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

Most people will recall that when the tragic events of September 11, 2001, occurred, the vice president, Richard “Dick” Cheney, was secretly whisked away to what has famously become known as an undisclosed location. Since that fateful day, the world’s media has spent a significant amount of time and effort trying to identify the secret locale to which Cheney and his posse quickly fled. There is certainly no shortage of notable candidates.

In May 2009, while attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington D.C., the vice president, Joe Biden, committed the ultimate cardinal sin — in the eyes of Cheney, Dubya, and Condoleezza, no doubt — when he openly revealed to those present his knowledge of a secret underground bunker housed beneath the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which, today, is the home of the vice president himself. As the story goes, upon getting the gig as V.P., Biden was given a tour of the entire facility by a young naval officer. This tour included the classified, below-ground area, which was protected by a huge steel door. During Biden’s tour the very same officer quietly informed him that after Cheney’s miraculous vanishing act on 9/11, it was from right within the heart of this sub-surface installation that Cheney’s personnel were conducting their damage assessment of the terror attacks.

When this particular story about Biden’s apparent spectacular slip of the tongue surfaced in the mainstream media, White House staffers — or, more correctly, damage-control experts — were quick to deny its validity. Presidential spin-doctors earnestly announced, practically bellowing, to all those willing to listen, that the whole thing was a big mistake. Honestly, it really was! What Biden was actually talking about was not a secret underground world at all, but merely an upstairs room in the building from where the regular, day-to-day work of the vice president is routinely undertaken. The story was a non-story, and those were the final words of the Oval Office. Not everyone, however, was buying the government’s attempts to smooth things over. In fact, unfortunately for Biden and the new Prez, who had quite enough on his plate already, practically no one was buying it.

During the latter months of 2002, for example, locals living in the area of the Observatory were plagued and annoyed, both day and night, by the rumbling sounds of extensive underground construction in their direct vicinity. Those same locals were duly sent letters from the superintendent of the installation informing them of the reportedly sensitive and classified nature of the construction program. Not only that, but the completion of the project, at the absolute earliest opportunity, was deemed to be both vital and a matter of national security. Of course, openly telling people something like that is a guarantee that gossip will spread like wild-fire all across those pleasant, white picket fences — and it most surely did spread. Maybe people, it seems, should have listened more closely to Biden’s words, rather than to those of White House aides. The Naval Observatory is not the only site that has been suggested as Cheney’s private hideaway, however.

Fingers have also been pointed at the Alternate Joint Communications Center, located within Raven Rock Mountain, Pennsylvania, only seven miles from Camp David, the presidential country retreat. Constructed in the early years of the 1950s, the installation — also referred to as Raven Rock and as Site-R — is designed to allow for at least some form of continuation of government in the event of a nuclear strike upon the nation’s capital. Whether Raven Rock itself can withstand a direct strike, however, is unknown. Nevertheless, the location is reported to be impressive and futuristic. Buried deeply within the mountain, it can comfortably house at least 3,000 people for a considerable period of time, overflowing, as it apparently is, with an abundance of food, fresh water, and clean air. Not bad, provided you happen to be on the inside, rather than the outside, when the gigantic mushroom clouds start blossoming. It is the perfect place for Vice President Cheney to have been secretly transferred.

On May 25, 2007, the Federal Register (the official journal of the government) stated in a Department of Defense policy document that dealt directly with Raven Rock Mountain, titled “Conduct on the Pentagon Reservation”: “The use of cameras or other visual recording devices on the Pentagon Reservation is prohibited…. It shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of the Pentagon Reservation without first obtaining permission of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, Installation Commander, or the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.”[24]

In non-bureaucratic terms, this means unless you have some weird masochistic desire to incur the wrath of just about every agency of the government that can ruin your day then stay the hell away from Raven Rock.

The 2012 Phenomena

There is a far more disturbing aspect to the story of secret underground installations constructed, or still undergoing construction, to house government officials in the event of a national emergency.

For a number of years, dark rumors have circulated that government agencies all around the world are secretly working to build or revamp huge underground realms to house senior, elite elements of the establishment who are aware that a worldwide, planetary upheaval will cause massive devastation on December 21, 2012, as many assert was predicted centuries ago by the Maya. Sounds too bizarre to be true? Or might those paranoid souls actually be correct? Let’s take a look at what we know, what we think we know, and what they may not be telling us, or preparing us for.

