TARGET 080827 Safe Harbour (for Subs) Balaklava, Sevastopol, Ukraine
The sleepy little fishing town of Balaklava (pronounced: ball-ah-KLAV-ah) has an official status of a district of the city of Sevastopol. It was a city in its own right until 1957 when it was formally incorporated into the municipal borders of Sevastopol by the Soviet government. Sevastopol, which now serves as a Ukrainian naval base, used to be a strategic naval base for the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. In the early 1950’s Joseph Stalin ordered the soview military to build an underground submarine base inside a mountain, to make it safe from nuclear attack. The mountain you see in the top picture seemed to be perfect for the location. It is solid, hard rock, and not in a tectonicly unstable area. The base was completed and entered military service in 1961. If you look at a closeup section of the picture, (below) you will see what military photo analysts (like Mel Riley) look for when they examine photos from "spy in the sky" satellites.
That is the submarines' exit point from the underground base. A ground-level picture of it looks like this: And further around the mountain, there is the entrance (shown below), this one for both the submarines and the humans who worked in the base inside the mountain.
Inside, the base had a command post, dry docks, repair facilities and a channel which let submarines go from the bay into the Black sea in both the surface as well as the underwater modes… Various sections of this channel are shown below.
As you can see, the channel for the submarines is very long, traversing through over half the mountain. You can see further that there is not room for the submarines to go in both directions, thereby necessitating the entrance on one side of the mountain and the exit point on the other. For the advanced remote viewers who worked this target, a timeline of the base would look something like this: Early 1950's - 1961: Blasting, tunnelling, contstruction, etc. 1961 - 1993: military operations consisting of servicing, maintaining, quality checking and repair. During that period, the town of Balaklava was one of the most secret residential areas in the Soviet Union. Almost the entire population of Balaklava worked at the base; even family members could not visit the town without a good reason and proper identification. 1993 - 1996: The base remained operational after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until 1993 when the decommissioning process started. This process saw the removal of the warheads and low-yield torpedoes. 1996 - present: In 1996, the last Russian submarine left the base, which then became open to the public for guided tours around the canal system, the base, and a small museum, which is now housed in the old ammunition warehouse deep inside the mountain (see picture, below)
For those who kept getting what looks like railroad tracks, you'll be glad to know that the entire complex was so large that goods, equipment, personnel, and machinery were moved on tracks which ran throughout the complex. Some of those tracks are shown in the pictures above, as well as in these, below. The first photo also shows the train car which was used.
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If you gained information in your session which was not covered in the feedback, please take a look at these sites: More info on Sevastopol Click here for more photos & information from Wikipedia Also - If you go to Google Earth and enter the following coordinates, you can get a better idea of the area 44º 29' 46.81" N 33º 35' 37.04" E Many thanks to Ray McClure for suggesting this target, as well as doing the initial programming for the page.