Behind the Scenes of TEKOI

Okay, yeah, it is a bit late for coffee in the UK, but upload days now, with the addition of director's commentary, days are very long days. So I'm quite tired, quite tired by the end of it. But I feel like the right way to do this is to do the director's commentary the same day of upload. If I don't do the director's commentary on the same day, then I know what's going to happen, which isn't going to start really preparing for it, that I'm going to turn it into a whole another job, and then it will never happen.

So this is why it's like director's commentary right away, whatever I happen to remember or nothing. So that's the way it's going to work. This is a video that I really didn't expect I was going to do a director's commentary for because, I mean, obviously this is only the fourth one, so I'm still kind of figuring this out. But for the grey goes outside playlist, things that I've been working on, these already feel a little bit like they're behind the scenes videos anyway. So it's a bit odd to do director's commentary for them.

I think they're just a lot less dense and intense than the main CGP Grey animated stuff. So I think in general, if I'm doing stuff like this in the future, there probably won't be a director's commentary. But this decoy project, boy, did it turn out to be a whole thing. So I figure there's at least a little mini director's commentary in this one.

Would you classify this video as one of your light grey videos? No, I created on the channel this category that I'm a playlist in a category that I'm calling light grey, that is for stuff that is really easy and is relatively unedited and unresearched. So like the little video that I put up before this of just me driving the Tesla straight into a bunch of tumbleweed, that was like a cut scene. That's like a light grey video. I think that sort of video can be kind of fun, but it's obviously not a main video.

Or like I did the explanation of the Supreme Court recently and for various reasons, like that's a video that I could make without having to do a ton of research. It doesn't need to be as tightly edited. And so yeah, that's like a different category. You know what this is? I'm putting this under my playlist of grey goes outside, which really I could not have timed worse as a project. I was really planning on doubling down this year on, with the global pandemic. So this is obviously a project that's a little bit left over for that.

But yeah, I had a whole bunch of things in mind for grey goes outside as a concept and the world had other ideas. So that's the category this fits into. And who knows how much stuff will appear on that at any point in the future. But that's the answer to your question of what do I consider this? I consider this a grey goes outside video. It's not a main video, it's not a light grey video, it's me being outside and exploring a place.

Yeah, the harbour master. I could make a vlog taking out the trash and that is just about the most exciting outdoor thing that I have done in several months. So I hope everyone's doing alright. So to give you a sense of this, I was talking to my assistant this morning, and we were just trying to trace back how long have we been working on this thing. Because from our subjective experience, it feels like we have been working on T-Koi for forever.

And the answer was, the first correspondence between the two of us about this project goes to May of last year. That is more than a year ago when I first decided to bring someone in on this project. And then I don't know exactly how long before that I was working on this and sort of investigating it as a possible thing. But, so yeah, May of last year is when this became like a real, this looks like it's going to happen project.

[Laughter] Still not as old as the Catan video. Well, yes, I mean technically that's correct, but the Catan video is not actively being worked on. The T-Koi project was actively worked on for the past year in a bunch of different ways. But yeah, just a very, very long time ago. And the way that this worked, I was going to the Skull Valley Indian Reservation for other reasons at that time.

It just so happened that I came across this what I thought was just an incidental piece of information that, oh, on this reservation there happens to be this, I didn't even know what it was exactly, like old weapons facility or something. Like it was extremely hard to figure out at the time. But I could see that they like had this place as, or like this facility existed on the reservation, is the best way to put it. In the process of going out to Skull Valley and going to the reservation, I was able to get permission from the tribe to be able to go on to, go on to decoy.

That's how this happened. This is not a facility that you can just go visit. Like if anybody is out in the area, like don't drive down to decoy and just think you're going to see something. You cannot go on there. They're not joking when they say that the area is prohibited. It is also super dangerous. Like if people don't know that you're there, it's not a good place. Like it is an abandoned old facility, and given that there's a lot of underground construction and a lot of this stuff are huge metal doors and all the rest of it, like it's not a place to just go wandering on your own. Like that's a bad idea.

It's sort of funny as a creator because when I made the first video where I showed me just exploring decoy, I thought that would be kind of clear when I showed people the opening scene is, oh, I'm unlocking the gates with this key. And I always figured like this is a clear enough indication that I have permission to be here and this is not a place that you should go. There's a lock, and I am unlocking it and then at the end, you know, I'm closing it back up.

But boy, did I get a lot of comments from people about how did you go there or like people wanting to visit it themselves. So yeah, I guess I guess I was a little bit wrong about how clear that message is of unlocking the gate. But yeah, so I just just want to say like it's not a public place that a person can go visit. I was able to get permission from the tribal leaders and I had to sign a lot of waivers in order to be able to go there. So that's the behind the scenes of how did this actually come to happen.

Finally getting the secluded office space that you want. I actually had a little line that I cut from the exploration video where there was a bunker that was way off to the side of the facility that I thought, oh, this actually would be a really charming writing space if I could just get some air conditioning down there. Like I would really love this as an office. That didn't make it into the original exploration video. So one more thing before I get here, one more thing about the exploration video before I forget, the other really minor thing, which I just want to make clear, and I wish I had thought to put it in the original video, but I did not take the badge that I lift off of the rack in the opening of the exploration video.

Like that, that was a little bit of, oh, let me show you the badge. And the idea was that, oh, like oh I need this to be here, right? This is the badge for being a decoy. You don't go to a unique historical site and just take yourself a bunch of souvenirs that you're never going to look at. But I was pretty surprised by how many people were like, oh, I've got to take one of those badges. It's like no, no, no, no. That's not what these places are. You know, you leave them for the next people who are going to be there or you leave them to be reconstructed and restored in the future. But yeah, so that's one thing.

