BORN IN A CABBAGE PATCH - How America Turned its Darkest History Into its Most Beloved Toy

In 1971, a shy folk artist in Louisville, Kentucky began making soft-sculpture dolls she called Doll Babies. She gave them birth certificates. Adoption papers. A personalized letter from the doll itself. She called herself Momma Martha. Her name was Martha Nelson Thomas — and you have almost certainly never heard it.

Five years later, a 21-year-old art student from Georgia named Xavier Roberts walked into her craft fair booth. What happened next built a two-billion-dollar empire, sparked the most violent toy riot in American history, and stamped one man's signature on the backside of every Cabbage Patch Kid ever made.

This is the finale of Angel Makers. A four-part investigation into the hidden system that processed America's most vulnerable children across a hundred years — and somehow ended up in a mass-produced doll with a Georgia birth certificate.

In this episode:

• The real inventor of the Cabbage Patch Kid — and the funeral where her dolls filled the front pew

• Babyland General Hospital — the "Imagicillin" birth ritual, the preemie ward, and the signature branded on every baby's body

• The 1983 Cabbage Patch Riots — the Wilkes-Barre baseball bat, the pregnant woman trampled in New Jersey, and the adults ripping dolls from children's hands

• The names on the birth certificates — real children, real 1938 Georgia birth records, assigned to dolls

• The full reveal — baby farms, orphan trains, asylums, Cabbage Patch Kids. Same bones. Different clothes.

• A final tribute to Nancy Shoemaker, the nine-year-old girl who started this show

The language of institutional child transfer had been woven into American culture for a hundred years before a young artist in the Appalachian foothills built a hospital out of an old medical clinic and told children they were adopting a nameless baby. He wasn't thinking about Amelia Dyer. He wasn't thinking about the orphan trains. He wasn't thinking about Elizabeth Packard. But the ritual he created came from somewhere — and a generation of children recognized it in their bones.

Receive the nameless baby. Give it a name. Promise to love it. Mean it.

This is Angel Makers, Part 4. The series finale. Born in a Cabbage Patch.

If you've ever felt like the official story just doesn't add up, you're in the right place.

For Nancy. For Martha. For the nameless ones.

Subscribe to Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton wherever you listen — Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, iHeart, Amazon Music, and Pandora. Follow on TikTok and Instagram @justkillingtimepodcast. Send your Time Killer Files — your Cabbage Patch Kid's name, your orphan train ancestry, your family's asylum stories — and Elizabeth may read yours on the show.

Explicit content. Listener discretion advised.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

