Mount Weather: Secret Underground Complex

MOUNT WEATHER UNDERGROUND COMPLEX From the Alien Astronomer Website Just 46 miles from Washington DC, a mysterious and secretive underground military base exists, located deep inside a mountain near the rural town of Bluemont, Virginia. Here lies Mount Weather, also known as the Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations. In March, 1976, The Progressive Magazine published an astonishing article entitled "The Mysterious Mountain." The author, Richard Pollock, based his investigative report on Senate subcommittee hearings and upon "several off-the-record interviews with officials formerly associated with Mount Weather." His report, and a 1991 article in Time Magazine entitled "Doomsday Hideaway", supply a few compelling hints about what is going on underground. Ted Gup, writing for Time, describes the base as follows: "Mount Weather is a virtually self-contained facility. Aboveground, scattered across manicured lawns, are about a dozen buildings bristling with antennas and microwave relay systems. An on-site sewage-treatment plant, with a 90,000 gallon-a-day capacity, and two tanks holding 250,000 gallons of water could last some 200 people more than a month; underground ponds hold additional water supplies. Not far from the installation's entry gate are a control tower and a helicopter pad. The mountain's real secrets are not visible at ground level." The mountain's "real secrets" are protected by warning signs, 10 foot-high chain link fences, razor wire, and armed guards. Curious motorists and hikers on the Appalachian trail are relieved of their sketching pads and cameras and sent on their way. Security is tight. The government has owned the site since 1903; it has seen service as an artillery range, a hobo farm during the Depression, and a National Weather Bureau Facility. In 1936, the U.S. Bureau of Mines took control and started digging. Mount Weather is virtually an underground city, according to former personnel interviewed by Pollock. Buried deep inside the earth, Mount Weather was equipped with such amenities as: private apartments and dormitories streets and sidewalks cafeterias and hospitals a water purification system, power plant and general office buildings a small lake fed by fresh water from underground springs its own mass transit system a TV communication system Mount Weather is the self-sustaining underground command center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency - FEMA. The facility is the operational center of approximately 100 other Federal Relocation Centers, most of which are concentrated in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina. Together this network of underground facilities constitutes the backbone of America's "Continuity of Government" program. In the event of nuclear war, declaration of martial law, or other national emergency, the President, his cabinet and the rest of the Executive Branch would be "relocated" to Mount Weather. What Does Congress Know about Mount Weather? According to the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights hearings in 1975, Congress has almost no knowledge and no oversight, budgetary or otherwise, on Mount Weather. Retired Air Force General Leslie W. Bray, in his testimony to the subcommittee, said "I am not at liberty to describe precisely what is the role and the mission and the capability that we have at Mount Weather, or at any other precise location." Apparently, this underground capital of the United States is a secret only to Congress and the US taxpayers who paid for it. The Russians know about it, as reported in Time: "Few in the U.S. government will speak of it, though it is assumed that all along the Soviets have known both its precise location and its mission (unlike the Congress, since Bray wouldn't tell); defense experts take it as a given that the site is on the Kremlin's targeting maps." The Russians attempted to buy real estate right next door, as a "country estate" for their embassy folks, but that deal was dead-ended by the State Department. Mount Weather's "Government-in-Waiting" Pollock's report, based on his interviews with former officials at Mount Weather, contains astounding information on the base's personnel. The underground city contains a parallel government-in-waiting: "High- level Governmental sources, speaking in the promise of strictest anonymity, told me [Pollock] that each of the Federal departments represented at Mount Weather is headed by a single person on whom is conferred the rank of a Cabinet-level official. Protocol even demands that subordinates address them as 'Mr. Secretary.' Each of the Mount Weather 'Cabinet members' is apparently appointed by the White House and serves an indefinite term. The facility attempts to duplicate the vital functions of the Executive branch of the Administration." Nine Federal departments are replicated within Mount Weather (Agriculture; Commerce; Health, Education & Welfare; Housind & Urban Development; Interior; Labor; State; Transportation; and Treasurey) as well as at least five Federal agencies (Federal Communications Commission, Selective Service, Federal Power Commission, Civil Service Commission, and the Veterans Administration). The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Post Office, both private corporations, also have offices in Mount Weather. Pollock writes that the "cabinet members" are "apparently" appointed by the White House and serve an indefinite term, but that information cannot be confirmed, raising the further question of who holds the reins on this Shadow Government. Furthermore, appointed Mount Weather officials hold their positions through several elected administrations, transcending the time their appointers spend in office. Unlike other presidential nominees, these apppointments are made without the public advice or consent of the Senate. Is there an alternative President and Vice President as well? If so, who appoints them? Pollock says only this: "As might be expected, there is also an Office of the Presidency at Mount Weather. The Federal Preparedness Agency (precursor to FEMA) apparently appoints a special staff to the Presidential section, which regularly receives top secret national security estimates and raw data from each of the Federal departments and agencies. What Do They Do At Mount Weather? 