6 Massive Secret Operations That Are Hidden All Around You
Ever had a sneaking suspicion that there's another world, a secret world, hidden just out of sight of this one? Good news: There totally is! Bad news: There's a reason they're hiding that secret world from you ...
L.A.'s Urban Oil Rigs
The City of Angels: It's where many of our favorite celebrities work, play, go to rehab, get breast implants, relapse and drive expensive cars into trees. It's a land of magic, is what we're saying. But it's also home to the third largest oil field in the U.S. Now, isn't it a shame that all of that sweet Texas tea should go untapped, just because it's sitting underneath the nation's second biggest city?
Well, don't worry: It isn't. In fact, oil rigs have been placed all over L.A. and are pumping away in secret even now. The city was so caught up in oil fever that in 1930, 95 percent of the town residents passed a law allowing them to drill in their own yards. Of course the modern LA resident would never allow one of the largest oil operations in the country to go down right in their own back yard. So where'd all those rigs go?
See despite it's reputation for being not in Texas, L.A. has been an oil town from the time black gold was discovered there in 1892 right up until today. As the city's hippie clogged arteries began to expand out over the reserve, oil companies got creative. After refining a new urban design in the 1930s, the wells were all but soundproofed; an innovation that allowed oil companies to start playing "hide the pumping station."
Get your minds out of the gutter. We're still talking about oil rigs here.
Where Are They Hiding?
On street corners, on school grounds, tucked away behind shopping malls--hidden rigs are literally everywhere in Los Angeles. There's an unmarked building on Pico Boulevard in West Hollywood which houses one of the biggest hidden oil operations in the city. From the site, 58 wells have been directionally drilled up into the Beverley Hills area. Here's what 58 oil wells looks like everywhere else in the world.
And now here's the building in LA, busily drinking the milkshake right out from under thousands of unsuspecting Bel Aire residents as you read this.
But you know how the story goes: You go to Hollywood all hopes and dreams of making it big, and when things don't work out, you find yourself covered in crude, toiling inside a clock tower that houses a secret oil rig in Santa Monica. It's practically a cliche.
Hidden Government Bunkers
Government officials are elected to look out for you. They only want to make sure that you're healthy, safe and well protected... right after they make sure that they're healthier, safer and better protected. That's why FEMA has spent 1.3 billion dollars building secret bunkers all across the United States solely to house government officials in case the unthinkable happens. Cracked has a similar plan for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.
Project Greek Island was one of these secret bunkers. The U.S. government made a deal in the late 1950s with The Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia to use their building as a government facility to house Congress in the event of a nuclear war. Construction on a secret bunker beneath the hotel began under the guise of an "above-ground renovation" on the West Virginia wing. They dug out the area beneath the new wing as it was being built and constructed their own little addition: a massive, multi-level installation with walls of reinforced concrete and 30-ton blast doors. Right beneath the tourist resort.
Project Greek Island was operated under a dummy company named Forsythe Associates. It was completed, but went entirely unused during the 30 years before the Washington Post brought public attention to its existence. Once exposed, the project was shut down. Tax dollars at work, ladies and gentleman: They're building play-forts with it.
Where Are They Hiding?
Similar government bunkers could be anywhere. If they were able to slip one under this beast of a hotel--a place so public it's actually a tourist destination--there's no telling where else they were able to hide the others.
Disguised Cell Phone Towers
Cell phones are a massively expanding market, which is odd because they're already ubiquitous. But to keep up with increased use and the occasional unfrozen caveman just signing up, they need to build cell towers. Big, ugly, eyesore cell towers. But if that's the case, where are they? Have you seen new ones being built recently? No? That's because they're all over the place; you just can't see them. They're disguising them
Where Are They Hiding?
There's one outside your window if you know where to look. San Bernardino County in California alone has over 500 cloaked cell antennas.
The trend started small at first, only in upscale communities with tight zoning regulations, but now these towers are everywhere, even secretly shaping our cities at times. Murrieta, California, for example, recently approved a proposal by T-Mobile to build a 50-foot cell tower disguised as a clock tower. Which will go entirely unused as a time piece, because everybody's got clocks in their cell phones already.
