Foreword - A Cautionary Note To UFO Buffs

Persistent rumors of secret underground bases and deep underground tunnel systems have swirled through the field of UFOlogy for some years now.

These underground installations are variously said to be constructed, staffed and operated by covert human agencies (either part of the military-industrial complex or various federal government agencies), or by extraterrestrial or alien beings (the so-called "Little Greys" often mentioned in the UFO literature), or by both covert human agencies and aliens working together in secret, underground installations.

I will say at the outset that my research has not revealed whether or not Little Greys even exist, much less whether or not they are living and working in underground installations.

 

Perhaps the Little Greys really do exist; perhaps they do not.

 

But since I cannot definitively answer the question one way or the other, I will not deal with it to any great degree in this report. Neither will I discuss reported cases where abductees have been taken into purported underground installations, where they have allegedly seen and experienced many strange things, including bizarre medical procedures and biological engineering experiments.

 

Though I have both heard and read such stories I cannot testify as to the veracity of these reports, so I will not concentrate on them here. These anecdotal accounts are interesting, however, and I am keeping an open mind about them.

What I do know for certain is that there are many underground installations here in the United States.

I also know that the military-industrial complex and various federal government agencies have constructed, and are working in, many of these installations.

I also know that throughout virtually the entire post-WW II period (and perhaps before) the United States government has been actively planning and constructing underground facilities and installations, some of which are very deep underground, quite sophisticated and capable of accommodating large numbers of people. I have documented quite a number of these facilities and will describe them, to the extent that I am able, in this book.

 

I have also been told of many other underground facilities that I am presently not able to document. For that reason, most of them will not be discussed here.

I have been able to find considerably less information about the much-rumored tunnel system said, by some reports, to crisscross the United States. This does not mean that it does not exist. It may simply be that its deep underground location (if it really exists) gives it a natural cover that is hard to break. Or maybe it really does not exist! I don't know for sure one way or the other.

 

Whatever the case, I will present what information I have uncovered about tunneling technology and tunnel systems - the kind of information that may well form the popular basis for the rumored underground tunnel system.

My approach to the tunneling and tunnel network issue is the same as to the underground base question: I will present for my readers reports, information and facts that I have discovered and leave them to draw their own conclusions. I trust that most of what follows will be as new and intriguing for others to read as it was for me to discover.

I understand that some readers may object to the publication of information about military facilities. However, it is my feeling that the aims and ideals of representative democracy are poorly served by secrecy in government, especially in the policies of the armed services.

History teaches us that when a country has an exceptionally powerful military, and when that military carries out secret policies and agendas like the U.S. military does (think of the illegal Iran-Contra affair, of super-secret nuclear bomb testing in Nevada, of the astronomical amounts of money given to the Pentagon every year for so-called "black projects"), then there is an ever present danger of that military taking control of the government.

 

That control could be taken quickly - or gradually. Noisily or quietly. But dictatorships are born when power is usurped by the military. God forbid that a military dictatorship should ever march under the stars and stripes of the United States of America. Protection against that ever happening begins with the exercise of our First Amendment right to speak freely.

So, in that spirit, and in the hope that some of what follows will help peel away the cover of excessive secrecy that shields too much of what the Pentagon does from public scrutiny, I offer solid documentation of underground military installations, as well as official plans and documents pertaining to the construction, operation and planning for such installations.

I would like to briefly relate an unpleasant incident involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In December 1992, while researching this book, I filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

 

My request sought information about the Corps' involvement in underground base and tunnel construction and maintenance. As it happens, I was at that time a PhD candidate in political science working on my doctoral dissertation. After getting no substantive response to my request, I called the Pentagon and was referred to the Army Corps' Freedom of Information Office.

 

I subsequently called that office and complained about the Corps' noncompliance with my request. A few days later an attorney for the Army Corps of Engineers called my dissertation advisor to complain about me. He informed my dissertation advisor that if I wanted to get bureaucratic that he would show me what "bureaucratic" was!

Subsequently I received a letter from the Corps denying my request for a fee waiver and stating that I would have to pay all fees related to searching for and providing documentation on their subterranean construction and maintenance activities. Needless to say, this could easily have run to thousands of dollars.

As a result, that information is not in this report. However, I still found plenty of other information relating to the U.S. Army Corps' underground construction activities and it is all discussed in detail in the pages that follow. So the Army's attempt at suppressing my First Amendment rights was not entirely successful. The free press lives!

Chapters 7 and 9 of this book were first published in UFO Magazine, edited by Vicki Cooper.

Now, let's go underground - and see what's there!

RICHARD SAUDER, Ph.D.

January 1995

Back to Contents

 

 

 

Chapter One

Oh Yes, They're Real!

Do secret, underground government installations exist? The answer is absolutely, positively - yes. They are real.

In 1987, Lloyd A. Duscha, the Deputy Director of Engineering and Construction for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, gave a speech entitled "Underground Facilities for Defense - Experience and Lessons."

 

In the first paragraph of his talk he referred to the underground construction theme of the conference at which he was speaking and then stated:

"I must deviate a little because several of the most interesting facilities that have been designed and constructed by the Corps are classified."

Mr. Duscha subsequently launched into a discussion of the Corps' involvement, back in the 1960s, in the construction of the large NORAD underground base beneath Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado (See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of the NORAD installation).

 

And then he said:

"As stated earlier, there are other projects of similar scope, which I cannot identify, but which included multiple chambers up to 50 feet wide and 100 feet high using the same excavation procedures mentioned for the NORAD facility." ¹

I submit that you will probably not find a more honest admission anywhere by a military officer that the Pentagon has, in fact, constructed secret underground installations.

Given such an explicit admission, within the context of the paper trail that the military has left over the last 35 years (set out in this book in considerable detail), and the stories that I have heard from other individuals, I consider it an absolute certainty that the military has constructed secret underground facilities in the United States, above and beyond the approximately one dozen "known" underground facilities listed elsewhere in this book.

Just a few of the many places where these underground facilities are alleged to be are:

• Ft. Belvoir, Virginia (home of the Army Corps of Engineers)

• West Point, New York (site of the Army's officer training academy)

• Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, in southern California

• Groom Lake or Area S-4, on or near Nellis Air Force Base, in southern Nevada

• White Sands Army Missile Range, New Mexico

• under Table Mountain, just north of Boulder, Colorado

• under Mount Blackmore in southwestern Montana and near Pipestone Pass, just south of Butte, Montana

I would be glad to hear from individuals with information about any of these alleged facilities.

But not all underground installations are secret military projects. Many underground tunnels and facilities have been built that are not covert in any way. There are numerous highway and railroad tunnels, and many major cities have extensive subway systems. There are also miles of utilities, such as water lines and sewer tunnels, with accompanying pumping stations.

Some of the most complex, non-covert underground facilities that have been built are for hydroelectric powerhouses. The rooms and halls in these kinds of plants can be hundreds of feet below the surface and quite huge in some cases.

 

For example, the powerhouse at Portage Mountain Dam in British Columbia, Canada is 890 ft. long, 66.5 ft. wide and 152.5 ft. from top to bottom. Of special note is the method used to deliver concrete to the powerhouse chamber during construction. An 8-in diameter pipe was run 400 ft. from the ground surface down to the construction area, and the concrete was delivered through the pipe.²

But if such extraordinary human ingenuity and effort can bring into being the tunnels through which we freely drive our cars, and the power stations which deliver electrical power to our homes, it requires no great stretch of imagination to suppose that installations of similar, or even greater, size, complexity and depth could have been built underground, perhaps covertly, by agencies of the United States government and huge corporations.

 

As this book reveals, our government - and the contractors with which it works - has the personnel, technical know-how, machinery and money to plan and complete mammoth underground construction projects.
 

Where are the bases?
In the pages that follow I will list, one by one, as many of the known underground facilities in the United States and Canada that are operated or maintained by United States government agencies and major corporations as I can presently document, reporting as much information about each one as possible.

 

For some, I can report only that they exist; for others, I can say a good deal more.

 

As it happens, there are many similar deep underground facilities in other countries. Sweden, Switzerland, France, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Russia are known to have sophisticated underground installations - and, presumably, yet other countries have them as well. In this book I will restrict my discussion only to North American facilities. So there is no question that secret underground bases exist.

 

But how do they get there? How is it possible to plan, build, and operate them, all in secrecy?

 

As it happens, it is easier than the average person might suspect.

In 1985 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a report entitled Literature Survey of Underground Construction Methods for Application to Hardened Facilities

 

The report concluded that,

"Since adequate technology is available to construct hardened underground facilities under virtually any ground conditions, the main constraint in construction projects remains economic viability rather than technical feasibility."

In other words, with enough money, underground facilities can be built almost anywhere.

 

Given the huge buildup in military budgets under the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush one cannot help but think that "economic viability" - money - may not have been a drawback at all, especially for projects done beginning in the early 1980s.

In very general terms the Army Corps report discusses a variety of types of underground facilities and construction techniques.

 

Two of the types of underground facilities it discusses are:

1. deep shaft structures

2. tunneled structures in mountainsides

Inspect Illustration 1.3. Notice that tractor trailer trucks are depicted as entering both kinds of structures.

 

In the mountainside facility the truck appears to drive in through a tunnel. In the deep shaft structure truck entry appears to be via an access building and some kind of vertical hoist or elevator that would seem to be implicit in the layout of the facility.

 

The deep shaft structure is also shown with an accompanying ventilation shaft to the surface, which has its topside terminus in a "protective enclosure."
 

How To Hide An Underground Base

To illustrate just how well hidden such underground facilities - and the entrances that give access to them can be, consider the examples of two actual, underground installations.

 

One of them is in England, the other in Sweden.

 

First, the Swedish installation:

In central Sweden there is an underground factory excavated deep into a granite mountain which employs nearly 3,000 workers and manufactures diesel and gasoline engines, agricultural machinery, and various machine tools.

As you approach this installation, the only man-made structure apparent to the unaccustomed eye is an innocent looking Swedish farm house, located at the foot of a hill. However, when the hinged walls of this house swing open, much like large garage doors, there is an opening of sufficient size to accommodate large trucks.⁴

Consider that these words were written in 1949, during the immediate post-war period. If in the 1940s the Swedes could disguise the entrance to a major, underground, industrial facility as an ordinary farm house, what might the Pentagon be capable of today?

 

Clearly, the possibilities are extensive.

Now for the English example.

Until 1989 the War Headquarters of the British Army's UK Land Forces Command was situated in an underground bunker 50 ft. below a field in Sopley, Hampshire.

 

When it was active the sign in front of the installation identified the place as a "training area" for the "No. 2 Signals Brigade." (This is more than a little reminiscent of the two U.S. Army "Warrenton Training Center" stations mentioned later.)

 

The English bunker has now been replaced by a newer facility elsewhere, but the interesting thing about the now abandoned Sopley facilities is how nondescript the entrance is.

On the surface, only a guardhouse and two ventilator shafts now stand in an empty, but fenced-off field... A shaft concealed at the back of the innocuous looking guardhouse gives access to a stairwell and underground tunnel - at the end of which is a two-story bunker with about 50 rooms.⁵

I strongly suspect that the designers here in the United States have been at least as ingenious as their counterparts in Europe in disguising and concealing entrances to underground installations. Virtually any house anywhere, or any building, large or small, is capable of concealing an entrance to an underground facility.

 

This is not the same, of course, as saying that every house and building that one sees is, in reality, a disguised underground base entrance.

 

Still, as the above examples show, some houses and buildings certainly can be disguised entrances for such facilities. Since they don't have signs on them advertising the fact, the hard part is figuring out which ones they are.

 

To say that this is not easy is an understatement.

Starting Construction - One Case History
So underground bases do exist and they can be hidden.

 

But how do underground construction projects get underway in the first place, without being noticed?

Consider Kennesaw Mountain, just outside of Marietta, Georgia, in the late 1950s, and Green Mountain, on the outskirts of Huntsville, Alabama.

Two articles in 1957 reported that the Army was planning to build a huge underground rocket factory inside Green Mountain. The project was to have been undertaken jointly by the American Machine and Foundry Company, the Redstone Arsenal and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency.

 

In addition to the missile plant, the facility was also slated to have a,

"sort of subterranean 'junior Pentagon' where elaborate headquarters would be installed to direct the defense of the southern U.S. from enemy attack."

A local group bought 200 acres along the Tennessee River for docks from which a company called Chemstone would ship the limestone excavated during construction to market.⁶

 

This same group, comprised of members of the Huntsville Industrial Expansion Committee, also engaged in a nearly two-year,

"series of obscure real estate transactions" in which they purchased, "in their own names or through proxies, various parcels of land scattered about... Green Mountain" ⁷ for the construction of the underground, military-industrial facility.

I don't know if this base was ever actually built (if you do, please contact me).

 

But whether or not it actually moved to the construction phase is beside the point here. It is fascinating enough to see how a site is selected, bought and prepared for construction.

The preparation and preliminary work proceeded in a most interesting fashion, in that, even though it was to be a combination underground "junior Pentagon" and U.S. Army missile factory, the land for it was actually purchased not by the Department of Defense, but by private citizens, acting on their own or as proxies for others.

 

The plan for the facility is also intriguing in that, as of 1957, it clearly showed the kind of military-private industry cooperation that has today become commonplace. In this case, it involved the U.S. Army and the American Machine & Foundry Co.

So already in 1957 the Pentagon - and local business interests - showed themselves capable of coming together to plan the construction of a major underground military facility, to be built inside of Green Mountain, in the southern Appalachians, just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

 

That nexus of interests was comprised of,

1. big business

2. military agencies

3. private individuals who were in on the deal (and who very likely benefitted from insider speculation in the local real estate market)

Underground base researchers would do well to look for this nexus of interests and pattern of activity elsewhere, as similar groups are likely to have played key roles in planning and constructing underground facilities in other places.

Here is the way I see the actual construction scenario playing out:

military agencies desire to construct underground facilities as secretly as possible.

The Army Corps of Engineers can supervise the actual construction and draw up the plans, but special expertise and equipment will often need to be supplied by private industry.

 

And specific or highly technical industrial operations will likely need to be conducted by private companies as well. Although the Pentagon and other federal agencies (notably the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Land Management) control huge tracts of land in the West, in other parts of the country most of the land is owned by private citizens.

 

So if a military agency wishes to secretly construct a base on a piece of land that it does not own, in order to avoid drawing attention to its plans, it might covertly employ a sympathetic group of private citizens or businessmen to handle the real estate transaction(s) for it.

 

In this way, the military gets its land, but without unwanted publicity and fanfare.

The Air Force Times announced in 1959 that the Air Force was on the verge of agreeing with the U.S. Department of the Interior to place an underground SAGE radar facility inside of Kennesaw Mountain (the mountain was, and is, a National Park owned by the Interior Department), on the outskirts of Marietta, Georgia. Construction was projected to last two years and to cost about $15 million (in 1959 dollars).

 

The facility was to be a "semi-automatic Air Defense Center" for the surrounding 13 state region.⁸

 

I do not know if this installation was ever built. The mountain is only a few miles from Dobbins Air Force Base, so it would have been possible to drive a tunnel the short distance from Dobbins AFB and excavate the inside of the mountain without disturbing the surface of the national park in the slightest.

 

All of the heavy machinery required to build the facility could have entered and exited the underground construction site via Dobbins AFB.

Whether this was in fact done I do not know. But even if neither the Kennesaw Mountain nor the previously mentioned Green Mountain underground facilities were ever constructed the mere fact that plans to do so were announced demonstrates that the Pentagon, as of the late 1950s, was actively planning for underground bases in the southern Appalachian region.

 

Not only that, but the plans were in an advanced stage of preparation. (Turn to Illustration 2 to see how military planners in the late 1950's were visualizing their underground bases.)

So even if these two particular facilities were not built (and I do not know one way or the other) my research leads me to believe it is likely that others were built in northern Alabama and Georgia, and in the Carolinas, and perhaps in Tennessee as well.

Of course, major underground projects would probably get underway in much the same way in any other state or region of the country.
 

Supplying Power to Underground Military Facilities
A primary consideration in the construction of deep-underground facilities is obtaining sufficient power for operation once the installation is built and functioning.

 

By the early 1960s the U.S. military had decided that,

"... either of two prime power plant systems would provide suitable sources of electrical power for hardened, underground Command Centers. These two are the diesel power plant and the nuclear power plant." ⁹

While it may seem possible to plug into the commercial network that services most of the country for the electrical power needs of underground facilities, a 1963 Army report concluded that the power requirements of these installations can be sufficiently unique, due to,

"stringent voltage and frequency requirements which may be imposed by special electronic equipment," and due to the necessity of power self-sufficiency under emergency conditions, "that it is far more satisfactory, and in many cases more economical, to provide a generating plant within the installation itself to serve all the load and to eliminate any connection to a commercial power source."

The 1963 Army report concluded that,

"...nuclear power plants appear to be advantageous for use in underground installations."

And it effectively endorsed their use in underground military installations:

"...(N)uclear power is the only field tested, non-air-breathing system with sufficient electrical generating capacity to support an underground installation of the size and type envisioned."

The report then proceeded to discuss the pros and cons of various power plants, most of them conventional, before concluding with a list of the various nuclear power plants already built, under construction or being designed for military use.¹⁰

 

However, the report unfortunately did not specify for what size and type underground installation these power plants were intended, or where the facilities may be located. But the very existence of an Army Corps of Engineers manual entitled Utilization of Nuclear Power Plants in Underground Installations means it is entirely possible that underground military facilities may be powered by self-contained nuclear power plants.

In the case of diesel power plants, during emergency "button-up" periods when the installation would be sealed from the outside world, there would be a so-called "closed-cycle" system in operation.

 

This system would utilize,

• sodium hydroxide for disposal of carbon dioxide in the exhaust produced by the diesel engines

• liquid oxygen stored in cryogenic tanks for combustion of the diesel fuel

• fuel oil to power the diesel engines, stored in an underground depot, and replenished as needed from tanks on the surface ¹¹

Other proposals that have been advanced to generate independent power economically are detailed in Chapter 5.

The secret underground bases exist; they can be well hidden; and they can be independently powered.

In the next chapter I take the reader on a guided tour of underground bases throughout the United States. No doubt the locations of some of these bases will be a surprise to many!

 

Back to Contents
 

 

Chapter Two

The Military Underground - Air Force, Army and Navy

It is important, first of all, to realize that the United States military has been heavily involved in underground construction for decades.

 

I will set out for you as many of the locations where the various military agencies have actually constructed major underground facilities as I can presently document. I have been told of, and have read of, many others. While I think it highly probable that at least some of these other secret installations may exist I will not discuss most of them in this report, because I cannot presently document them.

I will also discuss at some length planning documents generated by various military agencies pertaining to construction and operation of underground bases and tunnel systems.

 

These planning documents are real. They were written over a 25 year period beginning in the late 1950s and continuing up to the mid-1980s. The reader will have to be the judge of whether any of the underground facilities discussed in the planning reports have been constructed.

 

I personally have not been in any underground military facilities and am not privy to classified information; however my hunch is that some of the facilities mentioned in these reports and studies probably were built.
 

The Air Force and Project RAND
One of the most prominent names in the early history of U.S. government planning for underground bases is Project RAND.

 

The RAND Corporation became operational in November 1948. It actually grew out of U.S. Air Force Project RAND, which was established in 1946 to carry out long-range research projects of interest to the Air Force. The mission of the RAND Corporation was to work on cutting edge problems in the realms of engineering, economics, mathematics, physics and social science.

In the late 1950s, one of the problems that the RAND Corporation was working on was the question of underground base construction for the United States military.

 

Accordingly, Air Force Project RAND and The RAND Corporation held a symposium on this topic, on 2426 March 1959, to which they invited a wide variety of technical experts from the public and the private sector.

 

According to the chairman, the purpose of the symposium was to discuss,

"the problems of protecting military installations located deep underground or under mountains" in the event of nuclear war.

He went on to say that for the two years previous (since 1957) The RAND Corporation had been,

"actively investigating the need for a small number of superhard deep underground centers" that could withstand the fury of a massive nuclear attack.¹

The two-volume report itself is made up of dozens of papers about tunneling, underground excavation, geology, engineering technology and the like. Most of the papers are quite general.

The major importance of this RAND Corporation symposium, however, is that it reveals that already in the 1950s the U.S. government was actively planning for the construction of underground bases and installations.

 

(In fact, as I shall show later, already in the 1950s the United States government had constructed a number of secret, deep underground installations.)

Also noteworthy is the way in which the groundwork for the move underground was prepared:

The RAND Corporation called on experts from military and nonmilitary government agencies, from the corporate world and from major universities.

Chairmen for the individual sessions were drawn from,

• Princeton University

• RAND Corporation

• Colorado School of Mines

• Army Corps of Engineers

• University of Illinois

• National Bureau of Standards

• Ballistic Research Laboratories

• Brown University,

...and an assortment of independent consultants and private firms.

This pattern of collaboration on underground construction projects between university researchers and university engineering schools, private sector industry and the military and other government agencies is one that has continued right up through the 1980s.

In 1960 the RAND Corporation published a study under contract to the Air Force in which twelve specific locations across the country were selected as possible sites for deep underground installations. In this RAND Corporation report, all installations are assumed to be more than 1,000 ft. underground.²

One of these sites, on the Keweenaw Peninsula near Calumet, Michigan, was selected for its location under places where previous hard rock mining had occurred. The theory expressed in the report was that in the event of a nuclear attack, seismic waves from the detonation of nuclear weapons on the surface would be attenuated and deflected by the previously excavated shafts, tunnels, drifts, rooms and chambers of the copper mine workings, thereby shielding the underground installation from the full brunt of a nuclear explosion.

