Entries 1–10, oldest first.
On 21 January 1968 a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs caught fire and went into the sea ice off Thule, Greenland. A year later Strategic Air Command's own historians wrote up the three-month cleanup: 82 pages on how you collect plutonium off Arctic sea ice in winter.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.governmentattic.org
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
Jim Thompson rebuilt the Thai silk industry after the war, filled a famous house in Bangkok with art, and in 1967 walked into the Malaysian highlands and was never found. He had also worked for the OSS. This is the CIA's own account of what he did and did not do for them, written for its in-house journal in 1993 and released after an appeal in 2018.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.governmentattic.org
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
In 1993 the United States agreed to buy 500 tonnes of highly enriched uranium out of dismantled Soviet warheads, blend it down, and burn it in American power reactors. These are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's files on the arrangement.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.governmentattic.org
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
The US Census Bureau ran an internal newsletter for its own employees. This is two hundred pages of it from 2011 and 2012, requested under FOIA in February 2016 and released that May.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.governmentattic.org
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
The State Department paid to find out whether the accelerometers and microphones in ordinary smartphones could detect a nuclear test. The work ran through 2014 and 2015. Someone requested the file in November 2014 and got it in April 2026.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.governmentattic.org
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
The manual that introduced the NASA worm. Danne and Blackburn stripped the agency's identity down to four red letters and then specified, over dozens of pages, exactly how those letters were to sit on a launch vehicle, a business card, a parking sign and the tail of an aircraft. NASA abandoned it in 1992 and brought it back in 2020.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.nasa.gov
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
A full-page advertisement for Pennsalt's DDT products, run in Time on 30 June 1947. A cow, a dog, a housewife, an apple and a potato take turns singing the slogan. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring fifteen years later, and the United States banned DDT for agricultural use in 1972.
Read about it · the scan · source: commons.wikimedia.org
Public domain, per the file's own licence record on Wikimedia Commons.
The OSS wrote this for ordinary people in occupied Europe who wanted to help and had no weapons. Much of it is advice on being bad at your job on purpose: call unnecessary meetings, refer matters to committees, haggle over the precise wording of decisions, insist on doing everything through channels. It was declassified in 2008 and has been read as an accidental description of office life ever since.
Read about it · the PDF · source: commons.wikimedia.org
Public domain, per the file's own licence record on Wikimedia Commons.
Twenty-seven pages arguing that a soft drink logo follows from the golden ratio, the Parthenon, the Earth's magnetic field, the expansion of the universe, and a diagram in which the new logo exerts a gravitational pull on shoppers walking down an aisle. Pepsi reportedly paid the Arnell Group a million dollars for the identity. The document leaked in February 2009 and has been passed around design studios ever since.
Read about it · source: www.goldennumber.net
Rights belong to someone else. The copy here supports the commentary on this page, and comes down on request.
Bernard was interviewed at Fort Meade on 31 August 1988, at the end of a career that began as an Air Force radar officer and ended as the fifth director of DEFSMAC. He describes maintaining ABNER, one of the agency's first computers, at Arlington Hall; starting a cooperative education program to recruit engineers who could not be told what the work was; and evacuating the STONEHOUSE deep-space listening site in Ethiopia over three weeks. He had taken a six-month job at NSA while waiting on a CIA clearance and stayed about thirty years. Released in January 2026 under mandatory declassification review, with names and technical details blacked out.
Read about it · the PDF · source: www.governmentattic.org
Work of the US federal government, not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105).
