Thursday, March 28, 2013

The steady background drone of bulls__t.

When I was a teenager, it was a widely-accepted fact in my peer group that somewhere in the bottomland near our school there existed a Cold War-relic underground blockhouse* where you could totally listen in on all the phone calls in the neighborhood because it was the phone company's emergency nukyular war control center for the area. Needless to say, desultory searches of various manhole covers only turned up storm sewers and no bunker, although some folks swore their best friend's cousin had totally been in it.

In Tennessee, visible in a mountainside north of I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville, is the mammoth entry to a mine or quarry. It's especially intriguing at night, when the gaping hole in the mountain is brightly lit, but I never could be arsed to find out exactly what kind of mine it was. My boss at a now-defunct gun store, the one who was a "snipe" in Vietnam and whose dad won three Medals of Honor in WWII for getting three carriers sunk out from under him, told me it was a secret underground Air Force base and he had seen jet fighters launch from it and buzz his Ford Ranger on the Interstate.

Here in Indianapolis, of course, there is the Amtrak repair yard down in Beech Grove, right across the street from one of my favorite local gun shops. The goofy legends surrounding the Amtrak yard are so pervasive and persistent that Shootin' Buddy and I jokingly refer to Beech Grove Firearms as "Death Camp Guns & Gear".

Imagine if you had giant caves in your town, caves that you can see streams of eighteen-wheelers driving in and out of all day and night; think of the legends that could be spun around that armature! Why, you might conclude that it was the entrance to a secret underground network of highways and rail tunnels maintained by DHS and FEMA so that our masters in Washington wouldn't have to get stuck in traffic jams with the hoi polloi.

By the way, in case you're in Kansas City and you'd like in on the secret underground DHS/FEMA base there, here's their leasing office. I don't get a commission or anything.
.



*Five minutes' careful thought would have led us to realize that the storm sewers in a flood plain along a creek bed where the trees all had muddy water rings two feet up their trunks were an unlikely place to find an underground bunker full of abandoned-but-still-functional electronic equipment, but the kind of people who believe Sean's dad's GTO can totally go 200mph are not generally known for their critical thinking skills or advanced B.S. detection abilities.

49 comments:

Mark Alger said...

Back in the early '70s, my then-roommate (who was a television journo, doncha know) swore that, out surrounding the Fernald site, there was a ring of Nike Ajax silos.

M

Anonymous said...

Here in little ol' Culpeper, VA we have Mount Pony
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/mt_pony.htm

Never really a big secret, it still managed to generate a bushel or two of BS. It used to be a radiation hardened Federal Reserve facility with A BILLION DOLLARS of cash stored there. Now it's part of the Library of Congress, they store movies there, and the public is regularly invited to attend screening of classic films. Sigh... so much for conspiracies.

Samsam von Virginia

Tam said...

Mark,

"Back in the early '70s, my then-roommate (who was a television journo, doncha know) swore that, out surrounding the Fernald site, there was a ring of Nike Ajax silos."

While there aren't any at Los Alamos, the Savannah River Plant, or ORNL, there do seem to be some Nike sites down around Cincy. (While the map's resolution is lacking, I'm assuming those ones in south central Washington State are for the Hanford Site, but there may be an old SAC base around there I'm not remembering.)

Anonymous said...

There's an underground city below Springfield, MO. It's called "Springfield Underground." And it's not a secret... though conspiracy buffs will be happy to know that they are supposedly much more expansive than they admit.

fast richard said...

That Prime driver sounded a bit confused by some of those questions. When he takes a load from Kansas City to Maine he uses a different government facility called the interstate highway system. If there really was a vast underground highway system, I wouldn't have had to drive on so many icy roads the last couple of weeks.

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

There are persistent rumors at Virginia Tech of an underground locker room left over from the old football stadium.

Joanna said...

It's like Modern Marvels on really bad acid.

Scott J said...

All this talk of drones lately causes me to pause whenever a small aircraft overflies my house.

Kind of silly since I'm not far from 3 different airports.

J.R.Shirley said...

Oh, god.

Anonymous said...

Re: the mine along 40

Limestone

http://www.frankmin.com/50loc.htm

Tam said...

Bless you, Anon.

I've kinda wondered about it off and on for years.

Anonymous said...

