Denver International Airport, also known as DIA or DEN by your local travel agent, it home to some of the strangest art in the country. Not only that, none of it is cohesive, and it’s main claim to fame killed its maker. If this isn’t the setting for a Greek Tragedy, we don’t know what is.
Laura and Rebecca discuss the myths and legends that surround the Airport, inside and out, and how you too can have fun with conspiracy theories!
Music by AudioNauti // Beginning Sound clip from Denver7News – 2018 // Livelihood Coop Productions
Resources:
- New York Times:
- Denver7 News:
- 9News:
TRANSCRIPT:
DEN – s2.e2
Rebecca: [00:00:00] Okay. Dark wondering season two, episode two. What are we talking about today, Laura?
Laura: Well, Rebecca, we are gonna talk about the Denver International Airport.
Rebecca: Yes. D E N If you care about , what letters are attached to which airport,
Laura: not as locals have called it for probably what decades. As DIA.
Rebecca: Dia, yeah. So it was opened in [00:01:00] 1995, which I was a child. I don’t really remember much of the curfuffle around an opening other than it’s always been referred to by people that have lived in Colorado for a long time as the quote new airport. Mm-hmm. Because prior to that, it was located in Stapleton. Which is a lot closer to Denver, and it was a much smaller airport.
And then that airport is closed and no longer does anything other than, it’s close to a large housing development in the Denver metro area.
Laura: Is it even still a functioning airport?
Rebecca: Nope. As far as I know. Yeah. And that area is no longer called Stapleton because the person of Stapleton was a racist asshole, so they renamed it.
I don’t remember the new name, but I, I applaud them for the renaming efforts.
Laura: Probably the biggest thing that people think of when somebody says Denver International Airport is that big blue anatomically correct horse that stands right out the front there as [00:02:00] you drive into the terminals.
Rebecca: Is that the first thing you think of?
Laura: Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah. Okay. Because you’re not from Colorado originally.
Laura: No, I’m not. But any, anytime. So before I moved to Colorado, like Denver was still just what we flew out
Rebecca: .Right. That’s really the airport for wyoming too.
Laura: Yeah. Like if you have to go anywhere that’s not like the next town over.
You know and you’re not gonna take like your little local
Rebecca: right. Puddle dumper.
Laura: Yeah.
You would fly out of Denver. Yeah. So, I remember we would always, like, we lived like three hours from the airport when I was growing up. So like the, like I think we maybe flew as a family. Once. I remember making the, the long three hour drive to get to the airports and I flew more than that, just myself. Cuz I would go different places. But [00:03:00] now I live down here and we’re like an hour from the airport, which. I’m like, this is so convenient.
Rebecca: It’s so easy. We were about two, two and a half hours from the airport growing up. I didn’t actually ever fly anywhere until I was 17 though. So, like I never, I don’t have any memories of going to Denver International Airport as a kid. Like I have no experience flying before 9-11, any of that. I remember one time my dad flew into the Colorado Springs airport, which was closer to us.
And I remember going to the gate to meet him and watching the planes through the big windows. That’s it. I was probably five or six years old. So Denver International Airport to me. Is like Blucifer obviously exists, which is the blue horse, also known technically as the blue Mustang. By the artist.
But Denver International airport always to me was the tent like roof, which is popular. And it’s meant to evoke an idea of the mountains, but it’s made out of like basically a super heavy duty canvas ?To prevent the snow and ice and everything. Mm-hmm. From accumulating on it. So it’s just kind of a cool [00:04:00] concept like compared to other airports is to have something like that.
I think though there has been times where we’ve had too much snow and it’s ripped in places, I don’t think anyone’s been hurt. But it’s an interesting location, so that always fascinated me more. And then, As I’ve grown up and traveled and talked to people about where I’m from, then we started getting the conspiracy theories around what Denver International Airport is and what it means in the cultural zeitgeist.
Laura: Yeah, I will say that thinking about Denver International Airport, it’s only as an adult that I have connected Blucifer with the airport because it didn’t actually get installed until 2008..
It was just this huge airport. And because I had so little like travel experience, I thought all airports were supposed to be that big. Yeah. [00:05:00] And they’re not. Denver International Airport is actually the largest airport in the United States, cuz I think it’s
Rebecca: Oh wow.
Laura: Like the property is, I think it’s like 54 square miles.
