Operation Channel Fireball & Operation Fantasia

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, the podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet and that's how it works now.

I'm Eli Bosnik and I'll be the hostess with the mostest this evening, but I'll need some beats with the leads.

First up, two men who did the brain damage to themselves before the enemy could get to them, Noah and Tom.

Yeah, yeah, they're just gonna get hit me with the truth serum and I'll be like, oh, it's quicker if you snorted if you powder it up.

Yeah, jokes on you, Eli.

The enemy was always me.

That's true.

That's true.

And also joining us tonight, two men who you could never brainwash because they refused to bathe.

Heath and Cecil.

Oh, guys.

Listen, that's true most of the time for me, but you just got lucky.

I do bathe when I see people.

Yeah, and I just roll in dust like a big chinchilla.

I can see that.

I can see that.

Before we begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons.

If you're not paying for this podcast on patreon.com, you've resisted the siren song of paying us for a free thing long enough.

Now it's time for your financial will to be broken.

If you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around to the end of the show.

And with that out of the way, tell us, Heath, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event will we be talking about today?

We're going to be talking about two of the most ridiculous military psyops in history.

All right.

Well, let's start with the basics.

What is a psyop?

PSYOP is short for psychological operation, and it's a tactic aimed at influencing the enemy's state of mind to gain the advantage.

In the art of war, it says, the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

That book, it's a textbook for MBA programs written by the Chinese business school professor Sun Tzu in the 6th century BCE.

So most of modern corporate culture in America is a giant psyop.

I think...

Tom can back me up on that.

But today, we're going to focus on the military version.

insane lies that would fuck with the enemy.

And just in these two stories alone, that includes faking the invention of technology that doesn't actually exist, simulating fantasy characters, and of course, sharks.

Keith, I hate to argue with you so early in the episode, but I think sharks do in fact exist.

Okay.

All right.

But if the sharks are dressed up like goblins and hobbits and shit, this is my favorite episode ever.

That's true.

U.S.

Army Prank War and Sharks Division.

How am I directly calling?

I wish we had that.

So

we're going to be talking about two PSYOPs, one that was run by British intelligence and the other by American intelligence.

And the contrast is stark in terms of having a grasp on reality between those two intelligences.

I'll start with the project by British intelligence.

I couldn't find an official name for the plan, so I'm going to call it Operation Channel Fireball for the MTG people.

Fireball!

In Operation Channel Fireball, the British ran a multi-year deception campaign that tricked Nazi Germany into believing an invasion of England through the English Channel would end with all the Nazi troops getting lit on fire before they even reached the shore.

Channel Fireball was two spells in Magic the Gathering, where you would use them in conjunction to strip your own life force just to beat the other guy.

Like Joe Biden did in 2020.

All right, when I saw MTG, I thought this was a Jewish space laser reference.

So Operation Channel Fireball took shape in the summer of 1940 when the Nazis had already occupied France.

Invading England was the next logical step, and it was only 21 miles across the channel from northern France.

So the German forces were putting together landing barges to carry loads of troops for an amphibious assault.

And England was in really bad shape at this point in terms of a defending force.

They were so low on weapons that British soldiers were being issued rifles from the mid-1800s to obtain from local zookeepers.

Ignore the panda blood.

They were too quick for Steve anyways.

Yeah, I want an episode now about what those old-timey zookeepers were doing with muskets.

You know, Noah, after Heath's episode about electrocuting the elephants, I'm not sure we want that.

No, you're right.

You're right.

Well, they weren't electrocuting the elephants with muskets.

That's cool.

So the Nazis didn't know exactly how bad it was for England in terms of supplies, but they had some idea, and they were definitely getting ready to attack.

The Germans were calling it Operation Sea Lion, and it was planned for September of 1940.

So England had to come up with something.

And they decided to stop a potential invasion by flooding the English channel with oil and lighting the whole thing on fire.

What?

Jesus Christ.

Or at least pretending they could do that and making Germany believe it was true.

These insufferable British, we spent so much time learning to fold our boats from paper.

