Uncanny Expeditions — “Is A Secret Military Operation Hiding In Sedona, AZ?” field investigation (2026-06-24)
Source: Uncanny Expeditions (YouTube channel focused on perimeter recon of test ranges/secret facilities). On-site skeptical field investigation of the Secret Mountain / Bradshaw Ranch / Clarkdale “Sedona base” lore. URL: https://youtu.be/oH55fEuka1w Published: 2026-06-24. Duration: 1:01:29. ~9,300 views at capture. Chapters: Sycamore Canyon (00:00), Clarkdale Cement Plant (16:05), Bradshaw Ranch (39:27), Conclusions (50:22). Captured: 2026-06-24 via youtube_transcript.py (auto-captions; an embedded sponsor read for Incogni is left in place as captured). What this is: a firsthand, evidence-based field check of the claims Ross Coulthart’s 2024 NewsNation Sedona series carried. The creator camped above Sycamore Canyon (PVS-14 night vision, thermal, ADS-B awareness), reconnoitered the Clarkdale cement plant (the alleged tunnel “front”) from the surrounding national forest, and explored the fenced Bradshaw Ranch at night. Skeptical but careful: it debunks specific claims on checkable grounds (the orbs, the cement-plant ownership, a “secret base” photo) while honestly conceding a residual (independent secondhand reports of Blackhawks landing in the canyons and at the cement plant). Analysis: bradshaw-ranch-sedona-lore.
Hey everyone, welcome back to today’s episode. So today’s expedition might be a slight departure from some of my other videos. Usually you’ll find me traversing the remote perimeter sections of military test ranges and aerospace facilities, but today I’ll be taking you guys to a place that may not even actually exist. I’m talking about the rumored secret military installation in the wilderness outside of Sedona, Arizona. Now, this has been a highly requested location from some viewers for over a year now. And I know some of you are excited while others of you are probably rolling your eyes. But I will promise you none of you know how this video will go. And in fact, I may end up making some of you angry with the opinions that I express later on in this video. But one thing is for sure, I’ll be taking you guys into the absolutely beautiful back country out here in Arizona. It’s an absolutely stunning location and I’ll be showing you guys whatever my camera sees and giving you my raw, honest, unfiltered opinion and not necessarily just paring whatever narrative might be floating around on other YouTube channels. So, sit back, buckle up, and let’s hit the road while we dive into some of these rumors. The journey begins in the small northern Arizona town of Williams, which sits along Interstate 40 near Flagstaff. I’m actually very familiar with this town, and in fact, I’ve owned property here for several years. Today, I’ll be heading down some forest roads into the vast expanse of national forest land that sits between here and the town of Sedona. This is a very remote area for the most part and the roads and trails will have varying degrees of maintenance. I’d be a bit more hesitant to explore this area during the monsoon season as the mud here in northern Arizona can be pretty brutal and I found myself having to get winched out of some sticky situations before. Things are pretty dry this time of year, so I’m hoping the majority of roads will be passable. I first became aware of these secret militarybased claims from Ross Coltart’s series he did for News Nation last year, although the allegations have circled around in Euphology for much longer than that. And in fact, one of the earlier references to it I could find is in William F. Hamilton’s book Cosmic Top Secret, published all the way back in 1991. One thing I should make clear is that the town of Sedona has quite a bit of, shall we say, folklore that has to do with all things paranormal. Portals, cryptids, ghosts, various new age claims have all persisted here for many decades. And I can’t say that’s something I’m particularly into. In fact, I tend to actively avoid it, which is probably why I’ve avoided Sedona for the most part, despite spending time here in Northern Arizona in the past. Well, that and it’s always seemed a bit like a tourist trap. I’m going to be doing my best to explore these secret military base allegations on their own without straying too much into the other stuff if possible. In Ross’ piece, he heavily features local residents and proponents of the secret military base claim. Jeremiah Horstman and Alexander Caldwell, who claimed that strange orblike aircraft escorted by military helicopters can frequently be seen over the area, and that hikers often run into mysterious men in black or heavily armed military personnel, often bearing no insignias on their uniforms or sometimes disguised as Forest Service rangers. All this is while hiking through what is supposed to be public land belonging to the Cookanino National Forest. Further claims indicate that the majority of this secret base lies underground beneath the areas of Secret Mountain and nearby canyons like Sycamore Canyon and that a tunnel connects the facility to a cement plant in the nearby town of Clarkdale, which houses an entrance and support facility for this supposed subterranean base. All this definitely sounds a bit far-fetched, but I’m not inherently opposed to the idea that there could be some sort of clandestine operations being conducted on or over public lands. In fact, we do often see experimental test flights over BLM land out in the desert regions of Nevada and Southern California. And of course, camo clad insignialess private security contractors are certainly a regular feature at Area 51. So, could something similar be happening out here? I’ve long been fascinated by the possibility that there could exist some unagnowledged secretive test ranges in remote parts of the Southwest. So, this was something that I at least wanted to explore for myself. I’ll link to Ross Colart’s video in the description, and we’ll be examining the claims a bit closer later in this episode, but for now, I’m heading to a place overlooking Sycamore Canyon, which is one of the places that is alleged to have a lot of this strange activity. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get a good view of the airspace to keep watch for any mysterious aircraft escorted by helicopters or possibly run into the threatening armed guards that they claim patrol these isolated stretches of forest. So, this channel, as you know, is all about exploring secrecy. And one thing that’s really become apparent to me while running this channel is how important it is for us to keep our private information from falling into the wrong hands. Unfortunately, in this day and age, that can be really difficult with these data broker websites that publish our information for anybody to find. 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Honestly, it’s such a huge load off my mind when I Google myself and find that this private information like my address, my phone number, my email, no longer comes up. Whereas it used to just be plastered all over the internet for anybody to find. So, if you want to protect yourself from those who wish to do you harm, start by taking charge of your personal data. Cuz remember, they can’t harm you if they can’t find you. Join Incogn today. Go to incogn.com/canny and use code uncanny to save yourself 60% off an annual plan. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Well, it took me a tad bit longer than anticipated getting here just because of all the uh the rocky terrain. I had to take it pretty slow, but I finally arrived to the end of this little trail and uh the view is absolutely incredible. As the sun begins to set, I settle in for my night on the rim above the canyon, setting up my PVS14 analog night vision device to scan the area for anything in the sky, anomalous or otherwise. One thing that became pretty apparent is that there is quite a bit of commercial air traffic in this area. You have the Sedona airport as well as a small airfield near Prescuit and one near Cottonwood. Not to mention a good deal of higher altitude traffic traveling through a very normal flight corridor. I hardly ever see anyone who makes the claims about orbs or military aircraft address this. And in fact, not once did I see Ross Colart check ADSB data to verify whether what he was seeing was unusual or not. This is a common problem with a lot of UFO media these days, so it’s certainly not unique here, but I think it’s important to address. Here, for example, is a perfectly normal landing light on an aircraft out towards the town of Jerome, likely headed for Cottonwood. When viewed through the image intensifier, it looks pretty orblike, doesn’t it? PVS14s and other similar night vision devices have a tendency to make everything look orblike and more spherical than it actually is due to the nature of the technology. Some devices, depending on their halo spec, are more susceptible to this than others. And I find that most of the self-proclaimed UFO hunters who tout their militaryra night vision equipment really don’t understand or want to understand how they work. It wasn’t much longer into the night when I was confronted with another of my biggest pet peeves, with some in the UFO community. Turning to the west, away from the canyon in front of me, I noticed through the lens of my night vision device some more quote unquote orbs appearing over the treeine. Had I finally seen the anomalous craft rumored to take off from within these canyons? Well, no. Here, in fact, we have a classic case of low Earth orbit satellites. Videos of these, often sped up for dramatic effect, are constantly passed around on X and Instagram as UFOs, sometimes innocently by people who don’t know what they are, and other times by those looking to deliberately deceive for clicks and ad revenue. I’ll admit the first time I encountered this phenomenon, I didn’t know what I was looking at until I did some research and found this to be a wellocumented phenomenon among anyone familiar with astronomy, astrophotography, etc. The biggest tell is that every light here is moving completely linearly. We don’t see anything stop or change direction. These satellites will appear to flare in a small window of the sky, which changes based on the position of the sun as well as your relative position to the satellites. People doing night sky time-lapses will often see a little cross-hatching pattern in part of the frame due to these satellites flaring up in one specific area. What I’m seeing here tonight isn’t a particularly dramatic example of this phenomenon, but it is one that I’ve become very well acquainted with on my nights out in the desert. And with space getting more and more crowded every year, this effect is only going to increase in frequency and duration as time goes on. Any object that I see moving in a straight line that appears to get brighter in a small section of the sky before slowly fading out, I pretty much always assume is a satellite, given that it matches this known and well doumented behavior. Here’s a good sped up video of some satellites in the flare window shot by my friend Josh on his account UFOland taken with a psionics aurora digital night vision moninocular as opposed to the analog unit that I’m currently using. Outside of the flare window, I also see a satellite traversing the sky in a pretty normal pattern. Again, it’s completely linear. It does look very bright, uh, but that’s due to the light amplification that’s going on in this PVS14. and