© 2009-2010 Stephen Klimczuk and Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie

Travel around the world and enter some of the most secret places ever to have existed and many to which few have had access. Here you will gain exclusive admittance to the tunnel at the Vatican down which Popes fled to safety, made famous in Dan Brown’s novel and the movie adaptation of Angels and Demons; the underground government bolt-hole to which then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was allegedly spirited off, following the 9/11 attacks; and a strictly guarded sanctuary that is the world’s most tantalizing site of still undiscovered hidden treasure; among some 150 other hush-hush locations.

Your mode of transportation? Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries, a remarkable book that takes a controversial stance on many celebrated “mysteries.” Rennes-le-Château is not the key to Templar treasure or secrets of the early Christian Church, claim the authors, but a fabrication by a hard-up restaurateur. Rosslyn Chapel a secret Templar shrine? We don’t think so, since it was built 150 years after the extinction of the Order. As for the persecuted Templars – guilty as charged, is the authors’ verdict. But this book will not leave readers’ hopes of genuine mysteries disappointed. After debunking the bogus, the authors highlight lesser-known sites and totems, including a plausible version of the Holy Grail in Spain, the remarkable events that preserved the holy oil of Saint Remi in France, an island that probably holds a fabulous treasure on whose origins they offer a completely new theory, and the secretive Swiss banks whose vaults guard the fortunes of the super-rich.

Here is but a small preview of the remarkable sites—and the meticulously researched history surrounding them—revealed in these pages:

· The Chapel of the Ark in Aksum, Ethiopia, rumored to be the sanctum of the Ark of the Covenant, which would be the most amazing surviving historical and religious object of all time if it still exists

· Area 51, the United States Government base that officially doesn’t exist, but is the focus of feverish speculation among UFO buffs and extraterrestrial conspiracy theorists

· The Masonic Chapel in Pushkin, reputed to be site of meetings that finalized the abolition of the Russian monarchy and sealed the fate of the Imperial Romanov family

· The world of secret symbols, ranging from the hieroglyphics on the Magic Alchemical Door in Rome, to the Rongorongo tablets on Easter Island, one of the most remote places on earth

· 440 Strand in London, head office of Coutts & Co., referred to as “the Queen’s bankers,” which boasts an indoor garden court with comfortable settees and an exquisite indoor pond for the enjoyment of clients that over the centuries have included Bram Stoker, Chopin, and King George III.

· Yale’s Skull and Bones society, with its supposed origins in a German university “corps” seeming factually improbable, and revealing fingerprints of a different kind of esoteric origin

· The Esalen Institute, where the countercultural elite met to rub shoulders and lose themselves in some of the wildest parties of the last century

Enter now and lose yourself in the mystique and history of Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries.