Above Top Secret

An ATS user finally figures out who killed Kennedy - Rose Kennedy - and contemplates his next edit.

On one hand, Above Top Secret (pronounced ATS) is a conspiracy and breaking news site manned by some of the brightest unemployed people on the planet. On another hand, it's a place where distracting ads try to grab your attention and further cripple your sense of keeping your wallet closed (some ads actually float up out of nowhere and defy all attempts to capture or kill them). And on the last hand, sticky with bodily fluids but the one that holds all the cards, ATS is a site occupied by inmates of mental hospitals and/or security agencies monitoring the populace to see where the crazy will go next.

The motto

ATS's motto is "Deny Ignorance." Ignorant users are required to post this at least once a day.

The members

The site is inhabited by thousands of geeks, scientists, administrators, pre-teens and pre-memes, and by good and bad writers of all descriptions and professions. It's inhibited by mothers calling their sons up to dinner. The smart people on ATS diligently research, report, and expose the outlandishness popping up all around us, and the still smarter ones dig in to research and expose the secrets from the deepest, darkest lurky-holes of history.

The not-so-smart people who troll ATS give it a go anyway, and come away with some friendly advice: STFU! Hello, Girls? Girls who long for emotional fulfillment? Here's your chance to pick up an intellectually liberated, probably obese and/or dehydrated layabout, who can type, do research, formulate exotic theories, and make the best chip dip that a little money can buy. And boys in various stages of virginity, here's your chance to hit on lots of cute, hydrated, intelligent working women and feel the Sammy phillips.jpg cold sting of their laughter.

The Content

posted August 4: "OMG OMG OMG, it buzzed my house and I screamed and filmed it. A giant flying amoeba with tentacles or something." (HOAX)

Topics at ATS range from the latest threads and heated debates about mainstream media's going-gently-down-the-stream news, loud booms in the sky and under the earth, major die-offs of species hopefully leading to gleefully anticipated global destruction, hot women - real or just alien-enduced internet fantasy - and the newest and oldest in political, governmental, and incidental conspiracies. And that's just their warm up act. They then go on to report on wars and rumors of rumors of wars, and write about "Look over there!" when other media outlets tell us to "Look over here!". ATS explains the universe by saying that "everything exists everywhere else" but, oddly, it allows no mention of "drugs", even though a healthy percentage of their users are solidly and significantly stoned when they come to visit.

Men who prowl ATS have fun with facts, fear, frivolity, and fantasy - the 4-F Club for those who don't fornicate. The women who write there are the salt of the earth, and likely know the chemical formula for both salt and earth. In fact, ATS's brave users exist far ahead of their time while digging their muddy hands into their time. If anyone tells you that ghosts can drive a UFO, they probaby aren't doing it on ATS, which doesn't put up very well with stupid. When an ATS thread reaches fifty flags you can bet your mother's house that some good data got through the dumb-down filter laid across the net by "the man" and "his woman". And if it's excitement you're after, exploring the site's caves and forums can take you deep into weird caverns where stalagtites grow faces and yell at you about the next big thing. Just don't swing your arms around, you're liable to hit Stephen Hawking on the way out.

HowTo:View Above Top Secret

A useful top secret from Zog, the Queen of tha ants: It's best to fill up your ultra-calorie snack bowl and view the site as a logged-in member, even if you never post anything, because, as said earlier, the unholy place seems as full of ads as that black thing was full of stars. Logged in members bypass some ads, but not all of them by a longshot (a not-so-fun fact - they even let ads grow in-between every fifth or sixth post as seen by the non-member riff-raff: a.k.a. the general public). And as an added bonus, when you log-in you get to see users avatars - some creepy ones, power mad ones, sexy ones, beautiful ones, but mostly sc ary ones - and can award "flags", "stars", and "geese" to threads and comments that you like and/or agree with.

The bottom line

And these are the bottom lines unless you can find the secret bottom line: on its way to denying ignorance, Above Top Secret blasts you to the moon (unlike those faked moon landings brought to you by Stanley Kubrick and E. Howard Hunt) and sends you back either with more knowledge of your world and others like it or with more backlit trauma than your brain can soak up in one visit. Ignorance has its place, but certainly not at ATS (unless you're their advertising manager).