Hey, it's Carter, all of us at Parkhurst really want to thank you for your continuing support throughout the year, Sparkasse could not be what it is today without you. We also wanted to give you a heads up that we're taking a break for the holidays and we won't be back until after the new year. But since the season is all about giving, we do have something special lined up for the next two weeks. So be sure to tune in.

In the meantime, enjoy the season and we'll be back the first week of January with our regular programming. Have a happy and safe New Year. Due to the graphic nature of today's episode, listener discretion is advised this episode features discussions of harm to children that some people may find offensive. Extreme caution is advised for listeners under 13.

12 year old Gordon Shaddock sat quietly pushing cereal around in his bowl. He'd been served the same bland breakfast every day since he'd arrived at the Walter E.. Fernald school three years earlier in 1947.

That day, Gordon's meal was disrupted by an attendant. He asked the boy to join him in a group of other kids back in the dormitory. Gordon had been summoned in the past and it was never good.

Back in his ward, Gordon sat down next to a few familiar faces, including a boy named Freddy Boyce. Dr. Clemons Bender, the medical director at Fernald, entered the room alongside him or several other adults who smiled back warmly, breaking the kid's nervous tension.

Their guests were from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and they wanted to offer the boys a very unique and special opportunity.

Then to explain that they were the brightest residents at Fernald, he and his team were starting a science club and the children's contribution could help society.

In return, the kids would be rewarded with trips outside of Fernald. They'd go to baseball games, have parties and receive prizes for their work.

The boys could hardly contain their excitement. Not only was this an opportunity to get off Renauld property, but they finally felt important. This was confirmation that they were destined for greater things. But that feeling wouldn't last for long.

With government funding, Amitay used the Fernald Science Club as lab rats. They conducted an experiment that fed ninety unaware kids radioactive oatmeal so that they could study its effects on the human body. It would be another 40 years before the Fernald boys learned the truth.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify original from past every Monday and Wednesday, we dig into the complicated stories behind the world's most controversial events and search for the truth. I'm Carter Roy. And I'm Molly Brandenberg. And neither of us are conspiracy theorists, but we are open minded, skeptical and curious.

Don't get us wrong. Sometimes the official version is the truth, but sometimes it's not.

You can find episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from Park asked for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is our second episode on the Walter E Fernald school. From the eighteen eighties until 2014, Fernald was home to thousands of children, kids with and without intellectual disabilities performed manual labor to keep the institution running.

Last episode we explored what life was like at the Fernald School through the eyes of Fredi Boys. This time we'll look at the radiation experiments that occurred at Fernald and were funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

We'll examine whether the government continued to test on other underprivileged citizens outside of Vernal during the Cold War.

Finally, we'll see if the U.S. government is still subjecting unwitting civilians to experimentation today. We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us.

In December 1993, 52 year old Freddy Boice turned on the radio to get into the holiday spirit instead of Christmas jingles. Freddy heard a piece of news that would change the course of his life forever.

The commentator spoke about how the U.S. government had secretly funded certain experiments during the Cold War. Their objective was to study the effects of radiation exposure if the country were to suffer a nuclear fallout. One of those tests was performed at the Fernald State School in the early 1950s.

Freddy turned up the volume and cut the words science club. Suddenly, vivid memories of his past came rushing back.

Could it be true? Was he victimized by his own government?

The more Freddy listened, the more it sounded like that's exactly what happened.

This brings us to conspiracy theory. Number one, Amity. Quaker Oats and the staff at Fernald were paid by the government to test radioactive materials on residents.

It's no secret that the state school was a playground for doctors and scientists back in its heyday. If you remember from part one, young Joey Almeda was forced to work in some of Fernaldi labs cleaning autopsy tables. Also, the institute's resident mad scientist, Dr. Bender, experimented on children with Down's syndrome.

If the origin of this disturbing study remains murky, seemingly it started with a Quaker Oats company in the 1940s. The conglomerate was one of the country's top selling breakfast food brands, but the company had recently started getting bad press.

A series of tests had revealed that the plant based grains used in Quaker Oats products contained high levels of acids. These compounds, known as five states, were believed to stunt the body's absorption of iron and calcium. Problem was, those nutrients were marketed as the two major benefits of eating Quaker Oats cereal.

So Quaker Oats teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to get a second opinion.

