All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Feb. 23, 2010 - Skeptoid
18:58
Skeptoid #194: The Denver Airport Conspiracy

Is the Denver International Airport a headquarters for the New World Order? (Hint: no) Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories 00:10:42
Hold on to your hats because today you're going swimming.
You're taking a deep dive into one of the most colorful of today's conspiracy theories.
The belief that Denver International Airport is secretly the headquarters for the New World Order, from which they plan to launch global extermination.
Oh, and also a bunch of strange races like aliens and Bigfoot live in the tunnels underneath it.
The Denver Airport Conspiracy is today on Skeptoid.
A quick reminder for everyone, you're listening to Skeptoid, revealing the true science and true history behind urban legends every week since 2006.
With over a thousand episodes, we're celebrating 20 years of keeping it focused and keeping it brief.
And we couldn't have done it without your curiosity leading the way.
And now we're even offering a little bit more.
If you become a premium member, supporting the show with a monthly micropayment of as little as $5, you get more Skeptoid.
The premium version of the show is not only ad-free, it has extended content.
These episodes are a few minutes longer.
We get rid of the ads and we'll replace them with more Skeptoid.
The extended premium show available now.
Come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Denver Airport Conspiracy.
On the surface, Denver International Airport seems like any other modern airport.
It's new, it's clean, it's big, and it's modern.
But some investigators have found more to it than meets the eye.
Much more.
Claims abound that Denver International was designed and built by the Illuminati as the headquarters for the global genocide that will trigger the New World Order.
An internet search for Denver Airport conspiracy reveals that there is a lot of talk about this and that the specific claims and observations are numerous.
Here's an overview of the basics.
According to the conspiracy theorists, Denver already had a fine airport, Stapleton International.
But despite widespread protests, Denver International was built and opened in 1995 with fewer runways, thus reducing Denver's capacity.
Its construction began with five mysterious buildings that were completed and then buried intact, with the cover story that they were built wrong.
Up to eight levels of underground facilities are said to exist, and workers who go there refuse to answer questions about what they do.
The entire airport is surrounded by a barbed wire guard fence, with the barbed wire angled inward to keep people in like a giant prison, not out like at other airports.
And if viewed from the air, the runways are revealed to be laid out in the shape of a Nazi swastika.
Questions about what the government might be doing in this underground base may have been answered in 2007 when 14 commercial aircraft reported spontaneously shattered windshields as the presumed result of electromagnetic pulses.
Indoors, the airport gets even stranger.
The Illuminati appear to have detailed their plans for global genocide and a new world order in two large murals.
The first depicts a huge Nazi soldier with dead women and children scattered around him, and the second shows third world populations dying, a few elite species protected from the apocalypse in sealed containers, and the Mayan symbol for 2012 presiding over all.
In the floor near the murals is written AUAG, the abbreviation for the deadly toxin Australia antigen, evidently the Illuminati's weapon of choice to accomplish the genocide.
In other places, strange words in an unknown, possibly alien language are written on the floors.
Most telling of all is the granite monument that the airport claims is a time capsule.
It's emblazoned with the symbol of the Freemasons, well known among conspiracy theorists to be a major arm of the Illuminati, and engraved with the words, New World Airport Commission.
And finally, the Queen of England, another alleged Illuminatus, has been secretly and anonymously buying up the property surrounding the airport.
There's a common red flag shared by this particular conspiracy and many others, and that's the presumption that the conspirators chose to publicly announce their evil plans by putting all of this out there for everyone to see.
That would be like Nixon before Watergate ordering a public mural to be placed in the hotel lobby showing GOP spies breaking into a room.
Or Oliver North announcing his intentions by placing a sculpture in the National Mall, showing himself handing a shoulder-fired missile launcher to an Iranian with one hand, and giving the proceeds to a Nicaraguan with the other.
If these analogies sound absurd, they are, but they do accurately portray the conspiracy theorists' belief of why Denver International has certain features.
It was to publicly announce plans for a future crime against humanity.
If you don't think that Nixon or North were fool enough to make such announcements, you might want to reconsider whether that's actually what was done at Denver International.
Was the old Stapleton International Airport truly adequate, and did it really have more capacity?
Not even close.
It was 65 years old.
It was a major noise nuisance being in the middle of the city, and had only three 10,000-foot runways, the minimum needed for large jets at such a high elevation, and barely adequate for fully loaded international jumbos.
Denver International has six runways, all over 12,000 feet, and one at 16,000 feet, that can accommodate any jet in the world.
Its location, clear of Denver, alleviates the noise concerns.
The underground constructions, as anyone who has traveled through Denver knows, are for the underground train system that connects all the terminals, including additional tunneling built to accommodate future expansion.
Other underground systems were built for Denver's state-of-the-art automated baggage handling system.
Unfortunately, the system never worked well, and by 2005 it was retired completely, and now the underground tunnels are used for conventional baggage handling.
Hundreds of workers go in and out of there every day, and none of them have ever reported seeing anything unusual.
No reptoids, no aliens, no Illuminati.
Yet.
I was not able to find any well-reported cases of a worker being interviewed and refusing to discuss his job, so as far as I can tell, this was simply made up.
What of the large barbed wire prison area?
Like those at all commercial airports in developed nations, Denver International's runways are fenced off with barbed wire.
This is required by law for obvious safety reasons.
Stories that the barbed wire is angled inward are simply untrue.
People who have actually been there report that the barbed wire sticks straight up and is not angled either way.
There appears to be no significant difference between the fencing at Denver International and that at any other commercial airport.
As for those broken windshields, it really did happen.
It took the newspapers a little while to get the cause from the National Transportation Safety Board, and that period of uncertainty is when the rumors about electromagnetic weapons germinated.
