China Lake

We had staff psychologists from the Naval Missile Center and from U.S.

Naval Ordinance Test Station, China Lake, lots of high-grade doctoral psychologists.

They had a horrible time with these chickens.

To us trainers, I had four of the trainers I was going to be working with teaching.

The United States Navy, and this is the first on the record documentation that I found.

In the 1960s, the United States Navy at China Lake Naval Weapons Station, which is a sprawling military base in the high desert of China, Eastern California, not too far from the border with Nevada.

And by the way, I'm told there's quite a large subterranean component to that base as well.

When people hear the word Navy, they shouldn't only think of the sea because the Navy also has underground installations, which can be quite large.

But And a research and design team at China Lake in the 1960s was working on undersea bases, manned undersea bases, large enough to bring big military submarines in and out through airlocks, through pressure locks, deep undersea.

like a thousand feet under sea or even more.

Wow.

Yes.

What you have, GSL is Greg S. Latka, and he i- has been manufacturing suppressors since the '80s.

I think he was involved in the, uh, China Lake, uh, Y- US Navy, you know, Special Operations, like custom manufacturing that did-- They were the, the bleeding edge of suppressor technology that almost everything that we have now, uh, is based upon in one way or another.

And, uh, he has an aerospace manufacturing background, and so you have something very special there.

Well, and honestly, I, I will say, like, look, suppressors are expensive.

And one by one, they got flown out to the desert and parked.

Doc ended up at the Naval Air Weapon Station at China Lake, California, out in the high desert north and east of the mountains in a place where the Navy tests weapons.

And that, friends, is where she should have ended.

Because at China Lake, an old airplane sitting in the open isn't a museum piece.

It's a target.

The Navy would tow these Hulks out onto the range and use them to sight and weapon systems.

In the mid-1990s, a man named Tony Mazzolini goes looking.

Tony was an old B-29 man himself, flew in them back in the day, and he'd gotten it into his head that he wanted to find one to save.