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The Channel Tunnel

By Andrew V


I was talking to this woman. She said she’d just taken her car through the Channel Tunnel with Eurotunnel. You arrive at the tunnel at the arranged time, check in, and then drive onto a shuttle train, which takes you to France where you drive off and enjoy the Continent. You join at Folkestone and get off at Calais.

What she said was that when the train goes off from Folkestone, it takes about two minutes before you’re in the tunnel. It’s a bit like being on a Tube train and when the train comes out in France it takes about ten minutes before it stops at the terminal and you drive off.

When you come back, you get on the train at Calais and you travel through the daylight about ten minutes, same as when you came, and then you enter the tunnel and it’s about 25 minutes in the tunnel before you re-emerge in England.

Funny thing is, when you get into the daylight in England again, it takes about another ten minutes before you reach the terminal at Folkestone. Yet it seemed almost instantaneous before you got to the tunnel going out. Funny thing.

No! She was not mistaken. It did indeed take a couple of minutes to reach the tunnel entrance from Folkestone, but yes- it took a lot longer the other way! How can this be?

What she had noticed was what a lot of people don’t. The explanation is this: on the return journey, she had been through the diversion. Yes, in all that dark under the Channel waters, in the tunnel, there is actually a second diversion tunnel. This leads to a separate island somewhere at sea. Her train was diverted to this island, where they have built an exact replica of England. The giveaway is that it does indeed take longer on the return journey than on the outward, between Folkestone terminal and so-called ‘Folkestone’ terminal on return.

When you had your tooth extracted under sedation, I said to the woman, you were telling the dentists all the time if you felt any pain and you heard them, they heard you. It was a normal exchange. But you never remembered any of it. You had to be chaperoned home by friends, as did every sedation patient, and the first thing you recalled was about two hours after the operation. It’s a normal story with sedation. The same happened in your Chunnel Shuttle. They actually use sedative gas, which is pumped into the compartments so you don’t remember the two hours till you emerge at the pseudo- Folkestone, where you notice it takes longer from tunnel exit to terminal than going out.

They have, I said to the woman, constructed a whole replica England around the neo-Folkestone terminal, and it’s so far out to sea no-one knows it’s there. This place is populated by androids, not real humans, and there is surveillance at every location. You were taken there to be observed. They want to get something out of you. What it is, only you know.

You’re somehow back in the real UK now, but what was it they wanted?

You’re not feeling paranoid, are you?