With 50 states across its nation, the United States encompasses beauty and wonder across all its bordering states. Tourists can be intimidated when choosing what they’d like to see and do, with so many diverse options. From the extreme arctic cold in Alaska to the breathtaking beaches and volcanoes of Hawaii, it can be a lot to take in!
With so many varied climates and attractions, travelers will really have to narrow down what they’d like to see and do. Some may be craving the magic of Florida’s Disney World or Cali’s Disneyland, while others may be looking for something a little different than the conventional norm. By this, I mean locations that tourists may want to see but are actually forbidden by the country. Now when something is forbidden to visitors it’s usually for good reason and although we may question why it’s prohibited, it’s probably best we abide by the rules.
But for the real brave risk takers, there are some questionable and eerie places in the USA that you CAN visit, but all at your own risk. If you’d like to potentially test your luck feel free to make a trip to any one of these risky destinations… just take some precautions!
1. Bohemian Grove, Monte Rio, California
What the fuck is up with Bohemian Grove?
Former American president Richard Nixon called it “The most foggy goddamned thing you could imagine.”
Bohemian Grove is a men’s club that meets for two weeks in July in Monte Rio, California. The most powerful men in the world — bankers, politicians, movie stars and the elite of society — make up the guest list.
There’s been a lot of speculation about what goes on at Bohemian Grove, and as most conspiracy videos on YouTube will tell you, it’s allegedly two weeks of the filthy rich, powerful and famous walking around naked and fucking each other, as well as gay male, female and child prostitutes. Oh yeah, in between performing occult rituals, of course.
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It’s also rumored to be a place where the most powerful men in our world, who literally control it, make political plans. The deeper you dig into this conspiracy, the more depraved, illegal and terrifying it gets. Some think that American presidents are handpicked by the world’s elite, aka the illuminati, headed by the Bilderberg Group. The Bilderberg Group is made up of world leaders, including the Queen and bankers (who are responsible for the current financial crisis — while the public spirals into debt and poverty, they profit) like the Rothschild and Rockefeller families.
I know this all sounds fucking crazy, mostly because, well, it is, but crazy doesn’t mean unreal. An interview given by Rik Clay about the illuminati and the 2012 Olympics, which many think he was murdered over, has opened my mind to a lot of unfortunate, and crazy, truths.
Think it’s all bullshit? Check out this video, filmed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, of a ritual called “The Cremation of Care” at Bohemian Grove, which happens every year, with the world’s elite dressed in creepy robes (#satanchic) performing a sacrifice (complete with torturous screams) to a giant owl. Don’t just take my word for it, hunty:
Not surprisingly, there are now motion detectors where Alex crawled in under a gate to gain his unprecedented access to 20601 Bohemian Ave, which is one of the most secured places in the world.
They need all that security if the world’s elite really are walking around naked and fucking anything that has a pulse. I realize these people are evil, are probably plotting the destruction of humanity, and most likely dial 666 for Satan, but there’s a part of me that really wants in. I can’t help it! I have this sick fantasy of being spit roasted by Barack Obama and George W Bush . . .
2. Mount Weather, Virginia
The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, also known as Mount Weather, The Mountain, or Maunde , is a location featured in the second and third seasons. Mount Weather is a United States military underground bunker and missile silo launch facility located in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the eastern United States of America on Earth. It was constructed to house senior US officials in the event of a nuclear war. The Mountain Men are descendants of the original people who took shelter there during the Nuclear Apocalypse. During Season One, it was the intended dropping point for the 100, but they were unable to travel there as the territory belonged to the Woods Clan. Mount Weather is currently inactive due to a self-destruct sequence initiated by Carl Emerson and the Ice Nation. The Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center (a.k.a. the High Point Special Facility), is a U.S. Government Continuity of Operations facility located in the Blue Ridge Mountains– near Bluemont, Virginia, on the border between Loudoun and Clarke counties– about 40 miles from Washington, D.C. Mount Weather was able to sustain itself using hydroelectric power from Philpott Dam, fresh water from its own underground reservoir, and fresh food from its hydroponic farm. It also served as a preservation of civilization through the U.S. Federal Culture Preservation Initiative.
3. Fort Knox, Kentucky
This next place is probably one of the most publicly known protected places. The United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox has more gold than anywhere else in the world.
