Declassified Intelligence & Covert Operations
Definition: An archive of declassified intelligence and covered-up projects. Exposing the suppressed truths that stayed in the dark until now.
On 6 August 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed by an atomic bomb. Japan did not surrender at once. On 8 August, the Soviet Union declared war. In the early hours of 9 August, the Red Army attacked Manchuria; on the same day, the United States dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki. On 15 August, Emperor Hirohito broadcast Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.
On 5 December 1914, the ship Endurance left South Georgia and entered the Weddell Sea. Ernest Shackleton, 27 crew members, and 69 sled dogs were on board. They planned to land on the Antarctic coast, cross the continent on foot, pass the South Pole, and reach the Ross Sea. The First World War had already begun in Europe, yet the British government allowed the expedition to continue.
On July 9, 1997, a hiker near Indian Lake in New York caught his foot on a piece of metal showing through the soil. He was far from a road or marked trail. After hours of digging with branches, he pulled out an old box. Its lid carried three marks: an upside-down triangle beside two circles. There was no lock.
Grosse-Île sits in the Saint Lawrence River, about 50 kilometres from Quebec City. From the nineteenth century onward, immigrant ships stopped there for inspection. People with fever, coughing, or signs of infection could be held on the island. Even healthy passengers sometimes waited for days before they were allowed to continue. The island existed to keep disease out of Canada.
Before dawn on 20 September 1977, people in Petrozavodsk saw a huge light moving across the sky. It looked like a glowing disc, then like a bright jellyfish. It hovered, changed direction and spread light over the city. Taxi drivers, police officers, airport workers, sailors and residents in several places around the Baltic reported similar objects. Reports came from Copenhagen and Helsinki on one side and from dista
On an evening in October 1969, while he was governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter stood with a group of guests at a club in Leary. He saw a bright object in the distance, changing colour and holding its position before moving away. Four years later, Carter filled out a report for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. The National Archives confirms that the report is preserved in his presidential l...
On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He reported seeing nine bright objects moving in formation at a speed he could not match to any aircraft he knew. Arnold said they moved like saucers skipping across water. Newspapers shortened the description to “flying saucers,” and Americans began looking at the sky with a new kind of fear.
Before dawn on 21 July 1968, El Fausto left El Hierro to return to Tazacorte on La Palma. The route was roughly one hundred kilometres, and three men aboard had travelled it many times. The crew were brothers Ramón and Heriberto Concepción and their cousin Miguel Acosta. The fourth man was Julio García Pino, a 27-year-old mechanic who had taken a last-minute passage to reach his newborn daughter, who was ill.
At about 7:15 p.m. on September 12, 1952, four boys were playing near Flatwoods Elementary School in Braxton County, West Virginia. A red-yellow streak crossed the sky and came down beyond a hill on the Bailey Fisher farm. The boys ran to tell the mother of Eddie and Freddie May. Kathleen May took a flashlight, called Eugene Lemon — a 17-year-old member of the National Guard — and walked up the hill with the boys, an
In 1982, a gas pipeline caught fire in the Tyumen region of Siberia. The area stood near the enormous gas fields the Soviet Union needed to sell energy to Europe and earn hard currency. The fire happened, but the outside world learned very little about it for years. Thomas C. Reed, a former U.S. National Security Council official, later wrote that pipeline-control software had been altered. It worked normally for a t
On the night of December 29, 1972, an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-1011 flew from New York to Miami. There were 163 passengers and 13 crew members on board. During the approach, the green light that should have confirmed the nose landing gear was locked did not come on. Captain Robert Loft, first officer Albert Stockstill, and flight engineer Donald “Don” Repo began checking whether the gear was really down. They cli
In August 1945, as Japanese forces withdrew from Manchuria, a compound at Pingfang, south of Harbin, was destroyed in a matter of days. Buildings were burned, records went into the fire, and the prisoners inside were not left as witnesses. The compound was known as Unit 731. On military paperwork, however, it carried a harmless-sounding name: the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung A
On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin sat inside Vostok 1 at Baikonur. The spacecraft made one orbit of Earth in 108 minutes and returned. The Soviet Union announced that this was the first time a human had gone into space. Gagarin became a hero, and his name entered every history book.
