The idea of “secret projects” such as MKUltra were once considered complete fiction and nothing but conspiracy theories. As were secret projects to influence the weather or the use of remote viewers by such intelligence agencies as the CIA. However, we now know that these efforts existed, at least on an initial research and experimental level.

If these top secret and once-denied projects were more factual than authorities would have originally had us believe, then what should we make of some of the other, albeit bizarre, allegations of top secret projects and programs that operate in the shadows of governments, funded by the “black budget?” Here are ten such programs. Some are more believable than others, no doubt, but all are intriguing to the max.

10 Project Mannequin

According to several whistle-blowers, Project Mannequin is a joint operation involving the NSA and the British intelligence agencies.^[1] Although a variety of activities and projects operate under the Mannequin name, the main purpose is to train and develop units of “super soldiers.” Some of these are used as part of UFO retrieval and security lockdown operations. Others, though, are called “sleepers” and are claimed to be mind-controlled and activated remotely to carry out deadly assassination missions, of which they will not be aware.

Not crazy enough for you? Okay, most of these super soldiers become members of these programs via kidnappings or through years of grooming via military and high-status families, who apparently submit their children to such programs for rewards unknown.

The main hub of the operation is said to be in a top secret facility 60 meters (200 ft) underground in Berkshire in Southern England. In addition to the training sessions in developing super soldiers and mind-controlled assassins (if, of course, we subscribe to these apparent leaks of information, which most don’t) there are also remote viewing sessions. These occur for a variety of purposes, not least to gain political and military advantages. Some whistle-blowers even claim “astral attacks” take place from this facility under the Project Mannequin name.

Perhaps one of the most high-profile people to make claims of involvement in Project Mannequin was Max Spiers, who died in the most suspicious of circumstances and whose death—shortly after making such claims—remains unsolved to any satisfactory degree still today. Make of that what you will.

9 Project Bluebird/Artichoke

In contrast to the outlandish claims about Project Mannequin, our next entry is all too real. Most of us, even those who don’t involve themselves with “conspiracies” and the like, are aware of such programs as MKUltra, even if only by name. The forerunner to this very real project went first under the name Project Bluebird, and then, very likely for security reasons and for a lack of a clear paper trail, under the moniker of Project Artichoke.^[2] Perhaps this activity is indicative of the nature of the “black budget projects” that would seemingly become standard operating procedure for many intelligence agencies as the 20th century progressed.

These programs began around 1950, in the aftermath of World War II and, incidentally or not, Operation Paperclip. (The Nazis were known to have carried out extensive experiments with mind control.) While there is no direct evidence to link him to the programs, it is generally accepted by many researchers that the work of Jose Delgado, who was looking to replace the brutal nature of lobotomies with electrical stimulation of the brain, perhaps unintentionally provided intelligence agencies with the insight they required to use such knowledge to their own ends.

8 Project Dreamscan

While the objectives of Project Dreamscan have little documentation to back up the whistle-blower-type claims, the methods utilized within the program very much do. It is widely known, for example, that the CIA experimented relatively extensively with remote viewing, particularly during the Cold War (mainly due to intelligence that their Soviet counterparts were doing so).

According to the claims of some, the objective of Project Dreamscan was to have remote viewers leave their bodies and enter a target’s mind in a dream state.^[3] These missions were thought to have been attempts to influence the thought processes of the targets. Interestingly, some researchers suggest that such remote viewers often accompany high-ranking officials to meetings with the UN in order to use their powers on other countries’ officials for similar reasons. Rumors even exist that Uri Geller was employed in such a way.

Furthermore, a purported CIA document declassified in 2017 suggests that similar missions would “send” remote viewers not only to other planets but to different times, both in the future and the past. While most dismiss this aspect entirely, it is an interesting notion that time travel may be something achieved on an astral plane as opposed to a physical one.

7 Project Stargate

As we mentioned above, many of these secret programs were a product of the Cold War and the intelligence obtained by both US and Soviet agencies. In reality, it is tempting to say that each country likely fed the other a good helping of purposeful disinformation. However, in the paranoid nature of the times, neither side could afford to ignore possible intel, no matter how absurd. It is easy to see, then, where the murkiness of such projects comes from.

One of these operations was Project Stargate, which, according to what little information is available on it, was a “psychotronic research” program.^[4] Furthermore, beginning in the late 1970s, established and proven remote viewers would “teach” other to hone their skills—all at the expense of the United States government, of course. This was, according to some, the new “psychic warfare” that was taking place in full view of an unknowing and unsuspecting public.

There are even more bizarre reports from some researchers that suggest these talented remote viewers would, on occasion, be “loaned out” to friendly countries for use in their own private matters. Like many such programs, whatever the truth of their operations, Project Stargate would suddenly cease operating, at least under that name, in the 1990s.

6 Project Rainbow

Perhaps another seemingly outlandish “secret” operation was Project Rainbow, whose roots allegedly reside in such equally insane projects as the Philadelphia Experiment, which, of course, most people insist are mere fantasy at best. It also has more direct connections to another supersecret program in the Phoenix Time Travel Project, which some researchers believe is essentially the same operation under a different name.^[5]

While much of the project—if we accept, for a moment, the authenticity of the claims—revolved around the attempted creation of time tunnels and wormholes, the other part of the Project Rainbow umbrella would look at weather control. This, particularly in recent years, is something that is increasingly being dragged from the conspiracy tray to the fact tray.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing connections to other conspiracies are the claims that it was from these weather and space-time experiments that the seeds of the fully working mind control devices came from. It is another interesting layer to such conspiracies that sees a now all-but-proven “conspiracy theory” such as weather control coupled with the much more unpalatable prospect of controlling the minds of unsuspecting members of the public.

5 Operation Sleeping Beauty

Project Rainbow was not the only operation to involve experiments more akin to mind control. Rainbow’s weather control research allegedly also reportedly resulted in the secret program known as Operation Sleeping Beauty.

Whether these experiments ever made it off the drawing board is unknown, although as you might imagine, some conspiracy theorists insist they did. And what’s more, they contend that the experiments are likely still going on today.

The drive behind these conspiracy theories is the notion that mind-altering electromagnetic weaponry could be used to the US military’s advantage.^[6] They would, through such advanced and experimental technology, be able to achieve battlefield superiority. Their enemies would be mentally disorientated to the point of surrender.

Another interesting aspect of this approach was that the soldiers affected would not have the slightest idea of what was happening to them. This confusion alone would inspire substantial fear. In short, such a secret, advanced weapon is not at all beyond the realms of imagination or possibility.

4 The Mindwreaker Project

A very similar advanced battlefield weapon program would be Project Mindwreaker (sometimes called “Mindwrecker”) an effort to create a state of artificial paralysis through “mentally induced” weapons.^[7]

According to the conspiracies (and, once again, we should note that there is no absolute solid evidence to back these outlandish claims up), the project came to light through another unintended observation during the weather control experiments of Project Rainbow. Once they realized there was a potential to paralyze subjects through the technology they had created, they looked to weaponize it.

In a conspiracy claim already bordering on lunacy, further accusations suggest that this technology was derived from reverse-engineered alien spacecraft, which only made the conspiracy theory more appealing to some and more unbelievable to others. Perhaps just to add another layer of appeal to the whole affair, Mindwreaker is also claimed to be one of the last secret projects commissioned by the Reagan administration. Of course, who was actually in charge during the Reagan years is perhaps also open to debate and is, in fact, likely the bigger conspiracy.

3 Project Sigma

Maybe the claims behind the apparent Project Sigma are the most intriguing of them all, if only because they offer an admittedly tentative explanation for the alien abduction phenomenon.

The roots of Project Sigma go back to the alleged, and equally controversial, meeting between President Eisenhower and two different alien races. One race was the Greys, whose offer of advanced technology apparently won Eisenhower’s mind against the offer of “green technology” from the other alien race (said by some to be the Nordics). Further rumors suggest that Eisenhower didn’t wish this technology to end up in the hands of the Soviet Union.

So, then, if we buy into the theories that Eisenhower did indeed meet with two alien races, one of which was the Greys, what was the outcome of such a meeting? Well, according to some researchers, themselves relying on whistle-blower testimony, it was Project Sigma. This was essentially an alien-human hybridization program. The reason behind this is said to be that the Greys’ DNA had suffered “extreme degradation” due to exposure to radiation on their home planet. In short, they could no longer reproduce. So, in return for this technology, the Greys were apparently granted “access” to humans for abduction, under the condition the abductees would not recall such abductions and would be returned unharmed.^[8]

It is certainly an interesting notion. Might this be the ultimate reason behind the reports of abductions by Grey aliens since the early 1960s?

2 Project Moon Dust

The official reason for Project Moon Dust was to recover the remains of Soviet satellites that reentered the atmosphere and crashed to Earth. And they didn’t just recover these satellites in the United States but all over the world, in places such as South Africa, Bolivia, and even as far away as the Himalayan Mountains.

However, according to some researchers, most prominently Clifford Stone, a great many of the Moon Dust missions actually recovered crashed UFOs. Many of these craft are thought to have been taken back to the United States to various air bases and research facilities, with a view to reverse-engineering the technology available.^[9] Stone, who also claimed involvement in the missions, would state shortly before his death in 2014, “While we were doing this, we were telling the American public there was nothing to it [UFOs].”

Stone would also state that on most of these missions, the unit thought they were going for a satellite or a Soviet test plane. However, he would also state that on each of these missions, there was also a person assigned at the last minute who “wasn’t an Army official.” It would appear that these mysterious additions to the mission were the only ones in full possession of the actual facts of each incident. The claims, while perhaps requiring a pinch of salt or two, are certainly intriguing.

1 The CHANI Project

Perhaps one of the most intriguing of these alleged secret projects is the CHANI (Channeled Holographic Access Network Interface) Project, which one researcher described as an “orgasmic interaction between science theory and spiritual awareness.”^[10]

A simple way of explaining this apparent project is a moving of remote viewing and the use of psychics into the digital age. Through various computer software programs, the conspiracy says, a digital “channeler” or presence would make contact with spirits and energies from another realm—or, more accurately, with one energy or spirit, who was referred to rather ominously as “the Entity.”

Even more bizarre, the Entity was in contact with humanity on behalf of “the Elders,” the creators and overseers of the universe. This is an interesting notion and one that is found in the legends of many ancient civilizations. Ancient Egypt, for example, had legends of nine creator gods. Perhaps interestingly, it is claimed that similar channeling experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, themselves an offshoot of the MKUltra and remote viewing experiments, made contact with one of these creator gods.

The world’s powers have to be ready for anything. After all, war could break out at any moment, and they have to be ready to fight. It’s very likely that every country in the world has plans ready to invade each and every one of their neighbors, just in case.

But some of those plans aren’t the best-kept secrets. Some of our plots to crush each other have been leaked—and now we know exactly what would happen if, for example, the US and Canada went to war. These plans might seem crazy today, but if things had just gone a little bit differently, any one of them could have been a part of history.

