Loring AFB Maine, now a restricted nature refuge

Loring AFB in north-eastern maine has quite a past; SAC base with nuclear armed B52s all ready to go @ a moment's notice, now a superfund site.. Nearly closed in the late 70s, it was deemed too strategic an asset to close, and congress in the early 80s pumped in hundreds of millions of $$ renovations and upgrades. Well, the base was officially closed Sept30, 1994, yet the base's land was not entirely retired. This is where things get a big interesting.

I had a relative stationed there and he told me a few curious stories of the place. Let me also add, that while researching Roswell back in the mid-90s, I had heard that a portion of some debris (not necessarily ufo) was buried in remote lands on Loring AFB, debris which was too hot to contain - was buried far below ground and encased in cement. Well, my relative, an avid hunter went deer hunting and fishing on the expansive base often.

The story he told me, was that he got the required paperwork to go deer hunting in the remote section of the base, and off he went by himself in the back-country of the base... and he ended up following an iced-over stream, and he followed it farther than he had ever gone, and he ended up finding a building out in the midst of the woods, which he thought was really odd.. There was no road to it, and it looked deserted, tho it was surrounded by a serious razor-wire fence - but especially odd about it all, there was no snow surrounding the building in a perfect circle. This was in late November, and there was 3'+ drifts of snow on the ground everywhere else.

I asked him many years later about Loring, and about that building, and he didn't want to talk about it really. But he did offer this tidbit of information, knowing that I was into researching this kinda stuff, "You know they decommissioned the base in '94 - but much of the base's land is now a restricted nature preserve.. In Maine. In northern-Maine - the whole friggin state is a nature preserve, yet (the space where the mysterious snow-less building) is still off-limits."

Well, I guess he was talking about the Aroostook National wildlife refuge - tho I can't find any mention of any restricted areas there, maybe by definition it's all off-limits? here's a map of it.

Of course all the satellite imagery of the base/nature refuge area are low-rez, tho just outside the base's perimeter is higher-rez imagery.

Pretty interesting post Have you ever thought about checking it out for yourself and snapping a few pictures of the snowless building? There must be a little snow on the ground still. It would be great to get pictures of that phenomenon.

Originally posted by QBSneak000
Pretty interesting post

Have you ever thought about checking it out for yourself and snapping a few pictures of the snowless building? There must be a little snow on the ground still. It would be great to get pictures of that phenomenon.

indeed! i'm out on the left-coast tho -- any limestone / maine natives up for a hike? ;-)

terra-server has better aerial imagery of the base / area tho.. too bad we can't see winter photos.

I spent 4 wonderful days and nights at Loring Air force base when Phish (a band) rented it out for a 3 day festival. We camped on the runways and the band played on top of the air control tower. It was a festival named "It". I will never forget it and that pun WAS intended.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened out there but a band playing on top of an air control tower with girls dancing up and down the air tower was definteily out of the ordinary. Just google phish and IT and you'll see what I'm talkin about.

Great place. Wonderful memories to last a lifetime

Tela

edited to make more sense

[edit on 3/18/2008 by Telafree]

right on good post. what you just said is a classic UFO landing. or theres material from a UFO stored in an underground hanger / storage building.

plus i live in massachusetts i'd be up for a road trip

Originally posted by Telafree
I spent 4 wonderful days and nights at Loring Air force base when Phish (a band) rented it out for a 3 day festival... It was a festival named "It". I will never forget it and that pun WAS intended.

Great place. Wonderful memories to last a lifetime

Tela

jewel of wilson's foul domain? Yes yes, i love the phish myself - and IT! was far far better than the dismal coventry.. but that's another matter..

pretty sure they kept the folks there for IT! far from wherever this mystery building may be... it was far far from the runways.. Loring (now Aroostook) has a LOT of land..

Originally posted by purpleneonofdoom
what you just said is a classic UFO landing. or theres material from a UFO stored in an underground hanger / storage building.

yep - seemed / sounded-like something was buried. he said that it was a "plain old pole building" - nothing special about it at all, apart from the perfect cirle of melted snow surrounding the building. if i could only get him to give me a rough location..

