UNDERGROUND BASES:

Government Digs Deep

by Geoff Olson

from The Vancouver Courier

PART 1

It was the summer of 1992. Richard Sauder was driving around the town of Warrenton, West Virginia, planning to do a bit of digging. He'd heard of a rumoured underground military base in the area, associated with an unknown federal agency. The "very secretive installation", Sauder soon discovered, was in fact two sites in close proximity. 'No one knows what goes on at Station A,' Sauder was told. "Unfortunately" he wrote later, "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 Sauder attempted to snap a picture of the gate are from his car, a security man bounded toward him, waving his arms and angrily shouting "No!" The response seemed out of proportion to the author's attempt at photojournalism. "Why Not?" Sauder responded," I'm on a public right-of-way." The guard yelled "because I said so!" Sauder noticed three other security personnel standing just inside that gate, moving toward the car. "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 netherwold ruled by military decree, I gave up trying to take a picture and drove away.'

Sauder, doing research for his Ph.D. in political science, began to probe through a 50 year old paper trail of declassified documents, soon discovering that there are incredibly large, deep, and labyrinthine structures existing across the land, under North American feet.

That immensely deep and large underground bases exist is unquestioned -- the NORAD facility in North Bay, Ontario, is one such officially acknowledged facility. Jointly staffed by Canadian and American personnel, the command center consists of two huge caverns, bored out of the solid rock, hundreds of feet under the Pre-Cambrian Shield. The caverns, "each 400 ft. long by 60 to 70 ft. high and 45 ft. wide, are connected by three cross tunnels." The facility, which can accomodate 400 people, comprises some 142,000 sq. feet, filled with computing and telecommunications equipment, monitoring the northern sector of the North American airspace.

Though much of the information on underground bases is classified, there is enough to piece together a consistent picture, from public records from private contractors, declassified documents from intelligence agencies, and freely available texts from official sources like the Army Corpse of Engineers. "Agencies of the United States government and huge corporations," Sauder wrote in his book Underground Bases and Tunnels, have "the personnel, technical know-how, machinery and money to plan and complete mammoth underground construction projects." Given the wall of secrecy surrounding the issue, the exact number and scale of these rumoured bases is not known for sure. Sauder's records could only prove the existence of twelve for certain, but indicate the number may be far in excess of what the typical American taxpayer may perfer to believe.

The capability of the US government to dig deep dates back to the immediate post-war period. There was much good sense, according to Sauder, for sensitive, top-secret programs to retreat underground. "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."

Much of Sauder's work involved taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act. In one of his research efforts, Sauder petitioned The Department of Energy for documents pertaining to underground installations below Los Alamos National Labs. After denying the existence of any such records, the agency did an about face for Suader's second request, providing him with " a badly blurred photostatic copy of an article...entitled LASL's Unusual Underground Lab." The DOE would give Sauder no further information on where, or when the article first appeared, but the document itself described a high-security, 6,000 sq. ft. facility built in the late 1940's. Sauder subsequently learned the underground warren was still in use into the 1980s, as a "pure physics" laboratory.

The underground mentality was the spawn of the cold war, and with the insane, Dr. Strangelove-like logic of MAD (mutually assured destruction) wartime planners saw the utility in digging deep, giving the US the capacity to "make the rubble bounce twice." But today's underground facilities serve another purpose beside defense from an unlikely ballistic nuclear attack: as a means for various US agencies, from the DOE to FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to pursue classified programs well-hidden from public scrutiny. With the demise of the cold war, the enemy of the underground world is looking less like communists bent on world domination than prying civilians with an eye on their tax dollars.

The bases involve a variety of suspected uses: nuclear weapons making and storage, domestic surveillance, and even federal preparation for national emergencies involving natural disasters and civil insurrection. The military-industrial complex, according to Sauder, seems to have gone underground -- in the fullest sense of the term. Even large defense contractors, like McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and AT&T are said to have their own subterranean facilities.

Sauder cites military documentation stating the feasibility of tunnels as large as 50 ft. by 50 fit. in diameter and chambers as much as 100 ft. high. In some installations, accroding to thte documents, "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." The manual goes on to state that "landscape scars, roads, and portal structures (entrances) should be as inconspicuous as possible.Camoulflage should be considered."

In his book, Sauder alludes to the many underground facilities that have been proven to exist, among them the base beneath the spooky Kirtland Munitions Storage Complex. near Albuquerque, New Mexico. 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." Said to be a "secret nuclear weapons assembly plant inside the mountain", the Kirtland complex allegedly has "miles of tunnels", and security in the area is, Sauder's words, "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. 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." Sauder doesn't mention any attempts to drive out to Kirtland to get someone to say cheese.

Underground bases like Kirtland have figured prominently in the waking nightmares of militia men and survivalists. They also get prominent play in the dark rumours circulating about captured extraterrestrials and alien technology. Sauder himself has heard these tales from a number of sources, but remains resolutely agnostic about such speculations. In Underground Bases and Tunnels, he discusses the cavernous classified world below Los Alamos, and asks if "this high security, climate controlled, plumbing equipped suite of vaults really dug into the mesa as as storage site for nuclear materials -- or was that just a cover story? Certainly the time frame is suggestive, since that is the approximate time when one, possibly more, UFOs were rumoured to have crashed and to have been retrieved, along with some of their occupants by the US military."