 

In the cases where such mine workings did not already exist, so-called "umbrellas" could be excavated above the installation. These are open spaces in the rock that would serve the same purpose of protection as mine workings.³

Another site where a facility was proposed was under an abandoned iron mine near Cornwall, Pennsylvania.⁴

 

Other sites proposed for deep underground military installations were,

• Mohave and Coconino Counties, Arizona, under the Grand Wash and Vermilion Cliffs

• a limestone mine near Barberton, Ohio, about 8 miles from Akron

• the Book Cliffs near Rifle, Colorado, where the federal government already has excavated an oil shale experimental mine

• the area near Morgantown, West Virginia

• the area of McConnellsville, Ohio, between the towns of Marietta and Zanesville

• the northwest corner of Logan County, Illinois, about 25 miles south of Peoria

• an indeterminate location in southwestern Minnesota

• the thick diatomite strata of Santa Barbara County, California

• perhaps most interestingly, under the glacial ice and rock of the Kenai Peninsula in southern Alaska

In the last two cases, it was felt that the chalk-like diatomite and the glacial ice would help absorb the considerable force of a nuclear blast and thereby afford a greater measure of protection to the deeply buried facility.⁵

While I do not know if the Air Force has constructed underground installations at the 12 locations specified in the RAND report, there is no question that the Air Force does have underground installations that can be documented. One such facility, little known, is in operation near Albuquerque, New Mexico.

 

The site is referred to as the Kirtland Munitions Storage Complex by the Air Force, which for years would not comment on what was there, though speculation was rampant that the complex was a nuclear weapons storage area.

In 1949 the Air Force dug into one of the ridges in the foothills of the Manzano mountains near Albuquerque and began to fill it with tunnels and caverns.

One of the miners who helped excavate the complex personally told me of blasting out large chambers underground, 40 ft. wide, 30 ft. high, and 100 ft. long. Security during construction was so tight that as soon as his crew completed a tunnel or chamber they were pulled out and sent away to excavate another portion of the mountain.

 

This was compartmentalization of the most literal kind, intended to ensure that not even the miners who built this underground base would be familiar with its complete layout.

The miner further told me that this facility contains a covert, subterranean, nuclear weapons assembly plant. Another man I have spoken with who has been inside the facility told me that it seemed to him that the mountain contained miles of tunnels. This second man also said that there was a secret nuclear weapons assembly plant inside the mountain (See Illustration 3).

Security at the facility, which is clearly visible a couple of miles to the south of 1-40 on the eastern outskirts of Albuquerque, is extremely tight. The 3,000 acre base, actually a separate base within the Kirtland AFB/Sandia National Laboratories complex, is ringed by a 9.5 mile concentric band of four, tall, chain-link security fences, the third of which carries a lethal electrical charge, and the fourth of which is topped by coils of razor-sharp concertina wire.⁶

 

Entrance to the facility is via secure blast doors set into the mountain. Until recent years, armed police in jeeps patrolled the perimeter around the clock.

In 1989 the Air Force began construction of a second underground facility within sight of the Manzano Base. The new facility, completed in June of 1992, is also on land controlled by Kirtland Air Force Base. 95% of the new, 285,000 sq ft. bunker is below ground.

I was told by one of the Marine guards at the new facility that in addition to more prosaic security measures such as magnetically coded ID cards there are also devices that scan the palm print and retina of the eyes of each person seeking entry. But he would tell me no more about the facility than that.

According to the Air Force, whatever used to be in the Manzano complex has now been transferred to the new underground bunker. However, this sheds little light on what was transferred to the new bunker since Air Force officials have never in the first place discussed what used to be in the Manzano complex. And although the Air Force may have announced that it has vacated the mountain, it is hardly empty.

 

A recent report indicates that the Department of Energy (DOE) now occupies 50% of the Manzano bunker complex. But like the Air Force before it, the DOE is not commenting either about what it is doing in the Manzano base. Nuclear arms experts speculate that nuclear weapons are being stored in both the new bunker and the old Manzano base.⁷

 

And they may well be right.

On the other hand, even supposing that nuclear weapons are in either or both of these underground bunkers, it is still entirely possible that something more than weapons storage is happening below the surface at Kirtland. Indeed, if my two sources are correct there was in the past, and still may be, a secret nuclear weapons assembly plant underground, beneath the foothills at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Knowing from published newspaper accounts in the local Albuquerque Journal that the Department of Energy (DOE) had moved into 50% of the large underground facility on Kirtland Air Force Base, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the DOE's Washington, DC office. I asked for information about the underground facility at Kirtland.

 

I also asked for information about other underground facilities rumored to be operated by the DOE at,

• Los Alamos, New Mexico

• the huge Pantex nuclear weapons factory near Amarillo, Texas

• the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado

• an unusual electronics facility called "ICE STATION OTTO," located in a very rural area a few miles north of Moriarty, New Mexico on Highway 41

My request was sent to the DOE's Albuquerque office at Sandia/Kirtland.

 

(Sandia National Laboratories, run for decades for the Department of Energy by AT&T, are now administered by Martin Marietta. Sandia Labs are located on Kirtland Air Force Base.)

 

In their initial response to me, DOE denied that they have any records of underground facilities at any of these sites. Or, in DOE jargon, "no responsive records to your request were located."

Well, that's an interesting response, because the local newspaper has reported actual underground facilities at Kirtland AFB that are fully 50% occupied by the DOE. Once again, a government agency has refused under the Freedom of Information Act even to release information that is readily available in the public domain.

I have been told that there are underground facilities and tunnels at Los Alamos National Labs as well. But the DOE response to my request said that there were none. When I received this response I called up the appropriate DOE personnel and informed them that the FOIA office at Los Alamos was not forthcoming.

 

In reaction to my phone call the DOE again queried the Los Alamos FOIA office. Within a couple of days the DOE at Los Alamos provided a badly blurred photostatic copy of an article by Earl Zimmerman entitled "LASL'S Unusual Underground Lab," which describes an underground laboratory built in the late 1940s (See Illustration 4 for a photograph taken from inside this mysterious facility).⁸

 

But the DOE included no information as to when, or in what magazine or journal the article appeared.

 

At my request the Sandia office again called the Los Alamos DOE office for more information and was told they did not know the facts of publication of the article and that they had no other information about this underground facility.

Hmm...

Isn't it interesting that Los Alamos' first search found no records responsive to my request, but the second search did?

 

As best as I can make out from the barely legible text in the photostat of the article about the LASL, the facility was constructed in 1948-49 by the huge fabrication company of Brown & Root, Inc., of Houston, Texas.

 

The main tunnel was designed by a company called Black and Veatch, of Kansas City, Missouri. It was bored into the cliff-side of Los Alamos Canyon, at a place called TA-11 or perhaps TA-41 (owing to the poor quality of the Xerox the numbers are indistinct). Opening off of the main tunnel, which was quite large and could accommodate a large truck for nearly 250 feet of its length was a thick vault door, behind which was a high security room, containing five more, thick, vault doors containing multiple combination locks, of the sort that banks have for their vaults.

 

Behind each of these doors was a walk-in vault.

 

The whole complex was,

"lined with reinforced concrete, equipped with three sources of electric light and power, modern plumbing, forced ventilation and air conditioning."

The climate control called for a "constant humidity of about 50 percent and a temperature that remained between 40° and 60°."

 

A spur tunnel led to another room that contained an emergency diesel generator, to supply power in the event that outside sources were cut off. In an emergency batteries could also provide lighting. The complex was located beneath the Non-commissioned Officers Club.

The complex was reportedly originally built to store nuclear materials, and later converted to a fall-out shelter, designated as Shelter 41-004 (here again the numbers are indistinct). In an emergency it contained supplies to take care of 219 people for two weeks. According to the article, construction details of the 6,000 sq ft. underground facility were declassified in 1959.

Interestingly, the article says that its vaults are "still used as vaults and security is just as strict as ever." And the article alludes to the facility's use as a "pure physics" laboratory.

 

The article also mentions that the complex was associated with something called "W Division."

In subsequent communications with the DOE I received information indicating that this facility was in active use as recently as the mid-1980s.

The existence of this facility raises many questions.

 

The most logical is:

• Are there other tunnels and other high security suites of vaults and rooms deep under Los Alamos?

• And in light of persistent rumors of captive "EBEs" ⁹ held hostage at Los Alamos, was this high security, climate controlled, plumbing equipped suite of vaults really dug into the mesa as a storage site for nuclear materials - or was that just a cover story?

• Was this complex, instead, actually intended as a high security jail for alien prisoners held against their will, incommunicado behind thick steel doors, deep underground?

Certainly the time frame of 1948-1949 is suggestive, since that is the approximate time when one, possibly more, UFOs were rumored to have crashed and to have been retrieved, along with some of their occupants, by the U.S. military.

But perhaps the only secrets being protected here really did revolve around the infant nuclear industry. After all, in the late 1940s the nuclear age was still in its infancy and Los Alamos was the place where the atom bomb was developed and first produced.

 

So it would have made perfect sense to have a local, high security, underground facility for storing nuclear materials.
 

Something Old, Something New
Yet another provocative underground Air Force installation has recently been reported in the heart of California's wine country.

Within the last couple of years a secret underground installation has allegedly been covertly constructed near Oakville Grade, not far from Napa, California. Aerial photographs of the entrance to the supposed underground facility, located in rugged, mountainous terrain, show,

"large cement bunkers with large concrete doors, a new road, freshly graded."

There are also eight to ten microwave dishes pointing straight up into the sky, evidently providing satellite communications links. There has been heavy helicopter traffic to the facility, evidently to outfit and provision it. When asked about the flights the Air Force responded that they were a "classified operation."

 

According to a local newspaper the new facility is an,

"elaborate underground complex designed to hold government officials, scientists and other high echelon personnel in the event of an emergency."¹⁰

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
A big player in the underground installation business is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers - and the "regular" Army itself.
 

Given the RAND Corporation symposium in 1959, it is no surprise that in the years 1959-1961 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a five-part series of training manuals entitled Design of Underground Installations in Rock. I cannot possibly condense the entire contents of these documents here, nor will I cite them all.

 

But suffice it to say that the tone of the series assumes that there already were underground military installations, as of the late 1950s. The manuals are clearly intended for use by military engineers training for the construction and maintenance of underground facilities. Judging from the manuals, the facilities in question were intended for use as command and control centers and survival bunkers for the military brass, in the event of nuclear warfare.

Citing the failure of the Germans and Japanese to recognize early enough in WW-II the strategic importance of placing crucial facilities underground, the Army Corps concluded that it was imperative for the United States to construct vital facilities deep underground. This decision was lent extra force by the destructive power of nuclear weapons which made previous installations obsolete.

