From secret war games and Cold War pranks to fast-food courts and UFO videos, the Pentagon is far stranger than its gray concrete walls suggest. This five-sided giant has seen everything from Vietnam War protests and bizarre weapons tests to accounting failures, zombie plans, and burger standoffs. In this list, we dig into 50 surprising facts that reveal how the Pentagon was built, how it operates, and the odd, often controversial stories hidden inside its corridors.
1 Pentagon Segregation And Extra Bathrooms
During World War II, builders designed the Pentagon with roughly twice as many bathrooms as a typical office building needed. They did this because racial segregation rules required separate restroom facilities for white and Black employees.
2. The Pentagon covers about 6.5 million square feet of space, roughly twice the floor area of the Empire State Building, and houses around 23,000 military and civilian employees. Designers laid out the five-sided structure so that no point inside is more than a 10-minute walk from any other point, despite its vast size. Construction began during World War II, and workers finished the building in just 16 months. This combination of scale, efficiency, and speed made the Pentagon the largest office building in the world.
3. The Pentagon has an actual defense strategy for a zombie apocalypse called CONPLAN 8888, a U.S. Strategic Command plan dated April 30, 2011, titled “Counter-Zombie Dominance.” It lays out defensive and offensive operations, planning phases, and an end state where zombies no longer threaten U.S. interests or partners.
4. Since 2012, the Pentagon has spent 6.8 million dollars paying American pro sports teams for game day ceremonies that honor troops as part of its recruitment campaigns. In one contract, taxpayers paid the Milwaukee Brewers 49,000 dollars so the Wisconsin Army National Guard could sponsor Sunday renditions of “God Bless America,” while another paid the New York Jets 20,000 dollars to recognize one or two New Jersey Army National Guard soldiers as “hometown heroes” on the field.
5. In the 2001 film Black Hawk Down, actor Ewan McGregor plays an Army Ranger who appears under the fictional name John Grimes because the real soldier, John Stebbins, was convicted of child molestation in a 1999 court martial. Stebbins had served as a company clerk in an elite Army Ranger unit and earned the Silver Star for his actions during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. When producers adapted Mark Bowden’s book for the screen, the Pentagon agreed to allow the use of actual Army Black Hawk helicopters only after the filmmakers changed Stebbins to the fictional John Grimes.
6 Roosevelt Removes Pentagon Whites Only
In 1945, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, before its formal dedication, he saw the “Whites Only” signs that marked facilities designed for segregated use under Virginia law. Roosevelt ordered the removal of the “Whites Only” signs, and his administration told the protesting governor of Virginia that the federal facility would follow the president’s policy rather than state segregation rules. As a result, until 1965 the Pentagon was the only building in Virginia where segregation laws were not enforced, even though the side-by-side restrooms remained and later simply operated as integrated facilities.
7. In 2005, a heavily censored Pentagon document went public in a usable form when a reader simply cut and pasted the blacked-out text from the PDF into Microsoft Word, instantly revealing the hidden sections. The report, released as a declassified document with thick digital blocks over sensitive passages, still contained the underlying text in the file.
8. In 2008, reports revealed that the Pentagon had developed a weapon nicknamed “rocket balls” to attack underground facilities that store chemical or biological weapons. Each so-called kinetic fireball incendiary is a hollow sphere made of rubberized rocket fuel that, once ignited, shoots hot exhaust from a nozzle, ricochets at high speed through rooms, and can break through doors while filling enclosed spaces with intense heat. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency tested a 2,000-pound BLU-109 bunker-busting bomb packed with these fireballs against a multiroom bunker to see how well they could heat and scour its interior.
9. During the Cold War, a small hot dog stand sat in the center of the Pentagon. Soviet observers reportedly believed this modest structure was the building’s most top-secret meeting room and that the vast five-sided headquarters formed a fortified shell around it. Because of that belief, a rumor spread that the stand would be the target of a Soviet missile strike if war ever broke out.
