[NARRATOR]
After decades of atomic testing, [NARRATOR]
the military has abandoned a
once top-secret test base. There are things lying
on the seafloor that very few people know about. They accidentally dropped an
atomic bomb that was more powerful than the
one they dropped at Hiroshima! The aircraft made a sudden rapid descent into the Salton
Sea. Who knows how many bodies
are still down there? [NARRATOR]
But now, EPA documents have
revealed the toxic legacy they left behind. As it dries up and stuff
comes to the surface, people will be in for a huge
surprise. [Music] Recently declassified documents
have shed new light on an
abandoned military base on the
shores of the Salton Sea just 140 miles southeast of Los
Angeles. The documents were part of a
series of base cleanup reports
mandated by the EPA which detailed previously
classified information about atomic testing
programs that took place at the Salton
Sea Test Base. Millions of us in California
know about the environmental disaster that will occur if the
Salton Sea is allowed to dry up. but there are other dangers out
there. There are things lying at the
bottom of the Salton Sea that very few people know about. It doesn't look like
much now. An old pier, a telemetry building,
some ammo bunkers and a heavily damaged
electrical building that was obviously
under water for quite some time. But what started out in 1942 as just a small
Naval Air Station quickly evolved into one of our
most secret facilities. Codenamed, Sandy Beach For decades scientists
from The Manhattan Project and
other agencies used the Salton Sea to test
the aerodynamics of atomic bomb shapes and to
develop more accurate and
reliable detonators. Although they claimed
that radioactive materials were never used here, we found out otherwise. Try to imagine America back in
1941. Up until then we've stayed out
of World War II. But then on December 7th 1941,
America was caught by surprise. December 7th 1941,
a date which will live in
infamy. 420 Japanese dive bombers attacked the warships anchored
at Pearl Harbor, and in almost 2 hours, nearly
the entire Pacific naval fleet
was destroyed. This was the event that brought
America into the war. [NARRATOR]
Across the Atlantic, Hitler and
the Nazis were steamrolling [NARRATOR]
across Europe, swallowing up one [NARRATOR]
country after another.
Hitler's forces [NARRATOR]
were well-armed,
dedicated, and highly trained. [NARRATOR]
They appeared unstoppable. The Germans and Japanese
had hundreds of scientists working
24/7 on new types of super-
weapons. The Germans had developed the
world's first working jet engine
aircraft, as well as the first long-range
guided missile, the V-2. The V-2 brought death and
destruction to thousands of
citizens in London. President Roosevelt
was getting letters from Albert Einstein, the
world's most prolific scientist
at the time. In one of these letters Einstein
warns Roosevelt that scientists in
Germany had split the atom a conventional bomb
could take out a ship, an atomic bomb could take out
the ship, the harbor, and a good part of the city. [NARRATOR]
Roosevelt finally made an
executive decision, [NARRATOR]
and on December 28, 1942, [NARRATOR]
he greatly expanded an
existing top-secret [NARRATOR]
project that had begun quietly a
few years earlier. [NARRATOR]
That project was called "The
Manhattan Project" [NARRATOR]
It was headquartered 34 miles
north of Santa Fe [NARRATOR]
New Mexico, in a
small town called Los Alamos. [NARRATOR]
Their goal was simple, to
produce an atomic weapon ahead
of the Germans the Manhattan Project
was like nothing we had ever
seen before. The Brits and the Americans
gathered the world's best scientists, some of these
scientists were refugees who had fled some of
the oppressive regimes in Europe. Imagine that you're
teaching college kids one day, then,
a week later you're locked up in a
top-secret compound in New Mexico. Suddenly you don't care how much
money you're being paid, you're working on something
that many of the world's top experts thought was
impossible. The problem was, the Germans
were already so far ahead in the
race for the atomic bomb. They split the atom in 1938.
That was crucial in creating the
Atomic Bomb After Roosevelt's dramatic
increase in funding, the scientists at Los Alamos
made huge progress. In just two years, scientists
created two working prototypes. One with highly enriched
uranium, and another with plutonium. The uranium bomb was
nicknamed "Little Boy" the plutonium bomb
was nicknamed "Fat Man". These bombs were
huge! Fat Man weighed over five tons and
was over six feet around! It was so big, America had to
re-engineer its newest bomber just to fit one single Fat
Man inside. But as huge and heavy as
Fat Man and Little Boy were, they still had to be
aerodynamic so that they could hit their
targets. These bombs were dropped from
six miles up and would fall for a full minute
before detonating. This is why Salton
Sea mattered so much out in the middle
of the desert it had both privacy and security. Captain Robert Lewis piloted the
first practice bombing run. He had two challenges that day.
