23 48’47.70″ S 133 44’16.86″ E
Flat chat Pine Gap in every home a Big Mac
And no-one goes outback that's that.
-- Midnight Oil
The Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, Australia has always had significance in the UFO urban mythology. What is publically acknowledged and uncontested about the US-led base is that it, like its much smaller New Zealand cousin Waihopai, does signals intelligence for the UKUSA intelligence community and the so-called ECHELON program, and that (among many other supply lines) it is serviced on the New Zealand end by military cargo 'channel flights' routed through the Operation Deep Freeze Antarctic science base in my hometown, Christchurch.
(Interestingly, my father worked with Deep Freeze as an engineer for many years and although I don't believe he ever lied to me, I was surprised to discover that the Harewood base is considered sovereign US soil - the subject somehow never came up, or if it did it didn't stick. Dad, like I guess a lot of civilian air people of the generation old enough to remember WW2, was generally a supporter of the USA, and the assumption was that you got out of the way of the military and let them do their thing, and antiwar protesters were annoying people who might have a point but took it too far. After all, who else would save us from the USSR?)
But I also grew up with an assortment of UFO lore from sources like Stan Deyo's Cosmic Conspiracy, in which Pine gap featured prominently in a much wilder, science-fictional role as 'the Australian Area 51'.
Every now and then I check up on the UFO mythos potboiler websites to see if any actual gems of truth (or what passes for it) have surfaced out of the glop. The problem, you see, is that once you've been exposed to one source of mind-blowing information (and growing up religious meets that criteria), it's harder to dismiss outright even the most incredible claims, because well, who's to say? And of course it's always hard to tell a well-stage-managed hoax from mind-melting truth, especially when you look back at the history of the 20th century and go 'whoa, we landed on the freaking moon!' In comparison to Tranquility Base, not much is weirder.
Note to conspiracy buffs: my personal list of conspiracies does NOT include 'Apollo never happened', and it disheartens me immensely to see how popular such an outright lie has become. But what fascinates me, in retrospect, is looking back at the Cold War, the Space Race and the curious gaps in history; the politics, the media spin, the popular culture, the artful not-quite-outright-deception that painted a picture of Space as the New Frontier, Kirk and Klingons and all, when in reality it wasn't a frontier for anything much except communications satellites and city-killer ICBMs. And after touching the moon once, we never went back at all! Doesn't that seem strange? It does to me - but only if you believed the public not-quite-lies as to why the Space Race happened, if you bought the spin that NASA was 'civilian' and 'we come in peace for all mankind' - while all the Apollo astronauts were military men and the same rockets were cross-purposed for weapons of mass destruction and the lead scientists were ex-Nazis - but they were now 'good' rockets because they did SCIENCE.
The problem with wars is that they breed secrecy. The problem with total wars is that they breed total secrecy. The problem with total secrets is that they need to be defended with total lies: blank-faced outright denials, and an ecosystem of 'disinformation', cover stories, and psychological manipulation.
The problem with building public democracy on a security-first policy enshrouded in total lies is that, eventually, people stop believing anything their elected representatives say. And that's a very dangerous place for a democracy to head - aliens or no aliens.
Pine Gap is one of those holes. On the surface, it's just a bunch of satellite dishes. There's a mythology of course about a whole underground base there. Which seemed pretty bizarre to me, but then you stop and think: this was the Cold War. Pine Gap is a hugely critical bit of infrastructure. It's right in the middle of Australia, one of the safest places to be in a nuke war, as far away from the continental USA as you can get, but it's got the biggest bullseye ever painted right on it - it'll be about the first target to get melted when the ICBMs start flying.
So. If you were in the 1950s or 1960s, and you had the military money, the military motivation, and the military secrecy needed to, say, excavate large underground bases for continuity of government and similar Cold War functions (the 'mineshaft gap' as Stanley Kubrick satirised it) -- would you miss the chance to put a hardened facility in Australia?
If there were some kind of bunker there, more than just a listening post - what else might be in it? In the absence of truth, speculation runs riot. And besides, it's just plain fun to think about secret military bases fighting UFOs, like a Gerry Anderson show.
That's one hole. Then you get the curious fact of the parallel USAF manned space program, not often talked about and supposedly shut down in 1989 (itself a curious year of global realignments)... and that's another hole.
The 1960s parallelism of USAF and NASA, and a guest appearance by the X-20 Dyna-Soar, are both apparent in the underappreciated 1969s space disaster movie Marooned. Watch this movie, which was playing (or at least fresh in the public's minds) at the time of Apollo 13, and you might get a sense of both how jumpy NASA was about the PR risks of manned spaceflight (which might explain why Apollo was so abruptly discontinued by Nixon) -- but also about what the future of the Apollo program was expected to look like. Not the lumbering Shuttle, but Dyna-Soar and MOL.
(Whatever did happen to MOL? Was it *really* cancelled in 1963? The bumbling US performance on ISS compared to the Russians suggests yes, and I guess a Saturn launch from the West Coast would be hard to hide, but... well, it's fun to speculate on what might have been, and might still be in some parallel universe, anyway.)
So: it's against a framework of such reasonably hard-science possibilities and intriguing lacunae in the public record, and the known paranoia and 'Team B' double-handling and compartmentalism of those Cold War years... and the awareness that many of the same people who ran with Nixon and Reagan are still movers and shakers... that you overhear some strange conversations on the Web.
Yes, it's most likely just another hoaxer. A lot of what he says sounds too plausible to be true, for those with a preconditioned science-fiction, UFO-lore mindset. That rings alarm bells. But...
Well, it's those holes that interest me. And 23 48'47.70" S 133 44'16.86" E is a lot of fun to look at in Google Earth, especially if you turn terrain elevation on (I maxed mine up to 3x) and just take a wander around. I didn't realise there were so many conveniently diggable-into hills there; flat satellite maps don't do it justice.
What *is* under there? Not that I necessarily want to know, if it's just bombs. I want the truth to be cooler than that. I want there to have been a Stargate program running from inside Cheyenne Mountain. I want us to have been out there exploring the galaxy, not just fretting about Islam and China. I want all that money to have been spent at least on some good special effects. Even if the story is a lie. I want to believe the truth is out there. I really do.
But one day, Pine Gap and all the places like it will be either opened up to the light of truth, or torn down by the violence they're stacking up, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later.
And then peace will come.