Where Is The Hunting Party's Top-Secret Prison The Pit Located & Is It Real?

The Pit is located inside an empty nuclear missile silo deep underground in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Its rigid containment protocols are breached in the pilot episode following a massive explosion that allows an undisclosed number of felons to escape.

While the prison itself isn't a real place (more on that below), its subterranean complex is actually based in truth. Thanks to its sparse population and wide-open swaths of land, Wyoming became an ideal state to house part of America's growing arsenal of atomic intercontinental ballistic missiles (otherwise known as ICBMs) in the early decades of the Cold War.

According to Annie Jacobsen's Nuclear War: A Scenario, the United States is currently home to 400 nuclear missile silos, all of which are "strategically positioned across America (west of the Mississippi River) — in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Colorado. They’ve been built beneath private ranches, inside national forests, on Native American reservations and family farms. Some are outside small towns, others down the road from local mini-malls. A few facilities are so remotely located, it takes missile crews several hours to get there by vehicle, on good-weather days."

The Pit is fictional and does not exist in our world.

When NBC Insider spoke with co-showrunners Bailey and Coburn, they confirmed that they actively avoided making 1:1 comparisons between the fictional Pit and controversial real-life prisons such as Guantanamo Bay detention camp (often referred to as GTMO or GITMO).

"We talk a lot about staying away from the GITMO of it all," Bailey said. "We don’t want this to feel like a terrorist, human rights violation-type thing even though it is a human rights violation-type of thing. We wanted it to always feel — this is going to sound weird — but we always wanted [the series] to feel fun. It’s crazy and it’s weird and it’s dark. We always want it to be fun and interesting and feel like a fun ride."

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Coburn offered up a different comparison: "MK-Ultra is the thing we probably talk most about," he said, referring to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's controversial human experimentation program Project MK-Ultra, which ran from 1953 until 1973.

The widely condemned program was undertaken by the CIA to develop procedures and identify drugs to use during interrogations in the hopes they could force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The now-defunct program is the subject of many conspiracy theories to this day and continues to inspire and influence pop culture.

After being relegated to imprisonment at The Pit, the dangerous criminals underwent mysterious experimentation whose consequences we'll likely see play out throughout the series.

"They’ve changed, and the change that occurred in them is manifesting itself in their behavior," Coburn said of the killers. "So it’s this process of trying to figure out who this person is now, why they’re doing what they’re doing."

RELATED: Is The Hunting Party's Premiere-Episode Serial Killer Richard Harris Based on a Real Killer?

Bailey added: "We had a term in the writers’ room. You talk a lot about the MO of your killer, right? We always had an ‘OG MO,’ the original MO, and then there was The Pit, and then there was the post-Pit MO. And … there’s always a change to what they’re doing based on the time in The Pit. So there’s investigating that has to happen, obviously, but it always comes back to their experience in The Pit and how it’s changed their behavior and how [the team] then gets ahead of them."