WHO KEEPS TURNING UP
Who turns up more than once. The file lists here are not asserted, they are found: the page searches every dossier for each name and reports what it hits, so it cannot credit anybody with a file they are not in. 67 names, 16 of them appearing in more than one case.
WHO GOT IT OUT
Almost every CONFIRMED file in this cabinet is confirmed because a specific person forced a document into daylight, sued for it, or spent years reading what nobody else would read. The archive would be a third its size without them.
Annie JacobsenIN 2 FILES
Reported on the recruitment programme and the Nevada test site from the documents rather than from the folklore.
Carl BernsteinIN 2 FILES
Reported the CIA's relationships with journalists in 1977, sourced to Agency files, and never used the code name everyone now attaches to it.
James BamfordIN 2 FILES
Brought the Northwoods documents to general attention, and has written the fullest public account of the NSA.
Jeffrey RichelsonIN 2 FILES
Intelligence historian who spent a career filing the requests that produced documents in several of these files.
Lawrence KuscheIN 2 FILES
Went through the Bermuda Triangle disappearances case by case and found the source literature had misreported nearly all of them.
Stephen KinzerIN 2 FILES
Historian of the Iran coup and of the chemical programme that ran alongside it.
Benjamin Carter Hett
Reopened the Reichstag fire argument by showing the lone-arsonist account struggles with the physical evidence.
Colleen Fitzpatrick
Forensic genealogist whose method has now closed identifications that fingerprints and dental records could not.
Derek Abbott
Pushed for the exhumation and, with a genealogist, put a name to the Somerton Man after seventy-four years.
Donald Wilber
Wrote the CIA's internal account of the Iran coup, which is the reason that file is CONFIRMED rather than contested.
Edmond Halley
Proposed a hollow Earth in 1692 as a serious hypothesis. It was closed by seismology, which is how this is supposed to work.
Eratosthenes
Measured the curvature of the Earth around 240 BC with two sticks and a well, and the measurement is still repeatable by anyone who wants to check.
Hank Albarelli
Argued the Pont-Saint-Esprit case from documents he obtained, none of which name the town.
Lawrence Walsh
Independent counsel who established the arms-for-hostages diversion and found that senior officials had withheld and destroyed evidence.
Leslie Kean
Sued NASA for the Kecksburg records, and a court ordered a further search after the agency said it had lost the boxes.
Michael Baden
Forensic pathologist whose dissent on the Epstein autopsy is the substance of that file's contested grade.
Nick Cullather
Wrote the CIA's own internal history of the Guatemala operation, later published openly.
Robert Hanyok
The NSA's own historian, whose internal study found the Gulf of Tonkin attack did not happen. It took press pressure to declassify his work.
BODIES THAT KEEP APPEARING
The recurring actors here are institutions more often than individuals, which is worth noticing. Conspiracy as popularly imagined needs a cabal. The proven cases mostly needed a department, a budget line, and nobody asking.
The Church CommitteeIN 8 FILES
The 1975 to 1976 Senate inquiry that turned several rumours in this cabinet into citations. More files here rest on its findings than on any other single source.
The National Security ArchiveIN 7 FILES
A non-governmental archive at George Washington University that has pried more of this cabinet open by FOIA than any government body has released voluntarily.
Central Intelligence AgencyIN 6 FILES
Appears as the subject of confirmed programmes far more often than as the villain of unproven ones, which is the pattern this archive keeps finding.
National Security AgencyIN 3 FILES
Holds the unreleased intercepts that keep at least two files in this archive from closing.
The Joint Chiefs of StaffIN 2 FILES
Signed a false-flag proposal against their own citizens in 1962, and it was the civilians who said no.
Atomic Energy Commission
Collected human tissue worldwide to measure fallout, and used euphemism in its own paperwork when describing how it got it.
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Ran a confirmed domestic counterintelligence programme against political dissent, and closed an anthrax case on evidence a scientific review called not definitive.
Hill and Knowlton
The public relations firm that arranged the incubator testimony, and did not mention that the witness was an ambassador's daughter.
Office of Naval Research
Denies running an invisibility experiment in 1943, and notes it did not exist until 1946.
PEOPLE IN OFFICE
Named because they signed something, ordered something, or told a committee something that turned out not to be true.
Robert McNamaraIN 3 FILES
Rejected one false-flag plan and carried a misreported naval attack to Congress two years later.
Allen DullesIN 2 FILES
Director of Central Intelligence through the era that produced more confirmed files in this cabinet than any other.
Harry TrumanIN 2 FILES
Excluded active Nazis from postwar recruitment, an order that was then routed around, and had his signature photographically lifted onto a forged UFO document.
