Was this Incredible Legend Confirmed from Space?
Four months before the Hollywood Casino's groundbreaking, did a satellite catch America's first secret spy complex being erased from untold history?

Facts and verification:

• Image 1 (from August 2009) shows the GM factory weeks before its demolition began. It was mostly dismantled, as this was a simple steel frame structure.

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• Image 2 (May 2010) shows the clear land after the demolition. The 33-acre factory had nearly 2 acres of very shallow basement space, including a vast cafeteria, nursing station, restrooms, locker rooms, offices, and chemical and parts storage. I tried to get plans from the city and county but got nowhere. 

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• A man who worked on its demolition crew contacted me on Facebook. He claimed that #3 showed the basement. However, as we communicated, he wrote that he saw a fleet of dump trucks fill the basement rooms with earth brought in from other construction sites during the demolition.   After he realized that image #3 was taken almost a year later, he admitted that this underground structure could not have been part of GM's basement.  

       

• I was only in that basement once, for a meeting in its cafeteria. That very shallow lunchroom was enormous, at least 100' X 100'. It was built to feed 10,000 workers each day. The underground structure is consistently 50 feet wide, verifying this was not the factory's basement space because the cafeteria was at least twice as expansive. Its basement area was also centered but next to the east side of the building, down a vast stairway from the main entrance to the parking lot. 

       

• Beside the vast cafeteria was a medical station. A very long hallway lined with offices also headed north. The offices appeared packed with equipment, supplies, and hundreds of steel barrels. This long hall was also along the building's east side, where truck docks had access. This factory was 865 feet wide by 1,780 feet long. The underground structure sat 440 feet from the eastern wall (Entrances and loading docks) and 365 feet away from the west side of the building. The closest that its northern (east-west) section came to an exterior wall was 101 feet. This verifies that the structure did not have direct access to truck docks or emergency exits, as the factory's basement did. Image #2 also shows the outline of these filled rooms and the stairway along the east side of the factory's northern half, yet nothing where the underground structure later appears.  

 

• Image #3 was taken just four months before the casino broke ground. It clearly shows an 1150-foot-long F-shaped underground structure that had just been partially backfilled with soil. This soil appears to have come from a mountain of earth previously covering its roof.

 

Why is that the most obvious possibility?

 

• Look outside the structure's northwest corner (upper left #3). You can see where a mountain of loose soil had recently sat. Because this large mound was not yet there in image #2, the obvious explanation is that the earth came from the underground structure. It also shows that bulldozers (their tracks) had recently shoved that soil back into the structure. Because it was not nearly enough soil to refill it (it was fully buried at the casino's groundbreaking four months later), this was likely the earth that sat on top of the structure's roof. I estimate that its roof was likely 15 feet underground. ​

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• Shadows in #3 show that the partially refilled structure was 12 to 15 feet deep. This indicates that the structure's floor was 27 to 30 feet below ground level.

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I studied these images for weeks:

 

• First, I determined it was not associated with underground utilities or storm drainage.

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• When image # 3 was taken (Dec 2010), a mitigation team was there installing pumps to suck out tons of metallic waste that General Motors had dumped into four lagoons near this 88-acre site's eastern boundary, right behind the houses on the far right. These lagoons were over one thousand feet southeast of the underground structure. Contamination mitigation was the only activity on this site during the 2010-2011 winter. The site was closed and guarded all winter long.   

 

Could this underground structure have been freshly excavated to remove undisclosed contamination?

 

• No. If this were a contaminated earth removal, it would look like a group of craters, not one perfectly geometrical 1150' by 50' 'F' shaped structure. 

• This hidden fortress was also in exact alignment with West Broad Street (Rt 40) over 1000 feet to its north. During the Civil War, a dirt road called the National Trail. Almost all Buildings are in line with the road. This may look east and west, but West Broad St. and the underground structure are six degrees off, proving it is in line with the trail, not longitude.  

 

• The GM factory was on Georgesville Road, which did not exist during the Civil War.

• However, for some reason, that factory is not aligned with Georgesville Road; it is also in perfect alignment with West Broad Street, well over 1000 feet to its north side.  Its old brick facade faced Georgesville Road at an angle. GM's property was a full city block away from West Broad St. The GM factory was not designed to be seen from West Broad Street.

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• Only one explanation for this is obvious. The site planners placed GM's factory in alignment with the underground fortress, not to cover it efficiently. West Broad Street was not even a consideration. ​

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• ​The Legend claimed the underground complex was originally a hidden Civil War weapon factory. Its construction also matches America's railroad bridge-building methods and materials of the 1860s.  

 

How did I determine that?

 

• Almost all Union Army engineers came from the railroad industry. This F-shaped structure is consistently 50 feet wide for 1150 feet. The suitable material in the 1860s that could support 15 to 20 feet of earth was the standard 50-foot iron girders used to build railroad bridges. This explains why the underground structure consistently remains about 50 feet wide. 

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• Twenty-five years before the factory was removed, that retired GM employee told me the building hid an underground spy complex that had become obsolete after airplanes became reliable. Then it became a hidden junkyard of the country's outdated secret weapons, machines, and files, and in 1944, it was sealed up.  ​Less than two years later, General Motors opened its sprawling Hilltop factory to permanently entomb it.

 

However, GM abandoned the factory in the early 1990s. It was finally dismantled in late 2009.

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• By late 2010, assuming it was still packed with early American secrets, Washington would have had to clear it out before the builders of the new casino stumbled into it. That also explains why it was briefly exposed right before the casino's construction began. Had it been cleared out in 1944, Washington's secret keepers could have ignored it, truthfully stating, "Wow, they must have unearthed a secret Civil War factory."  

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• The last Image (#4) was shot in December 2011; it shows the casino after eight months of construction. Not a single shred of the underground structure remained. 

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• Also, the underground structure was not visible during the casino's groundbreaking ceremony eight months earlier. I know this personally because I rode a bike over that site days later. That day was the first time I noticed the casino's seven deep drainage ponds had been dug (visible in image 4). So they were installed even before construction began, but after the underground fort was exposed. 

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• The earth excavated from these retention ponds was more than enough to finish burying the underground facility. It also raised the elevation of the casino by ten to twelve feet over the former GM factory.

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• Other customers told me that another underground complex, built between the World Wars, was installed a half-mile north of ORPHAN's site, buried under the massive Westinghouse factory. I have no physical evidence of this; however, decades ago, that factory became Big Lots' national warehouse, which still exists. So, if it also had an underground complex beneath it, it should still be there.

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In 2016 (after studying this satellite imagery), I could not keep this amazing untold history to myself. West Columbus needed something special to counteract 150 years of being the avoided Land of Lunatics (and something to boost it's consistently floundering economy).

 

So I outlined five spy action-comedy novels based on countless James Bond-like tails that had been bouncing around my brain since the 1990s, then began writing. I have been fascinated by the great inventors of the late 19th century for decades, so a few of my favorites are woven into these five stories.

 

Composing these action novels was immensely more fun than writing this information. It is like hard work writing out this website. However, when I wrote out these novels, it was like I was there scrolling down what I see, which is an amazing feeling.  

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The Southern Cross is actually the second ORPHAN Agent novel that has reached clean draft form, but it will be the first one released this summer. My first completed draft is called "The Legend of Sullivant's Hill."  However, it takes place only in Central Ohio and ends with the formation of ORPHAN. I believe that the first novel from Sullivant's Hill needs to be an ORPHAN agent escapade from start to finish, which The Southern Cross is.  

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For jaw-dropping circumstantial evidence that is verifiable, check out this  Timeline!

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