1) Collect Data on American Citizens: The Senate Subcommittee in 1975 learned that the "facility held dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans. [Senator] John Tunney later alleged that the Mount Weather computers can obtain millions of pieces of additional information on the personal lives of American citizens simply by tapping the data stored at any of the other ninety-six Federal Relocation Centers." The subcommittee concluded that Mount Weather's databases "operate with few, if any, safeguards or guidelines." 2) Store Necessary Information: The Progressive article detailed that "General Bray gave Tunney's subcommittee a list of the categories of files maintained at Mount Weather: military installations, government facilities, communications, transportation, energy and power, agriculture, manufacturing, wholesale and retail services, manpower, financial, medical and educational institutions, sanitary facilities, population, housing shelter, and stockpiles." This massive database fits cleanly into Mount Weather's ultimate purpose as the command center in the event of a national emergency. 3) Play War Games: This is the main daily activity of the approximately 240 people who work at Mount Weather. The games are intended to train the Mount Weather bureaucracy to managing a wide range of problems associated with both war and domestic political crises. Decisions are made in the "Situation Room," the base's nerve center, located in the core of Mount Weather. The Situation Room is the archetypal war room, with "charts, maps and whatever visuals may be needed" and "batteries of communications equipment connecting Mount Weather with the White House and 'Raven Rock', the underground Pentagon sixty miles north of Washington, as well as with almost every US military unit stationed around the globe," according to the Progressive article. "All internal communications are conducted by closed-circuit color television (senior officers and 'Cabinet members' have two consoles recessed in the walls of their office.)" Descriptions of the war games read a bit like a Ian Fleming novel. Every year there is a system-wide alert that "includes all military and civilian-run underground installations." The real, aboveground President and his Cabinet members are "relocated" to Mount Weather to observe the simulation. Post-mortems are conducted and the margins for error are calculated after the games. All the data is studied and documented. 4) Civil Crisis Management: Mount Weather personnel study more than war scenarios. Domestic "crises" are also tracked and watched, and there have been times when Mount Weather almost swung into action, as Pollock reported: "Officials who were at Mount Weather during the 1960s say the complex was actually prepared to assume certain governmental powers at the time of the 1961 Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The installation used the tools of its 'Civil Crisis Management' program on a standby basis during the 1967 and 1968 urban riots and during a number of national antiwar demonstrations, the sources said." In its 1974 Annual Report, the Federal Preparedness Agency stated that "Studies conducted at Mount Weather involve the control and management of domestic political unrest where there are material shortages (such as food riots) or in strike situations where the FPA determines that there are industrial disruptions and other domestic resource crises." The Mount Weather facility uses a vast array of resources to continually monitor the American people. According to Daniel J. Cronin, former assistant director for the FPA, Reconnaissance satellites, local and state police intelligence reports, and Federal law enforcement agencies are just a few of the resources available to the FPA [now FEMA] for information gathering. "We try to monitor situations and get to them before they become emergencies," Cronin said. "No expense is spared in the monitoring program." 5) Maintain and Update the "Survivors List": Using all the data generated by the war games and domestic crisis scenarios, the facility continually maintains and updates a list of names and addresses of people deemed to be "vital" to the survival of the nation, or who can "assist essential and non-interruptible services." In the 1976 article, the "survivors list" contained 6,500 names, but even that was deemed to be low. Who Pays for All This, and how Much? At the same time tens of millions of dollars were being spent on maintaining and upgrading the complex to protect several hundred designated officials in the event of nuclear attack, the US government drastically reduced its emphasis on war preparedness for US citizens. A 1989 FEMA brochure entitled "Are You Prepared?" suggests that citizens construct makeshift fallout shelters using use furniture, books, and other common household items. Officially, Mount Weather (and its budget) does not exist. FEMA refuses to answer inquiries about the facility; as FEMA spokesman Bob Blair told Time magazine, "I'll be glad to tell you all about it, but I'd have to kill you afterward." We don't know how much Mount Weather has cost over the years, but of course, American taxpayers bear this burden as well. A Christian Science Monitor article entitled "Study Reveals US Has Spent $4 Trillion on Nukes Since '45" reports that "The government devoted at least $12 billion to civil defense projects to protect the population from nuclear attack. But billions of dollars more were secretly spent on vast underground complexes from which civilian and military officials would run the government during a nuclear war." What is Mount Weather's Ultimate