It didn't occur to me at the time that I needed to film putting the badge back on the rack, but I just didn't think about it. And yeah, that was an interesting piece of feedback from people. Would I ever go to Chernobyl? It's an interesting question, probably not. I don't know what the background radiation is for that place now, like how dangerous that is compared to other things. But I think my gut reaction is Chernobyl to me is not interesting enough that I would want to increase my risk of getting cancer by visiting it, even if it's a relatively small amount.

Okay, were there classified things? Revolution Dude is asking, were there classified things you couldn't show on camera? So as best I could tell, here's some paperwork. Everything that was left there was not classified documents. Now, of course, I didn't read through every piece of paper that was there, but there was lots of stuff that had obviously been removed. There was nothing on site that was classified. But this project was weird because it kept running up against the, I'll say it this way, like the edges of classified things. But maybe we can get to that a little bit later.

Okay, alright, let me actually start this thing because my theory is that I want to do a relatively short one of these just to prove to myself that I can. This is the decoy test range, or at least it once was. The site is long abandoned now, but it once served a vital purpose. Oh, okay, I don't know if, okay, this is one of these things where as a creator you're really pleased with something, but I don't know if anybody notices or cares. I spent a million years on this.

Okay, so this is footage of footage of me on the facility, and then I do this little fade transition. Look, guys, look, we're going, we're going back in time, back in time to the 1980s. And this is footage from decoy when it was in operation. Now I don't know, okay, I need to be, here's the thing, I need to be a little bit careful about the way I say things because for this project it was necessary to have legal consultation for some parts of it.

And prior to this video existing, as far as me and my assistant were able to determine, there was absolutely no public footage available of decoy in operation at the time. Like no video, no photographs. But this piece of footage was acquired and is the debut of anyone being able to see what the facility looked like when it was in operation. And just by total dumb luck, I happened to film myself in one spot where whoever the camera operator was, what I think, what I suspect happens is the camera was just misaligned.

It happened to be pointing at the bunker and then the camera operator guy, you know, realigned the camera to where it's supposed to be and started to zoom in on one of the tests. So I feel like this is just a lucky accident from 30 years ago and a lucky accident from me a year and a half ago, filming this thing that I was able to transition back and forth. So I'm telling you all about this because I spent forever on it and I was really determined. I'm like, I am going to fit this transition in the video somewhere if it kills me.

So there we go, served a vital purpose, a military purpose. And the work done at decoy is still out in the world today. Constructed during the Cold War at the entrance to the facility is a warning sign in Russian. Okay, so everybody asks, what does the sign in Russian say? And what I've been delighted by is some people in the exploration video went through all of the trouble of trying to translate the sign. Like typing it into Google or using translation software on a screenshot or something.

What the sign in Russian says is what this sign in English says right next to it there. They are the same sign and it's like the list of prohibited items that are not allowed on the site. You know, so hey, you're coming on to a missile motor test site. Please don't bring matches, cigarette lighters, other flame-producing devices, firearms, ammunition, drugs, and intoxicants. Like those are the things that you cannot bring onto a missile motor test site. Don't do that.

That's really bad Russian. But this is not the former Soviet Union, this is the great state of Utah. Where in Skull, intoxicants not allowed for Russians. Oh yeah, I mean, guys, yes, I know it says please no cameras, but it's not an operation anymore so it's okay. I can bring the camera there. Like I had permission, it's all totally fine. So here's a map of Utah. The geography is that there are like four mountain ranges that cause three valleys.

And the easternmost valley is where Salt Lake City is. That's where like all the people live. There's a valley in the middle, which is much less populated than the westernmost valley, which is Skull Valley, which just has a tremendously awesome name. And to the west here is the Great Salt Lake Desert, enormous and terrifying, and yeah, just an absolutely deadly region. Skull Valley is extremely depopulated. I think the reservation population is, I mean, I'd have to double check the numbers, but I want to say it can't be more than 40 or 50 people at most who are living on the reservation.

So it's a pretty isolated area, but directly to the west, the Salt Valley is used for a lot of weapons testing. So anyone in Utah probably knows, like this is the UTTR, which is the Utah Test and Training Range. Aircraft and bombs and other weapons are tested out there. I mean, the Salt Lake Desert is beautiful, but it's also like, if you've got to pick a place in the continental United States where you're going to test some weapons and nobody's going to notice or care, it's probably not a bad spot.

But it does leave Skull Valley like the first area where there is some population right up against this. And I think that's part of the reason why the decoy test facility was put where it was because the missiles themselves were manufactured closer to Salt Lake City. But then Skull Valley is like within convenient striking distance of other military facilities on the Great Salt Lake, so it just sort of was like a little spot in the middle.

The T-Koi resides much of what happened on site was classified and equipment and documents were removed. But what remains is enough to piece together the story of T-Koi. The paperwork left behind bears the logo of Hercules Incorporated. Hercules got its start in the late 1800s with a patent improving on dynamite. The creator named Hercules Powder and began manufacturing the new explosive just outside of San Francisco in a company town that would outlive the company, Hercules, California.

One of the difficult things in trying to put together these videos is trying to figure out what do you include, what do you not include? And a lot of this Hercules stuff was really killing me. So the video should be about decoy, right? Like I've put up a video that shows the exploration of this place and now I should put up a video that is the explanation of the place. But I did get a little bit derailed by Hercules because in order to try to figure out, okay, like what was this place, the first thing that you need to figure out is, okay, well who ran it? And the answer is this company called Hercules.

But just like with T-Koi, there was not a lot of information about Hercules that was public on the internet. But I was able to trace it back to this patent that we pulled from the patent office website that started off like this company. Now, there's a line here where I'm sort of glossing over some of the details, right? Where it's what do I say? It's with the patent improving on, it's got its start in the late 1800s, right?

So yeah, so I say like Hercules got its start in the late 1800s. I tried not to dig into the details too much, but it seems like this guy Joseph Willard he patented Hercules Powder. It's this improvement on dynamite, but he was working for DuPont at the time. And something happened within the company where eventually the United States government, as part of like trust-busting and monopoly busting decided, like DuPont was too big of a monopoly on chemical productions.

