By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume the best available survey of the military's black world: a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.

A fresh approach to secret government. It shows that these secret programs have their own culture, vocabulary and even sense of humor.

--Steven Aftergood, The Federation of American Scientists

In a work that combines ingenious journalism and bizarrely encoded art, author/photographer/investigator Trevor Paglen uncovers sixty never-before-seen-in-public military patches that reveal a bizarre secret world of the American military. Paglen investigates classified weapons projects and intelligence operations by examining their own imagery and jargon, disclosing new facts about important classified military units--here known by peculiar names (Goat Suckers, None of Your Fucking Business, Tastes Like Chicken) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. The precisely photographed patches--worn by military personnel working on classified missions, such as those at the legendary Area 51--reveal much about a strange and eerie world about which little was previously known.

The author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide, based on extensive interviews with military sources and government records, to the patches included here, making this volume perhaps the best available survey of the military's black world--a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.

Shown here for the first time, these sixty patches reveal a secret world of military imagery and jargon, where classified projects are known by peculiar names (“Goat Suckers,” “None of Your Fucking Business,” “Tastes Like Chicken”) and illustrated with occult symbols and ridiculous cartoons. Although the actual projects represented here (such as the notorious Area 51) are classified, these patches—which are worn by military units working on classified missions—are precisely photographed, strangely hinting at a world about which little is known.

By submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, the author has also assembled an extensive and readable guide to the patches included here, making this volume one of the best available surveys of the military’s black world—a $27 billion industry that has quietly grown by almost 50 percent since 9/11.

Trevor Paglenis a geographer by training, and an expert on clandestine military installations. He leads expeditions to the secret bases of the American West and is the author, with A.C. Thompson, of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, which The New York Timespraised as “the real thing . . . and not on the evening news.”