1857 · War Department The Camel Corps Jefferson Davis’s report to the Senate on the Army’s $30,000 purchase of 75 camels to haul supplies across Texas. 1892 · USDA (R. G. Dyrenforth) The Dynamite Rainmakers Congress paid a special agent to set off dynamite over Texas from balloons, kites, and mortars to force rain from the sky. 1904 · USDA · Bureau of Chemistry The Poison Squad Twelve government clerks ate borax-laced meals for months while chemists weighed them and recorded the headaches. 1910 · U.S. House The American Hippo Bill A 1910 House hearing on a bill to import hippopotamuses to eat the water hyacinth choking Louisiana’s waterways and supply meat. 1917 · CIA Secret Writing Six World War I papers on invisible ink and opening sealed letters, which stayed classified until 2011. 1942 · U.S. Army Air Forces / U.S. Navy The Bat Bomb A plan to drop bats carrying tiny firebombs on Japanese cities. Escaped test bats set an air base on fire. 1943 · OSS The Hitler Profile An OSS psychoanalytic profile of Hitler that judged suicide his most plausible end if Germany faced defeat. 1943 · Los Alamos (R. Serber) The Los Alamos Primer The lecture notes given to new Manhattan Project scientists on how to build an atomic bomb. 1943 · FBI The Tesla File The FBI’s file on Nikola Tesla, whose papers federal officials seized after his death amid talk of a “death ray.” 1944 · OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual Advice for citizen saboteurs that reads like office satire: hold endless meetings and refer everything to committees. 1946 · Los Alamos (Konopinski, Marvin, Teller) Ignition of the Atmosphere The calculation of whether an atomic bomb could set Earth’s atmosphere on fire. The answer was no. 1946 · U.S. Navy · NACA Langley The Flying Flapjack Wind-tunnel tests of the Navy’s round fighter plane, which looked like a flying saucer. 1946 · U.S. Army Air Forces · Project RAND The World-Circling Spaceship Eleven years before Sputnik, the first RAND report designed a satellite and predicted the political shock it would cause. 1946 · OSRD · Tiffany Foundation The Yehudi Lights A wartime camouflage report on Yehudi, which hid bombers against the sky with lamps aimed forward from their wings. 1948 · Naval Research Laboratory Pigeon-Guided Missiles The Navy revived B. F. Skinner’s idea of training pigeons to steer missiles by pecking at a target on a screen. 1949 · USAF · Air Materiel Command Project Sign The Air Force’s first official UFO study. One appendix weighs whether visitors could come from Mars or Venus. 1950 · FBI The Hottel Memo A one-page FBI memo relaying a secondhand story of three crashed saucers in New Mexico, now the most viewed file in the FBI Vault. 1952 · U.S. Army / ONR · General Electric Project Cirrus The history of the first military cloud-seeding program, which dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into a hurricane in 1947. 1952 · NACA Langley (R. Whitcomb) The Area Rule The discovery that pinching a fuselage into a Coke-bottle shape cuts drag near the speed of sound. 1953 · Federal Civil Defense Administration Operation Doorstep The civil defense report on two houses, furnished and set with mannequin families, placed near a 1953 atomic test. 1953 · AEC · RAND Project Sunshine A fallout study that led to collecting human bones worldwide to measure strontium-90, often without families’ consent. 1953 · CIA The Robertson Panel A CIA panel of scientists recommended “debunking” UFOs, with help from Walt Disney cartoons and amateur astronomers. 1954 · NACA Langley The Pogo NACA flight tests of a model of the Convair XFY-1 “Pogo,” a Navy fighter designed to take off and land sitting on its tail. 1955 · USAF · RAND A Million Random Digits A RAND book of one million random digits, generated by an electronic roulette wheel for Air Force analyses. 1955 · CIA Hitler in Colombia A CIA station dispatch passing on an informant’s claim that Hitler was alive in Colombia, with a photograph dated 1954. 