Many of you were invading Cleveland, but I don't know.

So here's how England decided to pull off.

the deception.

Thanks to Shell and BP, one of the only supplies the British had in bulk bulk was oil.

So they started by building giant oil pipes that stretched out into the channel, and they set up public demonstrations of lighting the channel on fire.

They made a big show of the whole thing and invited journalists to watch.

Here's the description of one such demo from the head of the Petroleum Warfare Department in a book called Operation Sea Lion by Peter Fleming.

Quote, 10 pipes were rigged from the top of a cliff down.

Tanker wagons delivered oil at the rate of about 12 tons an hour.

Within a few seconds of the pumps being started, a wall of flame of such intensity raged up from the sea surface that it was impossible to remain on the edge of the cliff, and the sea itself began to boil.

Yeah, they turn to the folks at BP and they say, Okay, now turn it off.

And they're like, Turn it.

What?

Ah, yes, Operation Oceanic Trogdor the Berninade.

I do remember.

So the demos were relatively successful in creating big, frightening spectacles, but it wasn't going to work as an actual defense plant.

The oil was spreading too.

Turns out.

The oil was spreading too slowly to fill up the entire English channel.

Because obviously, also,

as pointed out by several British commanders, when you build giant tubes of explodey liquid, that's a great target for an airstrike that would blow up your entire coastline, including any nearby defense forces that you might have.

And if that happened, the Nazis could just wait for the fires to go out and then start the invasion.

So England decided to just pretend they had set the entire channel on fire technology.

with a big disinformation campaign that would scare the Germans into staying away.

So the German plan to invade England across the channel was already kind of risky, and the possibility of getting all their boats engulfed in a sea of fire made it even worse.

So Operation Sea Lion got temporarily suspended.

But it remained a looming threat, so British intelligence kept going with the disinformation campaign.

One big component was fake radio stations that pretended to be real ones located in Germany or in occupied countries like France.

They'd air a combination of music and real news and then sprinkle in some fake news like wall of fire technology, hoping the fake news would damage Nazi morale.

I don't know.

In my experience, fake news tends to pump Nazis right the fuck up.

It's tricky.

And one of the most successful broadcasters was Sefton Delmer.

He was a journalist who lived in Berlin when he was younger, and he spoke fluent German.

And in 1940, he started working for British intelligence.

Delmer gave them an important insight about countering fascist propaganda.

So it could be useful, you know, like whenever in history.

Instead of making real arguments, which would often just become part of an echo chamber of people who already agreed with them, he created a fake persona that attacked the Nazi cause from a different angle.

He pretended to be a fanatical Nazi,

which is a crazy term, but it'll make sense in a second.

His persona would deliver long, angry rants that criticized, of course, the Allies for being evil blood traders, but also attacked German officials for fucking up the awesome Aryan cause by being bad at doing Nazi stuff.

And in order to get plenty of listeners, he really sexed it up.

He'd make up graphic sexual descriptions of lazy Nazi officers in Germany having wild orgies together.

often with the wives of deployed lower-level troops.

This worked extremely well, and he got about 40% of German soldiers listening to his fake radio stations.

So he's a Nazi that calls other people cucks.

Next, he's going to march in khakis with a tiki torch, man.

Are we sure his name's Delmer and not Stein?

I feel like I've heard of this tactic before.

So the most effective station created by Delmer was called Gustav Siegfried Einz, or GS1 from the German military phonetic alphabet.

It claimed to be an illegal pirate station broadcasting from somewhere in Germany.

And Delmer voiced a character he called Der Scheff or the chief.

Der Scheff was an extremely patriotic old Prussian officer who was super loyal to Germany.

After his long tirades, he'd read a series of numbers that sounded like a code being sent to like-minded, disaffected fanatical Nazis, telling them the location for the next secret meeting.

British intelligence made the code medium hard to crack, but not too hard.

So Nazi code breakers were able to get locations within Germany and send the Gestapo.

But the locations were a little vague, and more importantly, it was all made up.

So the Gestapo just ran around hunting for nothing a lot.

