What was said · vs · what the documents showed
A searchable, self-contained archive of 181 verified cases where an official account — from a government, agency, or corporation — was later contradicted by evidence: declassified files, court verdicts, inspector-general reports, leaked documents, whistleblower testimony, or the institution's own admission.
Live site: (https://conceptcollisionapp.github.io/The-Record/)
No server. No tracking. No dependencies. One HTML file.
Real cover-ups and invented ones get talked about in the same breath, and that helps no one. The difference between them is the trail: genuinely suppressed truths crack along verifiable seams — a declassification, a court discovery file, a congressional hearing, a surviving record. Fabricated stories get vaguer the closer you look.
This archive holds only cases with a trail you can pull. Every entry names what was said at the time, what the record later showed, how it surfaced, and the source. If a case couldn't be verified against a primary source or major investigation, it didn't go in — no matter how popular the story.
Every case is graded by how far its evidence actually goes:
| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| I — On the record | Admitted, declassified, or decided in court. Settled. |
| II — Documented but contested | Strong documentary evidence; the official side disputes scope or framing (e.g. settlements without admission, split science). |
| III — Partial / unresolved | The cover story shifted or a program was later admitted, but the full popular claim remains unproven. |
The tiers are the honesty mechanism. A $21B settlement without an admission of wrongdoing is not the same as a guilty plea, and the archive refuses to flatten that difference. Heavily redacted releases count as evidence — a document the government releases but blacks out is itself confirmation the program existed — but rumors without paper do not.
181 cases across six categories: War & Intelligence · Corporate · Surveillance · Medical & Human Experiments · Civil Liberties · Nuclear — from Tulsa (hidden 80 years) and Project Iceworm to Operation Popeye, the Church Rock uranium spill, HTLINGUAL, and DBCP. Famous cases sit beside ones almost nobody has heard of; the obscure ones are the point.
Features: full-text search, filter by tier / category / decade, sort by evidence tier, longest cover-up, most recently revealed, or year.
Start with the source line on any entry, then pull the trail at the archives most entries trace to:
- National Security Archive — nsarchive.gwu.edu
- CIA FOIA Reading Room (incl. the "Family Jewels") — cia.gov/readingroom
- FBI Vault — vault.fbi.gov
- GovInfo (congressional reports) — govinfo.gov
- DOE OpenNet — osti.gov/opennet
- Government Attic — governmentattic.org
Found an error, or a case that clears the bar? Open an issue with the claim, what the record shows, and the named trail (document, ruling, or investigation). The house rule is absolute: name the trail, or it doesn't go in. Corrections that make an entry more precise — or that honestly demote a case to a lower tier — are as welcome as new cases.
The compilation, entry text, and site are released under CC BY 4.0 — use it, share it, fork it, teach with it, with attribution. The underlying historical documents belong to everyone already.