10. After scientists discovered that deep sea dragonfish had chlorophyll in their eyes that helped them see in the dark, the Pentagon began funding research into cheap night vision eye drops based on the same idea. Researchers found that a chlorophyll derivative called chlorin e6, already used in cancer treatment, could boost the eye’s sensitivity to low light when combined with a mild electrical current. In tests on volunteers, the drops temporarily improved night vision enough for subjects to distinguish shapes and people at longer distances in the dark.
11 Five Guys Pentagon Delivery Ban
Soon after Five Guys opened its first burger shop in Arlington, Virginia, in 1986, Pentagon officials called in an order for 15 burgers and asked if they could deliver them to the Pentagon. The staff refused because the company had a strict no delivery policy, and founder Jerry Murrell then took a call from a Pentagon admiral who argued that everyone delivers food to the Pentagon. Murrell still would not bend, and he and his son Matt hung a 22-foot banner outside the store that read ABSOLUTELY NO DELIVERY so no one could miss the rule. Business from Pentagon employees actually increased after the banner went up.
12. In 2016, Pentagon officials issued an internal memo to staff titled “Pokemon Stop,” telling its employees to stop playing Pokemon Go inside the building. Security officers worried that the game’s GPS tracking and location data could reveal the layout of sensitive rooms and facilities to outsiders. Staff could still play on their personal phones, but the Pentagon told them to do so only outside and to use sound judgment around military facilities.
13. Around 1999, the Pentagon’s National Security Agency circulated a memo warning that Furbys, the popular electronic toys, might overhear and later repeat classified information if people brought them into secure areas. Officials treated the chattering, owl-like gadgets as potential recording devices and banned them from certain offices. In reality, Furbys did not record or play back actual speech and had no way to store conversations.
14. In 1986, the film Top Gun was made in collaboration with the Pentagon. Enlistment spiked when it was released, the Navy set up recruitment tables at theaters playing the movie, and polls soon showed rising confidence in the military. The movie relied on Pentagon-supplied warplanes and aircraft carriers, which the studio received at a steep discount in exchange for giving military officials line-by-line input on the script.
15. In 2013, the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA, launched the Upward Falling Payloads program, which aimed to seed the deep ocean floor with dormant capsules holding sensors, drones, and other nonlethal systems that could be remotely triggered to “fall upward” and support U.S. forces at sea.
16 Pentagon Abrupt Climate Change Scenario
In October 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report titled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” that explored how sudden climate shifts could reshape global security. The scenario predicted that as climate disruption worsened, the United States and Australia would become fortress states that used their resources to wall themselves off from the rest of the world.
17. During World War II, the U.S. government built the Pentagon without using any marble inside the building. At the time, Italy served as the main government source for marble, but the United States classified Italy as an enemy nation and could not rely on Italian shipments in wartime.
18. General Leslie Groves, who later served as director of the Manhattan Project that helped develop the first atomic bomb, had previously overseen construction of the vast office complex that became the Pentagon. As an Army engineer, he managed the rapid wartime building effort that created the new War Department headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
19. Starting in the early 2000s, the Pentagon turned into a small food city of its own, with more than 20 fast food outlets, including a joint KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell that opened after the food court renovation in 2003. By September 2025, the official concessions roster showed more than 30 restaurants and kiosks, such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Panda Express, Panera, Popeyes, Five Guys, Subway, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin Robbins, etc.
20. On October 21, 1967, during a massive anti–Vietnam War demonstration at the Pentagon, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Michael Bowen led thousands of protesters who vowed to levitate the building, exorcise its evil, and end the war. Organizers even filed for a permit to raise the Pentagon 300 feet into the air through songs and chants, but authorities only allowed a symbolic 3 feet. Tens of thousands marched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon, where they staged an elaborate exorcism ritual with flowers, mantras, and theatrical invocations. The building never moved, but the March on the Pentagon became a landmark act of political theater and a turning point in public opinion about the Vietnam War.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Norman Morrison Pentagon Fire Protest
In 1965, Norman R. Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker and anti-war activist from Baltimore, went to the Pentagon and doused himself in kerosene below the office of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He brought his one-year-old daughter, Emily, with him, set her down or handed her to someone in the crowd, and then set himself on fire, an act inspired by photographs of Vietnamese children burned by napalm and by earlier Buddhist self-immolations. Morrison died within minutes after an ambulance took him to nearby Fort Myer.