Giulio Andreotti
Italian prime minister who confirmed the existence of the stay-behind network to parliament in 1990, which is why that file is not speculation.
J. Edgar Hoover
Directed the FBI's covert campaign against domestic political movements for fifteen years.
James Clapper
Told the Senate under oath that the NSA did not collect data on millions of Americans, three months before the documents showed otherwise.
John Foster Dulles
Secretary of State, brother of the DCI, and a name in the paper trail linking a fruit company's lobbying to a coup.
L. Ron Hubbard
Named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest known infiltration of the United States government by a private organisation.
Lyman Lemnitzer
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who signed the Northwoods proposal.
Thomas Moorer
Admiral and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who publicly rejected the official finding on the USS Liberty.
SUBJECTS, PRINCIPALS AND SUSPECTS
The people the files are about. Some are the accused, some are the evidence, and several are simply the person it happened to.
Edward SnowdenIN 2 FILES
Almost everything the public knows about mass surveillance arrived through one unauthorised disclosure rather than through oversight.
Frank OlsonIN 2 FILES
Army biochemist who went out of a New York hotel window nine days after the CIA dosed him with LSD without his knowledge. His death connects two files.
Arthur Leigh Allen
The long-favoured Zodiac suspect, excluded on the available DNA and on handwriting.
Bob Lazar
Source of the modern Area 51 claim, whose checkable biography does not check out, and the checkable parts are the only testable ones.
Bruce Ivins
Named as the anthrax mailer after his death, on evidence a National Research Council review found consistent but not definitive.
Charles Halt
Deputy base commander who wrote the memo and recorded audio in the forest while it was happening, which is unusually good evidence for a testimony case.
David Fravor
Navy commander whose visual account and the radar returns are separate lines of evidence pointing the same way.
Franciszek Honiok
The one identified victim of the staged attack that opened the Second World War. The operation called such people canned goods.
Gary Mathias
The one of the five never found. His remains would probably settle the sequence of events.
George Hodel
The leading suspect in the Black Dahlia case, named by his own son, which is a structural weakness in the theory whatever its merits.
Glyndwr Michael
The accepted identity of the body that carried false invasion plans and misdirected the German high command.
Harry Phipps
Named as a suspect by later authors and by his own son, and never physically connected to the children.
James Lewis
Sent the Tylenol extortion letter, served time for it, was never charged with the murders, and died in 2023.
Jim Sanborn
Made the sculpture, holds the answer, and has begun releasing it. The only file in the archive with a known expiry date.
Jim Templeton
Firefighter with no history of hoaxing who maintained for fifty years that there had been nobody standing behind his daughter.
Leo Tanguma
Painted the Denver airport murals and has spent thirty years explaining the anti-war allegory to people who prefer their own reading.
Marinus van der Lubbe
Executed for the Reichstag fire in 1934, pardoned posthumously in 2008, and still the centre of an argument historians have reversed twice.
Paul Freshour
Convicted while the letters kept arriving, including during his own imprisonment in isolation.
Paulette Cooper
Journalist targeted by a documented plan to have her imprisoned or committed using forged bomb threats.
Ron Watkins
Identified by stylometry as one of two likely authors, in an analysis that also indicated the authorship changed partway through.
Ronald DeFeo Jr
Killed six members of his family in the house, which is the only verified event in a file otherwise built over wine.
Ronald Pelton
NSA analyst whose sale of a single operation to the Soviets ended one of the most productive intelligence programmes of the Cold War.
Sidney Gottlieb
Ran the CIA's chemical and behavioural programme, and ordered its records destroyed in 1973.
Smedley Butler
The most decorated Marine of his era, who testified that he had been recruited to lead a coup against the President.
Steven Hatfill
Publicly pursued in the same investigation, cleared, and paid $5.8 million. A reminder that being the Bureau's suspect is not evidence.
THE PEOPLE WHO ADMITTED IT
Every one of these said, in public and on the record, that they made it up. In most cases the story carried on without them, which is the most consistent finding in this archive.
Carl Allen, as Carlos Allende
Sole source of an entire legend, who later told researchers he had made it up. When the only source retracts there is nothing left to grade.
Doug Bower and Dave Chorley
Demonstrated their plank and rope method to the press in 1991, having started in 1978.
Fiona Broome
Named the effect after discovering that she and others shared a specific false memory, which is a description of a real phenomenon and not evidence of a changed timeline.
Fred LaBour
Invented most of the canonical clues for a student newspaper in 1969, said so immediately, and it changed nothing.
William Weber
The attorney who said the haunting was created over many bottles of wine.