boss's ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico.While he's out tending to his duties, he sees mysterious debris spread all over the place.
Okay, if you're a big believer in UFOs, or even if you're not, you probably still know where this is going.Yes, we're talking about the Roswell story.
That's right.It's basically the mother of all UFO incidents. Ashley actually covered it on the show in the past, so you guys should go back and catch up if you don't know it that well, because the whole case is wild.
We'll link it out in the show notes so you can get to it easily.But here's the TLDR.Max sees all of this wreckage and tells other people about it.Eventually, there's gossip all over town that the scrap must be from a flying saucer.
Some other locals even come forward to say they saw what appeared to be a spaceship crash right before Mac discovered the scrap.
By July 7th, the military also hears the rumors and they're very interested in the debris Mack has found, so much so that they send their men out to gather up every last shred of it.Shockingly, there's quite a bit of press coverage on it.
Officials from the Roswell Army Airfield, or RAF, even do an interview where they let a photographer snap pictures of all the debris they collected.
It's pretty surprising because at the time, nobody within the military was trying to hide this at all.At least it didn't seem that way, not at first.But after that one single interview, they never let the press come back to look at the wreckage.
They didn't release any more photos or let anyone from the general public see this stuff ever again.To this day, nobody actually knows where the debris is hidden or if it still exists.
And naturally, there are a lot of questions about what happened to Roswell wreckage.These things don't just vanish into thin air.
I will say the Army did release a public statement a day or two later, sometime between July 7th and July 9th, saying they did collect a flying disk. and they've moved it to a, quote, higher headquarters.
For obvious reasons, people are not happy with that answer.So on the 9th, an Air Force base in Texas makes another public statement.
They say the wreckage was from a weather balloon, like one of those high-altitude, literally balloon-shaped instruments the National Weather Service might use.
Yeah, and for the record, this statement turned out to be a flat-out lie.It wasn't a weather balloon, and even the U.S.government acknowledges that now.
It's great they're admitting that, but they're still allegedly keeping lots of secrets about Roswell.
For example, according to some witnesses who worked for the Air Force in the summer of 1947, intelligence officers transported the debris to an army base, Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio.So that may be the higher headquarters they were talking about.
Now two months after that, the Air Force formally splits off from the Army and the base was reclassified as an Air Force base.It's also worth mentioning that Wright Air Force Base got renamed to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base the very next year.
But the debris, if it did end up there, was not kept out in the open.It's said that the pieces recovered from Roswell were stored in a top-secret building called Hangar 18.
However, that hangar was just one of many, many mysteries swirling around Wright-Patterson, because the base is pretty darn mysterious in its own right.
For one thing, it was the home to a whole bunch of secret projects.The first one being Project Sign, which was formed a few months after the Roswell crash in December 1947. Their goal?
Study UFO crashes, alien sightings, and everything else related to the mysteries from outer space.In February of 1949, Project Zyne got renamed to Project Grudge and lost a ton of funding and resources.
And the reason why still seems under lock and key.But it was finally shut down in December of that year, only for a new program, Project Blue Book, to pick up and restart their work in the spring of 1952. And here's the best part.
These weren't conspiracy theories.Project Sign, Grudge, and Blue Book were all real, confirmed military operations.Genuine, documented programs meant to study UFOs.
But Project Blue Book ran for the longest, 17 years, and they made some pretty wild discoveries while they were active.
One of their top advisors, J. Allen Hynek, was a real scientist who took UFO sightings very seriously, and he wanted the American public to take them seriously too.So I think there's something to be said about not underestimating the unknown here.
Hynek was also very careful about making sure all of Blue Book's research was credible and backed by real concrete evidence.So basically, he didn't want to come across like a conspiracy theorist.
The very first year Blue Book was in operation, they had a ton of action.They even received word that UFOs had been spotted flying above the White House.This is wild but true.Air traffic controllers noticed as many as seven ships on their radar.
One even saw a bright light hovering in the sky that looked like an orange ball of fire with a tail.Now these crafts were so close, the Air Force felt the need to call in reinforcements from a local base.
They literally sent fighter jets to the scene to try and intercept the UFOs. Only, they weren't able to accomplish much.
