Black Mesa Research Facility

Black Mesa Advanced Research Facility

Logo used from 1991 to 2000, up until its dissolution.
The above-ground section of the facility, with most of it's square footage being underground.
Former type	Privately-held company
Industry	Advanced Physics
Fate	Defunct; Resonance Cascade
Founded	January 11, 1945 (1945-01-11)
Founder	Wallace Breen
Defunct	December 12, 2000 (2000-12-12)
Headquarters	Black Mesa, New Mexico, United States of America
Key people	Wallace Breen Gordon Freeman Isaac Kleiner Eli Vance Arne Magnusson Barney Calhoun
Operating income	US$383.3 billion (2000)
Net income	US$235.3 billion (2000)
Total assets	US$3.5 trillion (2000)
Number of employees	2,083 (December 2000) 236 (January 2001)
Divisions	Black Mesa Advanced Physics Division Black Mesa Astrophysics Division Black Mesa Atomic Physics Division Black Mesa Classical Physics Division ... (List of Black Mesa divisions)
Subsidiaries	White Forest Research Facility Port Richmond Water Pollution Control Plant (25%)

Black Mesa Research Facility (or officially; the Black Mesa Advanced Research Facility, and formerly; Black Mesa Research Foundation (1945–1956)) was an American information, data, advanced physics and federally funded research and development center in Black Mesa, New Mexico, United States. Founded in 1945, the laboratory was owned by private holder, Wallace Breen, who was also the founder of Black Mesa in 1945, and was administered by University of New Mexico's Physics Institute. While the facility ostensibly conducts military-industrial research, its secret experiments into teleportation have caused it to make contact with the alien world of Xen, and its scientists covertly studied its life-forms and materials. In a catastrophic event known as the Black Mesa Incident, the anti-mass spectrometer experiment 12-06-2001 conducted on Xen Crystal Sample GG-3883, caused a resonance cascade that caused the destruction of the facility before the destruction of the site by a nuclear weapon on 7 December 2000.

The science foundation was created between Wallace Breen, Jonathan Whitehead, and a couple other colleagues at the University of New Mexico's Physics Institute, who began experimenting with advanced physics after receiving governmental support by the team behind the Manhattan Project, and the (at the time) currently active Nuclear Weapons Program in the United States. Breen and Whitehead had temporary positions in the Nuclear Weapons program, which assisted in their high-ranking positions in the Black Mesa Research Foundation as they held high ranks in the team given to them by unknown benefactors that Wallace Breen has never described, a so called G-Man. In the middle of the 20th century, Black Mesa had purchased the Black Mesa Facility from the United States government as it had been abandoned due to issues with water-leakage, and with the prior experience with nuclear weapons by Breen and Whitehead, were given limited autonomy with the nuclear weapons located at the site, forcing them to disassemble the nuclear weapons if they were to hold such material.

In the late 20th century, Black Mesa had grown a positive reception in the Physics & Science field, having contributed much to the advancement of both fields through their teleportation technology that they had mastered through out the 60s and 70s, being one of the main rivals against former Research and Development company, Aperture Science, who had lost their spot as the number one science company in the country to Black Mesa themselves, having gone bankrupt by 1997. Black Mesa had access to advanced teleportation technology and alternate dimensions, but had no access to studying materials from the alternate dimensions, until the creation of the Anti-Mass Spectrometer by the Sector C team, gained notoriety from the Science field because of its usefulness in identifying new materials on Earth and off-world, becoming incredibly popular amongst scientists who attempted to replicate such machines, Arbeit Laboratories being a famous example of one.

Black Mesa was previously famous for their teleportation technology among the physics science field, and held the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize for the Sector C Anti-Mass Spectrometer team, which included Colette Green, Cheryl Hicks, Gina Cross, Eli Vance, Isaac Kleiner, and the head of the facility, Wallace Breen. Until December 6, 2000, which was the date of the aforementioned Resonance Cascade that destroyed the facility, and also caused the Xen Invasion and later Seven Hour War. In the early morning, a system crash caused by a massive email caused the Black Mesa IT Division and Security Division to lose all data on their files, having to recover them from the servers, which also added onto by the fact the Anti-Mass Spectrometer was forced to turn to 101 percent by Black Mesa Administrator Breen, which caused several electronics in the facility to fail or explode from the overexertion of the technology at the facility. Gordon Freeman was later described as being tardy to his job as the materials handler for the experiment, before physically pushing the sample into the Anti-Mass Spectrometer as it functioned, and causing the explosion that caused the Resonance Cascade.