They wanted to see exactly how the body absorbed its minerals and nutrients. Maybe they could prove the damaging study wrong and win back their consumers.

Amitay would track the digestive process by lacing the oats with radioactive tracers. These chemical compounds are still used in imaging tests today, but in very low doses. Typically, they are administered intravenously through an injection. They give off small particles that can be detected under imaging scans, allowing doctors to spot problems in the body.

In the case of the MIT study, the tracers were ingested. This helped doctors follow the path of the enzymes and track how, or rather if the body was absorbing the calcium and iron.

The test wasn't only appealing to Quaker Oats and MIT, it also piqued the interest of the government. It's still not entirely clear how these forces came together or who joined the study win. But we know that at some point MIT began receiving a large portion of their funding through the Atomic Energy Commission.

The AEC was formed after the Second World War and acquired all plants, equipment, scientists and laboratories relating to atomic energy. This included the technology developed under the Manhattan Project, which was best known for creating the nation's first atomic bomb.

But there were other experiments going on at the Apex base in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Unbeknownst to the public, their laboratories were home to the biggest radiation genetics programs in the world.

This meant that when the AEC took over America's nuclear program, it also inherited all studies regarding the effects of radiation on civilians. And one of their biggest concerns was how these emissions could alter human health if the Soviets were to drop a nuclear weapon on American soil.

So, no, the government wasn't interested in the prosperity of the cereal industry. They wanted to learn how radioactive food affected the human body. Whether the study was their idea or whether they piggybacked on the opportunity is unclear.

Once the boys agreed to be in the club, they were immediately moved to a separate dormitory away from the other kids. For the next several weeks, researchers drew vials of blood from each boy before he sat down to eat. The kids consumed a large portions of oatmeal every day. Meanwhile, a team of scientists hovered, making sure they finished every bite. The boys didn't know why, but researchers took notes marking the moment they started eating to the time they finished.

Afterwards, the kids had to fill glass jars with urine. They were asked to use a special toilet that preserved their fecal matter for examination.

According to journalist Scott Allen with the Boston Globe, the children's spleens were exposed to between five hundred and forty four and one thousand twenty four milligrams of radiation over the course of seven meals. By comparison, the typical American receives about 300 milligrams of radiation from natural sources each year. In other words, in one week the kids were subjected to a level of radiation that was equivalent to 50 chest x rays, and they had no idea.

All the while, science club members that adhere to the rules were rewarded for their good behavior.

They were taken to Red Sox games. They were given lavish Christmas parties and received Mickey Mouse memorabilia. But some children saw right through this sinister study and they were punished for it. One morning, Gordon Shaddick refused to have another vial of blood drawn before his meal, he told doctors he wanted out of the science club. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option.

When Gordon protested, Bender sent the boy to the isolation ward where he remained for eight days. By the end, Gordon was so emotionally worn that he agreed to participate in the experiments without further question.

The studies didn't just happen once. Multiple groups of children kept on being subjected to these tests at Fernald until 1956. Then one day, Amity and Quaker Oats claimed they'd concluded their study with favorable results. Their oatmeal, when combined with milk, still offered high levels of calcium and iron.

When Quaker Oats rebranded their packaging, the words high in iron were streaked across the front of the box. This new marketing technique helped them make their funding back and then some. However, it would be another 40 years before Freddie Gordon and the other science club members realized how morally corrupt the experiments were in 1993.

The Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, declassified documents from the now defunct Atomic Energy Commission. Inside those files were the experiments funded at the Fernald School. Reporter Scott Allen at the Boston Globe exposed the project that December.

Suddenly, the entire nation was forced to re-examine the ethics of medical progress. One of the biggest issues Allen uncovered was that most of the children and their parents had not consented to these experiments prior to the studies.

Some parents received cagey letters from the school superintendent. They said they'd be adjusting the children's diets with no mention of radioactive tracers. Other science club members were orphaned or had no way to contact their estranged parents. Children were told to sign their own agreements without any idea how to read or write, let alone consent.

In 1994, this news sparked a series of Senate hearings mainly targeted at Amitay. As a result, the university's vice president of research, David Lyster, took the stand to defend Mitty's experiment at Fernald after digging up old research notes. He claimed the exposure to radiation was minuit and administered in accordance to the subject's weight.

