11Manned Orbiting Laboratory
The Manned Orbiting Laboratory was a United States Air Force project back during the Cold War. Its stated goal was to test the effectiveness of space-based reconnaissance. Its hidden agenda was to test the applications of an orbital weapons station. It would have also been used for global surveillance, including Americans. Luckily it was canceled to fund the Vietnam War.
12Business Plot of 1933
The wealthiest businessmen of America, like the names you see on banks and buildings in America today, allegedly formed a plot to overthrow President FDR and install a military leader in his place. Their choice was a U.S. Marine General named Smedley Butler, as he was a decorated leader of the highest rank. Butler, a loyal patriot, played along until they were seriously about to attempt to collapse the U.S. economy by holding the financial stability of the country hostage. He rolled on them and testified to Congress about the planned coup. No one was prosecuted.
13Ultra
One of the world’s best-kept secret is hiding the fact that the Allies broke the Enigma cipher, later, the Japanese “Purple” cipher, the German Lorenz cipher, and the Italian C-38 cipher. Allies had blown every code the Axis used out of the water, thanks to the work of the Polish Cipher Bureau, and the Bletchley Park mathematicians including Alan Turing, and the American Signal Intelligence Service. The collective intelligence from all these broken codes was called Ultra. But they couldn't let the axis know that their codes were broken. What do you do when your code gets broken? You make a new, harder one. The allies couldn't let that happen.
So they basically lied to their own men. If they wanted to take out an Axis supply ship after finding it through Ultra, they had a spy plane fly over where they knew the ship would be, then they sunk it. They also had to hide the broken codes from their own soldiers, lest they revealed it under careless talk. One of the few times they were forced to sink ships immediately, they covered it by sending a message in a code they knew the Germans had broken, to a spy in Naples, congratulating him of his success. The spy didn't exist, but the Germans intercepted the message and assumed everything was still good with Enigma.
They didn’t even reveal Ultra after the war. They saw to it that the Enigma machines were sold to potential enemies in the Third World, who continued to use the broken codes for years. Ultra wasn't revealed in its full extent until 1974, 29 years after the war. Never has a secret of such massive importance been so well kept for so long.
14Death of TELSTAR
USA was responsible for the death of TELSTAR, the world’s first commercial satellite. Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States in 1962 and that blast created an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that killed TELSTAR. TELSTAR was placed in orbit a day after the test. The EMP effect of the detonation energized the Earth’s magnetic field long enough to cause the satellite to die on orbit. US government didn’t tell AT&T what had happened until around 2005 or so.
15CIA
In the early ‘80s, the CIA helped facilitate the widespread sale of cocaine in poor Los Angeles neighborhoods to help finance the covert war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Gary Webb, the reporter from the San Jose Mercury News who first broke the story of CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, was found dead with “two gunshot wounds to the head.” His death, in 2004, was ruled a suicide.
16Machine Identification Code
Machine Identification Code is a series of secret dots that certain printers leave on every piece of paper they print, giving clues to the originator and identification of the device that printed it. It was developed in the 1980s by Canon and Xerox but wasn't discovered until 2004.
17Armstrong’s Secret
It is unknown what Neil Armstrong took with him to the moon personally and the record of his personal property kit was never found. Armstrong made an unscripted visit to a crater and it is speculated he left his late daughter's bracelet there.
