Kaysing was also tapping into a tradition. There had been one successful Great Moon Hoax already, over 130 years earlier, in 1835. Beginning on August 25 of that year, the New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming falsely that life and civilization had been discovered on the moon. According to the newspaper story, winged humans, beavers the size of people, and unicorns were seen through a powerful telescope belonging to Sir John Herschel, the most famous astronomer at the time. Editions of the newspapers sold out, were reprinted, and sold out again. Circulation soared, and the New York Sun made tremendous profits over the story, which readers believed to be true. On the subject of the public’s gullibility, Edgar Allan Poe, who also wrote for the paper, said, “The story’s impact reflects on the period’s infatuation with progress.” But the original Great Moon Hoax came and went without a conspiratorial bent because there was no government entity to blame. It was a publicity stunt to sell papers, not perceived as a nefarious plan by a government elite to manipulate and control the common man.
Shortly after Kaysing’s book was published (it is still in print as of 2011), a 1978 Hollywood film followed along the same lines. Peter Hyams’s Capricorn One told the story of a faked NASA landing on Mars. Even James Bond entered the act, referencing a lunar-landing conspiracy in the film Diamonds Are Forever. From there, the moonhoax theory remained a quiet staple among conspiracy theorists for decades, but with the rise of the Internet in the late 1990s, the moonhoax concept resurfaced and eventually made its way into the mainstream press. In February of 2001, Fox TV aired a documentarystyle hourlong segment called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? and the debate was rekindled around the world. This gave way to an unusual twenty-first-century moon-hoax twist.
In September of 2002, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, agreed to be interviewed by Far Eastern TV. This was because “they seemed like legitimate journalists,” Aldrin explains. Buzz Aldrin has the highest profile of the twelve Apollo astronauts who walked on the moon, and he regularly gives interviews. A former fighter pilot, Aldrin flew sixty-six combat missions and shot down two MiG-15s in the Korean War. He is also an MIT-trained physicist, which affords him extra fluency when discussing outer space. Sitting in a suite in the Luxe Hotel in Beverly Hills in the fall of 2002, it did not take long for Aldrin to realize something was awry when the TV interviewer began asking him questions involving conspiracy theories. “I tried redirecting the discussion back to a legitimate discussion about space,” Aldrin says. Instead the interviewer played a clip from the Fox documentary about moon hoaxes. Aldrin believes “conspiracy theories are a waste of everybody’s time and energy,” and he got up and left the interview. “I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon, but that the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace, has to rank with one of the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard,” says Aldrin.
Then, down in the hotel lobby, a large man in his midthirties approached Buzz Aldrin and tried to spark a conversation. The man, whose name was Bart Sibrel, had a film crew with him. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” Sibrel asked, the cameras rolling. Aldrin said hello and headed out toward the street. Sibrel hurried along beside him, asking more questions. Then he pulled out a very large Bible and began shaking it in the former astronaut’s face. “Will you swear on the Bible that you really walked on the moon?” Aldrin, who was seventy-two at the time, said, “You conspiracy people don’t know what you’re talking about” and turned to walk in the other direction. The man began hurling personal insults and accusations at Aldrin. “Your life is a complete lie!” the man shouted. “And here you are making money by giving interviews about things you never did!” The conspiracy theorist ran in front of Aldrin, blocking his way across the road. Aldrin, who had his stepdaughter with him, walked back to the hotel and asked the bellman to call the police. “You’re a coward, Buzz Aldrin!” shouted the conspiracy theorist. “You’re a liar; you’re a thief!” Aldrin said he’d had enough: “Maybe it was the West Point cadet in me, or perhaps it was the Air Force fighter pilot. Or maybe I’d just had enough of his belligerent character assassination… I popped him.” The second man on the moon punched the lunar-landing conspiracy theorist squarely in the jaw, cameras catching it all on tape.
In no time, the video footage was airing on the news, on CNN, on Jay Leno and David Letterman. CNN political commentator Paul Begala gave Aldrin the thumbs-up for pushing back against conspiracy theorists. But elsewhere, all across America, many millions of people agreed with the conspiracy theorists who believed that the lunar landing was a hoax. By the fortieth anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission, in 2009, polls conducted in America, England, and Russia revealed that approximately 25 percent of the people interviewed believed the moon landing never happened. Many said they believed that it was faked and filmed at Area 51.
As of 2011, the lunar-landing conspiracy is one of three primary conspiracies said to have been orchestrated at Area 51. The other two that dominate conspiracy thinking involve captured aliens and UFOs, and an underground tunnel and bunker system that supposedly exists below Area 51 and connects it to other military facilities and nuclear laboratories around the country. Each conspiracy theory contains elements of fact, and each is perceived differently by the three government agencies they target: NASA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. In each conspiracy theory lies an important clue about the real truth behind Area 51.