10 War Plan Red: The American Plan To Invade Canada

There was a time when the United States wasn’t totally sure what side it would take in World War II. They were still considering the possibility of taking the opportunity to declare war on Great Britain—and it was going to start with an invasion of Canada.^[1]

If Great Britain attacked the US, they figured, they would position their troops in Canada. The Americans didn’t want to let that happen, so they were going make a preemptive strike. They would attack Canada first.

Their goal was to take Halifax so that the British couldn’t use it as a port. To make it fast, they would bomb the city with poisonous gas. Then they’d move to Niagara Falls and take over the power plants there.

From there, it would be a full-on invasion, with American troops charging through Quebec and Winnipeg and capturing the nickel mines in Western Ontario. Meanwhile, the Navy would move south and take Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Bermuda. Once they had British America, they figured, Great Britain would plead for peace.

Their only worry was that Canada might declare itself neutral and refuse to fight, in which case they planned on not letting them stay peaceful. If the Canadians tried to be pacifists, they would have to give up their ports and some of their land. Otherwise, the US Army would march in.

9 Defense Scheme Number One: The Canadian Plan To Invade the US

It’s a bit crazy that the US had a plan to invade Canada, but it gets weirder. Because Canada had a secret plan to invade the US—and they developed theirs first.

As early as 1921, Canada was already worrying that the Americans might attack. They were ready to strike back, and just like the Americans, they planned on doing so with a preemptive strike. They even sent an officer to travel through the US looking for weak spots they could attack.

Canada didn’t actually expect to conquer the United States. They just wanted to keep the Americans busy long enough for Great Britain to intervene. Their plan was to send troops down the West Coast while a team of Quebec fighters took Albany, and Maritime troops took Maine.

They’d catch the US off guard and then, when the Americans recouped, flee back over the border, leaving scorched earth in their wake. Every bridge, railway, factory, and farm would be burned to a crisp, crippling the US and buying enough time for their allies to move in.

If it happened, the Canadians figured, they’d have a lot of allies. Japan, France, and Mexico would join in and help them destroy the United States—because every one of them, they believed, had had enough of “the modern Yank.”^[2]

8 Operation Dropshot: The American Plan To Nuke The Soviet Union

If history had just gone a little bit differently, the Cold War wouldn’t have been cold at all. It would have been an all-out nuclear apocalypse that would have wiped Russia off the map.

Early on, the US was the only country with access to nuclear weapons, and they had every plan to use them. They developed at least nine separate plans to blow the USSR to Hell and back. One of the most intense ones called for a sudden strike of 300 nuclear bombs on 200 targets in the USSR, followed by a massive land invasion that they expected would be over in no time.^[3]

The US government had even marked the date on their calendar. On January 1, 1957, they were going to unleash their nuclear arsenal on the Soviets.

They only dropped the plan when the USSR tested its first atomic bomb. If it hadn’t been for that, the US would have gone through with it and left Russia a smoldering, radioactive wasteland.

7 Seven Days To The River Rhine: The Soviet Plan To Nuke Half Of Europe

The Soviets had their own plans, of course. They probably had more schemes than we’ll ever know, but one that was written up in 1979 has been leaked—and if they’d gone through with it, it would have sparked World War III.

The plan was based on the idea that NATO was going to launch a nuclear first strike on Poland, which is such a strange notion that some people think it was just penciled in to make the rest of the plot seem more justifiable. Either way, the USSR planned to hit NATO hard.

They were going to launch 7.5 megatons’ worth of atomic weapons at targets in West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.^[4] Then they would send in the troops to seize every part of Europe up to the River Rhine.

They expected some casualties. Prague and Warsaw, they believed, would be destroyed by nuclear strikes, and they were planning on sending the Polish army on a suicide mission. Within seven days, they predicted, more than two million Polish people would die—and a new world war would begin.

6 The Nazi Plan To Invade Japan

The Nazis never believed that their alliance with Japan would last. Theirs was a marriage of convenience, and when the war ended, things would change. “Sooner or later,” Hitler warned his staff, “there will have to be a showdown between the white and the yellow races.”

He believed it wouldn’t happen until the distant future, predicting that there might be 100 years of peace before Japan and the Nazis clashed. Still, they needed to be ready for it.

Himmler was tasked with getting the SS ready to fight. His biggest worry was that the Germans would grow complacent and weak during peace. He planned on keeping his soldiers tough by having them carry on with merciless racial eradication and, when they seemed to be getting weak, posting them to “an ice-cold winter” in Siberia.

The key, though, would be to have a population that could handle it. He would spend the next decade getting the German people to breed like “a botanical garden” to get their population as big as they could.^[5] When the time came, he predicted, Japan would have an army of more than one billion men. Germany would have to be ready to match their numbers.

5 National Redoubt: The Swiss Plan To Stop Being Neutral

The Swiss weren’t totally locked into being peaceful. They flirted with the idea of jumping into the war, and in 1940, they nearly did it.

By then, Switzerland was completely surrounded by Axis armies and had to seriously consider the possibility that this whole “let’s leave Switzerland alone” thing might not last. They were pretty sure the Axis could turn on them at any moment, so they started getting ready.

The Swiss withdrew all of their troops from the borders and moved them into the Alps, where they set up a chain of mountain fortresses and bunkers to prepare for an invasion.^[6] They also ran drills, reenacting the battles that were happening in the countries next door. And they did everything in their power to let the Axis see them doing it, hoping they’d get the message that if they messed with Switzerland, it wouldn’t be easy.

It wasn’t exactly paranoia. The Nazis had a secret plan of their own called Operation Tannenbaum, and it was exactly what the Swiss had predicted. Switzerland, Hitler believed, was a “pimple on the face of Europe.” If the tides of war hadn’t turned against the Axis, the Nazis would have charged right into Switzerland—and the armies in those Alps would have had to put their practice to the test.

4 The Turkish Plan To Invade Syria

Most of the plans in this list are decades old, but that doesn’t mean countries have stopped coming up with ways to invade each other. They just try to keep the new ones secret. Sometimes, though, those secrets leak—like in 2014, when Turkey’s conspiracy to invade Syria was leaked onto YouTube.

In the recording, Turkish ministers can be heard talking about a possible terrorist attack on the tomb of Suleyman Shah, the father of the founder of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than being worried about it, one of the ministers says that a terrorist attack “must be seen as an opportunity for us.” If the terrorists attacked, they felt, they would have an excuse to send more soldiers into Syria and launch an all-out war.

Turkish intelligence chief Hakan Fidan took it even further. If the terrorists didn’t attack, he promised, he’d just send in actors to fake an attack. “I’ll send four men from Syria, if that’s what it takes,” Fidan promised.^[7] “Legitimacy is not a problem. Legitimacy can be manufactured.”

3 The Israeli Plan To Invade Iran

From 2010 to 2012, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak met on at least three separate occasions to discuss plans to invade Iran. And they would’ve gone through with it, too, if Gabi Ashkenazi, the chief of the Israel Defense Forces, hadn’t stopped them.

Three recordings that show Netanyahu and Barak discussing their plans were leaked onto the Internet. They came the closest to going through with it in 2010 but just needed to convince their ministers to support the plan.^[8] Ashkenazi, however, managed to talk them out of it with an impassioned speech about the lives that would be lost.

That didn’t totally stop them, though. In 2012, they ramped up plans again—and this time, it seems that the US Army was going to back them up. They were even running military drills to get ready for a joint invasion of Iran, although, for reasons unknown, they ended up calling the attack off.

2 Project A119: The American Plan To Nuke The Moon

In 1959, the US Army decided that just invading countries on Earth wasn’t ambitious enough. They were going to take it one step further. They were going to nuke the Moon.^[9]

The plan was partly to conduct a science experiment—which, as far as we can tell, must have been on the effects of overfunding a bored military—but they mostly just wanted to freak the Soviets out. They had scientists crunch the numbers to figure out how to make sure the explosion was visible from Earth, convinced that the USSR would crumble in fear if America blew a chunk out of the Moon.

The US didn’t go through with it because someone managed to convince the military that nuking the Moon wasn’t good PR. They came shockingly close to doing it, though. In fact, they even hired Carl Sagan to work on the secret plot to attack the Moon. And if they’d done it, they would’ve nuked the Moon before ever landing on it.

1 War Plan White: The American Plan To Fight Its Own People

During the first half of the 20th century, the United States made plans to invade pretty well every country on Earth—including themselves. It was called War Plan White, and it was the American plan to handle “internal disorder”—or, in other words, to fight its own people.

At the time, union workers around the country were fighting for labor rights, and the US government was worried it was going to build up into a communist revolution. War Plan White was their plan to deal with what they called a “leftist-radical insurrection.”^[10]

The Military Corps of Engineers were to take over every public utility, while the Navy protected military equipment and the Army marched through the people, trying to keep them in order. Meanwhile, a secret police force was going to be set up in Pennsylvania, which would spy on troublemakers to make sure they ready to stop them.

They’d even started working out the legalities of shooting American civilians, when it would be justifiable, and how far they could go. And as time went on, they reworked it for a new era. The most recent plan that has been leaked was for the US military to fight an uprising of black people wanting civil rights.

Throughout US history, the working class has fought for better wages and working conditions. These struggles often became violent, and it is important to remember the men and women who died to bring us the weekend, the eight-hour workday, the end of child labor, job safety, and so on.

Today, we have very sanitized images of striking workers—folks walking in circles with picket signs while chanting catchy slogans about unfair labor practices. Perhaps after a few days of interrupted business, workers and their bosses will sit down and work out some compromises.

For most of American history, going on strike meant something far more radical. It was an indictment not only of individual work sites but also of a social order in which few were rich and most were desperately poor. Going on strike could—and often did—mean being beaten by strikebreakers, being shot at by National Guardsmen, or even having bombs dropped on you from biplanes.

10 The Great Railroad Strike

On July 14, 1877, railway workers in Martinsburg, Virginia, went on strike to protest the third pay cut within a year. Workers disrupted rail operations and prevented all train traffic. The strike soon spread to Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri. It was the first national strike in US history.

Within six days, first blood was drawn when Maryland National Guard troops confronted striking workers in Baltimore and opened fire on them—killing 11 and wounding 40.^[1] Over the following two days, Pennsylvania National Guard troops killed 40 striking workers in Pittsburgh, firing upon crowds and bayoneting the strikers. At the same time, federal troops killed as many as 18 striking workers on the streets of St. Louis.

This violence proliferated. As many as 44 strikers were killed in Pennsylvania, 30 in Chicago, and eight in New York. By the end of the strike, more than 100 workers had been killed by cops, National Guard troops, and federal soldiers.

In the aftermath of the widespread violence and destruction, both workers and state governments took the events as a sign of a great struggle to come. State governments began growing their National Guard regiments, while labor unions ramped up recruitment and organizing efforts. It would be nearly a century before the bloody contest would come to an end.