On January 18, 2017, the CIA placed more than 12 million declassified pages online. Before that release, many records could be viewed only at four computers in the National Archives reading room in Maryland. A researcher had to travel there, search by file code, and photograph or print the material. When the collection moved to the CIA website, the public could finally search reports about the Cold War, reconnaissanc
On December 29, 1610, Palatine György Thurzó led officials and soldiers to Čachtice Castle, now in Slovakia. Elizabeth Báthory, a wealthy widow from a powerful family, was accused of torturing servants and causing the deaths of young women. Four close servants were arrested. Days later, they were interrogated and tortured for statements.
In 1942, while Britain was preparing for a war for national survival against Nazi Germany, Porton Down scientists brought sheep to Gruinard Island off Scotland’s northwest coast. The island had been bought by the military, closed, and given the code name X Base. The goal was not to study a natural outbreak. They wanted to know what an anthrax-spore weapon could do in the field.
On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m., a massive earthquake struck off northeastern Japan. Six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi were in different states: Units 1, 2, and 3 were operating; Units 4, 5, and 6 were shut down for maintenance or refuelling. Automatic systems immediately inserted control rods into the cores. Fission stopped. On paper, the most visible part of the safety procedure had worked.
In 1346, the port city of Caffa on the Black Sea was under siege by the Golden Horde. Caffa was a Genoese trading colony, now Feodosia in Crimea. Outside the walls, the besieging army was suffering from a disease that caused fever, swollen lymph nodes and rapid death. Inside, residents were hungry and could not simply leave the harbour.
On the afternoon of 27 January 1967, three astronauts sat inside the Apollo command module at Launch Complex 34 at Cape Kennedy. Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were running a ground test for the first crewed Apollo flight. The rocket had not left the pad. No launch fuel was burning below them. The command module had been filled with high-pressure pure oxygen to simulate flight conditions.
Shortly after midnight on 30 July 1945, the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis was sailing alone between Guam and Leyte. It had just completed a secret trip to Tinian, where it delivered components used in the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In the Philippine Sea, the Japanese submarine I-58 fired torpedoes. Two struck the starboard side. Indianapolis sank in about twelve minutes.
In 1994, the Sherman family moved to a ranch in Utah's Uintah Basin. They described a large wolf attacking their livestock without falling after several shots, animals disappearing and lights appearing above the property. At first, these were only stories from a family living in a remote place. There was no laboratory, military aircraft or government budget attached to them.
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, Pripyat in northern Ukraine was still asleep. A few kilometres away, Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was being prepared for a test. Engineers wanted to know whether a spinning turbine could keep the cooling pumps running after the outside power supply was cut, while the diesel generators started. It was meant to be a safety test, not an attack and not an unexpected eve
Before dawn on 25 February 1942, Los Angeles went dark under an air-raid order. Sirens sounded across the city, searchlights swept the sky, and anti-aircraft guns fired repeatedly at a target nobody could identify. For nearly two hours, more than 1,400 shells crossed above residential districts. No bomb fell. No aircraft was shot down. No wreckage remained to give the enemy a name.
At 7:15 a.m. on 12 June 1962, an Alcatraz guard made the routine inspection of the cells. Three beds appeared occupied, but the men in them had been gone for hours. What remained were fake heads made from plaster, flesh-coloured paint, and real hair. The heads rested on pillows so the guards would believe Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin were still asleep.
At about 7 p.m. on 21 August 1955, Billy Ray Taylor walked to the well behind the Sutton farmhouse near Kelly, Kentucky. He saw a glowing object fly low and descend behind a line of trees. About 45 minutes later, the people inside heard the dog barking violently. A small human-shaped figure, less than four feet tall, came out of the darkness.
On 1 September 1909, America read Frederick Cook’s claim that he had reached the North Pole on 21 April 1908. Five days later, Robert Peary sent a telegram saying he had reached it on 6 April 1909. Two men claimed the same first-place honour, but only one was turned into a hero by the press and powerful institutions.
On 19 May 1845, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror left Greenhithe, England. The two ships carried 134 people: Sir John Franklin, Royal Navy officers, sailors, engineers, and doctors. They carried years of tinned food, steam engines, heating equipment, and reinforced hulls for sea ice. Their mission was to find a sea route through northern Canada connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
On the afternoon of 9 December 1965, a blue light crossed the sky over the eastern United States and Canada. People in several states saw the fireball at the same time. In Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, residents said the object fell into woods near the village. They described a bronze-coloured metal body shaped like an acorn or bell, larger than a car and partly buried in the ground.