Missile Silos
At first, missile silos were set up as above ground launch facilities, completely out in the open. But then came the Cold War, and after the successful orbit of Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. started to feel a bit uncomfortable with the entirety of their weapons just sitting there, visible from space and being tripped over by drunken farmers. So they were all relocated to where they'd be safe from a nuclear blast and out of sight: underground.
And we all know that, right? The missile surfacing from beneath the army base is a war movie trope. The surprising thing, though? There's often no base.
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. had an estimated 1,000 Minuteman Missiles hidden in silos across the country. But don't worry; fewer than 500 even remain active today.
Where Are They Hiding?
Well, if we knew that they'd have to kill us. But we know they were literally everywhere, and we've got proof: After the Cold War, silos that were emptied were just left to the elements, no longer serving any purpose. But recently, abandoned bases have been appearing on the real estate market. For a missile base that cost the U.S. government three million dollars to build in the 1960s, you can snatch one up for as low as $100,000 and live in it.
Whether or not you want to spend your free time plotting the death of charming British men in tuxedos is entirely up to you. The methods of camouflage vary:
Disguised Government Buildings
The government likes their privacy and they go to great lengths to keep it. But not all of their secret facilities are located in labyrinthine cave systems, inside volcanoes or hovering in a cloud bank. They have thousands of perfectly normal buildings spread all over the country that they use to conduct their secret operations.
They're usually grouped in purposefully pedestrian-looking office buildings, discreetly unlabeled and carefully designed to be utterly forgettable. And we're not talking about the DMV here. These are serious agencies: The Fort Meade cluster in Florida is the largest of these facilities, and it's the headquarters of the NSA. The area, sitting right out there in the open, is so top secret that if you approach it, your GPS will send you into a series of U-turns thanks to the government jamming the signal.
If you take a picture near one of these buildings, uniformed guards will emerge--oftentimes from concealed security stations--to ask you for your personal information and to delete the pictures from your camera. Keith McCammon experienced this first hand when he accidentally photographed an unmarked office building which turned out to be the location of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Where Are They Hiding?
No, that isn't a Wal-Mart behind this dude's farm. It's a office.
We all know how you spot government hideouts: Be on the lookout for black SUVs, barbed wire and help wanted signs for local restaurants and coffee houses. Wait... what?
The "top secret" part of the U.S. government employs over 845,000 people, and when they want to recruit new workers, they can't really put an ad on Monster.com for super-spies. Instead they put out signs like the one above: "TS" means "top secret" and "SCI" stands for "Sensitive Compartmented Information." Only people with top secret security clearances can attend these normal-seeming "job fairs," which probably explains why nobody has ever, ever gotten a job out of one.
Underground Homeless Cities (Real Mole People)
Life on the street is tough, but what options does a homeless person have when the busy, unforgiving city is becoming too much for them to handle? Why, they just go underground! Underground: Where no cops or street-punks will hassle you. Just mole rats and the lava people...
Where Are They Hiding?
Beneath the casinos and the flashing neon lights of the Las Vegas strip lies a labyrinth of tunnels that were initially built to protect the city from flash floods. But now they've become a place where the homeless live sheltered from the weather, rent free.
There are over 200 miles of tunnels under the city and any trip down into them reveals a vast network of homeless shelters. We aren't talking cardboard boxes here, either: They have some pretty sophisticated homes.
New York City also has abandoned tunnel systems that the homeless have found shelter in. The AmTrak Freedom Tunnel was built in the 1930s but, as it served no real purpose, it was quickly abandoned. For over 30 years, it acted as a shelter for huge tribes (that's what you call groups of hobos, right? Or is it a gaggle?) of homeless people. But it wasn't just sleeping in the dirt: They formed complex societies complete with mayors and elaborate social structures. They were so resourceful that many of them even siphoned water and electricity from the city and built ad-hoc underground, multi-story homes out of whatever was available.
These "tribes" were the inspiration for both a book and a documentary called Dark Days, which sadly revealed that the Freedom Tunnel was eventually emptied out by AmTrak. But don't be sad: There are many, many more abandoned underground tunnels in NYC for you to get murdered in.
For more more things you most definitely missed, check out 7 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden in Famous Works of Art and 5 Species That Seem to be Trying to Take over the Earth.
And stop by Linkstorm (Updated 08.23.10) to see just what's hidden in the Internet.
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