One cornerstone of many a conspiracy theory is that of mysterious secret bases. Governments around the world do have extremely secretive, off-limits bases scattered throughout all corners of the globe, which draw to them such stories of strange experiments, secret research, UFOs, and all manner of high strangeness. Many of these have become legendary for the thick cloud of intrigue and bizarre tales orbiting them, such as the infamous and much-discussed Area 51 in Nevada. My colleague Nick Redfern recently also talked about deep weirdness at the top-secret Porton Down military installation in the English county of Wiltshire. However, while the stories surrounding many of these sorts of facilities may or may not hold any truth, at least the bases themselves are known to be real, if not fully understood. Yet there are other supposed secret bases out there that hover out in the realm of pure speculation, rumor, myth. For some supposed secret bases, their very existence seems to be fueled by pure conspiracy theory, and it is not really known if they have ever even existed or not. These are the weird, very often eyebrow raising tales of phantom secret bases that may or may not exist and the bizarreness that surrounds them.

One such base is known as Base AL/499, and is known primarily through the testimony of a James Casbolt, who came forward to claim to have been a high level intelligence operative at the top secret facility. According to Casbolt, Base AL/499 is supposedly located 200 feet under the earth in a subterranean cavern under the English village of Peasemore, and is involved with the top secret Project Mannequin, which supposedly seeks to primarily to clone genetically enhanced humans and to research various methods of mind-control to create sleeper assassins that could be activated at any time. The base is apparently overseen by the NSA, and it is all made even more ominous when considering the fact that Casbolt also claims that Base AL/499 has connections with the secret society the Illuminati.

Besides human cloning and mind control there are also the supposed bases dealing with aliens and UFOs. Area 51 is there and has been done to death, so let’s look at some more obscure such bases which are currently unknown to even really exist. Out in the remote wasteland of the Kalahari Desert of South Africa there is allegedly a secret underground base called Camp 13, which is most well-known from what is called the “Kalahari Incident.” On May 7, 1989, a bizarre unidentified spacecraft is said to have crashed into the desert near the border with Botswana, after being aggressively shot down by South African fighter jets. The South African military then immediately descended upon the downed craft, and apparently found their electrical equipment to inexplicably malfunction in the vicinity.

The craft itself was said to be made of a smooth, silvery substance, and inside there were found to be three passengers of apparently extraterrestrial origin, about 5 feet in height and with thin bodies, large heads, and dressed in tight silver one-piece outfits. The area of the crash had also seemingly experienced an immense heat that had fused together the sand in the location into smooth glass. The military did their best to hide the site with fresh sand and whisked off the craft and its occupants, who were reportedly still alive at the time. UFO researcher Tony Dodd has claimed that the United States negotiated with the South African government to hand over the alien spacecraft and its passengers, but South Africa then supposedly secretly kept one of the alien crew members and had it hidden away at the mysterious Camp 13. Is there anything to this odd story? Who knows?

Speaking of rumored secret bases harboring UFOs and aliens, there is also supposedly one called Dulce Base lurking in the wilds of the U.S. state of New Mexico within the Archuleta Mesa, which lies on the Colorado-New Mexico border near the small town of Dulce. The base, which has gained legendary status in the UFO community, was allegedly first discovered by the public in 1979, when a local electrician named Paul Bennewitz began picking up what he claimed to be radio transmissions between government forces and aliens emanating from the mesa, which he became convinced were from some secretive underground base. At the time, the story became a big hit in UFO circles, and there was much talk of what the government was up to out there in those badlands. The whole thing received further fuel when a man named Phil Schneider came forward to claim that he had actually worked at the facility, before proceeding to take the tale deeper into the weird.

Schneider would go on to describe the layout of the base in great detail, saying it had 7 levels and was a joint operation between the United States government and extraterrestrials. According to Schneider, the base had thousands of aliens living there, where they were allowed to experiment on humans in secrecy in exchange for pieces of advanced technology and peace. Eerily, the base also supposedly had an underground subway system running between it and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has its own mythology of conspiracy theories as well. Another supposed former employee at the base was a man named Thomas Costello, who claimed to have been a security guard there and that he seen horrific experiments carried out on both humans and aliens alike first hand during his tenure at the facility. According to an article by Mike Rothschild on Dulce Base from Skeptoid:

Castello added depth and detail to the existing story, telling of underground caves occupied for centuries by reptoids, caves that were taken over by the RAND Corporation for use by the New World Order to create biological weapons. The former guard spoke of fleets of alien ships stored at Los Alamos, human/alien hybrid cloning, his arguments with a cranky reptoid leader named “Khaarshfashst” and a vast system of tunnels running under the entire country.

