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

The commonwealth of Puerto Rico is what is known as an unincorporated territory of the United States, and is located in the Caribbean Sea. According to some, it may very well be the most secrecy-shrouded place on the planet, home to not just one secret base, but a plethora of classified locations, certainly of a governmental nature, and maybe even of an alien nature too. Throughout the course of the last 20 years or so, the people of Puerto Rico have been swamped by UFO encounters, sightings of strange and unearthly craft surfacing from mountainous lairs and undersea installations, and run-ins with strange, vampiric creatures that one might accurately describe as the distinctly evil twins of Steven Spielberg’s benign E.T.

For two decades, controversial tales have surfaced from Puerto Rico describing a killer beast creeping around the landscape, plunging the population into a state of fear and apprehension. The face of this monster is dominated by a pair of glowing red eyes; it has razor-sharp, clawlike appendages, vicious-looking teeth that could likely inflict some truly serious damage, sharp spikes running down its neck and spine, and even, on occasion, large membranous wings. On top of that, the creature thrives on blood. Puerto Rico, then, is home to a real-life vampire. Its moniker is the Chupacabra, a Latin term meaning “goat-sucker”—in reference to the fact that when the Chupacabra tales first surfaced in the 1990s, most of the animals slain by the blood-sucking nightmare were goats. That’s right: If you’re a goat, it most certainly does not pay to make Puerto Rico your home. It might not be too safe if you’re human either.

Theories abound with respect to the nature of the beast. Some researchers and witnesses suggest that the monster is some form of giant bat; others prefer the theory that it has extraterrestrial origins. Certainly the most bizarre idea postulated is that the Chupacabra is the creation of a Top Secret genetic research laboratory hidden deep within Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest, in the Sierra de Luquillo, approximately 25 miles southeast of the city of San Juan.

El Yunque was named after the Indian spirit Yuquiyu, but is also known as the Caribbean National Forest, and is the only rainforest in the U.S. National Forest System. Its 28,000 acres are a glorious sight to behold: More than 100 billion gallons of precipitation fall each year, creating the jungle-like ambience of lush foliage, sparkling leaves, spectacular waterfalls, shining wet rocks, and shadowy paths that really have to be seen up close and personal to be appreciated. The forest contains rare wildlife as well, including the Puerto Rican Parrot, the Puerto Rican Boa snake, a multitude of lizards and crabs, and of course the famous Coquí frog, so named after its unique vocalizations.

As for the Chupacabra…well, its predations and appearance are as legendary as they are feared. Although I could cite case after case, nearly ad infinitum, for our purposes one will suffice.

Norka’s Chupacabra

Norka is an elderly lady living in a truly beautiful home high in the El Yunque rainforest that one can only reach by negotiating an infinitely complex series of treacherous roads, built perilously close to the edge of some very steep hills. Although the exact date escapes her, Norka remembers driving home one night in 1975 or 1976, when she was both startled and horrified by the sight of a bizarre creature shambling across the road.

She described the animal as approximately four feet in height, with a monkey-like body that was covered in dark brown hair or fur, wings that were a cross between those of a bat and those of a bird, and glowing eyes that bulged alarmingly from a bat-like visage. Sharp claws flicked ominously in Norka’s direction. She could only sit and stare as the beast then turned its back on her and rose slowly into the sky. Since then, eerily similar encounters with such vile entities have haunted the terrified populace of Puerto Rico. They may have also attracted the attention of the official world too.

Roosevelt Roads

On one of my several expeditions to Puerto Rico, a number of residents suggested it would be a very good idea for me to focus my attention upon the links between the beast and a former U.S. Naval base called Roosevelt Roads, located in the town of Ceiba. Today the site holds the José Aponte de la Torre Airport, but in 1944, when the base was inaugurated, it was perceived as a place of prime strategic importance — particularly so if the island became the site of hostilities with unfriendly nations. By 1957, Roosevelt Roads had been officially designated as a Naval Station. To demonstrate its importance from a military perspective, the U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command (USNAVSO) had its base of operations at Roosevelt Roads. In January 2004, however, the Navy elected to relocate USNAVSO to Naval Station Mayport, Florida. When the Navy finally moved out of the base on March 31, 2004, it was seen as a victory for those on the island seeking independence.