22. In 1987, Finnish company Rauma-Repola’s Oceanics subsidiary delivered the Mir-1 and Mir-2 deep submarines to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, with test depths of 6,000 meters that far exceeded what U.S. officials had expected. American CoCom officials had originally granted export permission because they believed the engineering project would fail, but once the subs worked, there was what one Finnish executive described as a freakout in the Pentagon. They privately threatened Rauma-Repola with economic sanctions. Faced with the risk of losing its lucrative offshore oil platform business, the company backed down, and submarine development in Finland effectively ceased.
23. In 1981, the Pentagon spent 6 million dollars to determine whether burning a photograph of a Soviet missile would cause the actual missile to be destroyed. The bizarre project later appeared in the funding category of skeptic James Randi’s Pigasus Award, an annual tongue-in-cheek prize that calls out organizations backing parapsychological and paranormal claims.
24. Part of the land where the Pentagon sits today used to be a hemp farm run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Beginning in 1900, the USDA operated the Arlington Experimental Farm there, and botanist Lyster Dewey grew and bred hemp varieties on those plots from about 1903 until he retired in 1935. In 1940 the government closed the farm and moved its crop research elsewhere to clear the site for wartime construction.
25. In late June 1971, Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska, who had severe dyslexia, smuggled the secret Pentagon Papers into his congressional office in two large suitcases and had disabled Vietnam War veterans guard them. On the night of June 29, 1971, he used his position as chair of the obscure Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds to convene a meeting, began reading from the study, and then moved to insert 4,100 pages into the subcommittee’s Congressional Record so they would become public. By exploiting that little-known committee seat, he forced the Pentagon Papers into the official record and ensured that anyone could read and publish them. Although Gravel exposed the contents in 1971, the U.S. government did not officially declassify and release the full Pentagon Papers until 2011, forty years after they first leaked.
RE: Fact #7 (Pentagon Redaction Cracked By Copying) – That IT expert from the Casey Anthony case is looking much better now.
RE: Fact #2 (Pentagon Versus Empire State Building) – Leslie Groves, a US Army general, oversaw construction and was later put in charge of the Manhattan Project.
The guy’s results are hard to argue with.
Nope. It’s the same reason FDR picked Eisenhower. Ike was pretty far down the seniority list, but FDR knew he needed someone who was good with organizing and politics as Supreme Allied Commander, not just a battlefield general.
RE: Fact #15 (DARPA Upward Falling Payloads Program) – If something’s done outside US waters, I can totally see a business in ‘salvaging abandoned military hardware from international waters’.
RE: Fact #23 (Pentagon Six Million Photo Experiment) – So, basically, 6 million went to a secret prison.
RE: Fact #5 (Black Hawk Down John Stebbins) – His own daughter. He got 30 years at Fort Leavenworth.
If you get sentenced to 30 years at Leavenworth, it’s 30 years to the day, and that includes hard labor.
So, it sounds like he got out in March 2019, and only served 20 out of his 30-year sentence.
It’s not an easy time for sex offenders either. It’s even harder for child molesters.
RE: Fact #50 (Grenada Invasion Pentagon Tourist Maps) – Back before the internet, folks planning for war had to pick up copies of “The Economist” just to get some intel on a country. So, not only did we have to rely on the media for military intelligence, we had to use British media specifically.
Yeah, it sounds wild, but sometimes it’s really that simple. I recall reading somewhere that a lot of what people call “intelligence gathering” can just be someone reading the local newspaper in a particular area.
Back in 1982, the US had satellites, the SR71 was still flying, and stuff like that. You’d think maps and really detailed pictures would have been around then, right?
RE: Fact #20 (Abbie Hoffman Pentagon Levitation Protest) – Yeah, people really didn’t start changing their minds about the war until the Tet Offensive, which was still about a year away.