Purpose? We have seen that Mount Weather contains an unelected, parallel "government-in-waiting" ready to take control of the United States upon word from the President or his successor. The facility contains a massive database of information on U.S. citizens which is operated with no safeguards or accountability. Ostensibly, this expensive hub of America's network of sub-terran bases was designed to preserve our form of government during a nuclear holocaust. But Mount Weather is not simply a Cold War holdover. Information on command and control strategies during national emergencies have largely been withheld from the American public. Executive Order 11051, signed by President Kennedy on October 2, 1962, states that "national preparedness must be achieved as may be required to deal with increases in international tension with limited war, or with general war including attack upon the United States." However, Executive Order 11490, drafted by Gen. George A Lincoln (former director for the Office of Emergency Preparedness, the FPA's predecessor) and signed by President Nixon in October 1969, tells a different story. EO 11490, which superceded Kennedy's EO 11051, begins, "Whereas our national security is dependent upon our ability to assure continuity of government, at every level, in any national emergency type situation that might conceivably confront the nation..." As researcher William Cooper points out, Nixon's order makes no reference to "war," "imminent attack," or "general war." These quantifiers are replaced by an extremely vague "national emergency type situation" that "might conceivably" interfere with the workings of the national power structure. Furthermore, there is no publicly known Executive Order outlining the restoration of the Constitution after a national emergency has ended. Unless the parallel government at Mount Weather does not decide out of the goodness of its heart to return power to Constitutional authority, the United States could experience an honest-to-God coup d'etat posing as a national emergency. Like the enigmatic Area 51 in Nevada, the Federal government wants to keep the Mount Weather facility buried in secrecy. Public awareness of this place and its purpose would raise serious questions about who holds the reins of power in this country. The Constitution states that those reins lie in the hands of the people, but the very existence of Mount Weather indicates an entirely different reality. As long as Mount Weather exists, these questions will remain. Mount Weather's Russian Twin On April 16, 1996, the New York Times reported on a mysterious military base being constructed in Russia: "In a secret project reminiscent of the chilliest days of the Cold War, Russia is building a mammoth underground military complex in the Ural Mountains, Western officials and Russian witnesses say. Hidden inside Yamantau mountain in the Beloretsk area of the southern Urals, the project involved the creation of a huge complex, served by a railroad, a highway, and thousands of workers." The New York Times article quotes Russian officials describing the underground compound variously as a mining site, a repository for Russian treasures, a food storage area, and a bunker for Russia's leaders in case of nuclear war. It would seem that the Russian Parliament knows as little about Russian underground bases as the Congress knows about Mount Weather in the United States. "The (Russian) Defense Ministry declined to say whether Parliament has been informed about the details of the project, like its purpose and cost, saying only that it receives necessary military information," according to the New York Times. "We can't say with confidence what the purpose is, and the Russians are not very interested in having us go in there," a senior American official said in Washington. "It is being built on a huge scale and involves a major investment of resources. The investments are being made at a time when the Russians are complaining they do not have the resources to do things pertaining to arms control." Where's the Money Coming From? The construction of the vast underground complex in Russia may very well become a cause of concern to the Clinton Administration. The issue of ultimate purpose for the complex, whether defensive (as with Mount Weather) or offensive (such as an underground weapons factory) is not the only issue Mr. Clinton has to worry about. The real cause for concern is that the US is currently sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Russia, supposedly to help that country dismantle old nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the Russian parliament has been complaining to Yeltsin that it cannot pay $250 million in back wages owed to its workers at the same time that it is spending money to comply with new strategic arms reduction treaties. Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that "It seems the nearly $30 billion a year spent on intelligence hasn't answered the question of what the Russians are up to at Yamantau Mountain in the Urals. The huge underground complex being built there has been the object of U.S. interest since 1992. 'We don't know exactly what it is,' says Ashton Carter, the Pentagon's international security mogul. The facility is not operational, and the Russians have offered 'nonspecific reassurances' that it poses no threat to the U.S." U.S. law states that the Administration must certify to Congress that any money sent to Russia is used to disarm its nuclear weapons. However, is that the case? If the Russian parliament is complaining of a shortage of funds for nuclear disarmament, then how can Russia afford to build the Yamantau complex? Are the Russians building an underground city akin to Mount Weather with American taxpayer's money? Could American funds be subsidizing a Russian weapons factory? Hopefully Congress will get a firm answer to these questions before authorizing further funding to Russian military projects. (reprinted with permission)

