Markup View

Author: Koveras

Dec 11th 2012 at 7:13:03 AM

I am still reluctant to expand the Real Life section, but here are the collected examples for it thus far:

[[AC:Real Life]]
* From 1952 until 1967, the USA officially denied the existence of its  [[{{NSA}} National Security Agency]] (NSA).  Even after that, for many years they were very closemouthed about what they did, leading to the joke that the acronym really stood for [[TropeNamer No Such Agency]].
* "Area 51" does not officialy exist, this caused problems for civilian contractors [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51#Environmental_lawsuit when they sued]] the USAF and the US EPA. President Clinton issued a Presidential Determination exempting Groom Lake from environmental disclosure laws that's still upheld today. Still, the US president has to sign off on its budget every year, so it's at least ''that'' official. (Though what they get up to is anyone's guess.)
* Until the 90s, the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Tower BT Tower]] in London was officially a secret and did not appear on maps.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station Numbers stations]] -- radio stations that do nothing but broadcast long sequences of letters and numbers -- can be confirmed to exist by anyone with a shortwave radio, and it's not much of a stretch to speculate that they are transmitting coded messages to spies, but no government or other broadcaster has ever officially admitted that they operate a numbers station.
** A spokesperson for the UK regulator of radio broadcasting did once say "[numbers stations] are what you suppose they are" in a newspaper interview.
* SEAL Team 6 apparently doesn't exist, but they were real enough to kill Osama bin Laden.