Yeah, the opening scene to Inglorious Bastards is a lot less tense when there's just a bunch of hay in that basement.

Yeah, right, right.

All right, but the fact that you can save the world from fascism by doing over-the-top voices puts Eli firmly in state asset territory right now, doesn't it?

I'm not sure we want to use the term asset.

That doesn't very well.

You want a word with ass in it.

Okay, we do want to use the word asset.

So with GS1 proving to be effective, British intelligence decided to have Delmer help out with rumors about Operation Channel Fireball.

In one of his favorite broadcasts, He took on the voice of a British teacher and gave an English language lesson to the Germans.

Here's a little section of that broadcast.

Eli, actually, do you have a British and a German?

You think you can give this to us?

Absolutely.

So sorry, I'm doing

state asset, Eli Bosnik.

That's right.

You're doing this guy, Delmer, who is actually part Australian and lived in Germany,

but he's British.

And now he's doing an English language lesson to Germans.

As a German.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know, as a British broadcaster.

Oh, he's a British broadcaster.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The character is British in this one.

Okay.

We English, as you know, are notoriously bad at languages.

And so it will be best if you learn a few useful English phrases before visiting us.

For your first lesson, we'll take the channel crossing.

Repeat after me: Dost boot thinked.

The boat is sinking.

Dost water is cold.

The water is cold.

Jesus Christ.

Sick cold.

Very cold.

Now I'll give you a verb that should come in useful.

Again, please repeat after me.

Ich Brenne,

I burn.

You brerenest.

You burn.

Er Brent,

he burns.

Wirbren,

we burn.

Irbrent,

you are burning.

In English, a rather practical language, we use the same word you for both singular and plural.

Yeah.

And then at the end of that, he taught him to say, the SS commander is burning to death.

Smokey the bear, Jew.

I'm starting to see why the generation raised by these people were convinced Hillary was a lizard by Facebook.

It's nice to see that the subtlety of AM radio really has never changed.

So the idea of setting the entire English channel on fire,

it's fucking absurd.

But

Nazis are very stupid people, so absurd can work.

And Hitler was eating very large handfuls of meth for breakfast at this point.

So in response to the rumors, German high command decided to experiment with creating a fireproof boat.

It was just

a regular boat, and they glued like big sheets of asbestos on the side.

Fucking what?

And they tested it

with troops on board.

Why not start with eggs?

No, it's the meth, man.

So they poured gasoline in a cove at one of their Nazi ports.

They lit that area on fire.

And they sailed a barge full of troops straight into the flames.

They all got burned to death.

Who possibly could have predicted?

Yeah, as best those hats next time, guys, maybe we try.

So using the fake radio and leaflets and planting newspaper stories, British intelligence kept spreading rumors throughout Europe about all the scary reasons that Germans should stay the fuck off their island.

That includes reports about dead German soldiers washing up on shore with terrible burns from all the fire-based defense weapons.

There was a story that said, Britain has a new and deadly sea mine designed for the special purpose of preventing the landing of German boats.

Another type of mine is concealed beneath the runways of airfields.

It cannot be seen from the air and is remote controlled.

It will destroy German aircraft attempting to land troops on British airfields.

Another story said, the British have perfected a flamethrower for use in their aircraft.

Yes, a bunch of flamethrower guys jumping on big trampolines up into the air.

They fire it up when they're at the top.

It actually.

And here's my favorite one.

200 sharks have been sent from Australia to Britain and released in the channel.

What?

Okay, the number 200 sounds really low to me, right?

It does, right?

Just make up a bigger number.

So what I get like this whole acre, is that mine or what?

Which one?

How much do I get?

Yeah, I like that they made him Australian sharks, so you know it's the bad ones.

You know, it was a radical series.

Yeah.

Indeed.

All right, so I'll wrap it up for Operation Channel Fireball with the story of the final broadcast from their chef on GS1.

Delmer decided to write his character out of the radioverse by killing him.

I get it, Delmer.

I see it.

He staged an episode during which the Nazi code breakers finally crack the code, and they locate the pirate radio station.