 

Significantly, one of the reports in this series, issued in 1961, says,

"Vital governmental installations have been placed underground, as exemplified by the Ritchie project."¹¹

The Ritchie project is a large, underground, military facility on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border which is discussed in some detail later in this report.

 

The interesting thing here is that already in 1961, in a publicly available document, explicit reference is made to governmental installations (plural) already having been placed underground.

Examples of the sorts of facilities the military was discussing placing underground were: communications centers, fortifications, air raid shelters, staff headquarters and offices, research facilities, shops and factories, and storage areas; and hospitals, kitchens, lavatories and sleeping areas for the use of the personnel stationed underground.

 

According to the Army Corps, some facilities were to be relatively shallow, while other,

"more important equipment and facilities essential to defense may be installed in deeper workings" that "are likely to be long and tunnel-like," occupying "one or several stories."

According to the report, such deeper facilities may be several hundred feet underground.

 

Several kinds of facilities are discussed:

1. a simple installation with a single shaft or tunnel

2. a simple installation with two or more shafts

3. a simple installation with tunnel

4. larger installations with multiple tunnels and shafts for access and ventilation.¹²

The documents provide several possible schematic layouts for underground installations (See Illustration 5 for one such schematic).

 

In addition to the tunnels giving access to the facilities there are also shafts to the surface for ventilation, heating and cooling, and for exhaust of gases from power plant machinery. The documents also show possible designs and appearances of air-intake shafts for underground facilities (Illustration 6) and how an exhaust system for an underground power plant might look (Illustration 7).

 

According to the report, sewage would be piped out of the facility and treated at a nearby plant. There would also be spray ponds, cooling towers, or other air conditioning equipment visible on the surface in the near vicinity of an underground installation, besides air-intake shafts or vents, and exhaust pipes for the power plant. Water would be supplied both from outside commercial sources and also from wells sunk near or from within the facility. Large reservoirs would be hollowed out underground to provide operational water reserves for emergencies.

 

The facilities discussed in the report would also contain kitchens, snack bars, cold storage areas, dispensaries or first aid rooms, medical facilities, personnel lounges, barracks, auditoriums and conference rooms.¹³

Readers should keep in mind that these facilities could be almost anywhere and could be quite large. According to the report, they could be constructed inside "hills or plateaus" with concealed shaft entrances.

 

There need not necessarily be any conspicuous hoist house for a vertical shaft since the,

"principal parts of a hoist plant may... be contained underground."

Tunnels could be as large as 50 ft. by 50 ft. in diameter and chambers as much as 100 ft. high. In some installations "truck or rail traffic might be important."

 

In such cases provision would have to be made for "narrow-gauge rail transportation" or "single-lane highway tunnels," or perhaps even for "two-track railroad or two-lane highway tunnels" as much as "31 ft. wide by 22 ft. high."

 

And it is possible that quite large entrances to underground facilities could open directly off of major canals, lakes, rivers, bays and even the open sea, since the report says that,

"...an installation might require entrances for barges or ships."

The manual goes on to say that,

"Landscape scars, roads, and portal structures (entrances) should be as inconspicuous as possible. Camouflage should be considered."

Actual underground layout of the chambers in the installation might be in a parallel configuration with connecting shafts and tunnels as necessary or desired for utilities, ventilation, passageways, etc.; or there might be either,

"radial chambers connected at center, ends, and at regular intervals to form a spider-web pattern," or "chambers in concentric circles or tangents with radial connections," after the manner of the Pentagon.¹⁴

Certainly, this series of official Army documents, which explicitly discusses constructing large underground installations, some set inside of hills and plateaus with concealed shafts and portals, and underground hoisting plants and water wells, perhaps with entrances for barges and ships, and maybe even with tunnels that can accommodate two lanes of truck traffic or two-track railways, ought to give considerable pause to reflect.

 

At the very minimum, they mean that at least as early as the late 1950s the Army was training its engineers to design such facilities.

 

In fact, it seems very likely that the Army has built underground facilities similar to the ones described in the five-report series. It also seems very possible that they may be camouflaged or concealed, and for that reason, hard to detect.

In a three-volume report issued in June and July of 1964 and entitled Feasibility of Constructing Large Underground Cavities, the Army Corps of Engineers sets out 12 sites across the country (See Illustration 8) where it calculated 600 ft. diameter cavities could be excavated, up to 4,000 ft. underground. The ostensible reason for constructing these huge underground caverns was to have been for conducting underground nuclear tests.

 

The idea was to "decouple" the blast by situating the explosion in a huge, deeply buried cavity. In that way, seismic energy produced by a nuclear explosion could be muffled, rendering detection (presumably by the Russians) problematic. Let me emphasize that I do not know whether any of these twelve, huge, very deeply buried cavities were ever excavated.

 

And if they were excavated, I do not know if they were used for nuclear testing or for something else.

If actual nuclear tests were carried out in large cavities, deep underground, which had the effect of greatly attenuating the explosion, making detection by the Russians difficult, then it is possible that detection was difficult for others as well. Conceivably, these others could have been local American citizens who may have merely heard what they thought was a muffled sonic boom, or felt what they perceived as an unexplained, perhaps unquestioned, short-lived rumbling underfoot.

 

But that is speculation. Maybe the cavities were never excavated. Or perhaps they were excavated, but used for another purpose unrelated to nuclear testing.

In any event, Volume I begins by observing that if the surrounding rock is structurally sound,

"...construction of a spheroidal cavity at least 200 ft. and possibly as much as 600 ft. in diameter and located 3000 to 4000 ft. below the ground surface presents no unsolvable construction problems."

It further concludes that,

"...a number of sites are available within the continental United States in which large cavities up to the maximum size considered in this report can be constructed."

The authors state that a 200 ft. cavity would require two years and $8.5 million dollars to construct.

 

The relevant time and money for a 600 ft. cavity were calculated at 3½ years and $26.7 million. And all at 3000 to 4000 ft. underground. At the time this report was issued, all of the sites in the western part of the country were on federally owned land, some of them on or near military reservations. Most of the sites were also in regions of low population density.¹⁵

Interestingly, the first report estimates that construction of a 600 ft. diameter cavity would create about 4.2 million cubic yards of rock, not including the muck (excavated rock and soil) from the construction of the access tunnel.¹⁶

 

The third report in the series estimates that construction of a 600 ft. diameter cavity and access tunnels would create about 7.0 million cubic yards of muck which could be disposed of in an 80 acre dump area (my italics).¹⁷ Both reports allude to concealing, camouflaging or blending the muck dumps into the terrain, so that construction of the tunnel and cavity would be harder to detect.

Volume I goes into lengthy geological discussions of the various sites. Interested readers should consult the document directly for more detail than can be provided here.

 

I will simply list the 12 sites, giving directions to the planned locations of the underground facilities that are as precise as possible.
 

SITE 1 - YUMA COUNTY, ARIZONA

Access via vertical or inclined shaft. The site is located either in the Gila, Copper or Cabeza Prieta Mountains, or conceivably in all three ranges. Yuma, Arizona lies 40 miles northwest of the central Gila Mts. Ajo is about 25 miles east of the boundary of the general area in question.

 

U.S. Highway 80 and the Southern Pacific Railroad cross the northern part of the area. When the report was issued parts of the area were controlled, respectively, by the Yuma U.S. Marine Corps Air Station, the U.S. Air Force Gila Auxiliary Air Force Base and a wildlife refuge.
 

SITE 2 - MOHAVE COUNTY, ARIZONA

Access via vertical shaft. The location is in the east-central Hualapai Mountains (Gila and Salt River Base Line and Meridian). The site is reached by a secondary road that heads south along the base of the range from Arizona Highway 93. Kingman is about 30 miles northwest.
 

SITE 3 - INYO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

Access via inclined shaft. The five potential sites are located in the Argus Mountains and near the town of Darwin. The report says the two most important locations, from the standpoint of geological conditions that are favorable for constructing a large, underground cavity, are sites D and E.

 

Site D is 4 miles due west of Darwin; Site E is several miles northwest of Trona, directly under Argus Peak. This is a few miles inside the boundary of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center.
 

SITE 4 - MESA AND MONTROSE COUNTIES, COLORADO

Access via vertical shaft. The areas lie in the Sinbad and Paradox Valleys; two sites, one approximately 30 miles east, and the other about 40 miles southeast, of Moab, Utah.

 

The site in Paradox Valley can be reached from Nucla, Colorado by State Route 90; the one in Sinbad Valley can be reached by State Route 141, out of Grand Junction, Colorado, and an unimproved road along Salt Creek Canyon.
 

SITE 5 - PERSHING COUNTY, NEVADA

Access via vertical or inclined shaft. The site is located in a U.S. Naval Gunnery Range in the Shawave and Nightingale Mountain Ranges. To reach the area take unimproved roads from State Highway 34. Lovelock, Nevada is 30 miles to the east and Fernley, Nevada is south 35 miles.
 

SITE 6 - MESA COUNTY, COLORADO

Access via vertical, inclined or horizontal shafts or tunnels. The location is in Unaweep Canyon, approximately 30 miles southwest of Grand Junction, Colorado. State Highway 141 runs through the area. (See Illustration 9)
 

SITE 7 - EMERY COUNTY, UTAH

Access by vertical shaft. The area is called Horse Bench and is 10 miles south of U.S. 50, and just to the southeast of State Highway 24. Green River, Utah, is about 10 miles to the northeast.
 

SITE 8 - WINKLER AND NORTHERN WARD COUNTIES, TEXAS

Access by vertical shaft. Located near the small towns of Kermit and Wink, Texas. 50 miles west of Odessa, access is by U.S. Highway 80.
 

SITE 9 - MOHAVE COUNTY, ARIZONA

Access by vertical or inclined shaft. Site is on the western edge of the Grand Wash Cliffs, at head of Grapevine Wash. The location is northwest of Kingman, accessible by secondary roads from U.S. Highway 93.
 

SITE 10 - FRANKLIN COUNTY, ALABAMA

Access by vertical shaft. The site is about 10 miles southwest from Russellville, near the small community of Gravel Hill. U.S. Highway 5 is about 5 miles to the east.
 

SITE 11 - KANSAS AND NEBRASKA GRANITIC BASEMENT AREAS

Access by vertical shaft. No specific site was chosen, as the region has many useful sites where the geology is favorable for deep underground construction. Red Willow County, Nebraska was chosen as an example.
 

SITE 12 - OGLETHORPE AND PARTS OF GREENE, WILKES AND ELBERT COUNTIES, GEORGIA

Access by vertical shaft. One proposed site is near the community of Stephens, one mile due east of Highway 77 and the Georgia Railroad.

 

There are a number of other potential sites for deep excavation in these counties in northeastern Georgia in a general area that lies about 20-30 miles from Athens.¹⁸

Any of these 12 potential sites would be fertile ground for research and investigation, even now. I would like to hear from readers who may have information about underground facilities at these locations.