At the time, there was no law that required subjects to know the extent of the study. The National Institutes of Health didn't even make it their policy until 1953. But the Fernald experiments still raised ethical concerns surrounding the issue of consent. Senator Edward Kennedy questioned why MIT officials chose the children at Fernald as opposed to MIT students. He asked, Aren't you appalled at the fact the most vulnerable people in our society, which are young people, seven, eight years old, that are in an institution, aren't you appalled that they were the ones selected?

A University of Massachusetts research director, Dr. Burton Brill, tried to defend Mitt's actions. He suggested that intellectually disabled children eat more cereal than most people. His excuse was a disgraceful Hail Mary, and it didn't sway the court.

Following the Senate hearings, multiple law firms sought out former science club members who'd been wronged by these experiments. One by one, the subjects now in their 50s and 60s started coming forward. More than 30 men filed a class action lawsuit against MIT and Quaker Oats. Meanwhile, the government remained hidden in the shadows, escaping any blame.

The defendants were awarded one point eight five million in reparations, which only equaled about sixty one thousand dollars per person. It was hardly enough to make up for the lifetime of setbacks Fernald had cost them, but many of them didn't care. They just wanted to put the past behind them.

It's unclear what the long term health effects exactly were on the science club members. But on May six, 2006, Freddy Boice lost his battle against colon cancer, a proven side effect of overexposure to radioactive materials. He was only 65 years old. Unlike most of our conspiracies on this show, this one is hard to contest, the evidence is insurmountable and MIT and Quaker Oats both admitted to their involvement.

Meanwhile, declassified documents prove that the Atomic Energy Commission also played a role in the efforts. This is validation that the U.S. government funded a program that preyed on underprivileged and intellectually disabled children during the Cold War.

Typically, we debate this issue, but unfortunately, this is one of the few conspiracies that's proven to be completely accurate on the scale of believability. I'm giving this theory a 10 out of 10.

This is one I wish we could debunk. But like I said, Molly, the evidence is all there. And while there hasn't been any follow up studies to prove just how harmful the experiments were, it's the ethical boundaries that make this a hard pill to swallow.

And it's possible that the experiments at Fernald were not a one time deal. The Atomic Energy Commission may have continued their research into the effects of radiation by operating covertly in America's poorest neighborhoods.

Coming up, low income families become the agency's next victim.

Hi, everyone, it's Molly.

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In the early 1950s, the Fernald school recruited children to be part of an exclusive science club with the help of Quaker Oats and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These boys were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive tracers, even though they never provided proper consent. Meanwhile, the government organization indirectly funding the project stayed hidden in the shadows. That agency was the Atomic Energy Commission. As it turns out, the studies at Fernald were just the tip of the iceberg.

Which brings us to conspiracy theory. Number two. During the Cold War, the AEC and other federal agencies funded thousands of radiation experiments on disadvantaged U.S. citizens.

At the end of the 1940s, the U.S. Public Health Service funded an experiment at Nashville, Tennessee's Vanderbilt University, over 800 women, most of them below the poverty line, were receiving prenatal care at the center.

Doctors were instructed to prescribe a cocktail drink. The patients were told it would help with their child's development.

None of these women knew this medication included radioactive iron. As a matter of fact, they didn't know they were part of a government experiment at all.

After their dose, doctors drew the women's blood to determine how much of that radioactive material had been absorbed by the mother. When the subject gave birth, blood was taken from the baby to see who required more radiation. Four of the children born out of these experiments went on to experience complications, among them leukemia and an extremely rare form of soft tissue cancer called synovial sarcoma. All four died before the study was completed.

Much like the situation at Fernald, these women claimed they were manipulated by doctors at Vanderbilt. In 1994, they filed a class action lawsuit against the university and won a settlement. Vanderbilt took the fall, but once again the government remained in the shadows.

Throughout the 1950s, the government continued to turn disadvantaged citizens into guinea pigs. Local politicians in St. Louis, Missouri, were told that their city would be the subject of a harmless government study. Authorities wanted to test a smoke screen to see if they could shield the city from aerial view in the event of a Soviet attack.

Weeks later, the army arrived in St. Louis with motorized blowers that pumped out an allegedly benign zinc cadmium sulphide into the air. They fixed the devices to the top of apartment buildings, public schools and the backs of vehicles all within the lowest income and predominantly black neighborhoods of the city.

