🛸💀 Derry’s underbelly just cracked wide open…
HBO’s Welcome to Derry exposes the Air Force Base’s NIGHTMARE cover-up 😱—secret digs unearthing Pennywise’s cosmic cradle, Cold War experiments gone eldritch. Bones, beacons, buried gods… what horrors are they waking?
Unearth the truth 👇
The sleepy facade of Derry, Maine, has long concealed a festering underbelly of vanishings and violence, but HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry peels back the soil to reveal a conspiracy as vast as the Macroverse itself. Episode 2, “The Thing in the Dark,” dropped early on October 29 amid Halloween hysteria, thrusting viewers into the bowels of the Derry Air Force Base—a sprawling, fog-shrouded outpost on the town’s outskirts that’s far more than a Cold War relic. Here, under the guise of routine bomber tests, the U.S. military orchestrates Operation Precept: A clandestine excavation unearthing not just bones and beacons, but the primordial cradle of Pennywise, the shape-shifting devourer whose origins stretch eons beyond human folly. Spoiler warning: This exposé draws from the episode’s revelations, King’s 1986 novel It, and the 2017/2019 films, unpacking the base’s cover-ups, psi-experiments, and how they’ve unwittingly primed the clown’s return.
Established in the 1950s amid Eisenhower-era paranoia, the Derry Air Force Base masquerades as a strategic asset for B-52 patrols and radar surveillance. But Episode 2 exposes its true mandate: A black-budget black hole swallowing personnel, funds, and sanity in pursuit of a “Fear Weapon”—an entity buried deep beneath the town, capable of inducing terror lethal enough to “kill a man where he stands.” General Francis Shaw (James Remar), a hawkish composite of real-life figures like Curtis LeMay, commands the op from a bunker labyrinth of seismic charts, rune-etched beacons, and redacted Derry ledgers. With the Cuban Missile Crisis looming in 1962, Shaw views the base not as a deterrent, but a dig site for psychic Armageddon insurance: Harness Derry’s monster to shatter Soviet spines without a nuke. Cover-ups abound—staged accidents cloak worker deaths, racial scapegoats like Hank (Stephen Root) divert eyes from the theatre massacre, and “classified” stamps bury victim autopsies showing exsanguination sans blood. The military isn’t just hiding something; they’re resurrecting it, blind to the irony that Pennywise—It—feeds on the very fear their probes ignite.
Operation Precept: The Base’s Beating, Buried Heart
At Precept’s core is a network of excavation rigs rumbling through Derry’s quarries and sewers, guided by “beacons”—glowing artifacts pulsing with residual terror from past cycles. Episode 2’s finale unearths the crown jewel: A waterlogged 1935 Model T crammed with the Bradley Gang’s mummified skeletons—Al and George Bradley’s crew, Depression-era outlaws who met a clown-fueled frenzy in Derry’s last awakening. Their self-inflicted wounds (nails in eyes, throats gnawed) scream Pennywise’s handiwork: Fear turned cannibalistic, bodies propped as warnings. Shaw dismisses it as “local color,” but Hallorann’s (Carl Lumbly) shining decodes the car’s runes as a Macroverse marker—proof the “weapon” isn’t man-made, but cosmic contraband.
The cover-up? Precept’s veil is ironclad: Worker fatalities logged as “training mishaps,” beacons smuggled via black flights, and Derry’s council (led by the oily Tibbs) greased with federal pork to mute inquiries. Shaw’s memos, glimpsed in Leroy Hanlon’s (Jovan Adepo) briefing, trace to 1950s MKUltra offshoots—psi-evals blending CIA mind games with Native lore hunts for “anomalous assets.” The base’s perimeter? Electrified fences and “no-fly” zones hide seismic booms that rattle windows town-wide, blamed on “jet tests.” But cracks show: Episode 2’s overload projects town hallucinations—phantom children wailing—hinting Precept’s stirring more than dirt.