With several layers of security, it’s nearly impossible for someone with unauthorized access to reach the gold. But if you tried, you’d first have to get into the 100,000 acre Fort Knox Army Base in Kentucky. Once inside, you need to sneak past the motion sensor wire fencing around the perimeter of the depository. If you still haven’t been caught, you’ll then have to walk across an open field where you can easily trip a sensor.
Next are the two ten-foot-tall electric fences topped with barbed wire. In between those two fences are armed guards. If you make it over without getting shot, you’d be standing in front of the main vault door, a door that weighs more than 20 tons. Now here’s where you definitely can’t get through, because, to get inside you’ll need several people, each with their own secret code, to dial them in. If you somehow managed to sneak your way inside the vault, you’ll need to go down to the two-story basement and unlock the separate storage vaults protecting the various piles of gold. These vaults are also designed to be flooded with water in case they’re breached.
The depository was strategically built over 1,000 miles from the coastline. The airspace over Fort Knox is also highly restricted. It’s 4-foot thick granite walls can withstand heavy explosives and the blacked out windows are bullet and fireproof. The Bullion Depository was designed to protect against attack from a foreign military. It’s so secure that during WWII the vaults held the original copy of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. It even held the gold reserves of allied European countries and key artifacts from their history. Like the Crown of St. Stephen, which has been used to crown Hungarian kings since the 12th Century. Only twice in since it first opened in 1936, have they allowed civilians inside. The first was in 1974 after rumors spread widely that the gold had secretly been removed by wealthy elites and that there was no gold inside. A few Congressmen and a team of reporters were allowed in to disprove that rumor.
The second visit took place last year when the newly appointed Treasury Secretary inspected the facility with other members of Congress. Apparently, the vaults are under such tight lock that billions of dollars’ worth of gold haven’t been recounted since 1953.
There’s even a special division tasked with protecting the gold called the United States Mint Police. Established in 1792, they’re one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the country.
The Mint Police is responsible for protecting over $300 billion in Treasury and other government assets.
4. Area 51
What do we know about Area 51?
Area 51 refers to a map location and is the popular name for a United States Air Force base. It is at Groom Lake, a dry lake bed in the Nevada Desert, 85 miles (135km) north of Las Vegas.
What goes on inside is extremely secret. Members of the public are kept away by warning signs, electronic surveillance and armed guards.
It is also illegal to fly over Area 51, although the site is now visible on satellite images. The base has runways up to 12,000ft (2.3 miles/3.7km) long.
The facility is next to two other restricted military areas: the Nevada Test Site, where US nuclear weapons were tested from the 1950s to the 1990s, and the Nevada Test and Training Range.
The entire range covers more than 2.9 million acres of land.
According to the US military, it represents "a flexible, realistic and multidimensional battle-space to conduct testing tactics development, and advanced training".
Why was it built?
Area 51 was created during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union as a testing and development facility for aircraft, including the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance planes.
Although it opened in 1955, its existence was only officially acknowledged by the CIA in August 2013.
Four months after the CIA's disclosure, President Obama became the first US president to mention Area 51 publicly.
Rachel and Hiko are the two closest towns to the Area 51 base
What goes on there today?
Although official information is sparse, it is believed that the US military continues to use Area 51 to develop cutting-edge aircraft. About 1,500 people are believed to work there, many commuting on charter flights from Las Vegas.
Annie Jacobsen, who has written about the history of Area 51, told the BBC that some of the world's most advanced espionage programmes are at the site.
"Area 51 is a test and training facility. The research began with the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s and has now moved on to drones", she says.
Are there aliens and flying saucers at Area 51?
The secrecy surrounding Area 51 has helped fuel many conspiracy theories.
Most famous is the claim that the site hosts an alien spacecraft and the bodies of its pilots, after they crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. The US government says there were no aliens and the crashed craft was a weather balloon.
Others claim to have seen UFOs above or near the site, while some say they have been abducted by aliens, and even experimented on, before being returned to Earth.
And, in 1989, a man named Robert Lazar claimed he had worked on alien technology inside Area 51. He claimed to have seen medical photographs of aliens and that the government used the facility to examine UFOs.
Area 51's association with aliens may have served as a useful distraction for the intelligence agencies.
"As early as 1950 the CIA developed a UFO office to deal with the sightings of unidentified flying objects over Nevada. When people first saw the U-2 spy plane flying, no one knew what they were seeing," says Ms Jacobsen.
