Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

The Second World War was six years of carnage that has caused decades of discussion. One particularly tantalizing topic relates to certain secret wartime activities undertaken by the Nazis: namely, the plundering of priceless historical treasures by Adolf Hitler’s hordes as a means to fund his war effort, and Nazi Germany’s overriding fascination with religious artifacts. What does any of this have to do with the theme of the book you hold in front of you right now, you ask? Quite simply, there is a substantial body of data available suggesting that much of that plundered material, as well as certain unique items of quite literally biblical proportions may, nearly 70 years after the war’s conclusion, remain hidden in prominent facilities, including, incredibly, the Vatican and the Smithsonian.

Just like the maniacal Hitler himself, a significant portion of high-ranking Nazis, such as Richard Walther Darré, Rudolf Hess, Otto Rahn, and Heinrich Himmler, had major, unsettling obsessions with the supernatural and the mystical. Rahn, for example, who made his mark in a wing of Nazi Germany’s greatly feared SS, spent a significant period of time deeply engaged in a quest to find the so-called Holy Grail, which, according to Christian teachings, was the dish, plate, or cup used by Jesus at the legendary Last Supper. The Grail was said to possess awesome and devastating powers, and the Nazis were desperate to locate it, in order to utilize those powers as weapons of war against the Allies. Thankfully, the plans of the Nazis did not come to fruition, and the Allies were not pummeled into the ground by the mighty fists of God.

Heinrich Himmler, acknowledged by many historians as the driving force behind such research, was, perhaps, the most obsessed with the occult. In 1935, he became a key player in the establishment of the Ahnenerbe, which was basically the ancestral heritage division of the SS. With its work largely coordinated according to the visions of one Dr. Hermann Wirth, the chief motivation of the Ahnenerbe was to conduct research into the realm of religious archaeology; however, its work also spilled over into areas such as the occult, primarily from the perspective of determining whether a particular artifact was a tool that, like the Holy Grail, could be used to further strengthen the Nazi war machine.

Then there is Trevor Ravenscroft’s book The Spear of Destiny, which detailed a particularly odd fascination Adolf Hitler had with the fabled spear, or lance, that supposedly pierced the body of Jesus during the crucifixion. Ravenscroft’s book maintained that Hitler deliberately started the Second World War with the intention of trying to secure the spear, with which he was said to be obsessed — again as a weapon to be used against the Allies. So the account went, however, Hitler utterly failed. Ravenscroft suggested that as the conflict of 1939–1945 came to its end, the spear came into the hands of U.S. General George Patton. According to legend, losing the spear would result in death — a prophecy that that was said to have been definitively fulfilled when Hitler committed suicide.

Perhaps not every ancient artifact remained quite so elusive to Hitler. One rumor suggests that an attempt on the part of the Nazis to locate the remains — or, at least, some of the remains — of the legendary Ark of Noah was actually successful. It’s a strange and secret story that takes us from the icy-cold peak of Turkey’s Mount Ararat to a classified location in one of the United States’s most cherished and historic locales: the Washington, D.C. — based Smithsonian Institution.

The Bible states: “God said unto Noah…. Make thee an ark of gopher wood…. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.” A cubit roughly equates to 20 inches, thus making the Ark 500 feet in length, 83 feet in width, and 50 feet in height. In addition, it is said that the Ark was powerful enough to withstand the cataclysmic flood that allegedly overtook the globe and lasted for 40 terrible days and nights. As legend has it, when the flood waters finally receded, the Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat.

Exactly why Hitler was after the Ark is unclear, but the fact that he was hot on its trail is indisputable. Intelligence files generated by Britain’s highly secretive MI6 in 1948 state that, in the closing stages of the war, rumors were coming out of Turkey that German military personnel were then engaged in flying a sophisticated spy balloon (based upon radical Japanese designs) over Mount Ararat, attempting to photograph the area. Then, if the operation proved successful in locating the Ark, they planned to recover it — or whatever might be left of it, given the passage of time and the harsh conditions on the perpetually snow-capped mountain.

