Original subtitles

- [Rudy] The following program contains

footage of military operations.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Tonight, on The Proof Is Out There: Military Mysteries.

A photo of a doomed American sub.

Was it sunk by an enemy torpedo

or one of its own?

- The loss of the Scorpion is one

of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

- [Rudy] Breathtaking footage of a World War II bomber

exploding in mid-air.

What brought it down?

- Was that a friendly fire

or Japanese anti-aircraft attack?

- [Rudy] Yes, it's a real photo of a nuclear bomb in a tree.

How close did we come to nuking North Carolina?

- One simple low voltage switch

stood between the United States

and potential nuclear annihilation.

- [Rudy] And our secret weapon of the week,

a deadly game changer flying

at seven times the speed of sound.

- This missile would be able

to reach the US in a matter of minutes.

(dramatic music)

- [Rudy] In the modern history of war, there are films.

- Shazam.

- [Rudy] Photos,

recordings,

and documents that raise questions.

- So everything about this story is

one big mystery.

- This particular footage has caused

a lot of controversy.

- [Rudy] What's really happening?

- [Frederick] There's so little information.

- Nothing like this has been attempted before.

- [Rudy] That's where we come in.

Our mission, investigate the battlefield's

strangest images, sounds, and more.

- [Tim] This photo blows my mind.

- You can imagine how terrifying it would be.

- [Rudy] We'll analyze each with military experts

and try to come up with answers.

- I'm Ronnie Adkins,

former US Army Intelligence Analyst.

- I'm Rudy Reyes, Recon Marine war veteran.

The proof starts now.

(dramatic music)

- Hey everyone, I'm Ronnie.

He's Rudy.

And we're locked, loaded,

and ready to rock from the battlefields

to the bottom of the ocean.

- The USS Scorpion was one

of only two nuclear submarines ever lost by the US Navy.

- That's right.

It sank in 1968 and the question is, why?

- Was it a peacetime accident

or was it attacked?

At the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,

500 miles west of the Azores islands,

these eerie images mark the watery grave

of the USS Scorpion and her crew.

In this photo, you can see the submarine's sail

ripped from her top side.

How did the Scorpion

end up 10,000 feet underwater?

The mystery begins on May 27th, 1968,

in Norfolk, Virginia.

Wives, friends, and family members gathered

at Pier 22 on the Norfolk Naval Station

eagerly awaiting the Scorpion's return.

But Pier 22 would remain empty that day

as the USS Scorpion never makes it home.

- No one really knows why. The Navy doesn't know why.

The Navy kind of goes into dither mode

initially with the families.

Eventually, pretty quickly, people realize

there's a big problem.

Submariners are extremely reliable.

When a submariner says,

I'm gonna be at a place at a certain time,

they're either dead or they're there.

- Since our briefing yesterday,

the search effort has expanded considerably.

- [Rudy] Nine days after the Scorpion was a no-show,

the United States Navy declares the sub

and its 99 crew members presumed lost.

They commence a massive oceanic search

but it isn't until October that they locate the Scorpion

on the ocean floor,

at least what's left of it.

What could have caused such devastation?

Rumors begin floating to the surface.

- When it comes to why the Scorpion sank,

there is no shortage of theories that claim to explain it.

- The Scorpions is what's known

as the Skipjack-class of submarine.

After being introduced in 1959,

the Skipjack subs remain the fastest subs

in the US Navy, until the mid '70s.

- But what made the Skipjack-class

truly unique, was its teardrop hull design.

It moved the torpedo room

back a bit from the bow of the boat,

which allowed it to fire torpedoes

diagonally from the sides.

Now that made less noise

to interfere with the sub's sonar.

- The Scorpion fired Mark 37 torpedoes

that were lethal for almost all but the biggest of ships.

So, she was fast, she was sexy, she was deadly.

But the question is, why'd she sink?

(tense music)

Almost 25 years after the USS Scorpion sank,

the Navy finally declassified its official explanation.

According to this report

from the 1968 Naval Court of Inquiry,

the most likely explanation was the Scorpion was sunk

by one of its own torpedoes.