On the night of 1 October 1948, Lieutenant George F. Gorman flew his P-51 Mustang back toward Hector Airport in Fargo, North Dakota. The sky was clear, the football stadium below was lit, and the control tower knew of only two aircraft in the area. As Gorman prepared to land, a white light appeared to his right.
In May 1951, two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, disappeared. They were not stopped at a border, left no message, and did not travel alone. They crossed France, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia before appearing in Moscow. Britain immediately began a worldwide hunt.
At the end of January 1945, as the Red Army approached Auschwitz, Josef Mengele gathered papers, research material, and anything that could help him disappear. He left before Soviet troops arrived. The man who had stood on the Auschwitz platform deciding who would work and who would die in the gas chambers was not captured with the camp guards.
On 26 August 1946, the United States Navy planned to send a huge force to Antarctica. Thirteen ships, 33 aircraft, and about 4,700 people were assigned to build Little America IV, map the coast, and test operations in ice and snow. Its official name was the United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program. In military use, it was Operation Highjump.
On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were inside the command bunker beneath the German Chancellery in Berlin. Soviet troops were closing in. Hitler had said he would not be captured. He and Eva entered a private room, and the staff heard a gunshot. They later said Hitler was found on a sofa, Eva had taken poison, and both bodies were carried into the garden, soaked in petrol, and burned.
On the morning of 13 January 1996, people around Varginha in Minas Gerais, Brazil, reported a large object flying low and descending through white smoke. A university professor who approached the area said the debris was extremely light and smelled of ammonia and sulphur. Military trucks arrived and pushed civilians away. Seven days later, three girls saw a brown-skinned, red-eyed, three-toed creature crouched beside
On the morning of 2 July 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Lae, New Guinea, for Howland Island in the central Pacific. Howland was only a low strip of land a few kilometres long. The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited offshore to transmit radio signals and guide them in. If Earhart found Howland, she would complete the most dangerous leg of her round-the-world flight.
On the morning of 19 November 1961, Michael Rockefeller tied two empty fuel cans to his body and jumped from a capsized boat at the mouth of the Betsj River in the Asmat region of Dutch New Guinea. The nearest shore was only a few kilometres away, but between them lay a strong tide, mudflats, and the Arafura Sea. Anthropologist René Wassing stayed with the overturned hull. An aircraft spotted him that afternoon and h
On 5 December 1872, Captain David Morehouse saw a sailing ship drifting off course between the Azores and Portugal. It was the Mary Celeste, sailing from New York to Genoa with 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol. Morehouse sent men to inspect it because nobody was on deck. The ship was still afloat and still carried food and water, but Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, their young daughter, and seven sailors were g
In April 1938, a German team crossed India and Sikkim to enter Tibet. It was led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer and included anthropologist Bruno Beger, geophysicist Karl Wienert, filmmaker Ernst Krause, and technician Edmund Geer. The journey ended in August 1939, just before the Second World War began. Photographs in the German Federal Archives show the party beside Tibetan officials and monks, with SS markings visible
At about 4 a.m. on 20 September 1977, the sky over Petrozavodsk in the north-western Soviet Union lit up. An object like a giant star appeared, sent shafts of light toward the ground, and then became a bright hemispherical glow. People in Petrozavodsk, towns around Lake Onega, and Finland saw it. The display lasted roughly ten minutes, long enough for witnesses to call, write, and report it to observation stations.
On 4 April 1922, neighbours broke into an isolated farm near Waidhofen in Bavaria, Germany. They found six dead people: Andreas Gruber, his wife Cäzilia, their daughter Viktoria Gabriel, her two children Cäzilia and Josef, and the maid Maria Baumgartner. The Bavarian State Archives records severe blows to the head during the night of 31 March, between about 7 and 10 p.m. The weapon was a mattock, but it was not found
At the end of the Second World War, as the Red Army advanced from the east and the Allies closed in from the west, Nazi Germany was not only withdrawing troops. It was also moving gold, art, records, and equipment through guarded routes. In Lower Silesia, now part of Poland, tunnels beneath mountains and Książ Castle still exist. What disappeared is the complete list of what entered, left, or was buried there.