But what about the link between Roosevelt Roads and the Chupacabra? According to the stories that were coming from all across Puerto Rico, a number of captured, very vicious Chupacabra had supposedly been briefly held within a secure, secret facility at Roosevelt Roads at some point in the early 1990s, before being secretly shipped to the States (probably to Area 51, or to some similar desert locale). This same story, in various incarnations and to varying degrees, was told to me by numerous individuals on the island. I was also informed that stories had been quietly circulating among the island’s inhabitants for years to the effect that there were some distinctly strange things going on deep in the rainforest at what was described to me as a “secret monkey research center.” So the rumors went, biological warfare tests, genetic manipulation, and even more horrifying experimentation were the order of the day there, and some of the unfortunate animals that had been experimented on were said to have escaped from their confines and run wild on the island. At least a few of those animals, it was suspected by locals on the island, could have been responsible for the tales of the exploits of the Chupacabra.

The Caribbean Primate Research Center

Accounts such as these, suggesting the Chupacabra was the result of gene-splicing experimentation by crazed scientists, proliferated. Notably, the CIA was also linked with this theoretical research center, and it was said that its interest was focused specifically upon social behavior studies related to monkey experimentation and Chupacabra attacks. However, it’s highly unlikely that even the very best scientists on the payroll of the United States government possess the skills to successfully mutate a friendly little monkey into a rampaging, blood-sucking killing machine with glowing eyes, razor-sharp claws, and spikes running down the length of its back. And yet there is no doubt that intriguing things of a genetic nature have occurred deep in the forest.

Furthermore, such a primate facility most assuredly does exist.

Created in 1938, it was (and still is) called the Caribbean Primate Research Center (CPRC), and it is a research, training, and education unit of the University of Puerto Rico, which attracts the attention of the U.S. government and receives funding and support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Center for Research Resources. In the words of the CPRC itself, its mission revolves around “the study and use of non-human primates [chiefly, Indian rhesus monkeys] as models for studies of social and biological interactions and for the discovery of methods of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases that afflict humans.”[51]

The Virology Laboratory of the CPRC is at the forefront of research to develop and simulate vaccines against SIV — or, as it is known in simpler terms, Monkey AIDS. It was this laboratory about which the locals had a great deal to say. And they weren’t afraid to say it either. This was the scenario: A number of monkeys had escaped from the center some years earlier, and were now wildly running riot and breeding in the dense woods. Most disturbing was the fact that the original escapees were those that had contracted SIV and were being used in experiments to try and find a cure for HIV — experiments that were, notably, of intense interest to certain elements of the U.S. government. In other words, infected monkeys were on the loose in Puerto Rico.

It was highly possible, I was informed, that some attacks attributed to Puerto Rico’s most famous vampire were really the result of the predations of very aggressive, SIV-infected monkeys. Arguably, that would be a very good reason for the U.S. government to create and circulate spurious tales about the Chupacabra: The story would act as very good camouflage in the event of any truly horrific attacks on local livestock, or, worse still, on people. As a bonus, the tales suggesting a Chupacabra presence in the area would hopefully ensure that the terrified locals kept their distance. On all of these thorny issues, the Caribbean Primate Research Center offers nothing more than an intriguing silence.

With the Chupacabra mystery, and its links to both the U.S. Navy presence at Roosevelt Roads and the Caribbean Primate Research Center now detailed, let us focus on the other big mystery that dominates Puerto Rico: that of unidentified aerial craft. As with the saga of the Chupacabra, one could wax lyrically for countless pages on the many and varied UFO reports that have emanated from Puerto Rico since the late 1990s.

Rosario’s sighting

Rosario is a middle-aged woman living in the old San Juan district of Puerto Rico who earns her living in the island’s food industry. In March 2000, she was working in a grove near the foot of the El Yunque rainforest. As she picked plantains (a type of fruit similar to a banana) her attention was drawn to a deep, resonating hum that seemed to come from directly above her. Looking up, Rosario was startled to see a black, triangular-shaped object, about 35 feet in length and with a shiny coating, hovering overhead at a height estimated to be around 90 to 120 feet.

Surprise and amazement turned to horror and shock when a pencil-thin beam of light shot out of the bottom of the object. The light-beam fanned out and enveloped Rosario in a pink glow. For what seemed like an eternity — but what was, Rosario says now, certainly less than a minute — she was rooted to the spot, while her mind was flooded with stark imagery of widespread nuclear destruction and environmental collapse in the Earth’s near future. The final image was that of a large, bald head with huge black eyes staring at her — a definitive alien entity, in other words, of the type that has become infamous in today’s world. Suddenly, the UFO soared upwards and headed slowly towards the thick rainforest. In the wake of the encounter, Rosario developed an overwhelming interest in environmental issues, and, quite literally overnight, after a lifetime of eating meat, became a staunch advocate of vegetarianism.

