In December 1955, a Sears department store ran a newspaper ad inviting children to call Santa on his “private phone.” But the newspaper made a mistake. One digit was wrong. Instead of reaching Santa’s workshop, kids who dialed that number reached the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Springs. This was the military organization watching for Soviet nuclear attacks. Colonel Harry Shoup answered the phone expecting news of World War III. Instead, a child’s voice asked, “Is this Santa Claus?” Shoup was annoyed at first, but when the child started crying, something changed. He said “Ho, ho, ho,” asked if the kid had been good, and put his airmen on the phones to answer more calls. That Christmas Eve, someone drew a sleigh and reindeer on the glass board used to track enemy aircraft. Shoup called the local radio station and reported an “unidentified flying object” that looked like a sleigh.

That moment of unexpected kindness became a 70-year tradition. Today, NORAD Tracks Santa is a massive operation. Every Christmas Eve, hundreds of volunteers answer over 100,000 calls from children around the world. Millions more track Santa online in nine languages. The same radar systems built to detect incoming Soviet missiles now track a magical sleigh. Colonel Shoup, who died in 2009, spent his final years carrying thank-you letters in a locked briefcase “like it was top-secret information.”

In this episode, learn how the infrastructure of nuclear fear became the infrastructure of Christmas joy.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, everyone!! May the New Year bring you many wonderful blessings!

Now, let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it!

The Cold War Accidents That Could Have Ended Cities

In May 1957, a B-36 bomber approached Kirtland Air Force Base outside Albuquerque carrying a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb, the largest nuclear weapon America ever built. The bomb was more than 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. As the navigator removed a routine safety pin before landing, something went wrong. The 42,000-pound weapon fell through the closed bomb bay doors and plummeted into a cow pasture five miles south of the base. The conventional explosives detonated on impact, blasting a crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet wide. The only casualty was a grazing cow. The Air Force classified the incident for nearly 30 years, and the people of Albuquerque never knew how close they came to nuclear disaster.

This episode explores the world of Broken Arrows, the military’s term for nuclear weapons accidents. The Pentagon admits to 32 such incidents between 1950 and 1980, with six nuclear weapons still missing today. We trace how Cold War deterrence strategy required constant movement of nuclear weapons across American skies, making accidents inevitable. From the single safety switch that prevented a 20-megaton detonation in North Carolina to the hydrogen bomb still buried in the mud off Tybee Island, Georgia, we examine what happens when you normalize flying city-killers over populated areas. The Albuquerque cow was the lucky one. She died quickly. The rest of us are still living with the Broken Arrows that never got found.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it!

The 1953 Document That Showed the Government Wasn’t Just Studying UFOs, They Were Thinking About Creating Them

In January 1953, H.C. Cross of the Battelle Memorial Institute wrote a classified memo proposing that the Air Force create fake UFO sightings to study public reaction. Five days before the CIA’s Robertson Panel would meet to evaluate UFO evidence, Cross suggested setting up observation zones with complete surveillance, then secretly scheduling unusual aerial activities to see how civilians reported them. The memo stayed hidden for 14 years until French scientist Jacques Vallée discovered it while organizing Dr. Allen Hynek’s files at Northwestern University. Hynek had been the Air Force’s UFO consultant since 1948 without knowing about Project Stork, the classified Battelle program that had analyzed thousands of UFO cases before the Robertson Panel ever met.

When Hynek confronted the Battelle team in 1967, their reaction was telling. Cross grabbed the papers and insisted the contents could never be discussed. When Hynek returned in 1968, Cross brought four colleagues who claimed all data was destroyed and wanted the conversation to end immediately. This episode examines whether Cross’s proposal was actually implemented, exploring the 1952 UFO wave that created public panic, the technology available to create convincing aerial displays, and the patterns in subsequent sightings that some researchers claim show signs of deliberate orchestration. While we cannot prove the government faked UFOs, we can prove they wanted to, had the capability, and reacted with suspicious fury when confronted about it decades later.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it!

In 1979, UFO researcher Robert Todd asked the Air Force about something called Project MOON DUST. They said it didn’t exist. Then he found references in other declassified documents and asked again. Suddenly, MOON DUST existed, complete with a 1961 Air Force Intelligence letter detailing its mission: recover “descended foreign space vehicles” and “objects of unknown origin.” The same teams publicly debunking UFO sightings were secretly deployed worldwide to recover crashed mysteries, from a three-ton aluminum cube in Sudan to metal fragments in the Congo explicitly labeled as UFO debris.

