100 Places You Will Never Visit (5 page)

However, Bennewitz was not to be dissuaded from his suspicions. Indeed, they developed until in 1982 they drew the attention of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), a long-established and scientifically credible UFO-study group. William Moore, one of APRO’s most senior figures, established a friendship with Bennewitz, who by now had concluded that two types of aliens had made it to Earth: good ones known as “whites” and evil ones known as “grays.” The grays were inhabiting a deep underground base, he told Moore, beneath Archuleta Mesa, near Dulce.

Dulce is a small town in the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, close to the New Mexico-Colorado border. With a population hovering around 2,500, it is, all in all, a quiet, out-of-the-way and unassuming sort of place. Nearby stands the impressive mountain of Archuleta Mesa, with a peak of 2,800 meters (9,200 ft). According to Bennewitz, the grays had reached agreement with the White House to carry out experiments on Earth-based life forms in a specially constructed base beneath the mountain.

BIG BORE A US Air Force tunnel-boring machine (or “mole”), capable of drilling a tunnel several meters wide through hard rock, photographed at Little Skull Mountain, Nevada, in 1982. Those who believe that Dulce Base exists suggest that hardware of this kind could have been used in its construction.

Over the course of the 1980s, Moore provided Bennewitz with “evidence” to back up his suspicions, and helped him publicize his story that aliens had arrived on Earth and, with the complicity of the US government, were experimenting on humans and perfecting forms of mind control. Needless to say, Bennewitz was treated by many as simply a crank.

Then, in 1989, Moore publicly declared that he had been part of a scheme (alleged by some to be in conjunction with staff at Kirtland AFB) to supply Bennewitz with disinformation. The only motive for this plot seems to have been to assist Bennewitz in utterly discrediting himself. Bennewitz, meanwhile, suffered deteriorating mental health until his death in 2003.

So Dulce Base, for which no one has ever produced hard physical evidence, seems like nothing so much as a figment of Bennewitz’s imagination. But for many, a fundamental question remains—if Bennewitz was a crank, why go to all that effort of undermining him? Had he, some wonder, stumbled upon something that may have been wholly unrelated to extraterrestrials, but which the authorities didn’t want him sniffing around? Was the misinformation really a case of misdirection, and the Dulce Base rumor a cover for something equally startling? For where better to hide a secret truth than in a great mass of incredible lies? Or, just maybe, Bennewitz was right all along…

14 Cheyenne Mountain Complex

LOCATION El Paso County, Colorado, USA

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Colorado Springs, Colorado

SECRECY OVERVIEW Operations classified: an underground center tasked with maintaining the security of North America.

The Cheyenne Mountain Complex is home to the Alternate Command Center for NORAD and, latterly, USNORTHCOM. A joint enterprise between the United States and Canada, NORAD has been key to surveying the region’s airspace and identifying potential threats to both countries. It then assesses the danger posed by any irregular activity, and raises the appropriate alarm.

NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) was established as a US-Canadian cross-border body in 1958, when the threat of attack from the USSR was the continent’s most pressing concern. USNORTHCOM, meanwhile, is the United States Northern Command, established to protect homeland security following the attacks of September 11, 2001. NORAD’s motto of “Deter, Detect, Defend” neatly summarizes the job done inside Cheyenne Mountain. While the threat of mutual annihilation has proved enough to put off most would-be attackers, the detection element is achieved with the aid of extensive radar and satellite systems that pick up on any abnormal activity in the skies. Meanwhile, Air Force fighters and bombers and, as a last resort, missiles are all primed for defensive action should the call ever come.

Both NORAD and USNORTHCOM have their headquarters at the Peterson Air Force Base in nearby Colorado Springs. Many day-to-day operations are now carried out there, but Cheyenne Mountain nonetheless stays on alert to take over at short notice. Rising to almost 3,000 meters (10,000 ft) in the Rocky Mountains range, the mountain was chosen as NORAD’s base because of its central location and stable tectonics, as well as its proximity to the US Air Force Academy and other military installations. Construction began in 1961, and it is estimated that more than 450,000 kilos (1 million lb) of explosives were used in the process of hollowing out the mountain. There are 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) of tunnels and chambers, covering an area of some 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres), where there was previously almost 700,000 tons of granite. By the time NORAD started its operations there in 1966, it was estimated that the project had cost US$142 million. A major upgrade scheme commenced in 1989, though by the mid-1990s it was hugely behind schedule and several hundred million dollars over budget.