Michael Schratt, who writes books and travels around the country giving lectures about government cover-ups at Area 51, says that the secret facility is “directly connected to Edwards [Air Force Base] North Base Complex and Air Force Plant 42 at Palmdale by an underground tube-shuttle tunnel system developed by the Rand Corporation and others [circa] 1960.” Schratt also says that Area 51 is “very likely connected to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio” this same way. “The tunnels were dug by a nuclear-powered drill that can dig three miles of tunnel a day,” Schratt says. “These tunnels also connect, by underground train, to other military facilities where leaders of government will go and live after a nuclear event” such as World War III.
In fact, underground tunnels, called N-tunnels, P-tunnels, and Ttunnels, have been drilled next door to Area 51, at the Nevada Test Site, for decades. The 1,150-foot-long tunnel at Jackass Flats, drilled into the Calico Mountains, through which NERVA scientists and engineers like T. D. Barnes accessed their underground workstations is but one example of an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site. The NERVA complex in Area 25 has since been dismantled and “deactivated,” according to the Department of Energy, but elsewhere at the test site dozens of tunnel complexes exist. In the 1960s, one tunnel dug into the granite mountain of Rainer Mesa, in Area 12, reached down as far as 4,500 feet, nearly a mile underground. There are many such government tunnels and bunkers around America, but it was the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup in 1992 that set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories related to postapocalypse hideouts for the U.S. government elite — and since 1992, these secret bunkers have been woven into conspiracy theories about things that go on at Area 51.
The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles southwest of the nation’s capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense spearheaded the construction of a 112,544square-foot facility eight hundred feet below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star Greenbrier resort. This secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier bunker had dormitories, a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital staffed with thirty-five doctors. “Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence of the shelter from our potential enemies, was paramount to all matters of operation,” Paul Bugas, the former onsite superintendent at the Greenbrier bunker, told PBS when
asked why the facility was kept secret from the public. Many citizens agree with the premise. Conspiracy theorists disagree. They don’t believe that the government keeps secrets to protect the people. Conspiracy theorists believe the leaders of government are only looking to protect themselves.
The underground tunnels and bunkers at the Nevada Test Site may be the most elaborate underground chambers ever constructed by the federal government in the continental United States. The great majority of them are in Area 12, which is located approximately sixteen miles due west of Area 51 in a mountain range called Rainier Mesa. Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel complexes were drilled into the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To complete a single tunnel took, on average, twelve months. Most tunnels ran approximately 1,300 feet below the surface of the earth, but some reached a mile underground. Inside these giant cavities, which averaged one hundred feet wide, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense have exploded at least sixty-seven nuclear bombs. There, the military has tested nuclear blast and radiation effects on everything from missile nose cones to military satellites. A series called the Piledriver experiments studied survivability of hardened underground bunkers in a nuclear attack. The Hardtack tests sought to learn how “to destroy enemy targets [such as] missile silos and command centers” using megaton bombs. Inside the T-tunnels, scientists created vacuum chambers to simulate outer space, expanding on those dangerous late-1950s upper atmospheric tests code-named Teak and Orange. And the Department of Defense even tested how a stockpile of nuclear weapons inside an underground bunker would hold up to a nuclear blast.
Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel complexes, guarding many of the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the test site, these were his least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear heavy shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus explains. “The air was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many people working so many different jobs. Carpenters, welders… There were forty-eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the equipment was hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the conspiracy theorists believe they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality, according to Atomic Energy Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted to, men like Richard Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to walk.
Unlike atmospheric weapons tests or the atomic tests in vertical shafts that made the moonlike craters, for the T-tunnel nuclear tests, the bomb was one of the first items to arrive on scene. “The bomb was cemented in the back of the tunnel, in a room called the zero room,” Mingus says. “That was about three-quarters of a mile distance.” Sometimes, Mingus would stand guard with the nuclear bomb at the end of the tunnel for eight- or ten-hour shifts, so he chose to walk in each morning “for the exercise.” Mingus also disliked the assignments inside the underground tunnels because they reminded him of a part of his early life he would rather have forgotten. “When I was a kid working the coal mines,” Mingus explains. But as anxious as a man standing guard over live nuclear bombs might have been, Mingus remained calm. He says the coal mines of his youth were far more dangerous. “There were no electric drills back then so my brother and I drilled by hand. We’d get down on our knees in those little tunnels — three and a half feet wide, not tall enough to stand up in. We’d use black powder as an explosive, not dynamite. We’d set the powder in the hole, tap it with a rod, use a fuse that was like toilet paper, light it, run out, and then wait for the smoke to clear. Some things you never forget even if you want to,” Mingus says.