On May 20, 1967, Stefan Michalak left a motel at Falcon Lake, Manitoba, at 5:30 in the morning. He was a Polish-born industrial mechanic who liked searching the Whiteshell forest for quartz veins and minerals. He carried a hammer, a map, a compass, paper, a pencil, and enough food for the day. Six hours later, he came back to the road vomiting, dizzy, with burned clothing and a grid-shaped injury across his chest.
On July 24, 1989, Hokkaido police used a helicopter to search for two hikers lost in Daisetsuzan National Park. From the air they saw a giant SOS sign made from fallen birch trunks on Mount Asahidake. The two hikers were rescued because of it. When police returned, they found a second story nearby: a hollow containing a recorder, cassettes, human remains, and identification belonging to Kenji Iwamura, who had disappe
In 1942, Germany’s A-4 rocket rose from Peenemünde and fell onto a target hundreds of kilometres away. It became known as the V-2, the first ballistic missile used in war. It flew higher than any aircraft of its time, carried an explosive warhead, and arrived with almost no warning. To London civilians it was a weapon. To post-war engineers it was the first human machine to open a route toward space.
On May 9, 2001, cameras filled the main room of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. More than twenty people with backgrounds in the military, intelligence, aviation, air-traffic control, and government sat before the microphones. They did not come to tell a ghost story. They asked Congress to hold hearings on unidentified flying objects, technology not made by humans, and programmes kept away from the public.
From Hans Kammler to a concrete structure in Silesia, how the Bell story is told.
On 21 June 1947, tugboat operator Harold Dahl said he saw six round objects above Maury Island in Washington State. One object had a hole in its centre and dropped hot metal fragments. Dahl said a fragment damaged his boat, injured his son, and killed his dog. The next morning, a man in dark clothing met him at a diner. The man knew details of the incident without waiting for Dahl to repeat them, then told him to sta
In 1987, during the nationally televised Iran-Contra hearings, Representative Jack Brooks asked Colonel Oliver North a question that was not about arms sales to Iran. He asked whether North had worked on continuity-of-government plans for a major disaster. North’s lawyer objected immediately. Chairman Daniel Inouye said the question touched a “highly sensitive and classified area” and asked that it not be pursued.…
In February 1959, nine hikers died in the northern Urals after cutting their tent from inside and running into the snow. Documents, injuries, and long Soviet silence made it one of the twentieth century's most famous mysteries.
The covert effort supporting the Contras in Nicaragua used transport networks, front companies, and off-books money. Investigation records show why drug-trafficking allegations cannot be reduced to one simple denial.
WTC 7 was not struck by an airplane but collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001. Its straight-down appearance, early steel removal, and debate around NIST modeling drove the controlled-demolition allegation.
On August 4, 1964, reports of a second attack on U.S. ships led to a resolution that expanded the Vietnam War. Later official Navy history confirmed that the attack did not occur.
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza. The route from Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA, FBI, Cuba, and Mafia records is why the lone-gunman story has never felt closed.
In September 1950, the U.S. Navy sent a ship offshore from San Francisco and sprayed Serratia marcescens into the air. The military plan was to measure how a biological agent would move through a coastal city if an enemy attacked from the sea or air. Residents were not warned, did not consent, and did not know they were inside an experiment.
On September 15, 1966, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a memorandum about Project Pop Eye. It described a secret, highly classified experiment in the Laotian panhandle. The objective was written plainly: increase rainfall, soften roads, disrupt supply routes, and make North Vietnamese truck traffic harder to move.
In 2006, technician Mark Klein gave the Electronic Frontier Foundation drawings he had seen while working at an AT&T facility in San Francisco. The drawings showed a specially secured room connected to equipment that could split traffic from the telecommunications network. The room was known as Room 641A. Klein said the equipment could send a copy of AT&T traffic to the National Security Agency, or NSA.
In 1974, the Soviet Union approved development of Perimeter, a semi-automatic system intended to preserve a nuclear response after a command center had been destroyed. Western media often called it “Dead Hand.” The name suggests a machine that presses an apocalypse button, but public descriptions show a more complicated structure: it was placed inside the command network to address the loss of leaders and communications.