The, the airport itself is located 24 miles outside of Denver proper. Right. So it’s it’s, they definitely made a big change when they, they left the Stapleton airport. Right. Which was like basically in downtown. Yeah. And took it all the way out there . People were complaining about the noise.
Rebecca: Yeah, that makes sense.
Laura: As Denver got bigger, they were trying to build more, more high rises, and people are like, yeah, I don’t wanna live right next to the airport with all the planes flying in. So like there were a ton of factors that that went into moving that airport.
Rebecca: So much further away. Yeah. Well, and what I think is interesting too, cuz around 2008 is when I started flying and again, I didn’t notice Blucifer for a long time until more people started talking about it and it was like, oh yeah, there is that weird ass horse [00:06:00] statue.
Like you said, Denver International Airport is in the middle of fucking nowhere basically. And now there is a tram system that you can take to get into the heart of downtown Denver, but for a long time it was like bus, shuttles, and that sort of thing. It wasn’t the most convenient.
The idea of moving it further away from housing developments and stuff is also super interesting because now more and more ‘burbs are going up around the airport. Because we’ve had such a huge population boom in the last 10, 15 years. . I mean, a lot of people joke it’s halfway to Kansas and when you look at the map of how far out it is from the city center, you’re like, yeah, it’s pretty out there.
Which I think also adds to the whole idea of like, maybe there’s something more suspicious going on here because it’s away from the city and it’s a newer build.
So it was started 30 some years ago and finished in 1995. So it’s almost on its 30th anniversary of being finished.
There’s also, and we’ll get into this a little bit more, but there’s arsenal, national wildlife Refuge that’s near the airport as well. Mm-hmm. And that’s a location where they have like bison and deer and [00:07:00] other animals running freely. Oh. On what used to be a location for chemical and military testing.
and fun fact, a lot of the United States has high levels of radon in the dirt. So like my house, we have a radon mitigation system in our basement that is under the ground.
Laura: We have one too. We actually had to have one installed before we moved in. Yep. And I was like, oh. That sounds not great.
Rebecca: It’s great.
Laura: What are we doing to mitigate this? Exactly. Like I need to actually look up the science and be like, what is this?
Rebecca: Yeah. So I think the idea is that it just, it removes the particles that could be hazardous. Through its scientific slash magical functions. I don’t really know.
That’s, it looks like it’s like a lot of tubes and plastic and then it just does the job, apparently
Laura: witchcraft.
Rebecca: So if someone wants to tell us how radon mitigation systems work, we could probably
use a lesson.
Laura: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Also, [00:08:00] as you were saying, all of that, of course, my. Stupid brain was like, huh, I wonder what a radiated buffalo would do.
Rebecca: I’ve thought about this too, like, cuz these animals are running around on what is kind of toxic land, but like, so like you can’t build houses there. And people can’t live there and function, but like we’re, we just have all these animals. So, are they testing the animals to see if anything weird happens?
I don’t think it’s as alarming as it sounds like as far as the actual amount of risk or else I think we’d be dealing with a lot of different circumstances, but who the fuck actually knows? But this is all, this all adds. To sort of the mystique and confusion and conspiracy around the Denver International Airport.
Laura: There was the New York Times article that came out earlier, this [00:09:00] spring.
Rebecca: Yeah, there’s been two that came out recently, I feel like it comes in waves with these things. Mm-hmm. Like people would be super interested in something Colorado, there are a bunch of articles and news stories will pop up about it and then like people lose interest and move on to something else.
For whatever reason Denver International Airport is in view, which led us to say, you know, like we should do a piece on this. Cuz I think people are interested. We’ve both obviously been through the airport quite a bit. Yes. And we can definitely share kind of our insight and experiences.
Laura: Blucifer, as we’ve already mentioned, was installed at the in Denver International Airport in February of 2008, and the artist responsible for that very unique, unique installation was, Luis.
Rebecca: Jimenez
Laura: thank you. See Rebecca knows how to say words. This, this gentleman he, so he worked [00:10:00] on this piece for at least a while. I think it was at least a couple of years. But here’s the kicker. He didn’t finish it. He was killed by it instead.
So he died. After being crushed by a piece of the statue that fell on him in 2006, like it fell and like severed an artery.
Rebecca: Yeah. And, and basically, so he bled to death as a result of a piece of this statue falling on his leg, which I think like the statue is creepy enough. You’re also like, why would we commission a piece of art like that? And then the fact that it then killed its maker, Was then finished and then installed two years later. So it’s, for those of you that don’t know, it is a giant blue Mustang, Laura mentioned anatomically, correct
yes. So stallion, meaning nobody chopped off its balls. And it is bright [00:11:00] blue veiny, Not just the anatomy.
Laura: It’s got veins running up like, like it’s it’s sides. Yeah. Like it’s ribs kind.
Rebecca: I mean, it’s, and it’s very intense, like, I don’t wanna call it ugly, but it’s, it’s very intense and kind of scary. And then to add to how creepy it is, it has red eyes that also glow at night. So the statues lit up and then it has glowing red eyes. And why we picked a blue Mustang, I don’t know. I’m sure some of it has to do with the Broncos being our football team and I don’t, I don’t wanna like bash on him and it, cuz I think his art is really interesting, like looking up other pieces he’s done. He very much reminds me of Diego Rivera and kind of like intense colors and then unique proportions and like his art is very cool, but like this piece in particular is so much more intense and unhinged than [00:12:00] anything else I think he ever made. Would you agree to that? Did you look up his art?
Laura: I, I didn’t get a chance to look up his art, but all I can think of is like when somebody was commissioning him to make this central piece of art that everybody coming to the airport is going to see. They were like, we would think of a blue Mustang would be really great. You know, the blue of the mountains and the Mustang, and you know, Denver’s really proud and strong,
Rebecca: like Cowboy past and you know, like, and, and horses have a lot of symbolism for a lot of different cultures and people. And we’re not the only airport to have horse art at it, you know?
Laura: Yeah. I can just picture the artist being like, okay, blue Horse. But make it fucked up and it is an in incredible piece. It is a 32 foot tall 9,000 pound fiberglass sculpture.
Rebecca: [00:13:00] I think that’s the other thing too, is like, it’s not small, it’s 32 feet tall. That is like the size of a house. Like that’s a multi story story house. So it’s, it’s very wild. And this is how you get an introduction to the airport or as you’re leaving. So say you’ve just landed in Denver for the first time ever. And this is what you see hi to when departing the airport.
Laura: Blucifer is in a, a league of his own.
Rebecca: I think he’s just like the perfect symbol for everything we’re about to talk about.
Laura: Yeah. So Blucifer is, I mean, he’s, he’s not just, you know, this weird, freaky maybe intimidating figure when you come to Denver. There, there are actually a lot of people that have been, have sworn that, you know, the horse is meant to be demonic.
There have been rumors that the eyes of the horse didn’t start glowing red until after it killed its artist, which is not true.
Rebecca: That doesn’t make any sense.
Laura: Yeah, well see. That’s conspiracy [00:14:00] theories though. Like people just say stuff and it doesn’t have to make sense.
Rebecca: It glowed red after the person was dead after it was installed two years later.
Laura: Yes.
Rebecca: It’s definitely something I share with out-of-towners. I’m like, watch out Blucifer, like, as a good joke.
So that’s kind of the first thing that you see.
Now Denver International is under construction right now and has been for a couple of years. I think it started right before the pandemic. It is now currently what the. Fourth busiest airport in the entire world. Like it’s the only other one in the states that’s busier is Charlotte on the east coast and it’s so busy for several reasons.
We’ve had a huge population boom in the mountain west. Mm-hmm. Specifically in Colorado, but we’re also the only big airport. Like there are airports, don’t get me wrong, but as far as really big airport servicing a lot, and like, we’re servicing all of these states with really low populations. We have a ton of people utilizing us, [00:15:00] and if they’re not starting or ending in Denver, they’re using it as another gateway. Mm-hmm. So many airports feed into Denver, say you’re going to Santa Fe, you will likely have a layover in like Denver to then go on to Santa Fe.
Laura: Yeah. And there are a number of international airlines. That Oh . Fly into and out of Denver. And just use it as a central In the US. For their operations. .
Serviceability Was definitely planned Because Stapleton, part of the reason why that was struggling to begin with was because when it was built, Denver’s population was only like about 300,000. But as aviation was starting to grow demand went up.
Rebecca: Denver obviously opens in 1995. In this sort of continuation of expanding tourism and flying. I would say right away from my readings, people started having suspicions or telling stories about Denver International Airport.
How much was it over?
Laura: It was, so it [00:16:00] came, it, it was finished with construction 16 months late. And, $2 billion over budget,
Rebecca: which in 1995 was a much bigger deal than it is today.
$2
Laura: billion, like whatever, that’s nothing.
Rebecca: You know, that’s Jeff Bezos. Yeah. Like that’s chump change.
Laura: That’s just like his pocket change.
Rebecca: I think other things that made it unique is that it has kind of like a central check-in area and then you take a subway car over to the other concourses. So it has three concourse. Abc, taking the subway car was a newer thing, especially for anybody in the mountain west. We don’t have subways in any cities that I know about here. Like maybe on the west coast, if you’re lucky, but nothing here. So the idea of like doing an underground transportation to get between things I think was a lot for people. And because of that tunnel set up, because the tunnels were also set up kind of like they are at Disney World to move employees and move resources between [00:17:00] locations. Mm-hmm. People were like, oh, there’s definitely more going on here with these tunnels.
Laura: Dun dun dun.
Rebecca: So what are some of the conspiracies that you’ve heard about the tunnels?
Laura: Speaking of the tunnels, people were like you said, right away, they were totally suspicious. They broke ground on the airport in September of 1989. And then of course didn’t open till 95. So there was this extra time that was put in and they’re , well, where did this extra money come from? To, to cover this $2 billion extra charge. And why did it take so long? And what are these tunnels for? So people were thinking that those tunnels would lead to underground bunkers for the elite of the elite to ride out a nuclear
winter.
Rebecca: So it’s further away from the city of Denver, and then it’s pretty far away from NORAD. Which was a, how would you best describe Noad? It’s, it was an operational center for military [00:18:00] intelligence and I think nuclear weapons in Colorado Springs
Laura: Well, and aviation was specifically one of their things too. Right? So when you say, when we talk about NORAD, the first thing that pops into my brain is the NORAD reports of Santa’s progress I remember my parents big deal being like, oh, NORAD says, and I’d be like, oh,
Rebecca: where’s Santa? Where’s Santa Claus?
Okay, but on the other side of that, I grew up. Like in the mountain range that NORAD was in, in the boonies. And so when 9-11 happened, everyone was losing their shit, thinking NORAD was also gonna be under attack.
Laura: Oh God.
Rebecca: Now I’m not sure how you could fly a plane into a mountain military base. But people were losing their minds.
Laura: I mean, you can still fly a plane into a mountain, not that the mountain is gonna give a shit,
Rebecca: Not to downplay anything with 9-11. It’s so intense when you’re so close to so many different military entities. So you have NORAD, we have the Air Force base in Colorado Springs [00:19:00] as well. Mm-hmm. We have an army base in Colorado Springs. There’s an Air Force base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Mm-hmm. That’s not FAR away. We see them run drills over our house all the time here. Yeah. So Denver is kind of away from a lot of that.
There was an Air Force base in Denver as well. That was close to Stapleton. So now the airport’s way out and it has tunnels, so it must obviously be for the elite to hide. Would we have nuclear fallouts?
Laura: I mean, yes.
And I, I am still waiting for my ticket
Rebecca: if somebody listens to this, that’s from that team, like we would really like the invite asap. Yeah.
Laura: ‘K. Thanks.
Just a lot of people immediately thinking something government control related is going on. There’s a lot of talk about like, Fascism and totalitarian government stuff going on, which we’re, we’ll talk, we’ll touch on here in a little bit more, but
Rebecca: I think too, like the culture and the climate of things in the mid nineties, what was going on in the United States with [00:20:00] those kind of things mm-hmm.
Is important too because we were, it was around the time of the uni-bomber, it was around the time of Waco. It was around the time of that conflict in Oregon with that family. So like there was a lot of suspicion of government entities and power sources at this time. Mm-hmm.
Laura: I know too that there were people that well, and there still are people, I guess I shouldn’t talk about it like it’s a done deal. Like this is still current today.
Rebecca: Oh, for sure.
Laura: There are people that believe that The Denver airport has Illuminati connections and connections to
Rebecca: Deep State.
Laura: The Deep State. Oh my God.
Rebecca: Q-ANON is definitely in there. And it was like the OG qan from 1995.
Yeah. Don’t, you know? Yeah,
Laura: yeah. Totes.
Rebecca: Yeah. Don’t, you know? Yeah,
Laura: yeah. Totes.
Apparently according to some, the new world order that is going to come into power. They are seeking a totalitarian government you know, gonna Yeah. Subjugate [00:21:00] all of us,
Rebecca: swine
Laura: I honestly, I kind of think that any conspiracy you can come up with, somebody could tie it to Denver.
Rebecca: And I’ve heard a little bit of everything. Mm-hmm. So the tunnels are one thing, but then going back to the artwork, there’s been a lot of intriguing choices of artwork at this airport, and I don’t really know who gets to be in charge of picking artwork, but it’s kind of one of those things where like, let’s say you have a billionaire and they get this like McMansion, which if those are like the conglomerations of different styles and then they just like have all this extra money. They want to blow on art, and it’s kind of like they just decide to pick the most weird random things and then throw it all in their house. So like you’ve got a T-Rex on the front lawn, you’ve got a giant crocodile coming out of their back pool.
You’ve got some type of random Salvador dali-esque surrealism in the main foyer. Like there’s just a lot going on. And I feel like that’s kind of the Denver [00:22:00] airport. So for a long time they had these murals up that showed the idea of promoting peace and moving away from conflicts and abuse and power dynamics.
The murals were depicting an idealized future world, but they showed guys in a gas mask and with guns, just depicting kind of the horrors that different communities around the world deal with mm-hmm. Today. But of course that just fueled the idea of this being a place for nuclear fallout and this being a place where the Illuminati or the elites are going to hide. When there is nuclear fallout, and that’s what they’re depicting is some type of futuristic hellscape of nuclear war demise.
Laura: Or the, the planned takeovers.
Rebecca: And then of course, like they’re doing all this reconstruction and building stuff, so they’ve covered the murals to keep it safe, but people now are like, “no, they removed them on purpose. We’ve got onto them now they’re gonna hide it. We figured it out from their artwork.”
Laura: [00:23:00] Well, and I think the thing that makes me giggle about it too the people that are running the airport have leaned into the conspiracy theories when they’ve started putting up, you know, like the, the construction stuff, and they’ve got these, basically canvases to cover up the, the construction sites.
Yeah. Make it a little, you know, less. Constructiony.
So on these covers, Are different ads from the airport, talking about, ” what are we building?”
Rebecca: We’ll link to this in the show notes
Laura: illuminati Underground Headquarters,
Rebecca: Lizard, people live here.
Laura: That’s, that’s the one.
Rebecca: What was the, the one that made me laugh too? Gosh, like lizard people is obviously like, what are you smoking? But then I read another thing about them possibly breeding gargoyles.
As if gargoyles are real
Laura: I wanna meet the people who run this airport. Because they’re like, “yeah, you know what?
You know what this airport doesn’t have that it needs, that’s gonna make everybody feel so [00:24:00] much more comfortable. An animatronic gargoyle. “
Rebecca: And they have two.
Laura: They have two.
Rebecca: Like I love gargoyles. I think they’re neat, but obviously again, it’s the wealthy person just buying random art. You have gargoyles and then you have like Stone Globe. Things that somebody recently was saying that it’s proof of a flat Earth. Been in there almost since they opened, which is hilarious to me.
I saw another one because they have this almost, it looks like Mayan or Aztec architecture piece in one area. Mm-hmm. People are like, “this was an ancient civilization that they just. Built an airport over.” And I think to me, what’s funny is like there are actual ancient ruins in Colorado. Mm-hmm.
in the Four Corners area and other places around the mountain west you can go see of Native peoples. But nobody’s talking about that.
Laura: Well, of course not. That’s not as exciting as thinking that the Illuminati built an airport on an ancient burial grounds,
Rebecca: ‘ Cuz that’s how it would work.
Laura: And the lizard people in the [00:25:00] tunnels are breeding genetically modified hybrid people.
Called the quote unquote Babylonian Brotherhood, Obama’s
Rebecca: Babylonian Brotherhood? But what. But why Babylon.
Laura: I did not look further because it said Obama and Queen Elizabeth the second Oh. Of both part of that and so yeah, , I a hundred percent believe it.
I’ve got my foil hat,
Rebecca: There’s a time capsule that has like a free mason logo on it, which obviously means that like you had some people doing stone and mason work, which is still an important part of society and building, but people indicate that that’s another connection to the Illuminati and that that’s something else that’s going on.