RE: Fact #2 (Pentagon Versus Empire State Building) – And for a size comparison, the Pentagon could totally fit inside Apple’s new Campus 2.0 in Cupertino, CA. I think the Pentagon would still have way more office space though, since it’s designed so complexly.
RE: Fact #2 (Pentagon Versus Empire State Building) – This building is huge, but its design makes it blend in pretty well from the freeways around it.
RE: Fact #25 (Mike Gravel Reads Pentagon Papers) – It’s a shame that most people still don’t really know what’s in them.
RE: Fact #21 (Norman Morrison Pentagon Fire Protest) – Seriously, trying to set yourself on fire to protest something? It’s never actually worked out as a good way to get your point across.
Sorry, but Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on December 17, 2010. This event ended up sparking the Tunisian Revolution and the broader Arab Spring movements against authoritarian governments.
RE: Fact #24 (Lyster Dewey Hemp Fields Pentagon) – Years ago, it was actually against the law to *not* grow hemp. It was super important for making ropes and sails for ships, so back then, you’d see hemp farms everywhere!
RE: Fact #11 (Five Guys Pentagon Delivery Ban) – I was a bit unsure at first since I know that area and don’t see any Five Guys that close for lunch. I even asked my boss, who’s been here since 2000, and she couldn’t recall one either. But after looking into it, I found the first Five Guys was actually in the Westmont Shopping Center at S Glebe Rd and Columbia Pike back in 1986, and it looks like it closed before 2001. So yeah, it totally would have been a lunch spot for them back then. Close enough to drive to if you really wanted to, but far enough that it would have felt like a bit of a time commitment.
RE: Fact #9 (Pentagon Hot Dog Stand Target) – Even if we ignore the fact that the Soviets would obviously aim for the Pentagon itself, not just the lawn in front, they didn’t have the tech to hit a specific spot like that. They went for bigger warheads that would do the job even if they weren’t precise, instead of having smaller bombs that could land perfectly.
Yeah, the Tsar Bomba. That was like a 50-megaton “screw you” that would have wiped out everything for miles. They even planned a 100-megaton version, which thankfully never got tested.
Yeah, the Tsar Bomba was mostly just for show. It was super impractical, like, way too heavy. I think they even had to reinforce the bomber’s wings for it. And it had to fly high and slow, making it an easy target for planes or missiles.
RE: Fact #32 (Noam Chomsky Pentagon Funded Linguistics) – Just because someone likes his ideas doesn’t mean they’re a fan of the person. Most people really struggle with critical thinking, even on the simplest stuff.
RE: Fact #7 (Pentagon Redaction Cracked By Copying) – If government employees were more competent, we might be living in an Orwellian nightmare.
It really makes you wonder, right? How can some folks be so convinced by these wild, intricate conspiracy theories when it’s so obvious how messed up so many parts of the bureaucracy are.
You know that saying, “Lie so much that when you actually need a lie to be believed, people will believe it because you’re such a terrible liar”?
RE: Fact #25 (Mike Gravel Reads Pentagon Papers) – On the night of June 29, 1971, Gravel tried to read some papers on the Senate floor during his filibuster against the draft, but it didn’t happen because there wasn’t a quorum. So, Gravel instead held a meeting for the Buildings and Grounds subcommittee he was in charge of. He had John Dow, a Congressman from New York, testify that the war was taking up money meant for public buildings, which made talking about the war relevant to the committee. With the press watching, he started reading from the papers, leaving out any documents he thought could hurt national security. He said it was his constitutional duty to keep people safe by making sure they had the information they needed to make democratic decisions.
He kept reading until 1 a.m. He was so tired from the previous three sleepless nights and worrying about what was next that he started crying and said he couldn’t go on physically. Since no other senators were there, Gravel ended the meeting by getting unanimous consent to put 4,100 pages of the papers into the Congressional Record for his subcommittee. The next day, the Supreme Court’s New York Times Co. v. United States decision came out, siding with the newspapers, and The Times and others started publishing again. In July 1971, Bantam Books released a cheap paperback version of the papers with the information The Times had published.