1955 · NSA John Nash’s Letters to the NSA John Nash’s 1955 letters to the NSA, proposing a cipher machine and arguing that key-breaking effort could grow exponentially. 1955 · Federal Civil Defense Administration Operation Cue A built town of houses, cars, food, and dressed mannequins, set out beside an atomic bomb and then inspected. 1955 · USAF · Battelle Project Blue Book The Air Force’s statistical study of its UFO reports, from the project that collected 12,618 sightings. 1956 · FDA / Federal Civil Defense Administration Beer at Ground Zero A civil defense test that set beer and soft drinks near two atomic blasts in Nevada and found them safe to drink. 1956 · USAF · Strategic Air Command SAC’s 1959 Target List Strategic Air Command’s 1956 list of nuclear targets for 1959, which marked “population” as a target in every city. 1956 · ONR · Hiller Helicopters The Hiller Flying Platform A one-man ducted fan that the pilot stood on and steered by leaning. 1957 · NSA Gambler’s Ruin A math paper for the NSA co-written by the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, with a joke citation slipped in. 1957 · ODM · Security Resources Panel The Gaither Report A secret panel told Eisenhower that fallout shelters for every American would save perhaps fifty million lives. 1958 · USAF / U.S. Army · Avro Canada Avrocar An actual flying saucer, tested in NASA wind tunnels. It hovered but couldn’t get much more than a few feet off the ground. 1958 · NACA Langley The Inflatable Airplane Goodyear’s inflatable airplane, tested in a wind tunnel at speeds high enough to buckle its wings. 1959 · USAF · Armour Research Foundation A Study of Lunar Research Flights A study of setting off a nuclear device on the Moon, partly to show it could be done. A young Carl Sagan did calculations for it. 1959 · U.S. Army Project Horizon The Army’s plan for a military base on the Moon by 1966, with a crew of 12 soldiers. 1960 · AEC Project Chariot A plan to blast a harbor into the coast of Alaska with nuclear explosives. This survey of the site came first. 1960 · NASA · Brookings Institution The Brookings Report A NASA-commissioned report warning that finding alien life could destabilize society, and asking whether to withhold the news. 1960 · ARPA / U.S. Army · General Electric The GE Walking Truck A four-legged truck whose driver moved its legs with his own arms and legs. 1960 · ONR · Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory The Mark I Perceptron Manual The operators’ manual for the first hardware perceptron, a Navy-funded machine that learned to recognize shapes. 1960 · USAF · Ballistic Missile Division The Military Lunar Base An Air Force plan for a crewed spy base on the Moon by 1969. It mentions a “Lunar Based Earth Bombardment System.” 1961 · USAF · Systems Command LUNEX The Air Force’s rival to Apollo: a 21-person military base on the Moon by 1968. 1961 · NSF · National Research Council Project Mohole The report on 1961 test drilling off Guadalupe Island, Mexico, the first phase of a plan to drill through the ocean floor to Earth’s mantle. 1961 · USAF / AEC · Lawrence Radiation Laboratory Project Pluto A nuclear ramjet cruise missile meant to fly low for weeks. Its unshielded reactor would have irradiated the ground beneath it. 1961 · Defense Atomic Support Agency · Walter Reed The Atomic Pigs The Army’s report on 1,200 pigs exposed to three atomic tests in Nevada in 1957 as stand-ins for human casualties. 1961 · U.S. Army · Bell Aerosystems The Bell Rocket Belt An Army-funded jetpack: a hydrogen-peroxide rocket belt meant to fly soldiers over obstacles. 1961 · U.S. Army · Waterways Experiment Station The Overland Train Desert test planning for the Army’s 572-foot Overland Train, built to haul cargo where there are no roads. 1962 · USAF · SRI (D. Engelbart) Augmenting Human Intellect The 1962 report that set the agenda for Engelbart’s lab, which went on to build the mouse and hypertext. 