One of those buildings was the Prewett I Go public housing complex. It housed over 10000 people, mainly families. 70 percent of those residents were children under 12.

A St. Louis woman named Mary Helen Brendel recalled the event vividly. One summer afternoon, Brendel and a few friends were playing baseball in an open field. Out of nowhere, a group of green, low flying planes appeared. They were so close, Brandell said, that she recalled seeing the face of the pilot in the cockpit from those aircraft.

A powdery white substance, rain from the sky, sticking to the children's sweaty skin. Years later, Brendel suffered from not one but four different varieties of cancer, thyroid, breast, skin and uterine. Brendel sister passed away from esophageal cancer and Grendel's family wasn't an anomaly. Doris Bates was barely a year old when her father passed away unexpectedly in 1955, the St. Louis resident, who grew up in Pruitt AIGO housing, later lost four of her siblings to cancer.

She herself lived through a battle with cervical cancer, but still has chronic breathing and skin issues.

Sociologist Lisa Martino Taylor began collecting stories like Spaatz and Grendel's. She felt the answer was obvious. These smoke screen experiments were far more harmful than the government had advertised.

Due to the timing of these studies, Martino Taylor proposed that the allegedly nontoxic zinc calcium sulphide was compounded with a radioactive additive.

Martino Taylor had no proof that the government was trying to test radioactive materials on a sizable population, but her research was enough to spark the interest of a few Missouri senators who also wanted answers.

It's still unclear where the orders for this operation came from, but Martino Taylor believes the study was connected to the Manhattan Project. Although, as we mentioned earlier, any work once done by the Manhattan Project would have been handed over to the Atomic Energy Commission by the mid 50s.

In 1994, word of the secret testing climbed the ranks to Congress. There had been no payouts to the people of St. Louis from the United States government, much less a letter of apology.

As a result, Congress ordered the National Research Council to investigate the events in St. Louis further.

In 1997, the council determined that the testing did not appear to expose Missouri residents to harmful radiation.

But according to a CBS News article, the committee admitted that the research was sparse and the results relied on limited data from animal testing. The rest of the information was still under lock and key by the US government.

One other thing the council determined was that high doses of this cadmium sulfide could lead to bone and kidney problems as well as lung cancer. They recommended that the U.S. Army proceed with follow up studies to determine additional long term effects.

No follow up studies have been performed as of this recording. So Martino Taylor decided to prove the theory herself, the professor discovered a defunct company called U.S. Radium. The business was the target of many lawsuits after their workers ingested harmful levels of radioactive materials that were emitted from their products. One of the things they created was fluorescent paint. Through government documents, Martino Taylor uncovered information that set a compound called F.P. 22 66 was mixed with cadmium in the St. Louis Springs.

According to those same documents, FP 22 66 was manufactured by U.S. radium. Martinho Taylor suggests that this may be Radium 226, which happens to be the same thing that polluted and even killed many of those former employees.

On top of that, the Army publicly admitted at the time of the study that they were adding a fluorescent substance to the cadmium.

According to them, the fluorescent material was a key ingredient in creating this smoke screen device in their defense.

It's possible that the government didn't know these products were radioactive when they purchased them.

I would offer them the benefit of the doubt if it wasn't for their already sordid past. Plus, there's another piece of evidence that makes them look pretty guilty. In 1958, researchers collected baby teeth from children in the infected St. Louis neighborhoods. They use the evidence to measure the exposure of radiation in the area. Martino Taylor couldn't help but wonder if they knew something about the cadmium sulfide that others didn't at the time.

Fortunately, the Atomic Energy Commission didn't terrorize the country with similar experiments for long after President Ford was inaugurated, he signed the Energy Reorganization Act in 1974, putting an end to the 86 discriminatory operations.

Then in 1994, the United States General Accounting Office published a report admitting, quote, In a series of experiments conducted between the 1940s and 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Public Health Service funded research of the potential medical effects on people from fallout after a nuclear attack or accident. This report seems to be an admission of guilt on the government's part, which is why I am giving this theory another 10 out of 10. There's no doubt that the Atomic Energy Commission and other federal agencies wrongfully experimented on poor and disadvantaged citizens.

The pregnancy studies were also declassified by the secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary, in 1993. But I have to give this theory an eight out of 10 only because we don't have proof that the AEC was involved with the St. Louis operation directly. But there's no doubt some government agency was to blame.

