There's no use in trying to hide. The Denver Bureau of Exploration knows you're out there.
Illustrated fliers asking Denver pedestrians if they know about the mole people have been popping up around the city over the past couple of weeks. The fliers are posted on streetlight poles in neighborhoods such as Baker and RiNo and spots off the beaten path, including behind a Walgreens sign. The artwork shows a humanoid figure with a mechanical head emerging from a manhole, with the Denver skyline and mapped constellation in the background.
"Do you know about the mole people? Report your sighting at 202-753-9926," the flier reads. "Something is suspected to be living underneath the city."
We called the number — and the Bureau did not disappoint.
After we left a brief voicemail, a man who goes only by Alex called us back within an hour. According to Alex, he is the director of the Bureau of Exploration, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. Dedicated to "the discovery and cataloging of strange locations and phenomena around them," the Bureau has recently launched a Denver chapter, he says, with explorations taking place in abandoned buildings, tunnels, rooftops and "anything that has become a forgotten space."
"So far, the sightings have been pretty frequent: strange figures emerging from manholes. Not quite normal-looking humans around tunnel entrances and the like," Alex says of Denver-based mole people reports.
Digging up dirt on the mole people is the Bureau's first large project in Denver, but it's far from the last. According to a Denver field agent who goes by Garrett Stopmotion or Agent Bones, he and his team have also created fliers asking residents to report any sightings of an entity he calls Worman.
"I haven't seen it myself, but I hear it could be an escaped pet from somebody, and images are circling around," Stopmotion says.
The Bureau is also investigating people from the future, interdimensional architecture and cone crabs — street crabs that use traffic cones as a shell. "If people get too close, they'll latch on, and you'll see it in the form of people walking around with cones on their heads," Stopmotion details.
But right now, Alex, Stopmotion and their fellow agents are zeroing in on the mole people.
"We have reason to suspect they've been broadcasting coded messages. Some of our agents have come across messages that are seemingly from underground," Alex says.
And what are the mole people saying?
"With the coded messages, the one thing we've deciphered is 'The rent is too damn high,'" Alex reports. "As far as we know, it's specific to Denver, but rent has been going up all over the place."
Stopmotion's intelligence is a bit more grim. He believes that missing dogs in Denver could be connected to the mole people, and that people around town are reporting "things being snatched and pulled into tunnels."
In case you're wondering if this is a Weekly World News article, don't worry: Everyone is in on the joke. Although the Bureau of Exploration doesn't break character, it's mostly here for artistic fun — and the mole people aren't meant to be an allegory or message about Denver's homeless population, both members assure us.
Art installations detailing entities such as worm man and other subterranean dwellers are hidden around Denver.
Garrett Stopmotion
"There are already locations that have been put up that we are not able to talk about. But if people were to look, primarily underground, they are to be found," he says.
The Bureau has members and installations in other major cities, and a group of artists on Colorado's Western Slope is working on cataloging various locations and entities as well, Stopmotion says. Neither he nor Alex would say when the Bureau was founded, but the origin story is part of the fun.
"The origins of the Bureau of Exploration are murky at best. Some of the Bureau's archivists believe that it was founded as a secret sub-department of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management; others, that it is an esoteric order descended from medieval occult universities; yet others, that it began as a myth or urban legend, and sometime and somehow materialized into physical existence," reads an Instagram post from the Bureau. "Its departments are endless in number, its protocols are byzantine, its objectives obscure, and it is funded by annually-renewed government grants long forgotten in paperwork labyrinths."
Social media users in Denver speculated that the Bureau's fliers were a subtle marketing campaign for Meow Wolf, Denver's famous interactive art playground. Stopmotion says there's no connection, but he and his agents hope to see people take a similar adventurous approach to finding the organization's work.
"It's definitely not that, but it is in a similar vein," he says. "Keep your eyes peeled for the places off the beaten path, and you might see something."
