What Did The Government Leave At The Bottom Of Salton Sea? Learn The Military Secrets of Salton Sea

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Its just a damn salt mine.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/adamconn1again 📅︎︎ May 13 2021 🗫︎ replies

This dude discovered that piece of medal quick after so many years 😂

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Flashy_Loss_6600 📅︎︎ Aug 28 2021 🗫︎ replies
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[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.
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Channel: NotaRubicon Productions
Views: 508,946
Rating: 4.8001361 out of 5
Keywords: Military coverup, salton sea pollution, u.s. government pollution, salton sea documentary, what is at the bottom of salton sea, salton sea world war 2, salton sea WWII, Kerry F morrison, atomic bombs at salton sea, nuclear bombs at salton sea, lost atomic bombs, biggest lake in california, largest lake in california, is salton sea polluted, pollution in salton sea, is salton sea safe, salton sea navy base, abandoned navy base at salton sea, abandoned places
Id: b3AIYWROQkE
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)
Published: Thu Dec 03 2020
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