Debunking the mystery of New Mexican homes with bunkers

Built in 1951, a house located five minutes away from the University of New Mexico holds a secret. To the untrained eye, the five bedroom, two-bathroom house looks normal, with a small green lawn in the front and large trees with a tire swing swaying gently beneath.

Inside, within a small bedroom closet no larger than a cupboard, lies the staircase to a built-in bomb shelter.

When she bought the house 25 years ago for roughly $450,000, Sandra James had no idea the home had a bomb shelter until after she had signed with the Realtors. While she and her daughter Melissa Mclean at first didn’t have much interest, Mclean’s eventual boyfriend Addison Foskey found the bunker fascinating.

“I love history and stuff like that, so when she mentioned it at dinner one night, I made her drag me down there,” Foskey said. “We cleared out the closet and popped that lid off and started exploring the stuff in this little crazy time capsule.”

Surrounded by four feet of reinforced concrete slabs on all sides and topped with a nearly 200-pound steel cover, the bunker has everything a person would need to survive a bombing, Foskey said. The room is complete with plumbing, electricity, drainage, communication systems linking to the whole house, rations that smell of stale bakery food, and air ventilators to pump in fresh air from the outside. Foskey said the food tastes better than expected.

New Mexico is no stranger to nuclear bombs and bomb shelters. In 1945, Los Alamos lab director and nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer detonated an atom bomb 60 miles north of White Sands National Park. Years later, New Mexico would become home to the first public school built fully underground with the intention of withstanding a nuclear fallout — Abo Elementary School in Artesia.

Foskey learned the history of his own shelter after posting photos on Facebook. One photo went viral, leading Foskey to connect with the original builder’s — Dr. Thomas Chiffelle — daughter.

Chiffelle worked at Lovelace Hospital. Lovelace was contracted by the U.S. government to run experiments, and Chiffelle was sent to Nevada, where he witnessed Operation Plumbbob — a series of 29 nuclear tests from May through October 1957, according to the story told to Foskey.

During Chiffelle’s time at Plumbbob, he was tasked with testing various bomb shelters by placing animals within the shelter, dropping bombs and analyzing what did and did not survive, according to Foskey.

“The guy was legitimately worried,” Foskey said. “He took the best-performing bomb shelter and basically doubled the specs on everything. You can’t see something like that and not think, ‘This is something that needs to be addressed,’ so he came back and built this shelter in secret.”

Fearful of his potential demise, Chiffelle began secretly building a bomb shelter below his house, claiming to be building a room for his daughter when neighbors got curious, according to Foskey.

The emergency exit is covered by flooring in Foskey’s son’s room, meaning the family would have to redo their home to make the bunker completely functional.

“Without massive structural changes, it’s never going to be a place that you can use with anything much more than what’s in there now,” Foskey said. “If it came down to it, despite weapons being much stronger today, we could bunker down there and close the lid.”

Foskey said he and his family do not expect to hunker down in the bomb shelter anytime soon, but they have found uses for the space. They do allow filmmakers to film within the bunker on occasion, and Foskey has considered using the space as an Airbnb for history enthusiasts.

“We’ve had some people film some scenes down here and did a vampire flick here recently. Santa Fe Fashion Week did a Barbenheimer skit down here and I did a couple of commercials in here,” Foskey said, referring to a 2023 cultural phenomenon that blended the movie premieres of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

“I’ve had a few concepts for some movie ideas or a fun TV show where people drop in here with just a camera, and some people have suggested a recording studio.”

Foskey said there are several homes nearby that contain bomb shelters and, at one point prior to living there, his home connected with the neighbors behind him, hinting at a community based around bomb shelters.

“At the same period as this house, the people who lived here and the people who lived behind the house had sons that were the same age and they actually built concrete stairs to go from one yard to the next,” he said. “They have a shelter over there, so I don’t think that is a coincidence.”