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Before I came to live in Cornwall I lived on the edge of the Greenham Common USAF Base in
Berkshire. When the Newbury by-pass was about to be built the protestors climbed trees and
made tunnels in an effort to get it stopped. That was when I first heard about the secret
tunnels running beneath Greenham Common. A few people came forward to say that they
had actually been employed in the digging of these tunnels, but whether the claims are true
or not nobody seems to know for certain. So I thought I’d take a look at the topic of secret
tunnels in the UK, and I’ll start with Greenham Common as it was a part of my ‘home
territory’ for most of my first forty decades.
Of course, today Greenham Common is no longer a USAF Base. After it closed it was handed
back, to become common land again in 1997 and on part of which a new business park has
since been built.
If you’d like to know more about the history of the area then Wikipedia gives a very good
history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenham_Common
It also details the “supposed” nuclear accident that happened on the base on 28th February
1958. One of the aeroplanes ran into difficulties soon after take-off and had to ditch both of
it’s large fuel tanks. However, instead of landing in a pre-assigned safe area one tank hit a
hangar, and the other tank landed close to an already loaded plane. The cargo on that plane was a thermonuclear bomb, and the subsequent fire caused by the jettisoned tank overwhelmed this plane. Two men died, and the fire took sixteen hours to extinguish. But,
almost thirty years later both the UK and US governments still kept it a secret. They
maintained that not only had a taxiing aircraft caused the accident, but also that no fire had
taken place. To this day many believe that the bomb exploded and contaminated an area up
to
eight miles in radius.
Then, after a cluster of childhood leukaemia cases, the report of an investigation by neighbouring councils was released in 1997. Apparently no evidence for any such explosion,
or contamination, had been found. The survey, taking seven months to complete, was
undertaken by The Geosciences Advisory Unit and followed the release of de-classified MoD
documents that suggested a nuclear weapon might have been damaged in that fire back in
1958. And yet, a secret report issued in 1961 by the Atomic Weapons Establishment
(Aldermaston) seems to state that abnormal amounts of weapons-grade uranium had been
found in the area.
The event wasn’t greatly known about by the locals until 1997 when the leukaemia cases were the spur to the investigation. Personally, I was at school less than two miles away from
the base back in 1958, and I wasn’t aware of any accident, nuclear or otherwise. But even
after all these years it’s still a very unsettling thought to think I may have been exposed to
such radiation.
However, I digress, so back to the tunnels.
Not very far from Greenham Common lies the little village of Peasemore where, according
to some beliefs, there is a tunnel that links up to the Greenham Common Base. And yet, once again, I lived in the area for many years and have never heard of any type of base at Peasemore! Of course, if it exists or existed, it would have been so secret that it’s not surprising the local people were never aware of it. Although, in an article about a secret
base in Berkshire, by Matthew Williams and Miles Johnston, entitled: “Programmable
Life Forms,” it is suggested that the entrance to the tunnel lies inside the Hartnell Labs in
Oxford. Apparently this laboratory deals with Government Nuclear Experimentation,
including social engineering programming and mind control experiments. The interviewee
in the article, Barry King, states that he has been attempting to get information out about a
secret base in Berkshire, and that he was personally involved in these programmes between
1972 and 1988. He is, or was, also involved in the whole UFO topic, claiming to have worked
with aliens, and he founded a newsletter called “The Voice” in order to disseminate the
information.
According to Barry, the Peasemore base goes down six levels, and he was a security officer
there. If what he claims is true it’s very chilling indeed, but then, we’ve heard so many
similar stories before!
Asked about similar places in the UK he replies:
"Porton Down (Wiltshire) is connected to Boscombe Down via an
underground tunnel. Stuff from Porton Down is shipped to Boscombe
down and then taken out via planes to America and other places. The
cultures and small scale life-forms in early stages are shipped out of this
facility. Fort Mead runs the operation in the states under the NSA. There are no holds barred with them and their control policies. It was their idea originally and it started in 1947."
He also, as might be expected, mentions Rudloe Manor in Corsham, Wiltshire, and continues by referring to a USAF Base at: “Watchfield in Oxfordshire, Railton in Swindon and there is also a facility near Swindon.”
There is a Watchfield within about 5 miles of Swindon, but there is also a Watchfield in
Somerset, 36 miles from Corsham. However, just for comparison, Peasemore is around 20
miles from Swindon, approximately 19 miles from Oxford, and around 8 miles from
Greenham. It’s also in the region of 30 miles from Porton Down, and Porton Down is about
30 miles from Corsham.