passing overhead is one of the numerous examples of commercial air traffic that we can see in this airspace. Now, if there were any kind of exotic flight tests going on, you would think there would be some sort of permanently restricted airspace or TFRs put in place here. I also came equipped for taking some thermographic imagery on the off chance that I might spot some unusual heat signatures either on the ground or in the air. I can’t say I had any luck in that department. All right. Well, good morning everybody. So, now that there’s some daylight, I’m going to go ahead and pull out the long telephoto lens and kind of pan around the valley a little bit just to see if I spot anything interesting. Um, I do see some power lines over across the way. So, I’ll zoom in and take a closer look at those. After I’m done wrapping up with that, I will go ahead and take you guys to the next destination. So, the power lines over on that ridge across from me are like the only sign of civilization out here really. So, I figured people want me to zoom in and take a closer look. I’ll kind of pan along here just to see if there’s anything unusual. If it looks like they’re running into a location, that would be unusual. I don’t really see anything yet. They seem to just be running south towards the town of Sedona. There is some kind of little uh row of I don’t know if those are tower stubs or what. I can’t quite tell what those are. And just to give you a look at some of the geology in this area, as you can see here, this almost looks like uh almost looks like those S4 hangers in that photo that’s been going around. This just goes to show that you can definitely get some pretty geometric shapes out of natural rock formations. Unless these are secret hangers, I guess you never know. So, I ended up spending a couple additional nights at the canyon, which went pretty much like the first. The only airborne objects I could see were aircraft, and satellites, and the terrestrial viewing just led to me staring at dirt, rocks, and shrubs. So, I decided I needed to get eyes on something a little more interesting, something more concrete, if you will. So, I set my sights on the cement plant in the town of Clarkdale. Now, this cement plant is the place that proponents of the secret underground base theory say is a front operation of some kind that contains an entrance and underground tunnel to Secret Mountain. I’ve seen claims floating around online, unfortunately, not backed up by any photo or video evidence, of some unusually high security measures and guards patrolling this perimeter. Now, I suppose this is as good a time as any to go into another issue I have with Ross Koulthart’s NewsNation piece, and that is the claims surrounding the property ownership here. Early in the segment, they state that the plant is owned by Martin Marietta Materials. But later on they suddenly start equating that with being owned by Loheed Martin. Despite the fact that while they share a historical corporate lineage, the current Loheed Martin has no relationship to Martin Marietta Materials, which is an entirely separate publicly traded company that was spun off in 1996. Further problems arise when you actually look up who owns this cement plant and find that Martin Marietta Materials does not in fact own it at all. And in fact, it is owned by the Salt River Materials Group, which is a business venture of the Salt River Puma Maricopa Indian Community. Not exactly a defense contractor. What Martin Marietta does own is a neighboring downstream readymix facility, but even that they didn’t purchase until 2021, along with a number of other downstream facilities in both California and Arizona, many decades after these supposed hidden subterranean tunnels were alleged to have been constructed. This is a normal type of facility for Martin Marietta Materials to own given that their business is in building materials. So, I struggled to get on board with the attempts to paint this as somehow unusual in and of itself. While admittedly I was a bit frustrated with the Loheed Martin label that seemed to be erroneously ascribed here, I did want to get some eyes on this plant as I’m a big believer in seeing things for myself before forming any opinions and I always enjoy a good exploration. Rolling right up to the front gate of the cement plan only gets us a view of some nondescript no trespassing signs. So, I wanted to find a way to do a little better reconnaissance. There’s a number of public roads that go up into some hills near Jerome that can get us a telephoto view of the plant, but I decided to go for something a little more unique here. When poking around in my various mapping apps, including some that show land ownership, I was drawn to this area back here around the back of the cement plant property where it butts up against some vast acreage of undeveloped land that belongs to the national forest. Given that this is a normal working cement plant with normal employees who would have to be unaware of any of the secret going on in support of an underground base, I figured the more remote areas of the property would be a good place to poke around. I’m interested in these areas in particular since they are far removed from any other infrastructure on the property. And it looks like we have some buildings and a loading dock of some sort kind of out in the middle of nowhere. That at least has my curiosity peaked. Another point of interest is the fact that there are numerous dirt roads in this section of public national forest land, but they all seem to originate from the private property restricted area of the cement plant. So only people that could reasonably access these parcels of public land would be those with cement plant access. I’m a bit of an