I want you to think about Christmas morning. It is nineteen eighty-three. Maybe you were six years old, maybe you were eight years old, and you are tearing through that wrapping paper, and there it is. That face, those chubby cheeks, that yarn hair, those painted eyes looking up at you like you are the most important person in the world. And there's a certificate with a name on it. A real name. Maybe Haley, maybe Calla Weezer. Yes, those are and were real names. Maybe something normal, unfortunately, like Amanda or Tyler. And you signed the back and you took the oath and you promised to love it and you meant it. I have spent four episodes building to this moment. We talked about the baby farmers and the white tape in the Thames. We have talked about children on train platforms being inspected like livestock. We have talked about women committed to asylums for reading novels and disagreeing with their husbands. And every episode I have been pulling at a thread. The Nameless Baby, the new name, the adoption papers, the hospital, and the oath. Today we follow that thread all the way to the end and we talk about the dolls. And by the time we are done, I promise you that Christmas morning memory is going to feel a little different. Not ruined, not tainted, just different, deeper, more complicated, and more human. And I think that is exactly what it should feel like. This is Angel Makers Part 4, Born in a Cabbage Patch. And this is the end of that series. You are listening to Just Killing Time, a true crime conspiracy and stories that keep us up at night. Welcome to the finale of Angel Makers. And if you're new here, I encourage you to go back. Start at part one. I promise you it's worth it. This finale will hit so much harder with the full context. But it is a standalone episode. It is your choice. If you've been here all four episodes, Time Killers, this one is for you. You have earned it. Let's bring it home. Now, before I tell you about Xavier Roberts, I need to tell you about Martha. Because there would be no Cabbage Patch Kids without Martha Nelson Thomas, and almost nobody knows her name. Martha Marie Nelson was born on November 29, 1950, in Princeton, Kentucky. She graduated from the Louisville School of Art and she was a self-employed artist, and she just was described by everyone who knew her as a humble and painfully shy woman. And in 1971, when Xavier Roberts was 15 years old and in high school, Martha began making dolls. In 1971, while a student, Thomas, began experimenting with soft sculpture in the form of dolls, she designed her doll babies with input from children she knew. She made them by hand and she sold them at craft fairs around Louisville, Kentucky. She called them doll babies, and they came with something that had never been done before in the doll world. They came with adoption papers and a personalized letter from Martha and a letter from the doll itself explaining its likes and its dislikes. Martha talked about how she birthed her dolls. To buy one meant to adopt one, to care for it for life, and she called herself Mama Martha, and her customers, adults and children alike, wrote to her regularly for years. In her obituary, it said this. She corresponded with her customers personally as Mama Martha. She created a relationship between the maker and child, between artist and family that was entirely about love and connection, not commerce, not marketing, love. That is where this idea was born, in the hands of a shy woman in Louisville, Kentucky, who just wanted to make children happy. In 1976, Martha Nelson Thomas was selling her doll babies at a craft fair in Louisville, Kentucky, and a 21-year-old art student from Cleveland, Georgia, named Xavier Roberts was there. He saw her dolls and he was fascinated. He asked if he could sell them at a gift shop in Georgia. Martha said yes for a while. And then she stopped supplying him because something felt very, very wrong. According to Editorial Magazine, in the late 1970s, Martha found Xavier Roberts reselling her babies at a local gift shop. And when she removed them in dismay, Xavier decided to make his own. When she discovered he had been reselling her babies at a profit, charging more than she did, treating them as merchandise rather than as the children she believed them to be, she pulled them. She took her doll babies back. And Xavier Roberts went home to Georgia and made his own version. According to court records, Roberts, a 21-year-old art student at Missionary School in North Georgia, discovered craft artist Martha Nelson's doll babies. They came with a birth certificate and adoption papers, and Roberts began purchasing Thomas's dolls. In nope, Roberts began purchasing Nelson's dolls in 1976 to sell at a profit at his own store in Georgia. Thomas later stopped selling additional dolls to Roberts, prompting him to turn to a manufacturing company in Hong Kong to mass produce dolls similar in appearance to Thomas's at a cheaper cost. Now, I want to be precise here because Xavier Roberts was a genuinely talented artist. The specific visual look of his little people, the needle molded faces, the yarn hair, that was his own craft. He had studied soft sculptures and their techniques, and he had great skill. But the concept, the soul of what the dolls were so beloved for, was that of Martha's. Though Xavier Roberts originated the look of little people, many of little people's defining characteristics, such as the dolls' overly round faces that came with the adoption certificate, they were taken from Martha Nelson Thomas. The adoption certificate, the birth certificate, the idea that you could adopt rather than buy, the idea, the idea that a doll had a name, a personality, a letter, and a relationship with its owner. That was Martha. And then Xavier did something Martha never did and would never have done. He signed the