First, he had to drop a giant bomb from over six miles
up, and have it hit a target
barely bigger than a football field.
Second, he had to do this crazy escape maneuver, like a full u-turn, so he could
get clear of the explosion when they
dropped the real thing. The scientists at Los Alamos had no way of knowing for sure
whether the aircraft that dropped the bomb would actually escape the blast radius
from the explosion. As far as these guys knew, they were on a suicide mission. how committed they
were to ending the war. Captain Robert Lewis's crew
dropped the very first atomic
bomb test shape right across the water, over
there near North Shore. That test bomb was a ten-
thousand pound monster. An exact duplicate of the
plutonium based Fatman atomic
bomb. Even without radioactive
explosives, it would have created an enormous crater when
it slammed into the ground at eight hundred
miles per hour. Fully armed, the fat
man bomb weighed over five tons, so to
make the test bombs the same weight they had to fill
them with ballast. This ballast was usually made of
concrete and lead. Years later, Sandia Labs
released a highly classified report saying that
an unknown number of these test bombs used depleted
uranium as ballast. Depleted uranium is what was
left over after the nuclear enrichment process.
It was cheap and it was heavy. It was 1.7 times heavier than
lead. [NARRATOR]
Depleted uranium is also used to
make [NARRATOR]
armor-piercing bullets in
artillery shells. [NARRATOR]
In the 1940s, the military
claimed [NARRATOR]
it was harmless but, recent
studies have [NARRATOR]
revealed that soldiers that have
inhaled [NARRATOR]
small particles of it on the
battlefield [NARRATOR]
were at a much higher risk of
developing lung cancer, kidney
disease, and a host of [NARRATOR]
other serious health problems. In addition to ballast, these test bombs would have
detonators, batteries, and a small amount of actual
explosives that would detonate when the
bomb hit the ground so that the recovery teams could
find these bombs. These test bombs were like giant
bowling balls dropped from over 30,000 feet up! When they hit the ground just
pray you're nowhere near it. [Music] We've just arrived at land
target number "10 L-B". At one time, there would have
been a large triangular piece of
metal on top of those posts that would have
reflected the radar used by
bombers, making it easier for them to
find their targets. Between 1946 and 1961, the
Strategic Air-Command dropped thousands of test bombs here and
there's metal strewn all over the place. there's pieces of degraded tires
and metal shrapnel pieces and all sorts of things
that we can't even identify, so this is
a great place to try the metal detector and see what
we can find. Bring me the Geiger counter! [geiger counter sounds] We've got something heavy! We found a bomb fragment, and they're really, really
heavy. Based on the research we've done
we know that they're either depleted uranium or solid lead. [NARRATOR]
The area around the land target
is still [NARRATOR]
peppered with ballast from test
bombs like the one found near
target Ten L-B. [NARRATOR]
These small pieces are extremely
heavy [NARRATOR]
and are made of either lead or
depleted uranium. [NARRATOR]
Even though depleted uranium
isn't very radioactive, it's
still one of the most [NARRATOR]
dangerous heavy metals on the
planet and [NARRATOR]
is known to cause birth defects
in regions where it has been
used. Just a few miles east of here, a
b-29 bomber flying at 32,000 feet,
accidentally released a full-size test bomb
over the town of Calipatria. This bomb was unarmed, except
for its explosive detonator. But even so, at 10,000 pounds, this bomb could have killed
dozens of people if it had
struck a building. A few months later, another
bomb was accidentally dropped nearby, in
Niland. No one was killed there either,
but many people were very shook
up, and military's atomic testing
program wasn't a secret anymore. As is the case after incidents
like this one, conflicting
reports emerged. One report stated that personnel
came out with a bulldozer and recovered the bomb. But another report said that the
bomb was so deeply buried that they just left it there and
they used the bulldozers to fill
in the crater. [NARRATOR]
In the meantime, the scientists
and military personnel working
on the [NARRATOR]
super-secret Manhattan Project
had just achieved the
impossible. [NARRATOR]
n July 16, 1945 at the Trinity
test site in Alamogordo New Mexico the team successfully detonated
the world's first atomic bomb. The atomic detonation in
New Mexico codenamed Trinity, was the first major success of the Manhattan
Project. After that the project could
