# Archived Futures

> Real government plans for moon bases, atomic airplanes, spy pigeons, and warp drives, each linked to the original document.

Archived Futures collects 272 strange research papers, studies, and proposals from NASA, the U.S. military, the CIA, the NSA, and the national labs, dated 1857–2024. Each file page has a plain-English description and links to the original document in a public archive such as NASA NTRS, DTIC, OSTI, the CIA reading room, or the National Archives.

- [Every description in full](https://archivedfutures.com/llms-full.txt)
- [All files as JSON](https://archivedfutures.com/papers.json)

## Nuclear

- [The Los Alamos Primer](https://archivedfutures.com/files/los-alamos-primer/) (1943): The lecture notes given to new Manhattan Project scientists on how to build an atomic bomb.
- [The Smyth Report](https://archivedfutures.com/files/smyth-report/) (1945): The government’s public account of how the atomic bomb was built, released on August 12, 1945, three days after Nagasaki.
- [Ignition of the Atmosphere](https://archivedfutures.com/files/atmosphere-ignition/) (1946): The calculation of whether an atomic bomb could set Earth’s atmosphere on fire. The answer was no.
- [Operation Crossroads](https://archivedfutures.com/files/crossroads/) (1946): The task force’s report on two atomic bombs fired at Bikini in 1946 against 93 target ships, some carrying test animals.
- [Operation Doorstep](https://archivedfutures.com/files/operation-doorstep/) (1953): The civil defense report on two houses, furnished and set with mannequin families, placed near a 1953 atomic test.
- [Project Sunshine](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-sunshine/) (1953): A fallout study that led to collecting human bones worldwide to measure strontium-90, often without families’ consent.
- [Operation Cue](https://archivedfutures.com/files/operation-cue/) (1955): A built town of houses, cars, food, and dressed mannequins, set out beside an atomic bomb and then inspected.
- [Beer at Ground Zero](https://archivedfutures.com/files/atomic-beverages/) (1956): A civil defense test that set beer and soft drinks near two atomic blasts in Nevada and found them safe to drink.
- [SAC’s 1959 Target List](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sac-target-list/) (1956): Strategic Air Command’s 1956 list of nuclear targets for 1959, which marked “population” as a target in every city.
- [The Gaither Report](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gaither-report/) (1957): A secret panel told Eisenhower that fallout shelters for every American would save perhaps fifty million lives.
- [The Pascal-B Manhole Cover](https://archivedfutures.com/files/pascal-b/) (1957): A Los Alamos physicist’s account of a 1957 test that blew a steel cap off its shaft at a calculated six times escape velocity.
- [A Study of Lunar Research Flights](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunar-research-flights/) (1959): 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.
- [Project Chariot](https://archivedfutures.com/files/chariot/) (1960): A plan to blast a harbor into the coast of Alaska with nuclear explosives. This survey of the site came first.
- [Project Pluto](https://archivedfutures.com/files/pluto/) (1961): A nuclear ramjet cruise missile meant to fly low for weeks. Its unshielded reactor would have irradiated the ground beneath it.
- [Starfish Prime](https://archivedfutures.com/files/starfish-prime/) (1962): Photographs of high-altitude nuclear tests, which lit artificial auroras across the Pacific.
- [The Effects of Nuclear Weapons](https://archivedfutures.com/files/effects-of-nuclear-weapons/) (1962): The government’s public encyclopedia of blast, heat, and fallout.
- [The Gamma Field](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gamma-field/) (1962): Brookhaven’s account of its gamma field, where plants grew in rings around a cobalt-60 source to study radiation damage and mutations.
- [The SL-1 Accident](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sl-1/) (1962): The final report on recovering the SL-1 reactor, which concluded its central control rod had been pulled out 20 inches by hand.
- [Project Carryall](https://archivedfutures.com/files/carryall/) (1963): A plan to blast a cut for Interstate 40 through the Mojave Desert with about 22 nuclear devices.
- [The NB-36H Nuclear Bomber](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nb-36h/) (1963): The GAO’s review of the nuclear airplane program, which flew a B-36 bomber dozens of times with a working reactor aboard.
- [Project Gnome](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-gnome/) (1964): A report on the first Plowshare test, a nuclear explosion in salt near Carlsbad that left a cavern scientists walked into.
- [Project Orion](https://archivedfutures.com/files/orion/) (1964): A spaceship pushed by nuclear bombs set off behind it, one after another. Freeman Dyson worked on it.
- [The Davy Crockett](https://archivedfutures.com/files/davy-crockett/) (1964): The Army’s history of the Davy Crockett, a recoilless gun built to fire a small nuclear warhead from the front line.
- [Camp Century and Project Iceworm](https://archivedfutures.com/files/camp-century/) (1965): A nuclear-powered research base under the Greenland ice sheet, and the secret plan to hide missiles in tunnels around it.
- [SNAP-10A](https://archivedfutures.com/files/snap-10a/) (1965): The first report on SNAP-10A, the only nuclear reactor the U.S. has sent into space, which shut down after 43 days in orbit.
- [Nuclear Weapons in Vietnam](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tactical-nukes-vietnam/) (1967): A JASON study by Freeman Dyson and three other physicists of what using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam would achieve.
- [Project Ketch](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ketch/) (1967): A plan to set off a nuclear device under Pennsylvania to hollow out a cavern for storing natural gas.
- [Project Gasbuggy](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gasbuggy/) (1968): A 26-kiloton device fired 4,200 feet under New Mexico to shake natural gas loose; the gas came up radioactive.
- [The Nuclear Canal](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nuclear-canal/) (1968): An assessment of whether nuclear blasts used to dig a second Panama Canal could send tsunamis onto nearby coasts.
- [Goldsboro Revisited](https://archivedfutures.com/files/goldsboro-revisited/) (1969): Sandia’s weapons safety supervisor concluded that one low-voltage switch kept a hydrogen bomb from going off over North Carolina.
- [The Nuclear Light Bulb](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nuclear-light-bulb/) (1969): A rocket engine that holds glowing uranium plasma inside a quartz bulb and uses its light to heat hydrogen.
- [The Nuclear Subterrene](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nuclear-subterrene/) (1971): A Los Alamos proposal for a reactor-heated borer that would melt its way through rock and leave a glass-lined tunnel.
- [Nuclear Waste into Space](https://archivedfutures.com/files/space-disposal/) (1973): A NASA study of launching nuclear waste off Earth on rockets, for good.
- [PACER](https://archivedfutures.com/files/pacer/) (1974): A power plant that would set off small H-bombs, one after another, in an underground cavern to make steam.
- [The Plutonium Heart](https://archivedfutures.com/files/plutonium-heart/) (1974): A fully implantable artificial heart powered by plutonium-238.
- [Nuclear War Survival Skills](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nuclear-war-survival-skills/) (1979): A national laboratory’s do-it-yourself manual for surviving a nuclear attack, with plans for a homemade fallout meter.
- [Broken Arrows](https://archivedfutures.com/files/broken-arrows/) (1981): The Pentagon’s 1981 summaries of 32 accidents with nuclear weapons, including Palomares and a bomb lost off Tybee Beach.
- [Operation Argus](https://archivedfutures.com/files/argus/) (1982): Secret nuclear blasts above the South Atlantic in 1958, meant to create artificial radiation belts around Earth.
- [The Atomic Priesthood](https://archivedfutures.com/files/atomic-priesthood/) (1984): A linguist’s proposal for a priesthood that would pass down nuclear-waste warnings through myth and ritual.
- [The Nuclear Winter Study](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nuclear-winter/) (1985): A National Research Council study, paid for by the Pentagon, of how smoke from burning cities could chill the Northern Hemisphere.
- [The X-Ray Laser Audit](https://archivedfutures.com/files/x-ray-laser-audit/) (1988): The GAO’s review of whether Edward Teller and Lowell Wood oversold Livermore’s bomb-powered X-ray laser to top officials.
- [NERVA](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nerva/) (1991): The test record of the nuclear rockets built and fired in the Nevada desert from 1959 to 1972.
- [Not a Place of Honor](https://archivedfutures.com/files/place-of-honor/) (1993): Markers to warn people off buried nuclear waste for 10,000 years: spike fields and “this place is not a place of honor.”
- [Human Radiation Experiments](https://archivedfutures.com/files/achre/) (1995): The federal inquiry into thirty years of radiation experiments on hospital patients, prisoners, and institutionalized boys.
- [A Review of Criticality Accidents](https://archivedfutures.com/files/criticality-accidents/) (2000): Los Alamos’s catalog of every known accidental chain reaction, including the two hand-stacked assemblies that killed their operators.
- [After the Bomb](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nuclear-detonation-guidance/) (2009): 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.

