The Mantis Project

The Mantis Project

Some people are outspoken believers in the paranormal; hauntings, things that go bump in the night, and an occasional apparition or poltergeist. I just like weird stuff, which is why I met with Jim ‘Casper’ McDonough, self-described paranormal investigator, or in today’s nomenclature, a “ghost hunter.”

“I’ve spoken to at least a dozen civilians as well as military personnel who worked at the Delta 5 Base during its operations during the seventies, all of whom wish to remain anonymous,” stated McDonough. “All have reported experiencing some type of unexplained presence at Delta 5 before it was closed due to federal research cutbacks. Now we are here to see if we can connect with whatever type of manifestation has chosen not to leave this place.”

McDonough, his assistant (a rotund, creepy man standing all of five foot two), and I set off into the labyrinth of dark, musty hallways that formed the concrete root system of the research area.

Rumors but little else depict Delta 5 as a hotbed of research and secret experiments with insects, often referred to as the “Mantis Project.” Conjecture of the believers describes Mantis as an experiment to breed insects of winged death with immunities to the kind of diseases they carried - typhus, primarily. When introduced to a population…well, you know. An Area 51 for really bad-ass bugs. McDonough and several others were convinced that the spirits of research volunteers who never made it out still called Delta home.

We skulked quietly and blindly for over an hour, opening doors, groping behind lab curtains, knocking over tubules and Bunsen burners. McDonough tried to summon the entities. “Are you in pain? What did they do to you here? Are you burning with fever? Come out and show yourselves to us!” I could barely see my hand in front of my face but McDonough’s assistant, apparently trustworthy enough to balance an infrared camera, stopped. “There’s something about thirty feet in front of us.”

As we approached, I was disturbed more by the assistant’s labored, Darth Vader-esque breathing than the possibility of a specter. Once we were almost upon it, we saw the chest of sorts, a type of long, metal box with an old set of skeleton keys still hanging from it, as it was left in 1972. The gloved-handed McDonough turned the inset key, which fell out of the chest and made a clinking sound that seemed to echo from every concrete fracture. Slowly opening the chest, we peered in. At the bottom of this steel coffin was an unmarked DVD and a laptop; things that were only sci-fi at the time the lab was closed. McDonough carefully placed the laptop and the DVD in his back pack. “Let’s get this back to the mobile ghost lab, apparently someone has left this to tell us a story.”

Back at the mobile unit, McDonough’s assistant confirmed that the laptop was broken, and inserted the DVD into the team’s laptop. I started to feel excitedly anxious at what secrets someone left for us to find, a compilation of scanned reports, still photos, mutated insectum, reel clips of live experiments. As the DVD began to whirr, the screen filled with static, and then slowly, the black background began to emerge. White letters of the title of this historical archive slowly faded in, and we were immobilized by what none of us could have foreseen: Enema of the State. The following film contains explicit language and graphic sexual situations. Apparently we had not been the first to return to Delta 5 seeking the stimulation of the unknown.