As for Railton, I can find neither a Railton, nor a Railston, in this area. In fact doing a UK
wide atlas search the place name doesn’t show up at all.
And, at this link, under the title of: “Secret and Not So Secret UK Bases and Installations,”
somebody has posted a very good, very long, list which they introduce by saying:
“Here is a list of the British militaries R&D, secret and not so secret bases and
establishments and a possible front company who controls most of it, which also is
responsible for all these genetic and germ warfare experiments that we’ve all come to love. Please bare with me, it’s quite a long post, but it is very interesting. It’s just to show that the U.K have their own Dulce’s and area 51s, we can’t let America take all the credit, now can we, lol. Defence Evaluation and Research Agency [DERA] as of July 1 2001, officially became known as QinetiQ [pronounced kinetic]. Many of the 80-plus laboratories, employing some 9,000 scientists, are now in the private sector. The UK government retains control of sensitive top secret sections of QinetiQ, such as the germ warfare laboratories at Porton Down, Wiltshire.”
You can find the list here:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread110/pg1
At the end of this list there is also an interesting thread of posts in response to it.
But, if you’re short of time, or just don’t want to click the link, here is the list they’ve written
for Berkshire:
Unspecified base (secret) - Henley, near Reading
Unspecified Base (secret) - Watchfield
AWE Burghfield - Mfg nuclear warheads for shipment via road to RAF + Trident Submarine Bases
Atomic Weapons Research Estab - Aldermaston
Atomic Energy Commission - Harwell
RAF Thatcham - UK Natl Dist Agency
Royal Naval Base - Bush Barn
Army - Arborfield Garrison. Mostly training & support
Welford - NW of Newbury. Returned to OS map after 50 yrs. Poss. [u/gnd?] weapons store
RAF Bracknell - Temp site for Joint Service Command. Closure 2000
Don’t be confused by Watchfield being listed. It really did used to be in Berkshire, prior to
the 1974 county boundaries reorganization. The comment I’d make about this list is that if
there is a base at Henley I’ve not heard of it; although if it’s secret that wouldn’t be surprising! And I also haven’t heard of RAF Thatcham, a town that’s now part of the
conglomeration of Newbury; where I lived for years and years. Nor have I ever heard of a
place called Bush Barn where a Royal Navy Base seems rather odd, as Berkshire has no
coastline. Also, being fairly familiar with Bracknell, I’ve never heard of an RAF site there.
But, of course, I’m not suggesting that these don’t exist, simply that I’ve never been aware
of them.
Now, if you have any faith in remote viewing, which must to some degree feasible or the US
military wouldn’t have spent so much money on their various experiments with it, there was a most interesting article on the web, although it no longer seems to be onlilne. The article, dated February 2000, came from the IUFO Mailing List. In it the author related that he asked a British psychic to remote view a certain area of the UK. The remote viewer was known anonymously as ‘Q’ and he was given the map co-ordinates for Salisbury Plain although, naturally, he wasn’t aware of what the co-ordinates represented at the time, nor what type of information was being sought.
However, from his description of what he was seeing it would appear that he was viewing a
very large underground complex beneath Salisbury Plain, complete with military guards
and scientists. He described the tunnels, and the people, in some detail, and the impression
of very tight security that he was picking up on. When asked what else he could see he
answered that he was seeing glass tanks and specimen bottles that contained blue liquid and other items. These he described as follows:
“. . Like a blue liquid with forms or specimens suspended in them, like a laboratory,
you know, specimens, preserved in blue liquid . . . is it blue? . . . oh, my God, they're like . . . well, they're like human forms, biological forms or specimens . . . aliens or hybrids or something engineered, something made, you know, genetically. They look sort of human . . . but, well, they're so ugly, grotesque things . . . Jesus . . . I can't look at them any longer . . .”
The viewing co-ordinates that ‘Q’ had been given were, in fact, for the Imber Ranges on
Salisbury Plain; which is the only area that is never open to the public. The article then added what ‘Q’ described as a “significant database” that was being kept in the underground area, although he was unable to be more explicit about it.
Apart from using a remote viewer the author of this article said that he also had other sources of intelligence information. He claimed that somebody with good contacts in MI5
and MI6 wrote to him with some “friendly advice” about another article he’d written
concerning Salisbury Plain being a possible underground site. The letter suggested that he
was, in fact, only partially correct in that the base existed, but it didn’t have anything to do
with UFOs or Aliens.
