Then there is Kapustin Yar, a secret Russian site established in 1946 in Astrakhan Oblast, between Volgograd and Astrakhan, dedicated to the research, development, and deployment of rocket-based technologies. Rumors coming out of Russia and data collected from NRO spy satellites, points toward continued underground digging and construction at Kapustin Yar. Why? To further advance Russian rocket research? Or to excavate a place to hide out when the storm hits?
Better known as the Russian Area 51, Zhitkur is a highly secret and incredibly well guarded installation built below a seemingly innocuous small town in the region of Volgograd Oblast. In the very same way that rumors and whistleblower testimony suggests that recovered alien spacecraft are being studied and test-flown at Area 51, Nevada, similar tales surround Zhitkur. Stories emanating from former employees of the base tell of top-secret studies of crashed UFOs. Darker accounts reveal that the Russians are hard at work developing deadly super-viruses at Zhitkur that will have the ability to lethally target specific races of people, while leaving others completely free of infection. All of those rumors are overshadowed by accounts similar to those emanating from Kapustin Yar — that extensive tunnel-boring activity is the order of the day at Zhitkur. And time, the unsettling rumors suggest, is rapidly running out.
People once sang, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” Maybe today it’s the Russians’ turn to sing another song: “2012 is coming! 2012 is coming!”
With Norway, Russia, and China now dissected, what of the United States?
The United States
Skeptics of the doomsday theories surrounding 2012 suggest that if such a calamity really was imminent, then the United States would by now be fully engaged in such a tremendously large program to construct massive shelters all across the country that it would be nearly impossible to hide them from the populace and the media. Those same skeptics fail to note, however, that — as this book demonstrates — the United States is already peppered with an impressive number of large, strengthened, underground domains.
The U.S. government does not need to build more underground outposts to protect the elite in the event the Mayas really did get it right: They have had them for decades. Providing a safe haven for government and military officials in the event of a national emergency of apocalyptic proportions is something that has been planned for pretty much ever since the splitting of the atom in the 1940s. Unless the world is faced with an event in 2012 that exceeds even the horrendous destruction that a nuclear war would bring, safe havens like Raven Rock might provide just as much protection from Mayan prophecy as they might from a multi-megaton Chinese nuke.
A variation on the theory that the U.S. government has ample secure underground installations in which its highest echelons are guaranteed some degree of survival when December 21, 2012 strikes suggests that officialdom is also secretly preparing to utilize many of the natural caves and man-made mines that can be found all across the United States as refuges from whatever might occur on that fateful December day. This particular theory provoked a wealth of debate in the online realm of conspiracy theorizing when, on March 26, 2009, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) issued a widely circulated press release recommending that cavers and members of the public all across the United States should cease and desist from entering deep caves, caverns, and mines. Inevitably, this led to an unsettling rumor that the government was issuing this demand as a means to slowly and subtly commandeer and control such underground havens, and wrest them away from public access before 2012 arrives.
The official version of events was quite different, however. According to the FWS, their reason for requesting that the U.S. populace desist from entering such places was due to a fungal condition severely affecting the North American bat population: White-Nose Syndrome. In the words of the FWS: “The evidence collected to date indicates that human activity in caves and mines may be assisting the spread of WNS. This fungus grows best in the cold and wet conditions common to caves and abandoned mines and likely can be transported inadvertently from site to site on boots and gear of cave visitors. It is generally recommended that cavers avoid all caves and mines containing hibernating bats, even in states where WNS is not known to occur.”[26]
The FWS additionally called for a “voluntary moratorium, effective immediately, on all caving activity in states known to have hibernacula affected by WNS,” adding that “scientific activities that involve entry into caves or mines where bats reside should be evaluated to determine if the activity has the potential to facilitate the spread of WNS…. These recommendations will remain in effect until the mechanisms behind transmission of WNS are understood, and/or the means to mitigate the risk of human-assisted transport are developed.”[27]
Was this an ingenious cover story on the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or is the whole idea just plain batty? Time may ultimately provide the answer. And if the 2012 theories do possess even a modicum of merit, the biggest conspiracy of all may well be contained in the following question: Why aren’t huge subsurface facilities — whether natural or man-made — being made ready for the rest of us who do not have the luxury of holding prestigious government positions?
An answer, perhaps, might be found by looking at the final scenes of the darkly comic 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove: When the U.S. president, his staff, and senior military personnel realize that human civilization is quickly nearing its end, they hastily envisage a plan in which, while everyone else is left to fry in a worldwide, radioactive nightmare, a small band of select governmental individuals will head deep underground, with a plentiful supply of resources, and a significant number of nubile chicks to help repopulate the decimated human race, before one day resurfacing to start all over again. Dr. Strangelove is harrowing, nightmarish, and fiction. Let’s hope that as December 21, 2012 gets closer and closer, this entire controversy, for which we have the Mayas to thank, proves to be fiction too.
C-8
The Nightmare at Dulce
The wild saga of the notorious underground base at Dulce, Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, is as fantastic as it is terrifying. It is a tale filled with hard-to-define rumors, outrageous government deceit and disinformation, hostile extraterrestrials from beyond our solar system, and dark secrets of an alien nature emanating from within the black heart of mysterious subterranean caverns. (It is not an exaggeration to say it’s a saga that would have been worthy of an entire season of The X-Files, nevermind a single episode.) When one carefully peels away the distortions, the myths, and the lies surrounding this base, what remains just might be a nightmarish reality of otherworldly proportions.