Branton, the Anti-Mormon Alien Conspiracist

Religions make good targets for alien conspiracists. With their ancient history, arcane rites, and more than a few real-life nefarious deeds, it’s easy to slot Reptilian invaders into their history — if you don’t live in reality. Oddly, considering its decidedly cosmic outlook, you don’t find too many conspiracists targeting the Mormon church. That is, until you enter Brantonia:

Branton (born: Bruce Alan Watson, 1960) despite not being forthcoming about this on his website, seems to have been born Mormon. Michael Barkun claims he was raised Mormon in A Culture of Conspiracy, and it’s easy to come to that conclusion by reading between the lines of Branton’s autobiography. He describes growing up at the western base of the Rocky Mountains in a large, religious family. According to Branton, the religion of his upbringing was “a system of legalistic religion” with “neo-Masonic infiltration” that created a “parasitical kingdom of darkness.” If I was unhinged, that might be how I’d describe my Mormon upbringing.

At age 12, Branton read his first UFO book: Frank Edward’s Flying Saucers — Serious Business. Branton possibly served as a Mormon missionary; he says that he “…is not proud of the fact that he was 'used' by the evil one at one time in his life to harm others around him.” At some point afterward, he found his faith in the non-Mormon Jesus and discovered the writings of William “Bill” Schnoebelen, the former convert turned anti-Mormon who I’ve written about in connection to the Perfected Church of Jesus Christ of Immaculate Latter-day Saints. Schnoebelen started writing in the 80s, which creates a reasonable, if unprovable, timeline for Branton being a disaffected returned missionary. 

By the 90s, Branton was on the full UFO swing, writing books and a newsletter. His works are basically unreadable. Not only are his websites formatted atrociously, but Branton constantly circles back on himself, repeating the same points with only slight alterations. Sean Casteel at Unexplained-Mysteries quotes ufologist Timothy Green Beckley generously reviewing Branton’s work this way:

Branton is not for everyone! His material has limited appeal, but for those who can take all this in and digest what he has to say, Branton is considered somewhat of a ‘savior,’ particularly to those who contend that there is a global plot to ‘take us all over.’

Beckley published Branton’s books back in the day and apparently has not heard from the author for years, implying that the CIA got him for knowing too much. The books are your standard UFO fare and less immediately unhinged than Branton’s website, that is, in relation to mainstream UFO lore. You have allegations of secret Nazi experiments involving UFOs, a tag team book with popular conspiracist Commander X, and Reptilian theorizing. Of course, Branton alleges his own alien abduction. But, for all this otherworldly mischief, Branton’s main focus was (is?) on the aliens below us. His real foot in the door seems to have been the Dulce Base conspiracy.

While not as popular among normies as Area 51 or the Roswell Incident, the Dulce Base conspiracy is a touchstone among ufologists. Dulce, New Mexico is a tiny town in the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, nestled against the Archuleta Mesa. Underneath the mesa, so claim the ufologists, the US government has built a secret base stocked with aliens, crashed UFOs, genetic experiments, and basically, any other bit of alien arcana you’d like to imagine. The area first came to prominence through the ill-fated ufologist Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz’s story is too long to tell here (see the books Mirage Men and Project Beta for a detailed treatment), but he claimed to have picked up transmissions from Archuleta Mesa before being kidnapped and brought inside Dulce Base. Bennewitz was most likely a target of government disinformation designed to spread the UFO mythos among the susceptible. He paid with his sanity, spending the rest of his life in an ever-deepening mental health spiral as he was fed more and more “information” from his government contacts. The Dulce thread was then picked up by ufologists around the country, most notably Phil Schnieder, who claimed to have witnessed a kick-ass gun battle between aliens and government officers while working at the base in the late 70s. Branton also jumped on the bandwagon, writing two books about Dulce Base and shoehorning a trip underground into his own abduction story. From that point on, Branton seems to have been fixated on the idea of underground tunnels. When it came time to aim at the Mormon church, Branton went subterranean, detailing an underground cave network spanning the Western states, centered on Salt Lake City’s Temple Square and its neighboring shopping mall. 

Tunnels! Under the Shopping Mall.

