Jor-El may have been labeled a heretic for saying the world was going to end, but that didn't mean everyone believed that label.
There was, actually, a whole group of people.
Those selfsame group of people spied on Jor-El long enough to know his hair-brained scheme to save his son.
They didn't have access to the same kind of tech Jor-El did, but they could still hobble together...something. Something similar.
Instead of just Inter-Stellar pods specifically designed to take care of a baby, they would have to go for Cryo-pods; their pods would be slower, and they didn't have a lot of material to work with, so the baby would need to stay baby sized.
Other than that, they managed to spy on Jor-El long enough to figure out where, exactly, he was sending his boy.
The programmed the pods to stick together, and released them almost too late.
They'd been right, those pods had been slower.
Hundreds of pods, carrying babies, landed outside of Amity Park. Some were further than others, but all of the babies survived.
The US military, faced with a bunch of babies and realizing they were aliens of some kind, decided to...make sure. That they knew how to handle this particular type of alien.
They got normal people to agree to adopt the babies with far more incentives than normal. The ones they couldn't adopt out, they used soldiers posing as civilians to adopt.
The kids started displaying powers of flight? The military worked to figure out how to mute that power.
Over and over, Amity Park became a testing ground to research various ways on how to contain aliens.
By the time Superman made his appearance, the kids were six and the Military already had a pretty good idea of how to subdue him.
They couldn't strike him down, it would be a PR nightmare!
So they just. Kept going on.
Kept monitoring the small Kryptonians, taking notes, and giving out new "vaccines" when powers started to manifest.
Then a pair of entirely human mad scientists managed to tear a hole in reality, and bit by bit, those serums they'd been giving all those Kryptonian children were starting to wear out.
They could not risk any of them bringing this operation to Superman's attention.
The teens would need to be detained if they showed any signs of their Kryptonian given powers. But they couldn't just...arrest the entire populace; there was still plenty of data to mine!
Called themselves the GIW.
Started looking for any, any signs at all, of those teenagers displaying Kryptonian-like powers.
A few states over, a retired soldier full of guilt sits down in front of Lois Lane and her husband.
"...There's a city being used to house a bunch of Kryptonian child refugees, and they're being drugged and experimented on constantly. They have no idea about any of it."
Or; Kal wasn't the only baby shot to earth in a pod. Other concerned parents did the same thing, after forming a secret group that kept their mouths shut around authorities.
Their pods were slower and Cryo based, but would be going to the same planet as Kal.
Those pods were Danny, Sam, Tucker, and also their entire grade in Amity Park.
Being turned half-ghost burned the experimental meds out of Danny and altered his powers to be, quite frankly, insane even by Kryptonian standards.
On a much slower pace, those same meds are being burned out of everyone in his age group in town.
