corn snake hatchling

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It was April 13th, 1984, when the Indian Armed Forces launched a military campaign on one of the most unlikely battlefields on earth: a glacier towering 6,500 meters above sea level. Their mission was to take full control of the area, a remote and uninhabited stretch of the disputed territory known as the Karakoram range of the Himalayas that straddled the India/Pakistan border. The border in question was established in 1949 in the aftermath of Partition. It was conceived in the Karachi Agreement, which itself ended the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, an armed conflict between the two newly independent nations for territory in the shared and highly disputed Kashmir region.

It was one of the strangest battles of WW2 in which a most unlikely team of soldiers came together in one of the most heroic stories of the war.
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Early in the afternoon on May 3, 1945, a Yugoslavian prisoner named Zvonimir Čučković left the gates of Austria’s Itter Castle, the looming fortress on a hill where he was being held by SS guards and bicycled into the thick forests beyond. He was supposed to be running an errand for the prison’s commander, Sebastian Wimmer - a not infrequent occurrence, as Čučković had earned the commander’s trust as a maintenance man and electrician who had helped convert the castle into a German prison.

But Čučković had an ulterior motive that afternoon. He was carrying a contraband note written by English-speaking prisoners inside. He had agreed to take the note out of prison and present it to the first group of American soldiers he encountered. And so, instead of running the errand and returning to the castle as he usually did, he continued riding.

Čučković considered making the short ride west to Wörgl, a small city close to the German/Austrian border. But the town was still densely occupied by German troops, and so instead he made the much longer trip to Innsbruck, riding over 40 miles along the Inn River valley. He reached the city that evening, where he succeeded in tracking down a group of Americans - the 409th Infantry Regiment of the American 103rd Infantry Division - and passed on his note. The unit did not have the authorization to move forward with a rescue attempt themselves, but they promised Čučković a definitive answer from their headquarters by the next morning.

What followed is one of the more extraordinary and unlikely stories of World War II; the story of an American Army commander working together with his enemy - an SS captain and a Wehrmacht major - to lead a mixed company of American and German troops to an Austrian castle and rescue a group of French political prisoners. What is now known as, the Battle for Castle Itter.

The desert can hold many secrets. The desert near Los Alamos in New Mexico just after World War 2 held perhaps the biggest secret of them all. Learn more about the Most Dangerous Science Experiment in the World with another Dark Docs presented by Dark5.

May 21st, 1946. A top-secret laboratory. A group of scientists look on as one of their colleagues, a Canadian named Louis Slotin, conducts a demonstration. Slotin hovers over a strange object, which sits on display on a small table in front of the crowd of onlookers. The object looks like a metal sphere, nested inside a more substantial metal hemisphere like an egg in a nest. But this metal device contains a terrifying potential. Why? Because it is nothing less than the exposed core of a nuclear bomb, and the egg at the center is an orb of pure plutonium. Imagine being in that room. You probably would have heard a pin drop, such was the intense atmosphere. Slotin’s demonstration was a risky one. The operation he was performing had an ominous nickname among the group – they dubbed it [quote] “tickling the dragon’s tail.”

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It was near the end of World War II, and the Germans were getting desperate to turn the war back in their favor. This included a plethora of suggested scientific and engineering projects, many of them quite bizarre, in what they termed Wunderwaffen, or 'wonder weapons.'

There was an almost megalomaniacal tendency by the German leadership in their belief that science could compensate for Germany's fast-deteriorating position fighting the combined might of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

One idea proposed in 1942 by Hermann Göring, head of the air force and one of the most senior members of the ruling elite. Göring had made a call for light bomber designs capable of meeting what he called the "3×1000" requirement; namely that the craft be able to carry 1,000 kilograms (that is, 2,200 pounds) of bombs a distance of 1,000 kilometers (or 620 miles) with a speed of 1,000 kilometers per hour, equivalent to 620 miles per hour.

Göring had proclaimed: "I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 4.5-tonne munition load. I would be extremely happy to possess such a bomber, which would at last stuff the mouth of arrogance across the sea."

Pictured: A photo of First Lightning, the first ever Soviet atomic bomb test. The United States assigned it the code-name Joe-1, in reference to Joseph Stalin. It was detonated on 29 August 1949 at 7:00 a.m., at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR, after top-secret research and development as part of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

It was in 1939 that Winston Churchill famously defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The Soviet Union’s atom bomb project could certainly be considered a riddle, a mystery, and an enigma, such was its secrecy at the time.

