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Military & War

Classified operations, declassified secrets, and the strange history of armed conflict that never made the textbooks.

Operation Paperclip: How the United States Recruited Over 1,600 Nazi Scientists After the War

At the end of the Second World War, American intelligence agencies launched a covert programme to recruit German scientists — including those with documented war crimes — before the Soviet Union could get to them. The programme shaped the space race.

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MILITARY & WAR

The Stargate Project: The CIA Spent 20 Years Investigating Psychic Spies. The Declassified Record Is Stranger Than You'd Expect.

From 1972 to 1995, the US government funded research into remote viewing — the claimed ability to perceive distant locations using only the mind. The programme produced results that its own evaluators couldn't fully explain.

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MILITARY & WAR

The Soviet Woodpecker: The Cold War Signal That Jammed the World's Radios for a Decade

From 1976 to 1989, a mysterious repetitive signal interrupted radio communications worldwide. It was nicknamed the Woodpecker. Its source — a massive over-the-horizon radar system near Chernobyl — was one of the Cold War's worst-kept secrets.

7 min readRead

MILITARY & WAR

MKUltra: What the Declassified Record Actually Shows

The CIA's mind control programme is often treated as conspiracy theory. The declassified documents are considerably stranger than the conspiracy theories.

9 min readRead

MILITARY & WAR

Acoustic Kitty: The CIA Spent $20 Million Turning a Cat Into a Spy

In the 1960s, the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology surgically implanted a listening device into a live cat and attempted to deploy it against the Soviet embassy. The declassified account is extraordinary.

6 min readRead

Military & War

The Hessdalen Lights Have Been Glowing for 40 Years. Science Still Has No Answer.

The Cursed Productions: Seven Horror Films Whose Sets Were Plagued by Genuine Tragedy

Folk Horror's Second Coming: Why Ancient Dread Is the Most Relevant Genre of the Moment

Scotland's Most Genuinely Unsettling Locations — And What the Evidence Actually Says

Thin Places: The Ancient Idea That Some Locations Are Closer to the Other Side

The Fringe Desk Halloween Watchlist: Seven Films That Take the Darkness Seriously

The Pentagon's UAP Office Has Now Filed Over 800 Reports. The Explanations Are Getting Stranger.

James Webb Is Finding Galaxies That Shouldn't Exist. Cosmologists Are Quietly Alarmed.

The Antikythera Mechanism Is 2,000 Years Old. We're Still Working Out What It Could Do.

The Easter Island Statues Walked. The Evidence Has Been There the Whole Time.

The Tartaria Tablets: Did a Balkan Culture Invent Writing 1,000 Years Before Sumer?

Göbekli Tepe Is 12,000 Years Old and We Still Don't Know What It Was For

The Ness of Brodgar: The Neolithic Complex That Is Rewriting Scottish Prehistory

Operation Paperclip: How the United States Recruited Over 1,600 Nazi Scientists After the War

The Stargate Project: The CIA Spent 20 Years Investigating Psychic Spies. The Declassified Record Is Stranger Than You'd Expect.

The Soviet Woodpecker: The Cold War Signal That Jammed the World's Radios for a Decade

MKUltra: What the Declassified Record Actually Shows

Acoustic Kitty: The CIA Spent $20 Million Turning a Cat Into a Spy

Voyager 1 Went Silent for Five Months in 2023. NASA Wasn't Sure It Was Coming Back.

NASA Crashed a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid on Purpose. It Worked Better Than Anyone Expected.

Betelgeuse Dimmed So Dramatically in 2019 That Astronomers Thought It Might Be About to Explode

The Wow! Signal: The Most Compelling Evidence for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Ever Recorded — and It Lasted 72 Seconds