afficionado of difficult to access public land. So this is where I intend to head today. I got to work mapping out a route that would have me driving along the edge of this old historic mine and hopefully lead me to a place where I could begin my ascent into these hills on foot. I began following the network of roads I had mapped out through the towns of Cottonwood and Clarkdale. But of course, I soon ran into trouble. It appears a new fence and warning signs had appeared across this road since the last street view photo was taken. I contemplated just parking here and scaling these fences on foot, but the warning signs looked like they meant business, and the prevalence of surveillance cameras around the area led me to explore other options. Pretty soon, it became apparent that other options in this case meant heading to an even more remote area and foring a river. So, that’s exactly what I did. Good thing it was a pretty hot day today, so I did not mind a little dip. All right. Well, this will have to do. It’s going to involve foring a river, but I’m going to head through this way. There’s all these signs that say no motor vehicles, but it doesn’t say anything about pedestrian traffic. So, I’m going to park here, head for the river, and uh hopefully I’ll be able to find a way up those cliffs. So, looks like there’s some washes or ravines that traverse the cliffs uh kind of near the railroad tracks. All right, this looks pretty doable. I’m going to make my way down these rocks and then there’s kind of some islands in the middle of the river. So, I’m hoping that means the water’s going to be not any deeper than than knee deep. So, yeah. Let’s see what we got here. Heat up here. All right. So, I’m looking for a way to make it up into this little uh this little canyon up here that I have marked on the map. So far, there’s not a lot of good entry points. We do have uh something here. Once safely to the other side of the river, I stumbled on my first sign of some infrastructure, namely a natural gas pipeline. There was a trail of signs that led out from the forest, so I followed those to get to the canyon that I needed to ascend. The next obstacle in my path was a small barb wire fence. And on the other side of that was a train trestle that I would have to cross underneath. Navigating my way up the canyon with only my offline mapping app to guide me as there was no marked trail or anything. I soon came upon my first sign of danger on this hike. Oh I know many of you viewers out there who may not be super familiar with desert environments often ask if I ever run into rattlesnakes out here. And well, as you can see here, the answer is a resounding yes. I decided to slowly back away from this angry guy and find an alternate route up the mountain. Once I was safely on the other side of this first set of hills, I ran into the first of the trails that seems to originate from the cement plant and then winds its way through the public land here. Again, I’m not totally sure what the purpose of a trail like this would be since it basically is only accessible from the cement plant and also doesn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. In fact, it just dead ends on this cliff. Perhaps it’s an old remnant from when the cement plant was first being constructed. Or maybe it has something to do with the natural gas pipeline in the area. Not totally sure on that one. Here along the trail is a small pile of shell casings. Definitely not an unusual site on public land as target shooting is a common hobby. It’s only slightly noteworthy because of how difficult this section of public land is to access. In the skies above is the unmistakable drone of a military C130. If I had to guess, likely headed to the Sedona airport. I don’t have good signal in this little canyon here, so I cannot verify that on ADSB, but that is probably the most reasonable assumption. I finally reached the top of this last set of hills, which was easier said than done given the 100° heat. Once reaching the top, I’m greeted by the expansive Clark Dale cement plant. Let’s pull out the telephoto lens, zoom in, and take a closer look. The first thing I notice upon zooming in is this white pickup truck down here, parked very far away from the facility proper, but still within the cement plant property. It appears to be parked right on the edge where the cement plant property meets the national forest property behind it. What its purpose is, I won’t pretend to know, but there will be some more activity with this truck later in the day, so make a mental note of it for now. I certainly won’t claim to be an expert in cement plant operations or infrastructure or anything like that, but I spent quite a bit of time observing the activity going on below me, and I can’t say that I saw anything about the cement plant itself that appeared unusual. As I often do with things like this, I’ll put this one out to the audience for those who might have more expertise than me. If you notice anything in the footage that sticks out to you as unusual, feel free to note it in the comments. As I said previously, I am quite sure that this is a normal operating cement plant given that they have real clients, real employees, and are pretty well connected to the local economy. I’m still fully on public national forest land, but I’m walking towards the cement plant boundary. There is this strange concrete square that I honestly don’t know what the purpose of. If you do know, feel free to shout it out in the comments, but it is fully on the national forest side of the property. In fact, I’ll walk up to this sign right here and show you where the property line is exactly. So, behind this sign is National Forest and the side that I’m on just barely is the cement plant