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

In the latter part of January 2011, an event described as a serious mishandling of a highly toxic nerve agent led to the temporary but complete lockdown of a Top Secret facility deep within the deserts of Utah. For a tense (but fortunately brief) period, the nation’s media reported on the mysterious affair, until assurances came from officialdom that all was well, everything had just been a big misunderstanding, and the good folks of the Beehive State were not about to be infected by some nightmarish cocktail conjured up in a dark underground lab.

We will return to this particularly controversial story in good time, but before we do so, we have to first go back to the dawning of the 1940s, when that same Top Secret facility — known today as the Dugway Proving Ground, or DPG — first reared its head.

Located 85 miles from Salt Lake City, the enormous DPG sits squarely within Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert, and is shielded by a huge expanse of mountains that dominate the landscape. Its creators chose their location well — but not quite well enough to avoid attracting publicity, controversy, and even outrage on more than one occasion.

A History of Chemical Warfare

One of the unfortunate side effects of the human race’s advancing technology is the ability this technology gives us to kill each other. Such is the case with the development and potential usage of extremely toxic substances that may be derived from living organisms: a.k.a. biological and chemical warfare. Make no mistake: The history of chemical warfare is long and dark. For example, during the First World War, from 1914 to 1918, German forces unleashed a terrifying onslaught of mustard gas upon unsuspecting Allied troops at Ypres, Belgium. The result: thousands of agonizing deaths under truly horrific circumstances. Sarin gas has also proved to be a cold-hearted player in chemical-warfare tragedies: In 1995, numerous people were injured and 13 died when Sarin vapor was released into the winding depths of Tokyo’s underground rail system by the apocalypse-obsessed Aum Shinrikyo cult — an event that briefly plunged Japan’s capital city into chaos as people scrambled to flee the jammed tunnels of death. Chemical warfare, then, is a highly dangerous game.

Death Needs a New Home

Prior to the early years of the Second World War, the U.S. military was pretty much reliant upon the expertise of the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for researching, understanding, developing, and offering protection from chemical-warfare agents. The biggest problem for military strategists of the time was that Aberdeen was hardly remote, let alone inaccessible, to theoretical invading hordes. After all, its northernmost tip practically sits on top of the Chesapeake Bay. So, to ensure that the United States’s research programs into chemical warfare could advance in a place that would offer personnel — as well as their deadly creations — protection from potential hostile nations and foreign spies, plans were made to build a new installation situated far away from prying eyes, in an area as remote as it would be secured.

Thus, on February 6, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed off on an order giving the War Department complete control over an astonishing 126,720 acres of previously open, public land, and the construction of a huge, secrecy-shrouded installation with both above- and below-surface facilities began. The Dugway Proving Ground quickly sprang to life. By the mid-1950s, more than a quarter of a million acres of additional land had been turned over to Dugway officials, thus massively increasing the size and scope of this isolated installation.

Despite various name changes in the years that followed, the mandate of the DPG remained very much unchanged: to further U.S. knowledge in the field of chemical and biological warfare. Today, the DPG has expanded to nearly 800,000 acres, and its airspace is constantly patrolled by the Air Force. And though understanding how the nation might best be protected from the ravaging effects of chemical warfare is without doubt a vital matter, it has not all been smooth sailing at Dugway. Not by a long shot.

Dead Sheep in Skull Valley

Imagine if you can a stark and shocking scene: It is early in the morning in mid-March 1968, and you are a rancher in Utah’s Skull Valley, a Native American Indian reservation of the Ghoshute tribe, less than 30 miles from the Dugway Proving Ground. Your income is mostly derived from breeding and selling sheep to the local communities, so your daily routine is to carefully nurture, feed, watch over, and house your animals. But this particular morning is destined to become one quite unlike any other. In fact, it’s about to turn into an absolute disaster.

As you ride your trusty steed (or drive your all-terrain vehicle) to the usual grazing area of your flock, you are met by a shocking sight: As far as the eye can see, sheep are lying dead on the valley floor. Others are struggling to take their very last breaths. Some wobble around on unsteady legs, their fates already tragically sealed. A few lie on the ground, unable or unwilling to move, suffering from fatal internal hemorrhaging. In the days to come, the casualty figure rises to 1,000 sheep. Then to 2,000. Finally it reaches a number that exceeds 6,000. To the uninitiated this may sound like the opening scenes of a big-bucks Hollywood eco-thriller. It is not. Rather, it represents one of the most notorious events in the history of the Dugway Proving Ground.