The battery powered Mark 37 is

somehow activated in its tube.

Unable to shut it down, the crew jettisons it,

but the armed torpedo now hunts

for the nearest target and destroys it.

That would be the Scorpion.

An interesting theory, but former submarine commander

David Marquet doesn't buy it.

- I think this is extremely unlikely.

Scorpion, if she knew the torpedo was

coming back after her,

has depth, she has speed.

She has a number of ways

to try and evade her own torpedo.

Secondly, the torpedoes are deliberately

designed to not do this,

and the warheads don't arm

until the torpedo's sufficiently safe

away from the submarine.

- [Rudy] If the torpedo theory doesn't float,

then what really happened?

Could the Soviets have been behind it all?

(intense music)

Headed for home, the Scorpion gets

classified orders to change course.

Why?

A suspicious flotilla of Soviet warships is

patrolling the Canary Islands

and the Navy wants eyes on it.

Author and former submarine engineer,

Kenneth Sewell, thinks it was

all a trap to take down an American sub.

- The Soviets knew we would investigate.

They knew we'd be sending a sub.

- [Rudy] Just months earlier, John Walker,

a US Naval Chief Warrant Officer turned spy,

supplied the Soviets with secret codes

that allowed them to intercept naval messages,

like the one that sent the Scorpion

to the Canary Islands.

- They were getting the codes from the spy

and for the first time in their history,

they had the ability to kind of track and know when

that submarine was gonna be there.

There's no doubt in my mind

that the Soviet navy attacked and sank the USS Scorpion.

- [Rudy] Historian Martin K.A. Morgan disputes the idea

of a Russian torpedo

and suggests the fate of the Scorpion may have

been something far more simple.

- I think the reality is that the ship was lost

for much more mundane reasons,

like there was a fire on board.

They couldn't extinguish it and it knocked out power

and then the submarine just sank

beyond a depth where it could be saved.

- [Rudy] Morgan points to the photos

of the Scorpion's uncrushed bow section

to support his theory.

- If there had been an explosion onboard that ship,

this wreckage would not look like this.

What we would see would be ripped,

torn, and rended wreckage that we largely

just don't see at the wreck site.

The wreck site photography indicates

something slightly less dramatic than an explosion.

It seems like the better,

the more appropriate explanation is one

in which you have a cascading series

of negative events inside the ship

that start with a small fire

that then gets bigger and the bigger it gets,

it knocks out power.

When the ship loses power,

it loses the ability to counter pump

and get rid of any water that has come inside the hull

as a result of leaking.

And that's going to drag it down

and the result is the loss of the ship.

- [Rudy] But if it was a fire,

why would the Navy release a story

about a rogue torpedo instead

of one involving basic mechanical failure?

Captain Marquet says it may tie back to another lost sub.

- We've operated nuclear submarines

since the '50s with an unbelievable safety record

and Thresher and Scorpion are two tragic

black marks on the record.

- [Rudy] The Thresher was yet another US submarine

that sank just five years before the Scorpion.

During deep dive testing near Cape Cod,

a leak shorted out the sub's electrical system

and its ability to surface.

The Thresher and its 129 men never came home.

Many suggest that the isolated torpedo story is

better than revealing a potential recurring issue

the US Navy may have had

with the overall maintenance of its submarines.

- We're in the height of the Cold War.

For God's sake, it's 1968.

There's a lot going on.

The Navy had to keep the loss of this submarine quiet,

and that was for no other reason

than operational security concerns.

Because if it admits that it's been lost,

there's the possibility that the Soviet Union

will be at the scene of the crime

almost immediately trying to pick through the wreckage.

(tense music)

- To this day, the wreck,

the USS Scorpion remains buried.

- And the US Navy continues to refuse

all requests to reopen the case,

which has only added to the mystery

and prolonged the anguish of the families

who question the official story.

- One of the most dangerous places

to be during World War II

was onboard a bomber

during a daytime raid over enemy territory.

- And when the World War II bomber

in our next clip exploded,

it left people wondering.

What caused a World War II bomber

to explode in mid-air?

May 4, 1945, it's the tail end of World War II

but the fighting is as intense as ever.

