Mapping Conspiracy Theories in Virginia

My final project will be a map of government and military conspiracy theories in Virginia. Even though I work in the Intelligence community, I still have a general interest in some of the unique missions being carried out on some of the military installations I visit. I also think the location of these installations is almost as interesting as their mission. The locations will be the main focus of the map.

 The audience is mostly me, but I think the conspiracy theorists websites I have been data mining from will appreciate my effort in plotting the location they are so curious about. The locations are going to be what makes this map interesting to look at. They are often right on the other side of the fence from major roads and neighborhoods, while some are deep in the woods or on the top of a mountain.

The content for this map will be derived from multiple sources including conspiracy theorists blogs, .gov and .mil websites, and my own experience with some of the sites in question. Reading the conspiracy blogs turned up suspicious sites I didn’t even know about.  The map will show how saturated Virginia is with secretive military and civilian installations. I will plot their location along with a photo or satellite image of the location along with it’s suspected mission. The base map will be from the ESRI ArcMap library.

This map requires a fair amount of combing through conspiracy theorists blogs to find out what locations they are theorizing about.  When I find a post with a location I might be able to use, I turn to Google search and Google Earth to see it and to find the public release statement…if there is one. In most cases, the military discloses the mission of each instillation and sometimes the blogger refuse to accept the statement published. 

The challenge will be to decide what content to include and what to discard because there are so many locations the conspiracy theorists are questioning. Anyone can be a Imagery Analyst with the free Google Earth application and some of them feel the need to blog about their suspicions. The other challenge will be design. There are not a lot of unclassified examples of government map designs to reference. I made a rough illustrator sketch to brainstorm what I want the map to look like.