@[email protected] I used to live in a small town called Griesheim in Germany and would regularly drive past an abandoned US airbase. The gate was still manned and I'd occasionally see people in cars getting checked there. Thought it was a bit weird, but that was it.
A couple of years later the Snowden revelations came out and it turns out it housed the infamous underground Dagger Complex (there were radomes too, but I never really gave it much thought).