Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

Porton Down is one of the most secretive of all government installations in the United Kingdom. It can be found in the green and pleasant county of Wiltshire, and its classified work focuses on exotic viruses and biological-warfare. Although the secret work at Porton Down originally began at the height of the tumultuous First World War, it was not until the dawning of the 1940s that the installation became the central hub for British interest in the expanding realms of chemical and biological warfare. From 1946 onward, one year after the successful defeat of Nazi Germany, Porton Down’s work began to focus more on the defensive — rather than chiefly offensive — uses of such warfare, and in 1957 the installation was duly christened the Microbiological Research Establishment.

By the late 1970s, a decision was made to place the MRE under the control of a civil body. As a result, there was a significant reorganization, and on April 1, 1979, the Microbiological Research Establishment became the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research. Then, in 1995, it was absorbed into the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). Six years later, there was yet another change: DERA split into two organizations, a private body called QinetiQ, and the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory, an arm of the Ministry of Defense steeped in official secrecy. Today, the facility is known as DSTL, Porton Down.

Although Porton Down has been careful to cultivate and maintain its image as a facility whose work is purely defensive in nature and relatively open to parliamentary scrutiny and official oversight, in reality this is far from the case. Porton Down is not without its dark side. During the 1950s, for example, a select number of British military personnel were — unbeknownst to them — given LSD at Porton Down as part of a classified effort to determine the effects of the drug and ascertain the extent to which it might have a viable role to play in warfare, perhaps by rendering enemy personnel incapable of engaging in hostilities.

Furthermore, at least as far back as the early 1950s, Porton Down was also secretly exposing military personnel to nerve gas, again to try and understand its potential role in warfare. Sometimes, this action proved to be recklessly and tragically costly: In 1953, Ron Maddison, a 20-year-old serviceman with the British Royal Air Force, died after Porton Down scientists ruthlessly exposed him to Sarin, an extremely toxic chemical agent that is now classed as a Weapon of Mass Destruction under the United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, which came into being in April 1991.

Top Secret Work At Porton Down

It is intriguing to note that, in addition to its regular (albeit controversial and Top Secret) work here described, Porton Down has been directly linked to two additional highly controversial issues:

1. UFOs and alien life.

2. A series of mysterious deaths that dominated the elite field of microbiology in the first decade of the 21st century.

Let us start with the former.

UFOs and Alien Life

On the night of January 23, 1974, an enigmatic event occurred in the large Berwyn Mountain range in North Wales, United Kingdom, that, for some within the UFO research community, has come to be known as the British Roswell. Researcher Andy Roberts summed up this mysterious affair: “The claim was that a UFO piloted by extraterrestrials crashed, or was shot down, on the mountain known as Cader Berwyn and that the alien crew, some still alive, were whisked off to a secret military installation in the south of England for study.”[44]

That secret military installation was said to be none other than Porton Down. Of course, this sounds like a conspiracy theorist’s wildest dream come true, but despite vociferous attacks from the more skeptical members of the UFO research community, it has steadfastly remained an integral part of the story ever since it first surfaced (publicly, at least) in 1996. The original source of this Porton Down story was a now-deceased UFO investigator named Tony Dodd, a North Yorkshire, England police sergeant with a quarter of a century of service on the Force. At the time the account was first revealed, Dodd flatly refused to reveal to anyone the real name of the source for his sensational story, and instead preferred to provide the pseudonym of James Prescott.

According to “Prescott,” at the time of the Berwyn incident he was stationed at an Army barracks in the south of England. Stressing to Dodd that he could not name either his unit or his barracks, as they were still very much operational, Prescott said that by January 18, 1974, it was clear that something unusual was afoot: He and his colleagues were placed on emergency stand-by status. The reason why became apparent 24 hours later, when Prescott’s unit was directed to make its way carefully and quietly toward the English city of Birmingham.

The team then received orders to proceed with speed towards North Wales, but were halted on the outskirts of the English city of Chester, in readiness for a military exercise they were told was about to take place in the area. Not long after, the orders changed yet again, and they were to make their way to the town of Llangollen, in northeast Wales. On arrival at Llangollen, recalled Prescott, the unit noticed a great deal of ground activity in the area. In addition, military aircraft were soaring across the darkened Welsh skies. Extraordinary events were clearly unfolding at an extremely fast rate. It was shortly after 11:30 p.m. when the situation began to take shape, and Prescott and his colleagues were on the move once more: to the village of Llandderfel. The team soon reached the little hamlet, whereupon they were directed to load two large, oblong boxes into their vehicle: “We were at this time warned not to open the boxes, but to proceed to Porton Down and deliver the boxes.”[45]