The two sides of South Temple Street in Downtown Salt Lake City show the duality of Mormonism. On the north side is Temple Square, the central hub of modern Mormonism, comprising the Salt Lake City temple, the church headquarters office building, and the massive Conference Center, where they hold semi-annual churchwide conferences. On the south side of the street, you have City Creek Mall, a massive retail complex with an artificial creek running through it, protected from the harsh desert weather by a cocoon of shops, restaurants, and glass. The Mormon church owns this as well, an edifice for a key sector of church business: real estate. 

But City Creek Mall is relatively new, a product of the West Coast mania for perennially tearing down and rebuilding. Before City Creek, the lot housed Crossroads Plaza and the ZCMI Center. The church bought both malls and in the 2000s began plans to tear them down and build a new mall — City Creek — to revitalize the property directly across from the Salt Lake City temple. To you and me, replacing a mall with a mall might just look like shady real estate trading. I couldn't find what Branton thinks about City Creek, but I’d be curious to know, because Crossroads Plaza is key to his allegations of Mormon-Reptilian Shapeshifter collusion.

Crossroads Plaza by Dustin Brohm

While Branton doesn’t seem to have experienced the Crossroads tunnels personally, he collected various “reports” about what’s going on underground. Maybe he did go in the tunnels? It can’t be emphasized enough: his website is basically unreadable. It gave me a massive headache. Let’s start on a large scale and work our way down.

On his website, Branton records a letter written to Paul Shockley of the Cosmic Awareness Communication organization. The anonymous Epistolist contains many allegations, some of which — oddly — have some semblance of reality. When you read some of this conspiracy stuff, you’ll notice a few interesting tidbits scattered here and there. 

The Epistolist alleges that there are tunnels between the Crossroads Plaza and the Salt Lake Temple that open to a large network of caverns spanning from the Southwest states (Dulce, naturally) to Northern Idaho. The caverns are infested with Reptiloid aliens, which the government prefers to keep in this area since the Western states are mostly empty land, making them perfect for hiding secrets away from prying eyes. That’s not actually incorrect. Nevada is really a glorified government test site with a handful of cities scattered on the border. Outside the Wasatch Range, Utah isn’t much different. The US government has used the Utah deserts for training the crews for the World War II nuclear bombings as well as tests of top secret spy planes. The Dugway Proving Ground, located under 100 miles from Salt Lake City, has a long history of open-air chemical and biological weapons tests. Like I said, a little nugget mixed in with the nonsense.

The Epistolist isn’t concerned with the real sins of the US government though. Not only are there shapeshifting aliens living underground, but the caverns also house mysterious artifacts: “a few ancient plates of an unknown language” and “weapons of crystal.” Apparently, the ETs are hanging out with the source material for the Book of Mormon 2. 

Naturally, the US government doesn’t want people to know that they are hiding Reptilians right under the collective noses of the Westerners and have hired the Mormons to help in the coverup. The Epistolist claims that because the Mormons own so many of the government entities, hospitals, schools, and universities in their two states, they can train Reptilians for their secret missions without the aliens ever having to go “topside.” Aliens come down to the Earth, train at BYU, and then go out to do their nefarious deeds. But of course, the Reptilians are not content with just using the Mormons — they have also infiltrated the church all the way to the top. Gordon B. Hinckley himself was a Reptilian!

The Mormon-Reptilian allegiance, according to the Epistolist, was first forged in the 1900s but “it's not something they're going to announce at their next General Conference.” Since then, the Mormons have been transmitting brain-bending beams from Salt Lake City while sending out missionaries as covert CIA agents to countries where the United States can not yet establish an espionage base. To coordinate all of this information, the Episotist claims that the Mormons operate massive supercomputers at the top of the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City, some of the biggest in the world. That caught my eye, since the Eyring Research Institute, my pet project, did develop computer technology for the Mormon church. Dynix, a piece of cutting-edge library software, was originally designed to help the church collate information from its temples, keeping track of the vicarious ceremonies performed on behalf of the dead. The church continues to operate genealogical databases and record membership details on its servers. The latter is so important to them that you have to use a pro bono legal service to get the church to delete your information. And if you want to get really spooky, check out the Utah Data Center, a key hub in the NSA’s computer surveillance network. There are these little bits of truth to what the Episotlist says, but he travels down the Reptilian rabbit hole and gets pulled away from the actually interesting things happening in his backyard.