However, Sauder acknowledges a more prosaic explanation will work: "...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."

The fringe culture rumours of underground alien-human shenanigans -- fed by leaks from questionable individuals with intelligence connections -- may have some utility for the status quo. Seattle science journalist Terry Hansen: "Some say the whole captured-alien-hardware story is just a highly elaborate cover for the wholesale looting of the federal treasury by the corrupt and cynical secret government."

" But as someone once observed," Hansen continues, " just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they really aren't out to get you. And therein lies the dilemma. After all, the U.S. government clearly does lie about quite a few things and doesn't say much at all about many others. As long as very odd things continue to happen and authorities are unable or unwilling to tell us what they know, almost anything begins to seem possible."

The evidence for Roswell and other "crash retrievals" is compomised by a society of secrecy, where the truth has gone underground, and rumours run rampant. Discussing the legends of bizarre technology that whizz around Los Alamos, Area 51, and other installations said to possess underground mirror-worlds, Hansen comes to a sobering conclusion:

"Perhaps the truth is that no terrifying mysteries lie within the tightly guarded boundaries of Dreamland or anywhere else in the scattered network of secret military facilities that dot the US. Although there are now many good reasons to doubt it, the U.S. intelligence community may be just as mystified by the UFO phenomenon as are civilian researchers. Given the stakes, though, the most disturbing lesson of this elaborate and long-running controversy may be that American citizens have lost their right to find out."

Bibliography

Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982

Gup, Ted: The Doomsday Blueprints. Time magazine, Aug. 10. 1992. Pg. 26-41

Hansen, Terry. The Psychology of Dreamland: How Secrecy is Destroying Public Faith in Government and Science , 1995 http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~drgnbane/ufospecific/area51/enigma.html

Sauder, Richard: Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide? Adventures Unlimited Press, 1995

Vallee, Jacques Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception.Ballantine Books, 1991

PART 2: THE ULTIMATE WARROOMS AND THE DOOMSDAY BOYS

Throughout the eighties and nineties, the American government refused to acknowledge the existence of Area 51, the legendary test facility in Nevada -- even though it shows up on freely-available Russian satellite photos. Pop culture observers were hard-pressed to determine what was sillier : the portrayal of Area 51 in the film Indepencence Day, or the official nonexistence of top secret facility already enshrined in a bad b-movie.

In his book Revelations, astrophysiict and computer programmer Jacques Vallee relates a 1989 meeting with fellow UFO buffs, who soberly informed him that the main installation for Area 51 was located underground in New Mexico --and was the size of Manhattan.

"Who takes out the garbage?" Vallee asked, a question that elicited shocked looks from the other researchers.

"Well, its a fair question, isn't it? Who takes out the garbage?" Vallee repeated. "You just told me there was a city the size of Manhattan underneath New Mexico. They will need water. They will generate solid waste. There would be massive changes in the environment. Where's the evidence for it?"

Vallee pointed out that any such facility would be "a major source of heat, and would stick out like a sore thumb on infrared satellite imagery." Such data, the computer expert asserted, would be freely available to industrial and news organizations from the French SPOT satellite, among other sources.

"There is no such thing as a hidden underground base of that magnitude anymore," Vallee told his fellow UFO-buffs flatly.

Vallee (the model for the character Lacombe in Spielberg's Close Encounters of The Third Kind) is not questioning the existence of such bases -- with the exception of the mooted underground Area 51 facility -- just their supposed undetectabliity. Technically Vallee may be right. But according to sociology PhD. Richard Sauder, underground bases remain a significant component of the military-industrial complex, and are relatively well-hidden from the bothersome attentions of the American taxpayer .

In Underground Bases and Tunnels, Sauder cites a 1989 report in in US news and World Report, stating that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Pentagon administer approximately fifty secret underground command posts around the country, where the president and top officials might flee in the event of nuclear war. And this is only one branch of unaccounted underground activity -- Sauder discovered in his research that other departments of the US federal government maintain underground facilities, including the Department of Energy, the Federal Reserve, the National Security Agency, and the US Navy. Amazingly, military contractors and corporations are said to have underground facilities as well: Standard Oil, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed, among others.

One such facility, the "nerve center" for the US military, is "Raven Rock" located in the hills of Southern Pennsylvania. This "underground Pentagon" has been in existence since the 1950's. Sauder's description gives an idea of the size and scale of some of these underground undertakings:

"This huge installation was blasted out of the native granite...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's normally is staffed by about 350 people. Access to Raven Rock is by way of portals 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."