A number of hours later, they reached the secret Wiltshire facility and were duly directed to a specific part of the installation. Once inside, explained Prescott, the boxes were opened by staff at the facility in their presence. He could see that they contained two strange, unearthly creatures that had been placed inside decontamination suits. The staff at Porton then began the careful task of opening the suits. Prescott said that when this action was complete it was clear to all those present that the entities were not of this Earth. He elaborated: “What I saw in the boxes that day made me change my whole concept of life. The bodies were about five to six feet tall, humanoid in shape, but so thin they looked almost skeletal with a covering skin. Although I did not see a craft at the scene of the recovery, I was informed that a large craft had crashed and was recovered by other military units.”[46]

Perhaps even more remarkable was what Prescott had to say next: Shortly after his life-changing experience at Porton Down, he had the opportunity to speak with several colleagues from his own unit, who guardedly informed him they had also transported aliens to Porton Down, but with one amazing difference. “Their cargo was still alive.”[47]

And that’s where the Berwyn Mountains story dries up, unfortunately. But the Porton Down/UFO link continues.

Invasion Earth

As I noted in a previous chapter of this book, Nick Pope, who officially investigated UFO reports for the British Ministry of Defense from 1991 to 1994, wrote a novel in 1999 titled Operation Thunder Child that focused upon a hostile attack on the British Isles by alien entities. In the book, alien bodies recovered from a UFO crash are secretly taken to Porton Down.

At the same time that Nick Pope was writing his book, the British Ministry of Defense, in a truly unprecedented move, gave a huge amount of technical assistance and support to a BBC science-fiction production titled Invasion Earth that dealt with an attack on the planet by hostile alien entities. Inevitably, rumors began that this move was a less-than-subtle attempt by certain elements of the British government to get the general public thinking about the possibility of waging war against an alien species. Did the MoD know something that the rest of us didn’t? A Ministry of Defense source — who was specifically referred to me directly by Nick Pope — had a number of perceptive comments to make on this particularly odd set of circumstances: “It’s extremely strange,” said the man, “that on the one hand the MoD is publicly so dismissive about UFOs, and yet on the other they bent over backwards to provide assistance to a TV company producing a science-fiction drama which starts with the Royal Air Force shooting down a UFO. Normally, the Ministry of Defense only helps film and TV companies where it believes that significant benefits will fall to the MoD in terms of recruiting, training, or public relations. This was the case, for example, with our participation in the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. What, one wonders, did the MoD think it had to gain from helping to perpetuate a view that the Royal Air Force were virtually at war with extraterrestrials? Questions about our participation in this project were raised at the highest level within the Ministry of Defense.”[48]

Most notable of all, in Invasion Earth, a number of aliens retrieved from a crashed and captured UFO are taken to — yes — Porton Down.

UFOs at Rendlesham Forest

There is one final footnote to the Porton Down UFO controversy: the famous UFO incident at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England in December 1980. The event has been the subject of half a dozen books, and is considered by many to be a prime example of a UFO landing. The basics of the account are these: Between December 26 and 29, 1980, multiple UFO encounters occurred within Rendlesham Forest, and involved United States military personnel based at the nearby Royal Air Force stations Bentwaters and Woodbridge. According to numerous U.S. Air Force personnel, a small, triangular shaped object was seen maneuvering in the forest. Others, such as the previously mentioned Larry Warren, told of traumatic encounters deep within the trees, with strange, spectral, alien-style entities.

Less well known is the fact that the late Rendlesham researcher and author Georgina Bruni uncovered a rumor suggesting that shortly after the events in the forest occurred, a number of personnel from Porton Down were covertly dispatched to the area. Significantly, the Porton Down team was dressed in full-body protection suits — or Hazmat outfits, as they have become known — and tentatively entered the woods, for reasons that remain unknown outside of official channels.

On January 11, 2001, the late British Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Hill-Norton, who had a personal interest in UFOs in general and the Rendlesham affair in particular, asked questions at an official level with British authorities in an attempt to resolve the issue of the Porton Down allegations as they related to the Rendlesham case. Predictably, the response to Hill-Norton’s questions, which surfaced on January 25, 2001, was that staff at Porton Down had made careful checks of their archives, but had found no record of any such visit to the woods. It should be noted this did not mean such records did not exist, only that the specific personnel who made the search were unable to locate anything of relevance. The controversy surrounding crashed UFOs, biological warfare, and Porton Down seemed destined to continue.