However, the letter-writer contacted him again to tell a story about what had taken place
after the correspondent gave an after-dinner speech one day. When he had finished it seems that a “very senior serving Royal Navy Officer” approached him to relate the experience his daughter had undergone while working for the Scientific Civil Service. It seems that she became withdrawn and paranoid, and was suffering from the most severe nightmares. These dreams correlated very closely with the description given by ‘Q’ of what he’d seen in those glass tanks during his remote viewing session. The Naval Officer concluded by saying that his daughter’s offer of resignation from her job had not been accepted, and that he feared her life was in danger, but he refused to say why, or from whom.
The author of the article, already having mentioned his own intelligence sources, added that one of his sources, known as Stealth, gave him information about all sorts of nasty: “secret genetic and mind-control programmes are indeed being carried out at British-based military-industrial facilities, deep underground.” According to Stealth, people were abducted by the Military and then hypnotised to believe Aliens had abducted them, as a smoke screen.
As you’ve probably gathered by now the article was a very long one indeed. So, to conclude,
what it said was that the author of it stated that, from other information sources, there does
seem to be a “military/industrial” underground base in Berkshire that has entrances from
both Greenham Common and from Aldermaston. This, he claimed, appeared to be corroborated by yet another source who quotes Berkshire as a possible site, together with
Harwell in Oxfordshire, RAE Farnborough in Hampshire, and two more places up in
Scotland. However, one source also maintained that these sites do have input from Aliens,
including reverse-engineering projects and the storage of crashed UFOs.He then cited the
story told by Barry King, that I mentioned quite some paragraphs back. And, in respect to
secret bases the author added that:
“During the course of my own investigations I have interviewed and spoken
with many still-serving and former military personnel, none of whom deny
the existence of underground facilities beneath high-security military bases
(there is rumoured to be a massive deep-underground complex beneath RAF
Woodbridge and Bentwaters in East Anglia, for example, home to what must surely
be Britain's best-known and best-documented military UFO incident to date, the
Rendlesham Forest Incident, which occurred in December 1980).”
Is what’s stated in this article true? I’ve absolutely no idea, but it did make a most interesting read.
Of course, Rudloe Manor is very well known to UFO researchers. But for those who may not
be quite so familiar with it an article at the following link gives a very thorough, and detailed,
investigation into the history, operations, and current status of the underground tunnels and bunkers that lie beneath it. The article includes a report seen on Sky News, in September 2000, when they obtained access to this underground base.
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicrudloe.html
And, just to be controversial, it is worth mentioning this clip, written back in January 1998,
from the Magonia web site. It comes towards the end of the page of the Magonia Supplement 11, entitled “Odds and Ends.” But, before you start to read this, and to save you having to reach for the dictionary, the first word, “Chthonic,” relates to the Underworld:
“Chthonic fantasies. For several years some British ufologists have been aping their
American colleagues by indulging in fantasies about secret underground bases - some of which might even conceal aliens or crashed saucers, who knows? The custom over here is to return to this topic whenever there is a shortage of UFO reports; if you see nothing in the sky then look underground. Of course, there are real underground bases and there has been a lot of rubbish written about the one near RAF Rudloe Manor, a place with which ETH ufologists are obsessed. This base, intended to be a seat of government in the event of nuclear attack, has recently been opened to the media and pictures of it have appeared in the press and on television. The fantasy about the underground railway from Rudloe Manor to Downing Street probably arises from the fact that the Box Hill railway tunnel is adjacent to the base. A number of similar bases have already been opened to the public. At this rate there will soon be nothing left for the fruitcake tendency to fantasise about.”
If that quote makes you wonder why I have chosen to write about tunnels this month then
my answer is in the negative. Ufology always goes through its quiet periods, but I wouldn’t
really claim to be a Ufologist. I simply have a huge interest in the subject, along with many
other topics, and the reason for this essay is simply that these tunnels intrigue me.
And now, after that little diversion, I’ll return to Rudloe Manor.
There used to be an Internet site that was all about underground government facilities, which also had some very good pictures of each site. I can no longer find the site, but here’s what it said about Corsham being a “Central Ammuinition Depot”:
“An amazing labyrinth of air-conditioned tunnels and chambers one hundred feet below ground and extending under some 200 acres of north Wiltshire in four
separate sub-depots which between them housed over 350,000 tons of ammunition. The depot was served by arterial networks of railways and conveyors and had its own system of underground powerhouses to provide electricity for the 100,000 lamps that lit its streets. The three sub-depots of CAD Corsham were Tunnel Quarry, Monkton Farleigh, Eastlays. A smaller depot nearby at Ridge Quarry contained some 40,000 tons of TNT used to fill RAF 'Grand' Slam bombs. At Tunnel Quarry a branch from the main London - Bristol railway line, diving mysteriously into the hillside at the eastern portal of Brunel's Box Tunnel, terminates at a breathtaking, half-mile long underground railway station.”
