 I am Edward Payden, P-E-D-E-N, and we are here in the Kansas countryside, underground, in a nuclear missile base. I was teaching current events courses at Topeka West High, and I was hearing people talk about the missile site. Ronald Reagan was president. He was talking about the evil empire. I heard a young father addressing a tremendous gathering in California. I heard him saying, I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God. And I had two young daughters, and I was feeling a bit nervous. And so on my birthday in 1982, I traveled to discover this site, and so the odyssey began. There's two buildings. The building here is the Launch Service Building, where the missile was housed and all of the equipment to facilitate the launch. Down there was the Launch Control Building, where the crew was housed and where all of the personnel were during the launch. My uncle, Forrest, died in France in 1945. Also another of my uncles died in World War II. But there was always a sadness in the family about war, about the loss of life. My grandmother grieved long, all the rest of her life, for the loss of two of her sons. These kind of feelings left our family with kind of a sadness about war and probably turned me into kind of a hippie peacenik. War is the only engine of survival, the only hope. And if we can't get that right, we're in deep trouble. There's a group of people across the country that are looking for bunkers, looking for hardened structures. And I think it's a symptom of the times and what's going on, the changes that are happening in our culture. Twentieth Century Castles has been in business for close to 16 years now. Mainly what they work with are decommissioned missile bases and a variety of communication bunkers. We have closed 55 sales of missile bases over the last about 17 years. It's a pretty interesting niche market that we've been able to jump into and it's fun getting to meet different people who would live in a place like this. This is a survival condo project. We are in central Kansas. It's a project that's designed to house up to 70 people indefinitely off-grid. Here's some of the demolition pictures. We'd have over a year to get all the old missile debris out of here, not the missile itself, but the launch and the structure that was in there to support the missile structure. Took a 275 ton crane just to pull the old doors off. It feels really good now to transition from destruction to construction. This steel structure is now in place and they're starting to put the concrete on the floors. Now they built the steel from the bottom up and they pour the concrete from the top down. When it's all said and done, this is kind of like the structure of Woodside. It's like a 14 story building that's underground. There's two configurations. You can either buy a whole floor. Down here you can buy a half floor. A half floor is a million and a full floor is two million now. This facility was designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike and the general accounting office estimated that in 2010 dollars to reproduce this concrete infrastructure would exceed 107 million dollars. I've got 300,000 in the purchase price of this unit. These sites are pretty cool. These are the air intake and exhaust valves for the LCC, the smaller, the two story. You don't want to bump your head on that. Ed Payden did and he had a concussion. You hit your head on that and it's serious. If there was just an energy crisis or a breakdown in transportation networks, most cities are only supplied with just a very few days supplies in the grocery stores. If the grocery stores were empty, if the grid went down, if the water was off or contaminated, a lot of people in urban areas would have trouble surviving just a few weeks. Cities could easily turn into jungles. I looked at ice core sample records and you go back and look at 13,000 years ago, which is when we lost the mastodons and the saber-tube tiker. That was when we crossed this galactic plane. It's a region of space that we go through. If you think of the Milky Way galaxy as a pinwheel, then as you get closer to the middle, it's like driving in the country out here versus driving in New York City. You come into a busier, denser region and what logically would you expect? More meteors, more comets, there'd be more cosmic radiation, warmer temperatures, global warming, climate change. Do I think CO2 has anything to do with our global climate change? No, I don't. But do I think we're having global climate change? Absolutely. I just disagree on what's causing it. I think it's a natural cycle we're going through. We know the government's broke. World governments are broke everywhere. The Europeans are in terrible mess. There are protests growing against Wall Street. The political climate in this country seems to be at an all-time low. They cannot seem to function together. And so there's this instability. We don't know what's going to happen. Food prices are going higher. Everything's becoming more expensive. The value of the dollar is in decline. There's a lot of people with a lot of guns out there. What would it take to get you to do something illegal, possibly immoral or whatever, to go do something to provide for your family? At first, I'm going to want to go get my gun and go try to shoot some birds or something or live off the land. I don't mind doing that. My first thought's not going to be to go rob my neighbor. My first thought's going to be, but you know what? Everyone else is going to be in that same thing. There's only so many birds and so many things. And pretty soon, pushes are going to come to shove. And resources are going to become increasingly scarce. And your list of things you won't do is going to get shorter and shorter. We've got lethal and non-lethal systems. We've got our own remotely piloted vehicle. We have a two-person holding cell. We can respond and we don't have to shoot them. We can send out a remotely piloted vehicle that can fly 5,000 feet up and it can fly 100 miles. So it can look around and it can see human-sized targets on the ground. We can see it in real time. If somebody were more aggressive in trying to damage the facility and to break