Deaths in Microbiology

From the latter part of 2001 to the present day, literally dozens of individuals working within the elite field of microbiology (the study of organisms that are too small to be seen with the naked eye, such as bacteria and viruses, some of which are lethal) in various countries around the world have died under suspicious circumstances. Many of the deaths appear, at first glance at least, to have prosaic explanations: suicides, illnesses, and accidents. There are those, however, who have maintained that the sheer number of such deaths cannot be explained away so easily. More intriguing is the fact that many of the now-dead microbiologists had links to worldwide intelligence services, including the United States’s CIA, Britain’s MI5 and MI6, and Israel’s Mossad.

Inevitably, this strange cluster of deaths in such a tightly knit area of cutting-edge research has led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Some students of the puzzle believe that a cell of deep-cover terrorists from the Middle East is attempting to wipe out the leading names within the field of microbiology as part of an ongoing plot to prevent Western nations from developing the ultimate bio-weapon. A much darker and controversial theory suggests that this same weapon has already been developed, and now, with their work complete, the micro-biologists are being systematically killed off by elements of Western Intelligence, in an effort to prevent them being kidnapped by terrorists who will then force them to work for the other side. Of particular relevance to this chapter is the fact that a number of those same scientists had ties — some very significant ties — to Porton Down.

On November 23, 2001, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, a former microbiologist for Bioreparat — a bio-weapons production facility that existed in Russia prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union — was found dead near his home in the county of Wiltshire, England — the very county that just happens to be home to Porton Down. Pasechnik’s defection to Britain in 1989 revealed to Western intelligence services, for the very first time, the sheer extent and scale of the former Soviet Union’s secret research into the field of biological warfare, including deadly anthrax. After his defection, Pasechnik was employed for a year at the Center for Applied Microbiology Research at Porton Down before forming his own company, called Regma Biotechnics. In the final weeks of his life, Pasechnik placed the sum total of his anthrax-based research in the hands of the British government. According to British Intelligence, Pasechnik died of nothing stranger than a tragic stroke. How very convenient that Pasechnik’s fatal stroke did not hit him until precisely after he had completed his work on Anthrax and handed it over to British authorities.

Then, on July 18, 2003, David Kelly, a British biological-weaponry expert, fatally slashed his own wrists while out walking in woods near his home. At least, that was the official version of events. Kelly was the British Ministry of Defense’s Chief Scientific Officer and Senior Adviser to the Proliferation and Arms Control Secretariat, and to the Foreign Office’s non-proliferation department. In 1984, Kelly had been appointed as Head of Microbiology at Porton Down. In the autumn of 1989, he was called in to assist MI6 in debriefing none other than the aforementioned Vladimir Pasechnik. This debriefing provided undeniable evidence of a gross violation of the 1972 biological weapons convention: the Russians were shown to be secretly studying the Smallpox virus, in direct, flagrant contravention of World Health Organization regulations. After the Iraqis were slung out of Kuwait in 1991, the U.N. invited Kelly to help force Saddam Hussein into compliance with the peace agreements. Kelly made 36 visits to Iraq, and, from New York, continued his work into the late 1990s. He also acted as the Senior Adviser on Biological Weapons to the United Nations’ Biological Weapons Inspections teams (Unscom) from 1994 to 1999. To this day, Kelly’s suicide is viewed with deep suspicion and great cynicism.

On July 3, 2004, nearly a year after Kelly’s passing, 52-year-old Dr. Paul Norman of Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, was killed when the Cessna 206 aircraft he was piloting crashed in the English county of Devonshire. Dr. Norman was the Chief Scientist for Chemical and Biological Defense at Porton Down. The Cessna’s crash site was sealed off, and was examined by officials from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. The wreckage of the aircraft was removed from the site to the AAIB’s base of operations at Farnborough, England. The crash, as no one should be surprised to learn, was ruled an accident. Uh-huh.

Were the deaths of Pasechnik, Kelly, and Norman really so prosaic, as the British Government was — and still very much is — so keen to assert? Or was the fact that all three had secret ties to Porton Down an indication that something stranger and far more deadly was afoot? In today’s climate of terror, it should be recognized that any suspicious deaths in the field of microbiology and biological warfare — specifically where the victims had links to the Intelligence services of a number of countries and secret installations like Porton Down — might be an indication that a terrorist assassination squad was at work.

Now let’s focus our attention upon the United States’s equivalent of Porton Down: Fort Detrick.

Fort Detrick

In 1941, President Roosevelt secretly ordered the establishment of a program that came to be officially known as the U.S. Biological Warfare Program. As a result of Roosevelt’s historic move, in 1943, the newly designated Camp Detrick, in Maryland, was assigned to the Army Chemical Warfare Service for the specific development of a center dedicated to biological warfare issues. Twelve months later, Camp Detrick was established as an installation focused on the research and development of both offensive and defensive biological warfare techniques and agents.