A great deal of what is spoken about, written about, and lectured on, when it comes the 2012 phenomenon, is, frankly, arrant nonsense that merely plays up to the worst fears and anxieties of the gullible, the wide-eyed, and the under-informed. Many of those fears and anxieties stem from deep misunderstandings about what, exactly, the Maya said, or did not say, 2,000 years ago. Plus, there is no doubt that with our civilization filled to bursting with tsunamis, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, Middle Eastern conflicts, avian flu, catastrophic oil leaks, drastic changes in weather, and melting ice caps, many people really do see the final days approaching.

Hollywood has hardly helped matters either. Blockbuster movies such as Children of Men, 28 Days Later, I am Legend, Knowing, Dawn of the Dead, and, of course, 2012, are great fun to watch, but they have all given end-of-the-world scenarios a lot of publicity, and mountains of depressing food for thought throughout the course of the last decade or so. And in the process, those movies have helped nurture apocalypse-driven belief systems that the end might be right around the corner. But is it?

The Mayas were a curious bunch, to be sure; and the means by which a determination has been made that something dramatic — for good, bad, or somewhere in between — may occur on December 21, 2012, is an extremely complex one. It all stems from something called the Mayan Long Count Calendar, which suggests that the end of one particular Earth-cycle will fall on December 21, 2012, some 5,125 years after that cycle commenced. Many people have come to the conclusion that something dramatic — for good, bad, or somewhere in between — will occur on that date. But a careful, unbiased study of Mayan lore reveals that, in actuality, the notion that the world will literally come to a horrific end, or that civilization will come crashing down around us on that day is very murky and difficult to fathom. For example, precisely nowhere in the Mayan legends are there any references to the sky falling in, the oceans overwhelming the land, or rolling firestorms overtaking the planet. In other words, the end of a cycle does not necessarily mean the end of all things. Rather, it’s the way in which that potentially emotive word, cycle, has been used that leaves its meaning so open to interpretation.

The Mayas believed that life on Earth progressed in cycles. Today, we are said to be living in the fourth cycle; the previous ones were, supposedly, failed attempts by the gods to create the perfect environment on our little world. But what comes next, in the fifth cycle, said to begin after December 12, 2012? Well, that’s the big question to which we are all eagerly awaiting the answer. (Some of us are, anyway.)

For some 2012 students, that doomsday date may mark the return of Nibiru — or Planet X — a world alleged to be a part of our own solar system, but whose orbit around the sun is so massive that only once in an extraordinarily long period of time does it ever come into view. Some say it’s going to do exactly that in December 2012. And guess what: Its orbit is going to bring it so close to the Earth that planet-wide disaster is all but inevitable. Nevermind that such a large planetary body should already be viewable via advanced telescopes if it’s already on its lumbering journey towards us. Nevermind that the entire Nibiru hypothesis was utterly unknown prior to 1995, when a woman named Nancy Lieder, who claimed to be in contact with aliens from a distant star-system called Zeta Reticuli was told that the return of Nibiru, and its attendant, powerful gravitational pull, would provoke a massive polar shift on our world that would result in unbridled chaos and death on an unimaginable scale. Nevermind that Lieder originally said the date of the disaster was going to be 2003. Now, we are told, it’s going to be 2012. Ho-hum.

Others suggest the end will come via:

The mighty wrath of a theoretical God.

A pulverizing comet.

A planet-swallowing black hole.

A nuclear confrontation in the Middle East that rapidly erupts into planet-wide atomic-warfare.

An unrelenting and incurable virus.

Hostile aliens.

There is also the view that the only thing likely to change is humankind’s mindset. In a best-case scenario, we will find ourselves on a new pathway toward world peace, enlightenment, and a renewed respect for our world and each other. Yeah, I know; kind of boring, and hardly the stuff of a big-bucks Hollywood movie. But it has been presented as a viable option.

On the other hand, we may all wake up safely on December 22 to find that absolutely nothing has changed in the slightest, and we can look forward to opening our Christmas presents only a few days later without fear of Armageddon. After all, not a single prophecy in the history of the planet has ever been proven conclusively to have come 100 percent true, so why should the 2012 fears be any different? It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask. Unfortunately, “nothing is going to happen” fails to strike much of a chord with the media, the populace, or the domain of onscreen entertainment. “Worldwide catastrophe is only months away” does, however. All of which brings us to a critical issue: the extent to which such End Times beliefs — valid or not so valid — may have even infected the collective mind of the world’s governments.