With this “evidence” in hand, Branton goes on to spin his own theories, based on stories he was allegedly told by SLC residents. While the Epistolist tracks the Mormon collusion back to the 1900s, Branton goes further, alleging that Brigham Young himself knew about the aliens, and that was why he built sub-basements into the Salt Lake City temple. When James Buchanan sent federal troops into Utah to quell the increasingly rebellious territory, Young filled in the hole to, according to Branton, hide the alien network from the feds. Since the completion of the temple, the Mormons have expanded the network of tunnels, connecting it to their shopping mall across the street.

One woman told Branton that her son (R) had been hired as a security guard in the mall, but was told never to enter the lower basement levels. During a training drill, her son took the opportunity to explore the forbidden realms. In the third sub-basement, he found a long tunnel leading to a pair of ancient wooden doors. An eerie green glow — like the kind an EXIT sign emits in the dark — emanated from the bottom of the doors. A few days later, R convinced a friend to pry a manhole cover from the street above where the tunnel must have been. Dropping into the gloom, they found themselves in a network of concrete rooms connected to tunnels reaching as far as the eye could see. In one of the tunnels, they saw two men with Uzi machine guns pacing around, disauding the two adventurers from traveling further. Before they left, they took note of the footprints in the tunnel. Shoeless, the prints had only three toes!

Another contact (R.W.) told Branton he had snuck into the under-construction Crossroads Cinema and was told to leave by a custodial worker. Was he being told to leave a dangerous construction zone, or being scared away from The Truth? A young man named T.J. informed Branton that he had met a man on a bus who claimed that while constructing the movie theater, he had stumbled into a tunnel where he came face to face with a lizard man. K.S. told Branton that she had encountered three Reptilians in the Nordstrom store, presumably shopping for sensible blazers. Perhaps that’s why Nordstrom decided to stay in the mall during a major renovation near the end of its life. K.S. also reported being abducted near the Sugarhouse Mall and brought into a facility connected to Crossroads.

Branton’s most interesting story comes from a D&D Dungeon Master he talked to while riding a UTA bus. Branton puts his alien spin on the story, but I think the tale is basically correct, for reasons we’ll see below. 

The Dungeon Master and his friends were on the lookout for interesting places to play the game to set the mood for their fantasy adventures. While exploring in the foothills to the east of the city they discovered an unmarked entrance to a tunnel. The D&D players decided to spend three nights mapping the tunnels while stopping periodically to play the game. After all this exploring they had worked themselves West and found themselves in the basement levels of the Salt Lake City temple. Failing a real-world Perception check, they didn’t notice the “No Trespassing” signs and were quickly apprehended by Salt Lake City police officers providing security for the basement levels. It’s an interesting story on its own. Branton spins it out into this convoluted theory about how the tunnels connect to Area 51 and the Dugway Proving Ground and so on, but basic details don’t seem that outlandish. Especially since, putting aside Branton’s musings, there are actually a lot of tunnels underneath Salt Lake City.

Tunnel Truth

Let’s start at the Salt Lake City temple. From the beginning, the temple was designed with a basement level. As with many Mormon temples, the basement level contains the baptistry, the room where Mormons are baptized for the dead by proxy. The baptistry generally consists of a large baptismal font carried on the backs of twelve oxen. It is genuinely a creepy bit of architecture.

SLC Temple Baptistry

The Salt Lake City temple has basement levels with elevator shafts running from them to the top of the building. The main entrance to the Salt Lake City temple also has an underground passage. Temple patrons don’t enter directly through the front doors, those are mostly used for bridal pictures. Instead, they enter through an annex building nearby, where their temple recommend barcodes are scanned by temple workers to ensure that the patron is approved to enter the building. They drop their bags down a chute and cross over to the temple through an underground passage. The annex building is currently being refurbished with the addition of more baptistries and instruction rooms. 

SLC Temple Annex

While the temple originally only had one basement level, the current renovation project (started in 2020) is expanding the subterranean footprint of the temple with the addition of three more basement levels and further seismic strengthening, bringing the total number of underground levels to the same as the above-ground floors. The additional basements will contain offices, more baptistries, and “other sacred places.” That’s a little ominously vague to me. As a former Mormon who’s been through the temple, I can’t imagine what other sacred places they need. Symbolically, the other ceremonies besides baptism for the dead (endowments and sealings) are supposed to take place above ground. The Salt Lake City temple already has endowment rooms, sealing rooms, and the Holy of Holies, the place where the leaders of the church meet in sacred communion with God himself. And that accounts for all the temple ceremonies. What other sacred rooms besides baptistries do they need underground? 

