![]() ![]() We ride in Baker’s Land Rover to Site 10, about 40 miles west, on the other side of Roswell. A Titan missile complex in rural Washington State is currently for sale for $11.5 million. “Over this last year, with everything going on in Eastern Europe, a lot of sites have probably tripled in value,” Baker says. By the time Baker bought both sites, in the late 1990s, the price was $110,000 for the pair. Department of Defense first sold Site 4 to a private buyer, in 1968, it went for $1,700. The world seems far away.īy some counts, there are now as many as 20 million Americans “anticipating something.” And as their numbers grow, the prices of so-called hardened sites like missile silos go up. ![]() The apartment has everything, it seems-except windows. Behind a scrim wall, a washer and dryer crouch in the dark. Off a short entryway are a utility closet, a bathroom, and a small bedroom with a walk-in closet. The space wants to feel roomy, but something is missing. A fire-engine-red refrigerator marks the open kitchenette, which stands on one side of a sitting room anchored by a central concrete pillar. Inside the Airbnb, the concrete is obscured by drywall and wooden partitions, the walls and wainscot done in military browns and tans. Like the silo, the control center is a concrete cylinder, this one 44 feet across. Behind us, at the end of a 100-foot tunnel broken up by more blast doors, stands the empty silo, an immense vertical tube lit by floodlights. Two stories below the desert, we face a two-ton blast door that protects the former control center. He escorts me past framed photographs of missile sites in various stages of construction. Bernal opens its steel door a concrete staircase leads underground. Close by, a low triangular structure seems to disappear into the earth. ![]() When I arrive at Site 4, the silo’s doors are closed. An American flag flaps in the constant wind. As I pull onto a dirt track just off the highway, I spot oil derricks at the northwestern edge of the Permian Basin and smell raw petroleum in the air. There are flying saucer pictures and signs everywhere and little green men at gas stations and outside pecan orchards. You can’t swing a dead extraterrestrial around here without hitting a reminder of the UFO that supposedly crashed nearby in 1947. Earlier that day, a string of telephone poles are the tallest things I pass while driving east from Roswell, about 20 miles away. ![]()
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