9 Bay View Massacre

On May 1, 1886, over 200,000 working-class men and women kicked off a nationwide campaign to win a nationally recognized and enforced eight-hour workday. In Milwaukee, such efforts led to the mobilization of 12,000 workers.

By May 3, the striking workers had managed to shut down every factory in Milwaukee with the exception of the North Chicago Railroad Rolling Mills Steel Foundry in Bay View. Fifteen hundred strikers mobilized to march upon the mills and encourage the workers to join the strike.^[2]

Meanwhile, Milwaukee business owners were growing understandably anxious. Since day one of the strike, they had been pressuring Wisconsin Governor Jeremiah Rusk to call in National Guard troops to end the strike. For three days, Rusk resisted the employers’ demands. However, by the morning of May 4, several companies of the local Guardsmen had arrived at the mill, 250 men in total.

On May 4, the situation grew tense as striking workers hurled rocks and insults at the National Guardsmen. In response, the soldiers fired rounds above the workers’ heads. By this point, the pressure on Rusk had reached a breaking point. That night, he ordered Captain Treaumer, who commanded the National Guard companies, to shoot at any striking worker who attempted to enter the mill.

On May 5, the striking workers again assembled, chanting for an eight-hour workday. They were approaching the line of National Guardsmen when Treaumer gave the order to begin firing upon the crowd of workers. The volley killed 15, including a retired bystander and a 13-year-old schoolboy who had excitedly joined the crowd.

The violence had the intended effect of breaking the strike. As a result, it would be many years before the common implementation of the eight-hour day.

8 Morewood Massacre

On February 2, 1891, more than 10,000 coke oven operators and miners halted all work in the expansive coke fields of Morewood, Pennsylvania. Organized by the United Mine Workers union, the workers demanded better wages and an eight-hour day.

Negotiations between the striking workers and US industrialist Henry Clay Frick continued through the rest of February and into March. The strike nearly ended on March 26 when talks neared a wage agreement. The negotiations did not pan out.

On March 30, over 1,000 striking workers damaged company property, destroying coke ovens and damaging railway lines in Morewood. In response, Pennsylvania Governor Robert E. Pattison ordered in local National Guard troops.

As striking workers began mobilizing again on April 2, the troops opened fire on the unarmed workers. Seven men were killed. When this did not stop the strikes, Frick called upon 100 strikebreakers to regularly attack and harass the strikers. By May, the strike broke and the beaten, bloodied workers returned to the coke mines and furnaces.^[3]

Three years later, conditions had not improved. Matthew J. Welsh, a worker in the coke fields, sent the following letter to the Pittsburgh Times, which was published on April 14, 1894:

The workingmen, and especially the Hungarians, of the coke region are represented as an ignorant class of men. Certainly we are to a certain extent or we would not be toiling our lives out with work that former day slaves never dreamed of on a coke yard or in the mines. Ignorant as we are, we know that it is time to quit work and die of starvation rather than be trying to work and starving at the same time.

7 Pullman Strike

On May 11, 1894, the recently formed American Railway Union went on strike against the Pullman Company in Chicago, Illinois. The workers sought union recognition, a key step in securing fair wages and working hours. Like the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, railroad workers across the country went on strike, partly in solidarity, partly to win an improvement of their own working conditions.

At its zenith, more than 250,000 workers were striking across 27 states, bringing railroad traffic in much of the nation to a grinding halt and disrupting every major industry. This put enormous pressure on local, state, and even the federal government to end the strike swiftly—and brutally, if needed.

In June, President Grover Cleveland mobilized a massive force of thousands of US Marshals as well as 12,000 US Army troops. These marshals and soldiers deployed across Nebraska, Iowa, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, and Illinois.

Troop responses to the striking workers varied, narrowly avoiding violent clashes in some regions such as Sacramento while killing more than a dozen strikers in Chicago, the heart of the strike. In total, more than 30 workers were gunned down by state and federal troops. Many more were wounded.^[4]

6 Lattimer Massacre

In August 1897, the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company laid off coal miners from the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Those who remained faced wage cuts, increased rent for living on company properties, and cost cutting measures that meant longer hours and increasingly dangerous working conditions.

Such conditions gave rise to a strike. The workforce consisted largely of immigrant workers, primarily of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and German origin. By September, as many as 10,000 workers were on strike. Initially, they were successful in negotiating higher wages. But the company broke the promise, prompting further outrage among the strikers.

By this point, the mine owners, growing increasingly frustrated at the loss of revenue and their inability to dupe workers back into the mines, called upon local Sheriff James L. Martin to disperse the strike.

Initially hesitant, Sheriff Martin organized a posse on September 10 to confront some 300–400 (mostly Slavic and German) unarmed strikers in Lattimer who were on their way to support the unionizing efforts of other local coal miners.

When the sheriff’s demands to disperse were repeatedly ignored, one of his men shouted, “Shoot the sons of bitches.” The posse opened fire on the peaceful, unarmed crowd. Nineteen men were killed, and many were shot in the back.^[5]

The nation immediately understood that this massacre was different. In previous strikebreaking efforts, law enforcement could at least attempt to justify their violence by pointing to the aggression and unarmed violence of striking workers. However, in Lattimer, the strikers were simply walking by. A monument to the slain workers in Lattimer reads:

It was not a battle because they were not aggressive, nor were they defensive because they had no weapons of any kind and were simply shot down like so many worthless objects, each of the licensed life-takers trying to outdo the others in the butchery.

5 Chicago Teamsters’ Strike

In April 1905, workers at the Montgomery Ward department store went on strike in Chicago, Illinois. Their chief complaint was that the owner subcontracted to nonunion workers. This minor labor dispute rapidly grew when the Teamsters Union launched strikes in solidarity with the department store workers.^[6]

The Teamsters had a strong Chicago membership. About 30,000 out of its 45,000 total members were in the Windy City. Soon, nearly every major employer in the metropolitan area of Chicago was affected.

In response, the Employers’ Association of Chicago raised millions of dollars (adjusted for inflation) to hire a massive force of strikebreakers. These men received special protections from the courts, allowing them great leniency in dishing out violence.

The Teamsters and other union strikers often clashed with the strikebreakers. By the time the strike ended in August, more than 20 striking workers had been killed in clashes with strikebreakers (none of whom were killed). More than 400 workers were also injured.

4 Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strike

On April 18, 1912, West Virginia coal miners at Cabin Creek, under the banner of the United Mine Workers, went on strike. Among their demands were union recognition, better wages, and improved working conditions. Shortly afterward, nearby miners at Paint Creek joined in.

Tensions escalated when the mine owners hired the infamous Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency to end the strike.^[7] Little more than a gang of thugs, the strikebreakers harassed the striking miners for months, often sabotaging their food, beating them, and even shooting at them from afar. By September, after months of standoff, thousands of coal miners from neighboring regions of West Virginia were moving to join the existing strikers.

While skirmishes were frequent, progress toward any resolution was not. Months passed. Frustrated by the impasse and the enormous loss of revenue, mine owners encouraged local law enforcement to increase their violence against the striking workers.

In February 1913, 10 months into the standoff, Kanawha County Sheriff Bonner Hill and a group of detectives resorted to truly desperate and brutal measures of repression. They brought in a heavily armored, weaponized train and assaulted the strikers’ camp with high-powered rifles and machine guns, deliberately targeting the homes of strike leaders.

The vulgar display of violence demoralized the strikers. But they continued to resist for another five months until the strike was completely broken in July 1913. Over the course of the 15-month strike, more than 50 workers were killed and many more were wounded. It is also estimated that many died from starvation, disease, and related causes due to the conditions of the strikers’ camp.

3 Ludlow Massacre

In September 1913, approximately 12,000 coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado, went on strike to protest low wages and unsafe working conditions. Colorado was the deadliest state for coal miners, with a death rate about twice the national average.

The strike had been organized with the help of the United Mine Workers. Along with their other demands, the workers sought union recognition because unionized mines had 40 percent fewer workplace deaths.

Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which owned and operated the coal mines, began evicting striking workers and their families from the company towns in which they lived. The workers moved with their families into a nearby tent colony that they had set up in anticipation of such an event.

The mine owners hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency—little more than a private gang of armed thugs—to break the strike. For months, the “detectives” harassed the strikers in their camp. At night, the thugs would shine floodlights into the camp, sometimes firing randomly at tents and occasionally maiming and even killing workers.^[8]

In October 1913, after a bloody month of violence, Colorado Governor Elias M. Ammons ordered the National Guard to move into the area. The miners had initially hoped that the arrival of the militiamen would bring peace and end the violent attacks they endured daily at the hands of the strikebreakers.

This proved little more than wishful thinking as the sympathies of the soldiers became clear. They palled around with the strikebreakers, and the two forces became nearly indistinguishable.

Six months passed. Progress toward any resolution was nonexistent. Unable to tolerate the strikers’ colony any longer, the mine owners urged the strikebreakers and militiamen to take drastic measures. So on the morning of April 20, 1914, as 1,000 men, women, and children were getting ready for their day, machine gun fire ripped through the camp.

The volley left 13 immediately dead. The leader of the strike was lured out of the camp to “negotiate a truce,” but he was executed instead by National Guard troops. That evening, the militiamen and strikebreakers moved into the camp, setting fire to it.

By the following day, the camp was mostly abandoned. One worker picking his way through the camp uncovered the burned corpses of two women and 11 children. The massacre sparked national outrage.

In Denver, the United Mine Workers prepared for war. Hundreds of armed strikers from nearby striker colonies marched to the Ludlow region. Thus began the Colorado Coalfield Wars, a brutal period of widespread armed conflict between workers and National Guard troops in the state.

Although the period of intense conflict ended by the beginning of May, the strike would continue until December. It ended in defeat for the workers. By the end of the conflict, nearly 200 people had died.

2 The Battle Of Blair Mountain

In May 1920, agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency went to Logan County, West Virginia, at the behest of local mine owner-operators to prevent efforts by miners to form a union. Upon arrival, the agents began evicting the families of miners suspected of unionization efforts.

As the Baldwin-Felts men worked their way through the town of Matewan, locals began to take notice, along with the mayor and Police Chief Sid Hatfield. Numerous armed miners had also arrived. The ensuing confrontation erupted into gunfire, leaving two miners, the mayor, and seven Baldwin-Felts agents dead. Sid Hatfield became a local hero to the working people.

For the next 15 months, a protracted labor dispute carried on. Miners sabotaged equipment and went on strike, while mine owners continued to fire workers, evict them, and bring in new workers. The extended dispute took a dramatic turn when Sid Hatfield was murdered by the brother of two Baldwin-Felts agents who had been slain in Matewan.

Miners all across the region began pouring out of the mountains to join forces and take up arms, intent on ending the tyranny of mine owners and their hired guns. As many as 13,000 miners marched on Logan and Mingo Counties to unite many more thousands of miners, drive out the hired gunmen who constantly terrorized them, and unionize the southern counties of West Virginia. It was the largest armed insurrection since the US Civil War.