## Space

- [Project Diana](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-diana/) (1946): NASA’s history of radar astronomy on Project Diana, the Army Signal Corps experiment that bounced radar off the Moon in January 1946.
- [The World-Circling Spaceship](https://archivedfutures.com/files/world-circling-spaceship/) (1946): Eleven years before Sputnik, the first RAND report designed a satellite and predicted the political shock it would cause.
- [Man in Space Soonest](https://archivedfutures.com/files/man-in-space-soonest/) (1958): An Air Force chronology of Man in Space Soonest, the 1958 plan to orbit a man by 1960 as the first step toward a manned Moon landing.
- [Project Excelsior](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-excelsior/) (1959): An Air Force pilot’s account of Project Excelsior, his three parachute jumps from balloons, the last from 102,800 feet.
- [Project Horizon](https://archivedfutures.com/files/horizon/) (1959): The Army’s plan for a military base on the Moon by 1966, with a crew of 12 soldiers.
- [The Brookings Report](https://archivedfutures.com/files/brookings-report/) (1960): A NASA-commissioned report warning that finding alien life could destabilize society, and asking whether to withhold the news.
- [The Military Lunar Base](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunar-observatory/) (1960): An Air Force plan for a crewed spy base on the Moon by 1969. It mentions a “Lunar Based Earth Bombardment System.”
- [A Voice in the Wilderness](https://archivedfutures.com/files/houbolt-letter/) (1961): A Langley engineer’s letter, sent over his superiors’ heads, urging lunar-orbit rendezvous, the method NASA chose for Apollo in 1962.
- [LUNEX](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunex/) (1961): The Air Force’s rival to Apollo: a 21-person military base on the Moon by 1968.
- [EMPIRE](https://archivedfutures.com/files/empire/) (1962): Before anyone had orbited the Moon, NASA was studying crewed flybys of Mars and Venus lasting 400 days or more.
- [Dyna-Soar](https://archivedfutures.com/files/dyna-soar/) (1963): 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.
- [Sea Dragon](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sea-dragon/) (1963): Aerojet’s study for NASA of a 500-foot rocket that would float upright in the ocean and lift 550 tons to orbit.
- [Project Ithacus](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ithacus/) (1964): A Douglas Aircraft study of a reusable rocket that would land 1,200 troops anywhere on Earth within 45 minutes.
- [Project West Ford](https://archivedfutures.com/files/west-ford/) (1964): An Air Force experiment that put hundreds of millions of copper needles in orbit to reflect radio signals.
- [Manned Venus Flyby](https://archivedfutures.com/files/venus-flyby/) (1967): A plan to send astronauts on a year-long flyby of Venus using Apollo hardware.
- [Project HARP](https://archivedfutures.com/files/harp/) (1967): A U.S.-Canadian project that fired instrument packages into the upper atmosphere from 16-inch naval guns.
- [Boeing’s Nuclear Mars Ship](https://archivedfutures.com/files/boeing-mars/) (1968): Boeing’s design for a nuclear-rocket Mars ship, assembled in orbit from six Saturn V launches.
- [Timation I](https://archivedfutures.com/files/timation/) (1968): A 1967 satellite that tested navigation by precise clocks, the core idea behind GPS.
- [Apollo 10’s Stray Turd](https://archivedfutures.com/files/apollo-10-transcript/) (1969): The transcript of the Apollo 10 crew’s onboard recordings, in which a turd floats through the cabin and no one claims it.
- [In Event of Moon Disaster](https://archivedfutures.com/files/moon-disaster/) (1969): The statement Nixon was to read if Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the Moon, written two days before the landing.
- [One-Man Lunar Flying Vehicle](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunar-flying-vehicle/) (1969): A one-person rocket platform that would let an astronaut hop across the Moon.
- [Lunar Escape Systems](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunar-escape-systems/) (1970): If the lunar module couldn’t lift off, astronauts would strap onto a bare rocket frame and fly it to orbit by hand.
- [Moon Dust vs. Earth Life](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunar-material-animals/) (1970): Scientists exposed fish and other small animals to Apollo 11 moon dust, checking for anything that could multiply and harm Earth life.
- [Astronaut Light Flashes](https://archivedfutures.com/files/light-flashes/) (1971): Apollo crews saw flashes with their eyes shut. Researchers traced them to cosmic rays passing through the eyeball.
- [Project Cyclops](https://archivedfutures.com/files/cyclops/) (1971): A design for about 1,000 radio dishes listening for alien civilizations. Its methods shaped later SETI work.
- [Surveyor 3, Returned](https://archivedfutures.com/files/surveyor-3/) (1972): 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.
- [The Arecibo Message](https://archivedfutures.com/files/arecibo-message/) (1974): The Arecibo Observatory staff’s paper on the 1,679-bit picture message radioed to the star cluster M13 in November 1974.
- [Space Settlements](https://archivedfutures.com/files/space-settlements/) (1975): Designs for rotating space colonies of 10,000 people, with widely reproduced paintings of life inside.
- [On the Habitability of Mars](https://archivedfutures.com/files/habitability-of-mars/) (1976): NASA’s first terraforming study, on whether Earth organisms could give Mars a breathable atmosphere.
- [An Interstellar Precursor](https://archivedfutures.com/files/interstellar-precursor/) (1977): 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.
- [The Voyager Golden Record](https://archivedfutures.com/files/voyager-golden-record/) (1977): NASA’s 1977 announcement of the phonograph record of greetings, music, sounds, and pictures from Earth sent on both Voyagers.
- [Solar Power Satellites as Weapons](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sps-military/) (1978): A 1978 study of whether a kilometers-wide orbiting solar power station could be used as a weapon or attacked by terrorists.
- [The Satellite Power System](https://archivedfutures.com/files/satellite-power-system/) (1978): A fleet of kilometers-wide solar satellites beaming power to Earth as microwaves.
- [Advanced Automation for Space Missions](https://archivedfutures.com/files/advanced-automation/) (1980): A study of a factory on the Moon that builds copies of itself.
- [Antimatter Rockets](https://archivedfutures.com/files/antimatter-propulsion/) (1985): An Air Force study of how to make, trap, and store antimatter as rocket fuel.
- [Project Longshot](https://archivedfutures.com/files/longshot/) (1988): Naval Academy midshipmen design an uncrewed fusion-powered probe to Alpha Centauri.
- [Brilliant Pebbles](https://archivedfutures.com/files/brilliant-pebbles/) (1989): Lowell Wood’s case for thousands of small, self-guided satellites that would destroy missiles by ramming them in flight.
- [The 90-Day Study](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ninety-day-study/) (1989): NASA’s 1989 plan for President Bush’s return to the Moon: a permanent lunar outpost by 2002 and astronauts on Mars by 2016.
- [BEAR](https://archivedfutures.com/files/bear/) (1990): A Los Alamos paper on BEAR, a particle accelerator launched on a rocket in 1989 that fired a neutral hydrogen beam in space.
- [Planetary Defense](https://archivedfutures.com/files/planetary-defense/) (1996): Air Command and Staff College officers argue for a military mission to stop asteroids before they hit Earth.
- [Space Elevators](https://archivedfutures.com/files/space-elevators/) (2000): An engineering look at a cable running from the ground into orbit.
- [Space Weapons, Earth Wars](https://archivedfutures.com/files/space-weapons/) (2002): A RAND study for the Air Force of weapons based in orbit, including 100-kilogram tungsten rods dropped onto targets below.
- [HAVOC](https://archivedfutures.com/files/havoc/) (2015): Astronauts living in solar-powered airships in the clouds of Venus, where the air pressure is close to Earth’s.
- [The Manned Orbiting Laboratory](https://archivedfutures.com/files/mol/) (2015): The NRO’s declassified record of an Air Force space station whose crews were to photograph the Soviet Union.
- [Titan Submarine](https://archivedfutures.com/files/titan-submarine/) (2015): A robotic submarine to explore a sea of liquid hydrocarbons on Saturn’s moon Titan.
- [A Roadmap to the Stars](https://archivedfutures.com/files/laser-sail-roadmap/) (2016): A NASA-funded plan to push gram-scale probes on wafers to a quarter of light speed with a giant laser array.
- [Hibernating to Mars](https://archivedfutures.com/files/torpor/) (2018): A plan to put Mars crews into a medically induced, hibernation-like sleep to save mass on the trip.
- [The Mach Effect Drive](https://archivedfutures.com/files/mach-effect-drive/) (2018): A NASA-funded study of a probe to Proxima b driven by a disputed thruster said to push without propellant.
- [The Solar Gravity Lens](https://archivedfutures.com/files/solar-gravity-lens/) (2018): 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.
- [Lunar Crater Radio Telescope](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunar-crater-telescope/) (2023): A JPL design for a radio telescope made by stretching a wire-mesh dish across a crater on the far side of the Moon.
- [Mycotecture Off Planet](https://archivedfutures.com/files/mycotecture/) (2024): A NASA Ames study of growing habitats on the Moon and Mars from fungus, with mycelium bricks tested in a planetary simulator.