Because when they got there, these mysterious crafts completely outmaneuvered those jets as they tried to engage, something radar operators witnessed firsthand before the objects disappeared completely out of sight.
So, each time something weird like that happened, Blue Book was assigned to the case.
But that's just one wild story that Blue Book supposedly investigated.There were way more than that.Over 12,000 incidents, some say.And they weren't declassified until 1976.
While most of them were explained in one way or another, there were over 700 events that the government couldn't write off as weather, birds, airplanes, I mean that sort of thing, which is definitely a big number to consider.
It's also worth reiterating that Project Sign, the first UFO org before Blue Book, wasn't established until a few months after the Roswell crash.
meaning there was no official organization called out to actively investigate the crash site at the time of the recovery.I mean, at least not one that we're aware of.
After Project Sign was founded though, something strange happened.Supposedly some big government officials ordered Sign to figure out what the Roswell wreckage was.
They shared all of their files and paperwork about the debris, but those same officials who handed out the directives wouldn't let anyone from Project Sign see the wreckage first hand.
So whatever it was, it was considered too dangerous, too explosive for even the investigators at Project Sign2See.And these are the people who are supposed to look at UFOs for their jobs.
Right.Talk about a frustrating day.Like, that's a crazy day at work.Wright-Patterson wasn't just a hub for these secret UFO projects, though.There were plenty of other
experimental programs that might explain why the Roswell wreckage ended up here of all places.
During World War II, the people on the base specialized in studying downed Axis airplanes and other enemy technology, specifically reverse engineering them.
Basically, taking apart top secret equipment from other countries and figuring out how it worked to see how we could make things for ourselves. If true, it's a skill that would have come in handy had the base received the Roswell wreckage.
As the story goes, those same scientists or a team similar to them at Wright-Patterson began reverse engineering that supposedly alien technology.
See, a whole bunch of witnesses at Roswell, including military personnel, later said they saw material at the crash site that looked like a dark gray metal.It was lightweight, but extremely durable, basically impossible to destroy.
But you can bend or crumple it with your bare hands only for it to return to its original shape.It's like it remembered its initial state, which might be why some people call it memory metal.
Now, that might sound like something out of a sci-fi story, but it's real.There are people making and selling this exact stuff today.It's called Nitinol.It's used for everything from eyeglasses to surgical tools to rocket ships.
Officially, it was invented by the Naval Ordnance Lab in the late 50s or early 60s, but it sounds like they might have started working on it right around July of 1947.
According to one UFO researcher named Anthony Bragaglia, there are even documents proving that Nitinol was, in fact, reverse-engineered from that Roswell memory metal.
Really, what?Give me something, something.
Yeah, and it might not even be the biggest secret they were keeping about Roswell.Because some say the work at Wright-Patterson was so confidential, even high-ranking members of the government couldn't access it.
In 1952, a man named Barry Goldwater was elected Senator of Arizona.And from that point onward, he was a major political figure.Among many things, he went on to run an unsuccessful but very high-profile presidential campaign.
But transparency between the government and the public was always at the top of Goldwater's agenda.
And he believed that Wright-Patterson was keeping some very important secrets on the base, specifically in a room he heard rumors about called the Blue Room.
Now, there's no formal record that the Blue Room existed at all, which means there's also no official story about where it got its name.But based on everything else we've heard so far, I'm gonna guess there's a connection.
And according to Goldwater, the Blue Room was somewhere on the Wright-Patterson base, maybe even inside Hangar 18. Allegedly, this was where officials stored all of those alien artifacts, technologies, and everything else you can think of.
And naturally, Goldwater wanted to see this room for himself and learn what kind of alien life was out there.
Well, as the story goes, Goldwater ended up at Wright-Patterson at some point in the mid-1960s for some kind of official Senate business he was conducting.
And apparently, Goldwater saw this as a perfect opportunity to get the answers he'd been looking for about the Blue Room.He called a high-ranking official named General Curtis LeMay. LeMay didn't work at the base.He was at the Pentagon.
But I guess Goldwater figured he was enough of a big shot to pull some strings and get him the permission he needed.So allegedly, Goldwater asked, like, hey, can I just take a tiny little peek inside the Blue Room?Let me guess.