property. So, I’m walking here along the boundary line. Here is an old faded no trespassing sign that does mark the entrance to the cement plant. Can barely read this one. This road does look like it’s seen a little bit of use. Over here we have a collection of appears to be survey markers. And again, this sign does mark the boundary to the national forest, separating it from the cement plant. Just to emphasize again, this little patch of national forest land is basically only accessible from this road that goes directly down there to the cement plant. These tire tracks, you can tell, were uh coming up from the plant. So clearly employees do travel up here. Can’t say for what purpose. Could just be when they’re bored on their lunch break. Who knows? Some sort of old structure here. This is right on the boundary line. I’m not sure if it’s technically on the national forest side. So, right down there is that far removed loading dock type area that I wanted to get a closer look at. Unfortunately, without trespassing, this is the closest that I can physically get, but I will launch the drone from here to do some flyovers. I’ve launched the drone from the very edge of public land. Doing a fly over here. We can see a collection of semi-trailers and some small temporary portable building setup. Looks like some tanks as well. I do believe there’s some staff on site cuz I heard a car door slam which I would guess belongs to that white Ford pickup there by that temporary building. Looks to be mainly an equipment storage area. Nothing immediately jumps out to me as unusual, but again, if you notice anything in this footage, feel free to chime in in the comments. That door is open there. Here we have that loading dock, which as I said before is very far removed from any other infrastructure on the property, which I found interesting when looking at the Google Earth satellite imagery. One possible theory could be that this is an area for handling explosives used in the blasting process here at the uh cement plant. That way if there were any sort of disaster, the damage would be minimal given that it’s located so far away from other critical infrastructure. I’m heading towards that other flat area that I highlighted on the Google Earth imagery. Not 100% sure what this is. Looks like some sort of staging area. Lot of tire tracks. So, this does get used by vehicles at least sometimes. One interesting thing to note is that there is a large concrete square. It looks to be about the same size as the one I’m currently standing on, though this one is not on public land. Circling back around, it was my intention to get to a little bit lower altitude and do another pass over this section. Unfortunately, as I was getting my drone into place, I got hit with a return to home, which I know a lot of people will probably jump to conclusions about this being a potential countermeasure. However, I strongly believe this to be terrain related as my negative altitude here caused me to dip pretty far behind these hills and I do believe it was just a natural signal loss due to the terrain. Well, after retrieving my drone, I’d been poking around here at this remote perimeter section for most of the day, and I hadn’t triggered any kind of unusual security response. I decided at this point to get back on the telephoto lens and check back in with that white pickup truck that I noted when I first arrived to see if there was any activity down in that area, which again is right on the perimeter of the National Forest property and the cement plant property. I did notice something interesting after I was watching the truck for a little bit. So, as I mentioned earlier in the video when I had the satellite imagery up, there’s this network of trails that branches off into the national forest land that really doesn’t go anywhere. Um, and the only way to access that area is by driving through the cement plant. As I was watching the truck, I looked over at this gate and I could see that two people were walking out of the national forest land and entering the cement plant property, which is interesting again because there’s really nothing out there and they must have been out there in the forest all day. And apparently they worked at the cement plant because they clearly have access to the property. These people certainly don’t look like any kind of security. They’re not armed. They’re not wearing body armor, anything like that. So, it doesn’t really strike me as suspicious. But I am curious what their role here at the cement plant would be, given that they basically just wandered out of the the national forest, which I thought was strange. At first, I thought this guy was talking into a radio, but upon importing the footage to my computer and blowing it up, it appears that he’s actually just hitting a vape. The two guys made their way down the dirt road to their truck and eventually drove off. I have no idea if this is evidence for anything. I certainly can’t say it’s evidence for any kind of an underground base. The only interesting thing to note is that they were basically coming from a place that there is no other infrastructure or buildings on the national forest property entered the cement plant property and drove off. So it would be safe to say that they are employees of the cement plant. I just have no idea what their role might be. Giving any definitive answers would just be me jumping to conclusions. But I will say that they were out there for quite a bit of time. So, I don’t think it was just two guys out on their lunch break going for a stroll. Just as I was packing up my equipment to leave, I was treated by a very low buzz from a V22 Osprey. Other than the C130 cargo plane I’d seen earlier, this was the first direct evidence