Senator Gravel was a real hero, both for his country and for the world.
RE: Fact #11 (Five Guys Pentagon Delivery Ban) – Five Guys is pretty bad for delivery. Even picking up food from them is a bummer because the buns get soggy from all the steam and moisture from the toppings. It really seems like they’ve got the right quality control in place.
A few weeks back, I ordered from Five Guys through DoorDash, and honestly, it was way worse than any other delivery I’ve tried, even though it’s my go-to spot when I eat out.
Yeah, the fries get kinda strange if you don’t eat them pretty quickly.
However, I discovered that if you re-bake Five Guys fries on a cookie sheet with foil in your oven, or toss them in an air fryer, they become unbelievably good – even better than fresh! I’ve saved fries and recooked them later, and they were awesome. I have no idea why, though.
And you can’t get your money back by just grabbing some free peanuts.
Yeah, that’s pretty much the case for any burger and fries, and honestly, most takeout or delivery food. If I’m dropping the same cash, I’d rather eat it right there at the place while it’s still hot and fresh.
RE: Fact #5 (Black Hawk Down John Stebbins) – When I was in basic training at Fort Benning back in ’99, he was a drill sergeant in our company. I was in 4th platoon, and he was with 3rd. I finished my OSUT training in early September, so I never heard about any of the trouble until now.
I recall him telling us stories about Somalia, how he’d been shot but kept fighting the guys with the machine gun that was hitting him. He survived because the bullets went through a brick wall before hitting his body armor.
I also remember him bringing his new girlfriend to the company just to brag, and I quote, about “Her I-cup t*ts.” It makes me sad knowing he’s in Leavenworth for being a bad dad. I actually liked him, but fu*k him for what he did.
He just vanished. No one said a word. He was the second drill sergeant to disappear on us like that, and it happened less than two weeks before graduation. I didn’t find out about the rape and imprisonment until much later when I decided to look him up. I guess I was trying to figure out why they changed his name in the movie.
He’s out of Leavenworth now.
He didn’t just “fail as a father.” He raped his 6-year-old daughter.
RE: Fact #5 (Black Hawk Down John Stebbins) – So, PFC Todd Blackburn, the guy who fell from the helicopter when it was dodging an RPG during a rappel, not only lived but also went on to become a police officer down in Florida.
That fact turned out to be way more positive and healthier than I first thought!
I always wondered what happened to that kid. It also seemed kind of rough that it was later brushed off as “he missed the rope.” It really wasn’t his fault!
RE: Fact #22 (Finnish Mir Submarines Spook Pentagon) – Honestly, the CIA totally played a role in ousting an Australian prime minister who was democratically elected. So, I don’t have much sympathy for the Russians interfering, considering the US has been doing that to other countries for like, the past 70 years.
So, back in the 90s, the CIA apparently tried to get 128-bit encryption banned or at least made difficult. They used similar threats, but F-Secure apparently stood their ground. The CIA figured that with 128-bit, they’d be way behind in actually cracking it. They eventually got what they wanted by getting into the committees that managed encryption keys, which put us in a situation where a huge global data breach could have happened. Basically, when you add backdoors or, more accurately, doors with known keys, someone’s bound to find them and the key eventually.
This kind of thing was pretty common back in the 70s and 80s. Helsinki was a huge hub for spies, and both sides were constantly trying to influence things, and often succeeded. The Soviets leveraged a lot of deals and even sponsored political parties. Meanwhile, the US would threaten economic sanctions if Finland made those deals. Finlandization was kind of a necessary compromise back then, keeping the Soviets happy enough that Finland was still profitable and safe. Things haven’t changed all that much, even though the Soviet Union is gone and borders aren’t as locked down. The same power plays are still happening. If you ask us, we would have preferred US interference over Soviet interference any day. Honestly, if it came down to losing our independence or being controlled by Russia, we would have been willing to become the 51st state in a heartbeat. Pretty much anyone but Russia would have been better.