Their chef is giving his rant, and everyone hears the Gestapo break into the building and fire some gunshots, and then the broadcast ends.

But then some idiot producer in the British fake radio team who didn't speak German decided to rerun that episode and everyone heard the fake death of the fake character happen twice.

But

it was all good.

Delmer scrapped GS1 at that point, and he got to branch out to more characters.

So that was fun for him.

All right.

Well, while I incorporate the Delmerverse into our lore, as I know in my heart he would have wanted, we'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing.

The wall of flame poses a tremendous threat to any invading forces.

We go to Nick Nicklesby now with more on the story.

That's right, Frank.

We have a giant wall of fire just ready to go in the channel.

So if Addie Hitler decides to come by for a stroll, he's likely to get awful toasty.

Glad to hear it, Nick.

Glad to hear it.

And now, a word from these sponsors.

I gotta say, Serge, this plan is going great.

Tell me about it.

What are you guys doing?

You got to get back on the air.

Back on the air?

We just did the fake news with the sponsors.

So, if people are going to believe you, you have to do all the stuff like weather and music.

But, General, we don't have any of that.

Well, you got to make something up.

You're supposed to be on the air.

Oh, all right.

All right.

Sorry about that, folks.

A little technical difficulties there, but the weather today in Germany

is German.

Sure is.

the smell of

sausage is in the air.

As it always is here in Germany, except when it

isn't.

And now, uh,

some music.

What?

What are you talking about?

I don't know.

I talk a lot.

Good idea.

I'm sit in a radio station

making up a song.

No, I'm not.

I'm a musician in a place where they are, where they make up songs.

Chair

play up

Henderson

Man, what a tune!

Let's go to a commercial.

How's that, General?

It was terrible.

Literally terrible.

Yeah, I was gonna say terrible.

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And we're back.

When we left off, the heart and soul of the British Army refused to let a little thing like the truth hold them back from delivering the emotional truth the world needed about fire channels.

So, tell us, Heath, what did America do with their lying?

All right, that brings us to a project that actually got a quick mention from Tom at the end of our episode about the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, that was the precursor to the CIA, run run by a guy named Wild Bill Donovan.

And the list of insane operations run by Donovan could not fit into a single episode.

So here we are.

This is the very real story of Operation Fantasia.

It starts with Donovan hiring a strategist named Ed Salinger for the Psychological Warfare Division.

Salinger ran an import-export business out of Tokyo, and therefore he knew all about Japanese culture.

No, he didn't, not at all.

But Salinger was pretty sure he did.

And he pitched the idea of scaring Japanese troops and civilians using a legendary fox-based spirit from Shinto lore called the Kitsune.

Its presence was known as an omen of doom.

And Salinger convinced Bill Donovan that Shinto lore is considered all the way real by everyone in Japan.

It's not.

Not.

Nonetheless, Donovan fired up a plan to make legendary fox ghosts to scare the enemy.

Okay.

However did the generation raised on birth of a nation think this was real?

Yeah, right.

Well, and a generation raised to believe Christianity was all the way real.

But like, now there's just some U.S.

soldier running around naked in a forest with like a foxtail butt plug and just thinking,

this is not how I pictured war.

Not at all.

glorious was how i pictured war this song so mad that he didn't think of the butt plug idea and that would have been better than what you're about to hear

so the first idea for operation fantasia was flying fox shaped balloons yep i was gonna say yeah the oss team built a prototype but they realized that was, you know, just adorable and they needed to make some improvements.

So they hired a whistle company to create an instrument that would make the realistic sounds of the Fox Ghost fantasy creature.

Solid progress, but still not perfect.

So they got their chemistry team to create a synthetic odor of a fox ghost fantasy creature.

Sure, of course.

And then they made a giant floating litter box because the fox ghost wouldn't use a traditional bathroom.

True, yeah.

I've seen that.

Yeah.

And then they created a Fox News station.

Only lies and deceptions to spread their message.

Oh, get it.

All right.

That's a whole other psyops episode right there.