1962 · NASA Marshall · Ford Aeronutronic EMPIRE Before anyone had orbited the Moon, NASA was studying crewed flybys of Mars and Venus lasting 400 days or more. 1962 · Joint Chiefs of Staff Operation Northwoods The Joint Chiefs proposed staged attacks to blame on Cuba as a pretext for war. The Kennedy administration rejected it. 1962 · Defense Atomic Support Agency · EG&G Starfish Prime Photographs of high-altitude nuclear tests, which lit artificial auroras across the Pacific. 1962 · ARPA The AR-15 Field Test ARPA’s field report on AR-15 rifles issued to South Vietnamese troops in combat, a test that helped lead to the M16. 1962 · DoD / AEC (S. Glasstone) The Effects of Nuclear Weapons The government’s public encyclopedia of blast, heat, and fallout. 1963 · USAF · Aeronautical Systems Division Dyna-Soar An Air Force progress report on the X-20, a piloted spaceplane meant to ride a Titan III to orbit and land on a runway. 1963 · NASA Flight Research Center Paresev A glider NASA built in-house to test landing space capsules under a Rogallo wing, and an ancestor of the hang glider. 1963 · AEC Project Carryall A plan to blast a cut for Interstate 40 through the Mojave Desert with about 22 nuclear devices. 1963 · NASA Marshall · Aerojet Sea Dragon Aerojet’s study for NASA of a 500-foot rocket that would float upright in the ocean and lift 550 tons to orbit. 1963 · MIT Lincoln Laboratory (I. Sutherland) Sketchpad A light-pen drawing program that pioneered interactive computer graphics. 1963 · ARPA (J. C. R. Licklider) The Intergalactic Computer Network Licklider’s 1963 memo on how separate computers could share programs and data, an early outline of the internet. 1963 · NASA The Mercury Chimpanzees The full record of Ham and Enos, the chimps who flew Mercury capsules before the astronauts and worked levers in flight. 1963 · GAO The NB-36H Nuclear Bomber The GAO’s review of the nuclear airplane program, which flew a B-36 bomber dozens of times with a working reactor aboard. 1964 · USAF · RAND (P. Baran) On Distributed Communications A design for a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack, and one origin of packet switching. 1964 · AEC · Lawrence Radiation Laboratory Project Gnome A report on the first Plowshare test, a nuclear explosion in salt near Carlsbad that left a cavern scientists walked into. 1964 · NASA Marshall · General Atomic Project Orion A spaceship pushed by nuclear bombs set off behind it, one after another. Freeman Dyson worked on it. 1964 · USAF · MIT Lincoln Laboratory Project West Ford An Air Force experiment that put hundreds of millions of copper needles in orbit to reflect radio signals. 1964 · FBI The “Louie Louie” File The FBI’s file on whether the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” was obscene. Its laboratory could not make out the lyrics at any speed. 1964 · U.S. Army · Weapons Command The Davy Crockett The Army’s history of the Davy Crockett, a recoilless gun built to fire a small nuclear warhead from the front line. 1964 · ARPA · Waterways Experiment Station The Marsh Screw Amphibian A vehicle that drove on two giant rotating screws instead of wheels. 1964 · ARPA · RAND The RAND Tablet RAND’s description of its tablet and stylus, which let a user write and draw by hand into a computer in 1963. 1965 · CIA Aquiline The CIA’s first spy drone, disguised as a bird, built to photograph the Soviet Union unnoticed. 1965 · U.S. Army · CRREL Camp Century and Project Iceworm A nuclear-powered research base under the Greenland ice sheet, and the secret plan to hide missiles in tunnels around it. 1965 · ONR Sealab I The Navy’s report on Sealab I, its first seafloor habitat, where four men lived for 11 days at 193 feet off Bermuda in 1964. 1965 · President’s Science Advisory Committee The Carbon Dioxide Appendix The appendix that warned a president about carbon dioxide, and proposed spreading reflective particles on the sea to offset it. 1965 · NASA Flight Research Center The Flying Bedstead A jet-lifted frame that flew as if in lunar gravity. Neil Armstrong ejected from one in 1968. 