The Posting On September 19, 2023, the National Security Archive, a research organization in Washington, D.C. published an online posting titled “After Black November: The U.S. and the 1985 Palace of Justice Tragedy.” It draws on U.S. government records connected to the November 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, several cited in … Read more
A Month’s Warning A month before two Cessna planes went down over the Florida Straits, FAA official Cecilia Capestany put the danger in writing. Her email referred to “further taunting of the Cuban Government” by overflights from the exile group Brothers to the Rescue, and to State Department concern about a “worst case scenario”: “one … Read more
The File The Black Vault hosts a 55-page document from the Project Blue Book collection, the Air Force’s program for investigating UFO reports, held at the U.S. National Archives. The file is titled “The Alleged 1964 UFO Landing in Harrisonburg, Virginia,” runs to 12.1 megabytes of scanned material, and was posted online on May 23, … Read more
Edward Teller spent much of his later career trying to step outside a label he had done more than anyone to earn. By 1978, as The Black Vault’s own account notes, he was already fixed in the public mind as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” a reputation built three decades earlier at Los Alamos. … Read more
A Lamb, By His Own Account Nikita Khrushchev, describing the end of the Cuban missile crisis to a foreign ally, landed on an odd piece of self-assessment. Having ordered missiles into Cuba and then ordered them out again, he told Czechoslovak party leader Antonín Novotný that the world would now see him as the man … Read more
Two words carry most of the weight in the KONA BLUE file: “non-human biologics.” Everything else in the release is paperwork built around that phrase, and the paperwork turns out to be thinner than the phrase suggests. The Release The Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security released the KONA BLUE documents jointly … Read more
Most declassified files arrive as leaks, pulled loose from an archive years after the fact. This one arrived as a press release. The Department of Defense issued it on July 20, 2022, announcing the creation of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and the researcher John Greenewald republished the bundle at The Black Vault that … Read more
A British officer in the Burmese jungle in 1943 did not need an ambush to lose an entire day of an operation deep behind Japanese lines. According to one unit’s own war diary, a map managed that on its own. Burma had fallen to Japanese forces in March 1942, and British troops retreated roughly 1,000 … Read more
Two documents, one classroom folder Two documents sit together in a folder built for a classroom, and between them lies most of what anyone can actually prove about the three days before the Belfast Agreement was signed. One is a piece of live television. The other is a civil servant’s account of the same stretch, … Read more
Wax that shouldn’t have lasted A disc of resin and beeswax, pressed with a royal design, is still attached to its parchment after more than three centuries, not something archivists expect to find intact. It survives on a letter patent held at The National Archives in Kew under the catalogue reference C 106/153, filed within … Read more