Wouldn't it be awesome, though, if they're like, there's a fox balloon floating and there's just a dude with a theremin floating next to him making spooky sounds?

That'd be fucking amazing.

So the OSS had the fox balloon with a loudspeaker covered in legendary fox cologne mush and what you know,

yeah.

Well, they never deployed that, but the overall concept of the operation was obviously amazing.

So they went with plan B.

They'd catch a bunch of wild foxes in China and Australia, spray those foxes with glowing paint, and let them loose in Japan.

Okay, I don't want to be the guy who always spots the obvious freedom on our podcast, but I feel like I know why they made an inflatable musk-scented fox and then

get around to launching it.

All right, but so but here's the most fucked up thing about all of this, right?

The spray paint the foxes to look like scary ghosts department was right next to the see if we can split the atom and make a bomb out of it department, right?

That's what's so fucked about the story.

Where was that scene in Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer, huh?

He was afraid to tell the real story.

So at this point, the OSS identified a few logistical hurdles to the plan.

Oh, whatever could they be?

Problem number one was finding paint that would glow

just like a legendary fox glow.

You know, realistically,

that was

number one on the problem list.

But that one turned out to be an easy solve.

They hired the United States Radium Corporation

to provide their glow-in-the-dark paint for them.

And yes, the paint contained the eponymous ingredient from that corporation.

Everyone was fully aware that radium is wildly dangerous at this point, but that might help.

They weren't sure.

So they went ahead with the plan.

So the next problem was getting the radium-based paint to stick to the foxes.

So Donovan hired Harry Nymphius, a veterinarian from the Central Park Zoo, to figure it out.

And Nymphius used a raccoon.

Just to be clear,

this was a top-secret radioactive raccoon hidden somewhere in the middle of, by far, the biggest population center in the United States at the time.

Feels kind of risky.

If anything goes wrong, you could just stage a bike accident.

But

after some experimentation by Nymphius, we were all set with a perfect paint job technique for a raccoon, which is the same as a fox.

All good.

Top secret raccoon jumps into a trash can, but it's actually an elevator to a top secret below-ground dumpster.

takes off the mask.

You're like, what?

So now it was time to figure out if the glowing foxes would actually scare Japanese people enough to warrant the operation.

So we decided to test it on American people.

If they panicked, we knew the folklore fundamentalists in Japan would be even more panicked.

Obviously, yeah.

Yeah.

The OSS released 30 radioactive glowing foxes in a public park in Washington, D.C.

Jesus.

And the test run was a big success.

Would we say success?

Asterisk.

People were out on their evening strolls in the park in D.C.

And then a radioactive glowing fox would run past them.

And the people were indeed a bit scared.

Yeah.

So big success.

One guy called up the National Park Police and reported the incident.

And just very, very sadly, there's no official recording of that call

uh or is there

hello parks department the very same how can i help i've just seen a ghost fox a ghost fox you say that's right a ghost fox and how do you reckon a fox becomes a ghost I don't know.

I suppose he had some sort of unfinished business when he died.

Oh, really?

And what's that?

I don't know, but say he met another fox in the war, and they were in the trenches together, fought together, watched good men die together.

But they were more than brothers-in-arms.

Much more.

A more he felt, but could never speak.

So when their tour was up, he came home and got married and told himself he'd forget.

But he didn't forget.

Turns out, he didn't wanna.

I see.

Or maybe he got hit by a car or something.

Anyway, I gotta go.

Sure, sure.

I miss you too, Larry.

What?

I said only you can prevent forest fires.

Right, of course.

That was a sad one.

That was a sad one, yeah.

Now I know why they call it a foxhole.

Okay, I get it.

All right, so the park test was obviously a big win.

And now the OSS had to figure out the issue of transport and delivery.

The original plan was an amphibious attack.

We'd get the Navy to carry a group of foxes known as a skulk.

That's a fun fact.

They'd get close to the shore of Japan, and they'd drop the foxes into the ocean.

Sure.

Yep, obviously.

And the radioactive foxes would...

Obviously, swim to the beach and then run in the correct direction and scare a village.

Great plan.