In 1956, the name of the installation was changed from Camp Detrick to Fort Detrick, but its workload remained very much the same. Then, on April 1, 1972, following the official closure of offensive biological warfare studies in the United States, the control of Fort Detrick was transferred from the U.S. Army Material Command to the Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army. One year later, Fort Detrick was assigned to the newly created U.S. Army Health Services Command. And in 1995, the HSC was itself reorganized, into the U.S. Army Medical Command. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fort Detrick, just like Porton Down, is a hotbed of controversial deaths.

Few people who lived through it will ever likely forget the incredible wave of terror that swept the United States when, only one week after the shocking events of September 11, 2001 unfolded, anonymously mailed envelopes containing anthrax spores arrived at the offices of a variety of major media outlets, including the New York Post, CBS News, and ABC News. Two Democratic senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were also targeted with the potentially deadly substance. The results were catastrophic. At least 22 people were infected, of whom five tragically lost their lives. The situation led the FBI to launch one of the biggest manhunts in its long and winding history.

Documentation that has surfaced via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act shows that, by the early months of 2005, the FBI had a suspect in the anthrax mailings case firmly in mind. It was not some minion of Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, however, as many had assumed (and as many within the administration of George W. Bush earnestly hoped would be the case). Rather, it was a Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins, a microbiologist who had worked for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick for no less than 18 years.

By 2007, Ivins became the subject of periodic secret surveillance by the FBI personnel assigned to the operation. And it did not take the FBI long to build up what was perceived by the Bureau as a very strong case against the man: In June 2008, Ivins was informed that prosecution for the anthrax attacks, as well as for the subsequent injuries and deaths, was almost certainly forthcoming. Ivins did not wait around to learn what the FBI had in store for him. On July 27, 2008, he died as a result of a significant overdose of acetaminophen, a pain reliever. As was the case with the various microbiologists attached to Porton Down, England, whose lives ended so abruptly and suspiciously in this very same time frame, probing questions were asked as to whether Ivins had really taken his own life, or if he was merely a convenient scapegoat for a far bigger, wide-ranging conspiracy.

One theory suggested that Ivins was nothing more than a Lee Harvey Oswald — style patsy, and that the anthrax attacks were actually the work of rogue elements within the Bush Administration that were intent on terrorizing the nation to such a degree that no one would even dare to question Dubya’s plans to invade the Middle East and establish footholds in both Iraq and Afghanistan before then moving on to Iran, and who knew where else after that.

FBI sources stated that in the direct aftermath of the anthrax attacks, the White House practically ordered Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, to find a link— any link, no matter how tenuous — between the anthrax attacker and Osama bin Laden. Despite the unrelenting pressure put on Mueller, FBI agents wryly noted that there was no way whatsoever that the particular strain of anthrax in question could have been fashioned by “some guy in a cave.”[49]

Whether or not the FBI was right to focus on Ivins, Dr. Meryl Nass, an authority on anthrax, said that regardless of how accurate microbial forensics might be, that discipline would only have the ability to connect the anthrax to a specific strain and place of origin, and not to any particular individual. Regardless, as a result of the fact that Ivins was now dead and the FBI had no other target in sight, it elected to close its investigation on February 19, 2010. Not everyone was satisfied with the outcome, however.

Echoing the sentiments of many, Senator Leahy — who had been one of the key targets of the anthrax attacks — said of the theory that Ivins had been the sole culprit, “If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape, or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all.”[50]

There is a curious afterword to this story: Militarized Anthrax, as it is known, was developed by William C. Patrick III, who, throughout the course of an extensive, multifaceted career, was employed at Fort Detrick and the equally secret Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, and periodically undertook contract work for the CIA. Patrick, who died in 2010 at the age of 84, developed a process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at a level of one trillion spores per gram, which happens to be the precise concentration of the anthrax utilized in the 2001 attacks — yet another clear indicator that, regardless of the role played (or not played) by Ivins, the anthrax attacks were domestic in origin. Aside from the United States, no nation on the planet has ever successfully managed to achieve concentrations above 500 billion per gram.

In later years Patrick worked closely with a certain Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov, who rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to become the first Deputy Director of the Russian equivalent of Fort Detrick and Porton Down: Biopreparat. Alibekov, who defected to the United States in 1992, now goes by the far more Western moniker of Ken Alibek. Interestingly (some might say highly curiously), before his defection, Alibekov’s boss was none other than Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, who, as we have seen, was an expert in the field of anthrax research, and died under questionable circumstances in Wiltshire, England, in November 2001, only a month after the anthrax attacks in the United States were at their height.

Whether as a result of its reported ties to anthrax attacks, the Age of Terror, and groundbreaking research into the realm of biological warfare, Fort Detrick, just like its British cousin, Porton Down, remains an enigmatic installation.