(dramatic music) (explosions booming)

In the skies over Palau in the Pacific,

22 B-24 Liberators bombed Japanese

military installations positioned below.

A film crew has tagged along

and this is the footage they capture.

- [Reporter] Air Force cameras follow our planes

through layers of overcast as they draw near the target.

- [Rudy] Seen here is a B-24 nicknamed,

The Brief, by our crew.

Everything is going according to plan.

Then, (explosion hissing)

her mission is cut short.

- My God, it's painful to watch.

You know that there's a crew onboard this aircraft

that they're hopelessly spiraling

down to their deaths.

- [Reporter] With one wing completely shattered,

the plane plummets groundward.

Our Pacific island warfare is not cheap.

(suspenseful music)

- [Rudy] Ten crew members tragically lose their lives.

And the one lucky survivor is captured

and executed by the Japanese 20 days later.

The film, however lives on an infamy.

It's released as a news reel story

and shown in theaters across the US.

Take another look.

The plane explodes in flames as the left wing tears off

but it's unclear exactly what causes the initial explosion.

It's strange that the plane explodes

just as it's framed perfectly by the camera.

Did the Japanese really shoot the plane down?

Was it some kind of accident

or was this whole incident staged?

Okay, to understand what happened to this plane,

it's best to get inside it.

The B-24 was a real game changer from the start.

- That's right, Rudy, it was.

This bomber was crucial to winning the Pacific

because it could take off and land on small islands

and that was thanks to its wing design.

- Its long narrow wings helped it

get the extra lift it needed on short runways.

But remember, it wasn't invulnerable.

So what could have caused such a terrible explosion here?

(tense music)

Let's tackle the most outrageous theory first,

posed by some on the internet.

Did the War Department stage

this incident as a propaganda effort?

After all, the Nazis had just surrendered

and some on modern social media have claimed

this was a stunt to keep the American people committed

to finishing the war with Japan.

- The United States did use this

for a public relations campaign.

It received the big play in the United States.

- [Rudy] But do we buy that?

Absolutely not.

There's no way we'd break down a plane

crewed by 10 of our own American heroes.

And plus, there are more viable theories out there.

Former Naval aviator Ward Carroll

offers one that's gotten some traction.

- There's only one explanation for what we just saw,

and that is a bomb

from another American airplane that was located above.

- [Rudy] It's not that big a stretch.

Look here, just behind the B-24.

You can see bombs falling from above.

- I believe because of the way that the wing collapses

and the flash happens at the top of the wing,

that this B-24 was hit by a bomb from another American.

(intense music)

- [Rudy] Historian Martin K.A. Morgan disagrees.

He says the footage contradicts the friendly fire theory.

- When you look at the footage,

you can see what led people to believe

the possibility that a bomb

from another B-24 above it caused the incident

that's captured on camera.

But if that's what happened,

we would see that bomb moving very slowly

through the air before it strikes Brief

and causes the explosion.

We don't see that.

(suspenseful music) (explosion booming)

- [Rudy] So if it wasn't staged or friendly fire, then what?

- It was Japanese anti-aircraft fire

on the ground that brought this airplane down.

The B-24 is particularly vulnerable

because of the wing.

It gives the aircraft a lot of lift

and that's what makes

the B-24 such a war winning weapon.

But because it has to be long,

it has to be high, and it has to be lightweight.

That makes the aircraft a little bit more vulnerable.

- [Rudy] In fact, the B-24 was known

as something of a widow-maker.

More than 80 of them were lost to anti-aircraft fire

in a single raid in Europe.

And Morgan, who studies World War II weaponry, says

what we're seeing here is exactly

what happens when an aluminum wing gets

hit with anti-aircraft fire.

- It's clearly an anti-aircraft hit.

Anti-aircraft shells come from below

and they strike it.

And keep in mind what they're striking.

Aluminum gives and it gives very quickly.

It scores a good, direct hit.

On the lower surface of the wing,

you can see it blow out

and that's all fuel that begins to spill out of it

which is why you suddenly have this massive fire that erupts.

(tense music)

- Alright, what do you think?