move directly into wartime
applications. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Germany and Italy had already
surrendered. But in the Pacific the Japanese
were demonstrating that they
were going to fight to the death. Japanese fighters were instilled
with the spirit of their
ancestors, the Samurai. The Samurai didn't
care about death they cared about honor,
and nothing was more honorable than dying in
battle. Or in the case of the kamikaze, sacrificing yourself to take out
an enemy ship. [NARRATOR]
On August 6, 1945 just three
weeks after the Trinity test, [NARRATOR]
Colonel Paul Tibbets and his
crew dropped the "Little Boy"
bomb over Hiroshima. [NARRATOR]
It detonated at 1,900 feet [NARRATOR]
and vaporized almost two square
miles of the city. [NARRATOR]
Three days later a second bomber
dropped The Fatman [NARRATOR]
plutonium bomb over Nagasaki,
with the same destructive
results. [Dramatic Music] [NARRATOR]
One week later, Japan's Emperor
Hirohito [NARRATOR] announced his
intention to surrender, and [NARRATOR]
on September 2nd, 1945, World
War II officially came to an
end. [Music] [NARRATOR]
But the end of the war didn't
mean the end of the development
of the atomic bomb. So, World War II was pretty much
over. But Americas addiction and better bombs was just
getting started. If anything,,the Salton Sea test
base became busier than ever. The Salton Sea Test Base was
expanded, and during the 40s 50s and 60s,
three agencies did atomic testing there. The Manhattan Engineering
District, The Atomic Energy
Commission, and the Sandia Corporation were all operating out of the
base during this time which by
now had greatly expanded. One of the agencies dropped
2,500 test bombs! Another
agency, Sandia Labs, dropped 1,200 test
bombs! It was during this very
active period at the base that an aircraft from one of the
agencies overshot their water
target. They released a bomb that hit
the concrete tennis courts at 800
miles an hour. This bomb blasted an enormous
crater. Although no one was killed, it was such a close call that
the Navy was forced to move
their floating target 3,000 feet further out into the
water. [NARRATOR] But shortly after the
incident at the base tennis
courts, [NARRATOR]
another incident occurred. [NARRATOR]
This one had the potential to
destroy far more than just a
tennis court. [NARRATOR]
It could have poisoned the
entire base and the entire
Salton Sea as well. Up until this time, the only
test bombs that were dropped at
the Salton Sea Were unarmed. They were enormous
but, aside from depleted uranium
they contained no other radioactive material. But in the early 1950s, a
Strategic Air Command bomber accidentally dropped a real
nuclear bomb containing
uranium. So this crew dropped an actual
atomic bomb. It was designed to produce a
hundred and sixty kiloton blast. that's 12 times the power of the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima But this bomb had to
be fused before it could
explode. [NARRATOR]
The "Mark Six" bomb was a
lighter and more powerful
version of the [NARRATOR]
plutonium based "Fat Man" bomb. [NARRATOR]
it was designed with a fail-safe
which would prevent the device
from exploding [NARRATOR]
without its plutonium capsule, [NARRATOR]
and because the Bombardier had
not yet inserted that plutonium
capsule before [NARRATOR]
the bomb was lost, it was
impossible for the Mark Six bomb
to detonate. [NARRATOR]
But the device still contained
enough uranium to poison several
hundred [NARRATOR]
square miles if it became
exposed to the air or water. That's toxic enough to kill
thousands of people! No one knew where it landed.
All they knew, is it was somewhere at the bottom of the
Salton Sea. Just like in previous accidents
at Calipatria and Niland,
official reports are classified. Everything about this bomb was
top-secret. We learned about it from base
cleanup reports, and even those
are contradictory. The first report states that in
September of 1960, Navy divers recovered 10,000 pounds of
material and one complete weapon prototype. The term "weapons prototype"
might mean that missing Mark Six
bomb. But a second much, more recent
report indicates that no record of the nuclear
bomb's location was ever found and its exact location today,
remains a mystery. [NARRATOR]
By the early 1960s the Salton
Sea had become so popular with
fishermen and [NARRATOR]
tourists that test bombing
operations had become unsafe. [NARRATOR]
So the Manhattan Engineering
District, The Atomic Energy
Commission, [NARRATOR]
and Sandia Labs, moved their
test bombing operations to [NARRATOR]
Tonopah Nevada and returned
the control of the Salton Sea
test base to the US Navy. But check this out!
