Product Description

Here is the unseen America of government 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 innocuous office buildings located in the middle of major cities. This "other America" has an enormous impact on your life, but you probably have little idea of its extent, scope, and power.

This book invites you to visit this top-secret America. Listings are by state, and each facility/site entry gives its history, discusses the activities carried on there, explores various rumors, and provides maps and directions to every location.

Author Harry Helms visited and photographed a number of sites in this book. None of the intelligence here was taken from classified sources; everything was on the public record and obtained by patient digging. Since the 9/11 attacks, much of this information was removed from public dissemination. To those who think a book like this discloses vital government secrets, Helms says: "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."

Adventurous travelers and truth-seekers will want to know how to navigate within top-secret America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154068 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781932595239
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

Too weird and frightening to pass up...and funny!
This book is an outstanding guide to all the all-too-real top secret government-controlled spots in the United States, from underground bases, to nuclear testing sites, to creepy office buildings, to fortified areas built just to ensure "continuity of government" in case of an apocalypse.
It's well-written (with only the almost expected typos and tics of a first edition by a smaller publisher to mar it), funny, sarcastic, and interesting. It features maps, good driving directions, and lots and lots of very strange and interesting information.
It is NOT, as one of this book's more asinine reviewers has suggested, a handbook for terrorists full of privately obtained and otherwise unavailable information. Everything within its pages is from public files or from the author's own observations.
For New Mexico alone, my home state, I learned a ton that I had never known before---the Air Force Base in my hometown of Albuquerque has the world's largest wooden object in the world (?!) and more nuclear weapons than any other place in the country, a hippie was caught living in ca ve right on the property of Los Alamos National Labs, the residual radioactive materials at one of New Mexico's underground nuclear tests are considered to be a dangerous collection point for such materials by terrorists, and the UFO that Lonnie Zamora allegedly saw in Socorro, NM a couple of decades ago could have been a moon-landing device prototype....
(I would have liked to have seen something on WIPP though, and all that hidden nuclear waste....)
This was a great book. I'm glad I bought it, and I would recommend it to anyone---even to the guy who reviewed it here without actually reading it.

Not very impressive
No wonder the publisher or author doesn't offer a "Search Inside This Book" link. If you were able to read the table of contents of this book you would see everything you've probably already seen or heard of and lots of large military installations that aren't really secret or hard to find at all. Being an Air Force brat my entire childhood and then serving in the Army myself for six years, I've been to over a dozen of the installations listed in this book and not only are they widely visible and accessible to military members and their families, they also give tours to the public and have a large civilian workforce inside them. Been inside "Cheyenne Mountain", been underground at the former "SAC headquarters" and even to this very day I do work in and around various naval facilities including a nuclear submarine base, only having to show my drivers license, signing in, letting them search my vehicle and getting an I.D. tag. Next thing you know I'm 50 feet away from the flight line or looking inside an F/A-18 hanger. No "top secret" clearance or elusive James Bond tactics necessary.

There are tens of thousands of places across America that have restricted areas regardless of what they are or what activities they do. Our local utility company's headquarters building for instance has very tight security, many restricted areas and armed guards to protect from sabotage, terrorism and people pissed off about their electric bills but that doesn't and shouldn't automatically qualify it as a "top secret" destination. There's nothing new or exciting listed at all in this book unless you haven't watched the Military or History Channel or have been without internet access for the past fifteen years. There's absolutely nothing, not one thing like, "the dark brown building downtown by the post office and next to the river, the one with no windows or markings, it's actually a top secret munitions cache and surveillance center". No under your nose type stuff that the book's description implies. Instead you get stuff like what's in the "Florida" chapter of the book. There's only one entry for the entire state of Florida and it's the "Wackenhut Corporation", nothing else period. Most any Florida resident, military, civilian or even a rest stop janitor could and would point you to better places like Eglin AFB, CENTCOM or the military section of the Kennedy Space Center instead of a "rent-a-cop" headquarters.

Buy it used or even better, do a Google, Wikipedia or search any property appraiser's website for any US city for this kind of stuff and you'll get better results. Example, the current Rachel, Nevada (Area 51) official home page (Amazon doesn't allow posting links) tells you there's no gas sold anymore in Rachel and that some entrepreneur is about to build a private "for profit" prison there. Do your own homework and you'll come out ahead, trust me.

And since I totally expect the author to cry foul about this review, maybe even write himself another 5-star review (anyone else notice that?) I challenge him to post the table of contents online and let you, the would be consumer decide.

Not really a travel guide, but entertaining
I expected a lot more from this book. It's not really a travel guide, although it does give crude maps and textual directions to each place. There are very few pictures, and most of those are for Area 51. The text is very entertaining though, but not very useful. Each site gets at least a couple pages, but there's nothing in-depth about any site. I'm not sure how much of the information comes from the author's experience visiting the sites and how much is just hearsay. He told only a few stories about his own experience, and I would have liked to read more of a travel diary about the author's experience going to each site, even if just to look from far away.

Although the book presents nothing that you can't legally get on your own, I would have liked to see an appendix listing the source material, contact information for public affairs officers, websites, and so on. There's no bibliography for further reading on any particular site. The book's best use is its table of contents. You're going to have to do more research on your own anyway.

At times the language is coarse and I think the book would have been better served without sarcasm, but I think the author was pandering to his audience. Some naïve politcal commentary creeps in as throw-away jokes, and might have been more appropriate if the author fleshed out the history a bit more.

Despite being disappointed in the marketing and categorization of the book, I did have a good time reading it, just like I occasionally need to watch a UFO show on TV.