1965 · NASA Langley · SRI (Engelbart, English) The Mouse Trials A NASA-funded test of the new computer mouse against a light pen, joystick, and knee control. Experienced users preferred it. 1966 · ARPA · Johns Hopkins APL Project Pandora The report on a Walter Reed microwave chamber built to test whether a Soviet beam aimed at the U.S. embassy in Moscow affected behavior. 1966 · NSF · National Research Council The ALPAC Report The National Research Council report that saw “no immediate or predictable prospect” of useful machine translation. 1966 · U.S. Navy · Naval Ordnance Test Station The Rock-Site Concept A Navy study proposing rooms excavated in the bedrock beneath the seafloor, with no connection to land or the surface. 1967 · CIA Acoustic Kitty The CIA’s verdict on cats wired to eavesdrop: “a remarkable scientific achievement,” but impractical. 1967 · NASA · Bellcomm Manned Venus Flyby A plan to send astronauts on a year-long flyby of Venus using Apollo hardware. 1967 · DoD · JASON Nuclear Weapons in Vietnam A JASON study by Freeman Dyson and three other physicists of what using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam would achieve. 1967 · State Department Operation Popeye A State Department memo weighing a secret program to seed clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and keep the roads muddy. 1967 · U.S. Army · BRL / McGill Project HARP A U.S.-Canadian project that fired instrument packages into the upper atmosphere from 16-inch naval guns. 1967 · AEC / Columbia Gas Project Ketch A plan to set off a nuclear device under Pennsylvania to hollow out a cavern for storing natural gas. 1967 · ONR Sealab II The Navy’s report on Sealab II, where aquanauts lived for weeks on the seafloor and a porpoise named Tuffy carried their mail. 1967 · CIA The Kidnaping of the Lunik CIA officers diverted a Soviet spacecraft from a touring exhibition, examined it overnight, and returned it unnoticed. 1968 · NASA · Boeing Boeing’s Nuclear Mars Ship Boeing’s design for a nuclear-rocket Mars ship, assembled in orbit from six Saturn V launches. 1968 · USAF · Pacific Air Forces Igloo White An Air Force history of the sensor barrier on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which relayed truck noise to computers in Thailand. 1968 · AEC · Lawrence Radiation Laboratory Project Gasbuggy A 26-kiloton device fired 4,200 feet under New Mexico to shake natural gas loose; the gas came up radioactive. 1968 · CIA The Berlin Tunnel The CIA’s internal history of the tunnel it dug into East Berlin to tap Soviet cables, which a mole had betrayed before digging began. 1968 · AEC · John A. Blume & Associates The Nuclear Canal An assessment of whether nuclear blasts used to dig a second Panama Canal could send tsunamis onto nearby coasts. 1968 · U.S. Army · Fort Detrick The Subway Germ Test The Army released a harmless bacterial simulant in the New York subway and measured how far trains carried it. 1968 · Naval Research Laboratory Timation I A 1967 satellite that tested navigation by precise clocks, the core idea behind GPS. 1968 · NSA UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions An NSA staff paper asking how humanity should prepare to survive if UFOs turn out to be real. 1969 · NASA Manned Spacecraft Center Apollo 10’s Stray Turd The transcript of the Apollo 10 crew’s onboard recordings, in which a turd floats through the cabin and no one claims it. 1969 · Sandia (P. F. Jones) Goldsboro Revisited Sandia’s weapons safety supervisor concluded that one low-voltage switch kept a hydrogen bomb from going off over North Carolina. 1969 · Nixon White House In Event of Moon Disaster The statement Nixon was to read if Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the Moon, written two days before the landing. 1969 · NSA Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages The answer key to mock messages from aliens that an NSA mathematician wrote as a codebreaking exercise. 1969 · NASA · Bell Aerosystems One-Man Lunar Flying Vehicle A one-person rocket platform that would let an astronaut hop across the Moon. 1969 · NASA · United Aircraft Research Labs The Nuclear Light Bulb A rocket engine that holds glowing uranium plasma inside a quartz bulb and uses its light to heat hydrogen. 