bottom of every baby with his own name like a brand. Like a trademark, like ownership, or I dare say, like a cow. Martha didn't believe in mass production of her babies or in copywriting or signing their bodies. Unthinkable things to do to one's offspring. Xavier signed the bare backside of each baby he produced. He signed them on their backsides his name on babies that were built on her concept. And he put his name on millions of them and built a 30-room mansion and bought a limousine with a 24-hour chauffeur. And Martha Nelson Thomas sold her doll baby kits at craft fairs for $16, while Cabbage Patch Kids sold for $30 at major retail chains. And I'm gonna let you decide how you feel about that. Thomas filed a suit against Roberts and eventually settled it out of court for an undisclosed amount in 1985. She and her husband, Tucker Thomas, told the press that she was more upset by the corruption of her dolls, for which she cared for deeply more than the money. She settled for an undisclosed amount. And we do not know what she received. We know it was not public credit. We know that it was not the billions that the Cabbage Patch Kids generated. And by 1984, one year after mass production launched, Cabbage Patch Kids and related products had generated over $2 billion in retail sales worldwide. And Martha Nelson Thomas settled for an undisclosed amount. And she went back to her craft fairs, back to her doll babies, back to being Mama Martha in Louisville, Kentucky, back to being a mother and a teacher and an artist who loved children and the art with everything that she had. After the court case, Martha continued to create art throughout her entire life. Some of her projects included making toys based on her children's drawings and making toys using socks. Martha and her family sold these creations at local craft fairs. Martha was also committed to fostering a love of art in children. She was an artist in residence at her children's elementary school and did workshops with the local Girl Scout chapter. Martha Nelson Thomas died on May 26, 2013. She was 62 years old, and she'd been battling ovarian cancer, but she died peacefully at home surrounded by her family. At her funeral, at the memorial service at Highland Presbyterian Church in Louisville, something happened that I think is one of the most quietly powerful things I've ever read about another human being. Her dolls in turn stayed loyal till her death, filling the front row of her pews at her funeral. The people who owned her doll babies brought them to the service, and they placed them this gets me really choked up. They placed them on the front pew, a full row of doll babies, at her funeral, bearing witness to the woman who made them, the woman who called herself Mama Martha, the woman whose idea built a billion-dollar empire that put someone else's name on it. Her babies came to say goodbye. I've been researching this one for a while, and that detail, that front row pew filled with doll babies, is the one that got me because it tells you everything about who Martha was and what she believed and what she had built. She did not build a franchise, she did not build a brand, she built relationships, and she built love. And at the end, the love showed up row by row, doll by doll. And I'm so glad you existed, Martha Nelson Thomas. And I'm so sorry the world did not say your name loudly enough while you were still here to hear it. But we are saying it now. Now I want to talk about Xavier Roberts, and I want to be honest about what I think about him, because this show is, of course, built on honesty. Xavier Roberts is a genuinely talented artist. He is from Cleveland, Georgia, population 3,500, deep in the Appalachian foothills. He grew up without his father, who died in a car accident when Xavier was only five, and his mother raised six children. She was a quilter, and Xavier learned to work with fabric from her hands. He was an award-winning art student. He had a real gift and he had something else, an extraordinary marketing instinct that turned a handmade doll into a multi-billion dollar global phenomenon. And he also took an idea that was not fully his and he built an empire on it without adequate credit or compensation to the woman who gave it to him. Both of those things are true, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. In 1979, Xavier Roberts and his friends renovated the old LG Neal Clinic in downtown Cleveland, Georgia, a turn-of-the-century medical clinic, and they turned it into Babyland General Hospital. Now I want you to listen carefully to the language of Babyland General because this is the conspiracy thread, Time Killers, and it's hiding in plain sight. The facility is presented as a birthing nursery and adoption center for the cabbage patch kids. In accordance with the theme, employees dressed and pretended to be doctors and nurses caring for the dolls as if they were real. A hospital, doctors, nurses, a nursery, a preemie ward with cabbage patch babies in incubators, a recovery room, a father's waiting room, blue rooms and pink rooms separated by gender, and then the birth. A nurse announces over a loudspeaker, cabbage dilation, all staff on standby. And a small crowd gathers around the magic crystal tree. The doctor listens through with a stethoscope and injects some imagicillin into the cabbage and then yanks out a nude doll. It's a girl! And the doll is turned over to show its Xavier Roberts' signature birthmark, and the crowd chooses a name. The doctor announces, Let's give Michelle a big hand. It's her birthday. And then it's off to the recovery room. A birthmark, his signature branded onto the body of every baby born in his hospital. And according to the Strong Museum of Play, each doll came with a random name from a list of George's 1938 birth records. The very first a thousand handmade dolls