Meanwhile, Logan County Sheriff Don Chafin—securely in the pocket of the regional coal mine owners—was given sizable funds to put together a private military force to stop the workers’ march. Chafin and his men set up on Blair Mountain, a daunting natural obstacle which lay in the strikers’ path.

The first skirmishes broke out between strikers and hired goons on August 20, 1921. A brief agreement to cease the march came to a quick end when Chafin, displeased at letting his assembled force go to waste, murdered several union sympathizers in a nearby town. Infuriated, the strikers continued their siege of Blair Mountain.

Chafin employed pilots to drop surplus munitions (bombs and gas) left over from World War I onto the workers. President Warren Harding ordered federal troops to move into the area and even threatened to deploy Martin MB-1 bombers against the striking workers.^[9]

Instead, under the command of General Billy Mitchell, the planes were used to run reconnaissance. The troops arrived on September 2. Fearing a bloodbath, strike leaders disbanded the march. As many as 100 strikers were killed during the conflict.

1 Memorial Day Massacre

On May 26, 1937, Cleveland steelworkers went on strike when minor steel companies refused to follow the US Steel Corporation in adopting union demands of recognition, eight-hour workdays, and better pay. The work stoppage in Cleveland led to calls for strikes by two major unions—the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—which took place in many cities across the country.

On May 30, the Memorial Day holiday, approximately 1,500 striking steelworkers and allies in Chicago assembled at the SWOC headquarters. They planned to march to the nonunionized Republic Steel mill nearby in protest.

At the gates of the mill, the unarmed, peaceful crowd—which included women and children—was met by 250 armed Chicago policemen, who were provisioned and paid for by Republic Steel. Without provocation, the assembled policemen fired over 100 shots at the crowd, killing 10 and wounding more than 100. Most were shot in the back.^[10]

Not one officer was indicted for the shooting. Centered in Cleveland, the strike was gradually defeated, with Chicago being the only violent incident during the entire work stoppage. However, the massacre of Chicago workers and the strike brought national attention to the plight of the steelworkers. Five years later, they won union recognition and the fulfillment of their demands.

Zachary is a graduate student in history in Arizona. His work focuses on the struggle of the American working class and labor movement. He runs the American Labor History Facebook page.

What does the term “government experiments” immediately remind you of? Many would think about weird conspiracy theories, comic book super soldiers, and even eerie mutated animals.

But nothing is farther from the truth. Of course, when you exit the fascinating world of horror flicks and comics, you’ll soon discover-to your amazement- that governments don’t have a budget to fund such fictitious programs. Rarely do these “mad scientists”- or “atomic supermen”- receive the money they earnestly request to carry out such experiments. Nevertheless, some witty scientists have convinced high-ranking state officials to sponsor some crazy projects that end up confounding everyone.

Let’s dive into the list of the top ten scariest government experiments.

In the 1960s, during the Cold War (pitting the US against its rival, the USSR), espionage was the name of the game. Think of this rather interesting happening- the US Central Intelligence Unit (CIA) squandered a whopping $10 million in attempts to train “a spy cat!”

In this eerie project, the CIA surgically implanted listening gadgets, a tail-based antenna, and a battery. The agency intended to win these spy wars by all means. Yet, more drama would follow the costly espionage war. In the CIA’s efforts to outfit the cat, named Acoustic Kitty, the unthinkable happened; the poor animal slid under a speeding taxicab and was crushed!

Was this accidental? Was it a deliberate sacrificial act to close a controversial, monstrous program? We’ll probably never know. Interestingly, the government did not tell Americans about Acoustic Kitty until 2001, when the Clinton administration finally released the secret classified documents.

Don’t you agree this was a crazy government program?

You’ll likely know about the horrific science fiction movies that feature living disembodied heads. Still, many governments have funded such creepy programs by medics who want to achieve a chilling first in the real world. In 1954, doctors finally performed a pioneer human organ transplant, the first being a kidney transplant. Experts then suggested the possibility of a future head transplant!

True enough, in 1908, US surgeon Charles Guthrie successfully transplanted a dog’s head onto another dog’s neck, all funded by the government. Later on, in 1951, Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet surgeon, attempted to perform a canine upper body transplant.

In response to Demikhov’s work, in the mid-1960s, the US government funded the renowned neurosurgeon Robert J. White’s project. Dr. White sought to experiment by transplanting dog and monkey brains into other animal’s necks and abdomens. Finally, in 1970, Dr. White successfully transplanted a living rhesus monkey’s head onto another monkey’s headless body.

8 Japanese Biological Warfare Tests

Have you heard about Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army special unit? The squad committed shocking atrocities disguised cleverly as “scientific experiments.” In 1984, the Japanese government finally admitted that state-funded researchers had conducted cruel experiments on humans. The state believed that these experiments would help the Japanese prepare for possible germ warfare.

The dreaded Unit 731 was first established in 1938 to develop biological weapons. The unit received support from Japanese medical schools and universities. They supplied the unit with research staff and doctors who carried out questionable experiments.

In this project, Unit 731 employed civilians and Chinese prisoners as guinea pigs to develop lethal diseases. The researchers injected wartime prisoners with anthrax, the plague, cholera, and other pathogens. Most horrifying, some of these experiments featured vivisection without anesthesia.

The researchers even used pressure chambers to test how much a human being can take before bursting! Disgustingly, the post-war US administration offered safe passage to the perpetrators of these terrible atrocities to access information on their findings.

7 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment involved a study of untreated syphilis among the Negro male population. In the name of receiving free treatment, this study turned into an infamous tragedy, attracting widespread condemnation. Initially, 600 men enrolled for this project. The scientists in charge carried out the study from 1932 to 1972. 399 of these men had latent syphilis. 201 men provided the experimental control. 

Doctors from the US Public Health Service monitored the project. Instead of giving the then recommended penicillin treatment, the doctors administered placebos, including mineral supplements and aspirin, to the test subjects. The doctors sought to understand the effect and spread of syphilis on humans.

Tragically, 28 men died of syphilis as a direct result of these unethical procedures. 100 more perished of syphilis-related complications while 40 spouses contracted the disease. Consequently, 19 women who gave birth passed on syphilis to their newborn children.

In 1997, US President Bill Clinton apologized to the survivors and their families due to the tragic government experiment. The President admitted that the government action was “profoundly and morally wrong.”

Vladimir Demikhov is recognized as the first medic to successfully perform a coronary artery bypass surgery on a warm-blooded creature. Despite being a successful surgeon in coronary and organ transplant surgery, the medic performed some embarrassing experiments, thrusting him into disrepute. The infamous two-headed dogs’ experiment is one notorious example of his downfall.

In the two-headed dogs’ project, Dr. Demikhov stitched a puppy’s head, shoulders, and front legs onto a German shepherd’s neck. Since both dogs could move around independently after the surgery, the project appeared successful. However, they soon died due to tissue rejection. Demikhov repeated his experiment 20 times, but the longest these creatures lived was one month.

Many considered this a cruel experiment, and I bet you do too!

5 Human Testicle Transplants

In a most disturbing experiment, Dr. Leo Stanley, a physician at California’s San Quentin Prison, transplanted some executed criminal’s testicles onto living inmates. The doctor believed that these criminal males had a common characteristic: they all had low testosterone levels. He believed that raising testosterone levels would reduce crime rates.

In his theory, Dr. Stanley turned over 600 inmates into his test subjects. Then came the most horrifying action- the doctor injected his victims with liquefied animal testicles when he could not get enough human testicles!

To prove his success, Dr. Stanley later cited a Caucasian inmate who claimed to feel energetic after undergoing a testicle transplant from an executed convict of an African American background.

4 The Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, researchers from Stanford University experimented with investigating why prisoners and guards always seemed to be at loggerheads. The researchers assigned 24 students the roles of prisoners and guards, putting them into a prison-like environment.

However, in just six days, this bizarre study abruptly came to an end. They initially planned to experiment for two weeks, but that did not happen. The researchers found it impossible to maintain and control the order in the experimental cells.

Interestingly, prisoners who became guards were instructed to shun violence. Shockingly, a third of the guards became abusive. The surprising thing is that the abused prisoners passively accepted cruel treatment, leading two of them to emotional trauma.

3 The Zombie Dog Experiment

Shockingly, two Russian scientists Dr. Boris Levinskovsky and Sergei Brukhoneko, once released controversial videos featuring dog heads kept alive through an artificial blood circulation system. The released videos were known as Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. In the controversial video, the scientists used the autojektor, a piece of special heart-lung equipment, to display dog heads blinking their eyes, licking their mouths, and wiggling ears in response to sound.

In 2005, American Scientists repeated the same experiment by flushing the dog’s blood and replacing it with sugar-filled saline and oxygen. The unthinkable happened; the dogs came back from the dead three hours later, after undergoing an electric shock and a blood transfusion.

2The CIA MKUltra Project

Pundits consider the MKUltra among the CIA’s most notable projects. The CIA intended to develop a mind-control technique to be unleashed against enemies during war. The agency carried out the project from 1950 to 1970. The primary goal was to put America in the lead of mind-control technology. However, in time, the project degenerated into an illegal drug-testing regime targeting thousands of citizens.

The CIA used drugs and chemicals, like LSD, to inflict psychological torture. The agency even tried to manipulate the victim’s mental states by altering brain functions. In a curious move, the authorities ordered the destruction of all project-related documentation. Despite this, in 2001, more than 20,000 pages of the program’s documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

1Regenerating Dead Human Cells

This might sound more like science fiction, but can you imagine a scientists’ gallant attempt to grow human brains in mice? The surprising truth is that it happened.

A group of scientists discovered that they could dry pig-bladder tissue into an extracellular matrix powder. In turn, this powder could help regrow human fingers. Interestingly, the researchers also found that pig-bladder lining cells commonly contain a unique protein that boosts tissue growth. This is strikingly similar to the way lizards regrow their tails. In contrast, the typical mammal grows scar tissue to heal injuries; this prevents future cell growth.

More recently, a few scientists achieved the impossible; they succeeded in injecting a human embryo’s stem cells into the brains of an unborn fetal mouse. After birth, the human brain cells continued developing together with the mouse brain cells. Astoundingly, this proved human stem cells can grow into such cells while “encased” in another living creature.

Doctors have used similar treatments to develop new fingertips, reattach severed fingers, and regenerate an Iraqi war veteran’s destroyed muscles. Ultimately, many scholars believe this knowledge could boost human brain disorder research and improve researchers’ testing experimental medications.

+Bonus Experiment: Spider Genes in Goats

In another development, a team of scientists succeeded in inserting the genes of spider silk into goats. Once they did this, the goats’ milk contained a protein that forms silk. In turn, this likely makes it possible to harvest massive quantities of silk from the goats’ milk. Experts consider spider silk to be five times stronger than ordinary steel! Overall, medics believe this discovery will help them design artificial limbs and bullet-proof vests.