1970 · NASA · North American Rockwell Lunar Escape Systems If the lunar module couldn’t lift off, astronauts would strap onto a bare rocket frame and fly it to orbit by hand. 1970 · NASA Lunar Receiving Laboratory Moon Dust vs. Earth Life Scientists exposed fish and other small animals to Apollo 11 moon dust, checking for anything that could multiply and harm Earth life. 1970 · ESSA / U.S. Navy Project Stormfury The year Navy aircraft seeded Hurricane Debbie with silver iodide to test whether a hurricane could be weakened. 1970 · U.S. Navy · Hazleton Laboratories Sanguine’s Test Animals Navy-funded tests that exposed rats, beagles, insects, and plants to the fields of a proposed submarine radio antenna. 1971 · NASA · Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Astronaut Light Flashes Apollo crews saw flashes with their eyes shut. Researchers traced them to cosmic rays passing through the eyeball. 1971 · ONR · General Electric Hardiman A hydraulic exoskeleton with 30 joints, meant to multiply a sailor’s strength about 25 times. 1971 · NASA Ames · Stanford Project Cyclops A design for about 1,000 radio dishes listening for alien civilizations. Its methods shaped later SETI work. 1971 · AEC · Los Alamos The Nuclear Subterrene A Los Alamos proposal for a reactor-heated borer that would melt its way through rock and leave a glass-lined tunnel. 1971 · USAF · Foreign Technology Division The Stealth Equations A Soviet radar-scattering monograph the Air Force translated. Its equations are widely credited with enabling stealth aircraft. 1972 · DIA Controlled Offensive Behavior A survey of Soviet mind-control research: hypnosis, telepathy, psychokinesis, and teleportation. 1972 · U.S. Navy · Naval Undersea Center Project Deep Ops The Navy trained orcas and pilot whales to dive and attach recovery gear to lost torpedoes. 1972 · NASA Surveyor 3, Returned Apollo 12 astronauts cut parts off a probe that had sat on the Moon for 2.5 years. Bacteria found in its camera started a long debate. 1972 · NASA · AiResearch Tektite II NASA studied aquanauts living for weeks in a seafloor habitat, one crew all women, as a stand-in for a space station. 1972 · NSA TEMPEST An NSA history of leaking cipher machines, starting with a wartime Bell device whose signals revealed plaintext 80 feet away. 1973 · NASA Lewis Nuclear Waste into Space A NASA study of launching nuclear waste off Earth on rockets, for good. 1973 · NASA Johnson / NASA Ames The Apollo 17 Pocket Mice Five pocket mice flew around the Moon with radiation detectors under their scalps, to test whether cosmic rays damage the brain. 1973 · NIMH (J. B. Calhoun) Universe 25 An NIMH scientist’s account of Universe 25, a mouse colony given unlimited food and water that peaked at 2,200 and then died out. 1973 · CIA · SRI Uri Geller at SRI The write-up concluding that Uri Geller, tested in a shielded room, “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability.” 1974 · CIA Avian Delivery System A field manual for training a raven to drop off and pick up small objects on buildings. 1974 · DARPA · UCLA Biocybernetic Control An ARPA-funded UCLA report on reading EEG brain responses as computer input, from the lab that named the brain-computer interface. 1974 · Los Alamos PACER A power plant that would set off small H-bombs, one after another, in an underground cavern to make steam. 1974 · NASA Marshall Skylab’s Spiders Results of 25 high-school experiments on Skylab, including Arabella and Anita, the spiders who learned to spin webs in zero gravity. 1974 · USAF · Electronic Systems Division The Multics Penetration Test An Air Force penetration test of Multics that described a self-perpetuating compiler trap door a decade before Ken Thompson did. 1974 · AEC · Westinghouse The Plutonium Heart A fully implantable artificial heart powered by plutonium-238. 1975 · U.S. Senate · Church Committee Alleged Assassination Plots The Church Committee’s report on U.S. plots against foreign leaders, including cigars treated with botulinum toxin for Castro. 