The Japanese, who were closely allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, were indeed master builders of advanced balloons. Arguably one of the best-kept secrets of the Second World War, the “balloon bomb,” or Fugo as it was generally called, was a classified weapon constructed and flown by the Japanese military. No less than 9,000 such devices were built and employed against the United States. More than 32 feet in diameter when inflated, the balloons were constructed out of paper or rubberized silk and carried below them payloads of small bombs powerful enough to wreak havoc if stumbled upon at the wrong moment. They were intensively launched from the east coast of Honshu during a nearly six-month period beginning in the latter part of 1944, and traveled more than 6,000 miles eastward across the Pacific to North America. The vast majority of the Fugos failed to reach their planned targets, but U.S. Army estimates suggested no less than a thousand made it to the States, the majority having come down in such West Coast states as Oregon, British Columbia, and Washington.

Thus, given what we know about their expertise in such areas, the Japanese may very well have helped their Nazi comrades locate Noah’s Ark by providing some form of highly advanced reconnaissance balloon that could be directed over Mount Ararat. Available MI6 files are frustratingly incomplete — maybe too conveniently and suspiciously incomplete — and do not reveal whether or not the operation was in any way successful.

Mysteries at the Smithsonian

Witness testimony has suggested a fantastic scenario that some see as far-fetched: Certain sections of the famous Smithsonian Institution are off-limits to the general public due to certain unacknowledged archaeological wonders contained therein. Indeed, available data suggests that (in an eerily parallel to the final scenes of the 1981 Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark) deep below the Smithsonian there exist secret chambers housing anomalies from humankind’s ancient past — perhaps even the fragmentary remains of what was once known as Noah’s Ark.

Said witness, an employee of the Smithsonian named David Duckworth, revealed that in the fall of 1968 a number of crates were delivered to the particular section of the Smithsonian to which he was assigned, and provoked a significant amount of interest on the part of senior personnel. The crates contained within them ancient pieces of wood and a selection of very old tools. Possibly echoing — or directly connected to — the story of a Nazi/Japanese balloon utilized to find the Ark, Duckworth stated that the unique stash of material contained photographs reportedly taken from a balloon, and showed a ship-like object partly buried in the ice of a mountainous location. On speaking with colleagues, Duckworth was quietly told that the site displayed in the photographs was Mount Ararat, and the ship in question was Noah’s Ark.

Five days later, the excited atmosphere began to change. All discussions of the Ark came to a sudden halt as people were told to keep their mouths firmly shut, and the priceless evidence was gathered up and removed to a new location. Duckworth, after making the mistake of speaking with people outside of the Smithsonian about the Ark rumors, paid an ominous price: he was visited at work by two men who identified themselves as agents of the FBI. The visiting special agents made it clear to Duckworth that his very talkative mouth was making significant waves; he had been somewhere he shouldn’t have been, and had seen things he had no business seeing. End of story.

Had the Nazis really found Noah’s Ark? Did their Japanese-assisted, balloon-based operation actually work? And did that same discovery somehow, years later, secretly fall into the hands of the U.S. government and the Smithsonian? Even if there does exist a secure vault — or series of vaults — at the Smithsonian where such legendary materials are still being maintained and carefully studied, officialdom is today saying nothing of any significance on the matter of that old wooden ship.

Nazi Gold

Here’s another important question: If such an ambitious Nazi program to recover whatever was left of the Ark did go ahead, then how was it funded? Similar to a lot of the Nazis’ unsuccessful efforts to overwhelm the Allies, the funding may have come via controversial means.

As the hordes of Adolf Hitler took on the combined might of Western Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union, as a means to ensure that its war efforts proceeded at an ever-increasing pace, the behemoth-like Nazi regime came up with a bright idea: They plundered, stole, and confiscated as much gold, treasure, and other priceless items as they could from those nations on whose territory they had left their terrifying marks. They then duly (and secretly) transferred the spoils to certain sympathetic banks (including the Swiss National Bank) in return for hard currency. The stark nature of this massive program was detailed in a document generated by the U.S. government on June 2, 1998, titled “U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations With Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury.”

Stuart Eizenstat, who served in the Carter administration in the position of Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and under the Clinton administration in the positions of Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Undersecretary of State for Economic Business and Agricultural Affairs, stated on publication of the report that: “The Swiss National Bank must have known that some portion of the gold it was receiving from the Reichsbank was looted from occupied countries, due to the public knowledge about the low level of the Reichsbank’s gold reserves and repeated warnings from the Allies.”[13]

Findings suggested that Switzerland had been the recipient of more than $400 million in gold plundered by Nazi Germany. That figure, however, was later upped to around $440 million, as Eizenstat explained: “New sources recently came to light that provided additional information about the infamous Melmer account at the Reichsbank, named after Bruno Melmer, the SS officer who was responsible for taking materials, possessions from concentration camp victims and others at killing centers and depositing them in an SS account in the Reichsbank.”[14]

Moreover, $300 million — the equivalent of a stunning $2.6 billion in the economy of 1997—in Nazi gold found its secret way to such neutral countries as Portugal, Spain, and Sweden at the height of hostilities, no less than 75 percent of which was clandestinely channeled via the Swiss National Bank. And there was an even more controversial story to come, involving nothing less than the secretive world of the Vatican.

