[00:00] I got a lot of questions on my last short about the sound the FBI used as a sonic weapon in 1993 against the Branch Davidians during the Waco siege. So in this video, I wanted to talk about that sound, how I found it,
[00:12] and listen to it a little bit more together. Now, if you've read about the Waco siege, you've probably heard stories about the FBI using sleep deprivation to get the Branch Davidians to surrender. And how did they do that? Through all-night broadcasts of recordings of jet planes, pop music,
[00:27] Buddhist chanting and the screams of rabbits being slaughtered. If you've ever tried to find the actual audio files used, you've probably noticed that there's a lot of wrong answers out there. Here's something from Reddit, from YouTube.
[00:40] A lot of audio clips purport to be what the FBI used, but as it turns out, they're almost all sound design from the 2018 TV miniseries Waco. To find the real ones, I had to do some searching,
[00:52] and I found this article from Deseret News dated November 3rd, 1995. And it says that during a recent hearing, Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah played the same taped screams of rabbits being slaughtered that the FBI blasted at night during the Branch Davidian standoff at Waco, Texas.
[01:09] So we got to go to C-SPAN. Now, on C-SPAN, they have the hearing. This is day two, and this one clip is more than four hours long. However, they have text transcripts that are searchable.
[01:21] So if you look up rabbit you find that about 30 minutes in they talk about it And apparently at 31 minutes and 29 seconds in a tape of rabbits being slaughtered is played Unfortunately this time code is incorrect If you hit the play button it jump you to that part of the video but it the wrong
[01:37] moment. So to find the evidence actually being presented, you kind of have to watch the whole thing. Turns out it's not that far away. It's only 28 minutes in. Let's listen. So if we could put on that tape, I'd appreciate it.
[01:54] This is some of the actual audio the FBI played through loudspeakers to frighten the Branch Davidians, raise their anxiety, and get them to surrender.
[02:12] Now, unsurprisingly, the decision to do it this way was highly controversial. Not only was the compound full of children, if you're the FBI, if you're the ATF, and you believe that David Koresh is out of his mind, mentally unstable, and dangerous, is it really a great idea to use a sonic weapon intended to raise his anxiety levels?
[02:33] Probably not. This only happened 33 years ago. Now, that's kind of a big number, but the social fault lines that formed the environment for Waco, for Ruby Ridge, for the Oklahoma City bombing, and the debates around the role
[02:46] of government did not get erased, did not get solved or healed after 2001. The national conversation changed a lot, but in many ways, we still live in this world.