LEAKEDENHANCED ×212Every Friday for the last six years an envelope has been left for me behind the bar of the Royal Hotel. Inside the envelope there is a Keno slip. On the back of the Keno slip, in pencil, there is information. The information comes from a man I know only as Pine Gap Pete, a senior facilities contractor at a facility near Alice Springs, and in six years he has never been wrong.
This Friday the envelope was thicker. Inside, folded around the Keno slip, was a photograph.
The photograph
Night. The domes of the Joint Defence Facility, which for the benefit of overseas readers is the Area 51 of the Southern Hemisphere and is run by the Americans with Australian help, or by the Australians with American help, depending on who you ask and whether they’re allowed to answer. Above the domes, a single bright object. Stationary. Not a star, because it is below the ridgeline. Not a plane, because it has no navigation lights and because, as Pete writes on the slip, “it didnt go anywhere for a good while and then it went in”.
Went in to what, I wrote back, through the barman, on the back of a different Keno slip.
The answer came the following Friday. One word, underlined twice.
“Loading.”
What Pete says it is
Pete has described the facility to me over the years in some detail, and I have passed as much of it as I dare onto this website. The domes, he says, are not what people think. People think antennas. Pete says the antennas are there, but the big dome, the one on the end, is hollow, and what it is hollow for is receiving.
Cattle go in the top. He has not seen this. He has heard it. He has heard it from a bloke on the night shift who heard it through a wall, and the sound, the night shift bloke says, is a sound anyone who has worked a saleyard would know. Pete says they are brought in by craft, lowered through the dome, processed, and the product shipped south by road in unmarked refrigerated trucks with Victorian plates, which is where, Pete says, “all your cheap mince comes from”.
I asked Pete, via the barman, if he had ever seen Beryl. He said he would not know Beryl from any other cow and that they all look the same under the lights. I did not reply to that for three weeks.
The requests
Shane put the photograph on the website on the Monday. By the Wednesday there were two emails.
The first was from an address ending in gov.au and said that the image “may depict a Commonwealth facility” and asked that it be removed “pending review”. The second was from an address ending in something else, and was shorter, and did not ask.
I have not removed the photograph. I have had Shane enlarge it. It was 400 pixels across; it is now, he tells me, 2,400 pixels across, and if they would like it bigger than that they have only to write again.
I would point out to both agencies that there is nothing in the photograph but some domes, which are on the postcards in Alice Springs, and a light, which is in the sky, which I was under the impression was still public. If the light is theirs, they can say so. If the light is not theirs, they can say that too. What they cannot do, and what they have in fact done, is ask me to take down a picture of a light without telling me what the light is, because that is how you confirm the light.
Who is Pine Gap Pete
The Collective has been asked many times to identify our source and we will not. He has a job. He has a family, or he has mentioned a family, or at least a dog. What I can say is that he has been right about the following: that it would rain on the Tuesday (it did); that the price of cattle would go up in the spring (it did); that a certain senior figure would “not be around much longer” (he retired); and that the Men in Beige would come back (they did, 2004, see file U8MC-04-0103). Noreen says these are not predictions, they are “things that happen”, and I say that is exactly what a prediction is.
A word from management
Pine Gap Pete is Warren's cousin Peter. Peter mows lawns in Alice Springs. Peter has never been inside the facility and his contract, which I have seen, is with a body corporate in Larapinta. The photograph was taken from the public lookout. The light is a helicopter. The Keno slips are Keno slips; Peter plays Keno. The emails were from a records office and from Keith, using a Hotmail address, because Keith thinks he is funny. — Noreen
Where it stands
The photograph remains on this website at its new, larger size. The Collective has classified it as LEAKED, which is one below CONFIRMED and one above everything else. I have written to the facility’s public line to ask what the light was, and a recorded message has informed me that they do not comment on operational matters, which is the first time in fourteen years that anyone in government has called Beryl an operational matter, and I have had Shane save the recording.
Pete’s next slip is due Friday. I have asked him, through the barman, one question only.
Which dome.
— Warren
Document U8MC-08-0105. Status: LEAKED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.