of military activity in this airspace that I’d seen today. All right. So, for the third and final destination in today’s video, I’ll be taking you guys to a place that might sort of contradict something I said earlier in the video, which is that I’m going to try and avoid any of the paranormal locations around Sedona. The paranormal stuff is just a little bit outside the scope of what I do on this channel. And given that I can’t say I’m a big believer in it, I figure it’s best to stick strictly to the military claims for now. But for the next segment, I’m going to be taking you guys to the Bradshaw Ranch, which is known as being somewhat of a paranormal hot spot in local lore here in Sedona. But it also directly ties into the military related claims. So, I think it’s important to hit this location while I’m here. One of the original people to popularize this subterranean-based narrative is longtime Sedona resident Tom Dongo, who Ross also interviewed in one of the segments of his Sedona series, which like the others I will have linked down in the description for you to view yourselves and make up your own mind on. In fact, he seems to be sort of the godfather of all things mysterious when it comes to Sedona lore, and he wrote extensively on the paranormal phenomenon at the Bradshaw Ranch and elsewhere in the region. I won’t pretend to be an expert in the history of the Bradshaw ranch. But to give a general summary, it was formerly owned by Hollywood stuntman Bob Bradshaw and his wife Linda before it was purchased by the US Forest Service in the year 2000 with the help of the Trust for Public Land. The site currently is fenced off and restricted housing a project called the Southwest Experimental Garden Array or SEGA operated under a special use permit by the Northern Arizona University. Jeremiah Horstman and others highlighted in the news nation segments alleged that this environmental research project is a front for something else and the land is actually restricted by some other government or military project tied to this subterranean base and that the tunnel from the cement plant to secret mountain in fact passes right under the ranch itself. As with the previous claims, I definitely make no endorsements of their validity, but I’ll be heading up to this ranch at night to explore and see what happens. Maybe this will finally trigger some response from the elusive security personnel. Who knows? I’m genuinely not sure what I’m going to find here, if there’s going to be anyone on site or if it’s going to be totally deserted or what. The remote back roads leaving Sedona quickly turned into dirt 4x4 trails and wound their way up towards Bradshaw Ranch in an area called Hartwell Canyon. The beginning of the road had quite a few dispersed campers in the designated Cookanino National Forest camping areas, but driving for a while, I’ve long since left those behind, and my surroundings are now completely quiet and free of any signs of civilization. Well, I made it to the ranch. It uh looks totally deserted. There’s no other cars here or anything. And uh it’s pretty quiet. I hear some kind of a real distant metallic kind of a clanging sound like something blowing in the wind, but there really isn’t any wind. So, I’ll have to see what that’s all about. I’m going to start by rolling with the uh PVS14 to navigate just to keep the visible light to a minimum until I get a little bit closer to the uh the fence and then we’ll see what’s happening. One thing that first stuck out to me upon arrival is that this area didn’t look like a very high security facility or anything. There was a pretty tall double fence here with a padlocked gate, but no threatening warning signs or anything like that. There is the infamous camera on that tower there. We can see through the night vision, which is pointed at the buildings over there rather than pointed outward. The gates around the perimeter seem to have three padlocks. One of them is labeled US Forest Service. Presumably, one of the other ones belongs to Northern Arizona University, and I’m not sure who the third one belongs to. Through the thermal camera, I can get a good look at some of the ranch buildings down there. Definitely looks pretty abandoned. Smashed windows, debris laying around. Notice there are quite a few buildings on the property. One of the weirder things I spy is a circle of apparently office chairs. water tank and a windmill, which is likely responsible for the metal clanking sound I was hearing when I pulled up. Flying up above the ranch is a bog standard commercial aircraft. just to show you guys what it looks like through the thermal imager if you’re not familiar. Not only did I not find this property to be particularly high security, but large sections of the barbwire fence were completely gone or knocked over. So, I decided to pop in for some stealthy exploration, primarily relying on the night vision just to keep visible light to a minimum in case there was anybody watching. This odd circle of office chairs definitely gives the place a liinal vibe. Very strange. Numerous old buildings dotted the property. And I did go in every single one just to see what I could find. Mostly junk, rat droppings, and probably haunt virus. The largest building on the property looks like it does see some visitation occasionally as it’s a bit more cleaned up. Some sporadic graffiti on the walls as well, as you’ll see here in a minute. couch beds pulled out almost like somebody was sleeping in here. And while I didn’t encounter any resistance, I did manage to piss off a few birds who started to dive bomb me until I fled the building. Quite the innovative security measures, I’ll say. Several of the shacks had some odd things left outside, like partially melted