Apparently there’s this artwork that’s supposedly been floating around, that was at the airport in 1994, showing people wearing masks over their face in different nationalities. Like their flags as masks. Snopes broke [00:26:00] it down as it’s mis-captioned the art was never at. Denver International airport is not a prediction of anything, but so, but it was just like one of those things that popped up in 2020 of like, people are definitely planning on this and they’re telling the future. , there’s all kinds of like forbidden knowledge supposedly.
And then why did they cover up the murals and hide them and you know, it’s just, It’s just entertaining at some level, but we know for a fact that like some of these conspiracy theories can turn into something dangerous.
So I think like it’s fun on some little laugh about Denver International Airport being so weird, but yeah. You also know that there’s a little bit of a danger side of like, who’s gonna take it a weird way? Who’s gonna maybe be the one to push it that much further?
Laura: Who’s gonna be the one to like crash into Blucifer to see if the Illuminati is hiding inside of it? Or you know, maybe when the new [00:27:00] world order takes over, Blucifer, red eyes reveal themselves to be lasers and they just like laser planes out of the sky. Pew. Pew.
Rebecca: That’s exactly it. I’m just always confused. When you have these situations, I think it’s fun to tell these stories. There’s obviously a part of the human brain that loves these kind of weird stories and ideas around things, but , where is that line between, this is fun and for shits and giggles, and then this is turning something dangerous.
Laura: So one, one thing I always kind of think about when it comes to, you know, conspiracy theorists and, you know, people who are like, just totally convinced that the world is not what it seems. I actually kind of maybe I, I empathize with them a little bit. So like, one of the, the millions of things that I try to do in [00:28:00] my almost non-existent downtime, is I write.
And what I see in a lot of like conspiracy theories and then, you know, the people who follow the conspiracy theories, this is just my opinion, I’m not a psychologist, but I feel like those people are bored with the way that life is.
Stories and movies and TV have for decades told us “oh hey, like there’s just the. You know, there are so many exciting things that are happening. They’re just not happening to you. And I feel like people who follow conspiracy theories, they so desperately want to be the main character in something that turns into, an adventure.
I don’t wanna trivialize this in any way, shape, or form. But I really do think that that’s a big part of it. During the, the four years of He who shall not be named as president. Stupid Voldemort. [00:29:00] I had a lot of family members that were just absolutely convinced of one thing after another. Yeah. And when it, when we came down to the election year in 2020, there were so many conspiracies flying.
Rebecca: And they feel like they have all of this evidence to back it up. And I think too, like the isolation that we sawOver the covid pandemic, where people are stuck in their bubbles and stuck just constantly consuming media from a few select outfits or their people that they feel like they trust. You’re not really challenged very much if you’re stuck in your bubble and your ideas aren’t looked upon as negative or problematic if you’re with the same people time and time again. And I think that isolation and that loneliness and the loss of jobs, and the loss of livelihoods and the loss of things that we all love doing, I think that can really drive people to feel like, well, no, this can’t be real.
This. This has to be fake. And like you said, sort of this hero dynamic, especially I think with the [00:30:00] Q-Anon on stuff is like, well we’ve been, what is it, blue pilled or whatever, we’re awake. Mm-hmm. We’re, we know what’s actually going on. And I, I can see the appeal of that because it’s a much simpler explanation of the things that happen in life, and it’s a much easier thing to acknowledge versus like actually looking at the very convoluted and complicated things that we deal with in our world.
Laura: It’s, it’s a coping mechanism I kind of feel like it’s in the same vein as, you know, centuries ago people explaining nature and science biology. As magic or witchcraft? Ah, witchcraft,
Rebecca: that child died and that that was the one midwife that touched them or helped them. It must be their fault must have cursed that child. You can’t fathom that God or somebody, something would be so cruel as to like kill your child or to cause these problems. So it’s much easier to blame something else. I think with the [00:31:00] pandemic, it’s hard to believe that a disease could be as lethal or painful. Mm-hmm. Or cause as much problems as it can and cause the world to shut down. So it’s much easier to believe that it was all made up. And that it was made up to do something else. Like it’s a, it’s much easier to wrap your head around this is all conspiracy and it’s not real, versus this is very real and this is a very real threat and it’s very scary for a lot of people.
