"That door," he says with dramatic pause. "That
door weighs 4,000 pounds. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast."
Peter Davenport has a radio voice, the kind of exaggerated baritone that cuts through walls and most doors, but not this one. This is solid steel and a foot thick.
It is Davenport's door, which opens into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear missile complex here in the desert of eastern Washington.
The Air Force decommissioned the site in the mid-1960s and it sat empty for most of the time since.
Davenport, longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse and 24-hour hotline for UFO sightings, bought it for $100,000 two years ago to turn into his new headquarters.
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©Ingrid Barrentine / Associated Press
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Comment: Another sonic boom from an overhead meteorite explosion perhaps?