looks like they were taking the cold war threat seriously

U Think.
People Think It is Not Still A Secret But I Know For A Fact it still is FEMA is Just Above The Ground But the bunkers Are known On A Few Lower Levels
But it Hides More Secrets I Know People That have Been In Side They Told Of 20 levels From The Top An Told Of A Road Way From The Moutian To The Pentagon. the people That Paved these roads Where told That This Was Just apart of the moutian access Tunnels But They Told Me That this Road is Too long to be just an access root The Goverment Still Has Not Released All The Info About Mount Weather. I Bleave What They Told Becasue No one Goes Under Ground That Works for FEMA.

absolutely fascinating!

While Mount Weather does have some command capabilities, it is mainly a bomb shelter for VIP's and government officials. It was created during the cold war to help maintain the countinuity of government. The plan was that if war a major broke out, the Defense Department would Evacuate the US Government From DC, to several Underground Facilities around the US for safety. The people that are directly involved in the Miliatry's chain of command would be sent to underground command centers, Like Chyenne Mountain, or US Strategic command headquaters, and other's like the Speaker of the House or Senate leaders would go to Mount Weather or other VIP Bomb Shelters.

Tim
ATS Director of Counter-Ignorance

Mt Weather was on the discovery channel years ago. But nice post anyway. The real place is now near Kansas City.

Is this the same underground base that was built to house members of both the Senate and Congress as well. I remember a report that ws done where a state of the art base was built so that the functions of government could continue in a post nuclear war era?

Mt. Weather is the shelter of the supposed "shadow" government. Buit for President and his cabinet in the event of nuclear war.

I believe I saw pictures of this facility on a tv show. I'm not sure how many members of congress would be happy to go to a facility like this since I heard it was only for VIP's and did not include space or resources for family members. Congress would have to say goodbye to their spouses and kids in the event of nuclear or biological war. The new facility they built or are building I don't know too much about. Anyone know if it has room for spouses, kids, and even other guests? Probably not is my guess. Just a thought, we should probably only elect people who are happily married to congress. I can just imagine a congress that is not happy with their wife and kids would think this place is not that bad.