There is also a very informative post at this link entitled: “A List of all known "Cold War"
Nuclear Bunkers and Subterranean Complexes in the UK:”
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/873564/posts
The MoD considered offers from the private sector for the sale of the now out-dated, and
therefore unused, area called “The Mine” beneath Corsham. This was the area that the
government would have been relocated to in the event of a nuclear war.
If you have a particular interest in this cold-war era of the UK’s history then the commentary
at another site, that I can also no longer find, will tell you all about the government bunker.
It begins with the following description:
“.. the former emergency relocations site for the government in the event of nuclear
war, the site has been abandoned since the 1980s since which time it has been kept as a decoy site until it's declassification at the end of 2004. Burlington has had many code names since it's conception in the early 50s, these include Stockwell, Subterfuge, Turnstile and more recently Site 3.” And continues with its history, starting with the opening paragraph of: “Many people in the UK will know about and even have visited the Cabinet War Room and Paddock in London, the government emergency war headquarters up until the end of World War II but very few people will know anything about the secret bunker which took over from these sites in the early 60s.”
It ends by stating that the site was allowed to wind down by 1991 as it would have needed a
multi-million pound refurbishment, although Site 3 remained classified until December 2004. And it adds:
“By the mid 90s Site 3 was starting to drive the conspiracy theorists nuts. Believing
that Burlington as part of RAF Rudloe Manor was a sinister part of what they called
the UK's own version of Area 51, their wild speculations included the fact that Rudloe Manor was the home of UK UFO research and that Burlington was a facility in which the government stored captured UFOs or worked with aliens to achieve mind altering technologies. While JSU Corsham have now confirmed that they had previously been involved in the subject of aerial complaints, they clarify that this was only in a co-ordinating role, the reports were simply forwarded to Sec(AS)2a, and no further action was taken.”
One of the reasons Site 3 remained classified was that it was acting as a decoy until a new
safe site for the government could be built. Thus, the following snippet of information becomes intriguing:
http://www.fictionalcities.co.uk/tunnels.htm
Under the heading of “The Buckingham Palace Tunnel” we can read :
“There are several rumoured escape tunnels from Buckingham Palace. One is said to
run under Green Park to the Piccadilly Tube line, giving the royals a speedy escape
route to Heathrow. Another is said to give access to the Victoria Line - which runs
under the Palace - for a similar escape, and one is said to lead to Wellington Barracks just over the road. More likely is the tunnel running along the Mall to the
underground citadel called Q-Whitehall which is rumoured to stretch as far north as Holborn. Supposed evidence of this complex is the huge extractor fan outside the
Gent’s toilets in the ICA, which the ICA say is nothing to do with them, and the top-
secret fortress on the corner of the Mall and Horse Guards Road which is said to be an entrance to Q-Whitehall. This complex also probably connects to 10 Downing Street via the atom-bomb-proof bunker built under the Ministry of Defence building at a cost over £110 million in the early 1990s.”
In a final look at what lies beneath the Wiltshire countryside, home to Salisbury
Plain and Rudloe Manor, there is a wonderful description of some of these
underground warrens and tunnels in a feature on the BBC web site:
http://tinyurl.com/4sydl7e
It details the experiences of an “Urban Explorer” who knows where the secret entrances are. Some areas contain “… miles upon miles of tunnels, an amazing labyrinth of long forgotten ammo depots, abandoned mines and caverns ….”
Whilst writing this article it seems to have mostly been about the underground base
at Rudloe Manor, Corsham, although that wasn’t my original intention. However,
when searching the web for information on what might exist in the UK most of the
links I came up with all seemed to point in that one direction.
Apart from the underground base at Corsham, that we now know is real, what about the ones whose existence can’t be proved? Throughout history, on a worldwide scale, there have been claims of ‘secret,’ ‘ancient,’ and ‘alien,’ civilizations living below ground; hence the Hollow Earth proponents. How much is simply speculation, or fantasy, and how much is real?
I don’t have the answer to that question, so I’ll have to leave you to make your own decision about these bases, bunkers, and tunnels. But I will leave you with one thought, and it’s this: When the Manhattan Project was being developed it employed over 3,000 people working on the mission. And yet, even allowing for a compartmentalized, “need-to-know” basis, no news of the secret leaked out before that bomb was dropped. It seems to me as though that one single statistic puts the idea of governments being able to ‘force’ people to keep quiet about secret operations into a totally new light.