What you are looking at above is the CIA’s own language about a classified object that they simply call the “box.” The document (via the CIA FOIA portal, link below) is dated January 15, 1959; it is marked SECRET; it was held for twenty-five years before re-review; and it reads like something the agency never expected the public to see. I have posted a long sequence of primary sources over the past weeks; maybe this is my last one here on Reddit; but this particular doc appears to be as revealing as any of them because it uses the government’s own words to choke itself. The memo begins quietly; “Point Mugu was told that we were through testing at their location”; the author thanks the Navy for their cooperation; and then, with zero dramatic setup, the document wanders straight into a problem that sounds like something out of a noir mystery courtroom transcript. Captain Murphy and Major Githen asked whether “the results of the test and the contents of the box could be made known in some part at least to personnel at Camp Mugu.” 🤔😳For context, keep in mind these are the senior Naval officers, at the hosting base itself, asking whether the people based at Mugu involved with the project are allowed to know (1) what was just tested on their own range and (2) “the contents of the box.” The consultant writing this memo claims he “encouraged them to believe that it would probably be possible,” but then immediately proposes an alternative to this apparently unacceptable option. Since the contractor has material on the “box” that exceeds “secret,” he suggests writing “a sterilized booklet at not greater than secret level” about the box; the tests; and its “technical factors.” Only then, he says, can an “addendum to the booklet” be produced where the actual test results are written. Both pieces can then be classified at a level “not beyond the ordinary secret level.” In plain English; the contractor will write a cleaned-up version; the real details will go into an addendum; the classification is deliberately lowered; and the base that hosted the test will never see the true version. To reiterate, this is not speculation; these are the CIA’s words, not mine. Then comes the most revealing paragraph in the entire document; a paragraph the skeptics will pretend not to see; a paragraph that spells out why they intend to create this two-tiered reporting structure. The memo says; in coldly rational, bureaucratic language: “This should be done because: A. We have data and a box that could be helpful to all U. S. military interests. We should not deny the U. S. military the benefits of our results. B. It would serve to maintain our relationship with Mugu.” If this were “just routine weapons testing,” then why are they talking about “maintaining the relationship” with the very range that hosted the test? Why is the author worried about this unidentified vague harm that they apparently believe would come with their revealing the box’s true contents? Why do we see phrases like “sterilized booklet,” and “ordinary secret level,” and this inexplicable insistence by CIA here that their Naval hosts at Point Mugu should receive only a limited; sanitized version of the truth? The last section is worse; and it becomes impossible to pretend this is standard. After explaining that “master reels of data still exist at Mugu,” the author asks what to do with them; then asks what to do with the data he personally holds; and then writes the sentence that no amount of debunking can spin away: “Shall I send them to you or destroy them.” 😳😲🤦‍♂️ If have spent any time reading 1950s weapons development files; you know how absurd it is to pretend that this is normal. There is no weapons program where a consultant casually asks whether he should destroy the master reels of test data. There is no program where the local personnel are protected from the real nature of the object tested on their own range with a “sterilized booklet.” And there is no program where destruction of data is discussed in the same paragraph as “maintaining our relationship with Mugu.” Before anyone insists this is nothing special; remember the documents that precede this in the historical timeline. In August 1945; three separate Forrestal documents lay out the creation of a “Special Weapons Center” at Point Mugu itself; stating that the Navy had “already acquired a very large amount of information” from Europe on which “practical development should be started here.” The continuity is striking; the location is the same; the secrecy practices are the same; the bureaucratic evasiveness is the same; and the idea of a sensitive foreign-origin object being tested at that site is no longer hypothetical when you read these memos in sequence. Skeptics will no doubt shout and pout and whine and shake their heads like they always do; call this “mundane”; and insist that this is simply “normal classification.” But you cannot say that about a memo that explicitly calls for a falsified “sterilized booklet”; a classification downgrade to “ordinary secret” for public consumption inside the base; the withholding of the true report from the personnel who hosted the test; and the explicit option to destroy the primary data. You either accept the CIA’s own words or you reject them; but you cannot pretend they do not mean exactly what they say. If this ends up being my last major post on Reddit; I think this is the right one to leave you all with; not as a theory; not as a claim; but as the government’s own language about a “box” at Point Mugu that they never intended you to read. submitted by /u/MAJESTICJEHOVAH [link] [comments]