And if the government can carry out covert experiments on entire neighborhoods, who's to say they aren't still conducting dangerous tests on us today?

Coming up, we'll examine some questionable modern studies that may be putting you at risk.

Now back to the story. During research for her dissertation, sociologist Lisa Martino Taylor discovered an ugly corner of American history. Low income citizens of St. Louis, Missouri, were contaminated by a possibly radioactive smog shield in a Cold War experiment. Many of the victims directly exposed to the materials suffered from rare and deadly forms of cancer.

Martino Taylor suspected that the leaders of the Manhattan Project were to blame, although by this point their work would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the Atomic Energy Commission. Luckily for all of us, the AEC was dismantled in 1974, but the experiments may not have died with the agency.

This brings us to conspiracy theory. Number three. The United States government is still running harmful experiments on unwitting civilians today.

This theory originates with a 1966 study on the New York subway system. On June 6th, during peak travel times, a group of Army scientists entered the Seventh and Eighth Avenue lines.

Half of the team toted air sampling machines. The other half carried a box of light bulbs. Each of these bombs held 175 grams of a bacteria called bacillus garbagey.

Scientists broke the lights on the tracks to see how quickly the bacteria spread from station to station. Clouds of bacillus garbagey plumed over the platforms, leaving traces on computers, most of whom brush the mysterious substance off their clothes none the wiser before continuing with their day.

The field test was meant to simulate a biological attack so authorities could track the bacteria spread five minutes after Bacillus Garbagey was released at Twenty Third Street. It was detected at every single station between 14th and 15th. The study exposed more than one million people to the bacteria, while scientists at the time claimed the bacteria was harmless.

It's been proven to cause health problems.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, bacillus Globish is now categorized as a pathogen, meaning it can cause disease. In fact, bacillus garbagey commonly leads to food poisoning and is known to be fatal in rare cases.

Of course, the United States Army didn't know this at the time, and they certainly didn't monitor how many people got food poisoning after the test was complete. So there's no way to tell how many citizens were harmed. And while they tried to keep it under wraps, the test was exposed in the 1970s. Army scientist Charles Sense and he was asked to testify before Congress in 1975, and he admitted that New York City officials didn't even know the test had occurred.

A few years after this study, the Office for Protection from Research Risks, or OP, are was formed by the National Institutes of Health. They assembled basic regulations to protect human subjects. They also formed independent review boards to monitor and oversee the ethical measures of every government experiment.

But that didn't mean the American people were exempt from future studies.

In the summer of 2012, the Department of Homeland Security released a bacteria called B Subtleness throughout the Boston, Massachusetts subway system. Authorities stated that the bacteria was benign and commonly found in soil, food and cleaning products. However, they warned that it could be dangerous to those who were immunocompromised.

Like the 1966 New York subway test. The objective of the study was to track how a biological agent would spread in the event of a terrorist attack. And while authorities did post signs and alert the media about the upcoming study, they refused to state exactly when it would take place.

Instead, they told commuters it could affect a six month window, which was a lot of time to avoid public transportation.

If you were immunosuppressed in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security infected the New York subway system yet again. This time they released gases as well as nontoxic particles into crowded stations.

Again, they claimed it was a way to measure the spread of airflow in the event of a biological attack. But if the study had already been performed in the New York subway system, then why were they testing it again?

In their defense, technology had changed significantly, this test used a harmless sugar based particulate to track the spread of a potential anthrax outbreak.

Scientists then used a tool called DNA tracks so that researchers could better identify the gases and particles and get a more accurate measure on how these things spread.

Ultimately, I think these studies are pretty benign. In fact, tests like these could actually benefit our cities in the event of a biological attack. I don't believe there's any nefarious intent behind them despite the government's poor track record.

You're right, but it's hard to tell when the government is just being careless or if there's something more sinister at play, especially when you hear about cases like the FEMA exposure between 2011 and 2016.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known as FEMA, trained approximately 10000 firefighters, paramedics and other first responders in simulated terrorist attacks. The exercises were meant to train emergency workers on how to help victims in the event of a biological attack.

The powder they used was said to be a safe, inactive form of ricin, a poison created from castor beans because it's so easy to make. Ricin is high on the list of potential biological weapons because there's no antidote if someone is infected.

This is why it was so dire when there appeared to be some sort of mix up in the government's ricin study.

