100 Places You Will Never Visit (4 page)

E.T. DRIVE HOME Nevada State Route 375, a UFO sighting hot spot, was officially designated as the Extraterrestrial Highway by state authorities in 1996, with a dedication ceremony held in the nearby town of Rachel in April of that year. Rachel now supports a thriving trade in alien-and Area 51-related memorabilia.

Some of the most ardent ufologists hold that Area 51 contains a complex of underground tunnels and warehouses (including the fabled Hangar 18) storing all of this extraterrestrial booty. A few even claim that aliens are actually running the project. Inevitably, the veracity of such stories has not been (and is unlikely ever to be) proved. But it is an attractive tale for those who believe in little green men…

Whatever the truth, potential visitors should bear in mind that the US government treats the base as strictly off-limits to all but a few. Indeed, Area 51 received hardly any official recognition until Bill Clinton signed a presidential order in 1995 exempting it from certain environmental regulations. The site was declassified in 1997, though the projects undertaken there remain top secret.

Civilian and most military air traffic is forbidden from the airspace overhead, and it is a court martial offense for a military plane to purposefully breach the no-fly zone. Area 51 does not appear on any government-produced maps, and the site is adorned with signs warning trespassers that use of deadly force is authorized. Teams of imposing security guards keep vigilant watch over the perimeter fencing, which is liberally peppered with motion sensors: if you’re intent on some alien action, your best bet might be to stay at home and tuck up with a DVD of E.T. instead.

1 GROOMED FOR SUCCESS The US Army Air Corps built the first two runways at Groom Lake in the 1940s. A network of much larger runways emerged from the 1950s onward, after Kelly Johnson, of Skunk Works fame, recognized the area’s potential as a testing site.

2 HIDDEN SECRETS While UFO enthusiasts argue that Area 51’s many hangars contain the remains of crashed or captured alien spacecraft, but in reality they probably house high-tech prototype aircraft. Many conspiracy theorists argue that Hangar 18, the largest on the base, is the last resting place for all manner of extraterrestrial booty.

11 Granite Mountain Records Vault

LOCATION Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, USA

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Salt Lake City, Utah

SECRECY OVERVIEW High-security location: the record vaults of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Mormon-run Granite Mountain Records Vault is built deep within a Utah mountainside, and visits by members of the public or journalists are rarely sanctioned. Over the years, this has led some to question why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is so protective of its privacy at the facility. The Church, meanwhile, argues that its policies are less to do with maintaining secrecy than ensuring security.

Granite Mountain is a deep-storage facility containing a mass of materials related to the Mormon Church, its operations, organizational structure and history. It is also home to a stock of genealogical information perhaps unrivaled anywhere in the world. It is said to include upward of 35 billion items of genealogical data stored on almost 2.5 million rolls of microfilm (a total that increases by around 40,000 rolls per year). The archive employs a staff of 50 to catalog, store, copy and, since 2002, digitize the records.

HALL OF RECORDS A rare photo from deep inside Granite Mountain reveals countless filing cabinets for the safe storage of microfilms capturing genealogical records from around the world in miniaturized form. At the last count, more than 35 billion such images were stored in the vault.

The history of the Mormon Church began in New York in the 1820s, when a man named Joseph Smith claimed to have experienced a series of visions. These included one in which an angel directed him to a hillside, where a book inscribed on gold plates lay buried. In 1830 he published The Book of Mormon, which he said was the translation of these plates, and established a new Church based on their teachings. A little more than a quarter of Smith’s original manuscript remains in existence, but what is left is stored within Granite Mountain.

The movement soon spread, but often found itself in conflict with local populations over its unorthodox beliefs (which in its early days included polygamy). Indeed, Smith himself perished during a skirmish with a mob in Illinois in 1844. Leadership of the Mormons then fell to Brigham Young, who relocated a large group of his followers in 1847 to what is now Salt Lake City—Utah has remained the Church’s spiritual home ever since.

