Went straight to the aliens, you did. Maybe it's random chance of the particular sci-fi we've read or seen. But aliens weren't my first guess, I thought of tongue-in-cheek "Nazis on the Moon!" stories, and the common trope of a secret asteroid belt base, for example in Harry Turtledove's "Colony" books, and a couple more I've read recently whose titles are gone.
While most of the serious sci-fi tales of secret asteroid bases take place in the future and thus rely on advanced technology, Turtledove's story and the Nazis-on-the-Moon stories are based on the premise of just barely making it on tech from the 40s to the 60s (Turtledove used Orion nuclear bomb pushers).
I'd say our present-day technology is comfortably up to the job, if we just want to get it done in a hurry instead of doing it "right", as in wanting to grab the big prize before somebody else. So I'll assert that a covert human base is no more or no less plausible than a covert alien base. Somebody could have just barely pulled it off in the last few years.
I rest my case.
Science Fiction » in reply to I've often fantasized about that myself.
Iron Sky
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