RE: Fact #22 (Finnish Mir Submarines Spook Pentagon) – The main point isn’t that they built submarines, but that they sold them to the Soviet Union.
RE: Fact #35 (Millennium Challenge 2002 War Game) – General Ripper is the kind of marine we really need more of. He’s humble, creative, smart, understands the enemy, and is honest despite the political stuff. When I say we should seriously slash DoD spending, people worry about making the country weaker. I always bring up this event to show that funding and power aren’t really what determines victory or military strength.
RE: Fact #20 (Abbie Hoffman Pentagon Levitation Protest) – Yeah, I recall reading about Hoffman’s account, I think it was in “Steal This Book.” Before they lifted it, they apparently measured it by walking around it and counting their steps. Some cop tried to stop them, saying it was against the law to measure the Pentagon. They just laughed and asked to see the law.
RE: Fact #1 (Pentagon Segregation And Extra Bathrooms) – Yeah, not just bathrooms, water fountains as well.
In the South, a lot of buildings have two men’s rooms next to each other, and two women’s rooms right beside them. The Harris County courthouse is one example.
RE: Fact #26 (New York Times Pentagon Papers) – There’s a really great documentary about this called “The Most Dangerous Man In America.”
Nixon actually shut down newspapers that published the Pentagon Papers, including The New York Times. A lot of people today don’t realize that news organizations used to get shut down for printing things the government didn’t approve of.
Since the papers were top secret, Mike Gravel read them aloud during a filibuster, which put them into the public record.
Luckily, The New York Times won a court case that protected the press’s right to publish things, no matter what the president said. That ruling basically made journalism a protected field.
It was good until the powerful industries that control the government found a way to get around it by buying up all the news outlets. That’s why you see everyone on TV calling WikiLeaks “terrorists.”
RE: Fact #13 (NSA Furby Ban At Pentagon) – You can totally use a speaker as a microphone! You could even take a Furby and change it up to make it a listening device pretty easily.
Totally. It wasn’t about a regular Furby being dangerous, it was the worry about one that had been tampered with to spy.
RE: Fact #16 (Pentagon Abrupt Climate Change Scenario) – Yeah, not much is changing for Australia, huh.
RE: Fact #30 (Teen Hacker Hits NASA Pentagon) – Sounds like a super quick way to land a really well-paid, top-secret job with the CIA or DOD.
RE: Fact #12 (Pentagon Pokemon Go Security Memo) – To save everyone a click, it looks like the players were accidentally mapping out the Pentagon.
Wow, Japan has been planning a second attack on us this whole time and we didn’t even notice. So sneaky!
RE: Fact #2 (Pentagon Versus Empire State Building) – I’m not sure I can really buy this. It says it’s 6.5 million square feet, but the building is a pentagon. Shouldn’t it be 6.5 million pentagon feet then?
That really adds a whole new way to look at those calculations.
RE: Fact #3 (Pentagon CONPLAN 8888 Zombie Defense) – I really hope if that happens, we get Walking Dead-style zombies instead of World War Z ones.
Hey, so about that World War Z movie or book? The book definitely had humanity coming out on top the best compared to most zombie stories out there.
The super fast and “smart” ones in the movie. I haven’t read the book, so I’m wondering if they’re different from how they are in the movie.
RE: Fact #17 (Pentagon Built Without Italian Marble) – Yeah, I remember that wives’ tale quote, something about “no fat generals in my army.” People have attributed it to all sorts of guys like Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Patton. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if someone claimed Rommel said it too.
RE: Fact #9 (Pentagon Hot Dog Stand Target) – It seems like Ground Zero was probably chosen because it’s right in the middle of the Pentagon. That’s how I remember hearing it anyway.
RE: Fact #19 (Pentagon Fast Food Mini City) – Seriously, most people have no clue how massive the Pentagon is. It’s genuinely one of the biggest buildings on the planet in terms of floor space, and that’s not even counting all the different levels.
