The 10 Most Secretive Locations In The World

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1. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

NordGen/Dag Terje Filip Endresen, public domain / Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA http://3.0 / Via commons.wikimedia.org , commons.wikimedia.org

800 miles from the North Pole on the island of Spitsbergen stands an Arctic vault holding almost a million different seeds. Why? Just in case the zombie apocalypse wipes out any living plant species (or any other natural disaster).

2. Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center

Karen Nutini, Public Domain / Via commons.wikimedia.org

This campus near Bluemont, Virginia is straight out of a movie. The MWEOC is a FEMA command center and where all high-ranking civilians and officials plan to hide out if there's ever a national disaster.

3. Area 51

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Aliens, UFOs, and futuristic military equipment... you've heard it all before. The above white mailbox, eerily named the Black Mailbox, sits right outside of the restricted Nevada lands.

4. Pine Gap

Schutz, CC BY-SA http://3.0 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

The U.S. isn't the only nation with extremely protected barren land in the middle of nowhere. Australia's Pine Gap is a facility actually located in the dead center of Australia's Outback, jointly run by Australian and American agencies responsible for conducting global surveillance.

5. North Sentinel Island

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, Public Domain / Via commons.wikimedia.org

This 28-square-mile island in the Bay of Bengal is home to some of the most remote and isolated indigenous people in the world. The Sentinelese population on the island is somewhere between 50 and 400.

6. The United States Bullion Depository

Alberto Cabello, CC BY http://2.0 / Via bit.ly

More commonly known as Fort Knox, the U.S. Bullion Depository located just south of Louisville holds roughly 147.3 million ounces of gold bullion, or about three percent of all the gold ever refined in the world.

7. Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA http://3.0 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

But if you really want to see some gold (or stand nearby a building that houses a lot of gold, rather), you'll have to head to NYC. As of 2012, the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan held 6,700 tons of gold bullion worth over 400 billion dollars.

8. Royal Air Force Menwith Hill

Tim Green, CC BY http://2.0 / Via Flickr: atoach

If you're ever driving through North Yorkshire and come upon a field full of giant golf balls, you've probably hit RAF Menwith Hill, the largest electronic monitoring station in the world.

9. Vatican Secret Archives

Vicente Villamón, CC BY-SA http://2.0 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

An estimated 35,000 volumes covering over 53 miles of shelving live vaulted away beneath the Vatican. It is forbidden for any piece of this monster collection of official documents (technically owned by the standing pope) to be published or indexed.

10. Granite Mountain Records Vault

Darwinek, Public Domain / Via commons.wikimedia.org

The Mormons also have a secret spot to store all of their sacred documents, and it's 600 feet inside of a mountain. This secure vault south of Salt Lake City holds over "3.5 billion images on microfilm, microfiche, and digital media."

Whatever, USA

Located somewhere in the U.S., this real city built by Bud Light will be hosting three days of unexpected awesomeness, and you can go! Are you #UpForWhatever?