And so I don't say that the company was like founded in the late 1800s, just that it got its start. But the United States government apparently came in and said like DuPont, you're too much of a monopoly, we're going to split you, we're going to split you into several other companies. And like DuPont obviously went on and became its own thing, but Hercules became a separate company. And this patent for this particular kind of explosives was like the foundation of what the business was in terms of intellectual property.

Like okay, you Hercules, you own this new explosive that's what you get. DuPont, you don't get this explosive, you have to go make baby powder and other things. And I've never heard of Hercules, but it turns out that from starting as this, you know, making better dynamite for farmers seemed like the primary use in the late 1800s, they exploded to become just an absolutely ginormous company.

And I kept having to cut stuff about Hercules from the video because it really isn't about them, but it blew my mind how huge they were. Like they had dozens and dozens of production sites all over the US, manufacturing gunpowder, and then later manufacturing intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles. It's just unreal. They were involved in like every aspect of chemical production. They did petroleum, they did turpentine. Like it's crazy how much they actually created.

And better dynamite for farmers to deal with the tumbleweeds, yes, I'm sure. Well, we'll get to it in the end. But so anyway, I spent forever, like just trying to research this company and be like, what's the deal? And at one point, I found what I thought like, oh, this is gonna be my salvation. This is now I'm gonna get all the answers that I want and my research is over. So let me find for you a little video to show you.

This is my desk here in my office. So back when the video had way more about Hercules than any normal person would care, I thought I was going to mention like the story of discovering this book. But I ended up not doing that because nobody cares. But so this is, as far as I can tell, this is like the canonical and maybe only book that exists about the history of Hercules Incorporated. And it's huge.

It's written by two guys who, it seems like this is what they do. They like, they just pick companies and go through and write these really detailed histories about it. And so when I found this book, I was just really pumped. I'm like, yes, I'm going to have all of the answers that I could ever possibly want. And while I read it, and they did have a lot of interesting things about Hercules, decoy is not even mentioned in the book, not once.

Like it's not in the index, it never ever appears anywhere in this book because the company was so huge that T-Koi was just like an incidental little, like nothing piece of information compared to everything else that they were involved in. I originally kind of thought that would be a fun thing to mention, like, oh, decoy was so huge that the definitive book about the company doesn't even mention decoy, but it just didn't work.

And then it also causes like, it's a little bit weird to cut away to my desk and then later me showing you a book. It wasn't the point of that. So I'm kind of showing you in the director's commentary, but it was, Gumbos is asking how dry is the book? Like college textbook? I guess I would say that you probably would want a reason to read the book would be the way I might want to phrase that. There are things that are like interesting if you've spent a year of your life trying to like make a project about this weird abandoned facility, but I would not put it on my list of like general books to recommend for reading.

Also, I love there's like this picture here of this poor dude on the bottom where they're like, oh yeah, here's a guy, in I don't remember where that plant is, but here's a guy his job is to transport nitroglycerin using this little like rickety-looking basket. I would not want to have to transport nitroglycerin using this thing. And I say in the beginning of the video that 60 people or about 60 people died in the manufacturing plant in California.

I didn't say it clearly enough in the video because it really was just the people in that plant in California. There were plenty of other explosions nationwide related to Hercules and all the various things that they did. But yeah, so anyway, this book exists, and yeah, I thought it was gonna be a gold mine that would solve all of my problems. But nope, did someone post an Amazon link in the ghost chat? Hey, if you know, if you want to read it, I'm not going to stop you.

Oh yeah, Niv, you're totally right, a plus on the book's name though, "Labors of a Modern Hercules" is an amazing title for that book. Like a plus! Oh, I forgot to mention the other weird thing about the book is it was written in like 1990 or 1989, and so at the very end there's mention of how in the facility that I mentioned later West Bacchus the author of the book saw all the Soviet inspectors there as part of the facility and he's like, oh what a new world we live in where the Soviet Union is here at Hercules manufacturing facilities in the United States.

Like how strange is that? And it was also super frustrating to me because since the book stopped in 89 or 90, all of the questions I had about how this gigantic company went out of business, like what are the details, none of those were present in the book because all of that happened like five years later. And there was a lot of digging around online to try to like answer that question more precisely. But again, you have to realize at some point this isn't actually a video about the company Hercules, right?

I'm not adopting or I'm not adapting "Labors of a Modern Hercules" into a video, I'm supposed to be making a video about what this weird place called decoy was. So yeah, this is part of like the decisions that you have to make behind the scenes. Clinical products, but their smokeless gunpowder rapidly grew them to become a vital United States military supplier during the world wars. As the posters said, Hercules men and women in the war keep them shooting.

I always love these old war posters, like these old propaganda posters, they have such a distinct look to them. And it's like, here's Uncle Sam, he's trying to raise money by selling war bonds. It's not clear in the video, but the context of this is I think he's trying to guilt the people who live in the factory town of Hercules like, hey guys, I know you're literally manufacturing the bullets for my weapons, but it's not enough, you also have to buy Uncle Sam's war bonds.

You come over to these, so I found a few of these on the National Archives. Do I have the other one? So again, I think these are like propaganda slash recruitment posters for Hercules. These were produced during the Second World War. I find their messaging is like a little mixed, it's a little bit unclear like what they're trying to say here. I'm glad of the chance to do something real while my husband's in the army and say, you know, these machinists are swell.

And it's like, Sophie, I like, I feel like I get the message, but maybe there's a better way to word this, especially because like these machinists are swell, like what do you mean by that? And it's, you know, the I get to do something real, it's just odd, it's odd messaging, you know? Or like the other guy over here, he's putting in a full day every day at Hercules and he has to, otherwise he'd be letting down his kid who works in the parachute troops. Like, you know, that's a lot of pressure.