In November 2016, a FEMA employee discovered that the non-toxic form of ricin they'd been ordering for these simulations was not benign at all. Their distributor had been sending them the pure deadly form of ricin for the last five years. By that point, they used it in thousands of experiments.

According to USA Today, the miscommunication happened back in 2011. The FEMA center ordered what they thought was the non toxin ricin chainey because it claimed to have only one of the two parts that whole toxic ricin has.

However, when FEMA received the invoice for the ricin, it described it as ricin toxin. RCA 60. This is the scientific term for whole lethal ricin. On top of that, the packaging came with a cacophony of warnings greater than 90 percent pure, extremely toxic, may be lethal if injected, inhaled or ingested. Use caution when handling.

And yet, for the next five years, the FEMA center had continued to order and use the same product, stating that they believed it was nontoxic.

When the mix up was revealed, they blamed it on a miscommunication with their unnamed vendor.

Thankfully, no one was seriously injured by the poison. All emergency service members wore protective equipment throughout the trials.

But there's no way of telling if this was just a senseless mistake by a federal agency or if something more nefarious was at play. The warnings were printed right there on the box. The government may have been studying the effects of exposure on these first responders without their consent. That's possible.

But I think it's more likely that this was the mistake of one or two individuals who didn't know what products they were dealing with.

Maybe, but this has happened in other government departments in 2015, the Pentagon revealed that the Army had been shipping live anthrax to other labs around the world. They claim that it was a mistake and that the army believed the anthrax bacteria was dead. Another supposed mistake happened in 2014 when the Centers for Disease Control accidentally allowed lethal samples of the Ebola virus to be handled in an unsecure lab. One technician was possibly exposed to the virus, and a dozen others were under surveillance after this mistake occurred.

I agree that it all sounds a bit shady, especially after what we've learned about America's past. When the government funds a project to test radioactive materials on a group of young boys, pregnant women and low income families, it's hard to regain that trust again. But at the end of the day, the administration is run by human beings, people with flaws who sometimes make mistakes.

I can sympathize with that. We do know that there have been multiple systems and practices put into place to protect the American people from another St. Louis type exposure.

Dr. Leonard Cole, an expert on bioterrorism, covered many of these arguments in his book Clouds of Secrecy the Army's germ warfare tests over populated areas. When asked if he thought the government was still testing harmful toxins on American citizens. He said that he didn't think it was likely.

Cole gives the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt, claiming a lot of the experiments were due to the nation's Cold War mentality. He also mentions that these biological warfare tests, like the 1966 subway experiment, actually helped the U.S. prepare when reports of chemical weapons began during the Gulf War.

So while our first two theories are essentially proven to be true, this third theory is a bit more complex.

Ultimately, if the United States is still experimenting on civilians, they're following a stricter set of guidelines and are no longer exposing people to harmful long term effects because the theory falls in a gray area. I have to give it a five out of 10.

I'll also give it a five. Today, the United States government has tools and resources that weren't available during the Cold War. They know what's potentially harmful and how it might affect people down the line. I'm not sure they would have performed some of these experiments had they known the lasting physical and mental impact it would have on citizens. But who's to say?

Ultimately, I think there's a bigger sociopolitical lesson to be learned here, we need to have compassion for every corner of society, the disenfranchised citizens of St. Louis, the impoverished pregnant women in Tennessee, and the intellectually disabled boys at Fernald State School all had one thing in common. They were exploited by a government who saw them as weak, disposable members of society.

If we work together to eradicate these destructive, systemic beliefs, maybe we can prevent America's sordid past from haunting our future. Thanks for tuning in to conspiracy theories. We'll be back Monday with a new episode. You can find all episodes of conspiracy theories and all other Spotify originals from podcast for free on Spotify.

Until then, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.

Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify original from past. Executive producers include Max and Ron Cutler, Sound Design by Dick Schroder with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Freddie Beckley. This episode of Conspiracy Theories was written by Lori Gottlieb with writing assistants by Nicholas Mort and Obiageli Audy Megu, fact checking by Onya barely and research by Brad Klein and Brian Peatross. Conspiracy Theories Stars Molly Brandenberg and Carter Roy.

Listeners, there's no better time to follow your heart and check out the hit Spotify original from Park Cast Blind Dating every Wednesday. Find out if personality alone is enough to make a love connection. Follow blind dating, free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.