Dumb about DUMBs?

Cheyenne Mountain, protector of NORAD.

What do you know about DUMBs (Deep Underground Military Bases)?  Probably not much, as they are classified as top-secret by "our" government.
We already know about some older government / military underground bases, even though information about them is somewhat restricted.  There's Iron Mountain, Mount Weather, and right here in my own backyard, Cheyenne Mountain.  Amazingly enough, my father was at one time the Public Information Officer for the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), headquartered underneath Cheyenne Mountain.  Information cleared for release into the public domain about the underground base and its activities was often channeled through my father.  As a boy, back in the 60s, I remember seeing the glossy black-and-white photos of the massive blast doors, the three-story buildings mounted on huge springs, and the water reservoirs that are all built inside the mountain.

A decade ago, I had another encounter with the mountain.  I elected to test out a little sports car I was thinking about purchasing by driving it up the winding mountain road leading to the tunnel entrance of Cheyenne Mountain.  The owner of the car was with me, and we were intercepted by a military jeep with four armed soldiers.  At gun-point, we were made to assume spread-eagle positions leaning on the hood of the little sports car, while the lead soldier queried us as to why we were leaving skid marks on "his" road.  The owner of the car started to get belligerent with our interrogator, and I felt obliged to calm him down by saying, "Cool it - those are real guns they are pointing at us."

Recently, I came across an amazing MySpace bulletin full of information and photos of the immense drilling machines (TBMs, or Tunnel Boring Machines) that I didn't even know existed.  These use mechanical cutters, but Phil Schneider (whistle-blower geologist involved in top-secret tunnel construction, killed for talking) mentions in his filmed lectures that we have secret nuclear-powered TBMs that melt through rock.  This article says the same thing:

"The September, 1983 Omni ran a picture story on the 'Subterrene,' a nuclear tunnel-boring machine developed at Los Alamos. The machine burrows through deep underground rock, heating it to a molten state (magma), which cools after the Subterrene moves on. The result is a tube with a smooth, glazed lining that can be used for the high-speed transport shuttles that link the sub-base complexes."

Some of the sources on DUMBs talk about being in these tunnels with smooth, glassy sides.

I recently talked to my father about what I had read while researching DUMBs, about how they are more than a mile beneath the surface, and he immediately responded with, "That's ridiculous!"  Isn't that an interesting reaction?  There's about a mile of tunnel drilled through Cheyenne Mountain, where he sometimes worked, and that tunnel was supposedly bored in the early 60s.  Does a boring machine care whether it cuts horizontally or vertically?



Imagine, the US Air Force goes underground.



Going underground gets serious.
More info:

• Interview with Richard Sauder, author of "Hidden in Plain Sight: Beyond the X-Files" and "Underground Bases and Tunnels: What is the Government Trying to Hide?"
• Red Ice Radio interview of Richard Sauder.