Books : Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You're Not Supposed to Know About
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 917.30493
EAN num: 9781932595239
ISBN number: 1932595236
Label: Feral House
Manufacturer: Feral House
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: April 01, 2007
Publishing house: Feral House
Sale Popularity Level: 55283
Studio: Feral House
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
I got this book after a long road trip through the West, and wish I'd had it sooner. It turns out many of the towns and mysterious places we passed are described in detail, and what it will raise the hair on your head when you read about the things that are going on with our taxpayer money behind barbed wire.
The coverage of sites throughout the America seems pretty extensive: it describes locations both on and off the beaten track in 25 states and, of course, Washington DC. For anyone planning on visiting Area 51, the Nevada Test Site, or the Trinity Site in Alamogordo, NM (with proper permission), this book is the one to have. It's arranged state by state, with entries marked with practical categories (Getting There, What's There, Getting a Look Inside, etc.) and presents itself as a practical guidebook to getting close to these sites.
I hope, however, that a 2nd edition is on its way. The maps are far less than detailed (perhaps for good reason), so don't expect to navigate close to anything top secret using only this book. And some sites are conspicuously absent. There's nothing on the Pentagon itself, CIA headquarters, or even the Minuteman Missile Natl Historic Site in South Dakota (where you as a tourist can see a Minuteman missile left in it's silo, and enter the preserved launch facility). Perhaps these aren't here since there are conventional ways to visit these places, but they're certainly of interest to the nuclear tourist. Hawaii is also missing, as are various submarine bases.
To complement this, I'd suggest also looking at A Nuclear Family Vacation, by Weinberger and Hodge.
Rated by buyers -
I've read this book a few times through, and I can't help but come back to it often. If you want a no-fluff read, where you can quickly jump from location to location, this is the book you've been looking for.
Rated by buyers 
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This book covers the places like area 51, army bases and the fenced off area the goverment owns.It is scarey what goes on there and a few of the goverment programs that went on and what they cost, like when the govermentdecided to see if they could use atomic bombs for excavation and the insane results a normal person would expect .They did it more than once!!!!!
Rated by buyers 
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When looking at the description before ordering the book I was expecting more of a "hands-on" travel guide. By this I mean more of a personal journal of visiting (or attempting to) the sites. The book is more like a series of 2-3 page encyclopedia entries with a few photographs and black, line art type maps. Most entries lack even a photo which was disappointing.
I actually was amused at the tongue-in-cheek style and was not put off by it. The lack of even a basic list of sources renders the information suspect without further investigation yourself. Despite this, I took the history and anecdotal stories at face value and just enjoyed the quick read.
I would say the book serves as a quick overview that may entice a reader to dig on the internet for more information about the sites. I had already heard about most sites listed so there was little "new" information contained inside. What was "new" is, as mentioned above, not backed by any sort of source so it takes some of the shine off the book in my opinion.
If you want a book that is easy to read in short sections and does contain some unusual tidbits of history about these places and are not put off by a bit of coarse language then you'll get what you pay for. If you are looking for actual accounts of a personal visit to each site with lots of pictures you are looking at the wrong book.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
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