This episode exposes the beautiful hypocrisy of Cold War intelligence through declassified documents that read like satire but are deadly serious. We examine the 1965 Kecksburg incident where MOON DUST teams recovered something the military claims didn’t exist, the personnel crisis of maintaining secret recovery teams for non-existent phenomena, and how classification stamps hid this contradiction for decades. Through FOIA releases from the Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, and NASA, we reveal how the government built elaborate infrastructure to handle the very problems it told the public were imaginary. Sometimes the cover-up really is more interesting than what’s being covered up.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it!

On July 9, 1962, the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton hydrogen bomb 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Hotels in Honolulu threw rooftop parties so tourists could watch. Newspapers promoted it. The countdown broadcast over radio. Families brought their kids expecting a harmless light show 900 miles away. At 11:00 PM Hawaii time, the sky exploded in brilliant colors visible from Hawaii to New Zealand. Then Hawaii’s infrastructure started failing. About 300 streetlights went dark instantly. Phone systems died. Burglar alarms triggered across the city. The electromagnetic pulse was so powerful it exceeded what measuring equipment could record. Scientists had predicted minimal effects. They were catastrophically wrong about everything.

The explosion created an artificial radiation belt around Earth that lasted over 10 years and killed at least eight satellites, including Telstar 1, the first communications satellite. This episode examines declassified documents from Operation Fishbowl, the military program that conducted five high altitude nuclear tests in 1962. We trace the failed June launch that contaminated Johnston Atoll with plutonium, the successful July test that broke orbital space, and the 1963 treaty that finally stopped the madness. The most disturbing part is not the weapon or the miscalculation. It is the casual normalization. The rainbow bomb parties. The tourists complaining about slow drink service while a thermonuclear aurora lit up the sky. We threw parties to watch a hydrogen bomb test and treated nuclear weapons like entertainment.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it!

The Spy Agency’s Decades-Long Quest to Turn Animals into Surveillance Machines

In the 1970s, the CIA’s Office of Research and Development decided the future of espionage lay in building robot animals. Their first creation was the Insectothopter, a mechanical dragonfly weighing just one gram, hand-painted to look exactly like the real insect. Built by a watchmaker, it used a miniature gas-powered engine to flap its wings and was guided by an invisible laser beam that heated metal strips to control its flight. The project worked perfectly in laboratory conditions, achieving 60-second flights over distances of 650 feet. But the moment they took it outside, the tiniest breeze sent the mechanical spy tumbling through the air. Despite years of development, the Insectothopter never flew a single operational mission.

Twenty years later, undeterred by failure, the CIA tried again with Charlie, a 61-centimeter robotic catfish designed to secretly collect water samples near suspected weapons facilities. Charlie contained a pressure hull, ballast system, and tail propulsion that mimicked real fish swimming. Unlike the doomed dragonfly, Charlie could be controlled via radio and might have actually worked, but the CIA has kept all operational details classified to this day. These projects represent peak Cold War optimism: the belief that with enough money and engineering, the CIA could improve on millions of years of evolution. They couldn’t, but the fact that they got a mechanical dragonfly to fly at all, even if only indoors, stands as testimony to an era when American intelligence genuinely believed robot animals were the future of spying.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it!

The Cold War Decision to Gaslight America About UFOs

In January 1953, the CIA convened five distinguished scientists for what would become known as the Robertson Panel, tasked with addressing America’s growing UFO problem. But they weren’t there to investigate what people were seeing in the skies. They were there to figure out how to make Americans stop reporting it. Through declassified documents now available in the CIA’s online reading room, we can trace how these scientists, including future Nobel laureate Luis Alvarez, spent five days reviewing the Air Force’s best UFO evidence, including gun camera footage and radar reports, only to recommend a systematic campaign of ridicule against witnesses.

Their solution was elegantly sinister: use mass media to “educate” the public that only unstable people see UFOs, monitor civilian UFO organizations as potential subversives, and make military personnel afraid to report sightings by criminalizing disclosure under the Espionage Act. The panel’s recommendations were immediately implemented, transforming Project Blue Book from an investigation unit into a debunking operation, approaching Disney about propaganda films, and beginning FBI surveillance of American citizens interested in UFOs.