Conclusion

These horrifying tales prove that humans will do anything to further their ambitions. One crucial detail is that the researchers accomplished all these listed atrocities with official government support and funding.

On June 25, 2021, just in time for Washington’s usual “when nobody’s looking” Friday information dumps, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its assessment of “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” or UAP (that’s government-speak for UFOs). The assessment was a disappointing 6 pages (not counting title page and appendices). It, nevertheless, had a few surprising revelations.

First, the study limited its scope to UAP reports between November 2004 and March 2021 from military aviators – mostly naval pilots – whom the ODNI considered reliable witnesses. Surprisingly, they found 144 such reports and only 1 of them they could explain (but added they could eliminate more sightings with more data). Eighty of these reports were supported by electronic sensors (i.e. radar, infrared), giving credence not just to the reports, but that the UAPs were real, solid objects (as opposed to illusions or storm clouds). And 18 of the UAPs demonstrated speeds or movements that could not be explained by existing technologies.

Perhaps more disquieting is that most of these sightings were around military installations or training and testing grounds. This is what we’d expect if the witnesses were military personnel. But is that the only reason? Eleven of these UAPs had near collisions with the military aircraft. Could they have been attacks? Warnings? Testing of the aircraft’s capabilities? The ODNI must have wondered that too. They warned that these UAPs were potential hazards to national security. Here are 10 reasons the government is now concerned.

10 Truly Unbelievable Claims Of UFO And Alien Encounters

10 The Los Alamos Green Balls of Light (December, 1948)

Sightings of UFOs stretch all the way back to antiquity, but these strange encounters increased exponentially during World War II, the most violent conflict in human history. Sightings were so common, U.S. aviators began to call them “Foo Fighters.” Coined by Donald Meiers, a radar operator for the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, Foo Fighters described mysterious glowing objects seen in the skies over Europe during missions. There are several accounts of Foo Fighters following or shadowing military aircraft for several minutes before peeling away, changing direction and speed on a dime. The fear was that Hitler had developed a superweapon, but aviation historians have since denied that possibility. The Nazis had neither aircraft nor rockets advanced enough for such maneuvers. Nor are there any known instances of these UFOs engaging these aircraft in combat, something the Nazis would definitely do. So what would be the purpose of shadowing and observing aircraft on combat missions?

Perhaps more disconcerting was the appearance of these lights after the war around the top secret Los Alamos and Sandia atomic weapons laboratories in New Mexico where the world’s first atomic bomb was assembled and tested. By 1948, the labs – specifically Los Alamos—were developing the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb that was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb. For nine days in December, 1948, green orbs of light – sometimes called balls of fire – flew above or near the labs. On December 5th , one of the orbs played chicken with an aircraft, forcing the pilot to veer off at the last second. On December 20th, a green orb descended at 45 degrees, then abruptly leveled off – something a meteorite wouldn’t do. Nor did anyone find evidence a meteorite reached the ground. The government was so disconcerted that they sent an expert to investigate and he determined the lights were man-made, either secret U.S. “defensive devices” or Soviet spying apparatus. Another expert posited it was ball lightning, but ball lightning is so rare we know very little about it. What are the odds something so rare would happen in the same area on nine separate nights in the same month? The lights continued to visit the area until the early 1950’s.

9 The Washington D.C. Sightings (July, 1952)

If Washington was concerned about the green orbs over Los Alamos, imagine how they’d feel with UFOs whizzing over their heads. Shortly before midnight on July 19th, 1952, an air-traffic controller at Washington National Airport found 7 slow-moving unidentified objects on his radar. Two more controllers at National Airport reported an odd light in the distance that hovered, then zipped away. Controllers at Andrews Air Force Base also saw a cluster of blips on their radar, racing away at speeds exceeding 7,000 mph. A commercial pilot for Capital Airlines saw six streaking lights over Washington “like falling stars without tails.” He added: “In my years of flying I’ve seen a lot of falling stars… But these were much faster… They couldn’t have been aircraft.” Two F-94 jets were sent to investigate, but the lights disappeared. The lights reappeared a week later on July 26 and this time an F-94 acquired a visual on the lights. But his jet had a top speed of 640 mph and he never caught up to it.

The next day the press was screaming for answers. President Truman was demanding them. So the Air Force did the obvious thing: it lied. A press conference was called and the press was told it was a temperature inversion, which, they explained, happens when warm air traps cooler air low in the atmosphere and radar signals bounce off it, making ground objects appear to be flying. It’s fairly common in the muggy summer months in Washington D.C., so common that all the radar operators were familiar with it and insisted temperature inversions were not what they saw on radar. Nor would an F-94 pilot chase a temperature inversion. And yet the Air Force explanation worked: the public outcry fell to a whisper.

But in true government form, they assigned a group to study the phenomena (but were not interested in properly funding it). The U.S. government entity that put out the June 25, 2021, report was the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF). It was just the most recent entity in a long history of such entities. The first three were Project Sign (1948), Project Grudge (1949 – 1951) and Project Blue Book (1952 – 1969) all headed by the U.S. Air Force. The latter – Project Blue Book – was established in March 1952 and probably would have continued to investigate a handful of sightings a year if it weren’t for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. Just to the left of a sultry picture of Marilyn Monroe was the caption “There is a Case For Interplanetary Saucers.” UFOlogy was suddenly mainstream and Project Blue was inundated with UFO sightings, jumping from 23 in March to 148 in June. But after the Air Force’s temperature inversion theory was released, sightings to Project Blue Book dropped again, from 50 a day to 10. Years later when the relevant government papers were declassified, they showed that the administration wasn’t trying to cover-up secrets, unless you consider their inability to find their own butt inside their pants a secret.

8 Operation Mainbrace Sightings (September, 1952)

But 1952 wasn’t done yet. That September the U.S. and 7 other NATO nations along with New Zealand conducted a massive war-games exercise in the North Sea off Denmark and Norway. With 200 ships, 80,000 personnel, and 1,000 planes, Operation Mainbrace was the largest combined sea, land and air operation since World War II. Someone at the Pentagon joked that they should expect UFOs to show up as well. By the end of the 12 day operation, no one was laughing.

On the operation’s first day – September 13 – a Danish destroyer was just north of Borhnholm Island when Lieutenant Commander Schmidt Jensen and several fellow crewmembers observed a triangular bluish UFO as it flew by at a speed Jensen estimated to be 900 mph. A week later a British aircraft was landing at the Topcliffe airfield at Yorkshire, England, when air and ground crews observed a silver, disk-shaped object following it, swinging to and fro like a pendulum. When the aircraft circled the airfield, the object hovered, rotating on its axis. It then shot away at a speed greater than a shooting star.

On September 20, a metallic disk flew over Karup Field in Denmark at high speed. That same day the U.S. carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt was buzzed by a silver, spherical object that was photographed by reporter Wallace Litwin. His 4 photographs of what he described as a “white ping-pong ball” have never been released to the public. The next day, 6 British RAF pilots chased a shiny sphere, but could not catch it. On September 27 and 28, there were widespread UFO sightings in Germany, Denmark and Sweden. None of the sightings have been explained by anything other than the usual “it was a weather balloon.”

In his 1956 memoir The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, later to be the director of Project Blue Book, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote he initially thought the governments “brush-offs” were meant to keep the public from panicking. Instead he found a combination of a lack of interest, disbelief and aversion to admitting wrong blocked his investigative efforts. Even in the face of mounting, compelling evidence, the government just wanted it to go away.

7 Malmstrom AFB UFO Incident (March, 1967)

Perhaps the most disquieting UFO incident on this list is not a single incident at all, but the first of a decades-long harassment of the personnel manning and maintaining the missile silos at Malmstrom Air Force Base in central Montana. On a crisp March morning in 1967, Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander (DMCCC) Robert Salas was 60 feet underground at the Oscar-Flight Launch Control Center (LCC) where he and his commander monitored and – if so ordered – launched 10 ICBM missiles, each with an 800 kiloton nuclear warhead. That’s when Salas got a bizarre call from his LCC’s head of security upstairs: they had a UFO just above the LLC, making strange zig-zag movements. Salas hung up, annoyed at what he perceived to be a joke. A few minutes later the security head called again. The UFO – an orange and red pulsating oval-shaped object—was now hovering at the front gate. Salas hung up and woke his sleeping commander just as all hell broke loose.

A Klaxon alarm sounded and on the control panel “A ‘No-Go’ light and two red security lights were lit indicating problems at one of our missile sites…Another alarm went off at another site, then another and another simultaneously. Within the next few seconds, we had lost six to eight missiles to a ‘No-Go’ (inoperable) condition,” Salas would later relate. Eventually all 10 missiles were inoperable, would not launch, would not respond to commands. Repair crews were quickly dispatched, but it took a full day for the missiles to be brought back online.

Just a week before, a similar event happened at the Echo-Flight LLC under the same command but 20 miles from Oscar-Flight. Security and maintenance personnel contacted the Echo-Flight LLC to tell them there were UFOs hovering over two missile silos. Shortly afterward, ‘No-Go’ alarms began to wail as their 10 missiles became inoperable. Echo-Flight’s missiles, too, were down for a day. A full-scale investigation of both incidents failed to find a cause and Boeing conducted laboratory tests. “There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert,” wrote Boeing. “…there was no technical explanation that could explain the event.” They did theorize an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) might have caused the missiles to go off-line, but the equipment was shielded from an EMP up to a certain level. An EMP above that level required technology that didn’t exist in 1967.

Nor were these two incidents isolated. In November 1975, Malmstrom reported multiple disk or saucer-shaped UFOs with various colored lights hovered over the Weapons Storage Area where the nuclear warheads were kept. A pair of F-106s were dispatched but the lights disappeared. UFOs appeared again over Malmstrom in 1992, 1995 and 1996.

Nor was Malmstrom alone in these visitations. Between 1963 and 1996 there are dozens of UFO sightings over missile facilities or Weapons Storage Areas at Minot (North Dakota), Francis E. Warren (Wyoming), Ellsworth (South Dakota), Vandenburg (California), and Walker (New Mexico) Air Force Bases. UFOs were also reported at Wurtsmith (Michigan) and Loring (Maine) AFBs where B-52 nuclear bombers were stationed during the Cold War. At one of the Warren AFB silos, a missile’s targeting “tape” had been erased after a UFO hovered above it in the fall of 1973.

Perhaps one of the most well documented incidents also occurred over an ICBM site at Minot AFB on October 24, 1968. Sixteen Air Force personnel on the ground and 7 more in a B-52 overhead testified to seeing a large brilliantly lit object that changed colors from white to amber to green and at one point split into two objects. The government claimed it was a combination of two stars – Sirius and Vega – and some kind of plasma.

In September of 2010, a number of the Air Force officers who’d witnessed these UFO incursions gathered in Washington to highlight a scary pattern: UFOs are monitoring – and it some cases sabotaging—America’s nuclear arsenal. Where these UFOs malevolent or benevolent?