Before they left the AEC put up restricted areas around just one
of their 12 floating targets. They stationed heavily armed
guards in speedboats to keep
people away from the restricted
area. To prevent the unauthorized
search for, or recovery of, any
AEC material. The AEC demanded that round-the-
clock surveillance be maintained
over this restricted area. Furthermore, if the Navy was
unable to maintain that
surveillance they were required to notify the
FBI immediately. If the real atomic bomb had
already been recovered why would
the AEC demand that security
this tight be maintained? My guess?
It's because the bomb is still
out there. [NARRATOR]
in 1996 the US Navy conducted a
survey of the restricted area of
the Salton Sea [NARRATOR]
2,700 feet around the one
remaining water target. [NARRATOR]
Their side scanning sonar and
magnetometers identified more
than [NARRATOR]
100 metallic objects in that one
limited area. Since those objects are
surrounding the floating target
they're probably test bombs. But consider this. The Salton Sea is 375 square
miles. If the Navy found over 100
suspicious items in just this
one small section, think about how much military
hardware is littered across the
entire sea-floor. Now it gets even more suspicious
because later the Navy brought
in a radiological team to test the base for
radioactivity. Because, depleated uranium had
been used as ballast in a number
of test bombs and hundreds of these bombs had
hit land targets. So even though their mandate was
to test unarmed bombs, with no
nuclear material, the Navy is now having to verify
that that's what they actually
did. Remember. Sandia Labs have used
depleted uranium in some of the
test bombs. and the Strategic Air Command
had dropped a real bomb
with uranium in it! Using Geiger counters, that team
swept every abandoned building,
but found only low levels of radiation. But they didn't check the land
or water targets which is where
the vast majority of bombs were
dropped. If there's radioactive
contamination out there it's
gonna linger for hundreds
or thousands of years. [NARRATOR]
In 1997 the Navy began the
process of returning the
Salton Sea test base to the Department of the
Interior [NARRATOR]
and following federal law run a
gauntlet of environmental tests. [NARRATOR]
Experts found extremely high
levels of lead, [NARRATOR]
selenium, arsenic, barium,
cadmium, nickel, [NARRATOR]
and zinc in the sediment, and
excavated hundreds of tons of
contaminated topsoil. The Bechtel corporation
and the US Army Corps of
Engineers shared the task of collecting
the base's unexploded ordnance. But with 8,000 acres of land and
13,000 acres of seafloor it's just too large an area to
find everything. But there's more than just test
bombs, depleted uranium, and
lead here. Since 1938 27 aircraft have
crashed into the Salton Sea. The remains of those aircraft
and many are their crew are
still scattered all over the bottom of
the Salton Sea. Something so familiar here that
at times the Salton Sea has been called a graveyard of military
aircraft. The Navy kept all of these
crashes virtually secret for
over 50 years. But, an accidental discovery by
Riverside County Sheriff's
divers changed all of that. Suddenly the old aircraft and
their crew members were cast
back into the spotlight. A World War II mystery is one
step closer to being solved. Divers from the Riverside County
Sheriff's Department retrieved a valuable clue from a sunken Navy
warplane, but in doing so these investigators may have uncovered
an even deeper mystery. The first time I heard about the
plane crash in the Salton Sea was from liaison Wayne
Walker. He got the call, he said there's
a missing plane that looks like it went down
between Imperial County and
Riverside County. On Christmas Day, a Piper
Cherokee with an elderly couple flew from Ramona California to
Chiriaco Summit. And on their return flight
they ah, disappeared off the
radar screen and were reported
missing. The radar screen showed that the
aircraft made asudden rapid
descent into the Salton Sea. In my experience as a diver most
of my recoveries were people that had already passed. Someone drowns in a boating
accident we have to go out and
find the boat and find the victims, and
recover 'em. I took the task, I put on the
dry suit, I was ready to go. As I run down the line, going
five feet, ten feet, it starts getting darker and
darker. When I hit about eight feet,
just total black. You might as well just close
your eyes. [Ominous Music] While I'm using my line, and I'm
trying to find the location, you come across things like 55-
gallon drums. A row-boat with an outboard on
it. Tree limbs, tree branches. just all sorts of weird things. As I'm crawling, and trying to
find the next location, is when
I found the target. One thing for sure, it wasn't a
