20 of the Most Shocking Secret Government Projects

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20 of the Most Shocking Secret Government Projects

We think of the more secretive offices of intelligence and military as shadowy realms of James Bondian masterminds, but the fact is, most government departments are more Parks and Recreation than Clear and Present Danger. Sure, the stakes are life and death, but if anything, that’s all the more reason to try whatever goofy shit you can think of to see if it works. Besides, no one’s going to find out about it for 50 years, so you might as well get fully weird with it.

Then again, the cover of classification gives many operatives license to commit all kinds of horrific crimes. Yes, our government has totally run psy-ops on its own citizens, drugged them and even killed them. They’ve also tried to train kittens as spies. Truly, the CIA contains multitudes.

Whichever direction they weird out, everything comes to light eventually, so when user Oliver_Urback asked r/Ask Reddit, “What is a declassified document that is so unbelievable it sounds fake?,” Redditors with a lot of time on their hands to comb through the paperwork shined a spotlight on weird-ass history.

mortalcrawad66 2y ago Material FOGBANK Used in nuclear warheads to make them more effective. It was kept so secret that they forgot how to make it.

SexyNeanderthal 2y ago Edited 2y ago The wreckage of the Titanic was found because the Navy was looking for the wreckage of two nuclear subs in the area. They staged the expedition as a private venture to find the Titanic to cover for the fact that they were actually looking for the submarines. They actually ended up finding all three wreckages, although they only reported on the Titanic at the time.

boatyboatwright 2y ago The whole COINTELPRO project is disturbing, but reading about how the FBI literally paid people to murder Fred Hampton is so evil that it's cartoonish

2y ago Operation Northwoods, in which the CIA wanted to do a bunch of false flag terrorism operations against the United States, which would then be used as a justification to invade Cuba. Kennedy rejected it, and by sheer coincidence, was assassinated shortly thereafter.

seventhcatbounce 2y ago In canada the treatment of abducted Indigenous children away from their families and into Residential Schools was so harsh that the term Residential School Syndrome was invented to describe the PTSD suffered by the victims. Aside from the beatings. existential crisis perpetrated against children as young as 5 there was the question of unethical medical studies such as the deliberate starvation of 1000 children to study malnutrition.

Will-Da-Thrill 2y ago Phoenix program. Guantanamo Bay torture techniques were developed by the CIA Vietnam phoenix program. The Guantanamo guards didn't come up with the enhanced interrogation by themselves. They were taught. Before Guantanamo Bay the torture techniques were used in Latin America. The picture of the black hooded man (la capuchi) standing on a box in crucifix style with dangling wires was used in Latin America known as La Cama after a captured Chilean women.

2y ago CIA: Project Dark Gene Americans were desperate to fly over the Soviet Union and test their air defences-which they had not done since Gary Powers was shot down.. as well as gather signals information under a complementary program, Project Ibex to allow jamming techniques to be developed. The idea is that an American pilot would be training an Iranian pilot (this was before the Iranian Revolution) in an F-4 Phantom or F-5 Tiger... and they would get lost and accidentally enter Soviet airspace. It went about as well as you can imagine.. with half a dozen Iranian

Nulovka 2y ago Operation Unthinkable At the end of WWII, the British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff in May 1945 submitted to Prime Minister Winson Churchill a plan where the goal was to invade the Soviet Union, using ex-German troops and German industrial capacity if needed for the goal as stated: The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.

ramriot 2y ago Operation Foxley, The allies proposed a plot to assassinate Hitler during he morning constitutional walk at the Berghof. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley Although meticulously planned & researched with cooperation from a captured German soldier who served as a guard at this location, to involve a two man sniper team with ingress & egress routes, It was never carried forward. Supposedly it was decided that by 1944 the removal of Hitler would actually make things worse for the allies because he would likely be replaced with a more competent commander.

Reach268 2y ago Operation Mincemeat.. A dead British officer washes ashore Spain during WW2, with a briefcase of top secret documents handcuffed to his wrist. Spain is Neutral but as a fasist nation, supports Germany tacitly, and allows them to photograph the documents before returning them to the British, so they continue to remain Neutral. The documents detail an allied plan to launch a Naval invasion of Greece, and attack into Germany from the soft underbelly that is the Balkans and Hungary. The Germans eat the bait, and the Axis move forces to defend against this front in Greece. However

superweevil 2y ago Project A119 was a top secret study by the US government to predict the effects of detonating a nuclear warhead on the moon, big enough to be visible from Earth. They wanted to do this because they thought the Soviets would be doing something similar for the anniversary of the October revolution. It didn't end up going ahead because the study (unsurprisingly) concluded that this was a terrible fucking idea. 2 funny things about this 1. The Soviets were indeed doing a similar study that came to the same conclusion 2. The reason it was declassified is

sam6450 2y ago Project Thor would use kinetic bombardment dropping telephone pole sized tungsten rods from orbit with a similar impact force to a nuclear bomb

T-MinusGiraffe 2y ago Edited 2y ago The Ghost Army was a US tank brigade in WWII. Except instead of actual tanks and soldiers, it was made up of inflatable tanks and art school students. They cruised around pretending to be an actual brigade to decieve the Axis forces. It worked. Their activities remained classified for 50 years. There's a cool documentary about it if you want to learn more and see what it looked like.

RPGRuby 2y ago The CIA faked vampire attacks in the Philippines during the Cold War and won because of this.

kingbane2 2y ago there's an audio recording of nixon talking to a guy from kaiser permenente about how they would dismantle the healthcare system. they even say something along the lines of no this isn't about providing more care, it's about providing less. honestly a lot of the nixon audio recordings are fucked up. like how the entire war on drugs was just to target hippies and black people, both of whom are nixon's political enemies cause they don't vote for him.

maurymarkowitz 2y ago The Sigma war game series: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_war_games Classified war games of possible US involvement in Vietnam. Run several times over the early 1960s. The US lost almost every time. The best case scenario was where the war dragged on for several years until public opinion in the US forced them to leave. So basically the gov was entirely aware they would likely lose a war in Vietnam but went in anyway. They managed to pull off the best case scenario for themselves and it only cost the Vietnamese a couple million dead.

telarium 2y ago Operation Midnight Climax and George Hunter White. If I remember correctly, the basics were that the CIA in the 1950's wanted to research the possibility of using LSD for mind control. Consultant George Hunter White was given the task, so he would host dinner parties in his New York apartment and dose pitchers of martinis with LSD without the knowledge of his guests to see what would happen. One party goer later stumbled into a hospital, not knowing what was happening to her and understandably thought she had gone insane, attempting to have herself committed. So things

FriendlyLawnmower 2y ago Edited 2y ago The CIAs attempt to train cat spies. They tried to train cats to be spies by implanting recording equipment in their bodies and letting them loose near soviet buildings. The cats could accurately travel short distances to targets but the training didn't stick well enough for the cats to meet the CIAs eavesdropping needs. Program got shutdown after a few millions of dollars worth of investment.

2y ago The Gay Bomb The gay bomb and halitosis bomb are formal names for two non-lethal psychochemical weapons that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other. In 1994 the Wright Laboratory in Ohio, a predecessor to today's United States Air Force Research Laboratory, produced a three-page proposal on a variety of possible nonlethal chemical weapons, which was later obtained by the Sunshine Project through a Freedom of Information Act request

NicksAunt 2y ago Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid- flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20-40-mile radius (32-64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood

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