## Machines

- [The Akron Disaster](https://archivedfutures.com/files/akron-disaster/) (1933): Congress’s report on the 1933 crash of the Navy airship Akron, a flying aircraft carrier. Three of the 77 men aboard survived.
- [The Antarctic Snow Cruiser](https://archivedfutures.com/files/snow-cruiser/) (1939): The U.S. Antarctic Service’s file on the Snow Cruiser, a 55-foot vehicle with an airplane on its roof that bogged down in the snow.
- [The Spruce Goose](https://archivedfutures.com/files/spruce-goose/) (1944): NACA towing-tank tests on a model hull of the Hughes-Kaiser flying boat, the 200-ton wooden cargo plane later called the Spruce Goose.
- [The Flying Flapjack](https://archivedfutures.com/files/flying-flapjack/) (1946): Wind-tunnel tests of the Navy’s round fighter plane, which looked like a flying saucer.
- [The Yehudi Lights](https://archivedfutures.com/files/yehudi/) (1946): A wartime camouflage report on Yehudi, which hid bombers against the sky with lamps aimed forward from their wings.
- [Operation Highjump](https://archivedfutures.com/files/operation-highjump/) (1947): The Navy’s report on Operation Highjump, which sent 13 ships and more than 4,700 men to Antarctica in 1946–47 to map it from the air.
- [The Area Rule](https://archivedfutures.com/files/area-rule/) (1952): The discovery that pinching a fuselage into a Coke-bottle shape cuts drag near the speed of sound.
- [The Pogo](https://archivedfutures.com/files/pogo/) (1954): 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.
- [The Hiller Flying Platform](https://archivedfutures.com/files/flying-platform/) (1956): A one-man ducted fan that the pilot stood on and steered by leaning.
- [Avrocar](https://archivedfutures.com/files/avrocar/) (1958): An actual flying saucer, tested in NASA wind tunnels. It hovered but couldn’t get much more than a few feet off the ground.
- [The Inflatable Airplane](https://archivedfutures.com/files/inflatoplane/) (1958): Goodyear’s inflatable airplane, tested in a wind tunnel at speeds high enough to buckle its wings.
- [The X-13 Vertijet](https://archivedfutures.com/files/x-13-vertijet/) (1958): NACA tests of a model of the Ryan X-13, a jet that took off and landed upright, hanging by a nose hook from a wire on a trailer.
- [Missile Mail](https://archivedfutures.com/files/missile-mail/) (1959): The Postal Service’s history of the 1959 test in which a Navy submarine fired a Regulus missile carrying 3,000 letters to Florida.
- [The Flying Jeeps](https://archivedfutures.com/files/flying-jeeps/) (1960): Curtiss-Wright’s final report on the VZ-7AP, a four-rotor “aerial jeep” built for the Army to fly low over rough ground.
- [The GE Walking Truck](https://archivedfutures.com/files/walking-truck/) (1960): A four-legged truck whose driver moved its legs with his own arms and legs.
- [Project Mohole](https://archivedfutures.com/files/mohole/) (1961): 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.
- [The Bell Rocket Belt](https://archivedfutures.com/files/rocket-belt/) (1961): An Army-funded jetpack: a hydrogen-peroxide rocket belt meant to fly soldiers over obstacles.
- [The Overland Train](https://archivedfutures.com/files/overland-train/) (1961): Desert test planning for the Army’s 572-foot Overland Train, built to haul cargo where there are no roads.
- [The AR-15 Field Test](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ar-15-test/) (1962): ARPA’s field report on AR-15 rifles issued to South Vietnamese troops in combat, a test that helped lead to the M16.
- [Paresev](https://archivedfutures.com/files/paresev/) (1963): A glider NASA built in-house to test landing space capsules under a Rogallo wing, and an ancestor of the hang glider.
- [The Marsh Screw Amphibian](https://archivedfutures.com/files/marsh-screw/) (1964): A vehicle that drove on two giant rotating screws instead of wheels.
- [Sealab I](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sealab-one/) (1965): 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.
- [The Flying Bedstead](https://archivedfutures.com/files/flying-bedstead/) (1965): A jet-lifted frame that flew as if in lunar gravity. Neil Armstrong ejected from one in 1968.
- [The Rock-Site Concept](https://archivedfutures.com/files/rock-site/) (1966): A Navy study proposing rooms excavated in the bedrock beneath the seafloor, with no connection to land or the surface.
- [Sealab II](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sealab-ii/) (1967): The Navy’s report on Sealab II, where aquanauts lived for weeks on the seafloor and a porpoise named Tuffy carried their mail.
- [Igloo White](https://archivedfutures.com/files/igloo-white/) (1968): An Air Force history of the sensor barrier on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which relayed truck noise to computers in Thailand.
- [Hardiman](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hardiman/) (1971): A hydraulic exoskeleton with 30 joints, meant to multiply a sailor’s strength about 25 times.
- [The Stealth Equations](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ufimtsev/) (1971): A Soviet radar-scattering monograph the Air Force translated. Its equations are widely credited with enabling stealth aircraft.
- [Tektite II](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tektite/) (1972): NASA studied aquanauts living for weeks in a seafloor habitat, one crew all women, as a stand-in for a space station.
- [The Flying-Wing Freighter](https://archivedfutures.com/files/flying-wing-freighter/) (1977): A design for a giant cargo plane that would carry its freight inside the wing.
- [The Scissor-Wing Jet](https://archivedfutures.com/files/oblique-wing/) (1985): A small jet whose whole wing pivoted like scissors, testing a design for fuel-efficient supersonic airliners.
- [Plasma Cloaking](https://archivedfutures.com/files/plasma-cloaking/) (1990): An Air Force–funded SRI study that concluded a membrane of ionized gas could serve as a switchable radar cloaking device.
- [Wingship Investigation](https://archivedfutures.com/files/wingship/) (1994): A post-Cold War ARPA study of giant water-skimming craft like the Soviet “Caspian Sea Monster.”
- [BigDog](https://archivedfutures.com/files/bigdog/) (2008): Boston Dynamics’ status report on BigDog, a DARPA-funded four-legged robot built to carry soldiers’ loads over rough ground.
- [The TALOS Suit](https://archivedfutures.com/files/talos/) (2017): A Special Operations Command briefing on TALOS, the armored, powered exoskeleton suit the press called the “Iron Man suit.”