Yeah, I don't know, I just, I find these kinds of things, these sorts of posters really interesting. And there's one more, can I pull it up? Yeah, so here's the third one. So this little logo is just pulled out from a third one that had a different color scheme, which is, which is this guy. We're just, he's talking to his buddies. We may not be welding tanks, but boy, we're keeping a Hercules plant running. And that's something in this war.

It's just amazing. It's a bit like the old newsreels and propaganda videos where it's the same thing, like there's something earnest and deceptive about them at the same time. Mary, yeah, posters were so wordy back then. Yeah, that's right. People had more time to read posters back in 1940. Like what else are you gonna do? You don't have a smartphone to distract you. You might as well read all the propaganda posters being posted on the wall.

Yeah, no, they look like they show up in a Fallout game for sure. The Cold War came next and brought with it a new weapon, the intercontinental ballistic missile tipped with a nuclear warhead. Now one country could destroy another remotely, and the only defense was a credible threat of retaliation. This threw the United States and the Soviet Union into an arms race. I was working with the animator for a long time on this shot, and the sort of inspiration and the design for this concept was a little bit of the screens in WarGames, the movie, right?

So that like at the end there's all like these maps and you're seeing all of the nuclear weapons spread on the maps, you know, and that was kind of the direction that I gave for this one is like, what if the war game stuff, like we're seeing it happen on an actual globe? It's not happening on like on a computer screen. The United States and the Soviet Union into an arms race, building more and faster and bigger nuclear weapons each year.

For the, again, this thing, like the animator did the absolute last minute, just today, was animating in this graph, which I just love. I totally love the way it looks. Like I love the cool smoky look. And if it looks familiar, this is the same effect that was used on the time travel portal in the National Popular Interstate Vote Compact when Grey goes back in time. There's like a blue smoky portal and that's the same effect that's being used on the edge of the line.

The United States, this culminated with the Minuteman. Unlike earlier missiles, which had to be launched out in the open and were slow to fuel with liquid propellant, the Minuteman could be launched from an underground silo and thus be hidden in America's cornfields. The new solid fuel motors able to launch them instantly. Yeah, so this is also, I don't know how clear this is to people like what you're actually looking at here, but it's really quite shocking how open the United States is with some of the information about its nuclear weapons program.

And you know, one of the things that it's open about is the location of some of these nuclear silos. But yeah, if you like zoom in on Google Earth and you're looking around in northwestern Nebraska, you can totally just find the nuclear silos if you know what you're looking for. This is a little hatch that opens up, the Minuteman missile is underneath, there's a little bit of an entryway above ground for the military personnel to go into.

And like the whole facility is under the ground here, you know, this is like unnamed country road number four, just going through a bunch of farmland. But if you turn right at the correct moment, it's like, oh, and there is a Minuteman III nuclear missile underneath the ground right along the side there. It's crazy. Yes, I know that you can tour some of these things. Another thing that has just, it's killed me, be the this like not being able to go outside thing is heartbreaking because, yeah, I know that there are places where you can tour some of these facilities that are no longer active.

And this is a case where my original summer plans, part of what I was going to do was I wanted to wrap up this decoy project by going back to Skull Valley and being able to do a few more things. Like I wanted this project to be more of a thing than it ended up being. But the practicalities of it were just like, look, who knows when I'm going to be able to travel next? This project is already more than a year old. I've got to wrap it up, otherwise I'm going to go crazy.

But I would really have loved to be able to have made a trip to one of these silos that you can see in person, but that was not in the cards for this year. So maybe it'll have to be a future episode of Grey Goes Outside. But we harvest corn here, corn and nukes. Yeah, that feels again very, very American. Like what are we? What do we grow? We grow nuclear weapons and we grow, oh, I have to show you, like can I find it really quickly though?

But again, some of these old videos about like how the weapons work are totally crazy pants. Okay, alright, so this I just love it. This is the glory of America. Alright, the Minuteman is ready and primed in the earth beneath its hardened blast-proof cap in the vast open lands of America. From the grasses of Wyoming to the North Dakota plains, from the North Dakota plains... [Laughter] standing guard amidst the old forts, silent sentinels of freedom on strategic alert in the defense of America. [Music] [Music]

I just love it. Like it's amazing, right? They're like, oh we have these nuclear weapons that can fly out of the ground, but like what are they doing? They're protecting our beautiful grasslands and like, oh, there's silent sentinels in the ground. We've got children with ponies to protect and we need nuclear weapons. It's amazing. These things are totally unreal. There's one, I don't know if I can find it really quick. The reason I have these videos loaded up in Final Cut, I had a brief cut of this project where I included some of this footage, but I decided like it just didn't fit tonally.

I wanted this to be just like, okay, I went to this place and now I'm going to explain to you what it was. And it was a little bit weird to cut sometimes to this old like propaganda footage and then to cut back. But I really did greatly enjoy producing some of this stuff. So is this the, it's this video where the narrator is like really passive-aggressive about the Soviet Union and like America has to protect the world and the Soviet Union doesn't. I think it's this part. All of these various projects, while perhaps not sufficiently emphasized in light of today's events, did help the Air Force to understand the problems of pilotless missiles and to begin to build its operational force.

Russia, in the meantime, not hampered by having to police the world, concentrates on whatever weapon it's amazing. That's what it is, right? They're like, we're working on our missiles program. Russia, meanwhile, like they get to just be the baddies because they don't have to police the world. It's amazing. Russia, in the meantime, not hampered by having to police the world, concentrates on whatever weapon of war she desired. Since Russia did not have to worry about aggressive attack from the free world, she could jump ahead and develop weapons of the future at her discretion. This, as we now know, she did.

