"...The Los Angeles Times ran a spate of features poking fun of the excavation team until actual evidence of tunnels was discovered. Then the Times ran a brief news item, one paragraph long, dryly noting that "evidence" of tunnels had been found, and never mentioned the subject again. The local Beach Reporter covered the story without a blush: "parents began to dig with shovels, allegedly in an area pointed out by a nine-year-old former student of the McMartin preschool, who told them to dig behind a cement planter in the northeast corner. When parents unearthed several broken turtle shells and a few bones, they stopped digging and notified the district attorney's office."
Once the entrance was exposed, Stickel used remote sensing equipment to read the terrain conductivity of the empty lot next to the preschool. The survey was conducted by a respected geophysicist, Robert Beer, working with an electromagnetic scanner. The tunnel opening was found precisely where children said it would be.
Stickel: "Some of the children had stated there had been animal cages placed along that wall and that they had entered a tunnel under the cages." A foreign soil deposit was found near the foundation. Clearing the anomaly with a backhoe, they found the roots of an avocado tree cut to clear a path for the tunnel. The roots had been cut with a hand saw and torn away, and shreds dangled on either wall of the tunnel.
That's the moment editors at the Times chose to pull reporters off the story. All other news outlets rapidly followed suit.
McMartin Preschool Revisited
Allegations of secret tunnels
An excavation undertaken in May 1990 claimed to reveal tunnels under the McMartin Preschool. [2] A relevant quote from the summation is written as follows: "If the stories of the children were bogus fantasies, there is no excuse for the tunnels discovered under the school. If there really were tunnels, there is no excuse for the glib dismissal of any and all of the complaints of the children and their parents." The archaeologist's claims were refuted in a 1995 article published by the Institute for Psychological Therapies. The study showed that the concrete slab floor was undisturbed except for a small patch where the sewer line was tapped into. Once the slab was removed, there was no sign of any materials to line or hold up any tunnels, and there was no way for the defendants to fill in any purported tunnels once the investigation began. The report concluded that any disturbed soil under the slab was from the sewer line, and from construction fill buried under the slab, before it was poured. Some dated fill material under the slab was from the year 1940. [3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_Preschool