Underground tunnels, called N-tunnels, P-tunnels, and T-tunnels, have been drilled next door to Area 51, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), for decades:
The 1,150-foot-long tunnel at Jackass Flats, drilled into the Calico Mountains, through which NERVA scientists and engineers like T. D. Barnes accessed their underground workstations is but one example of an underground tunnel at the Nevada Test Site. The NERVA complex in Area 25 has since been dismantled and “deactivated,” according to the Department of Energy, but elsewhere at the test site dozens of tunnel complexes exist. In the 1960s, one tunnel dug into the granite mountain of Rainer Mesa, in Area 12, reached down as far as 4,500 feet, nearly a mile underground. There are many such government tunnels and bunkers around America, but it was the revelation of the Greenbrier bunker by Washington Post reporter Ted Gup in 1992 that set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories related to postapocalypse hideouts for the U.S. government elite—and since 1992, these secret bunkers have been woven into conspiracy theories about things that go on at Area 51.
The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles southwest of the nation’s capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense spearheaded the construction of a 112,544-square-foot facility eight hundred feet below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star Greenbrier resort. This secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier bunker had dormitories, a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital staffed with thirty-five doctors. “Secrecy, denying knowledge of the existence of the shelter from our potential enemies, was paramount to all matters of operation,” Paul Bugas, the former onsite superintendent at the Greenbrier bunker, told PBS when asked why the facility was kept secret from the public. Many citizens agree with the premise. Conspiracy theorists disagree. They don’t believe that the government keeps secrets to protect the people. Conspiracy theorists believe the leaders of government are only looking to protect themselves.
The underground tunnels and bunkers at the Nevada Test Site may be the most elaborate underground chambers ever constructed by the federal government in the continental United States. The great majority of them are in Area 12, which is located approximately sixteen miles due west of Area 51 in a mountain range called Rainier Mesa. Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel complexes were drilled into the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To complete a single tunnel took, on average, twelve months. Most tunnels ran approximately 1,300 feet below the surface of the earth, but some reached a mile underground. Inside these giant cavities, which averaged one hundred feet wide, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense have exploded at least sixty-seven nuclear bombs. There, the military has tested nuclear blast and radiation effects on everything from missile nose cones to military satellites. A series called the Piledriver experiments studied survivability of hardened underground bunkers in a nuclear attack. The Hardtack tests sought to learn how “to destroy enemy targets [such as] missile silos and command centers” using megaton bombs. Inside the T-tunnels, scientists created vacuum chambers to simulate outer space, expanding on those dangerous late-1950s upper atmospheric tests code-named Teak and Orange. And the Department of Defense even tested how a stockpile of nuclear weapons inside an underground bunker would hold up to a nuclear blast.
Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel complexes, guarding many of the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the test site, these were his least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear heavy shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus explains. “The air was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many people working so many different jobs. Carpenters, welders… There were forty-eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the equipment was hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the conspiracy theorists believe they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality, according to Atomic Energy Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted to, men like Richard Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to walk.