Mormon beliefs emphasize ancestral connections, and as a result, the Church began to accumulate genealogical records from the 1890s onward. From the 1930s, many of these records began to be transferred to microfilm, and within a decade there were more than 100,000 rolls in urgent need of a permanent home. Various sites in Salt Lake City were considered and rejected, until an architect from Little Cottonwood Canyon suggested tunneling into the sheer face of Granite Mountain. Not only would this be an immensely secure location, he argued, but it would provide wonderful temperature regulation—a major concern for all archivists.

Building works commenced in May 1960, with arched tunnels excavated to a depth of 700 meters (2,300 ft), some 250 meters (820 ft) beneath the peak. Three main corridors into the archive, and a further four cross-tunnels, were constructed. The passages were lined with concrete and steel (and painted in tasteful pastel shades, by all accounts), while six storage chambers were also lined with steel—all at a cost of a reputed US$2 million to the Church. The whole complex today covers an area of 6,000 square meters (65,000 sq ft). Huge reinforced entrance doors, weighing between 9 and 14 tons and reputedly able to withstand a nuclear blast, help to protect the facility from uninvited guests.

Storage cabinets 3 meters (10 ft) high accommodate the wealth of archival material. The transfer of microfilm began in 1963, and the vault was fully operational by 1965. Its mountain home offers protection not only from nuclear attack but also from natural disasters such as fire and earthquakes. The Church itself maintains that the records are best protected by strictly limiting their exposure to humans. For this reason, public tours are prohibited, with finger marks, dust and clothing fibers all cited as potential threats to the well-being of the vault’s contents. Since 2001, technological developments have allowed the archive to be kept at a permanent temperature of 13°C (55°F) and at 35 percent humidity.

In 2010, some 300 million of Granite Mountain’s genealogical records were made available online to researchers and members of the public in a major step forward toward openness. Nonetheless, the degree of security maintained at the vault leads many to wonder what other secrets might lie buried deep within its stone.

One of three imposing main entrances to the Granite Mountain Vault

12 ADX Florence

LOCATION Fremont County, Colorado, USA

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Pueblo, Colorado

SECRECY OVERVIEW High-security location: the highest-security prison in America.

Sometimes referred to as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, Colorado’s ADX Florence prison is home to many of America’s most dangerous criminals. Its residents include seasoned terrorists and prisoners too violent to keep in regular facilities. Many of its inmates know that the only way that they will be leaving the penitentiary system is in a box.

Opened in November 1994 at a cost of some US$60 million, the prison lies off Highway 67 amid the sprawling foothills of the Colorado Rockies. It covers some 15 hectares (37 acres) and lies not far from the small town of Florence. With room for 490 inmates, the prison has a staff numbering almost 350. The land on which it stands was donated by the people of Florence in 1990, principally because the facility promised significant local employment.

To a large extent, ADX Florence owes its existence to events at a penitentiary in Marion, Illinois on October 22, 1983. On that day, two guards were killed in separate but virtually identical incidents, after the prisoners they were escorting were able to unpick their handcuffs and stab the officers with help from fellow prisoners. The violence highlighted the question of how best to handle dangerous prisoners already facing such stiff punishments that further loss of freedom holds few terrors. One of the answers was the “control unit prison,” of which ADX Florence is a prime example. Here, the most dangerous prisoners in America are kept isolated from their guards and from one another as much as possible. Only around 5 percent of inmates are sent here directly from the courtroom: most are redirected from other prisons where they have shown a propensity for violence. Security at the facility is rigorous, with each prisoner assigned one of six security levels.

The jail was designed jointly by LKA Partners (Colorado Springs) and the DLR Group. Cells are 2.1 x 3.6 meters (7 x 12 ft), and contain basic furniture manufactured from concrete. Toilets and sinks are designed so that attempts to back up water or flood cells are impossible, while windows have been installed in such a way as to prevent inmates from knowing their exact location within the facility, with views generally restricted to a bit of sky and some wall.

IN THE COOLER The cells at ADX Florence may be clean and functional but inmates lead a lonely existence in an oppressive atmosphere. As Robert Hood, a former warden, remarked on life at the facility: “I don’t know what hell is, but I do know the assumption would be, for a free person, it’s pretty close to it.”

The main complex has high outer walls, and the entire site is surrounded by guard towers and razor-wire fencing to the height of two men, with regular patrols by guards and dogs. Inside the complex are almost 1,500 steel doors, activated via remote control, as well as surveillance cameras, motion detectors and pressure pads. When a guard manually unlocks a door, the key is quickly replaced in an aluminum shield for safekeeping and so that inmates are not able to visually memorize its configuration to later recreate it. There have to date been no successful escape attempts.

Prisoners are not allowed any telecommunications devices, but are permitted a single, monitored, 15-minute telephone call each month. They are locked in their cells for 23 hours a day in the first year of their sentence and do not eat or socialize together—food is hand-delivered to cells by the guards. A sunken, swimming pool-like exercise yard can be used by one prisoner at a time for short spells. Where appropriate after the first year, attempts are made toward greater socialization, including a shared dining room. Inmates who respond well to the prison’s program may be allowed out of their cells for as much as 16 hours a day during their final year at the institution. Each cell has a small black-and-white television broadcasting “improving” programs.

Within the prison is an area known as Range 13, which has even more stringent security measures in place. Inmates here are considered so dangerous they have virtually no human contact. Indeed, Range 13 rarely contains more than one or two inmates, and is frequently unoccupied for long spells.

The jail’s roll call has included Timothy McVeigh (subsequently executed for his part in the Oklahoma bombings), Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”), Eric Rudolph (Atlanta’s Olympic Park bomber), Ramzi Yousef (convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack, and occasionally resident in Range 13), and a number of people convicted of Al-Qaeda activities or associated with the Mob. To get into ADX Florence, you need to be seriously bad.

NO WAY OUT With a roll call that includes some of the most hardened criminals in the country, security around the prison is about as tight as it gets. It seems to be working, though, as there have been no break-outs in the two decades since it opened.

13 Dulce Base

LOCATION Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, USA

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Albuquerque, New Mexico

SECRECY OVERVIEW Existence unacknowledged: believed by some to be home of an underground extraterrestrial base.

Few places have captured the imagination of conspiracy theorists more than Dulce Base. A site for which there is little concrete evidence, believers nonetheless place it at the heart of a conspiracy between the powers-that-be and alien life forms intent on carrying out despicable research on human subjects. Whether it exists or not, Dulce Base is an instructive case study of the way conspiracy theories can take hold.

Rumors of a secret base beneath a New Mexico mountain can be traced back most clearly to Paul Bennewitz, a technological entrepreneur with a side line as an investigator of unidentified flying objects. Beginning in the 1970s, Bennewitz claimed that he regularly saw strange light displays in the sky, which he believed might be linked to the Kirtland Air Force Base a little outside his native Albuquerque.

The base had something of a reputation for classified development programs—it was, for instance, used in the 1940s as a transportation hub by Los Alamos National Laboratory staff working on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. It is also home to an Underground Munitions Storage Complex, believed to be the largest nuclear weapons storage facility in the world.

Bennewitz was not alone in claiming to have seen strange nighttime light shows. Around this time, New Mexico threw up a number of other apparently unexplained phenomena, including multiple instances of cattle maiming. Bennewitz is said to have made contact with a woman who, under hypnosis, described how she and her son were kidnapped by extraterrestrials and taken to an underground lab where she witnessed cattle being mutilated. The woman also claimed to have been fitted with an implant that left her subject to mind control.

Bennewitz was taken with her story and continued to compile evidence, including apparent video footage of lights in the night sky. He also constructed a system of radio receivers, and produced tapes that he said were UFO transmissions. Sometime toward the end of 1980, he contacted the authorities at Kirtland to make them aware of what he regarded as a potential UFO threat. His claims were met with a degree of skepticism, and received only limited follow-up.