It didn't go as planned.Let's just say General LeMay was not amused by Goldwater's request.In fact, seemed rather upset that Goldwater was asking about this at all.And the general made sure to let him know.
When Goldwater went on to talk about the incident later, he said LeMay told him, hell no.And not only no, but if you ask me again, I will have you court-martialed.Oh yeah, they're hiding something.He's not playing.Mm-mm.He's like, oh no.Mm-mm.
Now remember, Barry Goldwater was a United States Senator and a retired Major General in the Air Force.I mean, come on, that's a pretty powerful government figure.So if he wasn't allowed to see what was inside the Blue Room.
Or even allowed to ask about it without getting his head bit off. Right, so whatever is in there, it must be a huge deal.
And to this day, I don't know what that could be because the military has done a really good job of keeping their operations under lock and key. But Senator Goldwater might have at least gotten information of some of what was inside there.
See, in 1981, he got an even bigger and more important title when he becomes chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, meaning he has oversight of all intelligence operations and those who are assigned to top secret work.
which you would assume means, for the very first time in his life, he could request classified information that wasn't available to him before.
But even with his fancy new Senate Intelligence Committee title, Goldwater still can't get access to Hanger 18.He never ever gets to see the Blue Room, or anything that's stored inside of it.
And he's not alone.From the sound of things, even airmen who are stationed at Wright-Patterson can't just come and go from the Blue Room or Hangar 18.
Both of them are presumably off-limits to everyone except those with the highest levels of clearance.
But here's the thing, even though Goldwater never gets to see it for himself, he writes a few letters to his most trusted friends that suggest someone with a high level of clearance must have told him what was inside.
Because in those letters, he agrees that what's in the blue room should, in fact, quote, be kept secret.So granted, whatever he learned after heading the Intelligence Committee must've been big, I mean huge.
Big enough to convince him to do a complete 180 from wanting transparency to appreciating secrecy.The question for me is, Was it really alien technology, or could it have been something a little more terrestrial?
Like maybe whatever they're hiding in there is just new technologies developed by humans that they don't want linking to other countries.
So as I was reading about this, I came across info from sources who came forward to say they did work on UFO projects in Hangar 18, and some of them did go on to talk about it in depth. Take this story from one anonymous government research analyst.
He didn't want his name to be released, so for the sake of the story, we're just going to call him John.One night in 1955, John's at home with his family when all of a sudden, someone knocks on his door.
It's a military official who has an urgent job for John to do, and he's not taking no for an answer.
After John signs a whole bunch of paperwork that says his work is confidential, that he can't disclose anything, and so on, he has to take a very long flight.
But he doesn't know where he's going, because he's literally wearing a blindfold the entire time.When he gets to his destination, he takes his blindfold off and realizes he's in a hangar.A hangar with blue walls.
So if John's story is to be believed, then the implication is that he was whisked away to Hangar 18.
That's what I took away from it.But his account gets even weirder.He says he's looking at all of the strange technology stored in this place.Now the stuff he sees may not sound impressive today, but it's state-of-the-art back in 1955.
Things like computer motherboards, processors, lasers, and so much more. And John's told they need him to figure out what these things are and how they actually work.
Which might strike him as odd, like, I mean, why can't the people who own this hangar just ask whoever built these things, why bring in a third party to try and study everything?
John seems to think the same thing, which is why he asks another officer point blank, like, where'd you get all of this stuff from? To answer, they take John into another room.
There, the person he's with says that everything he's seeing, the technology in the first room and the things in the second room, all came from Roswell.
But even if this came from Roswell, it all seems like human-made stuff, right?
I don't know about that, because John says that the second room has four containers that look like aquariums.They're full of pink fluid and suspended in the fluid in each of them is an alien body.
According to an anonymous government research analyst recalling John, the blue room at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base may have been full of advanced technologies.But even more shocking, he also said it contained literal alien bodies.
He described what he saw inside as very small, smaller than an adult human being, with gray skin, big bald heads, and enormous eyes.
And he's not the only person to say something like this.Here's a story from the son of an Air Force member that was stationed at Wright-Patterson.
The son's name is John G. Tiffany, but he doesn't offer up his dad's first name or his designation, maybe to protect his identity and his credibility, which I totally get, that's his father.