6 Cua Viet River Fire Fight (June, 1968)

The pattern of UFO interest in war continued after World War II. During the 3-year Korean War, there were dozens of UFO sightings, 42 of which were corroborated by secondary witnesses. One incident stands out. In May of 1951, American troops were at Chorwon, Korea, watching as artillery bombarded the enemy. Suddenly an orange-glowing object – like a “jack-o-lantern”—appeared atop a nearby mountain and quickly descended, flying without damage through the artillery bursts toward the American line. The UFO began pulsating a blue-green light. One private, Francis P. Wall, asked for and received permission to fire his M-1 rifle at the UFO and his bullets made metallic “dings” against the UFO’s hull. Its response was to attack. “We were… swept by some form of ray that was emitted in pulses, in waves that you could visually see only when it was aiming at you.” Wall remembered he experienced a tingling, burning throughout his body. The object hovered for a moment, then shot away at high speed. Three days later Wall’s entire company came down with dysentery and very high white-blood-cell count, similar to radiation poisoning.

Seventeen years later America was in another war, this time in Vietnam. Captain George Filer was an intelligence officer who daily briefed General George S. Brown, deputy commander of air operations in Vietnam. Frequently Filer’s briefings included UFO sightings and way too often they went from sightings to armed conflict.

Just after midnight on June 16, 1968, the patrol boat designated PCF-12 was on a routine night patrol on Cua Viet River not far from where it empties into the South China Sea, when it received a distress call from another patrol boat. PCF-19 said it was under attack from unidentified lights it called “enemy helicopters.” The North Vietnamese had a few Soviet MI-4 Hound helicopters at the time, but they were usually deployed along the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. Why would an attacking enemy helicopter have its lights on, making it easier for the Americans to hit it? PCF-12 was captained by Lieutenant Pete Snyder and as his swift boat approached PCF-19, he said he could see two bright lights with a “strange glow” hovering above PCF-19. One of the lights flashed brightly and PCF-19 exploded. The pair of lights then sped away. Two wounded survivors were picked up later by a Coast Guard Cutter and the survivors reported the pair of lights had stalked the PCF-19 for miles before the crew began firing at them. The lighted object then destroyed PCF-19.

PCF-12 motored up the Cua Viet River and encountered the pair of lights again. Snyder ordered his men to open fire, but the UFO was unphased. PCF-12 retreated as it fired, the object following. Eventually the lights were chased off by a pair F-4 Phantoms. This action so unnerved the American forces, it may have contributed to friendly fire the next night when F-4 Phantoms allegedly fired on the cruiser USS Boston and the Australian destroyer HMAS Hobart, killing two sailors and wounding 8. Extensive searches found no “enemy helicopter” wreckage anywhere in the area. Investigators determined that both incidents were the result of friendly fire, but, in the case of the destruction of PCF-19, no aircraft – friendly or enemy – were in the vicinity at the time. Interestingly, years later General George Brown admitted that the phrase “enemy helicopters” was a euphemism for UFOs. Is that what PCF-19 meant when they said they were under attack?

5 Campeche, Mexico sightings (March 5, 2004)

In the early evening of March 5, 2004, the Mexican Air Force was hunting drug smugglers along the east coast state of Campeche. The C-26A aircraft was flying at 11,500 feet when the crew turned on its infrared camera and noticed multiple bogeys – at one point 11 of them – on the monitor. ”We are not alone! This is so weird,” one crewmember can be heard saying. Since the camera only senses heat signatures, it doesn’t show the object’s exact outlines, its details or structure. The C-26A followed the blobs for a short time and some crewman claimed the objects actually surrounded their aircraft before breaking off.

When the Mexican air force released the video in May, it created quite a stir. Skeptics claimed the images were electrical flashes, ball lightning and even plasma sparks. A more plausible skeptical explanation was that the lights were flares from oil wells out in the Bay of Campeche. The area is the heart of Mexico’s petroleum industry with more than 200 wells in the bay, and they light flares on the tops of the rigs to burn off excess natural gas. UFOlogists proclaimed these images were far superior to the typical grainy pictures of UFOs the world was used to. Not really. It was cloudy, hot and humid that March 5, the images taken at sunset when temperatures were fluctuating, causing havoc not just with the human eye, but the infrared camera.

4 USS Nimitz Incident (November 14, 2004)

Just under two weeks before Thanksgiving, 2004, Carrier Strike Group 11 was training off the coast of southern California when the radar on the missile cruiser USS Princeton detected some 14 anomalous aerial vehicles (AAV) – yet another term for UFOs – uniformly spread out over 100 miles and was deemed a threat to the exercise. Two F/A-18F Super Hornet fighters from the carrier USS Nimitz – who had also picked up the AAVs on radar—were dispatched to the nearest object, guided by an E-2 Hawkeye airborne radar.

Once they had reached the intercept point, the F/A-18’s radar could not detect the AAV. Nor were they electronically jammed. That’s when the F/A-18 crews noticed a disturbance on the surface of the ocean below them, and flying just above the frothing disturbance was a white oblong object shaped like a “Tic-Tac” mint. Under its belly were what looked like two appendages. It was 40-50 feet long, 10-15 feet wide. There were no wings or engine heat or exhaust. It was moving erratically, instantaneously changing directions like, as one F/A-18 crewmember described, a ping pong ball bouncing off invisible walls. One of the F/A-18s descended to get a better look, but the object anticipated that and kept its distance. When the F/A-18 tried to intercept, the AAV shot away. The pilot, CDR David Favor, said: “And it takes off like nothing I’ve ever seen. It literally is one minute it’s there and the next minute it’s like -poof – and it’s gone.” Favor points out that an aircraft flying at Mach 3 will still be visible for 10-15 seconds. “This thing disappeared in a second, it was just gone.”

Shortly afterward the object returned and was videotaped. It was later determined that there was no submarine at the location of the water disturbance or any other known cause. From the video and radar information, it was calculated the object was moving 282,000 mph with a g-force of 12,823. No human could survive such g-forces, nor any aircraft survive the air friction at that speed. At that velocity there should have been noise when the object broke the sound barrier and the friction should have created a fireball. And yet the object was tracked by 3 highly sophisticated radar systems (from the Princeton, Nimitz and the E-2 Hawkeye) at different radar frequencies supporting the contention that this was a physical object and not a weather phenomena such as temperature inversion.

Shortly after the incident, the recordings of the radar, ship logs and other electronic proof was confiscated and it wasn’t until 2017 when a small portion of the evidence was declassified and released to the public. A careful analysis came to the conclusion that the “Tic-Tac” was not an “aircraft of any known type,” had “no aerodynamic air-frame, no obvious means of reactive propulsion, [and had] acceleration characteristics beyond human endurance and air-frame structural capability.”

Mike West, a former video-game designer and UFO skeptic, said the “Tic-Tac” is simply glare on the camera lens. The movements it makes? Simply the sweeping motions of the camera as it tries to keep a visual lock on the “glare.” West also said it could be due to the parallax effect, where stationary objects appear to move when it is actually the viewer moving. The problem is that the video is supported by reliable eyewitnesses who saw it with their own eyeballs. David Fravor, one of the pilots who saw the “Tic-Tac,” said it was not an illusion, and not glare. “It’s funny how people can extrapolate stuff who’ve never operated the system,” he said. Even the Navy, who has every reason to accept West’s theory, say the images are real and simply characterize the “Tic-Tac” as “unidentified.”

3 USS Theodore Roosevelt Sightings (2015)

Along with the Nimitz footage, two other F/A-18 Super Hornet videos were declassified in 2017 and released to the public. Both were shot by the same pilot from the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt while training off the eastern coast from Virginia to Florida before deployment to the Persian Gulf. A total of 6 seasoned pilots and weapons system operators (WSO) experienced multiple encounters.

The first encounter was in the summer of 2014 when Lieutenant Danny Accoin and his WSO picked up a UFO on radar and Accoin positioned his F/A-18 1,000 feet below the object. He should have been able to spot it with his helmet camera thru his canopy, but was unable to. A few days later, Accoin again encountered the object. This time Accoin got a missile lock on the object, but still could not visually see it. Accoin thought these UFOs were advanced military drones, until another Roosevelt pilot had a near collision.

In late 2014, the Roosevelt was training off Virginia Beach and a pilot – who wished to remain anonymous – was flying with his wingman, 100 feet between them. Then something flew between them that looked like a sphere encased in a cube. It flew so close, an aviation flight safety report had to be filed. If these UFOs were drones operated by the military, Accoin reasoned, they wouldn’t have endangered the pilots with a near-collision. “It turned from a potentially classified drone program to safety issue,” Lieutenant Ryan Graves said.

Then in 2015, the so-called “go-fast” and “gimbal” videos were taken. The objects have “no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume,” Accoin said of the videos. It also shows the UFOs accelerating to hypersonic speed, making abrupt stops and instantaneous turns, something a human wouldn’t survive. “Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

2 USS Russell’s Pyramid UFO (July 15, 2019)

In July, 2019, the Navy held military exercises in restricted waters off the San Diego coastline. Beginning July 14, at least three ships were harassed by – what is described in their logs – as “drones.” Often there were multiple unidentified objects and in one case a “white light” paced the speed and direction of a destroyer – the USS Rafael Peralta—and performed “brazen” maneuvers for 90 minutes, far beyond the flight duration of most drones. On July 15, three pyramid-shaped UFOs trailed the destroyer USS Russell at 700 feet. The ship’s log described the “drones” changing elevation and moving erratically in all directions. The Pentagon confirmed that an anonymous sailor on the Russell filmed the UFO using night-vision goggles, and said they have verified the video’s authenticity.

This video was part of a classified briefing the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had on May 1, 2020 in an effort to “destigmatize” the reporting of these incidents and encourage the military to relate their experiences without the fear of ruining their careers or reputations. It was acknowledged that something is going on, and uncovering what it is will not happen with denials and secrecy. As remarkable as that announcement is, what came out of the Pentagon was shocking.

Luis Elizondo is a former U.S. Counterintelligence Special Agent and worked for nine years in the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD[I]). While at USD(I) , Elizondo headed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) that, from 2007 to 2012, studied UFO experiences. Even after funding lapsed in 2012, Elizondo said AATIP continued, funded by the military. Elizondo said that by 2017, AATIP had collected compelling evidence that UFOs posed a significant threat to national security. But he was frustrated by continued government secrecy and resigned. He has since been instrumental in releasing the Nimitz, Roosevelt and Russell videos to the public.

Elizondo also released the remarkable news that the Pentagon has three theories about what these UFOs are. The first is that the UFOs are U.S. military or civilian technology the Pentagon is unaware of, something Elizondo considers “highly unlikely.” The second is that the UFOs are “foreign adversarial” tech that the Pentagon is also unaware of. “This would be a huge intelligence failure of [the United States] because we’ve been technologically leapfrogged,” Elizondo said. He summarized the third theory: “If it’s not ours and it’s not [another country] well, then it’s someone or something else.”