From 1962 to 1973, the U.S. military’s Deseret Test Center planned 134 chemical and biological tests. Fifty were conducted and 84 were canceled. About 6,400 service members were later identified as having taken part in at least one test. The shipboard tests were called SHAD, short for Shipboard Hazard and Defense. Land-based tests examined how agents behaved under different environmental conditions.
In 2001, the European Parliament published a report on an interception system known as ECHELON. The report did not rest on one rumor. It combined declassified records, testimony from people connected to intelligence work, technical research, and hearings. Its conclusion was that a global communications-interception system operated for a period through cooperation among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. ECHELON may have been the name of the whole system or one part of it.
In 1983, an officer connected to U.S. Army intelligence wrote a report titled *Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process*. The document is now held in the CIA’s declassified archive. It was not an advertisement for the Monroe Institute and not a record from an occult group. It was a military assessment of a method that used sound, relaxation, and visualization to change a person’s state of consciousness.
On January 4, 2012, an account named 3301 posted an image of a cicada on the 4chan forum. The message said that the group was looking for very intelligent people. People who downloaded the image found hidden data inside it. They were then required to solve ciphers, read books, call a telephone number, follow GPS coordinates, and locate QR-code posters placed in cities around the world.
On December 26, 1980, US personnel at RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters in Suffolk, England, saw strange lights outside the base perimeter.
In 1977, residents of Colares Island and nearby coastal areas of Pará in northern Brazil repeatedly reported bright objects flying low over their homes at night. They called the lights chupa-chupa.
A medieval parchment book kept its images and writing but lost its readers, as if its key had been separated from the world.
Groom Lake, the U-2, the A-12 and CIA records show how UFO rumours could conceal real reconnaissance flights.
In late 2016, U.S. diplomats in Havana reported a sudden buzz or pressure followed by headache, dizziness, balance problems, and difficulty concentrating. Some said the symptoms began inside a home or near a workplace. Similar cases were later reported in China, Russia, Germany, Austria, and other locations. The U.S. government called them “anomalous health incidents.”
On the night of July 19, 1952, several lights appeared on radar screens around Washington, D.C. Civilian and military pilots reported unusual objects as well. The U.S. Air Force could not ignore such reports because the same trace might be a spy balloon, a test aircraft, a missile, or interference. In 1952 the Air Force created Project Blue Book after Project Sign and Project Grudge to receive, classify, and explain
On May 26, 1987, an American newspaper reported a set of papers called Operation Majestic-12. They presented themselves as a top-secret briefing for President Dwight Eisenhower. The papers said that after an object fell near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, President Harry Truman created a twelve-person group to recover technology from outside Earth, study bodies, and keep the operation away from the public.
On 7 July 1947, Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico released a statement that drew national attention: the military had recovered a “flying disc” that had fallen near a ranch. Within hours, the statement was withdrawn. General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth said the object was only a weather balloon and a radar reflector. An object called a flying disc in the morning had become a balloon by evening.
In July 1947, strange material was found on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Roswell Army Air Field first announced that it had recovered a “flying disc,” then quickly changed the story to a weather balloon. Two contradictory statements appeared within a day. That reversal is why the Roswell story outlived the debris itself.
A declassified intelligence program shows what happened when the state tried to turn remote viewing into an operational tool.
In May 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered. Allied forces entered Peenemünde, rocket plants, laboratories, and test ranges. They were not looking only for guns and tanks. They wanted the people who knew how to build rockets, guide aircraft, develop chemicals, and run military laboratories. The war ended on paper, but a new technology race began inside the files of the defeated state.
In March 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129 disappeared in the Pacific with its entire crew. K-129 was a Golf II-class boat carrying ballistic missiles and secure communications equipment. The Soviet search failed to locate it. The United States found the wreck about 5,000 meters d
After World War II, Western European governments feared that Soviet forces could occupy their capitals and cut the state apart. From the late 1940s, several countries built stay-behind networks. If occupation came, secret members would not withdraw with regular forces. They would
In 1971, people broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and took files. The documents reached the press and forced the US Senate’s Church Committee to investigate intelligence activities in 1975. The public learned that COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence Program,
On March 13, 1962, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a classified memorandum titled “Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba.” Cuba had allied with the Soviet Union, the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion had failed in 1961, and Operat