But you know, we know that the government does have a history of discrediting the counts. even from their own servicemen.But still, we'll take this one with a grain of salt.So here's what I know.
John G's father was an officer tasked with supporting the 509th Bomb Group, who was supposedly dispatched to Roswell after McBrazel discovered the wreckage.
So presumably that summer of 1947, Mr. Tiffany was just going about his work when he received word that he and the rest of his unit had to hop on a plane. They flew all the way from Wright-Patterson to Roswell.
As soon as they got to New Mexico, they were dropped off in a field full of strange wreckage that didn't look like anything like normal man-made material.
Now, Mr. Tiffany told his son, he got this weird gut feeling every time he touched this stuff, like it was something that he was not supposed to be holding or moving around.
Still, Tiffany's a loyal serviceman, so he and his team followed orders and gathered a bunch of this debris up anyway.But he also confided in his son that he saw at least two bodies in the wreckage.
Now while he doesn't specify, I'm assuming these are alien bodies given that it's Roswell and all.
I mean it's hard to say for sure but whatever Mr. Tiffany sees it's apparently very upsetting.He barely talks about it at all other than telling his son years later that the two corpse were intact.
which could mean that, you know, there were more than two victims of the crash, but some of them were torn apart when they died.
However many there were, Mr. Tiffany supposedly helped gather up the bodies, a process that only added to his feeling that he was doing something that he was not meant to do.
Then he flew back to Wright-Patterson, but before he could head back to his barracks and take a long, hot shower, Mr. Tiffany was pulled into an emergency debriefing session.
So there, he was told that he never went to Roswell, and he saw nothing there.
Basically, forget everything you did today.If you speak out, we're gonna deny all of it.Jeez.
But we also have an idea of what happened to the remains after they arrived at Wright-Patterson, all thanks to a nurse named Norma Gardner, who was stationed there.
She did administrative work at the base, so she wasn't actively investigating or working with UFOs herself, but she was constantly getting these papers and forms from higher ups to type.
According to Norma, this was how she gained access to the autopsy reports, photos, and all kinds of confidential information about the Roswell recovery missions.
One time, she was working when some officials wheeled a couple of tanks full of liquid right past her.And suspended in the liquid?Wait, let me guess.Bodies.
About four feet tall with unusually big heads. In other words, Norma's account is consistent with John's.Yes!
Except she adds one more detail.She says that the moment she laid eyes on these beings, she knew on an instinctual level that they were not human.
Look, there are tons of other stories exactly like this coming from workers at Wright-Patterson.Some are definitely questionable and probably completely made up, but there's some that are at least worth entertaining.
Like this other one, this secretary named June Crane, who said she heard confidential reports about alien autopsies.And she can back that testimony up with proof that she was stationed at Wright-Patterson and had a very high security clearance.
And to make sure she kept quiet, she still had to sign a very scary confidentiality contract, which she said she would have to pay $20,000 fine if she leaked anything publicly, which in the 1950s was a whole heck of a lot of money.And you know what?
It was enough to keep her quiet for 45 years until she finally decided it was time to come clean. Now, there's one thing about all these stories that I really want to highlight here.They're not all from 1947, right after the Roswell crash.
In fact, some of these accounts are from the 1950s, like June Crane, She says that she heard about the alien autopsy report sometime around 1951 or 52, but it's hard for her to nail down an exact date.
Which, you know, I don't know about you, but if I heard or read some documents about alien bodies, I definitely, most definitely wouldn't forget when, how, where, all the things.
So with some of these accounts, there's got to be a seed of doubt, right?
Oh absolutely, but she's not alone.There are other witnesses with military titles who say they saw four, five, six, or even 13 bodies at one time, which is more than the two that are usually associated with Roswell.
That could mean that Hanger 18 isn't just the storage and autopsy site for the Roswell crash.It's where U.S.officials bring the wreckage and the bodies from every UFO that goes down on American soil.Or at least maybe they did at one point in time.
As wild as that all sounds, and believe me, I get that it is wild, this isn't even the biggest allegation that comes from an eyewitness.Because we also have testimony from a Marine Lieutenant Colonel named Marion Magruder.
And what he has to say blows all of these other accounts straight out of the water. Now, a lot like some of the other witnesses, Magruder keeps his experiences confidential at first.
