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- As we await the release of Stranger Things 4 Volume 2, set to hit Netflix on July 1, fans have been passing the time analyzing the many plot holes and Easter eggs from Volume 1.
- The internet seems to have missed one Easter egg, though. If you search the coordinates for the secret lab facility in Nevada that Eleven is held at (which Suzie discovered with her computer), it will bring you to the Nevada desert.
- Instead of a secret lab, though, these coordinates take you to a former nuclear bomb testing site called the Apple II House, a part of Operation Teapot that was meant to be destroyed.
- You’ll also find yourself near Sedan Crater, a remnant of a nuclear bomb test gone haywire.
In the month since it debuted on May 27, 2022, Stranger Things 4 has been shattering viewership records and is now Netflix’s most popular season of an English-language television show ever. And the whole season hasn’t even been released yet.
After releasing the first seven episodes in May, the Duffer brothers have decided to hold off on releasing Stranger Things 4 Volume 2 (the final two episodes of the season) until July 1, 2022, leaving fans on the edges of their seats.
In the interim between the two volumes of Stranger Things 4, viewers have been left with quite a few unanswered questions.
How the hell are Hopper, Joyce, and Murray going to get out of this prison while there are still Russian guards and a Demogorgon lurking around? Why are Eleven’s speech patterns so much better in her season 4 flashbacks than they were in season 1?
The Stranger Things creators have also given fans a few Easter eggs to look for while watching the series. For one, there’s the fact that the video footage from the roller rink scene includes the timestamp for March 22, which true fans will remember is Will’s birthday, explaining why Will seemed so annoyed that Mike wasn’t paying attention to him.
However, upon watching Stranger Things 4 Volume 1 for the first time, I discovered what I believe to be another Easter egg, one which I haven’t seen written about anywhere on the internet yet: the location of the secret test facility in Nevada where Eleven is being retrained.
Suzie Finds Nina
In “Chapter Six: The Dive”, the so-called California crew (consisting of Mike, Will, Jonathan, and Argyle) goes to visit Dustin’s girlfriend Suzie in Salt Lake City seeking her help with locating Nina. While, at first, the crew believed that Nina was a person, they later learn that it’s actually a computer and they need Suzie’s help to locate it.
Suzie, with her remarkable hacking skills (especially for a 15-year-old living in an era when home computers had only just hit the market), is able to locate the Nina project in a matter of minutes.
The gang discovers that Eleven is being held at a facility at the coordinates 37°03’00.0″N 116°05’16.8″W, surprisingly, in Nevada.
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Naturally, after watching this scene, I thought, Why don’t I plug those coordinates into Google Earth and see if I can spot anything weird out there? I did just that. And what I saw astonished me.
Secrets of the Nevada Desert
The coordinates mentioned in Stranger Things 4 are in DMS notation, which stands for “degrees, minutes, seconds.” This is an extremely precise way of measuring location that is capable of locating an object the size of a single human being.
So, while many articles online will say that the lab is located near the city of Ruth, Nevada, I wanted to see where the exact DMS location would lead me.
First, I plugged the location into Google Maps. What I saw made me sweat a little bit.
As I had expected, the location led me to a random patch of sand in the middle of the Nevada desert.
What I didn’t expect was to see some very strange black-and-white photos of broken military tanks. Thoughts and ideas began to flow through my mind.
Maybe there actually was a secret facility here that was destroyed by the military. What if someone was actually training children to develop psionic powers here?
As I dug a little further, my theories seemed less and less plausible.
However, there were still some very interesting things that were confirmed to have happened in this particular part of the Nevada desert. And I think it’s no longshot to say that the Duffer brothers chose this location for a reason.
Still, I’ve yet to find any explanations for the images of broken-down tanks lying in the desert that popped up when I searched this location. Both of these images, though, were uploaded by someone named Paolo Polizzy. So, if you’re reading this Paolo, please explain.
The Facility in Stranger Things 4 Is Actually an Old Nuclear Test Site
Unsure what to think of these mysterious images and seemingly random stretch of desert, I began scrolling around Google Maps and looking for the nearest marked location, which happened to be the Apple II House. So, I clicked on that and things got even creepier.
It turns out that the Apple II House (located a literal stone’s throw from our Stranger Things 4 location) was part of a staged town designed as the target of a nuclear bomb test during Operation Teapot, which took place in what is now known as the Nevada Test Site.
They even set up a family of mannequins to see how the bomb would affect humans. This made for some seriously eerie photographs of these locations.
While most of the houses were blown to bits, two of them survived: one that was 7,500 feet away and another that was 10,500 away from the detonation site. Both of these houses are still standing and open for visitors.
Also located very close to the coordinates from Stranger Things 4 is Sedan Crater, the largest man-made crater in the United States. The crater was formed by a nuclear bomb test allegedly meant to investigate whether they could be used for mining and other civilian purposes.
Apparently, in those days, it was common for residents of Las Vegas to stand on their rooftops and watch these nukes detonate. They even had atomic bomb-themed pageants in which the winner would be crowned “Miss Atom Bomb.”
Unfortunately, the fun ended when civilians “downwind” started to develop leukemia. The fallout from the Sedan test contaminated more citizens than any other test in the United States.
So, while searching this location on Google Maps didn’t lead me to a secret facility for psionically gifted children run by Dr. Martin Brenner, it did lead me to discover some pretty eerie parts of U.S. history.
Now, that’s a pretty cool Easter egg that the Duffer brothers left for us fans (if they even meant to).
But, my investigation still wasn’t quite done. I decided that I would also plug the location into Google Earth to see if I could spot any unexplained anomalies out there in the Nevada desert.
Satellite View
After entering the coordinates into Google Earth, I was able to see the area I had just been looking at on Google Maps from a satellite view. I was able to identify Sedan Crater and the Apple II House.
However, there were a whole bunch of other features on the landscape that looked like they were probably man-made.
Could one of those little structures be a secret laboratory housing a 15-year-old girl being trained to move stuff with her mind to fight an evil wizard in another dimension? In the words of Kevin Garnett, “Anything is possible!”
If you go just east of the coordinates from Stranger Things 4, you can also see the dozens of craters formed by bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site.
I’d say the chances of there actually being a top-secret lab like the one in Stranger Things 4 at the Nevada Test Site are pretty low. Still, if you were going to build such a lab, a creepy abandoned nuclear bomb testing site might not be the worst place in the world.