- Well, Ronnie, the B-24 has such thin skin,

I'm likely to believe

that this bird was shot down with AAA fire.

- Yeah, I think that's right.

And because it happened to take place right

as the camera was framing it perfectly,

we're still talking about it.

- Ronnie, what's scarier?

The thought of an accident involving nuclear weapons,

or the fact that there's been so many of these accidents

that there's a name for it?

- Well, this next story is about an incident involving

our own nuclear weapons

when they fell over North Carolina.

It left people asking,

just how close did we come to nuking ourselves?

1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Here's a terrifying photo.

It's a nuclear bomb caught in a tree.

We can see the bomb is tangled up

in its own parachute.

How did this near disaster unfold?

Wait 'til you hear this one.

Just before midnight on January 24th,

the walls of 17-year-old Billy Reeve's bedroom

begin to glow red.

- Yeah, I heard this awful noise and I raised up.

My mother heard it and she was praying

as hard as she could.

She thought it was the end of time.

- [Ronnie] Billy runs to his porch.

In the night sky, he sees flames plunging toward the earth.

All of Goldsboro, North Carolina seems to be on fire.

(indistinct radio chatter)

- [Ronnie] Military units seal off the area

as Billy and his neighbors flee in fear.

- [Ronnie] We now know it was an accident

involving a B-52 Stratofortress,

a heavy bomber that to this day goes

by the nickname B.U.F.F., big, ugly, fat fella.

In 1961, these nuclear strike aircraft

were a key part of something called Operation Chrome Dome.

It was a Cold War insurance policy

that called for a dozen B-52 bombers

fully armed with nukes to be airborne 24 hours a day,

seven days a week.

If the Soviets launched a nuclear attack,

the B-52 would already be airborne

and able to hit back hard.

- The B-52 bomber is perfect for this mission

because it has a payload of 70,000 pounds

so it's able to carry these heavy nuclear devices

and it's able to fly for extended periods of time.

- [Ronnie] That night over North Carolina,

the B-52 bomber loses over 5,000 gallons of fuel

in just three minutes and starts to go down.

- The plane starts to come apart.

The fuel leaking out on one side is

tearing the aircraft apart from the inside.

- [Ronnie] Eight men bail out.

Only five survive.

Three are killed.

That's bad enough, but the plane's payload,

a pair of 3.8 megaton

thermonuclear bombs, are released.

The term for a nuke accidentally getting dropped

or going missing, is "broken arrow" and it's terrifying.

Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein.

- This is a weapon several hundred times

more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb,

maybe about 200 times more powerful,

meant for destroying either entire metro areas

or for destroying underground bunkers.

- If one of these bombs were to detonate,

it would cause complete destruction

and would basically vaporize

anything within an 8.5 mile radius.

- [Ronnie] One bomb coasts to the earth on a parachute.

The other is found in the plane's wreckage.

The Air Force said no one was

ever in real danger in Goldsboro that night.

But what's the truth?

We want to reinforce with you that this is the Cold War.

- That's right, Ronnie.

JFK was going toe-to-toe with Khrushchev

so the government did not want the Soviets

to know that one of our nukes got hung up in a tree.

- But now after more than 50 years,

these government documents have been declassified.

They lay out three different versions of the facts.

And our experts are here to figure out if the truth

can be found in any of them.

(tense music)

Initially, the Air Force said they recovered both bombs,

except that was a lie.

Over a period of two weeks,

17-year-old Billy Reeves

kept visiting the crash site to watch the military dig.

- [Ronnie] The Air Force was looking for the second bomb,

the one without the parachute

and the swampy earth was making it hard to find.

- [Ronnie] After five white-knuckle days

and nights of digging, they found part of the bomb,

but the rest of it,

which contained the radioactive uranium,

was so far underground the Air Force decided

it wasn't worth trying to recover.

- The conclusion they came to was

that if the government couldn't get it,

probably nobody else could either.

- [Ronnie] So, maybe that bomb,

which is still underground, isn't dangerous.

But how close did the nukes come to exploding when they dropped?

- The fact that neither of the bombs

detonated is a testament

to the fail safes working correctly as designed.