This is amazing, right? Like because we're the goodies, she didn't have to worry about us attacking them. And so they, so like she got to make all the evil weapons that she wanted, which is such a weird, like it's such a weird way to explain the situation. Plus like given contemporary documents we now have of like what was going on at the time, we totally know that Russia was like their number one concern was like the rest of the world was going to invade them at any moment.

But this propaganda film portrays it like, oh, the Soviet Union knew that like the good guys would never attack them and so they just went on to build a bunch of nuclear weapons because they're evil, unlike our nuclear weapons, which we're building because we're policing the world. It's just amazing. [Laughter] You know what, no, I've got to stop. Well, okay, one more. This gleaming metallic instrument is being developed in a race against time. The Air Force plans to win by taking calculated risks based on sound technical judgment.

Only once before in the Manhattan Project has this nation taken a comparable gamble of such billion dollar immensity. That time the stake was atomic energy to stop a war. This time we aim for a ballistic missile force to keep the peace. Yeah, we're gonna keep that peace. We're gonna keep it. It's amazing. You know, just like this gleaming weapon, this is ours, right? There's bad things happening in the world, but this is, these are ballistic weapons to keep the peace.

Like I just love the way it's presented. You know, I mean, like you can totally have a conversation that's reasonable and about like what safety do nuclear weapons provide and like the game theoretical logic of mutually assured destruction. You can have this conversation and you can be on either side of like does this makes, does this make people safe? Does it not make people? Like there's a, there's an adult conversation to be had there, but this is just like hilarious propaganda for children.

Yes, that's right, Lizard Heart, that's exactly right. It's like the beautiful good nuclear weapons versus the evil nuclear weapons. Also, I don't know if you noticed, but like whoever made this film, I totally love, you know, this is like 1950s Final Cut editor. But you notice how like the America stuff is all blue and beautiful and Russia is evil and red, right? It's like, look at our beautiful blue bombers, like look at this evil Soviet Union. It's hilarious.

Okay, alright, I'm getting distracted. I'm sorry. Okay, here we go, launched out in the open and were slow to fuel with liquid propellant. The Minuteman could be launched from an underground silo and thus be hidden in America's cornfields. The United States ordered 1,000 Minuteman missiles to be constructed, which brings us back to Hercules and decoy. For, as a bullet in a round needs powder to hit a target, so too does the nuclear warhead in a Minuteman missile need its solid fuel motor.

I don't think this quite worked in the video. I was trying to draw this analogy like if I was going to spend an infinite amount of time rewriting it, I feel like I would have wanted to draw this analogy more closely that Hercules got their start manufacturing this smokeless gunpowder, that's like really what gave them their start. Now in the time that we're talking about, like what was T-Koi? They're manufacturing the gunpowder equivalent of an ICBM. But I don't think it quite came across right.

And again, this is where you have to put limits on how much you're going to rewrite things or re-record things or try to make stuff like perfectly fit together. I also feel like this is a little bit of a, probably for most viewers of the channel, like again doing the director's commentaries right after, I don't know how people are reacting, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a video that a lot of people think is kind of boring. So, you know, I've already spent probably way more time on this than makes any kind of economic sense.

But I did get a little bit obsessed with it. Need its solid fuel motor. Hercules manufactured the motors at a plant called Bacchus West in Magna, Utah and brought them to T-Koi for testing. The large concrete cubes still here are thrust blocks, their purpose to be an immovable object for a missile motor to push against during test firing. Each motor needed to be individually calibrated. Hitting a target a quarter of the world away while traveling at Mach 20 is a precise affair. Excellent work by the animator to do the ICBM here.

And even when I was just sent the rough version of it, like here's the outline of what we want, I think it really is kind of shocking to see how a missile goes up into the sky and then it turns around and it comes back down. But I really do think there's something quite visceral about seeing what is basically a parabolic arc. Right? That people like you intrinsically know from things like throwing a baseball or whatever. And then the way the animation is of the actual warheads coming down, like I think it's really quite a striking piece of animation.

Like it's incredibly well done. You know, it's not the whole missile that comes down and strikes. I think that's a bit of a misconception that people have that it's like the missile hits, but it really is just this tiny payload at the very end, which are the warheads. And an intercontinental ballistic missile can have many warheads. And I think the early Minutemen had two, later versions had three. And I don't know what the current state of technology is for warhead miniaturization.

But yeah, I think it really is quite striking just to see the simplicity of it. Thrust block technicians would connect sensors to the motor to measure heat and pressure, and those sensors connected via underground cables to instrument bunkers where engineers would record the results with state-of-the-art 1970s computer assistance. Setup for each test could take a week or more. So the motor and engineers and equipment had to be protected from the elements.

But a missile can't be fired inside a building without melting the structure around it and invalidating the test. To solve, so this is finally the part of the video where I actually get to explain like much more what decoy is. And again, part of the reason why I had such a hard time finishing up this project is like my original vision was I never intended for there to be two videos. I wanted for there to be one video that was both the exploration and the explanation at the same time.

That was the original idea. But when I was making the first exploration video, just the fact of the matter was there is absolutely nothing available that could show what did this facility look like, you know? It was a classified facility and many of the things related to it are still classified today. And so I ended up having to just make the first video a pure exploration one, and kind of putting out a little call for like, hey, if you know anything, get in touch.

In the end, I actually feel like it worked better as two parts. I like having the explanation and the exploration separate. But I had originally thought when I put up the exploration video, I was like, oh, I'll have the explanation done in two weeks. I'm gonna wrap this up real quick. But meanwhile, like two months of very solid work later, it's finally actually done. But it is very surreal personally for me to see like, oh, here's this footage of me in this location and then to see test footage from the time of like, oh, I know exactly which thrust block that is.

You know, there's three thrust blocks on site and this is the big one that was at the far end of the facility. So it's a strange experience personally. Let's go, let's move on to the exciting part. So the buildings at T-Koi were constructed on rails so they could be pulled back before firing and also give the nearby camera houses a clear view of the test. This will be the 5D5 second stage pet 5B250 minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.

