Atomic Bomb Shelters In Your Own Backyard

Jan
27thAtomic Bomb Shelters In Your Own Backyard

by John Keel

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD—AGAIN

A couple of hours from where you now live there is a wonderful underground city with bowling alleys, a beauty shop, a fully equipped hospital, a movie theater and hundreds of cases of fine whiskey. If you live in a major city, it may be even closer. The one in New Orleans is right in the city itself.

These underground metropolises—there are over 90 of them—are one of the worst-kept secrets of the Cold War.

But they haven’t been over-publicized, either. They sound like one of the fantasies of the late Richard Shaver (remember the “Shaver Mystery” about the underground world?) and they frequently provide fodder for the wild rumors of a whole subculture that has sprung up around them.

Old-timers will recall that back in the 1950s, when Cold War paranoia peaked, everyone started building atom bomb shelters in their own back yards. We had almost no Civil Defense program, and if a nuclear war had broken out we would have been in big trouble.

In contrast, the Soviets were building shelters of heavy concrete in the basements of every new building they were erecting. The theory—part of the madness of those times—was that the nation with the most survivors would be the winner of the war!

In 1962, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was a major confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. We came very close to World War III—so close that President Kennedy and Congress had to face the grim fact that our civilian population had no protection whatsoever. If war had come, we would have “lost” because we would have had the fewest survivors.

Something had to be done. Part of the answer was to allocate funds for the construction of major shelters all over the country. Eventually many billions of tax dollars were spent. Semi-secret underground installations were built, not only in this country, but in several foreign countries as well.

THE BIG SECRET

While the underground cities were being dug, local citizens were given a cover story. They were usually told that a major underground telephone installation was being built in their area. Ma Bell got the blame for all the furious activity. Once a “Facility,” as they were called, was completed, a few local people were hired to keep it clean and ready. They weren’t sworn to secrecy but they weren’t expected to blab about it either. Local newspaper editors were also politely advised to ignore what was going on.

Every state has at least one of these installations. Some states have several. Each one has large dormitories with many bunks, kitchens, bathrooms and equipment to comfortably accommodate several hundred people.

That was the problem. In case of war, millions of people would be on the move, fleeing the cities and roaming homeless over the countryside. It would be impossible to house and care for all these refugees in these underground facilities so the semi-secrecy was deemed necessary.

A scandal broke out in New Orleans because their shelter had only a few beds for black people despite the city’s huge black population. (This was in the early 1960s when segregation was still being practiced.) If you were black, you were going to get nuked while all the white politicians, or “city fathers” as they sometimes call themselves, would be bowling underground.

In most cases, there are no signs pointing the way to the installations and access is only by simple dirt roads. The main entrances, which consist of huge, heavy steel doors, are concealed in hillsides behind shrubbery. You have to know exactly where the facilities are and exactly how to get to them or you’ll never find them. It’s all part of the cunning plan to build multi-billion dollar shelters so that the people who might need them can never locate them!

There is a law, however, that these places must be open to public inspection one day each year. The public is never informed of this, though. You have to know someone who works at the installation to find out the chosen day. That’s how I managed to visit the “New York Facility” a few years ago. It is located in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains and seemed like a set from a James Bond movie. You could live there quite comfortably for years without ever having to go back into the outside world.

During my travels in the 1960s, I came across several others under construction. One was near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, not far from the notorious Three Mile Island atomic plant. Another was in the tiny state of Connecticut.

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

Occasionally one of these facilities gets into the news very briefly. Back in the 1970s, an airliner had the misfortune to crash in Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C. Firemen and rescue workers were prevented from approaching the wreck by swarms of soldiers. The plane had crashed right on top of one of these underground installations.

In the 1980s, the Japanese government began a campaign to have the island of Okinawa returned to their custody. The U.S. has claimed the island ever since we lost 50,000 men taking it in World War II. We don’t want to give it back because we have built all kinds of tunnels and underground installations on it, according to the news reports.

Recently a young man who had just been to Australia came to me and excitedly reported that he had seen a remarkable thing in the Outback country, smack in the middle of the subcontinent. He had been sightseeing when a black military plane suddenly appeared and, while he watched, zoomed toward a high plateau in the center of the desert. To his amazement, a door opened in the side of the plateau and the plane flew into it. The door closed behind it. He felt that he had been an accidental witness to some top secret event.

In a way, he had. He had seen another one of our worst-kept secrets. No less an authority than the New York Times had spilled the beans back in the mid-1960s when they published a long article describing our plan to build a huge installation in the middle of the Australian outback.

We recruited contractors and engineers to live in that inhospitable area for at least seven years. They were permitted to take their families with them and we even planned to build a small American community there for the duration of the project. It had theaters, soda fountains and the inevitable bowling alleys.

I sent copies of the Times‘ story to correspondents in Australia and they eventually reported back that they had never heard of the project and it was never mentioned in the Australian press. But apparently the job was completed and supply planes visit it on a regular schedule.

The average Australian still doesn’t know that it’s there.

HOLES IN THE DESERT

Closer to home, we have been blowing holes in the Nevada desert for years with our underground atomic tests. Hundreds of atomic blasts have been set off north of Las Vegas near a place called Skull Mountain. Each one has melted a very big hole in the ground there. These holes intersect and now comprise a vast network of underground caverns.

No outsider really knows what all these caves are being used for, but they are probably being used for something. Since the underground tests have been going on for a long time, an enormous area is involved—an area big enough for a really spectacular underground city.

A fringe cult of a few dozen people has sprung up, advocating the existence of a Shaver-like underground city there in the Nevada Proving Grounds. They claim that aliens from some other planet are living there and enjoying our hospitality as they eat our strawberry ice cream and play in our bowling alleys.

However, those who understand the bureaucratic and military mentality assume that the space is just being wasted, perhaps being used to warehouse toilet seats, ashtrays and pencil sharpeners.

Most of the backyard shelters built in the 1950s are now being used by their owners to store wine and garden tools.

Perhaps the 90+ atomic shelters may now contain rusting, obsolete equipment and may be filled with cobwebs and bats. [or maybe not?]

The Government’s Secret Underground Nuclear Bunker