What really concerns me is that noone in congress seems to be at all concerned that if martial law or other serious threat occurs to the US and our shadow government takes over and then the threat ends, there seems to be no guarantee we will ever have our constition back. What if a president was elected and just wanted to take over by declaring martial law? This decision I believe could not be rescinded for months and members of congress could dissappear if they suddenly became enemy combatants or insurgents. Think it can't happen? Well Senator Kennedy was already put on a no fly list as someone who may be a threat to the government. Of course the people who did this may have been right, he really could be a threat. way too liberal for this country

where is mount weather at in va. like whar roads take you to it?

Originally posted by bullshipper
where is mount weather at in va. like whar roads take you to it?

This may be of help, complete with satellite imagery.

Is this the same facility built under that big fancy Hotel owned by the old railroad tycoons. Above ground is all fancy buildings for patrons, and the facility is / was hidden in plain site (directly below the hotel) That piece was on Discovery chan a couple of times.

Same one?
If so, it was retired and is open for tours now.

Not the same place. Same mission, but The Greenbriar was "outed" years ago and subsequently retired. Mount Weather is much closer to DC than The Greenbriar anyway, but then it would make sense to spread out government leaders among several facilities.

Surely there are more such facilities around. If, as someone has posted before, there's a facility near Kansas City I'd like more info.

OK I just heard about this Mount Weather tonight while researching some info on my thread about Cheyenne Mountain Base being moved to insure continuity of operations.
Now this is just strange.
How many bunkers does one (supposed) Government need? Is there any further proof of Mnt. Weathers existence other than this article above?

Hi I do not have any more new information on this underground site than the original which I also found here on Ats .
Has it been debunked or something?
I just wonder how many of these underground facilities are around the country? Do you suppose some of the are for the back Government or for the families?
I suppose it is possible that some may have been here from past civilizations long ago on our planets history.

Mount Weather is operated through FEMA as an Operations center for the core of the US government. It was conceived as part of the Continuity of government planning that would go into effect in war times. Most of the Key People in DC would be sent to Mount Weather and sealed inside to run the government. A second group would be taken to another site, and a few key people from the NCA would be sent airborne in the E-4 NEACP to command US military forces. The Idea is to spit up the Key people in several different secure location so the an enemy can't bing down the US government with a "Decapitation Strike"

Tim

And then there was the time back in the 70's when a plane taking off out of Dulles crashed into the Mount Weather reservation -- that sort of caught some attention, at least in the DC area. I remember the Washington Post saying that guards stopped emergency apparatus at the gate trying to respond.

I've had the pleasure of going up to Mount Weather a few years back when I lived in Sterling Va.
If you go up the mountain, which is pretty accessible, I think I remember homes along the way up. Not many, but a few. As we climbed the mountain we encountereed snow when most of Virginia had none.
We were going up Mount Weather to look for "the place where they had aliens, lol!" because of an X files episode. up at the top of the mountain sat what looked like a small base, protected by chain link fences, and a guard post. The main sliding gate was wide open.
Being slightly drunk ( I was young, what can I say) we pulled up to the gate and found an intercom, for stating your intentions. Matt, our driver (who was not drunk, but playing along) rolled down his window. "Can I help you?" an irritated, yet highly bored guard said. Matt ordered a cheeseburger, with fries.
The gate started to close, and we were on the track! Yikes! We decided to high tail it out of there, and were properly followed by a Humvee.

My little story about Mount Weather.

Don't forget, RavenRock is not far from here, about an hour drive into Maryland. My Dad used to be stationed at Fort Richie, the base directly under Ravenrock. That was another underground base featured on Discovery channel also, and where Dick Cheney went during the 911 attack, if memory serves.

Originally posted by Ghost01
It was conceived as part of the Continuity of government planning that would go into effect in war times.

I think you are correct. I know someone who was almost run off the road by several government vans travelling towards Mt. Weather on 9/11.

Originally posted by Skibum

Originally posted by Ghost01
It was conceived as part of the Continuity of government planning that would go into effect in war times.

I think you are correct. I know someone who was almost run off the road by several government vans travelling towards Mt. Weather on 9/11.

I think thats Raven Rock, Site R in Pennsylvania.(COOP)