Nuclear Missile Down | The Cover-Up America Tried to Bury

At 2:40 AM on July 11, 1970, a United States Air Force missile, 50 feet tall, weighing 16,000 pounds, and carrying radioactive cobalt, launched from Green River, Utah. Its target was a test range in New Mexico, 600 miles away. However, the missile never reached its intended destination. Radar crews watched as it climbed, turned south, and disappeared over the horizon. It took three weeks to locate the rogue missile, which had crashed in a remote patch of Mexico. This area, known to locals for its strange occurrences, is where radios die, compasses spin wildly, and peculiar visitors wander the desert. It is called the Zone of Silence.

A Desert Where Radios Go Silent

The Zone of Silence is located in the Bolsón de Mapimí, a vast desert basin where the Mexican states of Durango, Chihuahua, and Coahuila converge. Summers here are brutal, with temperatures soaring to 113 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. It's a desolate landscape with almost no water and very few people. In 1966, Mexico's national oil company, Pemex, planned to run a pipeline through this desert. Harry de la Peña, the engineer leading the survey, encountered an inexplicable problem: his radios stopped working. Initially, he suspected faulty equipment, but after trying different radios and frequencies, nothing worked. He discovered that moving a few hundred feet would restore communication, but returning to the original spot would silence the radios again. Even more baffling, the dead spots moved, blocking radios in the morning but not in the afternoon. De la Peña named this area "La Zona del Silencio," the Zone of Silence. Despite repeated visits and bringing in scientists, he couldn't find a consistent pattern to the anomaly.