- [Ronnie] According to the Air Force,

to arm the bomb, a crew member in the cockpit would

first need to throw a switch,

then someone must pull a lanyard from the bomb

which starts the arming sequence.

Neither step happened.

But according to another declassified document,

the bomb had almost armed anyway.

- The plane is heading down.

The same forces that are

breaking apart the plane in mid-air

also pulled on a lanyard in the cockpit.

This is the bomb release mechanism

and one of the bombs behaves exactly

as if a crew member had dropped it over a target.

- [Ronnie] As the weapons dropped over North Carolina,

power starts to switch on for that bomb.

- The two nuclear devices that are

hurdling out of this aircraft

as it gets ripped apart by all these G-forces,

one of them has the parachute deploy

which you might think, oh, that's a great thing.

The parachute successfully deploys

and it's going to safely land.

But in reality, that's the first step

to the arming procedure.

- As it's going down,

its electronics are sort of checking off

all of the steps it needs to do,

including opening up a parachute,

checking how high it is from the ground,

making sure enough time has gone on.

And then finally it got down to the second to last check,

which was, is the bomb armed to detonate?

- [Ronnie] When the bomb hit the ground,

it tried to fire but it didn't detonate.

That's because back in the cockpit,

nobody ever threw that switch to arm the bomb.

It's the only safety mechanism that didn't fail.

- One simple, low voltage switch stood between the United States

and potential nuclear annihilation.

- [Ronnie] But here's the thing.

That same arming switch had failed many times before.

In more than 30 incidents,

crews never even touched the switch

but the bombs were still armed due to a wiring glitch.

Engineers had already planned on replacing the switch

before the Goldsboro accident.

- In many cases, the switch had

spontaneously turned itself to being armed in other weapons.

And fortunately that didn't happen in this case.

But had that switch malfunctioned,

the weapon would've detonated at full power.

- The US Air Force kept this secret

because they didn't want the public

to know that they had come one hair

away from detonating a nuclear device

on their own soil.

(tense music)

- One hair away.

But despite that danger,

Operation Chrome Dome continued.

- The program didn't end until 1968

with another broken arrow over Greenland

that involved four hydrogen bombs.

- But that's a mystery for another day.

- Most people think of the Vietnam War

as being a guerilla jungle war on the ground.

- But the North Vietnamese also

used the same guerilla tactics in the air.

- And to be frank, they were kicking our butts

until one American Maverick turned the tables.

- So what was his plan and how did he pull it off?

You're looking at a photo

of Colonel Robin Olds, taken on the day

of his most daring and brilliant mission.

January 2nd, 1967,

a squadron of state-of-the-art MiG-21s,

the crown jewels of the North Vietnamese Air Force,

ascend into deep cloud cover above the Phúc Yên Air Base.

Their target, a group of American F-105 bombers

that's just been detected.

Preston Stewart is a former Army lieutenant

and popular podcaster.

He says the specs of these two planes

are key to this story.

- The MiGs were faster and more maneuverable

and were used in more of an ambush setting.

- [Rudy] And these MiGs are feasting

on the American bombers every day.

- At this time, the US Air Force in Vietnam

is getting destroyed and the F-105 bombers are laden

with these heavy bombs, so they're unable to outmaneuver

the MiG-21 over the skies,

easy pickings for the MiG-21.

(intense music)

- [Rudy] In fact, the F-105 was known as the "lead sled."

It was supposed to be protected by the nimble F-4 fighter,

but those planes lacked radar jamming capability,

making them defenseless from enemy ground fire.

- They couldn't spend much time over North Vietnam.

It was just a constant issue

of trying to navigate these threats.

- [Rudy] But today is different.

As the North Vietnamese pilots drop out of the clouds

expecting a turkey shoot,

they get hit with incoming.

One by one, they're destroyed.

In just 12 minutes, half of North Vietnam's

fighter force is completely destroyed,

all without a single US casualty.

Another challenge for the US

was that we were fighting with one arm behind our back.

Our rules of engagement didn't allow pilots

to bomb the North Vietnamese airstrips.

