In 1967 a facility was built in Central Australia just 19 km by road from Alice Springs town centre. It is wrapped up in secrecy as are most defence installations around the world. It is located at the end of Hatt Road on the South Stuart Highway near the Roe Creek crossing. Hatt Road was named after Edwin Hatt who was the Australian man who designed the Pine Gap facility.

It is said that approximately 800 people are employed at the facility making it the largest single employer in central Australia. Of the people who work there it is said that about half are US citizens. The remained being Australians except, according to a source, a very small number are British employees. It is an unusual facility as there are so many rumours that go around about the place and due to the secrecy, few people are in a position to prove or disprove what the rumours suggest. Thus many rumours abound with some rumour mongers possibly attempting to out-do others.

The SIGINT gathering station at Pine Gap near Alice Springs is quite possibly one of the most secretive satellite ground stations in the world, and is one of the largest. Pine Gap receives data from a number of geostationary SIGINT satellites, most notably from the satellites that were manufactured by TRW Space Systems at Redondo Beach, California. These satellites are under the control of the CIA which in turn answers to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

The original code name for the Pine Gap facility was MERINO, but that is now almost obsolete.

Claims

Pine Gap is linked by a 1400 mile long tunnel to North West Cape (Submarine Station) and Submarines refuel at Pine Gap.
The facility has up to 9 underground levels
The facility has an escape tunnel for the workers to evacuate in the event of nuclear attack
The facility is built to withstand 3 simultaneous nuclear weapon strikes
It is the number one nuclear target in Australia
It is a UFO guidance system as many UFO’s are seen flying in a straight line to or from the facility. The facility is an Experimental Aircraft Testing Station
It is powered by a nuclear power plant
Everybody who works there are C.I.A. agents
It is a C.I.A. employee training facility
It is a spy training centre
People who work there are followed and spied upon by C.I.A. agents to ensure they don’t leak information
The U.S. Government are doing space research in partnership with Aliens at the facility
The facility is a nuclear weapons construction factory
The facility is a nuclear weapons launching site
The Facility is housing one single giant nuclear missile with multiple war heads
The facility is a satellite receiving station and is spying on the world
The facility is the first stage of the U.S. ‘Star Wars’ weapons project
The facility is a chemical weapons plant

The Base

Pine Gap is one of the largest ground satellite stations in the world, at the present time the facility currently contains eight large radomes, an extremely large computer room and 20 or so service,support buildings. The radomes that cover the large anntenna array’s serve two purposes, one being to keep dust, sand and other foreign objects out of the delicate equipment, and two being to conceal the antenna’s position from enemy spy satellites.

The computer room at the base is also unbelievebly large encompassing almost 5,600 square metres, so large in fact that the operators use headsets to communicate with each other, also as a matter of interest the computers at the station are mainly IBM. The computer room itself is principly divided into 3 different divisions:

The Station Keeping Section, which has responsibility for keeping the satellites at their correct geo-stationary orbit.
The Signals Processing Office
The Signals Analysis Section (SAS)

Speculation

The United States has three major bases in Australia. One is in South Australia (Nurranger, near Woomera, T.N.), another in New South Wales, and the third (and by far the largest) is located within about 230 km of the geographical center of the continent, not far to the west of Alice Springs (Northern Territory), at the foothills of the southern slopes of the MacDonnell Range. This base is completely underground, with barely visible entrances to the surface. This ‘Top Secret’ base is entirely financed by the United States Government, and is officially known as the Joint Defense Space Research Facility. When the JDSRF was first initiated, its aim was scientific research for the supposed development of a space defense technology. It is now known that since its inception, its primary purpose was research into electromagnetic propulsion.

Communication

The Pine Gap facility has a wide range of communication services at it’s disposal, (HF) radio, underground cable, Telstra telephone and telix link, 2 satellite comm’s terminals. As well as this the  base is serviced by the US Military Airlift Command which physically carry tapes of intercepted signals back to the US for further study. The primary landline communication link for the base is provided by TELSTRA, via the trans-Pacific under-sea cable sea system which links the US and Australia, while AT&T maintain their end of the deal. Around 1968 a HF antenna was installed in the northern edge of the facility, with the international call sign VL5TY, this provides a direct link to the US base Clark Field in the Philippines this service operates on an estimated 16 frequencies from 4.048 MHz to 23.69 MHz.

