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People started to suspect something was strange about Denver International Airport before construction began. Stapleton Airport in west Denver seemed to work—why did the city need a new one? So the government can build a secret base underneath it, some whispered.
The conjecture grew after delays postponed DIA’s completion for almost two years, and it became a full-throated conspiracy theory once the facility opened in 1995: Murals seemed to depict soldiers striking down children, and there was talk of a bunker complex below the terminal. The gigantic blue stallion with glowing red eyes that appeared near the entrance in 2008 didn’t exactly silence the rumors.
DIA remains a fertile landmark for myth-making three decades after its first flight. In fact, Canadians Brady Roberts and Mike Howorun had never been to Colorado before launching Escaping Denver, their science-fiction podcast, in 2021. The friends and producing partners simply watched videos about the airport on YouTube and thought the location seemed ripe for a story.
Escaping Denver follows two main characters, Noah and Sara, who wake up as prisoners under DIA. Rather than encountering Blucifer, the Illuminati, and other characters from the airport’s rich history of conspiracy, Noah and Sara navigate shadow governments, aliens, and a deadly robot called the Puncher, among other spooky inventions. Although the show’s sound effects are spare, Roberts and Howorun employ veteran actors, including Greta Carew-Johns, who plays Sara and has appeared on TV shows such as Supergirl. They also pack the sunken labyrinth with strange, Lost-style surprises, including an appearance by Bigfoot. The 52-episode series has racked up more than 2.75 million downloads.
This month, Roberts and Howorun will expand Escaping Denver’s universe by publishing a novel of the same name, timed to coincide with the release of the show’s fifth and final season. They looked for a local author to write the book and settled on Teague Bohlen, associate professor of fiction at the University of Colorado Denver, whose first novel, The Pull of the Earth, won the Colorado Book Award for literary fiction in 2007. He’d never written sci-fi, but he’s long been a fan of genre fiction. His home office is littered with lightsabers, and he bonded with Roberts and Howorun over their shared nostalgia of 1980s culture.
Escaping Denver takes place in modern-day Colorado, but some listeners believe descriptions of the fictional complex indicate it was built four decades ago. “One of the things that plays a role in the novel is New Coke,” Bohlen says. “Just the pure ’80s sense of New Coke coming out and being a complete bomb.”
Bohlen is cagey about the rest of the mysteries that will be revealed in the book, published by Oregon-based Blackstone Publishing, only saying the plot involves new characters. Rather than trying to leave DIA, they’ll be seeking to enter the compound—at least until they encounter a few of the cryptids Bohlen has planted around the place.
He also added some personal touches. DIA is just one piece of the enormous underground complex, and Bohlen’s characters access the facility near Ward, a city the author has visited often, almost 60 miles northwest of the airport. “Up there, around the Brainard Lake area, there’s a lot of government land that is pretty pristine,” Bohlen says. “You can hide a lot up there.”
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3 Real DIA Conspiracies—Debunked!
1. A time capsule installed in 1995 references the “New World Airport Commission”—an evil-sounding group that really just helped organize the airport’s opening.
2. DIA’s runways appear to make a swastika, but the formation simply permits more than one plane to take off at once and reduces shutdowns in case of strong winds.
3. Construction delays led some to speculate that a network of bunkers was being built. It doesn’t exist (or maybe that’s what the government wants you to think).