During high school, mid-70s, the KC caves were relatively unused, and a haunt of ours. By the 80s, someone figured out what great warehouse/industrial space they made, and the caves went commenrcial. Believe they still are.
Now the old concrete bunkers at old Richards-Gebaur AFB in Belton & Grandview, MO-different story completely. They'll make for some great conspiracy theories.
Texas rodent

Bob said...

Back in 1979/1980 when I lived in the Knoxville area myself, one of the places we saw for sale when out house-hunting with my parents was Cherokee Caverns. Could you imagine owning your own cavern?

"Mom? Dad? Can we at least check on how much they want for it? Pleeeease?"

Scott J said...

Speaking of your teen years your comments yesterday on spending them trapped in suburbia brought this song to mind http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=lBhxvVNuADY

Thought you might enjoy being a fellow 80's child.

Jay G said...

When I was a wee sprog, our family vacationed on Cape Cod.

There were rumors of a nude beach somewhere on the Cape.

Despite walking several dozen miles up and down the seashore, we never managed to find it...

Anonymous said...

Steven Segal closed the one in Eastern Kentucky down a few years ago. I saw it in a movie. regards, Alemaster

Anonymous said...

"Despite walking several dozen miles up and down the seashore, we never managed to find it..."

Probably just as well, because (and I hate to break it to you) the average nudist has more in common with Ed Asner and Mrs. Clinton than

Stretch said...

Outside old CIA HQ is The Bubble. It's an auditorium. http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/facttell/building.htm

Of course it REALLY was:
1. the entrance to the secret subway that would whisk govt. officials to West Virginia bunkers.
2. a silo for the Doomsday Missile. If it looked like the Reds (Norks?) were going to capture Washington the missile would go straight up and come down on DC destroying it. To save it?
3. a nuclear reactor that powered the CIA and all its satellites.

All that imagination and not a single best seller among them.

Carl H said...

Those caves here in KC are pretty useful. Heck, if we ever get in a nukular war w/the Norks, we've got tons of Govt. cheese 'on ice'.

The caves - really the remains of limestone mines - are pretty extensive. They hold a 5k race down there: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/01/29/4034018/4000-turn-out-for-largest-charity.html

James family outpost, Iowa. said...

I grew up in Virginia, college in Richmond, here is ours: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Hill_Tunnel

Ed said...

Didn't everyone have a nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile launch or control site in their town? I know I did.

http://coldwar-ma.com/Nike_Missile_Bases.html

"Duck and cover" took on a whole different meaning to us growing up. I even had a Lionel train set that could launch a toy version of that missile from one of the flatbed cars.

Novelist Dennis Lehane's basis for "Shutter Island" allegedly was Long Island in Boston Harbor, which had a TB hospital and a Nike Ajax launch site, restricting casual access to the island and adding "mystery" to the place.

Tam said...

Ed,

"Didn't everyone have a nuclear-tipped Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile launch or control site in their town?"

No, we had an AFB, an NAS, and the Lockheed plant right down the road, though...

Nike missile sites were already relics by the time I was old enough to know what they were, though. ;)

JohninMd.(HELP!) said...

There's an old Nike Hercules site in Davidsonville, Md.; was part of the defence ring for D.C., was manned by Army NG in the 70's. friend of mine pulled duty there. Never saw more than 2 missiles raised outa the bunker/silos at a time, for maintenince...one night in '72, he's kinda surprized when he comes out of the control trailer for a smoke and looks around to see all 12 missiles up and locked in firing position. never saw that before, or after, he said...Come to find out that was during the Yom kippor war, and Nixon was tellin' the Russki's stay the hell out of it...we were stripping armored units in W. Germany to rush tanks to Isreal to replace the losses. Apparently it was a lot hairier than believed.....

Ed said...

Locally, the sites were guarding the Boston Navy Yard, Hanscom AFB, South Weymouth NAS, Logan Airport, the Quincy Shipyard, where the aircraft carriers Lexington were built, the Hingham Yard, where many Destroyer Escorts and LSTs were built, even the small shipyard where L. Ron Hubbard was stationed in the Neponset section of Boston, all manner of defense related industry, and the Hingham Ammunition Depot and Annex:

http://www.patriotledger.com/news/x1522315996/Looking-back-50-years-at-the-closing-of-the-Hingham-Ammunition-Depot

So look at what was in yesterday's paper:

http://www.patriotledger.com/topstories/x694781635/Cops-Teen-caught-tagging-former-military-structure-in-Wompatuck-State-Park

Why is part of it still off-limits, 50 years later?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hingham_Naval_Ammunition_Depot_Annex

Well Seasoned Fool said...