"The CIA used that disinformation to their benefit by fostering an alien mytholog
5. Ni'ihau Island, Hawaii
Purchased by a wealthy Scottish widow in 1864, the family-owned island of Niihau is committed to preserving its natural and cultural history — perhaps at a dangerous cost.
Just 17 miles from the coastline of Kauai, Hawaii boasts a historic restricted area: the small, 70-square-mile island of Niihau, also known as the “Forbidden Island.”
The island is actually a privately-owned preservation project that for 150 years has been largely successful, save for the constant threat of outside influence.
Niihau’s transition to the “Forbidden Island” began in 1864 when Scottish widower Elizabeth McHutchison Sinclair purchased the island from Hawaiian monarch, King Kamehameha IV, for $10,000 in gold, for ranching purposes.
“My great-grandmother purchased the island from the monarchy and it’s been virtually unchanged since that date by my family,” Bruce Robinson, the great-grandson of Eliza Sinclair, reported. “We’ve tried to maintain the request of the King when it was turned over. We maintain the island for the people and continue to work it as he had.”
King Kamehameha IV had actually offered Sinclair better real estate, which included an area from downtown Honolulu to Diamond Head in Waikiki, but Sinclair saw the island as a lush alternative for her large family since they had relocated from New Zealand.
Kamehameha IV reportedly had one request for Sinclair: “Niihau is yours. But the day may come when Hawaiians are not as strong in Hawaii as they are now. When that day comes, please do what you can to help them.”
The families that supplement their income with traditional lei making can sell a piece for thousands, but access to these Niihau shells has become scarce.
It’s becoming evident that tourist dollars are required to keep the island economy afloat, which means that the “Forbidden Island” is more accessible than the name suggests. Kauai boat tours offer day-long snorkeling and dive packages, while the Robinsons offer guided tours, hunting safaris, and helicopter trips to remote parts of the island.
Though these tours are carefully controlled so as to avoid contact with the Niihauans, it is difficult to ascertain how long the Niihauan culture can be maintained.
“While it is an ancient type of culture, they’re a very modern type of people,” Bruce Robinson said of the Niihauans. The problem today for these natives is deciding how many concessions they will have to make to their traditional lifestyle without losing their ancient Hawaiian way of life.
The Robinsons vow to do all they can to preserve this native history. There’s “a feeling of inner peace and renewal that we don’t understand in the outside world,” Bruce Robinson told lawmakers in 2013, “The Western culture has lost it and the rest of the islands have lost it. The only place it’s left is on Niihau.”
After this glimpse into Niihau, Hawaii’s “Forbidden Island,” check out Snake Island, the Brazilian isle on which humans are forbidden (for obvious reasons). Then, read about the tumultuous life of the legendary lifeguard, Eddie Aikau, who needed saving of his own.
6. Granite Mountain Secret Vault, Salt Lake City, Utah
All the way in Utah’s Salt Lake City is the world’s largest compilation of genealogical records to ever have existed. If you’re familiar with Mormons, you probably know they’re also renowned genealogists and have collected and cataloged documents and records on almost every family in the United States.
The process all began with the efforts of the LDS Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) who began their collection and then needed an ultra-secure location for their fast-growing archive catalogue. This led to them blasting a cavern into the side of a mountain known as Little Cottonwood Canyon which now holds hundreds of thousands of genealogical records 700 feet beneath the earth. There is also maximum security to ensure these sensitive documents are never revealed to the public or curious tourists.
Visitors described the three long, narrow corridors and four cross tunnels, while media reports noted the $2 million price tag. Some 675 feet of granite rock guarded the tunnels from above, and reinforced entrance doors weighing 9 to 14 tons each were said to be able to withstand a nuclear blast.
Steel and concrete lined the tunnels, with banks of metal storage cabinets reaching 10 feet high. The arched interiors were painted in pastel colors, the Deseret News reported, "to alleviate the monotony and eliminate the cavernous atmosphere."
The site was fully operational in 1965, named in May 1966 and dedicated on June 22, 1966.
Forty-plus years later, the vault boasts the world's largest collection of family history information.
Microfilm masters — negatives used for duplication and digitization — occupy 60 percent of Granite Mountain's space. Duplicate rolls are sent to the Family History Library, family history centers and patrons to the tune of 4 million images a week. Digital images are indexed and used in online research.
