One of the sites that appears in Mike Casey’s Chinchuba novel is a NASA facility located in rural southern Mississippi. I’ve been there. If you drive about 45 minutes east of New Orleans on Interstate 10, you’ll cross a tall bridge over the Pearl River as you cross into Mississippi, and just over the border you’ll find yourself outside the gates of NASA’s Stennis Space Center. The creation of the center is one of the little known chapters in the history of the Space Race.
In the early 1960s, the U.S. government bought out several small communities in Southern Mississippi and relocated the people. Then they fenced it off and turned it into the facility where NASA’s rocket engines would be tested. Some of the old homes and businesses still sit empty inside those gates. The people were compensated for their land, but I’m sure the transition was anything but peaceful for them. One woman, I understand, sat on her porch the whole time her house was being moved.
Across the highway from the entrance is the INFINITY Science Center. You can catch a bus there and take a guided tour of the Stennis Center. They’ll show you the buildings where technologies are developed and, in some cases, repurposed for civilian use. (WD-40 is an example of a product that was repurposed for civilians. It was originally sprayed onto rockets.) and the fields where rocket engines are tested on giant platforms. (https://www.nasa.gov/centers/stennis/home/index.html)
http://www.visitinfinity.com) Interestingly enough, the Stennis buffer zone includes not only the homes and businesses of relocated Americans, but artifacts left behind by the native peoples of the region as well. In one article I read, a former Stennis employee tells about using ground-penetrating radar to explore archaeological sites. (http://www.picayuneitem.com/2016/09/former-employee-shares-history-of-stennis-buffer-zone/)
The Stennis Center and the surrounding landscape makes an excellent setting for a story in which modern humans, with their scientific sophistication, are haunted by ancient and powerful mysteries that predate civilization.