The NTSB confirmed what the mechanics who replaced the windshields were able to tell at a glance.
The breaks were caused by flying debris during high winds.
Whether the runways are laid out like a swastika seems to be a matter of opinion.
It's easy to see on Google Earth, and to me it certainly does give the general impression of a swastika.
If you select certain taxiways and runways, you can overlay a near-perfect swastika.
But to do so, you have to ignore very significant runways, including the biggest one.
I'd say the eastern half does look like half a swastika, but the western half it's too much of a stretch.
Even if it was perfect, I don't see what that would prove.
Runways are laid out with prevailing winds and have to be approved by safety agencies and pilot groups.
If a swastika is what works, a swastika is what they'll use.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating, skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Decoding the Swastika Murals 00:06:22
The swastika theory was bolstered by the Nazi-like figure in those artistic murals depicting, supposedly, the Illuminati's plans to reduce the Earth's population.
In fact, those two creepy murals were each half of a diptych, a two-part mural, each depicting a hopeful message of man's journey from brutality to peace.
They were made by Chicano artist Leo Tanguma, one of several artists commissioned to paint similar murals throughout Denver International.
The Children of the World Dream of Peace shows a menacing Nazi-style soldier wreaking havoc and fear and includes a poem written by an actual child who died at Auschwitz.
In the second half of this diptych, the soldier is dead and the children of all nations come together over his corpse and beat the world's swords into plowshares.
inspired by the Bible verses Isaiah 2.4 and Micah 4.3.
Tanguma's other mural, In Peace and Harmony with Nature, shows the earth suffering from exploitation, and some species extinct and now found only behind museum glass, mistaken by the conspiracy theorists for elite species being protected from the apocalypse.
The alleged Mayan reference to 2012 is simply a small piece of carved stone with Mayan-style decorations held by one figure in the mural and representing the decline of indigenous populations.
Tanguma himself is a Mayan.
The second half of this diptych shows children from all nations gathering at the flowering tree of peace on a rejuvenated earth.
But the conspiracy theorists have been told all this.
They simply choose to regard it as untrue, in part because of that warning etched into the floor near Tanguma's murals that Australia antigen will be used to kill us all.
Colorado is well known for its history of gold and silver mines, and so a mine car full of AU and AG is a most appropriate symbol for the state.
Is it also an appropriate symbol for a planned genocide by the Illuminati?
Well, a mine car doesn't seem to have any particular significance to genocide.
If the mine car was put there to confuse us and throw us off the trail, and the idea was for the clue to be obfuscated, why give the clue at all?
Australia antigen is indeed sometimes abbreviated as AUAG, but its true common abbreviation is HBSAG, for hepatitis B antigen.
By itself, it would not be much of a biological weapon.
If you exposed everyone to Australia antigen, you'd essentially just inoculate them against hepatitis B.
An antigen is not the disease germ itself.
It is simply any substance that provokes an immune response.
Australia antigen is merely the protein found on the surface of the hepatitis B virus.
By itself, it's harmless.
A vaccine has existed for some time against hepatitis B, and many people have received it.
Even if you haven't, hepatitis B is treatable and is rarely fatal.
And so, again, a pretty poor choice for a mechanism of global genocide.
The other words in the floor, the alien language, are Navajo names for sacred mountains in Colorado, once again a significant part of the state's history.
And then there's that granite 100-year time capsule bearing the symbol of the Freemasons on its capstone.
Could there be any explanation other than Denver International being the headquarters of the Illuminati?
Another explanation might be that the local Masonic Lodge constructed and placed the time capsule.
The Masons are a civic organization that often performs such services, and this has been a tradition at public buildings in the United States for a long time.
Both the White House and the U.S. Capitol have cornerstones placed and marked by local Masonic lodges.
Although you might choose to interpret this to mean that Denver International is some kind of government headquarters, you could also observe that these are just three examples of hundreds, if not thousands, of public buildings in the country that followed this tradition.
The New World Airport Commission, mentioned on the capstone, did exist, contrary to conspiracy claims that there's no record of any such organization.
The Commission was a group of Denver business and civic leaders who sponsored and organized some events at the airport's opening, ushering in Denver as a new, world-class city.
You can say this is false, but all you've got to back that up is your own imagination.
Perhaps the most entertaining of the conspiracy claims about Denver International Airport concerns the brass plaque at the end of an artistic curved pedestal above the time capsule.
The plaque repeats the Mason symbol and has the rest of the text from the time capsule written in Braille.
However, many conspiracy websites refer to this paragraph of Braille as a keypad.
I even found a lengthy discussion on abovetopsecret.com, the notorious conspiracy theory website, speculating about what the code might be.
In all seriousness, some seem to believe that a code can be typed on this solid plaque, which will either open the time capsule, permit admittance to the secret underground base, or perhaps even trigger the global genocide.
Queen Elizabeth II is indeed a pretty substantial property investor, although it's really the royal crown in general and not her personally.
Her own fortune is a few hundred million dollars, but the majority of the crown's wealth is held in trust for the nation.
This portion is somewhere north of $17 billion and includes property investments all around the world.
Although neither I nor a friend in the real estate department at a Denver law firm could find any specific record of the crown purchasing land near Denver Airport, real estate near a new international airport is usually a sound investment for anyone, and such a purchase would be consistent with the crown's other investments.
Remember Skepticism Is Best 00:01:50
Of course, if we don't uncritically accept all this, we're sheeple who have had the wool pulled over our eyes by the Illuminati overlords.
And I'm merely a shill paid to spread misinformation, but you knew that about me already.
The truth is that the apocalypse is coming, and the New World Order has chosen to publicly announce their plans in an airport.
But only the specially gifted patriots are enlightened enough to see it.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello everyone, this is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile non-profit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X
Export Selection