Laura: This was, you know, it sucked, but it was not unprecedented,
Rebecca: right? I mean, this happens every century or so, I think the harder part too is to acknowledge that our system is not set up to deal with a lot of these kind of things, and that’s where we start to fail. People. Like I think we fared a lot better than other countries might have, but we also can, could really see the bones and the sort of degradation of our social systems to help people in a dire time of need, whether it was with medicine, whether it was with testing, whether it was having time off work to [00:32:00] not expose other people or to just have systems in place that if you do have to go to work at home, what are you gonna do?
I think it, it just ripped the bandaid off or ripped the skin off of Our system. And like, now you’re just exposed and there’s all of these sort of raw nerves that haven’t been dealt with.
Denver International Airport, we’ve gone from a funny episode to like, this gets pretty dark.
Laura: . Still kind of just blows my mind about the whole thing is that like people are still actively believing that there’s things going on behind the scenes, we’ve been through, you know, the pandemic and all this other stuff that has happened and People [00:33:00] are still just like “lizard people:. I don’t think it’s ever gonna go away. Because in a way it’s probably too much fun to keep imagining what exactly is going on. And like I said, the airports, the people who are running the airport staff and everything, they’re leaning into it.
Rebecca: I think there’s some fun in leaning into it and I think like Denver as a whole is just kind of a unique if not just bizarre community, I think Denver is just this weird mix of. Cultures and identities. You have the wild west elements, then you have Latinx elements, then you have, you know, kind of yuppy elements, and then you have sort of hipster elements and like they just kind of all clash. We have Meow Wolf now, which is their largest art installation. There’s no real storyline. It’s just kind of there, you know, and it’s fantastic.
I think the art is amazing and it’s something to experience for sure, but it’s
Laura: it’s a space station, Becca. It’s an internation
Rebecca: but it’s not a set, like this is exactly it. [00:34:00] It’s a choose your own adventure. It’s weird.
Laura: It’s fun.
Rebecca: You know, we have weird art, we have weird murals.
Like Colorado is kind of a weird place. We have this amazing natural beauty, but then we have kind of the grunge of cities, and then we also have a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds, all competing for attention and space, and it makes a very. Weird mix.
Laura: Yeah. We also have probably have just a, a lot of artists getting really, really high.
Rebecca: Also, also a lot of marijuana has been here forever, Well before it was legalized.
One other thing I read about when I was researching was people were talking about hearing Native American music at night, as if they being haunted. Let me just tell you, as somebody that has flown in internationally to Denver . When you were coming from the international, Concourse. You have to walk forever to go through customs. Yeah. When you’re going through that, there are big art installations of Native American peoples beautiful photographs and Native American music.
It is not a [00:35:00] haunting, it is not meant to be. It’s meant to pay homage to the first nations that were here, and I actually think it’s really beautiful. It’s one of my favorite things about coming home to Colorado
Laura: . That isn’t to say that Denver doesn’t deserve to be haunted.
Rebecca: We haven’t even talked about Cheeseman Park, which was. An old cemetery that they just built a park. It’s one of my favorite parks in the Denver metro area.
Laura: Of course it’s,
Rebecca: but it’s also like there’s a lot of dead people underneath your feet and you know, it’s also a casual place to like take family pictures and have a picnic and walk your dog and you’re just walking on dead people.
Laura: Neat.
Rebecca: That’s us touching on Denver International Airport and all of its fucking weirdness. I hope you’ve enjoyed this ride with us. If you are coming to Denver and you would like to share your experience going through the airport and seeing these art installations and whatever else, please tag us and let us know what you think.
We’d love to do a [00:36:00] follow up episode of additional Stories.
Laura: If you’ve heard of any conspiracy theories that we didn’t touch on in this episode, leave a comment on our Instagram or our Twitter, or whatever the hell else we’ve got. We have a TikTok. We talked about that last time, but I keep forgetting. Yeah. And being surprised by the fact that we have a TikTok.
Rebecca: We’re 30 somethings. Yeah. And we have a ticky talk.
Yep. So thank you for. Listening and if you want to support us, we do have a merch store.
So you can go to our website and
shout out to Peter for being our first order. Peter ordered from us. He did. Your wonderful brother-in-law.
Laura: He don’t tell me up.
Rebecca: He ordered some stickers.
Laura: Peter, I love you. Thank you. [00:37:00]
Dark Wandering 