in, we can put an end to that too. It's so funny, I had a Jewish woman that I was playing with and she said, well, I'm old and my kids want me to do this and we're on here, but I'm thinking, let's be honest here. I'm not going to say I'm two years into this and I die. What are you going to do? How are you going to bury me? And I go, well, we have an incinerator. She goes, no, I'm Jewish. You have to bury me. I have to be buried. And I go, oh, well, that's easy. We tell you we're going to bury you and then we incinerate you. If it's convenient and we can have a nice ceremony under a tree outside, we'll honor your wishes. But if you're a health hazard and you're starting to decompose down here and you're stinking up the joint, we're going to burn you. To play a drum for very long creates entrainment of heart rates. The heart rate will begin to entrain. And we have, you know, we'll get 20 people drumming and have dancing in the center and have fun. We are interested in the human spirit and it's been defined in many, many ways, in many different times and in different places and cultures. We're interested in all of it. We have redone this space in kind of an eclectic spiritual context. We have Hindu art, Buddhist, Native American, pagan, Christian, and Islamic prayer rugs. So I'm hopeful that somehow we'll find our way to a wiser path with our fellow man on the planet. I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful. It always irritates me when the traditional interviewers ask that cliché question is, so do you think the world's going to end on December 21, 2012? It's the wrong question to ask. I mean, of course I don't believe that's going to happen. The fact that we're standing here means that this, you know, this earth is billions of years old. We've gone through this cycle before and that evidence is in the ice records, it's in the soil records and stuff. So it's the wrong question. The question should be, do you think life is going to get difficult with the cycle that we're approaching? And that answer is a two thumbs up. I do think it's going to get very difficult and I think it'd be, you know, prudent for people to be prepared. What's it all about? How big is it? Who are you? Why are you here? On our journey to wholeness, we meet darkness and fear. Questioning all the old answers, denying what's too painful to see. Living a life of false illusion, getting off track with destiny. When the darkness falls around me, I don't think I'll make it through. When the darkness falls around me, I'll need your light to see me through. We've been about this for a long, long time and it's bigger than we can see. Making peace with our darkness, we reclaim our destiny.
 I am Edward Payden, P-E-D-E-N, and we are here in the Kansas countryside, underground,
 in a nuclear missile base.
 I was teaching current events courses at Topeka West High, and I was hearing people talk
 about the missile site.
 Ronald Reagan was president.
 He was talking about the evil empire.
 I heard a young father addressing a tremendous gathering in California.
 I heard him saying, I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God,
 than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God.
 And I had two young daughters, and I was feeling a bit nervous.
 And so on my birthday in 1982, I traveled to discover this site, and so the odyssey
 began.
 There's two buildings.
 The building here is the Launch Service Building, where the missile was housed and all of the
 equipment to facilitate the launch.
 Down there was the Launch Control Building, where the crew was housed and where all of
 the personnel were during the launch.
 My uncle, Forrest, died in France in 1945.
 Also another of my uncles died in World War II.
 But there was always a sadness in the family about war, about the loss of life.
 My grandmother grieved long, all the rest of her life, for the loss of two of her sons.
 These kind of feelings left our family with kind of a sadness about war and probably turned
 me into kind of a hippie peacenik.
 War is the only engine of survival, the only hope.
 And if we can't get that right, we're in deep trouble.
 There's a group of people across the country that are looking for bunkers, looking for
 hardened structures.
 And I think it's a symptom of the times and what's going on, the changes that are happening
 in our culture.
 Twentieth Century Castles has been in business for close to 16 years now.
 Mainly what they work with are decommissioned missile bases and a variety of communication
 bunkers.
 We have closed 55 sales of missile bases over the last about 17 years.
 It's a pretty interesting niche market that we've been able to jump into and it's fun
 getting to meet different people who would live in a place like this.
 This is a survival condo project.
 We are in central Kansas.
 It's a project that's designed to house up to 70 people indefinitely off-grid.
 Here's some of the demolition pictures.
 We'd have over a year to get all the old missile debris out of here, not the missile itself,
 but the launch and the structure that was in there to support the missile structure.
 Took a 275 ton crane just to pull the old doors off.
 It feels really good now to transition from destruction to construction.
 This steel structure is now in place and they're starting to put the concrete on the floors.
 Now they built the steel from the bottom up and they pour the concrete from the top down.
 When it's all said and done, this is kind of like the structure of Woodside.
 It's like a 14 story building that's underground.
 There's two configurations.
 You can either buy a whole floor.
 Down here you can buy a half floor.
 A half floor is a million and a full floor is two million now.
 This facility was designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike and the general accounting
 office estimated that in 2010 dollars to reproduce this concrete infrastructure would exceed
 107 million dollars.
 I've got 300,000 in the purchase price of this unit.
 These sites are pretty cool.
 These are the air intake and exhaust valves for the LCC, the smaller, the two story.
 You don't want to bump your head on that.
 Ed Payden did and he had a concussion.