Volume III of Feasibility of Constructing Large Underground Cavities is devoted to an analysis of the cost and constructability of a large cavity 4,000 feet underground, under Argus Peak, or the Southeast Peak, both located several miles to the northwest of Trona, California, within the boundary of the present-day China Lake Naval Weapons Center.

A variety of schemes for access were considered, including vertical and inclined shafts, and long horizontal tunnels, as much as three or four miles in length (See Illustration 10 for the vertical access scheme). The actual facility was planned to be hollowed out from top to bottom, with a spiraling perimeter tunnel and a large central shaft (Illustration 11).

 

Method of excavation was to be by conventional hard rock mining techniques, using truck mounted mining drills, high explosives, front end loaders, caterpillar tractors, dumptors, etc. Muck (excavated rock) would be removed from underground by either conveyor belts, trolley trucks, mining rail cars, hoists or a combination of rail cars and hoists.

 

Two tunnel sizes for access were considered:

(a) 13 ft. in width by 15.5 ft. in height

(b) 23 ft. wide by 19 ft. high.¹⁹

I would reemphasize at this juncture that I do not know whether or not any of the cavities discussed in this Army Corps of Engineers document, including the one near Trona, California, were ever excavated.

 

Clearly, a great deal of care and time was invested in this planning study; whether that care and planning translated into actual construction I do not know.

 

I would note, however, that the projected Trona, California site lies just inside the boundary of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, which has long been rumored to be the site of a massive underground installation. While I cannot speak to the truth of the rumor, I nevertheless find it suggestive that in 1964 the Army Corps of Engineers published a document that sets out in some detail a plan to construct a large, deep underground cavity at that location.

I know from direct experience that at least one U.S. Army facility does exist.

The U.S. Army operates a facility in the northern Virginia town of Warrenton. A reported underground bunker known as the U.S. Army Warrenton Training Center, this very secretive installation is supposedly a Federal Relocation Center for an unknown agency.²⁰

 

In fact, when I visited the area in the summer of 1992 I decided that there may possibly be two such sites. There are two U.S. Army facilities there, one on Rt. 802 and the other on Bear Wallow Road, on Viewtree Mountain.

 

One facility is "Station A" and the other is "Station B". Both have signs out front saying "Warrenton Training Center."

When asked about local, underground installations, the person who gave directions to these facilities said that Station B is believed to be a computing and communications facility (this may well be true, judging by the large antennae towering overhead and the AT&T microwave facility located in a field to the rear).

 

He then added,

"but no one knows what goes on at Station A."

Unfortunately, if the actions of the guard on duty at Station A when I visited are any indication the Army does not want anyone to find out, either.

As I attempted to snap a photo of the gate area from my car the guard sprang into action and bounded toward me waving his arms and angrily shouting,

"No!"

Somewhat taken aback at his reaction, which seemed out of all proportion to an innocent snapshot of a government facility, I asked him,

"Why not? I'm on a public right-of-way."

He replied even more forcefully,

"Because I said so!"

As he spoke those words, three other security personnel standing just inside the gate began to move toward me.

 

Suddenly feeling very much as if I had abruptly been stripped of citizenship in a democratic republic and had crossed over unaware into some grim netherworld ruled by military decree I gave up trying to take a picture and drove away.

Peering through the fence at the back of the installation I did notice that at Station A there are massively thick power cables that descend utility poles from large electrical transformers and disappear underground.
 

Navy Plans
If the Air Force and Army are going underground, can the Navy be far behind?

The Naval Facilities Engineering Command issued a report in 1972 that discussed placing several sorts of Navy installations underground.²¹

 

The stated reasons for planning for subsurface naval installations revolved around concerns such as cost efficiency, environmental impact of new construction and the severe land pressures facing many Navy bases, which are hemmed in by surrounding cities and towns.

 

The five sorts of facilities the report's authors recommended for underground construction were:

1. administration buildings

2. medical facilities

3. aircraft maintenance facilities

4. ammunition storage facilities

5. miscellaneous storage facilities

Interestingly, while the report is devoted to a discussion of the merits for the Navy of underground installations, there is also a brief, passing mention made of possible needs for "undersea ports" and emplacements that would service a future, submarine Navy.

 

To be sure, I have heard stories and read rumors of undersea Navy ports at various places along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States, as well as in the Great Lakes region.

 

Have they been built? Does this 1972 document hint at what is now a military reality? If you know, please send me the relevant information.

The schematic illustration of the underground weapons storage area is interesting (Illustration 12). Notice that there can be more than one level, and that the complex may extend down several hundreds of feet. Presumably, the network of shafts and tunnels could also be adapted for other uses besides weapons storage. I consider it entirely possible that these sorts of facilities have been built by the Navy.

But the Navy isn't just interested in underground bomb 'n' submarine parking garages. They're also interested in your telephone calls.

The U.S. Navy runs a secret electronics facility near the isolated mountain community of Sugar Grove, West Virginia, on the Virginia-West Virginia line. The purpose of the installation, which works out of a two-story underground operations center, is to spy on microwave communications traffic for the National Security Agency (NSA).

 

This illegal and unconstitutional activity is a serious military violation of civil liberties as set forth in the Bill of Rights.²²

But if the government doesn't very much care about your rights to privacy, it certainly cares a lot about its own right to secrecy. Especially when it comes to fighting war. In particular, the big one.

 

Back to Contents
 

 

Chapter Three

The Ultimate War Rooms - Fighting the Big One From Deep Underground

A 1989 article in U.S. News & World Report stated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Pentagon administer approximately 50 secret underground command posts around the country, where the president might flee in the event of a nuclear war.

 

(Although FEMA is perceived as a "civilian" federal agency, in reality FEMA and the Pentagon work closely together.)

 

Each of these underground bunkers is "equipped to function as an emergency White House." The article specifically cites the FEMA "Special Facility" at Mount Weather and the Pentagon back-up facility called Raven Rock, or Site R, located along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, and operated by Fort Ritchie (see the next page for more on the Ritchie facility).

 

Supposedly, in the event of a nuclear crisis, 1,000 civilian and military officials would be rushed to these secret bunkers. They would take refuge there while the rest of the country muddled through the ensuing radioactive holocaust as best it could.1 In reality, given the number of secret bunkers cited (50), it seems that the number of personnel who would be evacuated would be considerably higher.

The logical question is: where are the underground command posts and bunkers?

 

The answer is not an easy one, since by their very nature these facilities are hard to find. To begin with, they are all underground. Some of them are on military bases. Virtually all of them have been constructed behind a veil of secrecy and high security. And all of them continue to operate under considerable security.

Nevertheless, at least a partial answer can be provided, because the locations of some of the underground bunkers are known.

 

And information is also available about the function of some of them and what they contain.
 

THE PENTAGON - NORTHERN VIRGINIA

As might be suspected, the Department of Defense has burrowed underneath the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia and established a sophisticated facility called the "National Military Command Center."
 

"SITE R" AKA "RAVEN ROCK" OR THE RITCHIE FACILITY

In the hills of southern Pennsylvania, near the small town of Blue Ridge Summit, is the home of the "Underground Pentagon."

 

Run by nearby Fort Ritchie, since the 1950s the facility has been a major electronic nerve center for the U.S. military.

 

This huge installation, known as "Raven Rock" or "Site R," was blasted out of the native granite known as greenstone and lies 650 ft. below the surface. The 265,000 sq. ft. facility which sprawls beneath 716 acres is comprised of five different buildings in specially excavated separate caverns.

 

It normally is staffed by about 350 people. Access to Raven Rock is by way of portals set into the mountainside. Its corridors are lit by fluorescent lights and it contains a wide variety of amenities including a convenience store; barbershop; medical, dining and fitness facilities; a subterranean reservoir that contains millions of gallons of water; a chapel; 35 miles of telephone lines; and six 1,000 kilowatt generators.

 

"Site R" has long functioned as a sort of second Pentagon and is equipped as a supercomputing and electronic command post linked with numerous military communications networks all over the globe. Local rumor has it that "Site R" is connected by tunnel to the presidential hideaway at Camp David, several miles away in northern Maryland, near the town of Thurmont.

 

According to a recent press report, with the thawing of the Cold War "Site R" has gone to a standby status and will be staffed at a lower level than in the past.²
 

THE WHITE HOUSE - WASHINGTON, D.C.

There is a large, sophisticated bunker complex under the basement of the White House in Washington, D.C.

 

Dating back at least to the Eisenhower administration, special forces were ready to tunnel down and extract the President from deep underground in the event a nuclear holocaust reduced everything above to rubble.

But just how extensive - and deep - is this complex?

 

One source I have personally interviewed claims that there are many, many levels below the basement of the White House, that keep going down and down. On one occasion during the Lyndon Johnson administration (in the 1960s), this source was sent to deliver some papers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

 

Upon arrival, my source was escorted by two Secret Service agents to an elevator in an area of the White House that is not open to the public. They entered the elevator and went down for what the source remembers as 17 levels. When the elevator doors opened they stepped out into a corridor covered on the walls, ceiling and floor with beige, ceramic tiles. The corridor was very long, stretching away in the distance to the vanishing point.

 

According to my source, other corridors and doors opened off the main corridor.

 

The fluorescent lighting was recessed in the ceiling. There was a man sitting at a desk by the elevator doors. The papers were delivered to a man in a room that opened off of the corridor and then my source was escorted back to the elevator, back to the surface and out of the White House. All of the men appeared to be Secret Service agents and were dressed in dark, business suits.

 

The person who related this story to me had the impression there were even more levels below the 17^th level. Why papers from HUD had to be delivered to the subterranean bowels of the White House, my source did not know.

 

Whatever the actual size of this underground installation may be, clearly there is far more to the White House than is apparent from driving by on Pennsylvania Avenue.
 

KANEOHE - HAWAII

There is also an underground installation at Kaneohe, in Hawaii, connected with U.S. Pacific Fleet operations.
 

CAMP DAVID - MARYLAND

At the presidential retreat in northern Maryland, there is "an ultrasensitive underground command post" for the use of the president in an emergency.

 

During the Eisenhower administration this command post was run by a group of military officers known as the "Naval Administrative Unit." ³
 

OMAHA - NEBRASKA

And at Offutt Air Force Base, in Omaha, Nebraska, there is an underground command post for the Strategic Air Command.⁴

Unfortunately, I know little more about these installations than I have set forth here. And that's just the point - I'm not supposed to know, and neither are you. In the event of nuclear war, we'll be nuclear missile fodder while the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff huddle underground figuring out how to bounce the rubble one more time. For that type of arrangement to work, you need secrecy, and lots of it.

In a time of nuclear war, or during some other crisis, when the politicians and military planners go underground, where will they get the information they need to make decisions?

