Everyone lies. People lie about little things like telling a family member their food is good when it is clearly the worst thing they ever tasted in their life or they tell their wife how skinny she looks in her new jeans. People also lie on a much larger scale whether it is to a Grand Jury or to a loved one about infidelity, people lie.
People also lie about the things they own, their property, and other valuable items they own that they do not want anyone else knowing about. Sometimes it is guns, money, gold, jewelry, or other assets that are extremely valuable that people lie about but they also protect those items too.
It isn’t just people, businesses do it too.
So these people and corporations build secure rooms, buildings, and locations to protect these things. What you probably do not know is that there are some incredibly secure buildings on this planet that is hard to believe are real. But these incredibly secure buildings and locations exist and we have the best of them right here for you to be shocked and surprised.
20. Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad Bunker
- Located: Baghdad, Iraq
- Owner: Formerly, Saddam Hussein
- Size: Unknown but the main room has 60 foot high ceilings
- Purpose: To keep Saddam Hussein protected in case of a military attack, nuclear holocaust, or just about anything terrible that could happen and cause his death in the process. The United States couldn’t penetrate the ceiling of the bunker during several attacks, so you know this thing is legit.
19. Town of Mezhgorye
- Located: Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia
- Owner: Russia
- Size: Two microdistricts, 14 miles apart, within the same valley
- Purpose: Russia built this remote town in the near Mount Yamantau back in 1979 during the Cold War between the United States and Russia. Little is known about the town except that it houses two Russian military battalions that both serve a secret nuclear missile base.
18. RAF Menwith Hill Base
- Located: Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Great Britain
- Owner: Ministry of Defence
- Operator: United States Air Force & Royal Air Force
- Size: 545 Acres
- Purpose: It’s the largest electronic monitoring station in the World. Although the base is run by the Royal Air Force of England, the United States National Security Agency, NSA, works in conjunction with the RAF to monitor satellites and electronic communications from all across the world. The base is mostly US citizens employed by the NSA.
17. Vatican Secret Archives
- Located: Vatican City
- Owner: Holy See
- Size: Unknown
- Purpose: It stores the most important church documents, an estimated 35,000 volumes of information, in history into a separate building not part of the Vatican Library. The Roman Catholic Church has become the most secretive organization in the world and their methods and ideals can almost always circumvent the actual law and legalities from anywhere on earth. So it is amazing that the Vatican Secret Archives are such a mystery to the rest of the world. They revealed several documents a few years ago but remain silent on allowing the public inside. Only a few photos have been taken down there and it looks like a football field worth of book shelves filled to the brim with secrets from the history of the world.
16. Woomera Prohibited Area
- Located: South Australia
- Operator: Royal Australian Air Force’s Aerospace Operational Support Group
- Size: 127,000 km
- Purpose: The area is secured and locked down for one reason, testing long range weapons. It is a weapons testing range for the Royal Australian Air Force’s Aerospace Operational Support Group. It has done nine nuclear tests in its’ existence, which has been since 1946. It is the largest weapons testing land zone in the world.
15. The Dubai Gold Vault
- Located: Dubai Airport Freezone
- Owner: Government of Dubai
- Operator: Brink’s Global Services (BGS)
- Size: Unknown
- Purpose: This is the largest and most secured vault in the United Arab Emirates. It serves one purpose, storing gold for anyone in the world. It is known to be one of the most secure bank vaults ever constructed and all the security is handled by Brink’s, which has been around 150 years.
14. ADX Florence Prison
- Located: Fremont County, near Florence, Colorado
- Managed By: Federal Bureau of Prisoners
- Size: 37-acres
- Purpose: If you are a villain in a James Bond film or you are trying to make Snow White eat a poison apple, you would end up spending some time in ADX. It is the prison that houses the worst prisoners in the country. It was the former prison of Salvatore Gravano, the man that testified against John Gotti and the former underboss of the Gambino Crime Family and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, among several other well-known bad guys.
13. Bank of England Gold Vault
- Located: London, England
- Operator: Bank of England
- Size: 300,000 sq ft
- Purpose: This is a vault that stores nearly $156 billion in gold underneath the City of London. The coolest security feature of the vault is that the three keys you need to open it are three feet long. Being that this vault houses 1/5 of the world’s gold, it requires a level of security that would make Jason Bourne smile.
12. Snake Island
- Located: Near Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Operator: Brazil
- Size: 430,000 sq metres
- Purpose: The Bothrops insularis, better known as a Golden Lancehead snake, is a critically endangered pit viper snake that has venom so lethal, it is five times as deadly as the jararaca snake. The reason it is called Snake Island is because it is the home to the Golden Lancehead and is off-limits to humans to protect the species from extinction. So this might not be the most secure building in the world, you can assume no one is dumb enough to sneak past the Brazilian navy just to get to an island covered in these extremely deadly snakes.