candles or this weird shrine. All right. So, I spent a few hours at the Bradshaw Ranch till pretty late in the night and then I was wrapping up and got to my car and I was heading back up the trail and I saw some headlights coming back down the trail towards me and I thought maybe, just maybe, I had finally triggered some kind of a security response from these supposed insignless security contractors that patrol this area. And well, unfortunately, that was not the case. It was in fact a UFO tour group, one of many that operated in Sedona. And um not only did I pass that group, but when I got back up to the top of the trail that I was on, there was another group there of UFO tourists all staring through PVS14 night vision goggles looking at the same aircraft and low Earth orbit satellites that I had been staring at this whole trip. And it was honestly at this point that the whole thing started to feel a little bit ridiculous to me. Sedona has this reputation of the sort of new age tourists and there’s so many businesses in town that I feel like not only cater to that crowd but kind of take advantage of that crowd a little bit. And it’s at this point in the video where some of the UFO crowd that I know watches my channel may get a little bit upset at my take. But I promise you, don’t click off the tab yet. Don’t take to the comments calling me a government shill just yet. Watch to the end of the video cuz my take on this whole Sedona thing is going to be a little bit more nuanced than you actually might think. So, in Ross Colart’s NewsNation series about Sedona, one of the segments he interviews one of these UFO tourist group leaders, uh, her name is Melinda Leslie, and she seems to be one of the more prominent UFO tour group leaders. in the interview, which again I will have linked below as with all the other media that I’m referencing here. Uh in the interview she mentions that she sees what she calls full structured craft. She sees lights that behave anomalously in the sense that they stop or change direction. Unfortunately, in the media that we see here, we don’t see any of that. All we see are lights moving linearly, which again, if a light moves linearly, if it behaves exactly like a satellite, a razor suggests that it’s probably a satellite. So, I really wanted to see what some of these more anomalous craft supposedly were. Now, she claims in the interview that that they see UFOs out there every night, which that is lucky considering on her advertisement here, she says that you see UFOs or you get your money back. So, there’s definitely a little bit of a financial incentive to to paint everything as a UFO, which I think is a common theme that we’re going to see here. I will note that in addition to UFO tours, she offers to teach you how to bend spoons with your mind.
I do a psychokinesis uh spoon bending class where you learn how to bend metal with your mind. Although, I noticed she doesn’t offer a similar guarantee with that one like she does with the UFOs. But anyways, I went through uh various public social media postings about these UFO tours just to see if I could find anything that behaved anomalously. And well, unfortunately, I came up empty in that department. I’ll give you a little sample here of some of the commentary that you’ll find on these UFO tours. And like we can’t see big power up. Look at that. Right over the hill. Wow. Yes. Look how big that is to your eyes. Now that’s like government canyon. That’s got to be right there. That’s Intense. Okay. And then there’s one over here too coming up. It is already dimming. Look at that. So good. You think they have like headlights, but then like they’re turning right so we can’t see them. No, no, no, no. These are powering up. That’s No. Oh, you don’t know about amber? Well, I do, but I’m like Amber means there’s an ionized field. is they’re bleeding a huge huge electrical field so massive it’s ionizing the air around it. So what we’re seeing here is movement that’s completely consistent with satellites moving linearly through that flare window low on the horizon. But instead the commentary we’re getting is honestly just kind of completely word salad about uh ionizing the air and stuff like that. Um, and it’s not my intention to spend a lot of time calling specific people out for this, but given that this is being amplified nationally in the media, I do think it’s important to call this stuff out. And one thing that I think is important to understand when you’re when you’re out skywatching, whether it’s on one of these UFO tours or whether you’re just doing it on your own, is the fact that if something is in orbit like a satellite, it is not going to show up on a thermal camera like this AGM or this infrared unit here. Um whereas it will obviously show up in analog night vision like a PVS14 or PVS7. So, if you want to tell if what you’re seeing is something closer to you, like an aircraft taking off from a canyon, that will absolutely show up in a thermal camera. You may not get a good outline of the aircraft depending on the distance, but you will see something coming up from the canyon. Whereas a satellite, if it’s in orbit, you’re going to see absolutely nothing. So, I would uh I would extend an invite to Melinda Leslie and anyone else running a UFO tour group. If you are actually interested in factchecking what you’re seeing through your night vision through a PVS14 or PVS7, I would highly suggest incorporating thermal. Um you may unfortunately have to give some people their money back if you keep that that guarantee of seeing UFOs, but um I I would like to hope that all of us uh are interested in the facts and interested in in the truth, even if we may go about that in different ways. So, I decided to head over to Jeremiah