But over the years, he starts admitting little things here and there to his kids.Nothing too explosive, at least not at first.It's not until Magruder is on his deathbed that he really drops a bombshell.
And what he shares is so shocking, his children have to go public with the story. So imagine this, it's June 27th, 1997, Magruder's 86th birthday, and he only has mere hours left to live.
That's when he admits that he spent about a week at Wright-Patterson in the spring of 1948, a little under a year after the Roswell incident.Now, Magruder was there because he was training for a very elite, high-profile military program.
And during this program, some base executives showed Magruder all the things we described already, a room full of wreckage, including what sounds like memory metal.
And then everyone went into another room, but they didn't see dead alien bodies there.Apparently, one of those UFO crashes had a survivor.He claimed a living, breathing alien was being held at Wright-Patterson.
For the most part, Magruder's description of the alien matches everyone else's.It had a small body, just four feet tall with long, thin limbs, a big head, and huge eyes.
The only real difference was that Magruder said this thing had pinkish tan skin and not gray. Now Magruder said he saw the creature, but he wasn't allowed to talk to it, at least not in the traditional way, out loud with words.
But when they were in a room together face to face, the alien still found a way to communicate with him telepathically. The specific words Magruder used were that the alien spoke to him, quote, in his head.
He never revealed what the alien said, but he did say that he felt sorry for this creature.He didn't think it was right for it to be locked up all alone on the base like that.
But that's not the end of the story, because according to Magruder, he heard rumors that this alien died later on while it was being held hostage. Magruder blamed the Air Force.
He didn't think they meant to harm this alien, but he said they were running all sorts of tests trying to learn more about this creature.The problem was, they didn't understand its biology well enough to realize the experiments were fatal.
Of course, the authorities have always denied accounts like these.And I have to admit, while I love Magruder's story, it does seem a little strange that he would be handpicked from a class of cadets to get to see a real live alien.Like why, why him?
Why they pick him when they wouldn't even let a senator like Goldwater in there?But look, I don't know what to believe, but at the same time, I want to believe it.
I mean, maybe.It was supposed to be some very elite, high-security training class, so who knows?But yes, like Yvette said, we should be critical of every account, especially because on paper, Hanger 18 doesn't technically exist.
And I don't mean it was shut down when Project Blue Book ended or anything like that.Supposedly, there has never been a Hanger 18 at Wright-Patterson, period. But the same thing was said about Area 51 for a very long time.
That it didn't exist, but now we know that it does.And here's the thing, we know Air Force engineers are still coming out with new cutting-edge technology basically every day.
Just recently, on August 2nd, 2024, they opened a new lab at Wright-Patterson.And this is a real big mouthful, so please pardon me if I stumble every step of the way.
It was called Manufacturing Industrial Technologies and Energy Division's Collaborative Automation for Manufacturing Systems. In simple terms, they're pouring money into artificial intelligence.
According to one spokesperson, they're making breakthroughs that are quote, game changers.So maybe they're still reverse engineering alien technology even to this day.
Look, is it possible that Hangar 18 might be nothing more than a playground for geniuses?
I mean, some of America's best and brightest putting their heads together to design state-of-the-art, ahead-of-their-time technologies without the help of aliens, of course?
Absolutely.And it would make sense, then, why they would want to keep it under wraps.Like we said, we don't want stuff like that getting in the wrong hands, especially if we're talking about dangerous weapons.
But that doesn't explain the many accounts from seemingly credible witnesses that say it's also the storage facility for alien technology and possibly alien life.
I agree 100%.And it's not like we're getting these stories from one or two random conspiracy theorists.
There are so many people that have come forward, including well-respected army soldiers, I mean, Air Force airmen, Marines, like all the tops, and not to mention a literal U.S.senator.
So real talk, if you had the choice between Area 51 or getting five minutes in Hangar 18, what would you take?
Yes.Yes.We got to see those aliens.It really does sound like that's where all the action is anyway.
And it seems to be home of many secrets that are literally out of this world.
This is So Supernatural, an Audio Chuck original produced by Crime House.You can now connect with us on Instagram at sosupernaturalpod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com.Join Yvette and me next Friday for an all new episode.
So what do you think, Chuck?Do you approve?
Sign in