## Computing

- [The EDVAC Report](https://archivedfutures.com/files/edvac/) (1945): John von Neumann’s 1945 draft, written under an Army contract, describing a computer that keeps its program in memory with its data.
- [A Million Random Digits](https://archivedfutures.com/files/million-random-digits/) (1955): A RAND book of one million random digits, generated by an electronic roulette wheel for Air Force analyses.
- [The Mark I Perceptron Manual](https://archivedfutures.com/files/perceptron/) (1960): The operators’ manual for the first hardware perceptron, a Navy-funded machine that learned to recognize shapes.
- [Augmenting Human Intellect](https://archivedfutures.com/files/augmenting-human-intellect/) (1962): The 1962 report that set the agenda for Engelbart’s lab, which went on to build the mouse and hypertext.
- [Sketchpad](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sketchpad/) (1963): A light-pen drawing program that pioneered interactive computer graphics.
- [The Intergalactic Computer Network](https://archivedfutures.com/files/intergalactic-network/) (1963): Licklider’s 1963 memo on how separate computers could share programs and data, an early outline of the internet.
- [On Distributed Communications](https://archivedfutures.com/files/distributed-communications/) (1964): A design for a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack, and one origin of packet switching.
- [The RAND Tablet](https://archivedfutures.com/files/rand-tablet/) (1964): RAND’s description of its tablet and stylus, which let a user write and draw by hand into a computer in 1963.
- [The Mouse Trials](https://archivedfutures.com/files/display-control/) (1965): A NASA-funded test of the new computer mouse against a light pen, joystick, and knee control. Experienced users preferred it.
- [The ALPAC Report](https://archivedfutures.com/files/alpac/) (1966): The National Research Council report that saw “no immediate or predictable prospect” of useful machine translation.
- [Biocybernetic Control](https://archivedfutures.com/files/biocybernetic-control/) (1974): An ARPA-funded UCLA report on reading EEG brain responses as computer input, from the lab that named the brain-computer interface.
- [The Multics Penetration Test](https://archivedfutures.com/files/multics-security/) (1974): An Air Force penetration test of Multics that described a self-perpetuating compiler trap door a decade before Ken Thompson did.
- [The Aspen Movie Map](https://archivedfutures.com/files/aspen-movie-map/) (1980): A DARPA-funded MIT paper on the Movie-Map, which let a user drive the streets of Aspen, Colorado, on videodisc, filmed every 10 feet.
- [The Stanford Cart](https://archivedfutures.com/files/stanford-cart/) (1980): An ancestor of self-driving cars: a camera cart that moved about a meter every 10 to 15 minutes, thinking between moves.
- [A History of the ARPANET](https://archivedfutures.com/files/arpanet-history/) (1981): BBN, which built the ARPANET’s switching computers, writes the network’s first official history, maps included.
- [Strategic Computing](https://archivedfutures.com/files/strategic-computing/) (1983): DARPA’s plan for machine intelligence: robot vehicles, a “pilot’s associate,” and battle-management AI.
- [Tennis for Two](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tennis-for-two/) (1983): Physicist William Higinbotham’s account of the tennis game he built on an oscilloscope for Brookhaven’s 1958 visitors’ day.
- [Shakey the Robot](https://archivedfutures.com/files/shakey/) (1984): A wheeled robot that planned its own actions. The project behind it produced the A* search algorithm.
- [The Morris Worm](https://archivedfutures.com/files/morris-worm/) (1989): The GAO’s report on the November 1988 program that reportedly infected up to 6,000 of the internet’s 60,000 computers.
- [SIMNET](https://archivedfutures.com/files/simnet/) (1995): An insider’s history of SIMNET, DARPA’s network of low-cost tank and helicopter simulators that put crews in a shared virtual battlefield.
- [LifeLog](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lifelog/) (2003): A DARPA solicitation for a system to capture everything one person sees, hears, reads, and does, and sort it into an “episodic memory.”
- [Total Information Awareness](https://archivedfutures.com/files/terrorism-information-awareness/) (2003): DARPA’s report to Congress defending its counterterrorism data-mining program, including a plan for futures markets on attacks.
- [The DARPA Grand Challenge](https://archivedfutures.com/files/grand-challenge/) (2004): DARPA’s report to Congress on its 2004 race for driverless vehicles, in which none got past mile 7.4 of a 142-mile desert course.

## Fringe

- [The Dynamite Rainmakers](https://archivedfutures.com/files/dynamite-rainmakers/) (1892): Congress paid a special agent to set off dynamite over Texas from balloons, kites, and mortars to force rain from the sky.
- [Kudzu, Not a Pest](https://archivedfutures.com/files/kudzu/) (1939): A USDA bulletin urging Southern farmers to plant kudzu against erosion, with a section headed “Kudzu not a pest.”