1975 · U.S. Army Dematerialization and Antigravity An Army Missile Command technical report proposing a mechanism by which matter could dematerialize and craft could use antigravity. 1975 · NASA Ames · Stanford Space Settlements Designs for rotating space colonies of 10,000 people, with widely reproduced paintings of life inside. 1976 · NASA Ames On the Habitability of Mars NASA’s first terraforming study, on whether Earth organisms could give Mars a breathable atmosphere. 1976 · FBI The FBI Bigfoot File The FBI file on 15 hairs a Bigfoot researcher sent to its laboratory, which found them to be “of deer family origin.” 1977 · NASA JPL An Interstellar Precursor A JPL study of a probe launched around 2000 to fly 1,000 AU out of the solar system as a rehearsal for a trip to a star. 1977 · U.S. Senate Project MKULTRA The Senate hearing on the CIA’s drug and behavior program, held after seven boxes of its records turned up misfiled. 1977 · U.S. Senate The Army’s Open-Air Germ Tests Senate hearings at which the Army described open-air germ-warfare simulant tests in places including San Francisco and the New York subway. 1977 · NASA Langley · Vought The Flying-Wing Freighter A design for a giant cargo plane that would carry its freight inside the wing. 1978 · DOE / NASA · PRC Energy Analysis Company Solar Power Satellites as Weapons A 1978 study of whether a kilometers-wide orbiting solar power station could be used as a weapon or attacked by terrorists. 1978 · CIA Spy Pigeons A Top Secret study of photographing Soviet shipyards with camera-carrying pigeons. Appendices cover pigeon care. 1978 · DOE / NASA The Satellite Power System A fleet of kilometers-wide solar satellites beaming power to Earth as microwaves. 1978 · NSA The Voynich Manuscript An NSA cryptologist’s survey of the Voynich manuscript, an illustrated book in a script no one has deciphered. 1979 · Oak Ridge National Laboratory Nuclear War Survival Skills A national laboratory’s do-it-yourself manual for surviving a nuclear attack, with plans for a homemade fallout meter. 1980 · NASA · University of Santa Clara Advanced Automation for Space Missions A study of a factory on the Moon that builds copies of itself. 1980 · USAF · RAND Faster-than-Light Particles A RAND note for the Air Force on what faster-than-light particles would have to be like, written in search of a theory of antigravity. 1980 · DARPA · Stanford AI Lab (H. Moravec) The Stanford Cart An ancestor of self-driving cars: a camera cart that moved about a meter every 10 to 15 minutes, thinking between moves. 1981 · DARPA · BBN A History of the ARPANET BBN, which built the ARPANET’s switching computers, writes the network’s first official history, maps included. 1982 · Defense Nuclear Agency Operation Argus Secret nuclear blasts above the South Atlantic in 1958, meant to create artificial radiation belts around Earth. 1983 · DARPA Strategic Computing DARPA’s plan for machine intelligence: robot vehicles, a “pilot’s associate,” and battle-management AI. 1983 · U.S. Army · INSCOM (W. McDonnell) The Gateway Process An Army analysis of using meditation to move consciousness beyond time and space. It went viral on TikTok in 2023. 1984 · DARPA · SRI Shakey the Robot A wheeled robot that planned its own actions. The project behind it produced the A* search algorithm. 1984 · DOE (T. Sebeok) The Atomic Priesthood A linguist’s proposal for a priesthood that would pass down nuclear-waste warnings through myth and ritual. 1985 · USAF (R. L. Forward) Antimatter Rockets An Air Force study of how to make, trap, and store antimatter as rocket fuel. 1985 · CIA Project Azorian The CIA and Howard Hughes built a fake deep-sea mining ship to lift a sunken Soviet submarine off the Pacific floor. 1985 · NASA Ames-Dryden The Scissor-Wing Jet A small jet whose whole wing pivoted like scissors, testing a design for fuel-efficient supersonic airliners. 1988 · U.S. Army · National Research Council Enhancing Human Performance A National Research Council review, requested by the Army, of “new age” techniques from sleep learning to remote viewing and psychokinesis. 