In 1998, Valve released a videogame about an alien incursion that took place in the Black Mesa Research Facility; a secret underground laboratory located in the New Mexican desert. Players of the game ‘Half-Life’ enjoyed its exciting blend of action and puzzles, often proclaiming it as the ‘best game of all-time’. Little did they know that what they’d played was real. New Mexico is real. The Black Mesa Research Facility, in New Mexico, is real. The aliens are real. Possibly. Definitely.
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Half-Life was no simple videogame. It was an intelligence delivery system. Valve knew the secrets about the Black Mesa Incident, but were obviously sworn to silence. President Bill Clinton probably had Gabe Newell’s mom locked in a bunker or something, threatening to slap her with wet towels should anyone at the studio leak details about the ‘Resonance Cascade’. Making a videogame that exposed the government’s lies was the only way that Valve could safely spread the truth.
How do I know this, you may ask? Well, at 10:33am on March 22, I received a signed photograph of actor David Duchovny from an anonymous sender. On the back of this photo were the words: “Black Mesa – the truth is out there”. As you may know, Duchovny played special alien investigator Fox Mulder on The X-Files, and is a respected expert on government conspiracies. I couldn’t ignore this.
Desperate to uncover the secrets that Valve were attempting to communicate in their game, I packed a light suitcase and flew to New Mexico. The truth was out there, I just needed to find it.
My first port of call was obvious: Black Mesa Road in the town of Santa Fe. Hiding in plain sight is a well-worn tactic, so I knew I was on to something. The surrounding countryside was desert-like scrubland, which looked astonishingly like the environments Valve had created for the Surface Tension levels of the game.
Alas, the road simply led to a gated community. But what if this was a gated community of scientists? Perhaps this was where The G-Man lived? I waited until a car emerged from the compound, and my suspicions seemed confirmed: an expensive Mercedes Benz saloon containing two men in suits and sunglasses. Government agents, clearly! I set off in pursuit.
Unfortunately, owing to the agents’ Mercedes having significantly more horsepower than my VW, they escaped into the New Mexican desert. But, when all hope seemed lost, I saw a sign.
Black Mesa Beauty Salon. Walk-ins welcome. Now, we all know that you have to take a train into Black Mesa, so this must have been a trick to ward off lab hunters like myself. I saw through such a ruse though, and decided to call the number in seek of answers, or perhaps even an invitation.
The naysayers among you will no doubt chortle and claim that the Black Mesa Beauty Salon is, in fact, an actual beauty salon in the city of Espanola. In any event, if you’re looking for vortigaunts this is not the place to go. I’m reliably informed that their facial treatments are the best in the area at a competitive price, though.
Defeated once more but not deterred, I searched Google Maps for Black Mesa again and locked in coordinates for a place between Santa Cruz and Taos. It was neatly positioned in the middle of nowhere, with just the US Post Office and a place called ‘Michael’s Mini-Mart featuring Your Favorites by Alice’ for neighbours. Figuring scientists need both mail and Alice’s favourite groceries, I had faith my third stop would be the lucky one.
Not so much. It appears local businesses in the area find the Black Mesa disaster popular enough to cash-in on the name, luring in truth-seekers with false promises. I found myself not at a lab, but at the Black Mesa Winery, which offered me six samples of wine and a free glass for just $8 plus tax. Not knowing what else to do, I stood at the bar and sipped small amounts of fermented grape juice while pondering my next move.
And then, as if it were a sign from Gabe (or even David Duchovny himself), two men at the bar began discussing scientific research. One, a ruddy-faced chap in his sixties with a trimmed moustache, seemed very happy to discuss various code words and acronyms. There was talk of high powered computers and a nuclear test range out in the desert. The location? Los Alamos.
This was it. Heading back to the road, I drove out into the New Mexican wilderness with a firm target in mind. And as if I needed further evidence this was the right place, a huge rock in the shape of the Black Mesa logo was just sitting out on the side of the road. There was no questioning that I was on the right path.
The entrance to the town was flanked by a guardhouse demanding that passes were shown to guards. But there were no blue uniformed men here, and a local looked confused when I asked him if Barney was on shift today.
I soon discovered that this was likely due to the checkpoint being a fake, simply there to amuse ‘history buffs’ visiting the town. No, the real entrance to Black Mesa – known locally as the Los Alamos National Laboratory – was just ten minutes down the road, and significantly more imposing. A series of guardhouses with barriers checked the ID badges of drivers who approached. Beyond the checkpoint, what appeared to be olive-green vans with machineguns mounted to their roofs patrolled the huge, campus-like laboratory grounds. With nothing but a homemade press pass pinned to a trilby hat, I had no way of getting in.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t find the truth. Los Alamos seemed to be a city where literally every human that lived there was a particle scientist. Someone must know something. So where better to find answers than a science museum? It’s kind of like a lab, right? And, lone behold, it was among the exhibits of Bradbury Science Museum that it finally sank in what the Los Alamos National Laboratory was capable of.
The lab made bombs.
Really big bombs. This one is called the ‘Fat Man’, which blew my mind. Not only was the Black Mesa lab potentially behind an alien invasion, they were also the munitions manufacturers for Vault Tec, as seen in the Fallout games.
The displays even contained this model of a protection suit, clearly the precursor to the orange HEV armour worn by scientists in the Half-Life game.
The lab, I learned, was where the Manhattan Project had been developed. A secret research facility had been created for a man called Oppenheimer to create a bomb to help America win World War II. And, as I looked at the face of Oppenheimer, I came to a horrifying realisation.
The scientist in Half-Life – that guy who wasn’t Kleiner or Eli Vance – was Oppenheimer. It was the missing piece of the puzzle: the final proof that Black Mesa WAS Los Alamos National Laboratory. And while the science museum contained no hint of the alien incursion incident, simple logic revealed the truth. If the lab had been capable of becoming Death, Destroyer of Worlds in the 1940s, then there was no questioning that by the 1990s some boffin there would have developed interdimensional rifts.
And so, dear readers, that concludes my journey into mystery. I may not have found physical evidence of the Black Mesa Incident, but I think you’ll all agree that I did find the proof. Valve were telling the truth in Half-Life, and the US government covered it all up. But now you know the reality, and as word spreads across the internet, the conspiracy will soon crumble.