Alien Bases

Given the sheer scale of the UFO activity and Chupacabra encounters on Puerto Rico, this matter has inevitably given rise to a widely supported theory among the populace that the island is home to an underground or undersea base of extraterrestrial origins. Certainly, stories abound of UFOs seen entering and leaving secret alien bases across and around Puerto Rico. For example, Carlos Manuel Mercado maintains that in June 1988 he was taken to one such base, located in the Sierra Bermeja, which is adjacent to Puerto Rico’s Laguna Cartagena National Wildlife Refuge. (Interestingly, the refuge falls under the jurisdiction of none other than the U.S. government’s Fish and Wildlife Service, whose 2009 recommendations to restrict public access to large portions of the cave system are discussed in another chapter of this book in the context of the 2012 controversy.)

According to Mercado, he was taken to a huge, futuristic, factory-like alien installation buried deep inside a mountain known as El Cayul, where row after row of aliens were hard at work building and repairing a multitude of extraterrestrial spacecraft. The aliens, Mercado said, encouraged him to spread his story of encountering them in their secret installation far and wide, after his return to civilization.

In a similar vein, the UFO researcher Timothy Good, who personally interviewed Mercado in 1997, spoke with a Puerto Rican investigator of both the UFO and the Chupacabra phenomena named Jorge Martin, who advised Good that he, Martin, had received confirmation of the existence of the alien base within El Cayul from a high-ranking military officer.

Of course, stories like this are bound to provoke deep controversy. But it might be argued that everything about Puerto Rico’s many mysteries and cosmic wonders provokes controversy, so why should the story of this apparently secret, mountainous facility be any different? So much for the base within El Cayul. But what about those rumors of undersea installations of a distinctly nonhuman nature?

Much of the evidence (which is admittedly fragmentary) points to the island of Vieques, a 21-mile-long landmass located, interestingly enough, near to the old Roosevelt Roads U.S. Navy facility where, as I discussed earlier, a number of very bad-tempered Chupacabra were supposedly briefly held in the early 1990s. Jorge Martin has uncovered a wealth of data on sightings of strange-looking craft of unknown origin and intent, both entering and leaving the waters that surround the island. In one case, from 1996, Martin was told by the primary eyewitness — a fisherman out at sea — of a huge, brightly lit, saucer-shaped craft that rose out of the waters near the Playa Grande lagoon.

A similar report from the same location, involving the sighting of a huge, triangular-shaped, silver-colored UFO, was provided to Jonathan Downes and I in 2004 by a former civil-defense employee, who had seen the gigantic craft rise silently out of the coastal waters of the island while he was on an early morning jog in the spring of 1999. In this case, the vast device, which was viewed at a distance of around half a mile off the coast, wobbled slightly, rather like a falling leaf, as it took to the skies, and then streaked vertically at a fantastic speed, growing ever smaller until it was finally lost from view due to the effects of the bright, rising sun.

Further rumors were provided to Downes and me on that expedition: They came from a retired police officer who had heard rumors to the effect that, somewhere off the coast of Puerto Rico (he was not entirely sure where, exactly), in late 1993, elements of the U.S. Navy spent several days tracking, via sonar, the movements of a huge UFO in the deep waters off Puerto Rico. Perhaps aware of its potentially hazardous nature, the U.S. Navy contingent, Downes and I were told, was ordered to merely carefully log the movements of the undersea craft, but never to engage it any way that might be interpreted as hostile.

Taking all these accounts into thoughtful consideration, is it truly feasible that Puerto Rico might be home to a massive undersea installation? When one realizes that we, the human race, have had the ability to construct such futuristic facilities for decades, then the possibility becomes not so unbelievable after all. And make no mistake: Evidence of our own undersea abilities is far from lacking. For example, an October 1966 document prepared by C.F. Austin of the U.S. Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California, includes a truly remarkable statement. Titled “Manned Undersea Structures — The Rock-Site Concept,” it states in part: “Large undersea installations with a shirt-sleeve environment have existed under the continental shelves for many decades. The technology now exists, using off-the-shelf petroleum, mining, submarine, and nuclear equipment, to establish permanent manned installations within the sea floor that do not have any air umbilical or other connection with the land or water surface, yet maintain a normal one-atmosphere environment within.”[52]

If, as this previously classified U.S. Navy document demonstrates, the government of the United States was constructing undersea installations a number of decades before the documentation was even prepared in the mid-1960s, perhaps someone else, someone from a world far, far away, has secretly been doing likewise. And just maybe they chose Puerto Rico as their base of operations.