But just to be sure they ran another test.

Come on.

The OSS took a top-secret boat of radioactive foxes into the Chesapeake Bay and threw them all overboard.

And to everyone's delight, the foxes all swam ashore, just like Harry the veterinarian assured them would happen.

But it turns out that water...

It can remove paint, and the foxes weren't glowing very much by the time they got on land.

Well, I sure hope they don't have rain in Japan.

Noah, you were alive.

What year did humans learn about cause and effect?

Was it 2010?

It wasn't 2024.

It was not 2010.

No.

So obviously they weren't going to scrap the amazing Operation Fantasia, of course.

And the OSS decided to drop the foxes.

onshore.

But how do you make sure the foxes run to the target location and scare the Japanese people?

The answer was use a shitload of foxes.

According to an OSS memo by Ed Salinger, quote, if enough foxes are released, some will get through, end quote.

And just in case that didn't work, Ed Salinger suggested they have a team of radioactive minks, muskrats, raccoons, and coyotes ready to go.

Why would that work if foxes didn't?

I don't know.

Hey, Captain.

Give the other species a chance.

If those ones are smarter, use one of those.

Whatever.

Hey, Captain, we've been shooting at them and dropping bombs and stuff on them for like

a while.

They actually don't seem very easy to scare.

Yes, I know.

I'll get back to painting those woodchucks for you.

Sorry, that's stupid.

So the radioactive fox drop drop was a go.

But Donovan and Salinger wanted to really sell the fox ghost.

So they added another component.

Salinger remembered an extra scary version of the Kitsune legend in which the fox appears with death's head on his crown.

And here's the plan that Salinger came up with from another OSS memo.

Quote, we've made a stuffed fox with a human skull affixed to his head, equipped with a simple mechanical device for raising and lowering the chase so as to simulate the opening and closing of the mouth of the skull.

This, why is everybody laughing?

Shut up in my memo.

This stuffed figure will be painted to give the same luminous effect as in the case of the live foxes.

Okay, I'm done.

Okay, someone very clearly walked in on this being made, and they were like, This is

from the story.

that's why the mouth opens

because of the story okay all right but guys

i'm scared as fuck of whatever idiot form of government allowed its resources to be spelled like this like i don't even know the legends and this shit's working on me

Okay, so you're probably thinking, except for Noah, amazing plan once again.

No, that's what I was thinking.

But how do you make sure plenty of Japanese people see the stuffed fox with a human skull and the sweet animatronic jaws?

Great question.

Here's the exact words from Smithsonian Magazine.

They were talking about this in an entire article about Operation Fandasia.

Quote, Salinger suggested draping the taxidermied fox body in a black cloth painted with glowing bones and lifting this human-fox hybrid into the air with balloons or a kite as if it were levitating to have an even greater demoralizing effect on the Japanese.

From the ground, the Japanese would look up and see a floating, glowing fox body covered in glowing bones with a human skull sitting atop its head whose jaw opened and closed as if it were talking.

They'd be so afraid they wouldn't even notice the strings that lead to the giant balloons necessary to lift lift a really struggling fox like what are you talking about is this is this the story of how jeff dunham saved america he's

pretty close pretty close they could have used him and just in case it wasn't clear ed salinger is a very serious and very thorough person so he included an addendum to that memo with one last backup plan that he was working on.

The title of the addendum was, Fox Possessed Human Beings?

Nice.

I don't think he put a question mark, but it was a question mark.

The OSS would enlist all the Japanese people they could find who were sympathizers to the Allied cause and get those people to, quote, simulate persons possessed of the Fox spirit who utter strange chants purportedly emanating from the Fox spirit, end quote.

Okay, so there were like a bunch of Japanese traders waiting backstage, like Broadway sink, like Broadway swings, watching the glowing foxes being like,

I would have nailed this.

Can I dress right?

I would have nailed this.

Hey, hey, thanks so much again for betraying your country for us.

Would you mind overmuch if we weaponized your cultural heritage?

Do you want to help with that?

Okay, but Salinger was realistic about this whole thing.

