Some of these were quite easy to find, though others took a while. When you click on
a link you’ll see the location through either Wikimapia or Yahoo, depending on which offered the
better view in that instance. Wikimapia uses the Google Maps database but allows
viewers to add labels. Its images are between very recent and three years old. The
Yahoo images average another year or so older.
1. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
J.S. Henrardi 15.06.1990 Wallonia, Belgium
OK, let’s take care of
AREA 51
right off the bat. For those of us who have been in cryonic suspension since the
late 1980s, this is the folkloric name for a heavily classified US government test
facility about 220 highway kilometers (140 miles) northwest of Las Vegas. It served as a
bombing range during World War II, but things really got going in 1955 when Lockheed
set up shop there to develop the U-2 spy plane.
Apparently a lot of other, progressively stranger and eerier craft have been and are
currently being test-flown in the area. Its airspace is most emphatically off-limits
to civilian and most military aircraft. Camouflaged rent-a-cops, known as cammo
dudes, in cooperation with Lincoln County sheriff deputies, have traditionally the riot
act to any and all rubberneckers who got too close. Lately their approach has been
more along the lines of “May we help you?”
The facility has had its ups and downs. In 1994, toxic injury lawsuits on behalf of
seven Area 51 employees (two of them deceased) against the Air Force and the EPA
were squelched on grounds of national security. Something crashed on August 4,
1999 and touched off an enormous fire that was still smoldering the next day. In
December of 2001 several dozen cammo dudes went on strike against their employer,
EG&G, complaining of abusive 9/11-inspired overtime and underpayment.
Not surprisingly,
Area 51
may be one of the world’s most heavily photographed and scrutinized landscapes
by now — at least from an extreme distance. You can zoom way in on this view
to about 1 foot per pixel. (Though you’ll see many informative labels,
allowing literally anybody to post them does have its downside: for
example, “Area 51 Marijuana Farm,” “Area 51 Sex Dungeon,”
and “Cemetery of People that Look at Area 51
on Wikimapia.”)
Your tax dollars also support many other junior Area 51s that most people, aside
from UFO/aviation aficionados and a few local residents, know nothing about. One is
a purported cattle ranch in California’s Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles
and west of Edwards Air Force Base.
IF YOU LOOK AT IT FROM ORBIT
or from a nearby hilltop you’ll see little in the way of cattle but quite a
few buildings, dish antennas, three runways marked to warn off ordinary air traffic,
and pylons to mount radar test targets. I once caught a very bright red-orange light
doing frenzied zigzags in the sky over this so-called Anthill facility during the
graveyard shift. Others report triangular affairs resembling the Belgian object
shown above left, creeping at walking speeds over the nearby and otherwise perfectly
prosaic tract communities of Palmdale and Lancaster.
You’ll find two similar outfits
here
and
here.
The former warns, in bold yellow letters, “UNSAFE FOR LANDING.” The
latter, redolent of surrounding onion fields and not all that far from the Roy
Rogers Museum, has some fascinating structures to zoom in on at the north end of its
faux runway. My guess for both is mostly radar research, but your fantasies
may vary.
At least if you blunder your way into a secret restaurant they probably
won’t handcuff you. As a rule these tend to be
mom-and-pop enterprises that don’t bother registering with the Health
Department and depend on word of mouth for their clientele. But here are two
genuine, super-exclusive establishments that [presumably] observe all proper
sanitation codes.
The first is
CLUB 33
in New Orleans square at Disneyland, originally built in the mid 60s as an apartment
suite for Walt Disney and his guests but after his unanticipated death converted
into a posh eatery. Membership is awarded as a perk to upper-eschelon executives of
Disney and other firms, but also sold to anyone willing to wait several years and
then pay an initiation fee of $9,500 and $3,175 yearly thereafter. Unlike the park,
Club 33 is open all year around.
The other is a Chinese-themed restaurant,
THE PAIZA CLUB
on the 36th floor of the Venetian Resort Hotel in Las Vegas. It was originally open
only to Asian high-rollers willing to gamble $500,000 or more at the casino; but
business was shaky and so its proprietors had to lower their standards to the
riffraff of mere $100,000 bettors. I imagine they serve real bird’s nest soup
there — sustainably harvested, one hopes.
The next location isn’t really secret, as such, but all activities there are
very much so because it houses one of the planet’s most isolated
indigenous tribes, the Sentinelese. It’s
NORTH SENTINEL ISLAND,
part of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in the Indian Ocean. It’s entirely
tree-covered as you can see and about 80 km2 (30 mi2) in size
or a little larger than Manhattan.
Those few who have seen the Sentinelese describe them as short and very dark-skinned
with peppercorn-like hair. Though basically pre-neolithic they also salvage scrap
metal from nearby shipwrecks for tools and weapons. Contact with outsiders is
extremely infrequent and they greet most would-be visitors with swarms of arrows or
at least threatening gestures. In 2006 the Sentinelese hacked two Indian fishermen
to death who drifted too close to the island while sleeping off a bender.
Our final hush-hush site is known as the
SKINWALKER RANCH, Bigelow Ranch, Sherman Ranch, or Gorman Ranch.
According to the story, a Terry and Gwen Sherman (or possibly Gorman —
either or both may be pseudonyms), bought a Utah ranch just north of Fort Duchesne in 1994
and planned to raise cattle there.
This turned out to be a lousy idea, because every manner of paranormal activity
assaulted them from every angle of the property: disembodied voices, bizarre craft
including a refrigerator-like object with a blinking light, glowing orbs,
underground machinery noises, strange doglike creatures, a transitory
circle on the grass through which could be seen blue sky, various phantoms,
household objects levitating, superexotic-looking birds presumed not to have been
endemic, and so on. Oh, and more than a dozen of the family’s cattle turned up
strangely mutilated.
Terry and Gwen couldn’t live with this sort of thing, so a non-profit National
Institute for Discovery Science founded by hotel magnate Robert Bigelow took the
ranch off their hands for $200,000 and ran an elaborate series of scientific tests.
This generated a flood of abstruse pdf documents on NIDS’s website and
a hair-raising book,
but independent corroboration for any of this weirdness has been elusive. Now that
the Skinwalker Ranch’s location is largely out of the bag, they’ve
beefed up security and trespassers are especially unwelcome.
