Part 1 | -->

Dulce & Other Underground Bases and Tunnels

by William Hamilton III

Underground Bases & Tunnels Does a strange world exist beneath our feet? Strange legends have persisted for centuries about the mysterious cavern world and the equally strange beings who inhabit it.

More UFOlogists have considered the possibility that UFOs may be emanating from subterranean bases, that UFO aliens have constructed these bases to carry out various missions involving Earth or humans.

Belief in a subterranean world has been handed down as myth, tale, or rumor down the generations from all over the world. Some of these stories date back to ancient times and tell tales of fantastic flora and fauna that can be found in the caverns of ancient races. Socrates spoke of huge hollows within the Earth which are inhabited by man, and vast caverns which rivers flow.

A legendary large cavern supposedly exists below Kokoweef Peak in southwestern California. Earl Dorr, a miner and prospector, followed clues given to him by Indians. He entered Crystal Cave in the thirties and followed a passage down into Kokoweef Mountain until he attained a depth of about a mile. There, he entered a large cavern which he proceeded to explore for a distance of eight miles. At the bottom of the cavern, a river flowed, rising and falling with the lunar tides, and depositing black sands rich in placer gold along its banks. One day, crazed by fever, Dorr used dynamite to seal shut the entrance to his fabulous cavern, and started a legend that still lures men to seek the fabled wealth below Kokoweef.

Nowhere is the belief in a subterranean world more prevalent than with the Indians of North America. The Hopis believed they emerged from a world below the earth through a tunnel at the base of the San Francisco peaks near Flagstaff.

There are also legends about mysterious Mount Shasta in northern California. The mountain is said to have housed a race of surviving Lemurians who built a sanctuary in the depths of the earth to escape the catastrophes which befell them. These Lumerians allied themselves with space travelers who built a saucer base inside the mountain.

Whether ancient cities exist in caverns below the earth is anyone's guess, but it's a fact that governments have built underground tunnels and facilities for a variety of reasons. The Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese all built subterranean tunnels and bases. It shouldn't come as a surprise that America has been building its own underground world.

An elusive report in the August 7, 1989 edition of U.S. News and World Report, reveals the secret plan to carry on government in case of a disaster. The plan is called "Continuity of Government" or COG. The article stated that COG is the government's ultimate insurance policy should Armageddon ever arrive, providing the program runs smoothly. In 1982, a new secret agency, the Defense Mobilization Planning Systems Agency was created and reports to the President. In the event of a nuclear attack, special teams equipped with war plans, military codes, and other essential data would accompany each designated presidential successor to secret command posts around the country. Besides the president, another 46 key officials named in the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (JEEP) would be evacuated. There are 50 of these underground command post bunkers located in 10 different regions of the country, and each is linked with others via satellite or ground-wave relays.

The U.S. Air Force sponsored research in deep underground construction as early as 1958. The RAND corporation carried out this research, and published proceedings from symposiums held on the subject of construction methods and equipment, utility installation, and the use of nuclear bursts to produce underground cavities.

A great concern to underground construction engineers was the problem of ventilation. They considered it advisable to take into account all types of ventilation contamination, and not just radioactive fallout. Underground works included ingresses, egresses, and accommodations. The first two are generally provided for by shafts or tunnels, while the third requires larger openings, such as halls, chambers, cells, vaults, or other open spaces. Many problems in design and construction are common to all three, but the problems associated with the larger openings in the rock, required for accommodation purposes, are generally more complex and difficult than those for the smaller openings of tunnels or shafts. Operation and maintenance of underground installations can also pose special problems.

Huge boring machines with large-diameter disc-grinders are used in constructing tunnels. Tunnels are needed to link one accommodation area to another, or one facility to another.

The English Chunnel project is the largest engineering project in Europe, and will link France and England through a three-tunnel railway. The eleven boring machines used in the project are so large and so long that they were assembled in underground areas 65 feet high. Six of the machines are digging the submarine tunnel between the Dover Strait and Pas de Calais and five are digging the land tunnels leading away from the channel to aboveground terminals. The front of the boring machine contains tungsten-tipped picks that workers guide with the use of laser projections on video screens.