1988 · NASA · U.S. Naval Academy Project Longshot Naval Academy midshipmen design an uncrewed fusion-powered probe to Alpha Centauri. 1988 · GAO The X-Ray Laser Audit The GAO’s review of whether Edward Teller and Lowell Wood oversold Livermore’s bomb-powered X-ray laser to top officials. 1989 · SDIO · Lawrence Livermore Brilliant Pebbles Lowell Wood’s case for thousands of small, self-guided satellites that would destroy missiles by ramming them in flight. 1989 · DOE · Energy Research Advisory Board The Cold Fusion Panel The Energy Department panel report on the 1989 cold fusion claims, which found the evidence for a new nuclear process not persuasive. 1990 · SDIO · Los Alamos BEAR A Los Alamos paper on BEAR, a particle accelerator launched on a rocket in 1989 that fired a neutral hydrogen beam in space. 1990 · USAF · SRI Plasma Cloaking An Air Force–funded SRI study that concluded a membrane of ionized gas could serve as a switchable radar cloaking device. 1990 · USAF · SAIC The Electric Propulsion Study An Air Force rocket lab study of theories linking gravity and electromagnetism, including claims of antigravity and free energy. 1991 · NASA Marshall · Sverdrup Technology NERVA The test record of the nuclear rockets built and fired in the Nevada desert from 1959 to 1972. 1992 · CIA The U-2 and OXCART Programs The CIA’s secret history of its spy planes, including early attempts to hide them from radar. 1993 · DOE · Sandia Not a Place of Honor Markers to warn people off buried nuclear waste for 10,000 years: spike fields and “this place is not a place of honor.” 1994 · USAF · Wright Laboratory The “Gay Bomb” Proposal An Air Force proposal for nonlethal chemical weapons, one meant to make enemy troops sexually attracted to each other. 1994 · ARPA Wingship Investigation A post-Cold War ARPA study of giant water-skimming craft like the Soviet “Caspian Sea Monster.” 1995 · CIA CORONA A CIA collection on the first U.S. spy satellites, whose film capsules were caught in midair by planes trailing hooks. 1995 · NASA Marshall Drugged Spider Webs A NASA tech brief that measured toxicity by how badly spiders exposed to marijuana, Benzedrine, caffeine, and chloral hydrate built webs. 1995 · Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments Human Radiation Experiments The federal inquiry into thirty years of radiation experiments on hospital patients, prisoners, and institutionalized boys. 1995 · CIA Skyhook and Operation Coldfeet A balloon and a line let a low-flying B-17 snatch two men off an abandoned Soviet ice station. 1995 · CIA · American Institutes for Research Stargate The review that ended more than two decades of government-funded research into remote viewing. 1996 · USAF · Air University Alternate Futures for 2025 The Air Force imagined six possible worlds for 2025, including one ruled by corporations. 1996 · USAF · Air University Owning the Weather in 2025 An Air Force paper on using weather control as a weapon. 1996 · USAF · Air Command and Staff College Planetary Defense Air Command and Staff College officers argue for a military mission to stop asteroids before they hit Earth. 1997 · USAF Roswell: Case Closed The Air Force’s explanation that the Roswell “alien bodies” were crash-test dummies dropped from balloons. 1998 · NASA Lewis Breakthrough Propulsion Physics NASA’s official program studying warp drives and propulsion without propellant. 1998 · NASA Marshall The Gravity Shield Test A NASA Marshall test of the claim that spinning superconductors shield gravity; a gravimeter above the disks recorded no change. 2000 · Los Alamos A Review of Criticality Accidents Los Alamos’s catalog of every known accidental chain reaction, including the two hand-stacked assemblies that killed their operators. 2000 · NSA SIGSALY An NSA history of SIGSALY, the 55-ton wartime system that encrypted Allied leaders’ calls as digital speech keyed by phonograph records. 2000 · NASA Marshall Space Elevators An engineering look at a cable running from the ground into orbit. 