 You hit your head on that and it's serious.
 If there was just an energy crisis or a breakdown in transportation networks, most cities are
 only supplied with just a very few days supplies in the grocery stores.
 If the grocery stores were empty, if the grid went down, if the water was off or contaminated,
 a lot of people in urban areas would have trouble surviving just a few weeks.
 Cities could easily turn into jungles.
 I looked at ice core sample records and you go back and look at 13,000 years ago, which
 is when we lost the mastodons and the saber-tube tiker.
 That was when we crossed this galactic plane.
 It's a region of space that we go through.
 If you think of the Milky Way galaxy as a pinwheel, then as you get closer to the middle,
 it's like driving in the country out here versus driving in New York City.
 You come into a busier, denser region and what logically would you expect?
 More meteors, more comets, there'd be more cosmic radiation, warmer temperatures, global
 warming, climate change.
 Do I think CO2 has anything to do with our global climate change?
 No, I don't.
 But do I think we're having global climate change?
 Absolutely.
 I just disagree on what's causing it.
 I think it's a natural cycle we're going through.
 We know the government's broke.
 World governments are broke everywhere.
 The Europeans are in terrible mess.
 There are protests growing against Wall Street.
 The political climate in this country seems to be at an all-time low.
 They cannot seem to function together.
 And so there's this instability.
 We don't know what's going to happen.
 Food prices are going higher.
 Everything's becoming more expensive.
 The value of the dollar is in decline.
 There's a lot of people with a lot of guns out there.
 What would it take to get you to do something illegal, possibly immoral or whatever, to
 go do something to provide for your family?
 At first, I'm going to want to go get my gun and go try to shoot some birds or something
 or live off the land.
 I don't mind doing that.
 My first thought's not going to be to go rob my neighbor.
 My first thought's going to be, but you know what?
 Everyone else is going to be in that same thing.
 There's only so many birds and so many things.
 And pretty soon, pushes are going to come to shove.
 And resources are going to become increasingly scarce.
 And your list of things you won't do is going to get shorter and shorter.
 We've got lethal and non-lethal systems.
 We've got our own remotely piloted vehicle.
 We have a two-person holding cell.
 We can respond and we don't have to shoot them.
 We can send out a remotely piloted vehicle that can fly 5,000 feet up and it can fly
 100 miles.
 So it can look around and it can see human-sized targets on the ground.
 We can see it in real time.
 If somebody were more aggressive in trying to damage the facility and to break in, we
 can put an end to that too.
 It's so funny, I had a Jewish woman that I was playing with and she said, well, I'm old
 and my kids want me to do this and we're on here, but I'm thinking, let's be honest here.
 I'm not going to say I'm two years into this and I die.
 What are you going to do?
 How are you going to bury me?
 And I go, well, we have an incinerator.
 She goes, no, I'm Jewish.
 You have to bury me.
 I have to be buried.
 And I go, oh, well, that's easy.
 We tell you we're going to bury you and then we incinerate you.
 If it's convenient and we can have a nice ceremony under a tree outside, we'll honor
 your wishes.
 But if you're a health hazard and you're starting to decompose down here and you're stinking
 up the joint, we're going to burn you.
 To play a drum for very long creates entrainment of heart rates.
 The heart rate will begin to entrain.
 And we have, you know, we'll get 20 people drumming and have dancing in the center and
 have fun.
 We are interested in the human spirit and it's been defined in many, many ways, in many
 different times and in different places and cultures.
 We're interested in all of it.
 We have redone this space in kind of an eclectic spiritual context.
 We have Hindu art, Buddhist, Native American, pagan, Christian, and Islamic prayer rugs.
 So I'm hopeful that somehow we'll find our way to a wiser path with our fellow man on
 the planet.
 I'm not optimistic, but I am hopeful.
 It always irritates me when the traditional interviewers ask that cliché question is,
 so do you think the world's going to end on December 21, 2012?
 It's the wrong question to ask.
 I mean, of course I don't believe that's going to happen.
 The fact that we're standing here means that this, you know, this earth is billions of
 years old.
 We've gone through this cycle before and that evidence is in the ice records, it's in the
 soil records and stuff.
 So it's the wrong question.
 The question should be, do you think life is going to get difficult with the cycle that
 we're approaching?
 And that answer is a two thumbs up.
 I do think it's going to get very difficult and I think it'd be, you know, prudent for
 people to be prepared.
 What's it all about?
 How big is it?
 Who are you?
 Why are you here?
 On our journey to wholeness, we meet darkness and fear.
 Questioning all the old answers, denying what's too painful to see.
 Living a life of false illusion, getting off track with destiny.
 When the darkness falls around me, I don't think I'll make it through.
 When the darkness falls around me, I'll need your light to see me through.
 We've been about this for a long, long time and it's bigger than we can see.
 Making peace with our darkness, we reclaim our destiny.