During the Second World War, the Nazis established what was, essentially, a puppet outfit in Croatia called the Ustashi that was as ruthless as it was relentless in stealing gold and other items of great value from the populace. Around $80 million was secured by the Ustashi for Nazi military programs, some of which, in the latter stages of the war, also reached Swiss banks. Eventually a very big problem surfaced: The Ustashi was reliant upon Germany for financial support, as well as for security and military aid. With the irreversible collapse of the Nazi regime midway through 1945, however, the abandonded Ustashi began to spiral downward into splintered factions and unrelenting chaos. Seeing the end as being well and truly near, its high-ranking officials hot-footed it to Italy, and ultimately got a warm welcome from Rome’s San Girolamo pontifical college. It was run by one Father Dragonivic, and almost certainly received significant monetary funding from the Ustashi, possibly even with Vatican assent and knowledge.

On October 21, 1946, one Harold Glasser, the Director of Monetary Research at the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., received a Top Secret communication from a certain Emerson Bigelow, an agent of the Treasury. Bigelow wrote that he had learned from a reputable Italian informant that, of the significant funds secured be the Ustashi movement, no less than approximately 200 million Swiss Francs found their way to the Vatican and were held deep within its vaults for safekeeping. According to further intelligence data, Bigelow added, a significant percentage of this amount may have been secretly dispatched to Spain and Argentina via a Vatican pipeline. Bigelow conceded, however, there was a possibility this was merely a carefully arranged cover story, and that the vast sum may never have left its secret storage area — the heart of the Vatican, in other words.

Notably, additional reports generated during the same timeframe by elements of the U.S. Intelligence community suggested that Bigelow’s information was right on the money, so to speak, and that a massive 200 million Swiss francs was secretly delivered to the Institute for Works of Religion — the Vatican Bank, as it is generally known. To this day, not surprisingly, both the bank and Vatican officials deny any knowledge of such a controversial transfer of funds essentially done on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Seven decades after Hitler and his cronies were defeated much of this saga is still engulfed in a muddy haze of secrecy. Yet, the allegation that somewhere, deep inside the secret vaults and tunnels of the Vatican, there exists a repository for Nazi-purloined treasures just will not go away.

Hungary’s Crown

The Holy Crown of Hungary, also known as the Crown of Saint Stephen, has a similarly remarkable history, to say the least. Believed to have been fashioned in the 1100s, it has been stolen and recovered on countless occasions, such as when Lajos Kossuth, the Regent-President of Hungary, fled the country with it after the collapse of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 and then buried it in a forested area in Transylvania. By 1853, the crown had been successfully recovered and was returned to Buda Castle, Budapest, from where Kossuth had originally pilfered it. But the adventures of the crown were far from over: it was eventually destined to travel overseas.

As the Second World War came to a crashing end for Hitler and Co., and as the Russians were publicly demonstrating their strength all across Hungary, the crown was secretly handed over to the U.S. Army’s 86th Infantry Division to ensure that it stayed out of the hands of the Kremlin. A secure, heavily guarded location was chosen to house the priceless, legendary item: none other than the United States Bullion Depository in Kentucky, commonly known as Fort Knox, which holds approximately 2.5 percent of all the gold known to have been refined throughout human history. The crown remained there until January 6, 1978, when it was returned to the people of Hungary, with much fanfare and gratitude given to the United States and President Jimmy Carter for ensuring that the Soviets never succeeded in getting their hands on the legendary crown.

This would be just another story of political intrigue, were it not for one very strange, and previously secret fact: According to a collection of State Department memoranda of 1956 and 1957, at one point in the 1950s, as a means to ensure that the true nature of what they were guarding remained a murky secret, the soldiers at Fort Knox were first told that the crate containing the crown held the wings and engine of a flying saucer! They were later advised that its contents were actually recovered German artwork, gold, and other items of priceless historical value.