- It sounds crazy but here's the thing.

Chinese and Soviet advisors are working at these airstrips,

and you had top brass back in Washington

that's worried about hitting these communists

and ratcheting up tensions even further.

These airstrips were off limits, man.

- So how did we pull off that comeback?

Let's turn to our experts.

(tense music)

The weapon used to take out Vietnam's air power

was quite simply the brain

and cajones of Colonel Robin Olds.

- Robin Olds was straight out of an action movie.

He graduated from West Point 1943,

went straight into World War II,

became a "double ace,"

shot down at least 10 aircraft.

- [Rudy] Olds develops an audacious plan

called Operation Bolo.

The Americans will disguise

their own F-4 Phantoms as 105s,

luring the eager, complacent enemy into an ambush.

- Commander Olds' plan is to fly

at the same altitude as a bombing run.

They're even gonna use the same call signs

and have the same radio frequency

that a bombing run would have.

- [Rudy] Remember, the F-4's a badass fighter jet

but it has that Achilles heel,

it's inability to evade deadly surface-to-air missiles.

Olds convinces the military

to install some radar jammers used by the F-105s

to thwart missiles fired at the F-4s.

Not only does this make the F-4s less vulnerable

to surface-to-air missiles,

but the electronic signature put out

by the jammers will make the F-4s appear

as 105s to the North Vietnamese.

Now, the question becomes,

in a straight up dogfight,

how does the F-4 match up against a MiG?

- F-4s were much more of a closer match

to the MiG-21s.

And in a one-on-one fight

on level terms if that ever exists,

the F-4 had a good chance of taking the MiG-21s out.

- [Rudy] The F-4 has one big advantage, fire power.

- The MiG-21 has a 23 millimeter cannon on it

whereas the F-4s, they have eight missiles,

the Sidewinder missile and the Sparrow missile.

Having those eight air-to-air missiles

give the F-4 Phantom an advantage

over the MiG-21 at the lower altitudes.

- [Rudy] When it all goes down,

the dogfight turns into a major victory.

- Once they start that attack, it's game on.

- In under 15 minutes,

they're able to destroy seven enemy MiGs.

- The North Vietnamese Air Force, after the war,

said that it was the worst day for their Air Force.

(tense music)

- So, a big shout out to Colonel Olds

for devising Operation Bolo.

It was an ingenious plan that took advantage

of the predictability of the Vietnamese pilots.

- That's right.

Deception works best when your enemy's

gotten a little bit lazy.

And the moral of this story is,

when you're exploiting your enemy's weaknesses,

be careful not to reveal your own.

- Our next intriguing tale involves

secret nuke tests on American soil,

spies, and at the center of it all,

a celebrated soldier who strangely vanishes

in the middle of the desert.

- It's got all the makings of a Hitchcock thriller.

There's a lot to unravel as we try to answer,

what's behind the disappearance of Lieutenant Paul Whipkey?

The early 1950s, the Nevada desert,

US Marines hunker down in a trench

as a nuclear bomb detonates.

Then they start marching towards the mushroom cloud.

- Here, we can see the blast.

So they're sheltered from the blast

but then they're coming out

and they're standing sort of around it.

You can see the formation of fallout here.

- [Ronnie] These troops, who would come to be known

as atomic veterans,

were part of a massive government program.

- These were a series of exercises intended

to understand, in a battlefield setting,

what exposure to radiation would do

to soldiers on the battlefield.

- [Ronnie] But on July 10th, 1958,

nine months after another blast,

one of these soldiers goes missing.

26-year-old Army Lieutenant Paul Byron Whipkey

drives away from his home base, Fort Ord in California.

He never comes back.

- A few weeks later, Paul's car, it's this very identifiable

red and white combination, is found in Death Valley,

some 150 miles away from

where he last was seen or noticed

in the Mojave Desert purchasing gas.

- [Ronnie] Just months earlier,

Paul told his brother Carl

that he was going on an assignment

and that he was going to make a name for himself,

but instead, he goes missing.

And just one day later, he's declared AWOL.

- When his brother heard that he was missing,

he called the post and then they said, "Well,

we're busy packing up his stuff."