All manner of stories have been laid on the alleged base ever since, such as that it is ground zero for an interstellar war and that there has even been a shoot-out between humans and aliens on the premises. Schneider would eventually develop cancer, which he claimed to have contracted from an alien weapon during the incident, and committed suicide in 1996. Considering these rather far-fetched claims, the fact that all of our information on the alleged base comes from three possibly mentally troubled people, the sense of a detachment from reality to the whole tale, and the fact that there doesn’t actually seem to be any evidence at all of anything approaching what is described going on at Archuleta Mesa, there has understandably been quite a lot of skepticism aimed at the existence of the Dulce Base, and it is largely completely left to the imagination.

Just about as bonkers as the mythology of Dulce Base is the tale of a top secret government facility purportedly lying under the McCarran International Airport, in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to an elaborate report from a Reddit user named Blue_KeyCard, the infamous and mysterious Area 51 is merely a front and distraction from where the real secret experiments are being conducted, deep down in the bowels of the earth beneath McCarran Airport. The mysterious base itself, which is apparently called NEXUS, is described as a massive, labyrinthine complex deep down under the airport, where it remains hidden partly because the airport drowns out any suspicious sounds from it and city of Las Vegas consumes so much power that it its own immense power consumption doesn’t look suspicious.

Within the NEXUS base, there are claimed to be four distinct sections called “Hives.” According to the witness, Hive 1 is for “finance, accounting, operations/organization divisions, troop training/housing, and some small-scale weapons testing.” Next is Hive 2, which is for “Chemical engineering, some nano-tech research, and advanced psychological fitness,” then Hive 3 with its bioweapon and disease research and testing of “advanced space-travel and space-warfare technologies, particle engines and gravitational beams,” as well as research into inter-dimensional anomalies, and finally the sinister and terribly mysterious Hive 4, which is apparently kept in a “total information blackout.” In this place clearance is especially limited, and there is seemingly no communication at all with the outside world. Even more ominous is that the facility supposedly harbors what the witness calls possibly “the most terrifying thing in the world,” which he explains thus:

Another thing I’ve read minimally about are “the twins.” I don’t know who or what these are, but they’re the “above-top-secret” gem of Hive 4. It is treasonous to even correspond about them on our secure networks unless you are cleared to do so, and only four employees are. I’ve only seen a few things about them. One was a medical record. No vitals, unusual vocalizations that manifest hallucinations and psychosis in nearby employees, and skin that produces violent nausea when touched. The document was basically speculation that the skin functions much like the Australian stinging tree or a jellyfish.

I read documents about people who worked with them as well. In 4, a woman was remanded to the psychological ward after being in the same room with them, and a soldier who stood outside of the laboratory where they are kept basically killed himself. Specifically, he peeked inside during a routine access, then began bashing his own brains out with the butt of a pistol while singing an Irish folksong. The woman who was remanded to psych was even weirder: during breakfast with her colleagues, she grabbed a fork, stood up, walked out of the mess hall, stripped all of her clothes off, blinded herself in both eyes, then somehow managed to make her way all the way up to Floor 1 where the access corridor to Hive 3 is located. How she managed to operate the dozens of keycard readers, passcode boxes, and retinal scanners is still under review. Last email regarding her was sent in 2012, about how she sits in the dark of solitary on Floor 11’s psych ward with a permanent and blissful grin on her face.

One of my colleagues whom I trust told me that he saw the twins once through hacked access to a video feed. He said they are woman-like, about twice as tall as a full-grown man, with unidentifiable black growths dangling from their heads (like hair but thicker), and they basically float a few inches off the ground and drag their toes lightly as they move. They’re utterly pale. He never saw the faces, but he claims that they appear to distort reality (or at least the video feed) in such a way that space looks bent around them.