were named from a 1937 baby name book. Xavier Roberts hand printed the name tags which had accompanied his babies and then printed each birth certificate with his own fist as footprints. He used his own fists as the footprints on the birth certificates. Think about what that means. Every birth certificate in the original run of Little People had Xavier Roberts' fist marks on it. Not a baby's footprints, his fists, his mark. On documents that presented themselves as the official record of the baby's birth, this is a man who understood the power of ritual and symbol and language in a way that most people never fully appreciate. And he used it brilliantly. And he built it entirely on Martha Nelson Thomas's concept of what a doll could mean to a child. I want to spend a moment on the names because the name detail is the one that kind of sends a little chill down my back every time I come back to it. The first thousand little people were named from a 1937 baby name book. The names came from Georgia's 1938 birth records. Real names from real children born in Georgia hospitals in 1937 and 1938. Real people with real families, real histories, real lives that may have included joy and hardship and love and loss. And their names were assigned to dolls and sold to children across America without any knowledge, without their permission, and without any acknowledgement that these were names of real human beings. I'm not saying that is illegal. I'm not necessarily saying it's even wrong, but birth records from 37 and 1938 are public record, but I am saying this. The orphan trains gave children new names and stripped away their old ones. The asylum system stripped women of their identities and locked them behind institutional walls. The baby farm system took nameless babies and gave them new families, and Babyland General Hospital took the names of real Georgia children from real Georgia birth records and gave them to dolls. The machine that processed children's identities across a hundred years of American history left its fingerprints in soft cloth and yarn hair on the most beloved toy of the 1980s. Whether that was intentional or not, it happened and it's worth sitting with. And then there was the oath. Every cabbage patch kid came with an adoption certificate, and to complete the adoption to make it real, you signed the certificate and you took an oath. The oath asked you to promise to love your cabbage patch kid, to give it a good home, to care for it always. The same oath in different language the orphan train system asked of the receiving families. The same transaction in different language that the baby farming system performed. Money exchange, child transferred, papers signed. The same institutional ritual in different language and the asylum system performed when it processed a woman through its doors and assigned her a new identity and a new life that was no longer her own. Same bones, same but different clothing. $30 at Toys R Us. In October 1983, Cabbage Patch Kids had been introduced at the International Toy Fair in New York City, and America lost its collective mind. The Cabbage Patch Kids toy line was in tremendous demand, and in the 1982 Cabbage Patch parent company Colco was the best performer on the New York Stock Exchange, rising from $6.87 to $36.75 per share. Two million dolls were manufactured for that 1983 holiday season. Two million for a country with 76 million children under the age of 18. The math was never going to work. Most stores at the time typically stocked only between like two and five hundred of the product, and with thousands of customers surging the stores attempting to obtain one of those dolls, many fought with other customers to obtain one. The most notorious incident happened at the Zayre Department Store in Wilkes Bar, Pennsylvania, the day before Thanksgiving 1983. Over a thousand people camped out overnight waiting for their chance to get their hands on a cabbage patch kid. The most highly publicized cabbage patch riot took place at the Zayre Department Store in Wilkes Bar, Pennsylvania, when a melee broke out that was so intense, a store manager grabbed a baseball bat to protect himself. 500 people landed in the hospital, including one with three cracked ribs and a broken leg. As police and store security tried to quell the chaos, the crowd cleaned out the store's supply of 240 dolls in only 30 minutes. The store manager, a man named William Schigo, stood on the counter with a baseball baddie. He later told the New York Times, this is my this was my life, and it was in danger. His life was in danger because of a doll. A doll with a birth certificate and an adoption oath. Citing so Time magazine said at a Hills Department uh store in Charleston, West Virginia, 5,000 shoppers lined up for just 120 dolls. They knocked over the display table. People were grabbing at each other, pushing and shoving. It got ugly, said the store manager's Scott Belcher. A pregnant woman in Drewsy was trampled by a stampede of frantic customers, and adults grabbed. Dolls away from the children. I can't believe it. Adults grabbing dolls away from children in their desperation to get a doll for their child. They grabbed it away from someone else's child. I want you to think about that specific insanity in that image for a moment. A grown adult ripping a cabbage patch kid out of the arms of a child so they could give it to their own child as a Christmas present. This is what happened in Toys R Us stores across America in a holiday season of 1983 over a doll with adoption papers. Kolco's president, Arnold C. Greenberg, claimed that the dolls were popular due to their unique nature. The fact that the child can literally have a unique, loving, bonding experience separates it from other toys, Greenberg said. Colco deliberately targeted cabbage patch ads at adults, predicting that