 

Some of the most important information will come from - you guessed it - other underground facilities, among them the NORAD facilities described below.
 

NORAD AT CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN - COLORADO

For subterranean privacy, try Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operates perhaps the best known of the major underground bases.

This super-secret facility is located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Here's where the latest space, missile, and air-traffic information is gathered, using state-of-the-art equipment, and fed to military and civilian decision makers.

Planning for the subterranean, 4.5 acre, 15 building complex began in 1956. Construction was started in 1961. The Utah Mining and Engineering Company of San Francisco did the excavating, under the supervision of the Omaha District of the Army Corps of Engineers. The large engineering firm of Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Quade and Douglas was also involved on the project.

 

In 1966 NORAD moved in and began underground operations.

Jointly staffed by United States and Canadian military personnel, the installation constantly monitors all space traffic in and around the earth, all missile launches worldwide, submarine movements and air defenses for North America. This NORAD base is also the National Warning Center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). This is the place from which civil defense warnings for Canada and the U.S. are initiated.⁵

About 1,700 personnel operate the facility around the clock, including a night shift of 300 people.

 

A 4,675 ft. tunnel bores straight through the mountain. The entrance tunnel is 22.5 ft. high and 29 ft. wide, while the central access tunnel, that branches off the entrance tunnel, is 25 ft. high and 45 ft. wide.

 

Three hundred and fifty hardrock miners, working in three shifts, excavated almost 700,000 tons of granite to construct the facility. The NORAD base is stocked with 30 days of contingency supplies, including enough fuel to run its six diesel generators for 30 days. It also has underground reservoirs, hewn out of solid rock, that hold six million gallons of water for cooling purposes and for use by personnel for domestic purposes.

 

Its 25 ton, hydraulic-operated blast doors, that open off of the access tunnel, well inside the mountain, can open or shut in just 45 seconds. Hardened microwave channels and coaxial cables provide essential communications links for the state-of-the-art electronic and computer systems inside the facility.⁶

 

(See Illustration 50 for schematic diagrams of how these communication links might look.)
 

NORAD AT NORTH BAY - ONTARIO, CANADA

This deep underground command center, which is located about 200 miles north of Toronto, is also jointly staffed by both Canadian and U.S. military personnel.

 

The North Bay installation became operational in October 1963 and consists of two huge caverns, bored out of the solid rock, hundreds of feet under the Pre-Cambrian Shield. The two huge caverns, each 400 ft. long, by 60 to 70 ft. high and 45 ft. wide, are connected by three cross tunnels. Inside the caverns, just as at Colorado Springs, three-story buildings have been constructed to house personnel and equipment.

 

There are two access tunnels, the one about 6,600 ft. long and 12 ft. by 12 ft., the other about 3,500 ft. in length and 16 ft. by 16 ft. Inside are 142,000 sq ft. of floor space, filled with offices, communications and computer equipment, and defense radars that cover the northern sectors of North American air space.

There are also kitchen and dining facilities that can accommodate 400 people, a hospital and infirmary, washrooms and showers, a "well equipped canteen," and space for people to rest and sleep. Power is supplied by six generators that are normally fueled by natural gas piped down from the surface. Under emergency conditions the generators would run off of diesel fuel stored underground in the complex.

 

During normal operations, water for equipment cooling and personnel use is obtained from nearby Trout Lake. But during emergency "button-up" conditions water would come from underground reservoirs specially excavated for use when the facility was sealed off from the outside.

 

One reservoir holds 200,000 gallons for domestic use, and the other contains five million gallons for air conditioning and equipment cooling.⁷
 

Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
There are other secret underground government command facilities.

 

Many of them are operated by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA usually pops up in the news as the lead federal agency charged with hurricane or flood relief efforts.

 

But FEMA has another side as well - a secret, underground side.
 

MOUNT WEATHER - BLUEMONT, VIRGINIA

The hub of the FEMA subterranean network is located inside Mount Weather, near the small town of Bluemont, in northern Virginia.

 

This top-secret base was constructed in the 1950s to house the United States government in the event of a national crisis such as nuclear war. Funded by "black" money, Mount Weather remains nearly as inaccessible to scrutiny as it was when first built. Although it is the headquarters for FEMA's far-flung underground empire it does not even appear in the agency's published budget.

 

Security is tight at the installation, which is surrounded by a 10-ft. perimeter fence patrolled by armed guards. There are a few buildings above ground, but most of the real work of Mt. Weather takes place deep below, in great secrecy. The mountain contains what amounts to a small town.

 

The infrastructure includes:

• a small lake

• a pair of 250,000 gallon water tanks, capable of supplying water for 200 people for over a month

• a number of ponds 10 ft. deep and 200 ft. across, blasted out of solid rock

• a sewage plant capable of treating 90,000 gallons per day

• a hospital

• a cafeteria

• streets and sidewalks

• a diesel powered electrical generating plant

• private living quarters and dormitories able to accommodate hundreds of residents

• a sophisticated, internal communications system using closed-circuit color TV consoles

• a radio and TV studio

• massive super-computing facilities

• a "situation room" equipped with communications links to the White House and "Site R" in southern Pennsylvania

• a transit system of electric cars that transport personnel around the complex

According to published reports, some of the hundreds of people who work inside the mountain routinely stage practice drills for managing a wide variety of potential crises, ranging from civil disturbances and economic problems, to natural disasters and nuclear war.⁸

Speaking off the record, in the mid-1970s government officials stated that, in fact, Mt. Weather houses a resident, back-up government.

 

Many federal departments and agencies are represented there, including,

• the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, HUD, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation and the Treasury

• agencies such as FEMA, the Office of the President, the U.S. Postal Service, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Reserve, Selective Service, the Federal Power Commission, the Civil Service Commission and others

These highly placed government sources maintain that the administrators of the Federal departments at Mt. Weather hold cabinet-level rank and are referred to as "Mr. Secretary" by the personnel who work under them.

 

These covert "Secretaries" are said to keep their positions over the course of more than one administration, their terms not being limited by the presidential election cycles that govern the terms of office of their Washington counterparts.⁹

 

These are sensational allegations, but if they are true, then the political news we are fed in the mainstream media must be fictional to some, unknown degree and the system governing us is controlled to that same unknown degree by agencies and officials who work in great secrecy, literally underground and totally unaccountable to the citizenry of the United States.

Mount Weather serves as a hub for a system of other underground installations and bunkers, known as Federal Relocation Centers. These are located within a 300 mile radius of Washington, DC known as the "Federal Arc."

 

Key government officials and personnel would be evacuated to these centers in the event of nuclear war as part of the Continuity of Government Plan (COG). Besides Mt. Weather, there are said to be an additional 96 of these centers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.¹⁰

Presumably, at least some of the approximately 50 secret, underground command posts mentioned earlier in the discussion of military facilities would be among these 96 centers in the FEMA Continuity of Government system.

 

Among other things, the centers are said to contain data files and computer systems maintained by a variety of Federal agencies, and are supervised by the facility at Mount Weather.¹¹

A 1991 Jack Anderson column in The Washington Post reported that the COG system was created by the Reagan administration and consists of a,

"$5 billion network of bunkers filled with high-tech communications equipment at secret locations around the country."¹²

Just how many of these secret centers were newly constructed during the 1980s, and how many are older facilities that the Reagan administration merely converted to its purposes (expanded, remodeled and modernized) is not known.

 

My guess is that at least some of the dozens of secret COG facilities are mentioned in this book.

 

Of course, that would leave dozens of others which are not.
 

MOUNT PONY, CULPEPER, VIRGINIA

There are several underground installations either known, or alleged, to exist in the five-state "Federal Arc" area.

 

The best known is probably the large bunker complex that lies under Mount Pony, a couple of miles east of Culpeper, Virginia, just off of Rt. 3 in the northern part of the state. Although one published report identifies this underground facility as the emergency relocation center for the Treasury Department, two other reports, local rumor and the sign by the front gate identify the installation as a "Federal Reserve Center."

 

Constructed in the late 1960s, the 140,000 sq ft. facility is said to be supplied with water, food, a generator, communications equipment and even cold-storage for corpses. One source who formerly worked in the Culpeper area told me it is believed that the Federal Reserve stockpiles very large supplies of United States currency there. Indeed, 5 billion dollars are reportedly stored under Mt. Pony.

But this is not a dormant facility, waiting for Armageddon before springing to life. From its underground vantage point in Culpeper the Federal Reserve constantly monitors all major financial transactions in the United States.

 

It does this by means of the "Fed Wire," a modern, electronic system that permits it to keep track of all major business and banking activity that occurs.¹⁵

 

Why does the Federal Reserve need a secure, underground bunker to monitor the nation's economic life?

 

I don't pretend to know, but clearly, judging by the intermittent traffic going in and out the front gate on the day I visited, the Mount Pony bunker is in active use and doing something.

As it happens, just six weeks after my mid-June 1992 visit to the Federal Reserve's Mount Pony bunker a cover story appeared in Time Magazine that dealt, in part, with that very installation.

 

The story said that, as of July 1992,

"the facility's mission will no longer be needed."¹⁶

My opinion is that this may well be disinformation.

 

I doubt very much that the Federal Reserve has really abandoned its bunker in Culpeper. And even if the bunker really were to be emptied out, my suspicion is that the contents would merely be transferred to another, more secure location, quite likely also underground.

For what it is worth, I had spoken on the phone with the Time Magazine article's author just a few days after visiting the Mount Pony bunker.

 

He wanted to know where I found my information about underground bunkers and installations, and so I mentioned a few of the installations to him that I knew about at that time.
 

FEMA IN OLNEY, MARYLAND

Another, less well known, underground installation is located on Riggs Road, off of Rt. 108, between Olney and Laytonsville, MD.

 

Although it has been reported that there are actually two such facilities, a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) civil defense bunker in Olney and a bunker operated by an unknown government agency in Laytonsville,17 a recent visit to the area turned up only one site, midway between the two towns.

 

If there is another bunker in the vicinity it is sufficiently well concealed that it is hard to spot. While it is not clear to passers-by who operates the facility on Riggs Road, since there are only generic United States government "NO TRESPASSING" signs posted on the security fence that surrounds the complex, this site is reportedly the backup command center for FEMA's day-to-day operations.¹⁸

 

When I arrived the gate was open and no one was in the guard house. However, a prominently placed sign did advise that the entrance area was under electronic surveillance. So presumably, any unauthorized intrusion would not go unchallenged.

The one building visible from outside the fence is in an advanced state of disrepair and gives every appearance of having been vacant for some years. However, the real work at this site takes place beneath the surface. One former Maryland resident who told me of the site spoke of seeing a long line of cars heading through the gate when shifts change and disappearing behind a slight rise in the near distance.

 

I did speak with one man who had been inside the place many years ago on a school field trip. He remembers going down two or three levels and seeing an underground office complex and electronics facilities.