1 USS Omaha’s Trans Medium UFO (July 15, 2019)

On the same night (July 15) the USS Russell was swarmed by UFOs, another ship – the littoral combat ship USS Omaha – videoed a UFO doing something not often witnessed: it traveled thru the sky and the water. Called a trans medium UFO, it further distanced itself from existing human technology. At approximately 11 p.m. a dark blob appeared near the Omaha. The radar plot said the object was spherical, measuring 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter, and traveling at speeds as much as 158 mph (254 km/h). A crewmember began to film the object displayed on a monitor in the Omaha’s Command Information Center (CIC) and the clip clearly has multiple edits. It stayed in place for nearly an hour before splashing into the water. A submarine investigated soon afterward and neither the object or wreckage was found.

The Omaha video was released with the Russell video at the same May 1, 2020, ONI briefing and the Pentagon has confirmed that the Omaha footage is authentic, that it was filmed by naval personnel and that it, along with the Nimitz, Roosevelt and Russell videos were among the 144 UFO sightings it investigated for the June 25, 2021 report.

From all of this, Luis Elizondo has identified five “unique” technological characteristics these UFOs have that are not evident in existing human technology: they have the tech for instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic speeds (greater than 3,000 mph or Mach 5), low visibility (they easily disappear and reappear), trans medium travel (thru space, atmosphere and water), and positive lift (can fly without wings, ailerons, rudders, or even engine exhausts). For the intelligence community to be unaware a foreign power had “leapfrogged” in developing any one of these characteristics would be unlikely. For the intelligence community to be unaware a foreign power developed all five characteristics would be incomprehensible. “We are seeing these — let’s call them vehicles, if you will — that are incurring [incursions?] into controlled U.S. airspace that are displaying performance characteristics that are frankly well beyond anything we can either replicate or in some cases really even understand,” Elizondo said. And for UFOs to have been displaying these technological advancements as far back as World War II? It stretched believability.

So where does that leave us? Cue “Twilight Zone” theme song.

Top 10 UFOs Caught On Video In Recent Years

About The Author: Steve is the New York Times Bestselling author of “366 Days in Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency” and a frequent contributor to .

Whether we love it or not, the dominant form of government across the world today is the representative democracy, in which the citizens elect representatives who then use their voice in government on their constituents’ behalf. Representative democracy is found across the world and is broadly similar from country to country. Whether we live in Japan, the UK, or the US, elections and government work in much the same way.

But in the past, many wildly different government types existed side by side for centuries—and some were unimaginably different compared to the way politics work in the West today. Here are ten of the strangest forms of government in history.

10 Carthage

At its height, Carthage was a rival to the early Roman Empire and the dominant maritime power of the ancient world, controlling trade throughout most of the Mediterranean. Carthage was originally settled by Phoenician colonists from modern-day Jordan, but unlike the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians turned their back on monarchy and became a republic in the seventh century BC.^[1]

The heads of state were the two suffetes who, much like the consular system in Rome, were elected for a 12-month term and held equal power to each other. Beneath them was a senate of around 200 to 300 people who, when selected, served for life. Unfortunately, the way they were selected is lost to history.

We do know, however, that the senate played an important role in Carthaginian government, with groups of senators being commissioned to manage aspects of the government, such as maintaining religious sites or collecting taxes. The senate also had to be consulted by the suffetes on matters relating to the state. The senate would vote on the issue, and if their decision disagreed with the two suffetes, or if the two suffetes disagreed with each other, the matter would be settled by the people’s assembly.

The people’s assembly met in the market square in Carthage itself, and any male of the city could vote. Since voting was open to any citizen who turned up (only males could be citizens), the size of the assembly would have varied wildly. The people’s assembly also seems to have directly elected the two suffetes, meaning that the people had a large say in how they were governed in ancient Carthage. Unfortunately, though, it meant that people from elsewhere in the Carthaginian Empire had no say over how they were governed; this might have been why, when Rome eventually conquered Carthage, the rest of the empire felt little desire to avenge them.

9 Iceland

When Iceland was settled by the Vikings around 850, it was too far away from a center of authority for any king to really control it. The result was a medieval Viking republic, governed by the Althing from around 930, making it the oldest continuously functioning parliament in the world.^[2]

By 930, the population of Iceland had grown to the point where many people decided they needed a way to organize their own laws and attitudes toward people from outside Norway. From around then, for two weeks in June every year (the best time for traveling), the Althing met at Thingvellir to discuss matters of law. The country was split into 36 chieftaincies, each of which sent a chieftain and two advisers to the Althing. Chieftains—called gothis—were nominated by the people who lived in their chieftaincy, so they were usually the best-connected and most well-liked person in their region.

The Althing was directed by the lawspeaker, a chieftain who was chosen by the other chieftains to serve for three years. The lawspeaker was effectively the living constitution of Iceland, and he and his advisers were expected to know all the laws of Iceland by heart. He would start the Althing by reciting the laws from memory and then would help to facilitate debate between the chieftains by helping them resolve matters through the law or create new laws if they were needed. He held no more power than another chieftain, though, and Iceland had no single head of state.

The Althing was more than a meeting of politicians, though—hundreds of people from across Iceland would travel to the Althing to trade, party, catch up with old friends, and make or break family alliances or agreements, such as arranged marriages or fosterships.

8 Venice

One of the longest-lived republics in European history, the Venetians first elected a doge to lead them in 727 and were governed by elected officials until the city’s conquest in 1797, over 1,000 years later.^[3]

The Venetian system was so robust because it had lots of different moving parts, each wielding different amounts of power and having some level of influence over the others—a concept integral to modern democracy. The doge was the head of the system, appointed for life and the de facto ruler of Venice. Despite this, his power was restricted in many ways: The doge was unable to name his successor or even a preferred successor (to prevent certain families from dominating the position), he was banned from leaving Venice, and all his mail was read by an independently elected censor who reported to the public.

The systems that made up the Venetian government changed over time, but the most important were the Collegio, a council of 40 men from the elite families, the senate, which managed finances and diplomacy, the Council of Three, who monitored the other branches, and the grand chancellor, who ran the city’s bureaucracy. All these officials were chosen by and from the members of the Great Council, which consisted of 1,000 people who were all chosen from a list of 180 great families—making Venice an oligarchy, not a true democracy. To complicate matters further, some people were allowed to be members of several government bodies at the same time.

Nothing sums up the crazy Venetian system better than the way they elected the doge : First, 30 members of the Great Council were chosen at random and then reduced at random to nine. These nine chose 40 more Great Council members, who were reduced at random to 12. These 12 chose 25, who were reduced to nine. These nine then elected 45 members, who were reduced to 11, and these 11 chose the 41 who elected the doge by majority vote. The final number was originally 40 but was increased to 41 after a tie in 1229.

Venice’s masterminded system was ultimately toppled by the introduction of the Council of Ten around 1310. Originally designed to monitor the other bodies and prevent them from taking too much power, it seized more and more power for itself over time and even had its own secret police force. By 1600, Venice had effectively become a dictatorship.

7 Florence

At the end of the 1200s, many Northern Italian cities rejected the rule of wealthy nobles and instead turned to the rule of the popolo, and Florence was no different.^[4] In 1293, the city enacted the Ordinances of Justice, which blocked the 152 noble families of the city from holding political office. From then on, the people would rule.

Of course, it wasn’t quite so simple. Though government was no longer restricted to the nobility, to be part of the popolo, a citizen had to be a member of one of the seven major guilds of the city (the judges, cloth traders, moneylenders, silk traders, doctors, wool traders, and fur traders); the members of the five minor guilds (the butchers, shoemakers, smiths, masons, and secondhand traders) also had a lesser status in the popolo.

Together, they elected the Signoria, who served a term of just two months and were the highest authority in the city. The Signoria was led by the gonfalionere, a member of the Signoria who was chosen at random. The Signoria met every day in the Palazzo della Signoria (today known as the Palazzo Vecchio), where they discussed government matters and decided on legislation to introduce, which would then have to be passed by the Twelve Good Men.

The two-month term limit led to an acute interest in politics and much factional infighting, mainly because power was always within grasp for any aspiring politician. For most of the republic’s history, politics was dominated by antagonism (and sometimes outright civil wars) between the Guelphs, who supported the pope, and the Ghibellines, who supported the German emperor. The gonfalionere’s term limit was extended to life in 1498, after which Florence was dominated by the rule of the Medici family, who eventually made themselves the hereditary rulers of the Duchy of Florence in 1533, ending the republican government.

6 Republic Of Novgorod

While Novgorod was always ruled by a prince, the veche held the most power.^[5] The veche was effectively made up of every male citizen of the city and made government decisions through mass meetings in which people voted on the issues of the day. The veche could be convened by any free man of the city by ringing the veche bell in the town square, which was the official signal for any interested citizens to congregate in the square and participate in democracy.

The prince remained the head of state, but he was severely restricted by a constitution introduced by the veche : The prince was banned from engaging in commerce, for example, and could not hold land or have a personal army of more than 50 people. Other than the prince, the veche elected the posadnik (mayor) and tysyatsky (militia commander), who were in charge of day-to-day government.

As Novgorod grew in size and influence, the government became more advanced: By 1291, the state was managed by the council of lords, which was made up of the archbishop, a representative of the prince, the posadniks and tysyatsky of Novgorod, and the posadniks of other regions in the republic outside the city. Novgorod was split into five veches, which each elected their own posadnik. The territories the republic owned outside the city were also split into five regions, each with their own posadnik.

The republic’s end ultimately came from outside, from the city of Muscovy (aka Moscow), their ancient rival. Muscovy’s strength increased over the 14th and 15th centuries until, in 1478, the Muscovite prince and his army conquered Novgorod and removed the veche bell, officially ending the republic.

5 Iroquois Confederacy

The Iroquois Confederacy was a union of five—later six—Native American tribes who lived in the New York state area before the arrival of the first European colonists.^[6] Originally enemies, they were united by the semilegendary figure Hiawatha, who encouraged the tribes to work together and not to attack each other, instead helping each other to tackle their enemies.

The arrangement soon became a basis for government. Because Iroquois society was matriarchal, the individual clans and families were led by clan mothers. Each clan mother chose a chief to send to the Iroquois council, which was made up of 50 chiefs. The decisions of the council had to be unanimous, so no action would be taken until all 50 chiefs could be persuaded to support it.

As time went on, the Iroquois agreement became cemented in the Great Law of Peace, which was divided into 117 separate articles governing everything from religious and state ceremonies which helped to cement a feeling of unity between the six tribes, to protecting individual liberties and the concept of separate powers. Despite originally being recorded on strings of wampum shells because the Iroquois had no written alphabet, it was a highly complex and involved constitution. Ideas from it influenced the development of the United States Constitution—particularly Benjamin Franklin’s Albany Plan. In 1748, the Iroquois chiefs offered to teach their democratic principles to the British colonists.