Russia had been conducting independent research into radioactive elements as early as 1910, long before it even became the Soviet Union or USSR. By the 1930s Russian scientists had made remarkable efforts towards the advancement of physics research, even with setbacks such as the 1917 October Revolution and civil war of 1922.

Scientists tend to be a sharing community. That’s why Russian physicist, Georgy Flyorov, became suspicious in 1942 that the Allied powers were secretly developing an atomic super-weapon when his literature search showed that no one in the West was writing on nuclear fission. And so he wrote an urgent letter to Joseph Stalin pleading with him to start a Soviet atomic program.

Notable too is a report dated February 28th, 1945, and written for Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the NKVD, the country’s dreaded secret police. The report was titled “Progress of the Atomic Bomb Abroad” and stated that it was expected the United States would produce an atom bomb by July of that year.

How did the U.S. steal a sunken nuclear submarine? Right out from under the nose of the Soviet Union... Subscribe now: http://bit.ly/DarkDocs

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The Hughes Mining Barge, or HMB-1, is a submersible barge about 99 m (324 ft) long, 32 m (106 ft) wide, and more than 27 m (90 ft) tall. The HMB-1 was originally developed as part of Project Azorian (more widely, but erroneously, known as "Project Jennifer"), the top-secret effort mounted by the Central Intelligence Agency to salvage the remains of the Soviet submarine K-129 from the ocean floor.

The HMB-1 was designed to allow the device that would be used to grasp and lift the submarine to be constructed inside the barge and out of sight, and to be installed in the Glomar Explorer in secrecy. This was done by towing the HMB-1, with the capture device inside, to a location near Catalina Island (off the coast of California), and then submerging it onto stabilizing piers that had been installed on the seafloor. The Glomar Explorer was then maneuvered over the HMB-1, the retractable roof was opened, and the capture device lifted into the massive "moon pool" of the ship, all within clear sight of people on the beach

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DarkDocs is a new narrated documentary video from Dark5 taking an in-depth look at at some of the most mysterious stories on Earth. This week: Project Azorian, the Glomar Explorer, and the mysterious CIA to recover the lost Soviet submarine, K-129.

It’s March 1968. An unexplained event causes a Soviet Golf-II submarine known as the K-129 to sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean while enroute to its patrol station off the coast of Hawaii.

Publicly, no one in the world knew what happened, where the submarine was, or what secrets might be hidden on board. Behind the scenes, however, reporters caught wind of a classified US government operation to pry the wreckage from the floor with a giant claw and uncover whatever secret technology might be hidden within. The mission was codenamed Project Azorian, and it was launched from a covert ship named the Glomar Explorer.

Pressed for comment on the operation, a US government spokesman flatly replied, [quote] “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed…"

During the Cold War arms race, both the US and USSR were testing top-secret, cutting-edge technologies that seemed beyond belief to deliver nuclear warheads effectively to the other side. The goal was to strike as quickly, quietly, and as devastatingly as possible. To accomplish this, in 1964 the Soviets began developing an audacious plan that turned their focus to a most unlikely place. While US attention was trained upwards towards aerial superiority, the USSR would instead target the ground beneath their feet. Underground, in fact… with a brand-new experimental vehicle nicknamed the "Battle Mole."

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As images and footage of actual events are not always available, Dark Docs sometimes utilizes similar historical images and footage for dramatic effect. All content on Dark Docs is researched, produced, and presented in historical context for educational purposes.

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As Cold War tensions grew in the 1950s, the U.S. relied upon the U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance spy planes and reconnaissance balloons from its Genetrix Program. But these tools, unable to surveil some of the darkest and farthest reaches deep within the USSR, did not provide enough aerial coverage to accurately determine Soviet military operations, movements, and capabilities.

Instead, the US was forced to reach even higher with its reconnaissance missions using the “Keyhole” series of satellites. Unlike modern digital spy satellites, the KH-series relied on the use of physical film that had to be secretly jettisoned and returned to Earth. To keep the film out of enemy hands, each KH satellite utilized a simple but effective trick. When their missions were complete, the KH satellites dumped their top-secret film into a reentry capsule and dropped it back to Earth. If the fiery descent went to plan, the capsule would jettison its heat shield and a parachute would deploy. All that would be left was for an airplane to hook it in mid-air some 60,000 feet above the ground...