We have ignition! Hercules did improve. Thanks Chad! I'm glad the chat seems to agree that they like the two parts, that it worked. Yeah, I do think in the end it worked better than my original idea. I just never expected it to take this long or to be this much work, as always is the case. I think, oh, I'm at the Skull Valley Reservation working on what is the main project and this will be just a fun little diversion.

This will be just like a, oh look what a small fractal shard that I can pick up and just easily turn into a fun video about what this place is. It's like fast forward a year and several months later and it's finally done. Okay, so here is where we get the actual labeling of the facility. So yeah, this is like where it comes together. You can see what all the different parts are. You have the test site, which is in the building on rails.

The thrust block is inside that building, if the instrumentation bunker. There are three camera houses, there's another one which is being hidden by the building itself, and then the lightning rods that are around it to divert the lightning strikes. And I feel like I'm incredibly lucky that there was an oncoming storm when I happened to be filming this. [Laughter] You're glad the storm was correctly labeled? Do you like, I spent a long time trying to figure out if I could put an arrow to point to the storm, but it just didn't work.

So I ended up going with like a little label just like I can label the whole background. Okay, killed a T-Koi. Oh right, so yeah, here we go. Explosions, nonetheless, one man was killed at decoy in 1984, crushed beneath a motor that came loose during securement to the test block, an accident for which the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Hercules $640.

I had to kind of have my assistant just sanity check me on this one. I'm like, does this report really say 640? Like is that actually correct? You know, and you can look up this accident report on OSHA. There's a description at the bottom which is, you know, it's a little difficult to understand. I feel like if a man died on a facility, like maybe you could include a diagram, not just a bunch of all caps sentences with tech jargon.

But yeah, he was crushed to death underneath the missile motor when it came loose. And yeah, I cannot believe that the penalty was $640. I know even if you do inflation from like 1984 dollars to now, that's not enough dollars. But the thing is, like, right, it's 640, but that's infinity more dollars than all of the people who died in the explosions in the original plant in California or all the stuff before OSHA existed.

So I guess like this is an improved upward trend, but it was still really quite shocking to come across this as part of the research. Scholars, the end of the 1980s was the beginning of the end for Hercules. The United States had been slowing production of nuclear warheads and needed fewer missiles to carry them. Decoy was used less as a testing site and more as a storage location, as military contracts dried up, leading to hundreds of layoffs in the early 1990s.

What I'm saying right here about decoy became a storage facility, I think this is also part of the reason, going back to the very beginning, why by the time I get there, it's, you know, where it's been abandoned for a long time. There's not much confidentiality or there's not much confidential equipment left on site, right? Like those things had already started to be removed, it seems like by the mid-1990s or so that the decoy facility was already on the way down.

Though the United States no longer needed the facility for strategic production, it was still strategically useful in a different way. Politics in 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union signed START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, where both agreed to reduce the size of their nuclear stockpiles. Because of course neither country was just going to take the word of the other, numerous trust but verify policies were put into place.

For example, both sides disabling their long-range bombers out in the open for the other's satellites to see. This little detail, it doesn't really belong in this story of T-Koi, but I found this too fascinating not to include. And I can't imagine ever coming across this in a video again, as a place to mention it. But there's something really, that I find quite amazing about these photographs of bombers.

And it was in the treaty that they had to be, like all the tail fins had to be cut off and they were literally left out just out in the open so that the spy satellites from the other country would be able to see them and to confirm that they had been dismantled. It's an interesting question about trying to disarm, and I mean, we'll get to the inspectors in just a second, but it is a weird thing when you think about it.

Like how do you try to let someone else know that you actually have disarmed and that you haven't hidden a bunch of bombers somewhere else that they don't know about? It’s a difficult question and this is one of the mechanisms that they tried to come up with. And presumably, because like each of these are just so expensive to make that even if you were like hiding bombers, you're still incurring such a tremendous cost on yourself by destroying a bunch of these things.

Gumbos, to answer the question, how long were they left there? I don’t remember. I do know, I came across it in the treaty at some point that they had to be left out for a certain period of time, but I don’t remember offhand what that was. I’m nothin’ a bit of shiny tape couldn’t fix! I would not want to fly in a plane where they had welded the tail fin back on, no thank you!

The open for the others satellites to see. And each country picked weapon production sites the other could inspect. The United States provided a list of dozens of sites for the Soviets, one of which was the T-Koi test range. This is also where, to go back to the book from before, where is it? So on this list, you can see that a couple of the other test sites, Hercules plant number one, Magna Utah, and I forget somewhere else, somewhere else on here is another Hercules plant.

But I think the Hercules plant in Magna, Utah is the one where they were building the motors. And this is the one that the authors of "Labors of a Modern Hercules" were observing and where they saw the Soviet inspectors as part of that process is why the sign in Russian is at the entrance. Temporary housing for the inspection team was built in the Soviet Union to ensure the Americans had not installed any bugs in the walls or tampered with the equipment.

And transported to Utah, forming a small Soviet outpost in Magna, the flags of which had to be changed after the Soviet Union dissolved, and inspection duties fell to the Russian Federation. These bunkers, okay, you know what, let me get to the end of the video, but don't let me forget about the bunkers.

Because I have a bunch of things to say about the bunkers, but let's just finish this off. Russian Federation, decoy limped on during the inspection period, but in 1995, with too many canceled contracts, the now failing Hercules Incorporated put itself up for sale, acquired by Alliant Tech Systems, an American aerospace defense and sporting goods company. Okay, yeah, so that's not like a joke. As far as I can tell, Alliant Tech Systems really does make military gear and sporting equipment, which I guess kind of makes sense.

Like I didn't look into it too far, but maybe that's stuff like paintball guns and body pads, like I have no idea. And again, you can't research absolutely everything. But someone had asked the question earlier about Hercules going bankrupt or going out of business, I should say. They didn't go bankrupt, they sold themselves off. And yeah, I found it kind of frustrating because I wanted to know more of the details about like how does this happen?