I was there two years ago and drove all around the place including on the runways. It is some beautiful country up there. They have many companies working in newer buildings on the base including one that rebuilds Hummers for the army. I came close to buying a guys property up there that was an old Nike missile site. It was an amazing place, All the old buildings were there including a nice house with a full mechanics garage made out of the old missile assembly shop. Two of the three missile silos that are more like bunkers could be used, They are huge underground. One had water in it but one still had the old missile control panels and was pretty dry, It also had the old ventilation system in it. The third was filled up and sealed off being thats were they disposed of all the hazardous materials when the air force left and cleaned up the asbestos. Nothing too bad and the government checks it all the time for leaks. Many reasons kept me from buying it but dam did I want it bad. It was a site to see and the uses of the property were endless. If I would have found it a few years before it would be mine. Hell I would have had a party for ATS on my land lol.
If anything is in that building it is the remains of the old Nike Hercules missiles parts that were nuclear for taking down Soviet bomber fleets. lead paint with Asbestos I'm sure of. Not the warheads but I'm sure some pretty nasty stuff. You have to remember that base is still a reserve base that if need be can go operation in 48hrs so be very careful when you go there and don't end up in Canada lol.
To make a long story short, The air force had to get rid of allot of Asbestos and other nasty stuff so I would stay out of that building. The missile sites you can see where they are at the Presquile air port as they have a little museum there that shows the old bases and the sounding area good. They are all owned by private owners so if you want to see them just knock on the door and ask if you can take a tour, Most of the people there are very nice and like to show off their piece of history.
P.S. look out for the angry moose

purpleneonofdoom-- you don't have to go very far, you have Oxbow NWR by the south post of (Fort) Devens.

As far as I know, there is still legit public access to it via a bicycle path that runs alongside the railroad tracks off of Patton Road. Stay to the bottom of the hill with the old housing on top (now used by various agencies for training so don't go exploring-- besides the buildings are getting unsafe), follow the lower road, eventually you will find yourself virtually on top of route 2 with a concrete tunnel leading under 2 and into the Oxbow.

About eight or so years ago, before the golf course was built in that area, I was out on Perimeter Road (on legit Guard business) and observed a few Army flatbeds and a few 10-ton cranes heading into the Oxbow via that tunnel. I thought that was awfully peculiar since I've flown over the Oxbow many times on helos and I know that it generally looks like an overgrown wasteland. I've been in the Oxbow on foot and bicycle since then, and all there seems to be for anything worth any substance are the foundations of buildings and remnants of parking areas from buildings long ago.

Who knows what is going on there...but even my father was keen enough to observe that all of the barbed-wire-topped fence is pointing inward around the place, visible from route 2's eastbound lanes.

Interesting thread! I've got a story for you (and, yes, its even TRUE!).

My dad was stationed there in the early 70's. I lived there for four years clear up until I was 9 years old. I remember all the steam lines overhead all over the base and most of base housing as I recall was steam heated. Anyway, your thread brings up some memories.

Right behind base housing where I lived was a dirt road going through the woods to an old ski area. Me and a friend used to hike this road to the ski area because, frankly, living there as a kid was pretty boring.

To make a long story short, we found a strawberry patch in the woods and would go there to pick wild strawberries for our mothers. Well, everytime we went there, we would NOT go into the woods behind this patch because when we would try, we would here these creepy "monkey" noises and see very large shadows. I'll also tell you this. Me and Gary used to play in these gigantic barefoot-almost-human old footprints (they were old because even in rain the ground would remain rock-hard--and moss-covered I remember). I remember being able to stand with my feet slightly apart in the sole of these prints and not being able to jump to the next one. We told our parents about these experiences and they would tell us we were telling tales. ( I never had the presence of mind as a kid to take my dad to these gigantic footprints we played in every summer!)

Time went on, my dad and thus his family was restationed ( to the exciting state of Kansas!(yawn)) and all was forgotten. Until, I fell in love with Spokane WA when I was an older teen and decided to live there. (My dad was later stationed to Fairchild AFB). THAT is another bigfoot story in itself (its been told here on ATS)

Anyway, there you have it! This is part of where my interest in Bigfoot started, although I never thought of my "Maine" experiences as "bigfoot" experiences until a lot later in life!

I am wondering if the previous person who knew someone who hunted Loring AFB ran into this old ski area. I distinctly remember a round building as the main building in this area. The ski lift was still there in 1975, but only partially.

Maine was probably the creepiest (yet most beautiful!) place I've ever lived. Its no wonder Stephen King was one of the creepiest authors ever!