These boring machines are like huge, steel-encased worms. Sealed in each machine are teams of 35 men who line the cavity of the tunnel with concrete and guide the muck down the track. The machines bore the hole, remove the earth, and pave the inside of the tunnel with precast concrete segments. The digging face of the machine is a 95-ton, 28-foot-6-inch diameter disc, divided into cutting blades. The borer is 300-feet long.

The September, 1983 Omni ran a picture story on the "Subterrene," a nuclear tunnel-boring machine developed at Los Alamos. The machine burrows through deep underground rock, heating it to a molten state (magma), which cools after the Subterrene moves on. The result is a tube with a smooth, glazed lining that can be used for the high-speed transport shuttles that link the sub-base complexes.

Interestingly enough, an inventor named Charles Kaempen has invented a composite pipe that has enormous tensile strength. Kaempen has developed an undersea transportation tube that uses his unique system of lock coupling and merely has to be laid on the sea floor, obviating the need for excavating and tunneling. He has made a proposal to Spain to link Spain and Morocco using his new tube technology.

Tunnel boring is undergoing a boom according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 12, 1990). Susan Nelson, director of the American Underground Space Association is quoted in the article as saying, "There is simply a lot more interest in the world these days in tunneling and use of the underground in general." It says the underground is crowded with government-funded mega-projects and proposed projects. The Spanish want to put a tunnel through the Pryenees and bore a road to Morocco on the African coast. The Norwegians want to burrow under the fiords. The Japanese are toying with tunneling through to South Korea. The Canadians are building a tunnel from New Foundland to Prince Edwards Island. In America, there are 87 public-works projects planned in the next three years alone.

Bear in mind the fact that these are all classified as civil engineering projects. Where civil engineering goes today, military engineering has already gone yesterday. In 1959, the Rand Report carried photos of the giant Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs). Large scale military engineering projects may have made extensive use of these machines since the fifties.

Tunneling is getting a boost because of the increasingly crowded global landscape. Planners in Northern Italy are burying stretches of a freeway in a tunnel to avoid cutting a road through historical important forest and farmlands.

Mr. Russell J. Miller of the Colorado School of Mines and director of the Center for Space Mining in Boulder, Colorado, is working on studies to determine the feasibility of putting space bases and cities underground on Mars and on the moon. Of course, someone from somewhere else may have already beaten Mr. Miller to the punch.

Informants have told us that underground facilities utilize transport tubes to shuttle workers to and from work. This is more than a subway. These tube trains use high technology. It isn't surprising, then, to learn that Frank P. Davidson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a plan to unclog the airways by designing electric "wingless airplanes" that hurtle across continents and oceans in sealed tubes or tunnels that are essentially frictionless vacuum chambers. Perhaps he should meet with Dr. Kaempen and consider using his composite pipe as the tube.

Underground diggers have their own society called "Moles," who find talk of tunneling and tunnels spicier than most of us surface dwellers.

It's no secret that governments have built their own secret underground railways and tunnels. China's leaders built secret rail tunnels under Bejing that would enable them to flee in a crisis. According to a Chinese civil servant, the tunnels linked leader's homes, government buildings, the central bank and an army base. That sounds like a well-thought-out-plan. Grab your prized possessions, cash from the bank, armed guards from the base, and run like hell! The network was built up over a period of 40 years as a defense against foreign invaders. We can be sure that what China has done we have done.

Japan, dense and overcrowded, is giving serious thought to living underground. They are planning to build underground sewage plants, underground railroads, and underground cities. According to a recent issue of Omni, The Taisei Corporation is planning to build a subterranean mall called "Alice City." There would be underground stores, offices, hotels, theaters, and sports arenas. Strolling spaces would meander through interior spaces populated with trees, birds, fish tanks, bridges, and waterfalls. The Shimizu Corporation has a blueprint for constructing an underground grid that would span 2,000 square miles underneath Tokyo. This grid would contain a number of commercial centers connected by subway trains that could shuttle workers to and from work.

