The steady background drone of bulls__t.

When I was a teenager, it was a widely-accepted fact in my peer group that somewhere in the bottomland near our school there existed a Cold War-relic underground blockhouse* where you could totally listen in on all the phone calls in the neighborhood because it was the phone company's emergency nukyular war control center for the area. Needless to say, desultory searches of various manhole covers only turned up storm sewers and no bunker, although some folks swore their best friend's cousin had totally been in it.

In Tennessee, visible in a mountainside north of I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville, is the mammoth entry to a mine or quarry. It's especially intriguing at night, when the gaping hole in the mountain is brightly lit, but I never could be arsed to find out exactly what kind of mine it was. My boss at a now-defunct gun store, the one who was a "snipe" in Vietnam and whose dad won three Medals of Honor in WWII for getting three carriers sunk out from under him, told me it was a secret underground Air Force base and he had seen jet fighters launch from it and buzz his Ford Ranger on the Interstate.

Here in Indianapolis, of course, there is the Amtrak repair yard down in Beech Grove, right across the street from one of my favorite local gun shops. The goofy legends surrounding the Amtrak yard are so pervasive and persistent that Shootin' Buddy and I jokingly refer to Beech Grove Firearms as "Death Camp Guns & Gear".

Imagine if you had giant caves in your town, caves that you can see streams of eighteen-wheelers driving in and out of all day and night; think of the legends that could be spun around that armature! Why, you might conclude that it was the entrance to a secret underground network of highways and rail tunnels maintained by DHS and FEMA so that our masters in Washington wouldn't have to get stuck in traffic jams with the hoi polloi.

By the way, in case you're in Kansas City and you'd like in on the secret underground DHS/FEMA base there, here's their leasing office. I don't get a commission or anything.
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*Five minutes' careful thought would have led us to realize that the storm sewers in a flood plain along a creek bed where the trees all had muddy water rings two feet up their trunks were an unlikely place to find an underground bunker full of abandoned-but-still-functional electronic equipment, but the kind of people who believe Sean's dad's GTO can totally go 200mph are not generally known for their critical thinking skills or advanced B.S. detection abilities.