[edit on 21-3-2008 by CreeWolf]

EDIT: I lost the original point of my post. My point was, what if Loring AFB was designated a "nature preserve" partly 1) Superfund Site and 2) Bigfoot Preserve!?

[edit on 21-3-2008 by CreeWolf]

FT. Devens is and would be a tough place to explore. State police and Military both use it. But back to Loring, you said that this building was at the end of a frozen lake. Follow the yellow brick road or in this case follow the lakes inside the base via maps or mapquest, google earth.

I live about 10 miles from Loring. My father helped build it in the early 50s in fact. Nothing Earth shattering about that, he just did masonry work.

Last year (or 2006 maybe?) we went to the nature preserve. We were there on a genuine wildlife study so "the powers that be" knew we were there and why. The only precautions I recall were that we stay on the roads. Some of the open ground is growing up to trees and I think it was questioned as to the denegration of habitat for ground nesting birds... but they aren't allowed to cut many of the trees based on the existing management plan.

In our travels around the refuge we saw bunker after bunker after freakin' bunker. I thought the rows would never stop. Truthfully there may only be 30 or 40 , it just seemed like a lot. One building stood alone, I recall it being brick or cinder block, a big square building 2 or 3 stories high. The windows were covered in what looked like cement. A friend of mine's father in law was head of security in the 60s and he said one day a plane came in with all kinds of brass, they went into the building, came right back out, and the next thing he knew there were cement trucks filling it to the brim. He asked about it and they brushed him aside and told him to mind his own business.

There was another building there atop a little knoll, almost looked like an airport control tower and Dick Van Dyke's house had a baby. Rumor states that is just an empty shell and the real control area is a long ways underground.

As to the ski chalet mentioned, I've been there too. I helped with a day camp in 1976.

My mother worked on the base from 1967 to 1992 and aside from "alerts" when the gates were closed up (much like a fire drill) she never mentioned anything odd. I asked her about the possible sighting in 1975 and she didn't know what I was talking about.

As to Maine being one big refuge.... well, everything is relative I suppose, but here in Maine if it's not being farmed then it's being logged, and whatever is left over is used for McMansions. Any land set aside for wildlife is usually under the USDA Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program or the Conservation Reserve Program. There's a lady who owned Burt's Bees and she has been trying to buy the entire state but hasn't gotten ALL of it yet. My sense is that once she buys it, she won't let a human being so much as breathe the air over it.

EDIT: I found this site which has some good pics of what I was trying to describe. My memories were a little fuzzy but you'll get the idea.

rustyknight98.com...


[edit on 22-5-2008 by ksdaddy]

Can I float a theory? How bout the U.S. gov't WAS testing things there as well as Montauk and other areas but when the programs got too big or suspicious they moved them and left a string of cover stories/rumors to divert attention from the new locations for those tests.

I was born at Loring in 1974....my father was stationed there at the time..... if you wish to contact me on this see me at my space under ghost investigater.... yes with an er at the end...

thanks for that link ksdaddy

cool pics of the place .and i tend to agree with the poster who said things got to big or expensive, maybe they were moved to a more secure location.

snoopyuk

did anyone else notce in the pics from the 70`s the whole area was very green and fertile , yet in the new pics it seems a lot rier and more barren ??

has there been a drought in this area ??

thanks

snoopyuk

and once again cheers for the link ksdaddy

Na, snoopy. No drought. It's just seasons. It's quite green now. Currently, I live on the base (now called the Loring Commerce Center). It will be all brown in a month or so. Then, within another month or month-and-a-half, it will be all white from snowfall. The snow will begin to melt in March/April. Then, sometime in May, we will again see green.

It's an interesting place to be if you can stand the harsh Winters.

Nice site, by the way.

rooster

SO i work on the base currently and was talking to some people stationed there, So the cement bunker was a 4 story underground munitions bunker, stories from 7-13 people where workin on a warhead, it leaked, they never came out. Cement trucks deleiverd cement around the clock for 4 days until all levels of the bunker where full. The men delivering the loads where only allowed to drop one load each do to the risk of over exposure. That is what i have been told and found this blog trying to find more info about it

What are the coordinates of this building or could someone point it out on a map?

This site has good resolution.
megisims.state.me.us...

I worked in the reserve. Something was buried there, but not necessarily in those buildings. Those cement buildings do still exist. I heard a rumor about an accident that involved 10-13 people. Unknown if it may have something to do with one of those buildings many years before I worked there.