Norway

In 2010, a highly controversial communication allegedly written and circulated by an unnamed Norwegian politician was widely published across the Internet and attracted a flurry of major attention in the process. It has been dismissed by many as nothing more than a tasteless, fear-mongering hoax, which it may very well be. But it contains at least a couple of intriguing nuggets of verifiable truth, which has ensured the controversy remains. It reads as follows:

Hoax, joke, a distortion of reality, or an earnest and honest attempt to reveal the shocking truth of a dark fate that awaits us all in a very short time? We would all like to know the answer to that one. One thing is certain, however: The Norwegian government is preparing for the possibility of some sort of future, hypothetical cataclysmic event — not necessarily linked to 2012. It revolves around something called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is situated on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. The SGSV acts as a secure repository for countless plant and crop seeds, partly in the event that some sort of above-surface disaster will require a below-surface attempt to rejuvenate the Norwegian landscape and populace. Interestingly, within UFO research circles, there have been longstanding rumors of a flying saucer having slammed into the ground on Spitzbergen back in the early 1950s, instantly killing its crew on impact. But I digress…a worldwide disaster just around the corner is far more important than a 60-year-old UFO crash could ever be. (That is, unless you happened to have been one of the unlucky pilots of that UFO.)

As far back as 1984, Norway’s Nordic Gene Bank was quietly collecting seeds and storing them within the depths of an old coal mine on Spitzbergen. More than a quarter of a century later, things have been taken to a whole new level — and I do mean literally a whole new level: Extending nearly 400 feet into and under a mountain on the island and controlled by what is known as the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, the SGSV is an incredibly impressive setup, which would surely make the builders of Hangar 18 green with envy.

In February 2008, after almost two years of construction, the installation was proudly unveiled, amid the startling revelation that it was already home to more than 1.5 million distinct seed types. And with countless safeguards to protect its precious cargo (possibly even for a period of thousands of years), this static, Noah’s Ark of plants quickly caught the attention of the world’s media — particularly so when it was revealed that numerous countries had a financial stake in its construction and content, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Sweden. Even the Rockefeller Foundation and Bill Gates provided funding in the millions. Does Bill, perhaps, know something the rest of us don’t? Will he be making a quick trip to Spitzbergen around, say, December 18 or 19, 2012? Maybe he’ll have the presence of mind to fly in a week or two earlier, just to be safe.

Whatever the truth, the Norwegian government prefers to focus more upon the scientific importance of the project, rather than having to constantly answer awkward, survivalist questions about 2012. The fact is that the SGSV could, in an emergency situation, offer some degree of survival for a significant number of people. Providing you’re Norwegian. But what if, like most of the world’s population, you’re not? The word screwed might well pop up in the minds of many.

China

China has also been the target of claims in recent years that it has greatly expanded its plans to construct secret installations, either underground or burrowed right out of dense hills, as a result of a forthcoming, prophesied apocalypse. The most visible such place is located on the southernmost tip of Hainan Island, in the South China Sea, and has become known as Sanya Base. Although many Western military analysts believe the facility to be a secret installation designed for the construction, maintenance, and storage of an ever-growing armada of Chinese nuclear submarines, not everyone is certain that’s all it is. Vast tunnels more than 60 feet high have been photographed in and around the base and are said to expand into gigantic caverns that run far below the green hills. Maybe this really is merely China’s attempt to revamp its submarine fleet via the rapid construction of countless new underwater craft. However, the vast sculpting of Sanya is still underway right now, which has left more than a few 2012 researchers wondering if, time-wise, there might be a connection to the old Mayan predictions.

Russia

Some say Russia, too, is pulling out all the stops to complete the construction of a multitude of underground survival facilities before 2012 hits us, particularly in some of the more remote areas of the land. Two such bases are buried deep within the Yamantau and Kosvinsky Mountains in the Urals. And make no mistake: The installations are very real. Rudimentary construction at both sites was confirmed in the late 1970s by spy satellites of the United States’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Today, the bases have progressed significantly, and data recently collected by other U.S. satellites suggests that expansion of both places in the last few years has been widespread and intense. The Kosvinsky site, for example, is now protected by around 1,000 feet of granite. It is a self-contained hub capable, rumor has it, of comfortably housing in excess of 50,000 individuals. As for the Yamantau base…well, one U.S. intelligence source has suggested it is the size of the Washington, D.C. area within the Beltway.

Then there is Kapustin Yar, a secret Russian site established in 1946 in Astrakhan Oblast, between Volgograd and Astrakhan, dedicated to the research, development, and deployment of rocket-based technologies. Rumors coming out of Russia and data collected from NRO spy satellites, points toward continued underground digging and construction at Kapustin Yar. Why? To further advance Russian rocket research? Or to excavate a place to hide out when the storm hits?