According to science-writer Isaac Asimov, there are advantages to living underground. For one thing, no one would worry about the weather. The temperature could be held at a fairly constant level, between 55 and 60 degrees F, and a lot of energy used for heating and cooling could be saved. Without the diurnal sun cycle, no one would know day from night. People could be working around the clock or playing around the clock, depending on their penchant. All transportation, communication, and housing could go underground, freeing the surface world from human trampling. The surface of the planet would have a few nice restaurants and recreation centers where people could observe clear blue skies, the returning planet and animal life, and have room for all to roam on a weekend hike. Earthquakes would cause only one-fifth the damage to underground structures that they cause to surface structures.

In a provocatively speculative book entitled Alternative 3, author Leslie Watkins proposes that scientist have become concerned with the state of the Earth's atmosphere, a scenario that is much easier to accept these days. Secret meetings between scientist produce three alternatives for handling the imminent danger.

"Alternative 1" was a plan to blast holes through the stratosphere to release heat and pollution.

"Alternative 2" was a plan to relocate Earth's population in massive underground caverns drawing fresh, cool air from the soil (Perhaps there is a real Alternative 2 in progress).

"Alternative 3" was to escape the Earth and go to Mars. We will consider Alternative 3 later. Whether any real such alternative plans exist is not being argued here, but the concepts are useful in examining the future directions of secret projects.

The Atomic Energy Commission initiated Project Plowshare in 1957 to develop peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. It has explored the use of nuclear blasts to build harbors, dams, highway cuts, and canals, and to stimulate oil and natural gas production by following up the widely used practice of detonating ordinary chemical explosions in oil- and gas-bearing strata. The first test of this technique, known as Project Gasbuggy, took place 4,240 feet below ground in a desolate area of New Mexico know as the San Juan Basin, on December 10, 1967, where a 26-kiloton nuclear "device" was exploded in a sealed well.

While Gasbuggy was only a single experiment, the A.E.C., in partnership with Austral Oil Company of Houston, subsequently began the first of what promised to be a long series of even larger nuclear explosions, on the order of two 100-kiloton shots each year, for a period of 10 years or more. The first explosion, known as Project Rulison, was a 40-kiloton shot, some 8,400 feet below ground at a site near Rifle, Colorado, on September 10th, 1969.

A method that has been suggested to build bases on the moon may already be in operation on Earth. With the use of controlled nuclear blasts it will be possible to excavate cavities beneath the lunar surface. A missile could be used to drill a hole approximately 50 feet deep, then a second blast would produce a cavity about 45 feet in diameter. An igloo would be constructed over the hole, a plastic bag dropped down the cavity and filled with air. The work area and living quarters would then be constructed.

It may prove more efficient and practical to "house" future moon colonies in artificial or natural caves beneath the lunar surface, than to attempt construction of exposed meteorite domes. Living quarters, spacious parks, lakes, and wooded areas could be constructed underground. A transportation tube would connect various colonists to other ports and distant parts of the moon.

Back on Earth, we have reports of equally suspicious parks. An ex-security officer, who once worked underground in the Groom Lake area of Nevada, said he once saw a baseball diamond and an Olympic-sized swimming pool in one of the caverns a mile below the Nevada desert.

What's going on in the deep underground tunnels below Mercury Base at the Nevada Test Site? After hearing the story of Bob Lazar on KVEG radio, a construction worker called Billy Goodman and Bob Lazar to say, "We are the construction workers...we put things together and take them apart...of the meeting of seven people, there are two who will come forward to support you." This mysterious caller further said, "There's more than just tunnels down there. There's everything you can imagine down there. I know because we put it up. We installed. We did everything."

Informants have mentioned underground tunnels and facilities in New Mexico at Dulce, Sunspot, Datil, Corona, Taos Pueblo, and Albuquerque; in Arizona in the Santa Catalina Mountains; in Colorado at Delta, Grand Mesa, and Colorado Springs; in California at Needles, Edwards AFB, Tehachapi Mountains, Ft. Irwin, Norton AFB, and Morongo Valley; in Nevada at Blue Diamond, Nellis AFB, Groom Lake, and Papoose Lake areas, Quartzite Mountain, and Tonopah.

Part 2 -->