Before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Pentagon maintained a policy of announcing nuclear weapons tests to the public, usually one or two hours before shot time, which meant somewhere around 3:30 a.m. the day of the blast. After the test ban, the Pentagon reversed its policy. Information about underground tests — when they were to take place and how big they would be — was now classified secret. Only if a scientist predicted that an earthquake-like tremor might be felt in Las Vegas, sixty-five miles to the south, was a public announcement made in advance of the nuclear test. And so, from 1963 until the last test in 1992, approximately eight hundred tests were conducted underground. By the late 1990s, decades after the first drills bored into the rock at the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear bombs, the hard-rock miners, and Area 51 had merged into one entity. As it is with many urban legends regarding Area 51, the underground-tunnels idea has been spun from facts.
As creative as conspiracy theorists can be when it comes to Area 51, it is surprising how they have missed the one underlying element that connects the three primary conspiracy theories about the secret facility to the truth. For conspiracy theorists, in the captured-aliens-and-UFOs narrative, the federal agency orchestrating the plot is the CIA. In the lunar-landing conspiracy the agency committing the fraud is NASA. In the underground tunnels and bunker plot, the evil operating force is the Department of Defense. And yet the one agency that plays an actual role in the underlying facts regarding all three of these conspiracy theories is the Atomic Energy Commission.
Why have conspiracy theorists missed this connection? Why has the Atomic Energy Commission escaped the scrutiny it deserves? The truth is hidden out in the desert at the Nevada Test Site. To borrow the metaphor of CIA spymaster James Angleton, that is where a “wilderness of mirrors” can be found. Angleton believed the Soviets spun lies from lies and in doing so were able to keep America’s intelligence agents lost in an illusory forest. In this same manner, throughout the Cold War the Atomic Energy Commission created its own wilderness of mirrors out in the Nevada desert, built from illusory half-truths and outright lies. The commission was able to send the public further and further away from the truth, not with “mirrors” but by rubber-stamping documents with Restricted Data, Secret, and Confidential, to keep them out of the public eye. The Area 51 conspiracy theories that were born of the Cold War — the ones peopled by aliens, piloted by UFOs, set in underground cities and on movie sets of the moon — these conspiracies all stand to aid and assist the Atomic Energy Commission in keeping the public away from secret truths.
It is no coincidence that the agency behind some of the most secret and dangerous acts out in the desert — at the Nevada Test and Training Range, the Nevada Test Site, and Area 51—has changed its name four times. First it was called the Manhattan Project, during World War II. Then, in 1947, it changed its name to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. In 1975 the agency was renamed the Energy Research and Development Administration, or ERDA. In 1977 it was renamed again, this time the Department of Energy, “the government department whose mission is to advance technology and promote related innovation in the United States,” which conveniently makes it sound more like Apple Corporation than the federal agency that produced seventy thousand nuclear bombs. Finally, in 2000, the nuclear weapons side of the agency got a new name for the fourth time: the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, a department nestled away inside the Department of Energy, or DOE. In August 2010, even the Nevada Test Site changed its name. It is now called the Nevada National Security Site, or NNSS.
Since the National Security Act of 1947 reorganized government after the war, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force have all maintained their original names. The cabinet-level Departments of State, Labor, Transportation, Justice, and Education are all called today what they were when they were born. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has changed its name once since its formal beginning in 1908. Originally it was called the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI.
By changing the name of the nation’s nuclear weapons agency four times since its creation in 1942, does the federal government hope the nefarious secrets of the Atomic Energy Commission will simply disappear? Certainly, many of its records have.
James Angleton spent his career trying to prove Soviet deception. Angleton argued that totalitarian governments had the capacity to confuse and manipulate the West to such a degree that the downfall of democracy was inevitable unless the Soviet deceivers could be stopped. Angleton’s belief system made him paranoid and extreme. For three years, he imprisoned a Soviet double agent and former KGB officer named Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in a secret CIA prison in the United States — subjecting Nosenko to varying degrees of torture in an effort to break him and get him to tell the “truth.” (After passing multiple polygraph tests, Nosenko was eventually released and resettled under an assumed identity. His true allegiance remains the subject of debate.) The Nosenko affair brought about Angleton’s personal downfall. He was fired and he left the Agency disgraced. Deception may be a game between governments but the consequences of engaging in it are, for some, very real.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union did not have the monopoly on deception. In 1995, after President Clinton ordered his Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to look into Cold War secret-keeping at the Atomic Energy Commission, disturbing documentation was found. In a memorandum dated May 1, 1995, the subject line chosen by Clinton’s committee to sum up early AEC secret-keeping protocol read: “Official Classification Policy to Cover Up Embarrassment.” One of the more damaging documents unearthed by Clinton’s staff was a September 1947 memo by the Atomic Energy Commission’s general manager John Derry. In a document Clinton’s staff called the Derry Memo the Atomic Energy Commission ruled: “All documents and correspondence relating to matters of policy and procedures, the given knowledge of which might compromise or cause embarrassment to the Atomic Energy Commission and/or its contractors,” should be classified secret or confidential.
Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base Page 36