11. Dulce Base
- Located: Underground near the Colorado/New Mexico border town of Dulce, New Mexico
- Operator: Possibly the U.S. Government
- Size: Unknown
- Purpose: Have you ever heard of Area 51? Well this would be the same thing only less popular in pop culture and alien lore. It is, however, allegedly a place where aliens first appeared after Paul Bennewitz claimed he was intercepting electronic communications.
10. Iron Mountain’s National Data Center
- Located: Western Pennsylvania
- Operator: Iron Mountain Inc
- Size: 200-acres, 220 feet underground
- Purpose: The company, Iron Mountain, is a data center for Federal agencies, 94% of the Fortune 1000 companies, and some of the most highly regulated organizations in the world. It handles a lot of sensitive data for companies that require both security and protection of their data so it requires a facility that is not only secure, but unbreakable. So they built it inside a mountain, underground. It would take a lot of nuclear missiles just to reach the first group of doors into the facility.
9. The Greenbrier Bunker
- Located: Near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia
- Operator: United States Government
- Size: 112,000 sq ft
- Purpose: The original intent of this bunker was to house Congress in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. But after Ted Gup of The Washington Post, mentioned it in a story back in 1992, the government quickly made other arrangements. It is now a tourist attraction but was also once a luxury resort that 26 Presidents were hosted.
8. NORAD Cave
- Located: Colorado Springs, Colorado
- Operator: Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station
- Size: The Size of a large mountain
- Purpose: Do you know what a blast door is? It’s a large door that is built to withstand a nuclear blast. They are non-penetrable, 23-ton, giant doors that are lined up inside the mountain where the bunker resides and can only be opened one at a time. Basically, if The Walking Dead happens, go to Colorado Springs.
7. The White House
- Located: Washington, D.C.
- Operator: The President of the United States and U.S. Government
- Size: 18 acres
- Purpose: The White House is the secure white building located in Washington D.C. that is home to the President of the United States as well as his staff and many other key officials.
6. Bold Lane
- Located: Derby, Derbyshire, England
- Operator: Parksafe Systems
- Size: 10-stories tall
- Purpose: Bold Lane is the street where the world’s most secure multi-story car park is located. It is open 24 hours a day and has 440 parking bays that are protected electronically with barcodes, sensors, and other secret security tools. Why would you need to make a parking garage this insanely secure?
5. Mormon Church Records Facility
- Located: Granite Mountains, Utah
- Owner: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- Size: Inside a mountain near Salt Lake City, Utah
- Purpose: To protect the genealogical records of our history as well as store nearly 3 billion pages of family history data. The information is made public but you would not be able to actually touch it or hold it physically.
4. Federal Bank Reserve Gold Vault
- Located: New York, New York
- Operator: Board of Directors
- Size: Half the size of a football field
- Purpose: It is the largest, most active, and most influential Federal Bank Reserve in the country compared to the other 12 regional offices. It is the world’s largest depository of monetary gold. The vault houses over 500,000 gold bars weighing nearly 6,350 tons.
3. Area 51
- Located: Deserts of Las Vegas, Nevada
- Owner: U.S. Federal Government
- Operator: United States Air Force
- Size: Unknown
- Purpose: Area 51 is the most famous highly secured military research facility that is known for housing allegeded aliens and/or the world’s biggest secrets and cover-ups. For all we know, there is no aliens inside and the stories are all wrong. However, the level of security at Area 51 makes us all curious as to what is being locked up inside that place.
2. NSA Headquarters
- Located: Fort Meade, Maryland
- Operator: National Security Agency
- Size: 350 acres
- Purpose: The NSA has received bad press over the past few years because of the classified data leak from Edward Snowden in 2013. It let us know that the NSA was listening in on personal cell phone calls or whatever else they felt like monitoring, for any reason. Their HQ, however, is created specifically so no one can hack into it. Even the outside is covered in one-way dark glass lined with copper shielding to prevent spying.
1. United States Bullion Depository
- Located: Fort Knox, Kentucky
- Operator: United States
- Size: 42 acres
- Purpose: Not only is the U.S. Bullion Depository the world’s most secure building, it is also located deep within the world’s largest army base, Fort Knox. So good luck trying to get through the U.S. Army and 60,000 acres of land before even reaching the depository that stores nearly 2.3% of all the gold ever refined throughout human history.