Piper Cherokee. So we were shocked to find out
that this was not the Piper
Cherokee that we thought it
might be. It was a, uh, bomber airplane
from World War II You could just feel your way
along there, everything's intact. It just
felt like it was put down
there last night. [Dramatic Music] It was just a, just a strange
feeling as I would crawl along
the fuselage. I was amazed to see the
instruments were like brand-new. The Navy immediately ordered
that all the civilian divers
get off the aircraft and and that it was a classified
situation and that we are not to
look for any remains or remove any
parts of the aircraft. So we were told to stand-down
basically at that point. There was intense pressure from
the public and from the media to
find out how did this aircraft end up in
Salton Sea and were there any
remains on the aircraft. That aircraft is still sitting
at the same location, at the
bottom of the Salton Sea. During that investigation we had
numerous other sonar hits and
other hits when we were down
there. I came across probably eight
more plane wrecks that we're
down there. Some still containing bodies. There was a lot of different
training going on at the Salton
Sea. There was high-altitude bombing,
glide bombing, dive bombing,
skip bombing. All the different services used
the Salton Sea for training. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard,
and even Army air. As many as 55 squadrons from
carriers rotated at the Salton
Sea for rocket training. There was a version of the B-25
bomber called the "Marine Corps
PBJ" Two of those were lost at at The
Sea. There was a war going on, and in
war, training gets accelerated. So the pilots that were there
were motivated and courageous
but they weren't very experienced. [NARRATOR]
This inexperience and lack of
training, combined with [NARRATOR]
the primitive instrumentation of
the era [NARRATOR]
was dangerous combination
resulting in the loss of dozens
of young Airmen at the [NARRATOR]
Salton Sea. [NARRATOR]
Leading many to ask the
question, "why are they still
down there?" [NARRATOR]
When the Navy does not recover
sailors or airmen lost at sea,
it's called a "burial at sea". [NARRATOR]
Many consider this in honorable
tradition. But some people
question if in the case of [NARRATOR]
the airmen lost its Salton Sea, [NARRATOR]
if it's a matter of Honor or,
economy. [NARRATOR]
Why do other branches of the
military go to so much effort
and expense, [NARRATOR]
sometimes decades later, to
repatriate the remains of [NARRATOR]
soldiers who died fighting on
land, overseas, while the
Navy leaves their [NARRATOR]
Airmen sitting at the bottom of
a lake, right here in
California? There may be as many as 26 other
World War II aircraft that are at the bottom of a
Salton Sea, that have crashed
from various training missions, and
probably half of them, the uh, crew was never
recovered. They were killed in
these crashes and were never
recovered. [NARRATOR]
But in the years after World War
II, even more military aircraft
have been lost at Salton Sea. [NARRATOR]
In 1987, the Marines lost a
CH-53 helicopter when it crashed
while practicing nighttime [NARRATOR]
landings at the test-base,
killing all five crew members on
board. [NARRATOR]
The Army lost two P-40 Warhawks
and two B-25 bombers, none of
which have been recovered, [NARRATOR]
and the wreckage traced to an
Army C7 Caribou can still
be found [NARRATOR]
scattered across a 1/4 mile or
more of the base. [NARRATOR]
AeroQuest, a volunteer group
that investigates missing
military aircraft [NARRATOR]
has reported that the Navy has
lost these aircraft at Salton
Sea [NARRATOR]
since 1942, all of which
are still at the bottom of the
lake. [NARRATOR]
10 TBM and TBF Avengers. [NARRATOR]
4 Grumman F-4 Wildcats [NARRATOR]
3 Grumman F-6 Hellcats [NARRATOR]
3 Curtis Helldivers [NARRATOR]
3 Catalina Flying Boats, [NARRATOR]
and 2 F-4 Corsairs. This is going to be a public
relations disaster for the Navy
because the Salton Sea is drying up. Without a radical solution such as importing water from the
ocean, it's predicted the Salton
Sea could be half of its current size. And if that happens, all of
these old aircraft and the remains of these Airmen, are
going to be exposed. People would be stumbling across
them and scrappers would be
desecrating them. Everyone would be asking, why
didn't the Navy do something to
recover the bodies of these heroic young aviators? The bottom of the Salton Sea has
been contaminated by decades of
weapons testing and littered with military
aircraft and the bodies unrecovered crews. Now that the Salton Sea is
drying up,and shrinking, it is
urgent that the thousands of test
bombs, aircraft, and the
remains of their crews be recovered.
Its just a damn salt mine.
This dude discovered that piece of medal quick after so many years 😂