It is all very, very strange and compelling stuff, if not obviously charged with an whiff of pure fabrication. Just what is going on here? The Reddit user claims that all of this is going on as the U.S. government actively seeks to maintain the illusion that Area 51 is where all of these experiments are being carried out, in order to divert attention away from the real site. Is there anything to any of this tale at all or is this just the ranting of a delusional individual or a flat out hoax? You can read the whole report here and see what you think. It seems worth taking this all with a grain of salt or two, as it did come from Reddit, and is most likely a fabricated piece of spooky creepypasta, but it is all very entertaining nonetheless.

If that is not enough for you, then how about a tale of a secret government base complete with flesh eating aliens? According to a report that is allegedly from files published by the United States Department of Agriculture, a secret base was constructed in New Mexico within the Tonto National Forest. One witness allegedly told about the base in a mysterious email on December 30, 2013, which was described thus:

David received a call this morning at the front desk from a male caller reporting the construction of a secret government installation upstream from the Salt River Canyon past Pinal Creek (Upstream from Roosevelt Lake).

Aliens and at least one detached head are involved. Caller claims to have seen construction cranes coming out the side of the cliffs, miniature stealth planes and UFOs, aliens and people working together at the site, aliens eating humans.

He found a severed head and claims to have pictures of some of this stuff. Caller reported that he is 60, not crazy and doesn’t do drugs. He said he had already called the ‘office at the lake’, but he didn’t know if those people were turning the other cheek or maybe those people have been paid off.

Wait, what? Flesh eating aliens? Severed heads? What in the world? The witness claimed he didn’t do drugs, so there’s that, I guess. Besides its sheer insanity, this account is somewhat curious in that there are others who have claimed that a base lies in the same vicinity as well. Former US Air Force Intelligence Officer George A. Filer has said that he was contacted by a man named Scott Heckman, who spoke of a base in the same area. The witness claimed that the area was a hotbed of UFO activity, as well as unexplained disappearances, and said thus:

The most major base that I have been able to follow the craft towards is located in the Tonto National Forest. I discovered this while camping in the Sierra Ancha Wilderness.

The UFOs kept flying down into the basin two minutes apart. They flew low, out of the southeast at about two thousand feet above the terrain. During the daytime A-10s use the area for training. Re-fueling practice also occurs here both day and night.

These areas have also been plagued with several unexplained disappearances that have occurred in Cochise County over the last 30 years. Cars are abandoned with people’s ID; money and keys left behind.

Their occupants are mysteriously missing, never to be seen again.

Information on one extremely weird supposed base was relayed to me personally by the anonymous contact calling himself Molten13, who I have written of here at Mysterious Universe before. This mysterious individual claimed to me that there were several bases lying under the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, where he alleges he worked as what I suspect was some sort of security post. Molten13 claimed that the base was used for all manner of strange experiments including mental powers, mind control, inter-dimensional travel, teleportation, time travel, genetic experimentation, and apparently even individuals with unique powers, such as “guys who can walk through walls.” According to this source there was even supposedly seemingly an extraterrestrial kept in some sort of suspended animation down in a bio-containment unit.

All of this was described as research that mankind was not ready for, and supposedly took place down in a self-sufficient base hidden away even from the upper echelons of the government. According to Molten13, there was some sort of security breach at one point in which he suspects that something escaped out into the Nevada wilds. He claimed that whatever this was, it confronted me personally in a bizarre encounter I had at around the same time, which I have written of here before. I have come to the conclusion that this is most likely just a hoax and someone yanking my chain, and Molten13 has disappeared, with not even my article about him drawing him back out. Nevertheless, it is an incredibly far-out tale, and you can read more about it in my article on the incident here.

It is impossible to know how much truth any of these wild stories have, and considering their tenuous nature of being based on hearsay and rumors with no real evidence, there is no way to prove them or disprove them, keeping them firmly in the domain of speculation and the imagination. However, regardless of whether any of these secret bases and others like them exist or not, they still serve to be intriguing and entertaining, and show that such conspiracy theories have a tenacious ability to stubbornly continue to sprout up and spread. Is this all fiction, the product of disillusioned minds, hoaxes, or somehow rooted in reality? We will probably never know for sure, but these bases certainly do exist in conspiracy mythology.