The complex consists of around 15 free-standing, steel-built, multi-story buildings (the majority are three stories high), each resting on huge springs (there are almost 1,400 in total, each weighing a ton). In engineering parlance, this gives the structures “independent bounce capability,” making it possible for each building to sway as much as a foot in any horizontal direction, thus allowing the shock from a nuclear explosion or an earthquake to be largely isolated. A main thoroughfare constructed through the middle of the mountain from the north to the South Portal is another means of lessening the effect of shockwaves.

DOOMSDAY DOORS These vast 25-ton steel doors can be fully opened or closed in a relatively speedy three-quarters of a minute—long enough to make sure you don’t get your fingers jammed. They are an integral part of the system that can seal off the mountain’s interior from the outside world.

Entry to the complex is via 0.9-meter (40-in) thick, 25-ton steel doors, which are designed to open and close within 45 seconds. In the event of a nuclear explosion, there are sensors at the main entrances that pick up on pressure waves, prompting blast valves to close and seal the complex off. In such an event, there are enough food reserves to see several hundred people safely through a stay of up to 30 days, while natural springs provide water stored in four huge excavated reservoirs. These vast tanks can hold up to 5.7 million liters (1.5 million US gallons), and it has even been reported that workers sometimes use rowing boats to cross them. Meanwhile, a highly efficient ventilation system ensures a constant supply of fresh air. The mountain also has provision for many of life’s other “essentials,” including medical facilities, barbers, gyms and saunas. On the surface, local attractions include a nearby zoo and a shrine to early 20th-century humorist Will Rogers!

Thankfully, Cheyenne Mountain has never reached its highest state of alert, although there have been one or two close calls as a result of human or technological error. Most famously, in 1980 NORAD’s computers ran a test program without realizing it was only a test. Fortunately, an eagle-eyed worker spotted the mistake before any jets were scrambled or missiles launched.

The mountain can also boast a notable cinematic career, most impressively as a setting for the classic 1983 film WarGames, a cautionary tale of a young hacker who unwittingly accesses a NORAD supercomputer and brings the world to the brink of nuclear war.

1 CONTROL ROOM A rare glimpse inside the Cheyenne Mountain Complex reveals USAF and other military personnel at work. One of the base’s more light-hearted tasks is its annual tracking of Santa Claus’s Christmas Eve flight around the world.

15 Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

LOCATION Delaware Basin, New Mexico, USA

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Carlsbad, New Mexico

SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: a deep repository for America’s nuclear waste.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), located in Eddy County, New Mexico, has served as a rubbish dump for much of the US’s transuranic radioactive waste since 1999. Chosen for its stable tectonics and geological characteristics, it is expected to receive some 38,000 shipments of waste over 35 years. However, the site will remain off-limits to future generations for perhaps 10,000 years.

Transuranic waste consists mostly of clothing, tools, fabrics, soil and assorted other materials that have been contaminated with radioactive elements with atomic numbers greater than that of uranium (principally plutonium). This is the most dangerous waste produced as a by-product of the various US nuclear research programs, and its disposal presents a significant challenge.

After a prospective location in Kansas for the storage of such waste was rejected, the site in New Mexico gained support. The Delaware Basin, a salt basin created in the Permian period of geological time (some 250 million years ago) by a shallow sea undergoing a series of evaporation cycles, was chosen because of its geological suitability and the absence of potentially dangerous groundwater. Congress authorized construction of the WIPP in 1979 and testing at the facility began in 1988. In March 1999, the first waste shipment arrived from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons research and development facility in Albuquerque.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION One of WIPP’s underground tunnels, buried at a depth of some 650 meters (2,130 ft) in the middle of the thick salt bed. The first exploratory shaft at the New Mexico site was sunk in 1981, a full 18 years before WIPP received its first shipment of waste.

