Author Says America Has Bases Underground; Even Under Ocean

• On July 27, Er Richard Souder, author of Underground Bases, was Tom Valentine's guest on Radio Free America (RFA). Following is an edited transcript of the interview. Tom's questions and comments start with a "Q" and Souder's answers start with an "R".

Q. How is the book doing?

R. Very well, I've just gone through a sixth printing. So it's the little book that keeps on going. People are very fascinated in this topic.

Q. Taxpayers are paying for these underground bases.

R. Much of the funding is disguised. I've looked for how these things are funded, and a lot of it must be funded off the black budget because there is precious little documentation on the public record for how these facilities are built. But indeed they do exist, and I provide the documentation in my book.

Q. You say that there's now the technology to have underwater bases?

R. It's not that it's so new, in fact it appears that the concepts and technology are about 30 years old. During the course of my research I ran across a document on the open record that came out of the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California.

The title of the document is Manned Undersea Structures: The Rock Site Concept. The serial number of the document is NOTSTP4162. The document says quite clearly that using technology that was available in the middle 1960s to the mining industry, to the petroleum industry, and in terms of submarine tecnology then available, it was feasible and not very expensive to make very large, very deep, manned, shirt sleeves environment, installations and structures beneath the ocean floor, well out to sea.

These could be of three kinds. You could tunnel out from on shore, and even go tens or hundreds of miles out underneath the sea; you could construct artificial islands offshore and enter an undersea facility through them; or you could use natural islands that are offshore, for example or virtually and islands anywhere.

The idea is that you do down and under the sea floor. And the document goes on to say that structures within the sea floor can easily be made large and comfortable enough to permit the quartering of crews and their families for extended periods of time and can be made large enough to serve as supply and repair depots for submarines.

I have had a couple of off-the-record conversations with people in the know, and I've been told that his may very possibly have been done.

Q. You mean we may have an undersea base like something we would have seen in science fiction films?

R. That's right, air locks right on the sea floor and you would go down a tube, hundreds of feet. I've even seen an illustration where there would be provision for submarines entering a huge door, somewhat in the manner of what we've all seen in James Bond movies, and was presented as a fantasy, but in somewhat that manner, the submarine could be taken in and berthed undersea and the crew off loaded and supplies provisioned and so forth.

Q. I assume if we have this technology available, so do the Europeans, and others.

R. As a matter of fact the Scandinavians have some of the best underground technology in the world. The Norwegians have coastal installations that are very similar to what I've just described.

In fact, they have one where large, ocean-going warships enter a concealed entrance right along a rocky bluff, and are taken deep into the cliffs, into piers and docks that are underground, back in the fjords.

Q. Well this would be amazing. Now, you see, you can't very well track a submarine from a satellite.

R. No, and that's the beauty of it. Once it goes beneath the sea floor, you take a clandestine tunnel boring machine, you can bore undersea from on shore. Just for the sake of a hypothetical example, you cound start from Norfork Naval Base, Charleston Naval Base, a submarine base down in Georgia, any of these bases.

Q. Even San Diego?

R. You could take this tunnel boring machine offshore, and with a crew of about 10 men, you could operate it clandestinely and make about 1.5 miles per year. Over a decade that would be 15 miles, over the 30 years since 1966, 45 miles. Just from one tunnel boring machine. Now if you had five or ten boring machines, clearly you could easily have hundreds of miles of clandestine tunnels.

Q. That would be hard to do. How could you start one ahead of the other so that they could meet?

R. It wouldn't be hard at all to do with today's engineering technology. That's a simple matter of trigonometry, just plotting where you're going.

Q. Are they going to take a boat out there and drop something down, and then drop the boring machine down from the boat?

R. No problem at all. They do it all the time with oil rigs and far more difficult operations. All you need to do is make an initial tunnel, a shaft about 10 or 12 feet in diameter, sink it straight down, put a lock on there, and them lower your equipment into there, and off you go, and this is well within the state of the art, and it was 30 years ago.

Q. I've always been skeptical of the ability of the American people to keep a secret. If we didn't really go to the moon, as is being challenged now, how do these NASA astronauts manage to keep that under their hat? And how in the world do these underground bases manage to stay so secret?

R. They haven't managed to stay completely secret, or you wouldn't have a book like mine. As far as the possibility of these undersea manned installations, which the Navy has discussed in public in this document I have, I've been assured off the record by three separate people that these types of installations exist, and to pursue my research in the direction.

Given the documentation I've found, that I've cited here this evening, and the assurances I've gotten off the record, I'm inclined to keep looking.

The fact that three people at least, none of them know each other, each of whom has had a very different position in the government, and each of whom I've met under very different circumstances, say this, makes me inclined to believe that there may be some substance to it.

Q. You can see why the government would want to keep this a secret in case of times of war, because in times of war you want to be able to have the element of surprise. On the other hand, the government is using the people's money.

R. There has been a very small amount of investigative reporting on the subject. I guess I've looked into it in the most documented depth of anyone, and I'm not a professional journalist.

Q. I want to go back an let those who have not heard the story hear how you got involved in all of this, and some of the fantastic underground things that really do exist. There was a time when we talked about several of the vases underground being connected with these tunnels you're talking about.

I'm not sure how extensive these tunnels are. There are some areas where there are tunnels, and I'm not sure if different parts of the country are connected by tunnels.

I recently had a discussion with a gentleman who's been underground at Camp David. The Camp David underground bunker is one of the facilities I discuss in my book, and it's been discussed on the public record in Time and Newsweek in recent years.

What I didn't know until recently was how extensive it is. I've talked to a gentleman who has been in there a number of times, under contract to a Fortune 500 company to service some equipment that's there, and he told me that there are miles and miles of tunnels, hundreds of feet underground, that include work areas and chambers, and they extend from the mountains in western Maryland up into Pennsylvania.

Q. You got interested in this underground thing many years ago, right?

R. It wasn't that many years ago. It seems like many years ago, it was just a few years ago, back in the early '90s, and back when I moved to the southwest I heard people talking about the underground installations.

I knew little about it, but I thought it was very intriguing and did just a little bit of research.

On the basis of what I was told, I went out and did the research which led to this book within about the following year. And what I was told very briefly within about a two or three minute period by that disembodied voice was that indeed there are underground installations, that there are a lot of them, some of them are very deep, there are people living and working in them, and they are doing things, carrying out projects and various kinds of activities that would just astonish the ordinary person, if they would know what was happening underground.

I told myself that what I've been told was either true or it's false. If it's true, and there are these activities going on on the large scale as I've been told, then there should be a paper trail, and I should be able to find it. I went out and looked, and indeed I did find a paper trail.