RE: Fact #32 (Noam Chomsky Pentagon Funded Linguistics) – And it looks like he was pretty friendly with Jeffery Epstein too. He had a child pornography conviction in Florida back in 2008, and this was still going on at least as late as 2017. That’s when Noam’s wife, Valeria, sent an email apologizing for missing his birthday.
Yeah, and those two emails they sent back and forth are pretty interesting.
I’m seriously amazed. Epstein just randomly hit him up about some wild idea that language evolved from vision. And Chomsky actually engaged with him, somehow connecting this messy thought to David Marr’s work and how it relates to generative grammar. What the fu*k.
And it plays down the Cambodian genocide.
Back in 2019, he went to see Lula in jail and then called Epstein from there. Looks like Chomsky linked up both his buddies who were in the slammer.
RE: Fact #4 (Pentagon Paid Patriotism Sports Contracts) – They show recruitment ads during commercials, so it’s not really hidden.
RE: Fact #8 (Pentagon Rocket Balls Bunker Weapon) – Keeping them in the Pentagon seems pretty risky.
I was wondering if it was some kind of security self-destruct thing in case the Pentagon ever got compromised.
RE: Fact #32 (Noam Chomsky Pentagon Funded Linguistics) – A lot of Noam Chomsky fans are surprised to find out he worked for the Pentagon for the first part of his MIT career. Some might be even more shocked to learn he kept working with a Pentagon contractor after retiring from MIT.
Back in 2021, a research company funded by the military called Oceanit had Noam Chomsky give an online talk.
Even so, Chomsky continued working with Oceanit. The company’s website mentions they’ve been partnering with Professor Chomsky for about five years, creating a linguistics-based AI they nicknamed NoME. NoME stands for Noetic Mathematical Engine, but it sounds just like its namesake.
Other pages on Oceanit’s site show that this NoME system is meant for ‘war games’ and ‘cyberwarfare.’ We also found out the company has worked on ‘hundreds’ of US Government contracts, with at least 90 of them appearing to be military contracts. Sullivan himself even said that Oceanit’s AI systems are ‘mostly in industrial and military applications.’
What’s he admired for, and why should we care that he worked for a government contractor?
RE: Fact #23 (Pentagon Six Million Photo Experiment) – This has to be fake. People can’t be this dumb.
Back in the day, they did a ton of psychic experimentation. The thinking was pretty much, “if this stuff is real, we need to get good at it first.” And they weren’t afraid to ask some huge “what if” questions.
RE: Fact #10 (Dragonfish Chlorophyll Pentagon Night Vision) – the 46th Armored Division actually lost to one guy with just a flash-bang!
On the bright side, night vision goggles have tech to stop your eyes from getting messed up by sudden bright lights. But I don’t think these “drops” will ever be as advanced as NVGs, so I’m not really worried about that being an issue.
RE: Fact #18 (Leslie Groves Pentagon To Manhattan) – It’s wild that he was in charge of making the most destructive thing on Earth, which ended up ruining so many innocent lives, and he also worked on the atomic bomb.
RE: Fact #22 (Finnish Mir Submarines Spook Pentagon) – I just learned that James Cameron used the same ships for his Titanic expeditions. I had no idea they were built in Finland, and I actually knew about those ships beforehand.
RE: Fact #4 (Pentagon Paid Patriotism Sports Contracts) – Seeing that flyover makes me really want to join the Air Force.
Yeah, the air force does those flyovers for free because it’s good practice for them, like for bombing runs or stuff. For them, it’s kinda like a game of hitting a specific spot at a specific time.
This helps pilots make sure they’re flying enough to stay qualified for that plane.
RE: Fact #6 (Roosevelt Removes Pentagon Whites Only) – It’s interesting that President Roosevelt did that, but then didn’t invite Jesse Owens to the White House after the 1936 Olympics. Maybe he changed his mind.
He was just upset that he couldn’t even walk, much less run.
RE: Fact #44 (Kremlinologists Reading Red Square Lineups) – Yeah, this is totally a thing in America too. Like during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, you can totally see who’s got the most clout based on where they show up. Snoopy’s always number one, of course, but there are always a few others right there with him, basically sitting next to the king.