Nevada Nuclear Test site : Take a look at the weird stuff to be found there !!!

Great thread!! Also after reading first page, I came to a conclusion that involves defense tactics. They have to be testing the stability of some underground compound imo. Im not too informative on the topic though. But to the person that brought up the particle accelerator, I have to agree with you thats honestly what came to mind when I saw the two pics of the area.

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read on this website. The pictures are very mysterious and thought-provoking.

So why create such an overlapping crater combination and then fill it with liquid ... and where did such a huge quantity of liquid come from ?

All of these images reveal one thing in common, they are doing a simulation, drill, exercise of what they are going to build on the moon and other planets. That pyramid and and tall structure in the middle of crater fits perfectly with a lunar environment.

Excellent thread OP, S&F.

Even if some of this is due to optical illusions from shadow etc, there is just too much here to be explained away by natural phenomena.

I wonder if the "nuclear test" location was chosen because in reality TPTB needed to destroy something at the site?

Most of this stuff is explained on tours to the NTS which I took last July. The structures and cables in the craters are to measure the effects of radioactive material and it's movement below the surface. Many of the tests took place below the water table and since it all drains down into the salt flats at the bottom of the valley they want to make sure the material in contained in the vitrified stone. Some of the water you are seeing is actually from the underground water source pushed up to the surface after the explosions.

Stuff like the Pyramids were to test out bunker designs to find the best one to deal with blast waves, it's better to go underground but above ground command structures deal with them better in that configuration. There seem to be a few other structures underground you are showing as well.

There are also structures near the blast sites they used for final device assembly which are in some of those pictures. Usually earthen berm types which are typical for munition storage.

The area where the plane is I believe is the area that's dedicated to training emergency response teams to deal with radioactivity. There are a couple of containers on site and one of them on top of the hill has a small radioactive area they use to teach the personnel to detect it.

If you sign up for the tour they will drive you past all of those areas and explain them and you will see the two truck trailers and all of the cables to them rotting away.

The base is still active in training, storing of waste and in more modern things like testing the effects of chemical spills in one area and doing future work on back scatter radiation and other border control related tech. Also ensuring stockpile validity by taking material right up to the point of critical.

Also if you take the tour you will likely see a couple of predators out flying since Creech there home base is right next door. The tour guide we had basically ran the show for a long time even helping the groom lake facility find there own water supply and telling us many cool stories.

There were only a few off limits areas that were explained well enough why, but the ones that weren't arent shown in your pics and I think they may be doing work on recycling nuclear waste and other future tech there.




BTW that's not a flying saucer shadow in the pic they also do munitions testing out there, bombs ect.

do they have the refrigerator where Indiana Jones holed up for his, uh, "biological effects" test?

reply to post by mbkennel


lol no but they take you on a tour of the town that inspired that scene and show you the incredible detail of the planning such as constructing several types of power stations to see which handled explosions the best.

There is even one house they overbuilt using 4x8's instead of 2x4's and up stairs they had a bed with two mannequins designed to test a couple sleeping and one guy apparently placed one on top of the other in the missionary position and really tweaked the commanding officer.

Alot of cool stuff like how when some Russian generals came to the US in the late 80's they thought our super markets were actually staged and so they were shown several others at random.

And of course some gross stuff like pictures of cow fistuaries and some other animal testing methods.

And how they all used to race empty tires down the craters and bet on them to see which one would make it farther up the other side.

And what we have, is really no answer's at all. But interesting pics..

Wow, could you imagine a better place to hide a secret underground base? Big media whore base right next door keeping all the idiots crowd controlled, supposedly lethal levels of radiation, vast desert.. Seems like a good hiding spot to me, great pics and opinions OP, you've sparked me to follow up with my own research.

Great stuff !!

gonna go get my magnifier glass and load up google earth!

Originally posted by circuitsports
Most of this stuff is explained on tours to the NTS which I took last July. The structures and cables in the craters are to measure the effects of radioactive material and it's movement below the surface. Many of the tests took place below the water table and since it all drains down into the salt flats at the bottom of the valley they want to make sure the material in contained in the vitrified stone. Some of the water you are seeing is actually from the underground water source pushed up to the surface after the explosions.

Stuff like the Pyramids were to test out bunker designs to find the best one to deal with blast waves, it's better to go underground but above ground command structures deal with them better in that configuration. There seem to be a few other structures underground you are showing as well.

There are also structures near the blast sites they used for final device assembly which are in some of those pictures. Usually earthen berm types which are typical for munition storage.

The area where the plane is I believe is the area that's dedicated to training emergency response teams to deal with radioactivity. There are a couple of containers on site and one of them on top of the hill has a small radioactive area they use to teach the personnel to detect it.