It became clear very quickly to those who called Skull Valley and its immediate surroundings their home that something deadly and disastrous had occurred in their midst. Even before the evidence was in, the locals were looking in the direction of Dugway — and only in the direction of Dugway. History has demonstrated they were wise to do so: On March 13, 1968, mere days before the sheep deaths occurred, personnel at Dugway had secretly engaged in several open-air tests using an agent known as VX, a chemical weapon that, today, is officially classed as weapon of mass destruction, and the use of it is banned by the United Nations. Utterly odorless and tasteless, VX makes for the ideal weapon: By the time a person even realizes that something is wrong, he or she may very well already be on an excruciating one-way road to oblivion. And that, as the people of Skull Valley learned at the cost of their livelihood, goes not only for human beings, but for sheep too.

When the scale of the tragedy became clear, the news spread like wildfire — or just like VX. On March 16, 1968, the panicked manager of a livestock company in Skull Valley breathlessly telephoned a Dr. Bode, who was then attached to the University of Utah but working under contract to the DPG, and informed him of the discovery of the sheep’s bodies. Quickly and astutely recognizing the likelihood of a connection to the activities of the nearby Proving Ground, Bode, in the early hours of March 17, called the chief of the Ecology and Epidemiology office at the DPG to report the initial deaths. As more and more reports swarmed in to the heart of Dugway, the realization that an event of disastrous proportions had occurred was fast becoming undeniable.

Well, to some it was undeniable; not to others. Outrageously, instead of owning up to their cataclysmic errors, staff at the base initially had the gall to place the blame on the ranchers’ use of organophosphate pesticides on their crops. That is, until autopsies of some of the sheep, chosen entirely at random, revealed the presence of levels of VX that were certainly significant enough to account for all of the deaths. Staff at the base was then forced to take a second look at the grim picture.

Secret reports and studies were duly prepared — all of which remained classified for years, and in some cases for decades—which clearly and undeniably implicated the DPG, and no one and nothing else, in the sorry state of affairs. Ranchers in the area were financially reimbursed by the government for the loss of their livestock, but there was still a great reluctance on the part of the DPG to officially own up to anything at all.

This would not be the only occasion when mysterious deaths of animals in the area were tied to the secret activities of the Dugway Proving Ground. On the Independence Day holiday weekend of 1976, no less than 20 horses were found dead on the Proving Ground, in an area called Orr Springs — precisely where certain germ warfare tests had taken place. Three days later, another 30 were dead. Scott Baranowski, a young soldier who was ordered to the site, helped to bury the carcasses of some of the unfortunate animals, after they had been carefully autopsied by base doctors. Then, quite suddenly, Baranowski fell briefly ill too, with a 104-degree fever accompanied by severe aches and pains.

The Army flatly denied that it had engaged in any sort of outdoor experimentation using nerve agents, and suggested — in extensive reports now in the public domain — that all the horses had died from nothing stranger than thirst, which is highly ironic, given that most of the bodies were found very close to sources of abundant water. In addition, a number of the bodies showed evidence of many large sores, and scientists from the DPG quietly informed Baranowski that some extremely hostile material was then currently being tested on base. Its true nature and origin, perhaps mercifully for us, remains unknown. Collectively, this all led Baranowski to believe that death from dehydration and thirst did not even begin to tell the whole story — maybe none of it. Nor did he believe that the lung cancer with which he was later diagnosed was unconnected. To this day, the Army and the DPG vehemently disagree with him.

Human Testing

Baranowski may not have been the only person deeply physically affected by their time spent at the Dugway Proving Ground. Steve Erickson, of the Citizens Education Project of Salt Lake City, who heavily researched the history of the DPG, said that many of the tests run at the base involved human subjects, some of whom were military personnel, and “can only be described as human experimentation.”[9] He cited one example in which soldiers were given BZ — a hallucinogen not unlike LSD in terms of its effects upon the human mind. A second example involved a group of Seventh Day Adventist volunteers who were exposed to a swarm of hungry mosquitoes that had been deliberately infected with a biological warfare agent by staff at Dugway as a means to try and determine if such insects could be considered viable methods of delivery.

Lest anyone dismiss such claims as conspiratorial nonsense, it is worth taking into consideration the following quote from an official (and officially declassified) General Accounting Office report of September 28, 1994: “From 1951 through 1969, hundreds, perhaps thousands of open-air tests using bacteria and viruses that cause disease in human, animals, and plants were conducted at Dugway. It is unknown how many people in the surrounding vicinity were also exposed to potentially harmful agents used in open-air tests at Dugway.”[10]

Five Aliens in Utah

One of the most controversial aspects of the secret research undertaken at the Dugway Proving Ground is its link to classified matters of otherworldly proportions — UFOs, in popular terms. Shortly before his March 2010 death, one Colonel George Weinbrenner — who held the position of Chief of the Foreign Technology Division (FTD) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio (which is the rumored home of the legendary Hangar 18) — made a six-word statement to his caretaker: “We have five aliens in Utah.”[11] He would say no more about it. Granted, this brief statement is open to a fair degree of interpretation, but researcher Anthony Bragalia has suggested his comment may be a reference to the Dugway Proving Ground. And this was not the first time Weinbrenner had spoken outside of official channels about such issues.

In the 1970s, Weinbrenner confirmed to filmmaker Robert Emenegger that highly classified film footage of UFOs was held by elements of U.S. officialdom, but Weinbrenner was concerned about saying too much publicly — namely, what he really knew about UFOs. This may have been due to his suspicions of being spied upon by someone in the government. Researcher Anthony Bragalia has noted that this fear of Weinbrenner’s may have explained why he always spoke in distinctly guarded terms whenever the matter of UFOs surfaced. When one takes into consideration that (as will become apparent in a future chapter of this book) many of the claims surrounding Wright-Patterson’s Hangar 18 demonstrate a close link between its work and that of the base’s Foreign Technology Division, it’s practically a given that Weinbrenner, as a former head of the FTD, would have had some knowledge of recovered alien bodies and their several areas of storage. And that brings us back to the present day, and the events of late January 2011.

Base Lockdown

It was around 5:30 p.m. on January 27 when the doors to the Dugway Proving Ground were firmly closed and locked. From that point on, no one was getting into the installation — and none of the approximately 1,500 workers on base at the time was getting out. That situation remained in force for nearly 12 hours. Shortly after the DPG went on alert, and as rumors began to circulate that something serious was up, Colonel William E. King IV, the base commander, said that Dugway’s staff was doing its utmost to rectify the situation as soon as was humanly possible.

The official reason for the lockdown was given in a brief statement from the Army on January 28: On the previous afternoon, during the course of a regular check of stockpiled items, it was believed that a small vial of the nerve agent VX — the very same substance that killed more than 6,000 sheep back in 1968—had gone missing. In reality, however, nothing had gone missing; apparently the panic was all due to nothing stranger than a labeling error on the vital vial. Maybe that’s really all there was to it. Not everyone is so sure, though.

Around the same time that the lockdown occurred, strange lights of unknown origin were seen flitting around the skies near the base. They even became the subject of a major news story on Utah’s ABC-4 News. In a segment titled “Strange Lights Appear in the Sky Above Utah County,” reporters said the witnesses were clear that whatever they had viewed were neither conventional aircraft nor helicopters. One unidentified flying object even seemed to drop something to the ground. Interestingly, of the various eyewitnesses who agreed to be interviewed by ABC-4 News, one had served in the military, and said that whatever had fallen from the sky was most certainly not a flare or anything so down-to-earth. But just because something is an unidentified flying object, does that automatically mean it is an alien spacecraft?

‘Genesis’

For years, rumors have circulated that, as well as testing some deadly nerve agents, the Dugway Proving Ground also test-flies certain highly advanced aero-forms. Dave Rosenfeld, the president of the research group Utah UFO Hunters, is of the opinion that at least some of the many UFO sightings that he and his group have scrupulously catalogued in and around the Dugway Proving Ground for years may be due to the test-flights of radically advanced aircraft. He opines that perhaps the DPG is “the new Area 51,” and possibly even “the new military spaceport.”[12]

Rosenfeld may not be too wide of the mark. On September 8, 2004, NASA’s Genesis spacecraft slammed into the desert floor of the Dugway Proving Ground after successfully collecting a sample of charged particles ejected from the sun’s upper atmosphere — or what is known as solar wind. The plan all along was for the craft to come down at Dugway, but a big problem with its parachute resulted in the anticipated smooth landing turning into a full-blown crash-landing. Not surprisingly, the craft was significantly damaged, and so was its precious, unique cargo. Fortunately, however, after the area was sealed off (due to a leak of toxic substances from Genesis’ batteries), a recovery team was able to safely collect the vial containing the particles and transfer it to NASA for careful analysis. The good news was that even though the solarwind specimens had, to a degree, been compromised as a result of being partially exposed during the crash, NASA scientists were able to make a number of significant breakthroughs with respect to the makeup of such solar phenomena.

Taking into consideration the curious UFO encounter at the time of the January 27, 2011 lockdown and the combined words of Colonel George Weinbrenner and Dave Rosenfeld, I will leave you with a thought-provoking question: Given that the Dugway Proving Ground is at the cutting edge of classified research into chemical weapons, has been the site of a number of intriguing UFO sightings, and was the spot where one of NASA’s own spacecraft plummeted to Earth, is it totally out of the question to suggest that the DPG secretly knows a great deal about somebody else’s — or something else’s — spacecraft too?