Map of Phoenix

There is another America out there, an America of top secret programs, facilities, and installations protected by a wall of secrecy, deception, and misinformation. It includes huge isolated areas (some larger than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island) along with in-nocuous-looking office buildings located in urban areas like Las Vegas. This other America has an enormous impact on your life, but you probably have no idea of its extent, scope, and power. In fact, it’s doubtful that anyone”even the President”has an accurate idea of the true extent, power, and activities going on in what I call Top Secret America.

I want you to visit that Top Secret America.

Top Secret Tourism is your travel guide to germ warfare laboratories, government VIP relocation centers, electronic eavesdropping locations, espionage agent training sites, and other places in the United States that you’re not supposed to know about. In addition, private facilities and companies that provide support services to Top Secret America are also included. Listings are organized in alphabetical order by state, and each facility/site entry gives its history, discusses the activities carried on there, explores various rumors about the site, and gives directions to the location. I’ve also added commentary, trivia, and sarcastic remarks to many of the listings.

Am I serious when I say I want you to visit the facilities and locations that make up Top Secret America? Yes I am. Even though plenty of people try to keep Top Secret America secret, it is still your country, not only theirs. Even if you didn’t realize it, ordinary Americans like you paid for Top Secret America”sometimes through your taxes, sometimes through curtailment of your liberties and privacy”and you have the right to know about it. As you will discover in this book, national security is often just a convenient shield for hiding incompetence, failure, waste, and corruption in Top Secret America programs and activities. In those cases, secrecy is more necessary” to deceive the American people and Congress rather than potential enemies and terrorists.

You might be wondering how I found out all this stuff. I started researching this topic in 1999, and a surprising amount of this information was available on government websites prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Since the attacks, however, much of that information has been removed from public dissemination. Government documents (particularly environmental impact statements) and maps often inadvertently provided key details. (For example, aeronautical maps for a region that indicated all overflights, civilian and military, were forbidden 24/7 were always a strong clue that something top secret was going on in those areas.) Congressional hearings and budgets were another important source, and I was able to personally visit several of the sites in this book. None of the information in here was obtained from classified sources; everything was on the public record and obtained by patient digging. And for those who think a book like this discloses vital government secrets… get real. If I can find this stuff out, the Russians, Chinese, and various terrorist groups also found it out a long time before I did.