Supposed to be a complex under Denver International Airport.

Ancient Woodsman said...

Mr. Jay G....the nude beach on the Cape is found if you take a left upon exiting the Cape Cod Canal Tunnel. You were probably always going right, maybe?

In our neck o' the woods, the old Fort Dearborn bunkers (in now what is now Odiorne Point state park) were sealed with concrete. The kids' rumors then were that the facility was closed intact, all the office equipment, bunks, food, 16" shells, powder and big guns were still on site, mothballed and ready for use. Of course, one of my friends a few years senior to me had 'actually been inside and seen it!'

Nope. Not even when the whole thing was unsealed and I had unlimited non-public access. Nothing but empty concrete rooms & halls, nothing but graffiti & sea air.

Guessing we have some sort of evolved subconscious need to invent fascinating stories about mundane things, and in some cases a need to believe such things, too.

Tam said...

Ed,

Liability.

Woodman said...

"Mr. Jay G....the nude beach on the Cape is found if you take a left upon exiting the Cape Cod Canal Tunnel. You were probably always going right, maybe?"

There is a tunnel now? We always took the bridge. Though I was 8 when we left Otis Airforce Base, my dad worked at Pave Paws. I don't think I would have known about a tunnel now that I think about it, my mother was deathly scared of them.

Oh, and yeah, I heard about the beach too.

Anonymous said...

At a local aircraft manufacturing site (Plant 42) there is an underground tunnel between one engineering building and a manufacturing building. Changes in drawings can be requested, made, and returned to the assembly hall without the bother of going outside. Runners move the drawings, so the tunnel is called "The Runway".

So imagine my surprise when my aunt asked me if there was an underground runway there.

I said, conspiratorialy, that of course we have an underground runway. The big secret is the underground air we fly through after we take off from the underground runway.

That sent her off to read more on the Hollow Earth.

Kristophr said...

Yes, the Stonecutters have been using these secret tunnels to commute for years.

Bubblehead Les. said...

I remember seeing a couple of Nikes raised when I was a kid near Hopkins Airport in Cleveland.

And of course, there's the Salt Mines under Lake Erie.

And the Coal Mines in Southern Ohio, of course.

But there's no "Sooper Sekret Underground Control Facilities" up here in Ohio.

That YOU have a "Need to Know about," that is. ;)

Joe in Reno said...

Five minutes' careful thought would have led us to realize that the storm sewers in a flood plain along a creek bed where the trees all had muddy water rings two feet up their trunks were an unlikely place to find an underground bunker full of abandoned-but-still-functional electronic equipment,

Then you haven't been to Reno. Never underestimate dumb. ATT built their main switching center for N.NV & into Kali alongside the Truckee River...With underground power coming into the basement. You can see flood water mark is over 8 ft up the exterior wall.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I'm surprised that the dude didn't mention the Freemasons and the Trilateralists along with the Illuminati, not to mention the Bohemian Grove set.

Other than that, there went almost four minutes of my life I won't get back.

Steve Skubinna said...

In the early sixties we lived on Oahu and my Dad was stationed at Kunia. All I ever saw was the parking lot in front of an entrance bunker. To this day that's the one tour my Dad never talks about.

And he wasn't even a spook. Maybe he was OIC of the coffee mess or something.

John Stephens said...

As it happens I've a taste for this sort of thing, and I' m not the only one:

http://coldwar-c4i.net/index.html

Linoge said...

Conspiracy theories or not, that would be an awesome place to open up an indoor airsoft arena... which would only help fuel the conspiracy theories, really.

wolfwalker said...

"Needless to say, desultory searches of various manhole covers only turned up storm sewers and no bunker, although some folks swore their best friend's cousin had totally been in it."

Well, of course not. You had to know exactly which manhole to go down, and then exactly how many paces to walk down the tunnel, and then exactly which bricks in the wall to press, and what sequence to press them in. Only then would the wall slide up to reveal the waterproof door that actually let you into the bunker.

billf said...

