Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny

- Throughout time, governments and the people

who work for them have done strange and even terrible

things in the name of national interest.

Tonight, from a top secret facility built

to correct a US blind spot--

- The CIA now have eyes and ears

on the third of the world that it can't usually reach.

- --to a bio lab testing deadly toxins on US soil--

- It develops extreme programs that run from the apocalyptic

to the absurd.

- --and a city constructed beneath Arctic ice,

made with a sinister purpose.

- This site is largely forgotten.

And the US government kind of wants it to be forgotten.

- These places are all known as black sites.

Now it's time to bring them out of the shadows.

Every government has them, and none likes

to admit that they exist.

But sometimes clandestine bases

do get exposed by tragedy.

- TWA flight 514 is flying from Indianapolis, Indiana,

to Washington, DC.

Now, as the plane is getting closer

and closer to its destination in DC, there's a huge storm.

Just after 11:00 AM, the plane drops altitude way too quickly,

ends up crashing into the side of a mountain

on the Virginia border.

All 92 people aboard the plane die on impact.

- As the rescuers get to the top of this mountain

and start searching for survivors,

poring through the wreckage,

they find, puzzlingly, that they're not

the first people on-site.

- They see cars nearby, in the middle of the wilderness,

lined up like-- like a parking lot.

And neatly parked cars don't belong halfway up a mountain.

- It doesn't take long for journalists

to realize that there's a whole infrastructure

atop this mountain that isn't on any map.

- The land actually belongs to the Department of Defense,

but the DOD just claims that,

oh, it's nothing but a weather-monitoring station.

There's nothing special about this area.

- But journalists keep pushing to figure out

what secrets this Virginia mountain is hiding.

- And eventually, in Senate hearings a year

after the crash, the Pentagon finally

confirms the existence and the purpose of this black site.

It's called Mount Weather,

and its true purpose is surprising.

It's a top secret doomsday bunker.

It wasn't always secret.

It started out as a weather observatory.

Then for a brief period in the 1920s,

it was President Calvin Coolidge's summer home.

- The spot doesn't stay idyllic for long.

In 1949, the Soviet Union detonates

its first nuclear bomb, and Mount Weather's mission

becomes far more strategic.

- You have to remember that this is right after

World War II, which means the beginning of the Cold War.

And thanks to fears around a possible Soviet nuclear attack,

President Truman makes plans in the late '40s to make every

American home, workplace--

basically, everywhere in the country--survivable.

- You have, like, the duck-and-cover drills

for the public to help them survive atomic warfare.

But then separately, the government

is thinking hard about how the president survives,

how the government functions continue.

- They decide to build three massive nuclear fortresses

to ensure what they now start to call

the continuity of government.

One of these immense fortresses is Mount Weather.

- To create this base, they need to hollow out a mountain

and keep it a secret.

So in 1953, work begins on the project.

Thousands of tons of greenstone are excavated

from the interior of the mountain.

- And it costs over a billion dollars.

And when it's finished, it is a 600,000-square-foot

underground city and has everything ranging

from a hospital to restaurants to a movie theater.

- The entrance is protected by a 20-feet,

34-ton blast door that is 5 feet thick,

and it takes 15 minutes to open.

It's under 2,000 feet of granite.

So you could fire missiles at it all day long,

and the people inside would barely even notice.

- Its construction and its activities are classified,

and its staff is sworn to secrecy.

- While the community of Berryville, Virginia,

helps build it and staff it,

the public at large has no idea that this facility exists.

- Then in the 1960s, partly thanks

to the Cuban missile crisis, Mount Weather is expanded.

- Mount Weather has its own communications facilities,

its own water treatment plant, its own fire department,

in fact, even text messaging

and one of the world's first computers.

That technology begins for the first time at Mount Weather

as the way for the doomsday bunkers to communicate

amongst themselves.

With its cover blown

thanks to the crash of flight 514,

Mount Weather is pretty much mothballed.

That all changes on 9/11.

- Government decides to reactivate

and expand Mount Weather.

The Defense Department never mentioned it officially

anymore, and the complex's plans and operations

are all classified to this day.

- As far as we know, Mount Weather today

is as active and advanced a facility as it ever has been.

- It is now believed to sprawl over 700,000 square feet.

That's the size of four baseball fields.

So it supposedly can hold as many as 2,000 lucky people.

- Mount Weather was built to survive

a Soviet nuclear bomb attack.

Over in Russia, a black site built to make those bombs

would also be exposed by tragedy.

This time, a terrible accident is covered up for a decade.

- It was a fall day in September 1957,

in a village called Kyshtym in southern Siberia.

The villages are suddenly shocked by a vast noise,

and the sky turns to a completely

different shade of blue.

When this occurs,

it spreads panic through the local people.

And even worse, the government officials

descend upon the village,

and they start killing livestock, burning crops.

Things are getting incredibly strange.

Evacuations begin.

Several hundred villages, several hundred

thousand people, and they're all being evacuated.

They're not being informed, and so they're left

with nothing but question marks.

- Because it's behind the iron curtain,

in the West, we have no idea.

So it's a complete mystery as to what's going on there.

- In the years that follow, rumors circulate

that people are beginning to experience

unexplained illnesses,

pregnant women are giving birth to children

that have obvious birth defects,

Kyshtym and the 20,000-square-mile area

around it being a zone of death,

and that nobody could go there

because the entire area was contaminated.

- The real story of this disaster

remains hidden for another 16 years,

until a top Russian scientist named Zhores Medvedev defects

to London and tells all.

- Medvedev is a problem as far as the KGB is concerned.

He's critical of the government.

He is a troublemaker.

And so as soon as he leaves Russia,

they cancel his citizenship.

He can't come back.

- When he feels no obligation to the authority

of the Soviet government, he begins to speak out.

- For Zhores to come to London to write whatever he wants

and to get it published, you know, he became

a truth revealer and truth teller.

- And one of the things that he comments about

is this incident that occurs at Kyshtym

in Siberia in September 1957.

- Medvedev reveals that the Kyshtym disaster

was caused by an accident at the top secret

nuclear processing plant called Mayak,

just 8 miles away.

- The Russians have been caught flat-footed

by the end of the Second World War

and the introduction of nuclear weapons

at the conclusion of that conflict.

And so the Soviets are desperately attempting

to build a nuclear arsenal of their own.

They're desperately trying to catch up to the West.

- So the Soviets install a network

of weapons-grade plutonium processing plants

across the vast country.

Mayak is the most notorious,

but it's constructed at breakneck speed

by an unconventional workforce.

- Mayak's built by 40,000 prisoners,

all shipped in from gulags, and it's huge.

We're talking 35 square miles with an exclusion zone

around it that's three times bigger than that.

- Mayak has five nuclear reactors

producing plutonium, refining it,

and turning it into weapons.

- Even though there's not a big city nearby,

there are hundreds of small villages

and settlements like Kyshtym,

places that, when you combine them,

have tens of thousands of civilians in them.