For seventy years, this policy worked exactly as intended, creating a cultural reflex where UFO witnesses faced automatic mockery while classified programs continued investigating in secret, a hypocrisy only revealed with recent Pentagon admissions about studying the very phenomena they taught us to laugh at.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

The Cold War Program That Turned Utah into a Chemical Weapons Testing Range and Nobody Told the Sheep

On March 14, 1968, ranchers in Skull Valley, Utah discovered 6,000 sheep dead or dying across their grazing lands—victims of VX nerve agent that had drifted 27 miles from the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, where an F-4 Phantom’s spray nozzle had malfunctioned during a chemical weapons test. The Army initially denied involvement, then gradually shifted toward vague acknowledgments while never officially admitting guilt, ultimately paying ranchers $376,685 (about $3.3 million today and less than the cost of two modern cruise missiles) for the mass casualty event that exposed seventeen years of treating the Utah desert as an open-air chemical and biological weapons laboratory.

The Dugway sheep incident represents the perfect crystallization of Cold War folly: the military had conducted hundreds of tests with nerve agents, anthrax, Q fever, and other horrors just 85 miles from Salt Lake City, considering these normal operations until dead sheep made the invisible visible. The incident led President Nixon to ban open-air chemical weapons testing in 1969, yet Dugway remains operational today. As recently as 2015, they accidentally shipped live anthrax to nine states, proving that the infrastructure of insanity persists, we just promise to be more careful now.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it.

The Government Program That Turned Tax Dollars into Sex, Drugs, and Two-Way Mirrors

Operation Midnight Climax represents the CIA's most depraved MKUltra subproject: government-run brothels in San Francisco and New York where prostitutes dosed unwitting clients with LSD while federal agents watched through two-way mirrors. From 1955 to 1965, narcotics agent George Hunter White ran the primary safehouse at 225 Chestnut Street in Telegraph Hill, where he would sit on a portable toilet behind a mirror, drinking from an ever-present pitcher of martinis, taking notes as men's minds disintegrated during what they thought were private encounters. The prostitutes, referred to in CIA documents as "undercover operatives," were recruited from the Tenderloin and North Beach, given federal protection, and trained in dosing techniques that would deliver 100-300 micrograms of LSD to their unsuspecting victims.

The program's documented legacy includes Wayne Ritchie, a deputy U.S. Marshal who held up a bar at gunpoint after being dosed; at least one businessman who jumped from a hotel window; and "hundreds of subjects" according to White's own records, none of whom were ever informed or compensated. Through declassified expense reports listing "liquor for operatives" and "replacement of damaged furniture," Church Committee testimony where CIA officials defended drugging citizens as "essential research," and White's own diary where he celebrated that he could "lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest," we trace how the U.S. government normalized depravity, bureaucratized violation, and turned Americans' most intimate moments into data points for operational improvement—all funded by taxpayers who were simultaneously the program's unwitting subjects and financial sponsors.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas

Thanks for listening to the Declassified podcast from Author Daniel P. Douglas! This podcast is public so feel free to share it.

How the Minnesota Iceman Dragged American Intelligence into the Cryptozoology Business

In December 1968, two government agents stood in a freezing Minnesota parking lot, peering through glass at what appeared to be a hairy humanoid frozen in a block of ice—complete with a bullet wound through its eye. The Minnesota Iceman, a traveling carnival attraction that cost 35 cents to view, somehow triggered a federal investigation involving the CIA, FBI, and Smithsonian Institution, all fighting over jurisdiction of what was almost certainly a rubber suit covered in yak hair.

Through declassified documents and contemporary accounts, we trace how Frank Hansen's sideshow hoax became a matter of national security, why Soviet interest in "relic hominids" made the CIA monitor Bigfoot sightings throughout the 1970s, and how Cold War paranoia could transform a carnival freezer truck into a classified intelligence operation. The punchline? Portions of the government's investigation remain redacted after 55 years. I guess they're still too embarrassed to fully reveal how seriously they took a frozen rubber gorilla that you could see for less than the price of a candy bar.

Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?

-Daniel P. Douglas