It’ll come as a surprise to no one that the US government has a bunch of secrets that have never been revealed, though we assume the most explosive of them are related to aliens or dead presidents and musicians.
In reality, though, the actual secrets hiding in the US government’s vaults are the ones we barely get to know about. In fact, many of them may not even be out in the public domain if it wasn’t for some brilliant work by investigative journalists, making you wonder what all is still completely hidden…
8. The Torture Report
In December 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a particularly worrisome report. It described the extensive torture methods employed by the CIA in the post 9/11 War on Terror and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. While we’re no strangers to reports of CIA indulging in some shady stuff around the world, the scale of operations revealed by this one was unprecedented. At the least, it suggested that torture was extensively and systematically used as a wartime strategy throughout the war, and the orders seem to have been coming directly from the top.
Unfortunately, that report was only a snippet of the full 6,700-page file on the full extent of the torture, and the rest of it still remains classified. Even Obama didn’t agree to declassify it, though he did preserve it under the Presidential Records Act, which means that it would stay safe in the records from his presidency for at least twelve years.
7. EMP
Gamers know that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is easily one of the most overpowered fictional weapons around, to the extent that most games don’t even include it due to the unfair advantage. While we don’t know exactly how an EMP would work – as we don’t really have anything like it in the real world (although it very real could be soon) – it’s supposed to be able to jam all electronic equipment in a particular area, which could be debilitating for a modern digitized nation.
Because of its destructive capabilities, research into a working EMP has been classified information in almost every major country. That includes the USA, whose military has always kept that research a carefully guarded secret. While we know that the Air Force did successfully conduct an EMP test in Utah back in 2012, we haven’t heard anything about it since.
6. What Happened In Vietnam?
The Vietnam War was easily one of the most controversial episodes in American history, as well one of the most widely discussed. There are few things we still don’t know about it, or at least that’s what most of us think. If you dig into the archives, you’d find quite a few files that you’ve never seen before.
The most incriminating ones out of those are the ones that deal with the all civilian massacres, as there are many reasons to believe that there was a concerted effort – by the government as well as the military – to hide the extent of American involvement in the country, both during and since the war.
That’s not to say that none of it came out, however. The My Lai Massacre, for example, was one of the most horrific parts of the war, where a unit of American soldiers – frustrated by the brutality of the war – went on a rampage and murdered hundreds of civilians in cold blood, most of them women and children. We only know about it due to journalists working in the area, though according to some recent reports, it may be only one of the many violent massacres that took place throughout the war. The government has still not divulged the details of the officers involved in many of these massacres, as they still deem the information too sensitive.
5. Plans To Kill Castro
At this point, it’s almost a running joke that the US was never too fond of Fidel Castro. Almost everyone knows that after the Cuban revolution, the CIA tried every trick in the book to kill Castro, though some of the proposed ideas were too outlandish to even mention here, let alone succeed. From rigging his pen to sending an agent to seduce him, they came up with a lot of those ideas, too, though (clearly) none of them worked.
However, murdering a foreign leader is no laughing matter, especially not when everyone knows you did it. That’s why the only parts we know about are goofy, outlandish ideas like lipstick bombs. The actual plans that were put into motion but failed are still classified information, and it could take a long time until a president agrees to declassify them.
4. How Many Nazis Were Brought To America After WW2?
We think that we know everything about WW2, though the truth is that its more controversial parts are still hidden in government vaults, with absolutely no chance of ever coming out into the public due to how sensitive or damaging they are.
One of them is the question of exactly what we did with the Nazis caught during the war, as there were quite a lot of them. As you’d assume, most of them were tried for war crimes, though – and as you’d not assume – quite a few of them were brought to the US and assimilated as citizens due to their expertise in certain fields. Rocket scientists (such as Wernher von Braun, pictured above), as an example, were highly in-demand due to America’s growing need for nuclear and rocket tech at the time, and Germany was especially good with them. Instead of being punished for being Nazis, many of them were given citizenship, high pay packages and jobs with the American military. As you’d expect, much of this wasn’t public information until very recently, and we still don’t know the extent of the efforts undertaken by the US government to bring Nazi scientists back to the country.
3. The Real Story Of Area 51
Area 51 has been in the news so much that it’s almost impossible to discuss a new angle on it. Still, we’d give it a shot, as we firmly believe that the real secrets inside the facility don’t have anything to do with aliens or nanobots. Instead, if you dig deep down, the controversies are more rooted in reality, making them even more horrifying.
The true story of Area 51 is that of corporate misconduct, as there have been quite a few lawsuits by ex-employees claiming that the facility has always been a dumping ground for hazardous nuclear waste. Of course, it’s convenient to hint that it’s a top-secret facility containing hidden alien research rather than admitting that the military – along with private firms like Lockheed Martin – is directly responsible for exposing US citizens to nuclear radiation.
2. Were The Atomic Bombs Really Necessary?
No list of top secret government documents is complete without mentioning the Manhattan Project. An unprecedented endeavour of its kind by all measures, we only know about it due to documents declassified a long time after WW2 was over. As it happens, there is still a lot we don’t know about the bombs, including the intelligence that supposedly justified their use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While the official line of reasoning has always been that they had clear projections for the number of casualties if Japan were to be invaded, there are documents that suggest that the numbers weren’t that high. In fact, Japan was well on its way to defeat a long time before the bombs were even considered, and had even made an offer of surrender to the Allies. While some say that the bombs were only dropped to flex on post-war Soviet Russia, the documents from that time are still classified, and we may never really know the complete story.
1. Where Are All Of America’s Nukes?
You’d think that any country that possesses nuclear bombs also has the good sense to protect them better than anything else in their possession. In most cases, that would be true, too, except for America, which has perhaps lost the highest number of nuclear bombs in its entire nuclear history.
By some estimates, more than 50 nuclear warheads have been lost by the military in one way or another, and at least 11 of them inside US territory. If that’s astounding, consider the fact that many of those warheads are in populated areas and underwater, as it’s next-to-impossible to retrieve them. These aren’t deactivated or less lethal bombs, either; some of them are thousands of times more terrifying than the ones dropped on Japan, and even one of them going off would have massive effects on the nearby area.