- [Project Cirrus](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-cirrus/) (1952): The history of the first military cloud-seeding program, which dropped 80 pounds of dry ice into a hurricane in 1947.
- [Project Skyfire](https://archivedfutures.com/files/skyfire/) (1962): A Forest Service report on seeding Montana thunderstorms with silver iodide to cut the lightning strikes that start forest fires.
- [The “Louie Louie” File](https://archivedfutures.com/files/louie-louie/) (1964): The FBI’s file on whether the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” was obscene. Its laboratory could not make out the lyrics at any speed.
- [The Delphi Forecast](https://archivedfutures.com/files/rand-delphi/) (1964): A RAND paper on a Delphi survey in which 82 experts forecast science, war, and society up to 50 years ahead.
- [The Carbon Dioxide Appendix](https://archivedfutures.com/files/carbon-dioxide-appendix/) (1965): The appendix that warned a president about carbon dioxide, and proposed spreading reflective particles on the sea to offset it.
- [Project Pandora](https://archivedfutures.com/files/pandora/) (1966): 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.
- [Project Stormfury](https://archivedfutures.com/files/stormfury/) (1970): The year Navy aircraft seeded Hurricane Debbie with silver iodide to test whether a hurricane could be weakened.
- [Dematerialization and Antigravity](https://archivedfutures.com/files/dematerialization/) (1975): An Army Missile Command technical report proposing a mechanism by which matter could dematerialize and craft could use antigravity.
- [Faster-than-Light Particles](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tachyons/) (1980): 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.
- [The Cold Fusion Panel](https://archivedfutures.com/files/cold-fusion/) (1989): The Energy Department panel report on the 1989 cold fusion claims, which found the evidence for a new nuclear process not persuasive.
- [The Electric Propulsion Study](https://archivedfutures.com/files/electric-propulsion-study/) (1990): An Air Force rocket lab study of theories linking gravity and electromagnetism, including claims of antigravity and free energy.
- [The “Gay Bomb” Proposal](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gay-bomb/) (1994): An Air Force proposal for nonlethal chemical weapons, one meant to make enemy troops sexually attracted to each other.
- [Alternate Futures for 2025](https://archivedfutures.com/files/alternate-futures/) (1996): The Air Force imagined six possible worlds for 2025, including one ruled by corporations.
- [Owning the Weather in 2025](https://archivedfutures.com/files/owning-the-weather/) (1996): An Air Force paper on using weather control as a weapon.
- [Breakthrough Propulsion Physics](https://archivedfutures.com/files/breakthrough-propulsion/) (1998): NASA’s official program studying warp drives and propulsion without propellant.
- [HAARP](https://archivedfutures.com/files/haarp/) (1998): An Air Force and Navy report on HAARP, the Alaska transmitter built to heat the ionosphere for submarine radio and remote sensing.
- [The Gravity Shield Test](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gravity-shielding/) (1998): A NASA Marshall test of the claim that spinning superconductors shield gravity; a gravimeter above the disks recorded no change.
- [Teleportation Physics Study](https://archivedfutures.com/files/teleportation/) (2004): An Air Force-funded survey of teleportation, from the quantum kind to psychic claims.
- [The Lifter Tests](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lifters/) (2004): A NASA contractor study of high-voltage “lifter” capacitors that traced their thrust to charged ions colliding with air.
- [The AAWSAP Papers](https://archivedfutures.com/files/aawsap/) (2009): DIA-funded studies of wormholes, invisibility cloaks, and antigravity. DIA released 37 of the 38 under FOIA in 2022.
- [Climate Engineering](https://archivedfutures.com/files/climate-engineering/) (2011): Congress’s auditors assessed sulfate aerosols, brightened clouds, and mirrors in orbit, and found none of them ready.
- [Counter-Zombie Dominance](https://archivedfutures.com/files/counter-zombie/) (2011): A U.S. Strategic Command training plan for defending humankind against zombies, chosen because no one could mistake it for a real plan.
- [Warp Field Mechanics 101](https://archivedfutures.com/files/warp-field-mechanics/) (2011): A paper on how much energy an Alcubierre warp drive would need.
- [The EmDrive Test](https://archivedfutures.com/files/emdrive/) (2016): NASA Eagleworks’ report of thrust from a sealed copper microwave cavity in a vacuum, a result that would require no propellant.
- [The Navy’s “UFO Patent”](https://archivedfutures.com/files/navy-ufo-patent/) (2018): A Navy patent for a craft whose vibrating, electrically charged hull would polarize the vacuum around it and shed its inertial mass.