parents would be eager to buy the dolls as a wholesome gift for their children. The toys themselves may have been low tech, but the production process that created them was rooted in advanced technologies. Using computers, Colco was able to diversify its designs, making each cabbage patch kid unique. No two dolls looked exactly alike. They each had different names, and every doll came with adoption papers that could be signed by the children who took them home. So no two dolls were exactly alike. Each one was unique, each one had a name, each one came with papers. And in 1983, in a marketplace full of electronic gadgets, Wachmans, Atari gaming systems, cold, hard plastic, a soft, chubby, homely, unique, nameable, adoptable baby doll was a revelation. By the end of 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids and related products had generated over $2 billion in retail sales worldwide. Xavier Roberts became a millionaire by the age of 26, and Martha Nelson Thomas sold doll babies at craft fairs for $16. Time killers. I've been dropping pieces of this thread since episode two, and now I want to lay it out completely, word by word, language by language. I want to do something I've not done in any other episode. I want to put the language of the four systems side by side because when you see them together, when you see the exact same words used by Victorian baby farmers, by orphan train agents, by asylum administrators, and by the toy company in 1983, the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. The word adoption. Baby farmers used it to describe the permanent transfer of a child for a lump sum payment. Orphan train agents used it to describe the placement of children with farm families in the Midwest. The asylum system used it in reverse, taking women who had adopted children and stripping those children away from them. Cabbage Patch Kids used it to describe as buying a doll. The word hospital, let's talk about that one now. Baby farms sometimes operated under the cover of nursing homes or maternity facilities. The ideal maternity home in Nova Scotia called itself exactly that, a maternity home, a hospital where babies were born and transferred. The asylum was a hospital, and it swallowed people and rarely gave them back. Babyland General Hospital is built in an old medical clinic staffed by doctors and nurses, complete with a premi ward and a recovery room and a maternity ward where babies are born every hour. Let's talk about the birth certificate now. Baby farm operators sometimes forged or falsified birth records to conceal the origins of children in their care. Orphan-trained children were often given new names and new identities and told to forget the past. Effectively, new birth histories upon placement. The asylum emanates, they were stripped of their legal identities, a married woman had no legal personhood that was separate from her husband. And every cabbage patch kid comes with a birth certificate printed with the doll's name, with a 1937 baby name, book or 1938 Georgia birth records, and with footprints. Xavier Roberts fists pressed into a paper. The New Name. Orphan trained children were frequently renamed upon placement to erase their original identities. Asylum patients were referred by to by as case numbers and diagnoses rather than names, and every cabbage patch kid arrives with a preassigned name from real birth records, names that belong to real children who lived real lives, and that name is given to a doll and sent home with a new family. Now let's talk about the signature on the body. Baby farmers used physical marks to identify children. Amelia Dyer used white tape so the police would know which bodies were hers. Orphan-trained children were sometimes branded by the system, documented, cataloged, identified by case files. And Xavier Roberts name is printed on the backside of every cabbage patch kid ever made his signature, his mark on everybody. I want to be very clear about something. I'm not saying Xavier Roberts was a baby farmer. I'm not saying Colco was running an orphan train. And I'm not saying anyone involved in cabbage patch kids intended to reference this history. I am absolutely certain they did not. But what I am saying is the language of institutional child transfer has been woven so deeply into American culture over a hundred years of practice. Baby farms, orphan trains, asylums, all of it, that when a young artist from Georgia created a ritual around nameless babies with new names, adoption papers, and hospital birth certificates, he was drawing from a cultural well that ran very, very deep. And the well water had a very dark history. And he drew from it without knowing it was there, and we all drank it. And we loved it because the ritual of receiving a nameless baby and giving it a name and promising to love it is one of the most human things in this world, and it is also one of the most complicated. Here's the thing that I keep coming back to, the thing that I think matters most. Why did children love cabbage patch kids so much? Not the marketing, not the scarcity, and definitely not the riots. Those were adult phenomenon. Why did children, when they got one, love it the way they did? And the National Toy Hall of Fame said this. Cabbage Patch Kids offered American children a soft, cuddly playmate in a world of hard toys and cold electronics. They pro they promised a return to simplicity, something you could just hug. Something you could just hug. I think children love cabbage patch kids because the adoption ritual gave them something profound. It gave them a baby who needed them, a baby who arrived helpless, nameless, and very dependent. And the child got to be the one who gave it a name, a home, and a promise of love. Children who had no power over almost anything in their life got to be the adult. They got to be the