Transuranic waste is given one of two major classifications: it is either “Contact-handled” (CH), which means it can be handled by workers in controlled conditions without any extra shielding beyond the container it comes in; or it is “remote-handled” (RH), which means it emits greater amounts of radiation and must be transported and handled using lead-lined containers. RH waste accounts for only about 4 percent of the total brought to the facility.

Disposal rooms for the waste material are located about 600 meters (2,000 ft) beneath the Basin’s surface (which is to say, about one and a half times deeper than the Empire State Building is high). RH waste canisters are stored in boreholes drilled into the walls of the store rooms, which are then capped with concrete. CH waste, meanwhile, is simply layered on the floors. Once the repository is full, it will eventually collapse in on itself and any gaps will be filled with salt until the WIPP is entirely encased, hundreds of meters below ground.

The WIPP is regulated by a variety of agencies, of which the most important are the Federal Department of Energy and the New Mexico Environment Department. Access to the plant is necessarily tightly controlled, and the site is surrounded by a large fence.

Anyone visiting on official business must watch a safety film before entering and wear appropriate equipment (including emergency breathing apparatus and a radiation monitor, if going underground). All waste shipments are tracked by satellite from a central control center, and all routes to the WIPP have stringent safety and security regimes, as well as some 25,000 trained responders in the event of an emergency.

While keeping people away from the site today is the immediate concern, it is equally important to ensure that future generations do not stumble upon it. For this reason, a think-tank of scientists, anthropologists and linguists has spent years developing a system to warn the people of the far future to keep away. The resultant plan employs “Passive Institutional Controls,” a series of verbal and non-verbal markers designed to indicate that the area is not safe.

So what does this mean in practice? Firstly, once the plant has been filled in, a sloped earthen hill (called a berm) will surround the facility’s 50-hectare (120-acre) footprint, with a height of 11 meters (36 ft) and width of 33 meters (110 ft). Within the soil will be 128 equally spaced metal objects visible to radar, as well as magnets to give the area its own magnetic signature. Granite monuments, 8 meters (27 ft) high, will mark the perimeter of the berm, with another layer marking the outer edges of a control area covering some 10 square kilometers (4 sq miles).

In addition, an information center will be built in the middle of the facility’s footprint, constructed from granite and inscribed with messages in several languages as well as pictograms. Two further rooms containing the same information will be buried elsewhere on the site, and records will also be sent to archives throughout the world in order that maps, reference works and the like can be accurately maintained. Finally, 23-centimeter (9-in) discs made of granite, fired clay or aluminum oxide will be randomly buried across the site, each carrying a warning in one of seven languages (English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish and Navajo). Rarely can a place that wants to keep people out have had so many indicators of its precise location.

BURIED FOR ALL TIME This schematic gives an overview of the WIPP site. The waste disposal area is contained within a sedimentary layer known as the Salado Formation, which consists of salt, clay and shale. The salt will eventually isolate the radioactive waste from the outside world.

16 Forensic Anthropology Research Facility

LOCATION Freeman Ranch, Texas, USA

NEAREST POPULATION HUB San Marcos, Texas

SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: a “body farm” for the study of human decomposition after death.

The Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF) is maintained under the jurisdiction of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University (FACTS). This unusual outdoor research laboratory focuses on “reconstructing the postmortem interval to determine time since death and related studies on human decomposition.” It is perhaps more graphically described as a “body farm.”

Opened in 2008, FARF looks at the way in which bodies decompose in open-air environments, an area of particular use in the field of criminal forensics. It is one of five such institutions across the United States (the first opened in 1981 at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville) and is by far the largest, taking up 10 hectares (26 acres) of the University’s Freeman Ranch (the rest of the site is a working ranch). A range of environments are simulated across the site, including forested areas, scrubland and ponds.