He warned the higher-ups that his fox-possessed human army running around and yelling fox demon stuff was only in the planning stages.

According to Salinger,

there are many difficulties which would have to be overcome before the plan could be put into actual operation.

Well, it turns out we had at least one sane human being who eventually explained how fucking stupid this entire plan was, and we never went ahead with a radioactive fox attack.

That sane person was Stanley Lavelle, also known as Professor Moriarty of the OSS.

He called a meeting about shutting down Operation Fantasia and told everyone, quote, I trust this will serve as a critique to us in the field of pure reason.

So just to be clear, Stanley Lavelle.

The guy who oversaw a shit cologne to shame the enemy, a squadron of bombardier bats, and a plan to make Hitler's mustache fall out with hormone-laced vegetables.

That guy was the voice of reason on this.

So, anyway, we won the war and killed a bunch of Nazis the end, but I don't know how.

All right.

Well, Keith, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

British intelligence was so much fucking better than ours.

Alan Turing, he won the war.

And Operation Radioactive Fox Ghost is a great argument against anyone talking about American sexualism.

It sure is.

Sure is.

And are you ready for the quiz?

Ready.

All right, Heath.

These are all really great psyops.

What are a few more that didn't get a mention here?

Hey, Operation Wandering Soul, which involved driving boats and shit around Vietnam, playing scary Halloween music into the jungle.

Nice.

Okay, that one's amazing.

I had to skip it because these two added up to like enough crazy shit.

Yeah.

Or Operation Demon Doll, a G.I.

Joe-esque toy made to look like Osama bin Laden, whose face paint would over time melt to reveal the demon beneath.

All right.

The answer is.

See none of the above because you said a few and that was just two.

That's true.

I should have written a couple.

Damn it.

I was actually going to write another one, but I didn't.

Sure.

Stop the screen.

I didn't start.

I literally thought I got more in there.

I didn't.

I didn't write.

Good one, me.

Okay, Heath.

If you were going to have a fake news site about a giant fire today, what would it be called?

A, the Blaze.

B,

Explosion.

C, Inferno Wars.

Or D,

Barbecue Anon.

Okay, barbecue and on is perfect.

It's got to be pretty great.

Exactly.

All right, Heath, which character is shared between the Podcastiverse and the Delmerverse?

Is it A, Winston Churchill Dasher Mizzle?

Yikes.

B,

FDR

the Pugapuggy Corn?

She's so belabored.

Do you need like an epidural or something?

C,

Marky Mark.

Okay, it's got to be C, Marky Mark.

That is correct.

Yes, it is Marky Mark.

All right.

What are four better answers for Eli's question?

How dare you think of your own, damn it?

A

Menscape Mensch.

Oh, that was going.

That's fantastic.

Phony D.

C,

Sarah Huckabee Slanders.

Trust me, Tom Cecil.

All of these are jokes that are about Sarah.

Trust me.

They're good.

Or D,

S S E gay Jesus.

Okay, those are all fantastic.

And like, you know, you put actual work into this concept.

But I'm going to say Secret Answer E,

Operation Paperclip Pop Com.

It's got a lot of fun.

Oh,

there you go.

That's good.

That is good.

Amazing.

All right.

Well, Heath, you said that, so you win.

All right.

Let's get an essay from Noah next week.

All right.

Well, for Cecil, Tom, Noah, and Heath, I'm Eli Bosnick.

Thank you for hanging out with us today.

We'll be back next week.

And by then, Noah will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to our podcasts in the podcast places.

And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citation pod or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media, or check the show notes.

Be sure to check out citationpod.com.

and the Grammy goes to

Corporal Nick Nicklesby sitting in a radio station wow wow thank you thank you all so much God what a dream come true I want to I want to thank the sergeant and the general for really making me put this out there into the world you know could couldn't have done it without them but but most of all I want to thank the nation of England for being able to set the English channel on fire.

Boy, oh boy, can we do that?

We can do that.

We went to the Grammys together because we ended up together.

Yes, we did, Larry.

Yes, we did.

Oh.

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