Better known as the Russian Area 51, Zhitkur is a highly secret and incredibly well guarded installation built below a seemingly innocuous small town in the region of Volgograd Oblast. In the very same way that rumors and whistleblower testimony suggests that recovered alien spacecraft are being studied and test-flown at Area 51, Nevada, similar tales surround Zhitkur. Stories emanating from former employees of the base tell of top-secret studies of crashed UFOs. Darker accounts reveal that the Russians are hard at work developing deadly super-viruses at Zhitkur that will have the ability to lethally target specific races of people, while leaving others completely free of infection. All of those rumors are overshadowed by accounts similar to those emanating from Kapustin Yar — that extensive tunnel-boring activity is the order of the day at Zhitkur. And time, the unsettling rumors suggest, is rapidly running out.

People once sang, “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” Maybe today it’s the Russians’ turn to sing another song: “2012 is coming! 2012 is coming!”

With Norway, Russia, and China now dissected, what of the United States?

The United States

Skeptics of the doomsday theories surrounding 2012 suggest that if such a calamity really was imminent, then the United States would by now be fully engaged in such a tremendously large program to construct massive shelters all across the country that it would be nearly impossible to hide them from the populace and the media. Those same skeptics fail to note, however, that — as this book demonstrates — the United States is already peppered with an impressive number of large, strengthened, underground domains.

The U.S. government does not need to build more underground outposts to protect the elite in the event the Mayas really did get it right: They have had them for decades. Providing a safe haven for government and military officials in the event of a national emergency of apocalyptic proportions is something that has been planned for pretty much ever since the splitting of the atom in the 1940s. Unless the world is faced with an event in 2012 that exceeds even the horrendous destruction that a nuclear war would bring, safe havens like Raven Rock might provide just as much protection from Mayan prophecy as they might from a multi-megaton Chinese nuke.

A variation on the theory that the U.S. government has ample secure underground installations in which its highest echelons are guaranteed some degree of survival when December 21, 2012 strikes suggests that officialdom is also secretly preparing to utilize many of the natural caves and man-made mines that can be found all across the United States as refuges from whatever might occur on that fateful December day. This particular theory provoked a wealth of debate in the online realm of conspiracy theorizing when, on March 26, 2009, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) issued a widely circulated press release recommending that cavers and members of the public all across the United States should cease and desist from entering deep caves, caverns, and mines. Inevitably, this led to an unsettling rumor that the government was issuing this demand as a means to slowly and subtly commandeer and control such underground havens, and wrest them away from public access before 2012 arrives.

The official version of events was quite different, however. According to the FWS, their reason for requesting that the U.S. populace desist from entering such places was due to a fungal condition severely affecting the North American bat population: White-Nose Syndrome. In the words of the FWS: “The evidence collected to date indicates that human activity in caves and mines may be assisting the spread of WNS. This fungus grows best in the cold and wet conditions common to caves and abandoned mines and likely can be transported inadvertently from site to site on boots and gear of cave visitors. It is generally recommended that cavers avoid all caves and mines containing hibernating bats, even in states where WNS is not known to occur.”[26]

The FWS additionally called for a “voluntary moratorium, effective immediately, on all caving activity in states known to have hibernacula affected by WNS,” adding that “scientific activities that involve entry into caves or mines where bats reside should be evaluated to determine if the activity has the potential to facilitate the spread of WNS…. These recommendations will remain in effect until the mechanisms behind transmission of WNS are understood, and/or the means to mitigate the risk of human-assisted transport are developed.”[27]

Was this an ingenious cover story on the part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or is the whole idea just plain batty? Time may ultimately provide the answer. And if the 2012 theories do possess even a modicum of merit, the biggest conspiracy of all may well be contained in the following question: Why aren’t huge subsurface facilities — whether natural or man-made — being made ready for the rest of us who do not have the luxury of holding prestigious government positions?

An answer, perhaps, might be found by looking at the final scenes of the darkly comic 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove: When the U.S. president, his staff, and senior military personnel realize that human civilization is quickly nearing its end, they hastily envisage a plan in which, while everyone else is left to fry in a worldwide, radioactive nightmare, a small band of select governmental individuals will head deep underground, with a plentiful supply of resources, and a significant number of nubile chicks to help repopulate the decimated human race, before one day resurfacing to start all over again. Dr. Strangelove is harrowing, nightmarish, and fiction. Let’s hope that as December 21, 2012 gets closer and closer, this entire controversy, for which we have the Mayas to thank, proves to be fiction too.