If you sign up for the tour they will drive you past all of those areas and explain them and you will see the two truck trailers and all of the cables to them rotting away.

The base is still active in training, storing of waste and in more modern things like testing the effects of chemical spills in one area and doing future work on back scatter radiation and other border control related tech. Also ensuring stockpile validity by taking material right up to the point of critical.

Also if you take the tour you will likely see a couple of predators out flying since Creech there home base is right next door. The tour guide we had basically ran the show for a long time even helping the groom lake facility find there own water supply and telling us many cool stories.

There were only a few off limits areas that were explained well enough why, but the ones that weren't arent shown in your pics and I think they may be doing work on recycling nuclear waste and other future tech there.

edit on 12-3-2012 by circuitsports because: (no reason given)

BTW that's not a flying saucer shadow in the pic they also do munitions testing out there, bombs ect.

edit on 12-3-2012 by circuitsports because: (no reason given)

Was going to shed light on this but this poster already has. Aside from the obvious, excavations still continue to this day. The "real" base is some miles from there, actually, and requires a long tram ride underground to get to. Some of the chemicals you see are used to cut down levels from the weapons testing. A weapon is detonated, and the material is poured down.

The water rises due to the pressure changes and is very toxic. The cables have many purposes. Some are new, shielded better from blasts or EMP, others are replacement for general use, and others will extend to the excavated areas. The pyramid had multiple purposes as well. Working as a bunker, a measure of stability above and below, as well as an electric generator of sorts (lengthy, don't ask). The other things, the shadows and such, nothing secret, just used for measuring, cleanup, and informational purposes.

All the "fun" stuff happens down below in the gopher holes. Minimal explosives as possible are used in terms of material, then math is figured for scaling. For new types of detonations, it is moved always either further underground or farther away from the primary areas. There are roads that lead under, of course, but most items of importance are transported in via other means. The testing and cleanup occurs here, but the labs are far away. Even if you manage to break in, there's not much to see. Empty hallways, and crews working. That and the guards. It's 'down the line' that all the wild stuff is brought in. It's an obvious site, and target. Here are just offices of paperwork with people signing forms, bringing in the devices, running the checks through multiple boring departments, and then sending out the crew to test and clean up.

Cool pics though, I'm being serious.

reply to post by Wookie264
The facility with the pyramid is the The Big Explosives Experimental Facility (BEEF) located in area 4 (non of this is area 51 BTW). Two large bunkers (built to monitor atmospheric tests in the '50s) were later converted when development close to Lawrence Livermore made HE testing there too dangerous. The "pyramid" is a berm which deflects blast "table" (center of the picture) and protects the control bunker. The largest blast tested there was 36,000 lbs TNT.

There is no underground entrance other than to the two cold war monitoring bunkers, one of which is now under the berm. What appears to be an "entrance" in the center of frame is actually a door to a hardened instrumentation room below the test table. The buried pipe is (I believe) an em shield used to protect xray detection equipment.

If you have questions about the site, there is no need to speculate, they have a public affairs office at (702) 295-3521 according to a pamphlet about the BEEF published in Jan 2011. They also have a tour, (twice a year) that (among other things) visits the sedan crater, created with a nuclear excavation charge as part of research for operation plowshare. I might actually do that if I can manage it, cause science is cool.

I have done that tour. It's very interesting. And it's amazing how large the Sedan test crater is when you get right near it.

A lot of what appears to be water is actually salts, some melted and re-solidified, and others from up-welling water table. The towers and cable are just that, towers and cables. Some left in place from the tests and others added to monitor residual radiation after the tests. All of it is old and not in use.

BTW, I had a Geiger counter with me just for giggles. The background radiation is only slightly higher than my granite counter top in my kitchen. The very dangerous isotopes have very short half-lives in the 5 to 20 year range.

If you are curious about these types of things that people wildly speculate about and your going to Las Vegas, check to see if this tour is running while you are there. The info can be found in some of the posts in this thread. They have a little visitor center and the tour guides are nice and have a lot of historical information.

And for you paranoid nuts out there who talk about the affects of doing all this "testing on the planet earth", be happy that those devices were detonated in a back valley of the Nevada desert and not on your home or city. It was a crazy paranoid point in history, when we developed a technology beyond our comprehension of the consequences. It was this testing in a remote desert and the knowledge gained from it that led to our reluctance to use this technology and make our opponents realize the same.

I'll essay some explanations. I am not nor ever have been to the NTS, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

1. Yucca Flats is an aluvial plain. That means it was once a deep eroded valley, but it later filled up with loose or semi-compacted, eroded debris from the higher landscape around it. While digging there is not always quite like digging in the sand, it is friable and clumpy, tends to collapse and erode in the infrequent rain/snow melt. This explains why the area is so prone to subsidence craters (explained by someone back on page 2 of this thread), unlike say the similar test area in the Balapan, Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, the USSR's Southern Test Area for vertical underground tests.