The Experiments: Psi-Probes and Fear-Proof Pawns
Beneath the tarmac lie labs echoing The Shining‘s Overlook: Sterile chambers for “fear threshold” trials, where recruits stare into beacon glows until catatonia claims them. Hallorann, post-Overlook survivor, leads these—his shining tunes amplifiers to the entity’s frequency, mapping voids where victims’ souls loop in eternal grey rooms. Experiments draw from Project Stargate’s remote viewing: Subjects “project” into the Macroverse, emerging gibbering of orange Deadlights and spider-gods. Leroy’s recruitment? A twisted Tuskegee echo—his Korea shrapnel-scarred amygdala renders him “fearless,” ideal for proximity ops where others seize in panic. Shaw’s “test”—a staged supremacist ambush—proves it, but whispers Leroy’s numbness is cracking under sewer echoes mimicking his son’s voice.
Cover-ups mask the body count: Digger husks with orange irises “suicided,” psi-labs sanitized post-meltdown. Precept’s directive? Weaponize the fear-waves for psy-war—Soviet envoys hallucinating gulags, troops deserting leper visions. But ethics? Shredded: Minorities like Leroy as “controls,” Natives’ warnings dismissed as folklore. Hallorann’s files hint ties to the Black Spot massacre (King’s WWII bar bombing by cosmic racists), positioning the base as a multiverse nexus.
Pennywise’s Origins: The Buried Meteor and Derry’s Doom-Seal
Precept’s digs strike the entity’s heart: Pennywise crash-landed via meteor 27 million B.C., a Macroverse egg hatching in primordial seas to feast on dinosaur dread. Dormant eons, It stirred in 1715 when settlers slaughtered Penobscot guardians atop its crater, forging Derry as a fear-amplifier. The base overlies this scar—excavations crack the seal, beacons like the Bradley car (1935 cycle relic, Pennywise as gunman-clown) as psychic lures from past binges.
Shaw’s ignorance is fatal: He seeks a tool; It manipulates the hunt, fattening on global paranoia (nuke fears) and local rot (racial pogroms). Episode 2’s Bradley find—skeletons twisted in self-rage—proves origins pre-clown: It as orange glow, driving herds to doom. Hallorann’s visions tease the spider-true form, Deadlights as soul-traps. Precept awakens It early, dooming the 1962 cycle and seeding the Losers’ 1989 war.
Secret
Cover-Up Method
Link to Pennywise Origins
Real-World Echo
Operation Precept Digs
“Jet test” quakes, worker “accidents”
Cracks 1715 seal on Macroverse crater
MKUltra psi-war
Beacons (Bradley Car)
“Archaeological finds”
1935 cycle marker, clown-gunman lure
Project Blue Book UFO hunts
Psi-Experiments
Redacted evals, “suicide” logs
Shining probes Deadlights, soul traps
Stargate remote viewing
Leroy’s Recruitment
Racial scapegoats, family threats
Fearless bloodline to Mike Hanlon
Tuskegee unethical trials
Victim Hallucinations
“Mass hysteria” psy-ops
Awakens primordial dinosaur-feaster
Black Spot massacre (The Stand)
The Bigger Cover: Multiverse Nexus and King’s Cautionary Tale
The base isn’t isolated—Precept echoes The Mist‘s Arrowhead rifts, Crimson King’s manipulations in The Dark Tower, and Firestarter‘s psi-kid hunts. Derry as nexus: Black Spot ties to The Stand‘s superflu, Overlook ghosts via Hallorann. Shaw’s hubris—American exceptionalism vs. ancients—mirrors King’s Vietnam/Watergate critiques: Governments as unwitting pawns.
X speculates wildly: “Base = Todash door? Tower crumbles if they dig deeper.” Episode 3 (November 9) teases beacon cascades, town-wide panics. Risks? Lore overload, but 87% RT hails “prestige cosmic dread.”
Beneath Derry’s base lies no bunker—it’s a cradle cracked, a god goaded. The military hides victory’s illusion; reality? Pennywise’s feast. Stream Sundays on HBO Max—the ground trembles.
