There’s No Building In The World Like This One In North Dakota

I’ve mentioned this place in an article before, but have never really gone in depth about it, and I think it’s time to change that. This place is so fascinating in origin, information – and just on appearance alone. You’ll never find anything like it anywhere else in the world, and you won’t believe some of these facts about it. It truly is bizarre; just see for yourself.

Library of Congress/Wikimedia

From this birds eye view, these North Dakota fields are broken up by a huge area of mysterious objects known as the Stanely R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex. It's mostly flat except for the one structure that catches everyone's eye - the pyramid.

Craftsman2001/Wikimedia

This pyramid is part of a government program called the Safeguard Program that ran from the 1950s and 60s and continued until the mid 70s. There were plans for many of sites like this one all over the United States, but due to controversy they ended up only building two: one in Montana, and the one pictured here in Nekoma, North Dakota.

The purpose of the site was to be prepared for any sort of missile attack on the country. Tensions were high then due to the Cold War and it was hard to gauge how far was too far with these places. This was not a site to launch attack missiles to our opponents, it was a place to launch intercepting missiles that were supposed to destroy enemy missiles in the air well before they ever reached us.

US Federal Government/Wikimedia

These white circular objects were where the missiles were housed to be launched. The pyramid itself is actually the radar system to detect any incoming attacks, no weapons are housed there. What lay underneath these circular hatches were known as LIM-49 Spartan missiles and were to be launched as soon as enemy missiles were detected by the radar and would have the goal of hitting those missiles in air before they could make landfall. The following picture is one of these missiles during a test launch:

US Federal Government/Wikimedia

They were intended to make the hit high above the atmosphere and prevent any and all destruction. Not a single one was every launched for their true purpose, thankfully, and the complex was only open for a few years before being shut down permanently and left to rot for nearly half a century.

US Federal Government/Wikimedia

There was another part of this complex built in the Cavalier Air Force Station known as the PARCS, or Perimeter Acquisition Radar Characterization System, shown here. Essentially it was another radar system much like the pyramid in Nekoma. It is still used by the air force today.

The entire complex cost billions of dollars to build and ended up being completely unused. In 2012, the site went up for auction and sold at $530,000. It is now private property and not open to the public. The place is still sitting empty and untouched for the most part, and becoming eerier as time goes on. Here is a video from just last year of some drone footage showing the creepy atmosphere and crumbling concrete.

It’s like something from a dystopian novel to me. I wonder how long it’ll still be there? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still around well after our lifetimes, living on as a strange part of history most people don’t know about. This story is also a pretty unknown, and insane, bit of history, and happened right in North Dakota. This state has quite the past!