This is a typical subsidence feature. The concrete was possibly a foundation or wall constructed under the surface, which appears when the ground around it subsides. There will be a lot of this anon.

2. Fusileer/Orkney, 5/2/84, Area 8, 250 tonnes, 37.198228,-116.052348. The cables on the right extend out of the pipe stem going down to the electronics package atop the bomb; they carried data signalling up to the data trailers parked off to the side of the test (on the right). When the test was over, they were just cut off at the trailers and dropped on the ground, where they've rested in some cases for over 40 years. The "glow" is probably a pool of water; such things (and steel building and semitrailer roofs) drive satellite sensors insane with nearly direct sunlight reflection. It is very dim in photography from 1998. The black is not a shadow; it is far too diffuse - the shadow should be as sharp as the cabling (the sky is obviously clear; satellite photog doesn't see well when it isn't, obviously). Also, the shadows are in the 10 o'clock direction at the time of the photography.

The area hasn't been leveled after the fact; there simply wasn't a subsidence crater, probably becuase the small yield didn't open up enough cavern to make it to the surface. The "flattened area" was indeed; that is done to facilitate the drillers and the data trailer park. Go look at "Gabbs" (37.137,-116.074), a test that was being prepared when the CTBT was signed by Clinton in 1993; work froze, and all the usual artifacts were left lying around for 20 years!

3.Looks like a natural feature to me; I can't find it, but there are lots of "badlands" areas in the NTS that weren't anywhere near the testing for testing. 36.9736,-116.1254 in Area 6.

Continuing...

4. Possibly Niblick/Bunker, 2/13/84, Area 9, 2kT 37.13201,-116.03325. This is obviously a case where the concrete pad surrounding the pipe stem stayed put when the ground subsided under it, so now it's a concrete umbrella maybe 10 feet in the air. And this time it really is a shadow.

5. Fulcrum/Coulommiers, 9/27/77, Area 2, 20kT, 37.15113,-116.06843, seen in oblique view from the nw. Never been in a desert, have ya? Rainwater or snow melt has partially dissolved a deposit of alkali, gypsum, salt or similar substance which remained when the water dried out. That's the origin of the white dry lakes in Frenchman and Yucca flat.

6. Can't find. Likely it was a shelter buried for an early tower or drop test to see how well it handled pressure loads, and dug up afterward for close inspection. The cables in the upper right would have bee for an unrelated underground test.

7. Niblick/Bunker (again?). Structure is again a pad shadowing the subsided ground. Work is often performed on subsidence sites after the test; Wells into the blast area are dug for samples, water is extracted, etc.

8. No, it's the well stem (grouted; that is, filled with concrete) sticking out of the subsided ground. The drillers pride themselves on drilling perfectly upright.

Continuing...

9. Could be any number of the craters. The surface layer was a little more consolidated than usual, and so when it fell to the bottom is broke up in blocks. However, comparing the size of the road tracks to the blocks show them to be 4-5 ft in dimension, hardly big enough for buildings.

10. Dunno; looks like rubble.

11, 12. I've often wondered. Three tower shots, Upshot-Knothole/Simon (43 kT), Teapot Apple-2 (29kT), and Plumbbob/Galileo (11 kT) were placed there, and a fourth, Snapper/Easy (12 kT) was 800 ft to the west. They could have caused the circle, but I don't see a reason for the ray. It was originally "Survival Town", where houses were built and cars parked to see how they'd survive the Apple-2 shot. Now there are scattered train cars, semitrucks, and other scene simulations for training emergency personnel in more-or-less realistic radiation accident scenarios. The other end is the BEEF (Big Explosives Experimental Facility), a big bunker area for staging chemical explosions. In this area 5 underground bombs and a 6th large chemical explosion have been detonated, and four more tower shots were done just to the west. The creater to the north with the square berm is the Watusi shot, a 19 ton chemical explosion designed to calibrate nuclear testing detection equipment in the Vela Uniform program.

13. (37.05263,-116.10308) Yes, there is probably a bunker or underground garage there. It is difficult to build any shallow caves in the alluvium here, it is too unconsiladated, so it's probably not any kind of extensive cave system.

14. Yes, an airplane. There's also a train wreck, turned over semi-trailers, etc. The NTS runs a school for state and municiple emergency preparedness in realistic radiological surroundings on this site, called the CTOS - Counter-Terrorism Operational Support facility.