Digitization started in 2002 as a tedious process. Scanners of that era had trouble reading underexposed and overexposed images as light densities varied even on the same microfilm roll, meaning operators had to closely watch for problems, stop, back up, readjust and repeat.
Conversion to digital images was projected then to take more than a century, Verkler said.
The church has worked with international scanner manufacturers to develop improved scan rates and procedures. "We think we're going to be producing 10 times the images we were five years ago," Verkler said.
Thompson cites two advantages provided by the granite mountainside vault — a protected environment from intruders, fire, earthquake and disaster as well as a stable storage environment. Improvements in 2001 led to constants of 55-degree temperature and 35 percent humidity.
Besides genealogical preservation and storage, Granite Mountain Records Vault serves as the deep archives for a myriad of church materials — including scriptures in every language published, large leather-bound temple ordinance books that were hand-kept through the 1960s, materials and minutes from presiding priesthood quorums, financial records, backup tapes and audio-visual masters from "Legacy" to "Johnny Lingo."
"Once the original records are there, they generally don't leave," said Thompson.
Nor likely seen or touched either.
7.Cheyenne Mountain Complex, Colorado
The Cheyenne Mountain Complex is located at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station (CMAFS), a short distance from NORAD and USNORTHCOM headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station falls under Air Force Space Command and hosts the activities of several tenant units.
At the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s, the idea of a hardened command and control center was conceptualized as a defense against long-range Soviet bombers. The Army Corps of Engineers supervised the excavation of Cheyenne Mountain and the construction of an operational center within the granite mountain. The Cheyenne Mountain facility became fully operational as the NORAD Combat Operations Center on Feb. 6, 1967.
Over the years, the installation came to house elements of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Air Force Space Command and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). Under what became known as the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC), several centers supported the NORAD missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control and provided warning of ballistic missile or air attacks against North America.
NORAD's focus and facilities have both evolved to meet the asymmetric threats of the 21st
century. On July 28, 2006, the Cheyenne Mountain Directorate was re-designated as the Cheyenne Mountain Division, with the mission to assist in establishing an integrated NORAD and USNORTHCOM Command Center within the headquarters building at Peterson Air Force Base.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the NORAD agreement--May 12, 2008--the Command Center located within Cheyenne Mountain Complex was officially re-designated as the NORAD and USNORTHCOM Alternate Command Center. The Cheyenne Mountain Division of NORAD and USNORTHCOM was re-designated as the J36 branch within the NORAD and USNORTHCOM's Operations Directorates.
Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station is owned and operated by Air Force Space Command. In fact, NORAD and USNORTHCOM use just under 30% of the floor space within the complex and comprise approximately 5% of the daily population at Cheyenne Mountain. Today, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex serves as NORAD and USNORTHCOM's Alternate Command Center and as a training site for crew qualification. Day-to-day crew operations for NORAD and USNORTHCOM typically take place at Peterson Air Force
8. Google’s Douglas County, Georgia (Google Data Center)
Since 2003, Atlanta has been home to Google’s efforts and successes in building the world’s most efficient data centers. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week Google is not fooling around with their maximum security in their data centers.
Only accessible to their employees, who better to ask about Douglas County than one of their very own loyal employees? Norman Martin of Data Center Operations eagerly has said “The internet never sleeps - we keep it going! Working here is like taking an extended field trip to a toy store”.
. A central cooling plant in Google's Douglas County, Georgia, data center. Retrieved from wired.com, by Google/Connie Zhou, retrieved November, 2016, from https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ffinside-google-data-center/ 8 shows the cooling plant of one of Google's datacenters. Savings within such a plant were achieved by collecting data from thousands of sensors all along the building, and using these data within the system's machine learning algorithms, then training it to reduce the parameter defined as PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) 17 , and training another algorithm to predict future readings to simulate the recommended actions from the PUE model (Evans & Gao, 2016
8.Dulce Base, New Mexico
Rumours of a top-secret US military base in New Mexico have been swirling for years now. You’d think Dulce, New Mexico would be just another small southwest town in America, but think again. This town, which doesn’t even have traffic lights, is known for the subterranean experimental facility below the ground of Dulce’s Archuleta Mesa.
Those who believe in the supposed underground alien base, state that a seven-story compound exists beneath Dulce which houses top-secret extremely advances technologies and even human-animal hybrids! These rumours have been circulating since the 80’s but no conclusive data is accessible yet to the public so here we are left wondering what actually goes on down in Dulce.
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