The temple is also getting a new 180-foot-long tunnel connecting its basement levels to the Conference Center parking garage, traveling underneath North Temple Street. According to the church, the tunnel “will connect the Salt Lake Temple to the underground parking garage in the Conference Center to provide safer and easier access to those visiting the sacred edifice.” Safer? Why is it dangerous to walk 180 feet?

On the other side of Temple Square, there’s another network of tunnels. As reported by Exmormon superstar Sandra Tanner, this network was started in 1889. The tunnels connected the temple to the Joseph Smith Building, the old offices of the church leaders before they completed the modern Church Office Building. The tunnels were meant to allow Mormon leaders to travel between the various buildings of Temple Square without stepping out into public and interacting with their faithful followers in the aboveground temple gardens. Another building on Temple Square, the Tabernacle, has a tunnel system underneath it housing LDS Security officers. These are the tunnels that I think the Dungeon Master from Branton’s story stumbled into, and if the details are roughly correct, which I believe they are (minus the Reptilians, of course) the tunnel system is much more extensive than is public knowledge, leading all the way out into the foothills. 

The Mormon studies Sunstone magazine discusses another series of tunnels:

When Zions Securities Corporation, the Church's property management company, finally won the battle to raze the old Eagle Gate Apartments [at the corner of South Temple and State Street, across from the Brigham Young home], no one expected that the new replacements they built in their place would become an enclave for aging Church leaders. However, the not totally occupied high-security complex, which contains a permanent suite for the Church president, already includes President Gordon B. Hinckley, apostles Marvin J. Ashton and James E. Faust, and seventy Bernard P. Brockbank. Several other General Authorities are also considering buying units, which range in price from $123,000 to $291,000. The space available in the complex will double when the neighboring new Eagle Gate Apartments are completed.

The Eagle Gate complex is undeniably a convenient home for Church workers. It gives residents a fine view of the Temple and Brigham Young's Lion House. Other amenities include underground tunnels that link the condominiums to the Church office buildings, the Hotel Utah and Temple Square. Once the hotel is converted into a wardhouse and additional Church office space, it will be possible for Church leaders to travel between home, work, and church without ever seeing the sun. The ZCMI shopping mall is not yet connected to the tunnel network. (Sunstone 11:4/42, July 1987).

In 2018, Utah Stories reported that a tunnel connection to ZCMI (the Crossroads Plaza’s neighbor) had been completed. When James Kirk reached out to LDS church officials requesting information and possibly a tour of the tunnel network the church refused to comment on the story. Of course, no discussion of Mormon tunnels would be complete without mentioning the Granite Mountain Records Vault, the church’s repository of genealogical records blasted into the side of a mountain.

What’s going on here? On the one hand, I think it’s true that the Mormon leaders would really prefer to go about their business without being sidetracked by running into their flock on the street. Otherwise, they might get constantly accosted by Mormons asking for blessings, prophesies, revelations, etc. The Mormon leaders might even be approached by a member of Utah’s massive unhoused population.

On the other hand, a lot of this might be preparation for the apocalypse. Gordon B. Hinckley stated that the church’s goal is to keep the Salt Lake City temple standing through the Millennium, Christ’s 1,000-year reign on the Earth following his climatic Second Coming. To get to the Millennium, the world has to survive the many calamities described in Biblical and Mormon scripture, which most Mormons understand as comprising all the trappings of modern war, including but not limited to nuclear conflict. For example, US Representative Chris Stewart wrote a book series about a nuclear war leading up to Jesus Christ’s return, sold at Deseret Book. The Mormon church has long encouraged its members to stockpile emergency supplies in anticipation of the calamities before the Second Coming. I suspect that’s what the church means by using a tunnel to provide safe passage to the Salt Lake City temple: safer passage in a world of nuclear fallout, airborne pathogens, and civil disturbance. Once again, it’s easy to see how the Dungeon Master’s story fits in here, with a tunnel network existing to quickly and safely evacuate Mormon leadership from downtown Salt Lake City into the relative shelter of the nearby foothills. The official secrecy surrounding the tunnel network and the odd emphasis on safety seem more indicative of a system like this than a subterranean connection to a parking garage.

So no, Branton is wrong about the tunnels being the secret lair of alien shapeshifters. But they are evidence of something much more interesting. You might consider an apocalyptic conflict the end of the world, but the Mormons are planning to stick around.