protector, and they got to say, This one is mine. I chose it, I named it, and I promised to love it. That is not a toy, that is a ceremony. And here's what I think, and this is my honest editorial opinion, time killers. I think a generation of American children in 1983 were instinctively loving, protectively adopting nameless babies and giving them names and taking them home. Maybe we were processing something, maybe we were reaching back towards something our culture had done wrong. All those nameless babies in the Thames, all those children on train platforms, all those women locked behind asylum doors, and trying in the only language you had left to do it right to receive that nameless baby and name it and love it and mean it. And we could not fix what the machine had done, but we could hold on to something soft and promise it a home and mean every single word. Time killers, you've been sending me files since the first episode, and today is the finale. Here's my first question. First, I want you to tell me the name of your cabbage patch kid and whether now that you know what you know, it feels different. Let me tell you mine. Mine was Gertrude. My second one was Vera. And the power of taking that oath and saying that you were in love and protect that doll, it was it was real. I will tell you that. It was very, very real. So I also asked about the orphan train ancestry, and some of you came through on that and asylum stories. Please send me those as well. And together, Time Killers, we are going to just scratch at this little bit of history together. Let me say in one final time, the full thread. In Victorian England, and across North America from the 1960s, sorry, the 1860s to the 1940s, there was a system for interlocking pieces that processed children through institutions and gave them new names and new families, and called it charity. They called it medicine and they called it civilization, and they called it progress. The baby farms took infants for a fee, the nameless ones, the ones born inconveniently, and they gave them new arrangements, cold water baths, white tape, the Thames, and they called it care. The orphan trains took children from city streets, loaded them into rail cars, displayed them on stages, and let strangers inspect their teeth. They gave them new names, new families, new religions, and told them forget the past and they called it a new life. The asylums took the mothers, committed them on a husband's signature, locked the door, let the children be collected, and they called it treatment. And in 1978, in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains of Georgia, a young artist built a hospital out of an old medical clinic, and he made babies, and he gave them names from real birth records, and he issued birth certificates with his fists as footprints, and he told you what you did when you took one home was adoption, and he made you take an oath. He was not thinking about Amelia Dyer. He was not thinking about the orphan trains. He was not thinking about Elizabeth Packard and the Assain asylums. He was thinking about art and a business and making children happy. But the language he used, the ritual he created, it came from somewhere. It came from a hundred years of American processing children through institutions and calling it love. And then he offered that ritual to children in 1983, and they recognized it in their bones, in the oldest part of what it means to be a human. Receive that nameless baby, give it a name, promise to love it, and mean it. And that is the thread. That is the angel makers. I started this podcast because of a little girl named Nancy Shoemaker. She was nine years old. She walked to a gas station to get her sick little brother a seven up and she never came home. And I was a 13-year-old child myself at the time in ballet class when someone walked in and told us that they had found Nancy. And something in me changed that day because I've never been the same since. And I started this show because of Nancy. Starting to get teared up just a little bit. Because stories deserve to be told. Because the forgotten deserved to be remembered. Because the nameless deserve names. The babies Amelia Dyer through in the Thames had names once before she took everything. And the children on those trains, they had names before the system gave them new ones. The women in those asylums had names before the law erased their personhood. Martha Nelson Thomas had a name, a gift, a vision, and the history put someone else's name on it for 30 years. Nancy Shoemaker has a name and her father who wishes her happy birthday on Facebook every December 3rd and a memorial willow tree at Beach Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas. And now she has this show. To every time killer who's been here from the beginning, thank you. You showed up, you listened, you sent your time killer files, you carried these stories with me, and that matters more than I know how to say. And to Nancy, this whole series was for you the baby farmers, the orphan trains, the asylum, and the cabbage patch kids. All of it was to say the world has always struggled to protect its most vulnerable. And it has always taken people who refuse to look away to make it better. Elizabeth Packard refused to look away. Nellie Bly refused to look away. Eunice Kennedy Shriver refused to look away. And Martha Nelson Thomas refused to look away. And I refuse to look away too. And so do you. Angel Makers is now over, but just killing time is not. We are just getting started. I am your host, Elizabeth Stanton. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And thank you for caring for the ones that the world forgot. And take care of yourselves out there and take care of each other.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrails. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.