I know,this is all in good fun,but it gets my engineer's imagination going anyway...what capacity HVAC would it take for people to breathe,in a mine,after a fighter jet took off in there?
Billf

Steve Skubinna said...

Billf, Philip Klass wrote books examining and demolishing various UFO conspiracy theories, and concerning the secret underground base in NV that employs over 5,000 people, he has asked "Who takes out the garbage? Where do all the toilets flush to?"

My own question was "Where is the parking lot?"

NotClauswitz said...

One of the houses we looked at last week had a mine on the property, looked like you could (only) get about ten feet in before you hit rock-fall... Too much work.
The parking lot for the secret underground Nevada site is an old underground blast cavern that has not yet collapsed. I knew an old desert dirt-rider who knew of a few places where the past has yet to catchup to the present: there's a bunch of subterranean "near-domes" that are a minor cave-in threat to hikers. Like that sink-hole in FL, you could drop a hundred feet real quick when the ceiling goes away.

Sigivald said...

Plus if there was a nationwide entirely-underground highway system...

Who built it, when? I mean, it'd take as much effort as the interstate system for the roads, plus all the excavation!

(And then there's fueling, tow trucks, repair shops, food and drink, restrooms, ventilation... employees for all those services...)

All that concrete, all that rebar, all that waste dirt; every construction company in the country would still be working on it, and everyone would know about it.

The Government couldn't even keep the existence of an airbase in the middle of the Nevada Test Site secret, and this guy thinks they can keep a second Interstate Highway System secret?

(Steve: The parking one's easy - you fly them in from Vegas, like they really do for people who work at Groom Lake, last I heard.)

Sigivald said...

(And Mr. Alger's roommate was only mostly wrong - or rather, only wrong if he meant the ring of Nike sites was right by Fernald itself*.

Because there were Nike Ajax installations in Wilmington, Felicity, and Oxford, describing a rough arc around Fernald (though more importantly around Cincinnati.)...

I haven't checked the surrounding states to see if the ring encircled Cincinnati, or was just to the North and thus assuming that the Reds would be coming in over the Pole...

* Which would be pointless, for a line of sight missile system; being even a mile or two apart around a site doesn't give you any serious increase in coverage.)

Sigivald said...

(And now I see I missed Tam's reply. Oh, well.)

Rob said...

I grew up in a mining town. Every hole in the ground was assumed to be...well, a gold or silver mine. Yeah, it was kind of boring.

OTOH, we were only a few hundred miles from Area 51, so we didn't really need any local conspiracy theories...

Anonymous said...

Don't want to feed anyone's paranoia, but here in Hawaii,under ground are 22 fuel tanks. Each hoilds around 375,000 g of aviation/marine fuel. I was a cop here for 15 years before I heard about them and it was another 10 years before I could wrangle an invite to see them. Sometimes, "they" do exist.
Storyteller

Davidwhitewolf said...

Three bucks a square foot? Five-fifty a square foot? In Kansas City?

I mean, out here in suburban Kali if you pay more than a buck fifty for leased Class B office space right now, you've failed Negotiation 101.

Anonymous said...

I always get a giggle when driving I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver. There's a "tree" on the west side of the interstate that is either the best decoy for conspiracy types, or the poster child for desultory camo. "Eh, it's 1645. Stick these on it, spray paint it green and let's call it a day." Been there for at least 20 years now.

LittleRed1

Eric said...

NORAD has planes that could fly in and out of it. Or so they said...everyone 20 years older than I was had seen it.

As a contractor I went in expecting to see all this neat stuff. All I saw were the servers we pulled out...fun.

markm said...

There actually is an underground complex with miles of corridors, just across the river from Washington, DC. I've been there. I've walked those corridors for hours, burdened with all the stuff my wife bought in those shops.

OK, that isn't a secret complex - but you might not guess that from the Crystal City website. I went through most of that website to find just a single photo that, although not obviously underground, at least doesn't look like most aboveground malls: http://crystalcity.org/artful/art-underground (scroll down to the "Fotowalk Underground" picture).

It's like they think that miles of nearly identical underground corridors and shops isn't
their best selling point...