It's a hot summer night at a state park in Oklahoma.

Two groups of boys are on the property.

One calls itself the rattlers, the other, the eagles.

And just around midnight, the rattlers paint their faces and scramble through the night

to raid the eagles camp.

The rattlers crash through the windows.

They're yelling, hollering, they are picking things up and throwing them.

And once the place is entirely trashed, the rattlers leave.

And the eagle boys are left crying.

Some stuff stones into their socks to make a kind of weapon,

just in case they need to protect themselves.

Or take revenge.

I'm Dylan Therese and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today, author Gina Perry is taking us to Robert's Cave State Park in Oklahoma.

It's where, in 1954, these boys thought they were going to summer camp.

But they and their parents didn't know,

is that they'd actually been recruited for a psychological experiment.

That true story after this.

It's the summer of 1954,

and there are two school buses full of 11 and 12-year-old boys traveling through Oklahoma.

They are headed for our southeast of Oklahoma City to a place called Robert's Cave State Park.

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