And it was a day after he had disappeared.

It's odd to pack up somebody's belongings

a day after they've gone missing.

- If he were just AWOL,

one would think that there would be

some amount of time that would be allotted

before there would be, kind of,

this cleaning of hands and purging of the record

that he was ever there.

- [Ronnie] Just one month after his disappearance,

the Army makes a scathing conclusion

that Whipkey was a deserter

who cracked under the stress of his assignment,

drove off, wandered into the desert, and died.

But those who knew Whipkey find it hard

to accept those conclusions.

- Paul Whipkey was a model officer,

no issues, no problems.

- It's highly unusual for a soldier

who has a great service record and track record in the military

to go missing and then be declared AWOL

after only one day.

- [Ronnie] So, what really happened to Lieutenant Whipkey?

That's the question that's been

keeping his family up at night for decades.

Service members go missing.

You've just heard the term AWOL

and it means absent without leave.

It's a serious crime.

But what we're trying to figure out is,

did Whipkey suddenly become a dishonorable deserter,

or is there a more complicated and sinister explanation

for what happened to him?

Let's see if our experts can figure this one out.

(tense music)

One rumor swirling has Whipkey being a top secret CIA recruit.

A fellow soldier reports

seeing Lieutenant Whipkey having clandestine meetings

with two Army intelligence men in civilian clothing.

Paul's brother Carl believed Paul had

been recruited to join an intelligence team

involved in the top secret missions

of the U-2 spy plane.

Did Whipkey just become a CIA spook?

- There's certainly plausibility to the idea

that, given the nature of a mission,

which is going to be highly secretive,

that he has crossover with the CIA

and seems to be kind of a good candidate.

- [Ronnie] And what's a good spy story

without a mysterious chain smoking man?

- Paul wasn't a smoker but somehow his car is found

with a bunch of cigarette butts outside of it.

It just adds to the confusion

about what happened.

- [Ronnie] But former US infantryman Chris Capelluto

doesn't buy the secret agent angle.

- The argument that he was recruited

by the CIA doesn't really make any sense.

His teeth were falling out and he was medically unfit.

- [Ronnie] The teeth may be a clue.

Whipkey flew an observation plane

during five atomic bomb missions

and was exposed to high levels of radiation.

Accounts vary, but soon after Whipkey's

participation in these experiments,

he allegedly develops black moles

and plantar warts on his skin.

And a few months later,

he has to have all of his teeth extracted.

Was it possible that Whipkey's disappearance

was a cover-up relating to these horrific human experiments?

- These were military exercises.

They were involved in highly classified tests

and exposed in ways that were very, very secretive.

And the US is trying to keep a tight lid on that

so there's potential that there was a risk

that he was maybe unstable

and thinking about sharing that information

or taking that information elsewhere.

It would've been of great value to an adversary.

- [Ronnie] Of course, we also need to consider

the simplest, least dramatic explanation.

This theory posits that Lieutenant Whipkey

did indeed go AWOL,

but then his car broke down in the desert.

And when he went looking for help,

he simply died from exposure.

When the search began,

there was nothing left of his body to find.

- For him to have perished.

I mean, it seems entirely possible

that someone could die in the desert.

Death Valley, it's called that for a reason.

- [Ronnie] The strength of the accident theory is

that it sounds like the most plausible.

The weakness is that it leaves so many loose threads:

the unexplained cigarettes found by the car,

the message to the brother,

the allegations of strange meetings with army intelligence,

and the hasty packing of Whipkey's room.

- The idea that it was an accident

and he just perished from that is very convenient

but it doesn't fit the fact pattern.

- [Ronnie] In 1982, after decades of persistence,

Paul's brother Carl got the Army Board

for Correction of Military Records

to hold a three day hearing

into Paul Whipkey's disappearance.

The board ultimately determined

that Lieutenant Paul Whipkey died the day

after his disappearance in the desert.

And that his unauthorized absence

is excused as unavoidable,

and his death was in the line of duty,

not due to misconduct.

- It's a big deal regarding Whipkey's military legacy.