 

This is not surprising given the large number and variety of aerials and antennae visible on the surface.

 

Both this man and another local with whom I spoke said that the bunker is believed to extend as deep as ten levels underground.
 

THE GREENBRIAR HOTEL, WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, WEST VIRGINIA

Recent revelations about a large, secret bunker beneath the posh Greenbriar Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia make clear that it is entirely possible to keep the existence of a large, underground installation out of the public eye for decades on end.

 

Until the story broke in the last week of May 1992 only six members of Congress knew that between 1958 and 1961 a warren of living quarters, meeting rooms, and banks of computers and communications equipment had been installed underground beneath the hotel, located about 250 miles southwest of Washington, DC in the Allegheny mountains.

 

Situated behind two giant blast doors, each weighing more than 20 tons, and supplied with water, electricity and sewage treatment, the complex is large enough to house eight hundred people.

 

It contains,

• a large dormitory

• an infirmary

• shower facilities

• a television studio

• radio and communications equipment

• phone booths and code machines

• a dining and kitchen area

• a power plant

• a crematorium for getting rid of the corpses of those who might die inside the sealed bunker

According to published reports, the bunker was constructed to shelter the United States Congress in the event of a nuclear attack.¹⁹

Of course, the obvious question is:

in the certain chaos of an impending nuclear war, how could the hundreds of members of Congress take shelter in a distant bunker that most of them did not even know existed?

According to press reports, only a few local people, the hotel management and maintenance staff, a handful of government officials, and other government personnel with a "need-to-know" appear to have been aware of the installation.

 

Could it be that the bunker has, or had, another purpose which is not being divulged?

 

After all, if the bunker itself was kept secret for over 30 years isn't it conceivable that there is more to the story than has so far been publicly admitted?
 

FEDERAL REGIONAL CENTERS

In addition to the huge bunker at Mt. Weather and bunkers in the neighboring states, FEMA also operates underground installations at other sites around the country.

 

Reported locations for these facilities, designated as Federal Regional Centers, are:

• Santa Rosa, California

• Denver, Colorado

• Thomasville, Georgia

• Maynard, Massachusetts

• Battle Creek, Michigan

• Denton, Texas

• Bothell, Washington ²⁰

There are probably others; these are the ones that can be identified from the public record.

I did file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with FEMA asking where their underground facilities were located.

 

Even though information about underground FEMA sites is readily available in the public domain, FEMA refused to name them, citing national security provisions of Executive Order 12356, although they did list the following FEMA facilities in a letter to me: ²¹

 

 

The observant reader will note that I have already identified 10 of the facilities listed above as underground FEMA installations.

I do not know if any of the other facilities listed in the FEMA response to my request include an underground component. My guess is that some, or all of them, well may. I welcome information from readers who can tell me more.
 

The Defense Nuclear Agency
In 1975 the Defense Nuclear Agency published a detailed, geological study that discussed dozens of possible sites all over the country for very deeply based military installations - as much as 5,000 ft. underground.²²

 

Some of these prospective sites are relatively large in area, while others are fairly limited in geographic extent.

 

Most of them are in the West; a few are located in the mid-West and on the Eastern Seaboard. The report delineated the sites as follows:

East
Adirondack Mountains, New York (in vicinity of Elizabethtown)

3 sites in Central New Hampshire Area to northwest of Portland, Maine Northeastern, Central and South Central Virginia
 

Mid-West

St. Francois Mountains, Missouri (between St. Louis and New Madrid)

Northern Wisconsin (general area between Chippewa Falls, Wausau and Florence)
Minnesota River Valley (generally 30-40 miles south of Benson and about 50 miles southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul)
 

West

Southeastern Wyoming Rio Grande River Valley, New Mexico (to west and north of Taos; area of special interest 20-30 miles north of Taos, near Colorado border)
Pedernal Hills, New Mexico (60-70 miles east-southeast of Albuquerque)

Zuni Mountains, New Mexico (100 miles due west of Albuquerque, south of 1-40)

La Sal Mountains, Utah (20 miles southeast of Moab)

Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (large area 350 miles long by 50 miles wide)

Idaho Batholith (large area in central Idaho, north of Boise)

South Central Idaho (under Snake River lava flows between Twin Falls and Idaho Falls)

Holbrook, Arizona (general vicinity)

 

 

Northwestern

Arizona (north of Seligman)

Ash Fork and Williams, Arizona (general vicinity)

Black Mesa Basin, Arizona (under Hopi and Navajo Reservations)
Book Cliffs-Uncompahgre Uplift. Area along Utah-Colorado border (in general vicinity of and to south of Grand Junction, Colorado)
Monument Uplift and Blanding Basin, Utah (southeastern part of state near towns of Blanding and Mexican Hat)

San Rafael Swell, Utah (west of town of Green River)
 

Extreme West

Central Utah (area 30-40 miles west of towns of Delta and Minersville)
Southwestern Utah (area between towns of Cedar City and Panguitch)

Nuclear Test Site, southern Nevada Central Nevada (50 mile radius of town of Tonopah)
Northwestern Nevada (50 to 100 miles east and northeast of Carson City)
 

Special Sites
Washington, D.C. (surrounding area in Virginia and Maryland)

Omaha, Nebraska (general vicinity)

Readers should bear in mind that any installations that may have been built in these areas are likely to be well hidden, and very deeply buried. In addition, since the areas are often rather large, the directions provided are of necessity only a general guide to the location of possible installations.

 

After all, the geological formations of interest to the Pentagon for subterranean bases usually extend for miles.

 

Also, entrances to underground facilities may be some distance away from the base itself. So finding these places is not necessarily an easy task. My guess is that some of these sites have been used for underground base construction over the last 20 years.

 

Readers who may have information about the presence of underground bases at any of these sites are urged to get in contact with me.
 

Deep "Black" Underground: The Oliver North Connection
In Oliver North's autobiography, Under Fire, he briefly mentions an extremely secret government program called "The Project."

 

According to North, for a year and a half during Reagan's first term he was the "de facto administrator of The Project" and coordinated a group of expert advisors known as the "Wise Men."

 

The work of the Wise Men and The Project entailed providing for the survival of the United States government in the event of a nuclear war.

 

North specifically says that he wrote policy directives pertaining to The Project which President Reagan signed, and that he also often briefed then Vice-President George Bush about The Project. While North does not say precisely how The Project was carried out he does mention that the Soviet Union had "a network of secret tunnels under Moscow" to which its leaders would flee in time of war, while the United States had nothing comparable.²³

 

By implication, then, The Project would seem to have provided a similar capability for the United States.

In fact, it seems that The Project did involve an extensive underground construction program. In April 1994 a front page story in the New York Times announced the existence of a previously undisclosed program known as "The Doomsday Project."

 

According to the story, the project was an "amalgam of more than 20 'black programs'" during the Reagan administration, supervised by George Bush, with some involvement by Oliver North. It reportedly cost some $8 billion to build and took eleven years to complete. The Doomsday Project was concerned with the survival of the federal government in the event of nuclear war.

 

The project involved many people, including,

"White House officials, Army generals, CIA officers and private companies."

Of direct interest for readers of this book is the fact that the Pentagon built "scores of secret bunkers" as part of something called the "Presidential Survivability Support System."²⁴

 

It is my educated guess that many of these "secret bunkers" would be located in the areas and locations set forth in previously discussed documents generated by the Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Air Force Project RAND and the Defense Nuclear Agency.
 

Last But Not Least: Underground Command Center For Sale
And finally, this through-provoking footnote to our tour of underground strategic command centers: As of 1992 there was a decommissioned Strategic Air Command bunker for sale in Amherst, Massachusetts.

 

The 44,000 sq ft. bunker is three stories high, buried under a mountain, blast-proof, climate-controlled, with a glassed-in command theater. It was for sale for just $250,000.²⁵

 

There are a couple of interesting things about this piece of information.

• First, the size and location of this bunker underscore the fact that underground facilities and installations can literally be almost anywhere.

• Second, the fact that SAC is getting rid of it on the open real estate market means that it must be obsolete. So obsolete that they don't care who goes inside, and they don't care who knows where it is.

One obvious conclusion would be that the Pentagon now has something better, somewhere else.

 

Back to Contents
 

 

Chapter Four

More Underground Facilities - Military, Government, Nuclear and Business

Although I've been told that the Pentagon operates many other underground facilities here in the United States, perhaps dozens more than I've discussed so far, in this chapter, as in the previous chapter, I will err on the conservative side and report only on those underground installations for which I can provide some form of tangible documentation.

Along with military installations I also report on facilities run by other branches of the government, and on some run by private business. Currently, I can positively verify just seven underground corporate facilities. I strongly suspect there are many more. I welcome information in that regard from readers who know of other underground corporate facilities.

But whether it's the Navy or the Federal Reserve or private industry, they all seem to have one thing foremost in their minds: S-E-C-R-E-C-Y.
 

ATCHISON, KANSAS

At Atchison, Kansas the Pentagon operates (or used to operate) the Defense Industrial Plant Equipment Facility (DIPEF). This huge underground warehouse facility, with 987,000 total square ft. of space, is a converted and remodeled limestone mine.

 

The facility is serviced by underground roadways that make it easy to move the thousands of items of machine tools and industrial equipment stockpiled there. Half of the underground area is paved with concrete and the entire facility is climate controlled.

 

As of 1974, 138 people were employed at the DIPEF.¹
 

THE FEDERAL RESERVE

A 1981 Wall Street Journal article says that,

"Nine of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks have underground emergency quarters, where records are updated daily."

I do not know where most of these underground emergency centers are, or how elaborate they are.

 

Neither do I know exactly what kind of records are kept in them. However, since the Federal Reserve is the agency that controls national monetary policy I would speculate that the records it keeps in these underground centers might well have to do with the national money supply and the daily affairs of the world of high finance.

 

Moreover, since we are living in a computerized, electronic era of instantaneous telecommunication I would speculate further that these underground centers might contain sophisticated computing and communications systems.

 

But all this is speculation on my part, since I have never been in the Federal Reserve's underground facilities.²

 

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY - FT. MEADE, MARYLAND

Beneath the National Security Agency's headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland are "cavernous subterranean expanses," said to be filled with more than ten acres of the most sophisticated supercomputers that money can buy.³

 

The NSA operates in tremendous secrecy; however, it is a safe bet based on what is known about the agency that these computers are engaged in a massive surveillance of much of the world's telephone, telegraph, telex, fax, radio, TV and microwave communications, including surveillance of domestic, internal U.S. communications by ordinary citizens.

 

In a word, Big Brother is already here, and his name is "NSA."
 

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S NEVADA TUNNELS AND INSTALLATIONS

The DOE also has many underground tunnels and installations in Nevada.

 

Most of the DOE activity appears to be conducted at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), where the Department of Defense (DOD) and the DOE have for decades been excavating tunnel complexes for underground testing of nuclear weapons (See Illustrations 13 and 14).