## Paranormal

- [The Battle of Los Angeles](https://archivedfutures.com/files/battle-of-los-angeles/) (1942): General Marshall’s memo to Roosevelt on the February 1942 night when Army guns fired 1,430 rounds at unidentified aircraft over Los Angeles.
- [The Maury Island Incident](https://archivedfutures.com/files/maury-island/) (1947): FBI teletypes on flying-disc fragments that proved to be slag, and the bomber crash that killed the two officers carrying them.
- [Project Sign](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-sign/) (1949): The Air Force’s first official UFO study. One appendix weighs whether visitors could come from Mars or Venus.
- [The Hottel Memo](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hottel-memo/) (1950): 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.
- [Project Twinkle](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-twinkle/) (1951): The Air Force’s final report on its camera watch for the “green fireballs” seen over New Mexico, whose findings were “essentially negative.”
- [The Robertson Panel](https://archivedfutures.com/files/robertson-panel/) (1953): A CIA panel of scientists recommended “debunking” UFOs, with help from Walt Disney cartoons and amateur astronomers.
- [Project Blue Book](https://archivedfutures.com/files/blue-book/) (1955): The Air Force’s statistical study of its UFO reports, from the project that collected 12,618 sightings.
- [The Echo Flight Shutdown](https://archivedfutures.com/files/echo-flight/) (1967): Air Force unit histories on the March 1967 morning when all 10 Minuteman missiles of Echo Flight dropped off alert within seconds.
- [UFO Hypothesis and Survival Questions](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ufo-hypothesis/) (1968): An NSA staff paper asking how humanity should prepare to survive if UFOs turn out to be real.
- [Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages](https://archivedfutures.com/files/extraterrestrial-messages/) (1969): The answer key to mock messages from aliens that an NSA mathematician wrote as a codebreaking exercise.
- [Controlled Offensive Behavior](https://archivedfutures.com/files/controlled-offensive-behavior/) (1972): A survey of Soviet mind-control research: hypnosis, telepathy, psychokinesis, and teleportation.
- [Uri Geller at SRI](https://archivedfutures.com/files/uri-geller/) (1973): The write-up concluding that Uri Geller, tested in a shielded room, “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability.”
- [The Cattle Mutilation File](https://archivedfutures.com/files/cattle-mutilations/) (1974): FBI files on the 1970s cattle mutilations, from letters to senators to a 1979 inquiry on New Mexico Indian lands that found no culprits.
- [The FBI Bigfoot File](https://archivedfutures.com/files/fbi-bigfoot/) (1976): The FBI file on 15 hairs a Bigfoot researcher sent to its laboratory, which found them to be “of deer family origin.”
- [The First Earth Battalion](https://archivedfutures.com/files/first-earth-battalion/) (1979): An Army officer’s concept paper for a battalion of “warrior monks” trained in meditation, martial arts, and New Age techniques.
- [The Halt Memo](https://archivedfutures.com/files/halt-memo/) (1981): A U.S. Air Force deputy base commander’s memo reporting a glowing object and moving lights in an English forest in December 1980.
- [The Cash-Landrum Inquiry](https://archivedfutures.com/files/cash-landrum/) (1982): The Army inspector general’s inquiry into whether military helicopters escorted a UFO that three Texans said burned them in December 1980.
- [The Gateway Process](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gateway-process/) (1983): An Army analysis of using meditation to move consciousness beyond time and space. It went viral on TikTok in 2023.
- [Enhancing Human Performance](https://archivedfutures.com/files/enhancing-human-performance/) (1988): A National Research Council review, requested by the Army, of “new age” techniques from sleep learning to remote viewing and psychokinesis.
- [Stargate](https://archivedfutures.com/files/stargate/) (1995): The review that ended more than two decades of government-funded research into remote viewing.
- [Roswell: Case Closed](https://archivedfutures.com/files/roswell-case-closed/) (1997): The Air Force’s explanation that the Roswell “alien bodies” were crash-test dummies dropped from balloons.
- [The 2021 UAP Assessment](https://archivedfutures.com/files/uap-assessment/) (2021): U.S. intelligence’s 2021 report to Congress on UFOs, which could explain only one of 144 military sightings: a deflating balloon.

