Why not a hexagon or a square?
They wouldn’t go very well with the name.
Yeah, you can tell any story you want, but we of the Tin-Foil Hat Brigade (Western Michigan Chapter) know the truth–that the Pentagon serves as a prison for the demon called up and entrapped by FDR and Eisenhower to combat the Nazi menace of Nyarlathotep summoned by Hitler’s master occultists.
Why yes, I do subscribe to Art Bell’s newsletter. Why do you ask?
Stranger
About the same story here:
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/history-construction.htm
It’s merely echoing the existing answers, but Robert Norris’s (excellent) biography Racing For The Bomb (Steerforth Press, 2002) of Leslie Groves - who supervised the building project - agrees that it was the roads bounding the original Arlington Farms site that initially determined the shape. He adds (in a footnote on the subject on p604) that a pentagonal shape had been a common design for “old forts” and this may have reinforced Bergstrom’s decision.
He major cite on the subject is Alfred Goldberg’s 1992 official history The Pentagon: The First Fifty Years.
Personally, I think it’s a fantastic design… who would have thunk the government would have accepted such a cool design? = )
It does seem darned unlikely, doesn’t it – lending further credence to Stranger’s theory…
Harumph ! Every reader of Robert Anton Wilson’s treatise Illuminatus ! knows that it is Yog-Sototh that has been imprisoned there by the Illuminatis.
Because it has Intel Inside.
Like this one?
Because a square building called The Pentagon would be a little odd.
Huh. I always assumed it was symbolic of the five branches of the military – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and the Coast Guard. (The Coast Guard is a branch of the military, right?)
My parents met at the Pentagon, where he was as a military historian for the Army, and she was a technical writer for the Air Force.
My mother told me when I was little girl that the reason the Pentagon was shaped that way was because of the annual Pentagon Sadie Hawkins Day Race. The angles were built to give the men some breathing room when they had to round a corner, chased by fertile, nubile, female runners such as my mother.
My mother told me that’s how she and my father met - that she caught him in the Sadie Hawkins Day Race in the Pentagon. I believed her for long time. When I think about the Pentagon, and the shape of it, I can’t help but think of all those runners, and my father getting tackled by my mother.
wrong.
Dept Of Homeland Security, formerly Dept Of Transportation, formerly Dept Of Treasury.
No, it’s part of the Dept. of Homeland Security. It used to be under the Dept. of Treasury, then the Dept. of Transportation.
No, Intel is in Santa Clara, CA… = )
And Chandler, AZ…the “undisclosed location” that serves as the true home of the Shadow Government run by Dick Cheney and his Illuminati/Bilderberger/Tri-Lateral Commission compatriots. Nobody ever thinks to look for the locus of power in the center of the desert. I hear Dick has this underground lair with hundreds of henchmen willing to die at his behest while he escapes from agents of the British Secret Service and Japanese CIA by jetting away in his rocket-powered, gold plated Delorean.
I’d expand further on my knowledge but the pretty lady in white says it’s time for another shock treatment. More to follow.
Stranger
Why did they make the Pentagon a pentagon?
So it’s easier to spot from the air 
9/11 gags.
How…nice… :dubious: