Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel complexes, guarding many of the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the test site, these were his least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear heavy shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus explains. “The air was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many people working so many different jobs. Carpenters, welders… There were forty-eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the equipment was hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the conspiracy theorists believe they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality, according to Atomic Energy Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted to, men like Richard Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to walk.
Unlike atmospheric weapons tests or the atomic tests in vertical shafts that made the moonlike craters, for the T-tunnel nuclear tests, the bomb was one of the first items to arrive on scene. “The bomb was cemented in the back of the tunnel, in a room called the zero room,” Mingus says. “That was about three-quarters of a mile distance.” Sometimes, Mingus would stand guard with the nuclear bomb at the end of the tunnel for eight-or ten-hour shifts, so he chose to walk in each morning “for the exercise.” Mingus also disliked the assignments inside the underground tunnels because they reminded him of a part of his early life he would rather have forgotten. “When I was a kid working the coal mines,” Mingus explains. But as anxious as a man standing guard over live nuclear bombs might have been, Mingus remained calm. He says the coal mines of his youth were far more dangerous. “There were no electric drills back then so my brother and I drilled by hand. We’d get down on our knees in those little tunnels—three and a half feet wide, not tall enough to stand up in. We’d use black powder as an explosive, not dynamite. We’d set the powder in the hole, tap it with a rod, use a fuse that was like toilet paper, light it, run out, and then wait for the smoke to clear. Some things you never forget even if you want to,” Mingus says.
Before the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Pentagon maintained a policy of announcing nuclear weapons tests to the public, usually one or two hours before shot time, which meant somewhere around 3:30 a.m. the day of the blast. After the test ban, the Pentagon reversed its policy. Information about underground tests—when they were to take place and how big they would be—was now classified secret. Only if a scientist predicted that an earthquake-like tremor might be felt in Las Vegas, sixty-five miles to the south, was a public announcement made in advance of the nuclear test. And so, from 1963 until the last test in 1992, approximately eight hundred tests were conducted underground. By the late 1990s, decades after the first drills bored into the rock at the Nevada Test Site, the nuclear bombs, the hard-rock miners, and Area 51 had merged into one entity. As it is with many urban legends regarding Area 51, the underground-tunnels idea has been spun from facts.
As creative as conspiracy theorists can be when it comes to Area 51, it is surprising how they have missed the one underlying element that connects the three primary conspiracy theories about the secret facility to the truth. For conspiracy theorists, in the captured-aliens-and-UFOs narrative, the federal agency orchestrating the plot is the CIA. In the lunar-landing conspiracy the agency committing the fraud is NASA. In the underground tunnels and bunker plot, the evil operating force is the Department of Defense. And yet the one agency that plays an actual role in the underlying facts regarding all three of these conspiracy theories is the Atomic Energy Commission.