All communications to or from Pine Gap are encrypted in either the Signals Processing Office or the National Cypher and communication’s room. Two Univac computers are used to encrypt the transmissions, while two cryptographic machines (a KW-7 and a KG-13 for teletype and voice encryption respectively) communicate with the TRW’s buildings in Redondo Beach, California. Note these methods are only used for general signals rather than SIGINT traffic, it is only when prompt action is  required from the US that the SIGINT traffic is directed through this way.) The Communications Vault in TRW’s building M-4 (code named PEDAL) is a major point in the Pine Gap communications system, of the 25 to 30 messages sent from Pine Gap each day about half of these are directed to CIA (code named PILOT) headquarters in Langley Virginia. Occasionally SIGINT data is directed directly to the NRO headquarters in the Pentagon or to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. Since 1969 there have been twice weekly flights of C-141 Starlifter and Galaxy aircraft. These have 2 purposes 1 to deliver parts and supplies and 2 to collect the thousands of reels of SIGINT gathered at Pine Gap each week.

Rumours

What exactly is Pine Gap? As strange as it may seem, even Australian Federal Parliament members do not know. Among the Cabinet members, only a small number of ‘initiates’ have a vague idea of what this is all about. The only information source available to the public is the cross-checking done by private researchers following statements made by the United States or Australian magazines (always very short and terse paragraphs), and anything the locals may notice.

It is said that under Pine Gap is the deepest drilling hole in Australia – about 5 miles (more than 8,000 meters). Such a hole is likely used as an underground antenna able to recharge the batteries of submarines in the Pacific and Indian Ocean through ELF broadcasts. Such a gigantic antenna could be used to generate a gigantic stationary wave around the Earth. Some say that Pine Gap has an enormous nuclear generator to supply energy to a new type of transceiver. It seems too that there is a high-powered, high-voltage plasma accelerator which may be put to use to transmit electric current, or even to produce a ‘death-ray’, or quite simply to feed a plasma gun. All this is not as incredible as it sounds: it is now known that the US base of West Cape, near Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia (Harold E. Holt USN Communication Station), has an older type of the transceiver used at Pine Gap which is used to send electric current to submerged US submarines who trail a wire antenna. It is known that electric currents transmitted in this way are referred to as plasmo-dynamic cells.

Several times, locals have seen white discs about 30 feet in diameter in the process of being unloaded from large US cargo planes at the airports serving Pine Gap. Those disks had the USAF emblem on them. It seems likely that disks are assembled and based at Pine Gap. The number of disks seen at night leaves no doubt in anyone’s mind.

An amazing quantity of furniture has been delivered by plane from the United States. The locals also say that an enormous amount of food is stocked in warehouses of what could well be a true multi-leveled underground city. On the other hand, Pine Gap is well known as one of the most important control centers for spy satellites which circle the globe. An article published in late 1973 claimed that the Pine Gap installation, along with its sister installation in Menwith Hill (UK), were used to control the photographic missions of the large American satellites in orbit above the Earth.

Pine Gap has enormous computers which are connected to their American and Australian central counterparts, which collect all the information secured in these countries, not only about finance and technology, but on every aspect of the life of the average citizen. Those computers at Pine Gap are also evidently connected to similar mainframes in Guam, in Krugersdorp South Africa, and at the Amundsen-Scott US base at the South Pole. Let us say, incidentally, that the employees (more than 1200) of the US base in South Africa all claim to be members of the US consular mission in that country. It may also be worthy of note that the Amundsen-Scott base at the South Pole is located on a sensitive magnetic spot of our planet, that it holds exactly the same assets as Pine Gap, and that all the information about most of the average citizens of Western Europe is stored there in memory banks tens of meters under the icepack.

Overview

Pine Gap is still essentially a black project designed purely for espionage and covert intelligence gathering, but a number of questions still remain, does the Australian government really know what goes on out there? Just how big is this base? Undoubtably there would be underground level. As a SIGINT station there is a big possibility that it would be a nuclear target, going underground would certainly be a wise choice.

Pine Gap is still the most important US installation in Australia. It’s purpose and functions are still the most secret. Where as “all” other US installations in Australia have been acknowledged, the Pine Gap SIGINT satellite program still remains a BLACK program. The Australian public have been led to believe that this area is only a “defence space research facility”.