How does a company that is a major supplier to the US military go out of business? And you know, there weren't great answers. Like we were able to find a bunch of articles at the time, but they would all just like say these vague things about canceled contracts. So I don't have a good answer, but I do find it interesting like how enormous companies can just disappear.

And so I kind of guess or presume that with Hercules, it’s the same way that it goes with a lot of other big companies, that they end up acquiring a lot of fixed costs over time. And then if the market just slightly changes, like they're left with a huge number of fixed costs and it's hard to be profitable. That's what puts them in trouble and they end up going bankrupt, doors as Hercules did, selling themselves off.

I didn't mention it in the video, but Hercules split into two and they sold all of the missile stuff to Alliant Tech Systems. The actual Hercules company existed for, I can't remember, I think until like 2004. And then the rest of the company got bought by someone else and I don't remember off the top of my head who that was. But this is again where you have to make a decision in a video and it’s like does it matter that not all of Hercules was sold off in this moment?

Probably not. We can just sort of simplify that and say like Hercules was sold off, even though part of it continued to exist. But yeah, I really wish that "Labors of a Modern Hercules" had been written six years later. It could have covered the details of how did this actually disappear. But you know what, even if it had been written later, without a doubt, I would have read it, found it interesting, and probably written a similar sentence that just kind of glosses over quickly what happened.

I included this, this was like one of the few things I could find for Alliant Tech Systems at the time, but I love this image that they had on their website of like Alliant Tech Systems, we make rockets and guns. And it's just, you know, America has a very America culture that I can't help but love, right? Like it's ridiculous and awesome at the same time, right?

It's like, it's why it's often parodied in like the Fallout games and that kind of stuff. There is a sort of ridiculous and awesome like don't tread on me Americanness, and it definitely comes through sometimes. American aerospace defense and sporting goods company. In 1999, the lease on this land expired. Alliant Tech Systems did not renew and control of the decoy test range reverted to the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, within the borders of which decoy sits.

I know what I'm doing here and I intentionally did want to wait the whole video before mentioning that this is actually on the Skull Valley Indian Reservation. Because I do think there's not a small number of viewers who are paying attention and who, even if they're not watching the director's commentaries, like not watching the behind the scenes stuff, I imagine for a lot of viewers this is like the light bulb moment that explains oh, this is what all like this nonsense has been with these two videos that Grey made.

Like why did he make this video where he just walks around an abandoned place? Why is he telling me about a bunch of Cold War nonsense that I don't care about? Oh, he was out there for the Indian reservations and like all of this is just a fractal off of that. Again for me as a viewer, you know, the kinds of things that I watch, I like those moments.

Like I really appreciate when a creator sort of lets you in on like, hey, you're a viewer who pays attention. This is a detail that I know you will love and will make it feel like the puzzle pieces have come together. So it's part of the reason why, like on the earlier maps or in the beginning of the video, I don't say it first. Hey, this is on the Skull Valley Indian Reservation. I wait until the last possible second to mention it.

And Lynx, yes, you're totally right. One of my favorite things about driving out west is these buffalo crossing signs. Like they are amazing. And I mean, you know, I can't say too much, but the Skull Valley-Goshute Indian Tribe, they do have a pack of buffalo, I'll leave it at that. It operates no more. Its work lives on. Of the 1,000 Minuteman missiles constructed during the Cold War, 400 are still active, waiting with their solid fuel motors calibrated here at decoy to launch at a moment's notice.

So I don't know how surprising that end is for people. I think, I don't know, for me before going out to decoy and before reading about any of this stuff, there's a way in which I tend to think of the Cold War as, oh, the Cold War is over, like it's a thing that happened a long time ago and is totally irrelevant. And while that is true with almost all of history and almost all of wars, there is a way in which I think the Cold War is different because a lot of the stuff that was made during the Cold War is still sitting around waiting to destroy the world.

And that's part of what's going on with this decoy project is like, I mean, yeah this is all like ancient history. You know, this facility was built and operated before I was born. It's definitely built and operated before almost everyone watching this video was born. And shut down before a lot of those viewers were born. But unlike most of the boring history stuff, it's like, yeah, but the missile motors that pass through here are still sitting in bunkers out in cornfields all over America just like waiting to go off.

And yeah, it's just weird and uncomfortable to think about. Yeah, it's just uncomfortable to think about. That is the ending of the decoy video and a project that I felt like was, was never going to end in my life. Some projects they take a long time, some projects they really feel like they take a long time. And for sure the decoy project, it felt like the long project that it was. This one, I feel like it just took a little bit, took a little bit too long for me to actually bring it to the wraps.

Oh, oh Florence, thank you so much! Bunkers! I almost forgot! Okay, I can't believe I almost forgot because this is the thing that I was the most obsessed about. Okay, bunkers, bunkers, bunkers, how do I even know how to begin with this? Okay, so at some point in researching this project, I came across this incidental piece of information that like, oh hey, all of these inspection sites.

Right? If you look at the inspection list, you'll see there's a ton of stuff in Utah. It's like, oh, the UTTR is out there. The Dugway Proving Ground is out there. There's like a lot of military stuff out there and the United States, as part of SALT and START treaties invited the Soviet Union to come out and inspect them. And it's like, okay, what are you going to do with these Soviet inspectors? You got to put them somewhere.

And the Soviet Union built housing that it sent to the United States for their inspectors to live in because they were paranoid about the US spying on their inspectors. They were paranoid about the equipment being messed with. And apparently, they were also paranoid enough that they had electrical separation between the power supply and the bunker where you're smoothing out the electrical signal.