These tunnel networks can be quite elaborate (See Illustration 15). The DOE and DOD sometimes reuse the tunnels; other times they are apparently abandoned. Their usual practice is to pack the tunnels with all sorts of sophisticated, hi-tech equipment and machinery to monitor the blasts (See Illustrations 16 and 17).

 

Much of the monitoring takes place within thousandths of a second, even millionths of a second after the nuclear device detonates.

I do not know the purpose of all of the hundreds of underground nuclear blasts (a number that seems excessively high) detonated by the DOD and the DOE; I only know that there have been many, many of them and that there are many tunnels under the nuclear test site. I do not know where all of the tunnels are, what they are all used for, or how extensive the interconnections between them are, providing such interconnections exist at all.

Like many students of UFOlogy I have heard rumors and read anecdotal accounts that allege there are extensive underground complexes for living and working under the Nevada Test Site. I am inclined to think some of these accounts may be true, but I cannot provide factual documentation that demonstrates that such facilities exist.

 

The DOE also operated a test facility at the NTS in the early 1980s, deep underground, for storing nuclear waste (See Illustration 18).
 

THE NUCLEAR WASTE DEPOSITORY AT YUCCA MOUNTAIN, NEVADA

Evidently the nuclear waste storage tests in the early 1980s were successful, or at least encouraging, because in 1991 and 1992 the DOE actively solicited companies for construction of a deep underground tunnel complex inside and beneath Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as another "test" depository for nuclear waste.

 

The actual name of the facility is the "Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project, Exploratory Studies Facility (ESF)."

 

The solicitations were for companies that can provide:

• tunnel boring machines (TBMs) capable of boring tunnels of 25 ft. to 30 ft. in diameter

• mobile miners and other mining equipment for excavating tunnels

• conveyors and muck removal systems

• underground ventilation, water and power supply systems

• all requisite support facilities, buildings, roads and equipment for excavating and maintaining a major, underground complex

Construction was slated to begin in November 1992.

 

Reynolds Electrical & Engineering Co., Inc., which is the Prime Management and Operations Contractor for the Nevada Operations Office of the Department of Energy, is the company that will supervise construction and carry out the actual testing at the facility when it is constructed.

The plans call for 14 miles of underground tunnels and ramps, ranging from 14 ft. to 25 ft. in diameter, with grades as steep as - 16%. Since the facility also is slated to contain a 1,300 ft. vertical shaft, by implication the complex will be at least 1,300 ft. beneath the surface.

Here again, as with so much of what goes on underground, it is hard to say what the DOE is up to. Maybe they really are making a test facility for long-term storage (10,000 years) of nuclear waste. Or maybe the high-security curtain of the Nevada Test Site provides a convenient screen behind which the DOE can carry out other, more secret projects, under the public relations rubric of a nuclear waste "test" facility.

 

The trail of lies at the DOE, and at its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), is so long where things nuclear are concerned it is hard to know when to trust the public relations rhetoric and press releases.

 

The more so, since no one without a security clearance (people like the author of this book, for instance) is usually allowed anywhere near these facilities, let alone permitted to actually go underground to poke around to see what is there.⁴
 

LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO

At a June 1983 scientific conference in Lake Tahoe, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (which is located in northern New Mexico, but run by the University of California) put forward a proposal for a "National Underground Science Facility" to be constructed deep beneath the Nuclear Test Site in southern Nevada.

 

The proposal called for the facility to be built 3,500 ft. underground, with the possibility of extending it as deep as 6,000 ft. Initially, Los Alamos envisioned two experimental test chambers for doing particle physics, gravity experiments and geophysical studies. The facility would also include machine and electronic shops, a small computer, and dormitory space.⁵

 

Whether or not this installation was built I do not know. But, even if it wasn't, the fact that a government agency was actively planning to go as far down as 6,000 ft. to construct a manned scientific facility gives an idea of how deeply based these underground installations can be.

 

Most of the underground facilities I identify in this book range anywhere from tens to hundreds of feet underground. However, it is quite possible that there are bases that are thousands of feet underground. Researchers and students of this subject should be prepared to think of bases located as much as a mile or more beneath the surface.

 

That may seem implausibly deep, but I promise the reader that at the Pentagon there are planners who have commissioned studies calling for military bases to be built as deep underground as 8,000 feet below the surface of the earth - that's over a mile and a half down!

 

Those plans are discussed later in this book.
 

STANDARD OIL CO. OF NEW JERSEY

As recently as 1970 Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey operated an emergency center 300 ft. underground in upstate New York, near Hudson. The facility was formerly known as Iron Mountain Atomic Storage.

 

The site contained company records,

"vaults, dining halls and more than 50 sleeping rooms for key company officials and their families." ⁶

More recent reports indicate this facility is now used for storage of corporate records.
 

NORTHROP

In the Antelope Valley of southern California, near the towns of Rosamond, Palmdale and Lancaster are three mysterious underground facilities, operated by Northrop, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas. (See Illustration 19).

 

The Northrop facility is located near the Tehachapi Mountains, 25 miles to the northwest of Lancaster. There are rumors that the installation there goes down as many as 42 levels, and that there are tunnels linking it with other underground facilities in the area. I do not know whether these rumors are true or not.

 

There are also reports of many strange flying objects in the vicinity, of many shapes and sizes.

 

Some are reportedly spherical, others are alleged to be triangular, elongated, boomerang or disk shaped. And they are said to range in size up to hundreds of feet in diameter. The facility itself is engaged in electronic or electromagnetic research of some sort. There are large radar or microwave dishes and strange looking pylons to which various objects can be affixed, ostensibly for the purpose of beaming electromagnetic radiation at them.

 

These pylons rise up from underground out of diamond-shaped openings in the middle of long, paved surfaces that resemble aircraft runways, but which, in fact, are not used by aircraft.
 

MCDONNELL DOUGLAS

The McDonnell Douglas facility is located at the now closed Gray Butte airport, northeast of Llano, California. It too has "runways" that are not runways, with diamond-shaped openings through which huge pylons with strangely shaped objects mounted on them are raised to the surface.

 

These objects sometimes resemble elongated disks or flying saucers and have been seen to glow and change colors. Glowing spheres have also been seen by people in the area at night.

 

However, the nature and function of the spheres is not known.
 

LOCKHEED

The Lockheed installation is adjacent to what used to be the Hellendale auxiliary airport, six miles to the north of Hellendale, California.

 

Just like the McDonnell Douglas and Northrop facilities it also has the runway-like features, with large, diamond-shaped doors through which huge pylons rise from underground with strange objects attached. This facility also has an obvious underground entrance. (See Illustrations 20 and 21.)

To compound the high strangeness of these California facilities, there are ominous reports of covert military activity associated with them, possible alien activity (and I emphasize possible), possible abductions and lost time episodes, and numerous sightings of extremely unconventional aircraft and flying objects, to which I have already alluded.⁷
 

AMERICAN TELEPHONE & TELEGRAPH

A 1981 report revealed that AT&T had seven "emergency centers" in separate regions of the country.

 

At least three of these were underground complexes. Near Netcong, New Jersey, to the west of New York City, AT&T buried a three-story emergency center in the granite, 40 ft. below ground.

 

In the center were,

"...executive living quarters, a control room and a computer (with) the data bank for AT&Ts entire system."

Also in the center were a,

"kitchen, a month's supply of food for 100 people, sleeping quarters and emergency generators."

Facilities like the one at Netcong were also located at Rockdale, Georgia and Fairview, Kansas.8 And I have been told there are others all over the country, in isolated rural areas.

 

One of these underground AT&T communications facilities is said to be located in Catron County, New Mexico.⁹

In the preceding pages I have set out dozens of known underground facilities, installations and bases.

 

Some of these are quite complex and sophisticated installations, capable of supporting large numbers of people in some degree of comfort. Some are operated by the military, or other branches of government, and some are run by Fortune 500 companies in the military-industrial complex. I have also presented information on dozens of other possible sites where the military was contemplating building deep underground installations.

By now it should be clear that underground bases and installations could literally be just about anywhere:

• under a military base

• under a major hotel

• under a prominent government building

• under old, abandoned mine workings

• under virtually any mountain or hill

• under a national park, or perhaps in a national forest

• in a small town

• in the middle of a large city - maybe even deep under an Alaskan glacier

And as the Army Corps of Engineers documents spell out, these underground facilities could be - and in many cases probably are - well camouflaged and concealed, making detection by a casual observer difficult.

The purpose and function of many of these facilities appear to be related to either the waging or the surviving of nuclear war - or both. Of course, many other agendas and projects could conceivably be carried out in these underground installations as well.

 

Let your mind run - secret scientific research? Super-secure prisons where people are secretly detained incommunicado? Extraterrestrial living areas?

I must confess that while I don't have many answers, at the least it does seem certain that the southern California Lockheed, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas facilities mentioned above are heavily engaged in nonconventional, hi-tech aerospace research.

 

And while there are stories floating around in UFO circles about bizarre, Nazi-style genetic engineering programs being conducted in underground facilities by "Little Grey" aliens and the U.S. military I can offer no proof that such programs exist. They may exist; they equally may not.

As for the possibility of secret, underground prisons: I will simply observe that many people absolutely disappear in this country every year, never to be heard from again. No bodies are found, no trace of them ever surfaces. I don't know where these people go; I don't know what happens to them. I can offer no proof that any of them are held in secret underground prisons.

 

I cannot even offer any proof that there are secret, underground prisons. However, it occurs to me that at the end of WW II many German citizens were surprised to find out that there were concentration camps, run by the Nazis, in which millions of their neighbors (Jews, Gentiles, Gypsies, mentally impaired, homosexuals, political prisoners) had been incarcerated, tortured, forced into slave labor - and killed.

Given the many underground facilities secretly operated by the U.S. government, could a similar, smaller-scale program be going on here?

 

I have no proof of such a program, but considering the large numbers of disappeared people and the existence of dozens of underground installations operating behind a thick security veil it occurs to me that the possibility is at least conceivable.

As I have shown, there is every reason to think that the underground construction plans and activities of the military continued during the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s.

A 1974 report by Bechtel Corporation, a huge multinational company that derives significant revenues from government contract work, stated that,

"The demand for tunneling and underground excavation for national defense needs is believed to be large. Some examples of underground defense facilities include: hard-rock silos, command posts, communications systems, personnel shelters, storage and power generation facilities." ¹⁰

And a 1981 report issued by the U.S. National Committee on Tunneling Technology made a similar point:

"The demand for defense-related underground construction will be affected significantly by decisions made in the early 1980s. It could be for as much as 20 million cubic meters for missile sites and underground command posts, most of which would be constructed between 1985 and 1995. These projects do not include the civil construction routinely carried out by the (Army) Corps of Engineers." ¹¹

In other words, there could easily be a lot of covert construction going on beneath our feet right now.

 

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