Another base constructed in the Fifties is Mount Weather, located in Northern Virginia. Mt. Weather remains just about as opaque to public scrutiny as it was when its built, buried not just in hard granite but in secrecy as well. And although it is "headquarters to FEMA's far-flung underground empire it does not even appear in the agency's published budget." According to Sauder, the base has a transit system of electric cars, and is connected by surpercomputing rooms to other subterranean facilities such as Raven Rock. The facility was known as "Caspar" throughout the cold war, and only half dozen members of Congress knew it existed.

Like many of its other underground brethren, Mount Weather was built, according to a 1992 Time Magazine report, "to ensure the survival of the US. government, preserve order and salvage the economy in the aftermath of an atomic attack." Bernard T. Gallagher was a Strategic Air Command pilot and served as director of Mount Weather for 25 years. "I don't think people realize how close we were (to nuclear war)," the retired Gallagher is quoted. According to his predecessor, however, Mt. Weather only went on full alert once: on Nov. 1965, when a power failure blackened much of the American Northeast and part of Canada. (At the time it was feared the blackout was due to an EMP -- an electromagnetic pulse generated by a surgical nuclear strike in space.)

Mount Weather remains staffed and operational to this day, according to Sauder. "According to published reports, some of the hundreds of people who work inside the mountain routinely stage practice drill for managing a wide variety of potential crises, ranging from civil disturbance and economic problems, to natural disasters and nuclear war."

Sauder is not altogether sanguine about the activities done in the name of "national security". An estimated 35 billion dollars a year is unaccounted for in Congressional budgets, money earmarked for military-industrial "black projects". He cites the NSA headquarters' in Maryland, below which are "cavernous subterranean expanses, said to be filled with more than ten acres of the most sophisticated supercomputers that money can buy." The NSA operates at a higher level of secrecy than the conspiracy-theorists' favourite, the CIA. Says Sauder:" 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, fac, radio, TV and microwave communications, including surveillance of domestic, internal US communications by ordinary citizens."

In a 1976 article in the Progressive, author Richard Pollock suggested the underground world may even mirror the federal agencies above. According to Pollock's sources, Mt. Weather houses a resident, back-up government. Many federal departments and agencies are represented, including the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Interior, Larbour, State, and the Federal Reserve. According to the "highly placed government sources", administrators of the federal departments at Mt. Weather hold cabinet-level rank, and 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.

Sauder suggests such revelations make both the idea of representative democracy and open media a bit of farce, given that there may be "officials who work in great secrecy, literally underground and totally unaccountable to the citizenry of the United States."

And of course, fin de siècle fears about underground machinations wouldn't be complete without referencing undercover machinery -- specifically UFO-type craft. The airspace above numerous military facilities across the US are rumored foci of bizarre contraptions displaying impossible aerial maneuvers.

The speculation is that the thirty-five billion dollar black budget has bought some interesting R and D at some of the hidden facilities, creating "out of this world" crafts twenty years into the future of private research. The more enthusiastic speculation is that the inspiration -- and technology -- for these aerial objects originated somewhere other than earth.

As Nevada television producer and reporter George Knapp commented in July 1994, "We all have our share of loonies to deal with but the [government] cover-up angle attracts a special breed -- dark, foreboding conspiracy buffs who see evil tentacles around every corner. Secret treaties between the government and the aliens--they give us technology; we give them permission to conduct abductions -- as if they need our permission; the Trilateral Commission; the Bilderbergers, the Illuminati; neo-Nazis; the Rockefellers; One World Government--and UFOs. The gang's all here."

However, Knapp doesn't rule out the possibility some of the stranger tales may contain more than a grain of truth. He once covered organized crime in Las Vegas as part of his news beat, and discovered "more fear" form retired and active military personnel willing to speak off the record about UFOs than anyone willing to offer information on the mob.

The newsman says a number of sources in the Las Vegas area claim that alien technology is being stored and tested in the environs of Groom Lake, where the infamous Area 51 is located. When I had dinner with Knapp two years ago in St. Paul, he told me he had twelve sources with reliable credentials telling him essentially the same story. Disinformation?

""UFO files bulge with testimony from former military men who say they have seen disks or alien material," Knapp said at a 1994 conference in Seattle, "or even alien bodies, at various military facilities around the country. Residents of Lincoln and Nye counties report seeing flying disks and other UFOs in and around thesemilitary facilities since the early 1950s."

Richard Sauder has heard similar reports himself, and the Internet is full of dark rumours of underground bases and alien activity that Knapp only half-jokingly deprecates.

Etched on the main lobby wall of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, is this line from the Bible: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." Somewhere deep in the bowels of the underground world, under lock an key, there may be answers. But the American taxpayer isn't likey to get the security clearance to find out.

Bibliography

Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Agency. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982

Gup, Ted: The Doomsday Blueprints. Time magazine, Aug. 10. 1992. Pg. 26-41

Hansen, Terry. The Psychology of Dreamland: How Secrecy is Destroying Public Faith in Government and Science , 1995 http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~drgnbane/ufospecific/area51/enigma.html

Sauder, Richard: Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide? Adventures Unlimited Press, 1995

Vallee, Jacques Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception.Ballantine Books, 1991