Horseman’s Facebook page to try and find any photographic evidence of this supposed underground base. Now, I was looking for photos of entrances, photos of guards, really anything that would suggest that there was something anomalous out in the national forest near Sedona. And I actually thought I may have struck gold here because I found something incredibly interesting. So, what we have here is a post about this Northern Arizona rumored military installation. And this one, unlike most of them, actually seems to be accompanied by some photographic evidence. Clearly, we have a warning sign here. So, I was actually incredibly interested cuz this seemed like it was the first actual piece of photographic evidence of military infrastructure. Uh there’s a lot of comments on this post asking where it’s located, if it was at Camp Navajo, which is a National Guard depot nearby. Uh the only response we get from Jeremiah is that it’s an unmarked road access in northern Arizona presumably alleging that it’s a road access to this underground base. Now I was looking at this picture for a while and I actually realized I had seen it before. I couldn’t right off the bat remember where but I was thinking and thinking and then I realized because I’d spent a lot of time in Flagstaff before. This is actually the entrance road to the Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station or NOFS. We can pull this up here on the satellite view and get a look at the facility. And then if we drop the street view marker right here, we can actually find the exact sign that is being photographed here. Now, he alleges that this is an unmarked road access. And as we can see here, it’s very much not unmarked. It’s clearly labeled on Google Maps. And if we go to street view at the beginning of the road, there’s clearly a sign marking this as the Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station. So, this is only a small sampling of the various breadcrumb trails to nowhere that I’d been chasing down on the internet. Needless to say, I was pretty frustrated. The more I dug, the more I kept finding more and more extraordinary claims. Unfortunately, these extraordinary claims were never backed up by any extraordinary evidence or even evidence of the base’s very existence, just more smoke and mirrors. You might assume at this point that I’ll arrive at the conclusion that this whole Sedona militarybased thing is nothing more than a hoax or a long-running urban legend, but that’s actually not totally the case. Now, there’s one common thread here, and that’s the supposed sightings of military aircraft and personnel in the area going back decades. I wanted to see if there was any validity to these sightings. So, I wanted to ask around outside of this core group of believers to try and find normal everyday people who might have seen something. So, I started reaching out to some people who I knew spent time hiking in the Cookanito National Forest. And most people said that they hadn’t seen anything, but a couple people actually did tell me that they saw Blackhawk helicopters appear to land in both Sycamore and Secret canyons. Now, these people could be mistaken. They might have just seen low flybys or even training missions that involve touchandgo landings or search and rescue, things like that. In fact, military helicopter flights are not inherently unusual in this area given that the Sedona airport has a refueling contract with the military and is a frequent stopover for flights. There’s also the nearby Camp Navajo up in Belmont, which just a few weeks ago put out this notice about increased helicopter activity due to some training taking place here. The thing is, I’m not sure all of the sightings can actually be attributed to routine flights. As I’ve mentioned before, I used to work in Northern Arizona in a previous career. And the other day, I happened to be texting a friend and former co-orker, and I off-handedly mentioned that I was working on a Sedona video. Just then, to my surprise, he actually relayed to me that he had seen some odd activity when doing some overnight camping in the area, including what he described as black helicopters landing at the quote unquote quarry near Jerome, which immediately I realized he meant the Clarkdale cement plant that I had just been staking out. Keep in mind I had not mentioned the Clarkdale cement plant to him previously in this conversation. He brought that up completely independently. He also mentioned seeing some sort of out ofplace security personnel possibly driving a Ford F-150 near a resort up in one of the canyons. Now, I can’t personally think of any reason why Blackhawks should be landing at the cement plant given that it’s private property, not national forest land. So unless they had some sort of contract with the owners to conduct training there, there might actually be some sort of mystery on our hands here. I almost wonder if decades of smoke and mirrors and deliberate misinformation might actually be concealing a kernel of truth and that there is some sort of clandestine military activity out in these remote canyons. As with everything, my intentions are to stay curious, but remain skeptical and take an evidence-based approach to any further investigation that I might do in this area. So, one thing I can’t help but notice is that a lot of the more extravagant claims about this place have a lot of similarity to some of the more extravagant claims about other places like Doulce, New Mexico, which may not be a coincidence. But anyways, if you’ve had any interesting experiences out here, be sure to drop me a message, drop me an email. If you have any photographic or video evidence, even better. Anyways, until next time everybody. Uncandy Expeditions signing off.