15. The BEEF (37.09611,-116.09262). The pyramid is the operations control bunker; it is pyramidal because that best deflects shiockwaves from the shot table, which is in the middle. A trough deflects shockwaves off to the east, away from the control bunber. In the southeast corner is a bunker, bermed and oriented to also deflect shockwaves from the table. I'm told it is a camera bunker, but I don't know how that works. The watusi crater is at the bottom; there is also shown a subsidence crater from a underground nuke test, Fulcrum/Carnelian, 7/28/77, done before the BEEF was moved here from the Lawrence Livermore Labs.

16. The camera bunker.

17. The shot table and deflection trough.

18. Operations center. Not wierd; built to withstand multi-ton blasts 100 feet away.

19. Cresset/Topmast, 3/23/78, Area 7,

Great pictures. I'm sure those pictures will be very useful in the future.

Continued...

20. Grendier/Varmejo, 2/10/84, Area 4, 3kT, 37.085161,-116.053701. Again, it just looks like a pipe the wires disappear into. Guardian/Dutchess, 10/24/80, Area 7, 10 kT, 37.07454.-116.00003 is similar. They might have been done with pipes for some special reason, or just by a crew that believed in pipes.

21. Grenadier/Vaughn, 3/15/85, Area 3, 20 kT, 37.05811,-116.04609. The white stuff is more cable. Sometimes white cable is used (see Icecap, another aborted 1993 prep area, at 37.08193,-116.04519). It may be that that was the color available when the order went out, or they were having a special on winter camouflage, or whatever. Grenadier/Chamite, 37.00227-116.04374 also used white. It might be all twisty because it had to be pulled out of some enclosure, and got jammed; it comes out of the ground at a slightly different spot than the black cabling does. According to Earth, the white stuff as it lies is 356 feet tip-to-tip, so its a lot more cable than it looks to be just lying there, and the "kinks" in it aren't as sharp as they appear.

22. See #8 above.

23, 24. Nougat/Damen I, 6/21/62, Area 3, 11 kT, 37.04303,-116.03118 to the south; and Nougat/Hognose, 3/15/62, Area 3, 8 kT, 37.04394,-116.03187. I don't know why they were so close together that their craters merged, but the creation of these subsidence craters has many random factors behind them, and the fact that the people doing the digging probably just don't care if this should happen. The white stuff is, as I mentioned before, some salt or gypsum washed down in a rain and left behind when the water evaporated. Note that the craters were 50 years old this year. Google Earth's wayback machine shows the color there in 1998, an in fact, in 2005, the south crater's white area is partially filled with what looks like muddy water.

25. Many of teh craters show circular features around the center, with what appears to be a little tar leaking out. I believe that these are concentric cracks in the surface, and the tar is actually a darker sandy material below the surface blown out when the cracking occurs. (See the video www.youtube.com... for the sort of action I mean.) You can see it plainly in this photo.

26, 27. You got me. It looks like the artifact is a shadow, which might explain why I can't find it, but the thing being shadowed is likewise odd. Your "pagoda" might be anything, including more whitewash. Without an overhead, it's hard to know.

28. Ah, an easy one: This is another aborted prep site, for the planned Fortune event, 36.9867,-116.04384. This one has an interesting history, which can be seen in the Google Earth Wayback Machine. It was in development in 1993 when the moratorium was announced and operations stopped. They left it there, the tower, the crane, the cables and the data trailers. There it sat until 2002, when it was decided to recycle the site for the Unicorn sub-critical experiment on 8/31/2006, positioned 500 feet underground. What you see there now is the remains left after that experiment; the tower, a crane, the cables, some of the trailers. In the latest shot in 2011, they've removed the crane; otherwise, it's been left untouched.

29. The "other structure" is a data recording trailer, left on site after Unicorn.

Now, the Nevada Nuclear Test Site may not be as "glamorous or famous" as Area 51 right next door, but in my personal opinion, it's every bit as mysterious and without the slightest doubt, there most certainly was some really weird stuff taking place there over the years.

Yes, that is true. Much can be gleaned from it, mainly because the land is mostly single use, and because they haven't made great efforts to return the ground to what it was before. The desert air preseves things fairly well. The secrets are all blown up in the tests, and the site is almost all declassified, as long as the action is over.

There are a lot, lot more things to see on the site. For example, the BREN tower (Bare Reactor Experiment - Nevada) was Initially erected near the BEEF at 37.09952,-116.10371: it stood 1527 ft high, and elevated a naked reactor for drenching the area in gamma rays, for testing the effects of radiation on buildings and the people in them. It was moved to Area 25 after 1963 (36.78065,116.24353)where it was used for operation HENRE. It was finally dismantled in May of 2012, but the latest shot of the area still shows it in place.

nuclearweaponarchive.org...

interesting article on underground nuke explosion's effects..

making underground facilities is not so bad idea, but I don't know how many and wich "test" can be done so deep...

The Cold War: Where the combatants nuked their own country...repeatedly, rather than the enemy.