## Espionage

- [Secret Writing](https://archivedfutures.com/files/secret-writing/) (1917): Six World War I papers on invisible ink and opening sealed letters, which stayed classified until 2011.
- [The Einstein File](https://archivedfutures.com/files/einstein-file/) (1932): The FBI’s file on Albert Einstein, opened in 1932 and grown to 1,427 pages by his death in 1955.
- [The Hitler Profile](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hitler-profile/) (1943): An OSS psychoanalytic profile of Hitler that judged suicide his most plausible end if Germany faced defeat.
- [The Tesla File](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tesla-file/) (1943): The FBI’s file on Nikola Tesla, whose papers federal officials seized after his death amid talk of a “death ray.”
- [Simple Sabotage Field Manual](https://archivedfutures.com/files/simple-sabotage/) (1944): Advice for citizen saboteurs that reads like office satire: hold endless meetings and refer everything to committees.
- [The FBI Hitler File](https://archivedfutures.com/files/fbi-hitler-file/) (1945): The FBI’s file on Hitler, mostly tips from 1945 to 1947 that he had survived the war, including a landing by submarine in Argentina.
- [The Ghost Army](https://archivedfutures.com/files/ghost-army/) (1945): The official history of the Army unit that impersonated whole divisions in Europe with rubber tanks, recorded sound, and radio traffic.
- [Hitler in Colombia](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hitler-in-colombia/) (1955): A CIA station dispatch passing on an informant’s claim that Hitler was alive in Colombia, with a photograph dated 1954.
- [John Nash’s Letters to the NSA](https://archivedfutures.com/files/nash-letters/) (1955): John Nash’s 1955 letters to the NSA, proposing a cipher machine and arguing that key-breaking effort could grow exponentially.
- [Project Genetrix](https://archivedfutures.com/files/genetrix/) (1956): The Air Force’s final report on Project 119L, which launched 516 camera balloons to drift across the Soviet bloc in 1956.
- [Gambler’s Ruin](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gamblers-ruin/) (1957): A math paper for the NSA co-written by the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, with a joke citation slipped in.
- [The CIA’s Doctor Zhivago](https://archivedfutures.com/files/doctor-zhivago/) (1958): A CIA memo tallying the first 1,000 copies of its Russian Doctor Zhivago, including 365 handed to Soviet visitors at the Brussels Fair.
- [Operation Northwoods](https://archivedfutures.com/files/northwoods/) (1962): The Joint Chiefs proposed staged attacks to blame on Cuba as a pretext for war. The Kennedy administration rejected it.
- [Aquiline](https://archivedfutures.com/files/aquiline/) (1965): The CIA’s first spy drone, disguised as a bird, built to photograph the Soviet Union unnoticed.
- [Project Camelot](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-camelot/) (1965): Dean Rusk’s memo to President Johnson on Project Camelot, an Army study of insurgency whose approach to Chilean scholars caused a scandal.
- [Operation Popeye](https://archivedfutures.com/files/popeye/) (1967): A State Department memo weighing a secret program to seed clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and keep the roads muddy.
- [The Kidnaping of the Lunik](https://archivedfutures.com/files/lunik/) (1967): CIA officers diverted a Soviet spacecraft from a touring exhibition, examined it overnight, and returned it unnoticed.
- [The Berlin Tunnel](https://archivedfutures.com/files/berlin-tunnel/) (1968): 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.
- [The Wandering Soul Tapes](https://archivedfutures.com/files/wandering-soul/) (1970): Army psychological operations reports on “Wandering Soul” tapes, broadcast at night to exploit beliefs about restless spirits of the dead.
- [TEMPEST](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tempest/) (1972): An NSA history of leaking cipher machines, starting with a wartime Bell device whose signals revealed plaintext 80 feet away.
- [The Family Jewels](https://archivedfutures.com/files/family-jewels/) (1973): A 702-page file of CIA activities that might have broken its charter, compiled on the director’s orders in 1973 and released in 2007.
- [The Insectothopter](https://archivedfutures.com/files/insectothopter/) (1974): A CIA project history of a one-gram robot dragonfly built to fly a listening device to its target, steered by laser.
- [Alleged Assassination Plots](https://archivedfutures.com/files/assassination-plots/) (1975): The Church Committee’s report on U.S. plots against foreign leaders, including cigars treated with botulinum toxin for Castro.
- [Project MKULTRA](https://archivedfutures.com/files/mkultra/) (1977): The Senate hearing on the CIA’s drug and behavior program, held after seven boxes of its records turned up misfiled.
- [The Voynich Manuscript](https://archivedfutures.com/files/voynich/) (1978): An NSA cryptologist’s survey of the Voynich manuscript, an illustrated book in a script no one has deciphered.
- [Project Azorian](https://archivedfutures.com/files/azorian/) (1985): The CIA and Howard Hughes built a fake deep-sea mining ship to lift a sunken Soviet submarine off the Pacific floor.
- [The U-2 and OXCART Programs](https://archivedfutures.com/files/overhead-reconnaissance/) (1992): The CIA’s secret history of its spy planes, including early attempts to hide them from radar.
- [The Clipper Chip](https://archivedfutures.com/files/clipper-chip/) (1994): The federal standard behind the Clipper chip, which encrypted phone calls while government escrow agents kept a copy of each key.
- [CORONA](https://archivedfutures.com/files/corona/) (1995): A CIA collection on the first U.S. spy satellites, whose film capsules were caught in midair by planes trailing hooks.
- [Skyhook and Operation Coldfeet](https://archivedfutures.com/files/skyhook/) (1995): A balloon and a line let a low-flying B-17 snatch two men off an abandoned Soviet ice station.
- [SIGSALY](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sigsaly/) (2000): An NSA history of SIGSALY, the 55-ton wartime system that encrypted Allied leaders’ calls as digital speech keyed by phonograph records.
- [Venona](https://archivedfutures.com/files/venona/) (2001): An NSA history of Venona, the program begun in 1943 that read Soviet spy cables because Moscow reused one-time pad pages.
- [An Underwater Ice Station Zebra](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hexagon-recovery/) (2012): A CIA history of the Navy’s deep dives to retrieve a spy-satellite film capsule from 16,400 feet down in the Pacific.
- [Project GUNMAN](https://archivedfutures.com/files/gunman/) (2012): An NSA history of finding Soviet bugs in the U.S. Moscow embassy’s IBM Selectric typewriters by X-raying the machines.
- [The Great Seal Bug](https://archivedfutures.com/files/great-seal-bug/) (2018): An NSA history of “The Thing,” a powerless Soviet bug hidden in a carved Great Seal given to the U.S. ambassador in 1945.
- [The Havana Sounds](https://archivedfutures.com/files/havana-sounds/) (2018): A JASON study for the State Department that matched recordings of the Havana “sonic attacks” to a cricket’s call.