2002 · USAF · RAND Space Weapons, Earth Wars A RAND study for the Air Force of weapons based in orbit, including 100-kilogram tungsten rods dropped onto targets below. 2003 · DARPA Total Information Awareness DARPA’s report to Congress defending its counterterrorism data-mining program, including a plan for futures markets on attacks. 2004 · USAF · Warp Drive Metrics (E. Davis) Teleportation Physics Study An Air Force-funded survey of teleportation, from the quantum kind to psychic claims. 2004 · NASA Glenn · Institute for Scientific Research The Lifter Tests A NASA contractor study of high-voltage “lifter” capacitors that traced their thrust to charged ions colliding with air. 2006 · DARPA Cyborg Insects Beetles and moths with electronics implanted while they were still pupae, so they could be steered in flight. 2009 · Homeland Security Council After the Bomb Federal guidance for the first days after a 10-kiloton terrorist nuclear bomb goes off in a U.S. city, from damage zones to fallout shelter. 2009 · DIA · Bigelow Aerospace The AAWSAP Papers DIA-funded studies of wormholes, invisibility cloaks, and antigravity. DIA released 37 of the 38 under FOIA in 2022. 2011 · GAO Climate Engineering Congress’s auditors assessed sulfate aerosols, brightened clouds, and mirrors in orbit, and found none of them ready. 2011 · U.S. Strategic Command Counter-Zombie Dominance A U.S. Strategic Command training plan for defending humankind against zombies, chosen because no one could mistake it for a real plan. 2011 · NASA Johnson (H. White) Warp Field Mechanics 101 A paper on how much energy an Alcubierre warp drive would need. 2012 · CIA An Underwater Ice Station Zebra A CIA history of the Navy’s deep dives to retrieve a spy-satellite film capsule from 16,400 feet down in the Pacific. 2012 · NSA Project GUNMAN An NSA history of finding Soviet bugs in the U.S. Moscow embassy’s IBM Selectric typewriters by X-raying the machines. 2015 · NASA Langley HAVOC Astronauts living in solar-powered airships in the clouds of Venus, where the air pressure is close to Earth’s. 2015 · NRO The Manned Orbiting Laboratory The NRO’s declassified record of an Air Force space station whose crews were to photograph the Soviet Union. 2015 · NASA NIAC · NASA Glenn Titan Submarine A robotic submarine to explore a sea of liquid hydrocarbons on Saturn’s moon Titan. 2016 · NASA NIAC · UC Santa Barbara A Roadmap to the Stars A NASA-funded plan to push gram-scale probes on wafers to a quarter of light speed with a giant laser array. 2016 · NASA Johnson · Eagleworks The EmDrive Test NASA Eagleworks’ report of thrust from a sealed copper microwave cavity in a vacuum, a result that would require no propellant. 2017 · U.S. Special Operations Command The TALOS Suit A Special Operations Command briefing on TALOS, the armored, powered exoskeleton suit the press called the “Iron Man suit.” 2018 · NASA NIAC · SpaceWorks Hibernating to Mars A plan to put Mars crews into a medically induced, hibernation-like sleep to save mass on the trip. 2018 · State Department · JASON The Havana Sounds A JASON study for the State Department that matched recordings of the Havana “sonic attacks” to a cricket’s call. 2018 · NASA NIAC · Space Studies Institute The Mach Effect Drive A NASA-funded study of a probe to Proxima b driven by a disputed thruster said to push without propellant. 2018 · NASA NIAC · NASA JPL The Solar Gravity Lens A JPL study of a telescope sent 550 times Earth’s distance from the Sun to use the Sun’s gravity as a lens on an exoplanet. 2021 · ODNI The 2021 UAP Assessment U.S. intelligence’s 2021 report to Congress on UFOs, which could explain only one of 144 military sightings: a deflating balloon. 2023 · NASA NIAC · NASA JPL Lunar Crater Radio Telescope A JPL design for a radio telescope made by stretching a wire-mesh dish across a crater on the far side of the Moon. 2024 · NASA NIAC · NASA Ames Mycotecture Off Planet A NASA Ames study of growing habitats on the Moon and Mars from fungus, with mycelium bricks tested in a planetary simulator.