It's much more honorable to go from unauthorized absence

to died in the line of duty.

- [Ronnie] The official report says

there's no record of Whipkey being

involved in intelligence activities

and suggests it's most likely he wandered

into the desert by himself and died,

which still makes you wonder,

how is that in the line of duty?

The report has no answer, stating only that the events

of Whipkey's disappearance remain obscured and unexplained.

(explosion booming)

(tense music)

- Ronnie, what do you think of a soldier going AWOL?

- Well, I've never had anybody in my units go AWOL.

As far as Lieutenant Whipkey,

I'm inclined to believe that this is

more accidental than that.

His car broke down, he goes to get help,

and just dies in the process.

- I'm of the same mind.

He got lost, broke down, could not find help.

He probably died accidentally.

- It's time for this week's secret weapons segment, Rudy.

And this one's a potential game changer.

- You got that right, brother.

There's been a lot of hype over the last couple of years

about these muldoons.

- Rudy's talking about Russia's hypersonic missiles.

Now, they were top secret until this next video.

And now our question is,

how dangerous are top secret hypersonic missiles?

October 6th, 2021, the Barents Sea,

the Russian Navy's northern fleet is anchored here

and on this day, the site becomes Putin's launching pad

for a weapon that'll become

one of the fastest objects to ever fly.

(dramatic music) (explosions booming)

- There's gonna be the first stage

of the explosion goes off.

That's the first stage of the rocket.

And then the nose cone fires off,

stabilizing rockets on the side there.

- Immediately, it goes straight up

and then pitches over, which puts it on its trajectory

to whatever its target is.

This tiny missile just rockets away

and gains speed and it just disappears

into the sky in a matter of seconds.

- [Ronnie] You're looking at a hypersonic missile, people.

And get this, they're so fast,

they can destroy a building or target

without even having a warhead attached to 'em,

purely based on the force of impact.

Author and space historian Amy Teitel

talks about why it's got folks worried.

- So, if Russia were to launch one

against the continental United States,

there would be very little we could do to react in time.

This missile would be able

to reach the US in a matter of minutes.

- Okay, so that's a scary proposition.

Well, we asked our weapons dream team

to spell out what this thing can do in more detail.

(tense music)

- [Ronnie] For starters, we asked them

to contextualize just how fast these suckers are.

- The difference between supersonic

and hypersonic is speed.

Something going at the speed of sound is Mach 1

and that's about 760 miles per hour.

Something going Mach 5 or up,

which is more than five times the speed of sound,

is going hypersonic.

- [Ronnie] Okay, we told you that,

but it gets scarier.

- These missiles are going at Mach 7,

so more than seven times the speed

of sound or more than 5,000 miles per hour.

- "Popular Mechanics" journalist Joe Pappalardo says

that's why Russia released the video.

- Frame by frame, you can tell

that the state is sending a message.

And the message here is fairly clear.

(suspenseful music)

They're saying the world is small,

and we can hit targets

that are farther away as if they were close,

so don't mess with us.

You don't have to know anything

about the weapon system to get that message.

- [Ronnie] And if that doesn't have you

chewing your fingernails,

China tested its own hypersonic missile in 2021.

Why the race?

It's because these weapons can move

around our current missile defenses, literally.

They can zig and zag, making it nearly impossible

for us to intercept them.

And they can fly low enough to avoid detection.

Nobody really knows how to defend against them yet.

But the US isn't gonna sit on the sidelines

when it comes to new military tech.

In fact, the United States has successfully

tested two Lockheed Martin hypersonic missiles

amid growing concerns of a new arms race.

- The I-have-a-pony syndrome

is extremely strong in military circles.

If there's a lot of money being pumped in

to a program in China or the United States or Russia,

the other players are gonna get involved

because they don't want to be left behind.

(explosions booming) (dramatic music)

(tense muisic)

- It's hard to wrap your head

around the speed of these things.

It's really just next level.

- And nobody really has an answer yet

on how to take one down.

We'll be sure to keep following this one,

but that's our show for tonight.

Until next time, keep your powder dry.

- And your head on a swivel.

Goodnight.

(dramatic music)