## Animals

- [The Camel Corps](https://archivedfutures.com/files/camel-corps/) (1857): Jefferson Davis’s report to the Senate on the Army’s $30,000 purchase of 75 camels to haul supplies across Texas.
- [Reindeer for Alaska](https://archivedfutures.com/files/alaska-reindeer/) (1896): A Bureau of Education report on its program to ship Siberian reindeer to Alaska and bring Sámi herders from Norway to train Native herders.
- [The American Hippo Bill](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hippo-bill/) (1910): A 1910 House hearing on a bill to import hippopotamuses to eat the water hyacinth choking Louisiana’s waterways and supply meat.
- [The Bat Bomb](https://archivedfutures.com/files/bat-bomb/) (1942): A plan to drop bats carrying tiny firebombs on Japanese cities. Escaped test bats set an air base on fire.
- [Project Fantasia](https://archivedfutures.com/files/project-fantasia/) (1943): An OSS psychological warfare project to frighten the Japanese with glowing fox spirits, from luminous balloons to painted foxes.
- [Pigeon-Guided Missiles](https://archivedfutures.com/files/orcon/) (1948): The Navy revived B. F. Skinner’s idea of training pigeons to steer missiles by pecking at a target on a screen.
- [Operation Big Itch](https://archivedfutures.com/files/big-itch/) (1954): A 1954 Army test of munitions filled with uninfected rat fleas, dropped over pens of guinea pigs at Dugway Proving Ground.
- [The Atomic Pigs](https://archivedfutures.com/files/plumbbob-swine/) (1961): The Army’s report on 1,200 pigs exposed to three atomic tests in Nevada in 1957 as stand-ins for human casualties.
- [The Mercury Chimpanzees](https://archivedfutures.com/files/mercury-chimpanzees/) (1963): The full record of Ham and Enos, the chimps who flew Mercury capsules before the astronauts and worked levers in flight.
- [Acoustic Kitty](https://archivedfutures.com/files/acoustic-kitty/) (1967): The CIA’s verdict on cats wired to eavesdrop: “a remarkable scientific achievement,” but impractical.
- [The Dolphin House](https://archivedfutures.com/files/dolphin-house/) (1967): John Lilly’s 1967 book on his dolphin lab, where Margaret Howe lived in a flooded room with a dolphin to teach him English.
- [Sanguine’s Test Animals](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sanguine-biology/) (1970): Navy-funded tests that exposed rats, beagles, insects, and plants to the fields of a proposed submarine radio antenna.
- [Project Deep Ops](https://archivedfutures.com/files/deep-ops/) (1972): The Navy trained orcas and pilot whales to dive and attach recovery gear to lost torpedoes.
- [The Apollo 17 Pocket Mice](https://archivedfutures.com/files/biocore/) (1973): Five pocket mice flew around the Moon with radiation detectors under their scalps, to test whether cosmic rays damage the brain.
- [Universe 25](https://archivedfutures.com/files/universe-25/) (1973): 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.
- [Avian Delivery System](https://archivedfutures.com/files/avian-delivery/) (1974): A field manual for training a raven to drop off and pick up small objects on buildings.
- [Skylab’s Spiders](https://archivedfutures.com/files/skylab-spiders/) (1974): Results of 25 high-school experiments on Skylab, including Arabella and Anita, the spiders who learned to spin webs in zero gravity.
- [Spy Pigeons](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tacana/) (1978): A Top Secret study of photographing Soviet shipyards with camera-carrying pigeons. Appendices cover pigeon care.
- [Project Sea Hunt](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sea-hunt/) (1981): A Navy report for the Coast Guard on pigeons carried in a pod under a helicopter to spot orange objects in the water.
- [Drugged Spider Webs](https://archivedfutures.com/files/spider-web-toxicity/) (1995): A NASA tech brief that measured toxicity by how badly spiders exposed to marijuana, Benzedrine, caffeine, and chloral hydrate built webs.
- [Cyborg Insects](https://archivedfutures.com/files/hi-mems/) (2006): Beetles and moths with electronics implanted while they were still pupae, so they could be steered in flight.
- [Plum Island](https://archivedfutures.com/files/plum-island/) (2008): The GAO’s testimony that Homeland Security had no evidence that foot-and-mouth disease research could move safely off Plum Island.

## Subjects

- [The Poison Squad](https://archivedfutures.com/files/poison-squad/) (1904): Twelve government clerks ate borax-laced meals for months while chemists weighed them and recorded the headaches.
- [The Tuskegee Study](https://archivedfutures.com/files/tuskegee-panel/) (1932): The federal panel’s report on the Public Health Service study that followed Black men with untreated syphilis for 40 years.
- [The Starvation Unit](https://archivedfutures.com/files/starvation-unit/) (1944): A wartime report on 34 conscientious objectors who were semi-starved for six months so doctors could learn how to feed liberated Europe.
- [The Guatemala Experiments](https://archivedfutures.com/files/guatemala-std/) (1946): A presidential commission’s report on Public Health Service doctors who deliberately infected Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, and patients.
- [Operation Whitecoat](https://archivedfutures.com/files/whitecoat/) (1954): An Army study of the volunteers in Project Whitecoat, Seventh-day Adventist objectors exposed to biological agents at Fort Detrick.
- [Sonic Wind](https://archivedfutures.com/files/sonic-wind/) (1954): An Air Force history of the Holloman rocket-sled program, in which a flight surgeon rode the sled himself to find human limits.
- [The Edgewood Volunteers](https://archivedfutures.com/files/edgewood/) (1955): The National Research Council’s final report on twenty years of chemical-agent tests on soldier volunteers at Edgewood Arsenal.
- [The Subway Germ Test](https://archivedfutures.com/files/subway-germ-test/) (1968): The Army released a harmless bacterial simulant in the New York subway and measured how far trains carried it.
- [The Simulated Prison](https://archivedfutures.com/files/simulated-prison/) (1971): An Office of Naval Research report on the Stanford basement prison, shut down after six days of a planned two weeks.
- [The Army’s Open-Air Germ Tests](https://archivedfutures.com/files/army-germ-tests/) (1977): Senate hearings at which the Army described open-air germ-warfare simulant tests in places including San Francisco and the New York subway.