Like the Soviets did not do not trust the United States very much. So I do not know why, but I became really obsessed with these bunkers, because wherever I initially found out this piece of information, it was like this casual off-handed thing that said like, oh, by the way, these bunkers still exist. I was like, oh really, that's interesting. The bunkers still exist somewhere.

And this is also where the global pandemic was incredibly frustrating because if that had not been happening, 100%, I would have flown back to Utah to find these bunkers. So this project ended up having to be done entirely online, and I cannot, cannot give enough credit to my assistant who just did a herculean amount of work to track down where these bunkers were and to get the photographs that you're seeing now. Like phone calls over the course of a year to many military installations and Utah research installations and like, yeah, just a tremendous amount of work.

The number of human hours on this is unbelievable! I don't know if I'm going to be able to find this just off the top of my head. Yes, thank you guys for congratulating my assistant here! You know, one of the things with Patreon, like obviously you're supporting me writing and researching the videos. And obviously, you're supporting the animator and like the music and everything else. My assistant does a tremendous amount of additional work like helping these things to happen and like the whole decoy project.

Getting in touch with the Skull Valley Reservation and like getting permission to be on decoy, like that never would have happened without her being able to take lead on that project. And so like yes, there's many things that happen because of her. So, okay, so where are we here? Okay, so this is Utah. So you've got Salt Lake City is over here, Skull Valley is over here, we've got the giant desert.

So originally, the inspectors were all in Magna, Utah, which is sort of right by West Valley City. It's over here. For reasons that I cannot remember off the top of my head, the bunkers, after the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Federation was inspecting for a while. And then the START treaty came to an end and the bunkers were vacated and they ended up all the way on the other side of the Salt Lake Desert in Wendover.

So Wendover is this little town that's right on the Utah-Nevada border. They were, slash, air force-based kind of town. The historic Wendover Airfield Museum is the place where it was reported that these trailers ended up. But I was determined to try to find out like for real where these things, and if you, now am I going to be able to do it just from memory? Okay, here we go! Boom!

Okay, so we went on a Google Street View, and right outside the historical society in this town, you can see that there are a bunch of bunkers. We eventually were able to get it confirmed that yes, this is where the bunkers that the Soviet inspectors used ended up. And so there’s I think there’s three or four of them that are in this place. And again, through tremendous effort, we were able to get some photographs of the things.

So hold on, let me pull this up. Okay, so I mentioned before like there was just nothing that existed publicly about what did decoy look like when it was being operated. And it was a very similar situation for these Soviet trailers. Like come on guys, there's got to be pictures of this at the time. And again, what my assistant was able to do with just an ungodly number of hours spent on the project was eventually tracked down some boxes that were at the Utah State Archives.

And these boxes did not have date labels on them. They were like boxes of photographs from Magna, Utah around this time. Like none of the photographs are labeled, they're not ordered, there's no information on them. But she was able to convince one of the researchers there to scan some of the photographs for us that looked promising that they might be bunker photos from the time.

And then we were able to, by looking at the outsides, confirm like yes, some of these are totally the Soviet bunkers. These are the photographs from the inside. This is the one that I've used in the video. But some of these photos are a little mysterious. So like this looks like it's the inside of one of the bunkers. It was with the other bunker photos, who knows like what's the deal? Where is this photograph taken? Is this when it was constructed in the Soviet Union? Is this in America?

Like who knows? There's just a bunch of photos of like inspectors. You can totally see like this is definitely out in Utah. Here's the inspectors investigating like a housing for one of the missiles. Guys hanging out, like having a little picnic. It took forever to try to find these photos and this was like, you know, I don't know if you've ever worked on a really long research project, but we were so pumped when we finally were able to get some of these photos.

And it’s like excited all out of perspective with like what these images actually are, but to have been tracking them down for so long to actually get your hands on something that was like in a box in an archive somewhere, undated, it was just incredible. If I can get the other one. So this is the other thing that I then really like. So in addition to tracking down like what were the archival images, we were also able to get the Wendover Historical Society to go inside these bunkers that had been like untouched on their grounds in decades and just take some pictures from the inside of like what do these things actually look like.

And so here is the state of the bunkers today. And so you can see like this is what's left inside. There's the sign in Russian. Here is again, like some of the old equipment and the desks that they sat at. Like again, just equipment that's left inside. They’re in really rough shape as you can see, but like this is, this is what's left of these bunkers. And here's what it looks like from the outside.

This is what from like a month ago, I guess, this photograph. And this, this was really amazing because again, if the pandemic had not been occurring, I would have flown to Wendover to try to like talk my way into these things. But because that wasn't possible, you know, my assistant was able to do the next best thing and like get the Historical Society to take some photographs of what they look like.

I really, really wanted to work these into the video after so much effort trying to find them. But here's the thing, like what is the video about? The video is not about these trailers. They're not really part of this. They're like an incidental part of the story. It only loosely connects because they were in Magna and Magna is also where the missiles were manufactured by Hercules.

And so by the time that I mention the bunkers, we're already really at the end of the video. And so to have a little diversion about like oh, these bunkers still exist today and here's some photos of them, like I just could not make it work in the actual video. But I just really wanted to show everyone who crowdfunds, like look at these pictures we found, isn't it amazing? It was incredibly exciting to find them.

And so much so that I want to thank everyone who crowdfunds the channel because what we're doing is we are donating to the Wendover Historical Society to get one of these bunkers restored. We are donating to them so that they can actually turn one of these things into the best restoration of what it was at the time that's possible. Perhaps someday when the global pandemic is over, if you happen to find yourself traveling through Wendover, and you want to make a little diversion, there will be a restored Soviet Cold War inspection bunker related to the crazy decoy project out there to see.

So thank you all of the crowdfunders for making these sorts of videos possible. And thank you for letting us help try to restore something in the real world that's actually related to one of these projects. It's this one has been a real, real journey guys. So thank you so much. That is the end of the short director's commentary for the evening. And stay safe and I'll see you in the next one.