The confederacy ended in 1784 in a brief but devastating war with the United States. Two of the tribes decided to relocate to British Canada for protection, one moved to a reservation in Wisconsin, and three were moved to reservations in New York, where they remain today.

4 Sparta

In the past, it wasn’t unusual for a country to be run by a single king or queen. What was far more uncommon, however, was a country ruled by two different kings from entirely different families at the same time—but this was the system the Spartans used.^[7]

The two kings were also priests of Zeus, making them especially important in the religious structure of the city-state. In times of war, one of the kings would lead the army to battle, and he would have almost unlimited power over the soldiers. When in the city itself, though, the kings had surprisingly little influence over state affairs: that was reserved for the Gerousia, the council of elders.

The Gerousia was made up of 28 elders and the two kings. Each elder had to be at least 60 years old. They were elected by the people in a voice vote—the candidate who received the loudest vote was chosen, after which he held the position for life. The Gerousia mainly existed to advise the kings on matters of government and to settle disputes between other Spartans—the council was also Sparta’s high court.

Proposed law changes were voted on by the people’s assembly, which met once a month and of which every male Spartan citizen over 30 was a member. Unlike in other Greek democracies, however, the assembly had very little power: It was not allowed to debate issues, only vote yes or no on them, and the Gerousia had the power to overturn any vote they deemed to be “crooked.” The assembly was originally overseen by the kings, but in later years, it was managed by the ephors, five people who were elected for a single one-year term (and who were banned from standing again after) by the assembly.

The ephors were originally introduced to oversee government practice but, much like the Council of Ten in Venice, soon seized power for themselves. Their role allowed them to scrutinize and punish any in the government who they saw as acting illegally, which frequently led to the ephors abusing their position. By the end of the Spartan age, the ephors controlled the activities of the kings and had their own secret police force.

3 Babylon

Long before the ancient Greeks, the Babylonian Empire stretched across most of Mesopotamia, uniting the region under a single government that, at its height, could easily have opposed the might of ancient Egypt.^[8]

The strength of the Babylonians lay in their authoritarian, centralized system of government that prioritized efficiency above all things. At the center of their system was the king, who was considered a god on Earth and who, if his mind was made up, no one could contradict. The king enforced his rule with an organized bureaucratic system of taxation, military conscription, census records, and records of goods created, traded, and stored. This was maintained by a large elite civil service who kept things moving and who owed their power to the king.

Perhaps most famously, though, the Babylonians created a well-known set of laws. The laws, which are often known as the Code of Hammurabi (named after the king who introduced them) were written so that the “strong should not harm the weak” and to “further the well-being of mankind,” according to Hammurabi himself. In all, it consisted of around 280 separate laws, most of which set out the responsibilities of people who entered contracts—for example, holding a builder to account for a house that falls down or removing a judge who changed his decision after it had been written down.

2 Holy Roman Empire

In all of human history, few governments have matched the Holy Roman Empire for sheer complexity.^[9] To fully explain the government of medieval Germany would take an entire list by itself, but at its heart, the Holy Roman Empire was governed by two separate bodies: the emperor and the Reichstag.

The emperor ruled for life, but unlike many other medieval monarchies, the position was not hereditary. Instead, on the emperor’s death, it was the duty of the empire’s electors to select a new emperor. For most of the empire’s history, the electors were the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the margrave of Brandenburg, the elector of Saxony, and the count of the Rhine. The emperor had to be at least 18 years old, be of noble blood, and own land in the empire. This meant that, while it was rare, monarchs of other states could be put forward as legitimate candidates for emperor. Otherwise, the emperor was similar to a ceremonial head of state today in many ways: He represented Germany abroad but had little actual diplomatic agency, he was the highest judge in the empire but could only exercise his power in the courts, he appointed officials and had his own household staff, and he could withhold his consent to new laws, preventing them from being passed.

The Reichstag was the council of the empire, made up of representatives from all its regions. The Reichstag served at the emperor’s pleasure until 1653, after which a new member of the Reichstag had to be approved by the College of Princes and the College of Electors (effectively, the other members and the electors).

The main body of the Reichstag was the College of Princes, which was made up of members called states of the empire. In the early days, a state of the empire was attached to a particular portion of land—so the owner of that land would go to the Reichstag as its representative and use its vote. If there were several owners of that land (which became increasingly common as landowners divided their lands between their sons on their deaths), they had to share that vote in the Reichstag. This meant that if someone held different portions of land around the empire, they could end up sharing several votes on the Reichstag with different people, without outright owning a single vote. On top of this, the emperor could make a particular individual into a state, giving him a vote even if he held no land—this privilege was removed in 1653. A state of the empire also had several rights, such as forming its own council and making its own treaties with countries outside the empire. In effect, each state of the empire was its own country, which sent a single vote but (sometimes) multiple representatives to the Reichstag, depending on who owned the land that made up that state. In addition, some states were specifically defined as having only a single vote, which only one individual could use, or shared votes, which could be shared between the state’s landholders.

To make matters worse, there were also units bigger and smaller than the states: The electors had their own college in the Reichstag, where they had much more influence than their measly number would suggest (there were over 1,000 states of the empire), and there were the imperial cities, independent city-states which were grouped into benches that were led by different cities at different times. The city with the most prominence was usually the city in which the Reichstag was meeting that day. (The empire had no permanently defined capital.) The rights of different states, electors, and cities also varied depending on whether or not they were held by a member of the clergy or a member of the nobility.

Thankfully, the whole sorry affair was put to an end by Napoleon in 1806 when he created the Confederation of the Rhine following the Battle of Austerlitz.

1 Inca Empire

At its height, the Inca Empire numbered over ten million people.^[10] Despite its great population, however, the number of ethnic Inca was a lot smaller. The empire united many different Andean peoples with wildly different cultures and languages in a single unit, ruled by a single man—their god-king, who was the son of their all-powerful sun god. The state was highly organized and hierarchical, with the king at the top, closely followed by his dead ancestors, who were mummified and preserved (and even consulted for advice in elaborate rituals at times of crisis). Immediately beneath the king was his council of ten families closely related to the royal family, who advised the king and helped in the running of the empire. Beneath them was another council of ten noble Inca families, which was followed by another council of ten non-Inca families from other parts of the empire.

Beneath them, the empire was split into 80 regions, each led by a governor, whose job it was to administrate his region and ensure that the enormous amount of data the empire collected from its people was properly recorded, kept, and transported back to the capital. To ensure that the governors remained loyal to the empire, their heirs were taken to the Inca capital at Cuzco to be held under house arrest, where the king and his allies could keep an eye on them.

But the most unusual thing about the Inca Empire was that, despite its large population and extremely organized bureaucracy, it had no system of currency or written language. The government collected a census every year that recorded births, deaths, marriages, individual workers’ skills and statuses, and the amount of goods in each region, among other things. It was used to help the central government decide on where to build new state projects, where food needed to be distributed, where to send laborers (who were sometimes traded as a commodity), and so on.

They did all this, even lacking a written language and despite the many cultural and linguistic barriers across their empire, by using quipu, which involved tying knots on strings to represent values. These strings allowed the Inca to develop a rather advanced credit/debit system not unlike modern Western accounting, built on the base-ten system that we use for mathematics across the world today. The quipu knots were used to record everything from the numbers of different goods in stockpiles to the distances traversed by enemy armies. Because it didn’t rely on knowledge of a written language to work, it could be used across the empire, without people having to learn each others’ languages.

Preparation for the inevitable or purposefully planning for something? That’s the question that’s been birthed in the minds of millions throughout the world who have learned of the following. While simulations can most certainly be a fantastic means of learning appropriate ways of responding to a threat, some kinds of training are just a tad eerier than others.

It’s one thing to figure out how you’re going to respond to a potential financial crisis. But when you start talking about a bioterrorist attack, cyber pandemic, or plane hijacking, I don’t think anybody would argue there’s something inherently creepy here.

But perhaps that’s part of the appeal, right?

Either way, here are some of the eeriest government simulations which have ever been performed.

Related: 10 Reasons Why A Nuclear War Could Be Good For Everyone

10 Plan A

Performed in late 2019 by the Pentagon and modeled by the Princeton Science and Global Security Project Team, Plan A simulated how a full-blown nuclear war with Russia could play out in our modern-day world.

It all starts with a U.S./NATO conglomerate moving too close to Russia for The Bear’s comfort. As a warning shot, Russia fires a nuke into NATO territory. This, in turn, causes a retaliatory nuclear strike, with things only escalating from there.

Within a matter of hours, virtually all of Europe is incinerated by nuclear bombs, with it being doubtful many would be able to survive the ensuing fallout and radiation. Once Europe is destroyed, America’s mainland launches a large-scale nuclear attack. A Russian counterattack ensues on American soil, and within the first few hours of the war, 90 million are dead on a global scale.

This is a conservative estimate, however, as the simulation doesn’t account for long-term injuries (e.g., cancer) or deaths due to fallout as well. According to this simulation, if you had hopes for a Red Dawn situation, you’ll be lucky to survive through the first day of a Russia-U.S. war.^[1]

9 Clade X

Back in 2018, 10 various professionals in their respective fields participated in a daylong, more serious version of Dungeons and Dragons: a bioterrorist attack.

After an agent is released in both Venezuela and Germany, the bioweapon spreads throughout the rest of the world. Players within the simulation had to figure out as much as they could about this brand-new pathogen (affectionately termed Clade X) before determining the best means of keeping the infection in check, keeping infrastructure intact, and keeping healthy people from dying was.^[2]

8 Dark Winter

On June 22-23, 2001, yet another bioweapons attack against the U.S. was war-gamed. This time against a novel smallpox attack. The simulation spanned a period of 13 days, with Day One involving a single case of smallpox popping up in Oklahoma City.

From there, the pox spread to 25 other states within the U.S. and 15 foreign countries. A number of governmental agencies were involved in the simulation, with the end results being the discovery that such an attack would result in mass casualties, a breakdown in “essential institutions,” violation of human rights, and the healthcare system coming close to collapse.^[3]

Many have expressed concern about the use of the term “dark winter” being repeatedly applied to the winter of 2021-2022.

If you’d like to play through Dark Winter on your own to see how you would fare, you can find the script for the game online.

7 Vigilant Guardian 01

On the morning of September 11, 2001, NORAD was operating Exercise Vigilant Guardian 01—a simulation to see how American leaders would respond in the event of a passenger plane being hijacked and flown into a building.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the simulation, the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks took place. Those involved in the simulation initially showed confusion as to whether the real-world attacks were simply a part of their simulated training or not, eventually realizing the truth.^[4]

6 Lock Step

Created by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Business Network, Lock Step was one of four simulations published in 2010 under the title of “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” which you can read online.

This simulation imagined influenza rocking the globe. The source? Geese, natural reservoirs of influenza. Within just seven months of Patient Zero, 20% of the world’s population has been infected, with 8,000,000 deaths—most being healthy, young adults.

Poorer nations suffer worse fates than the rest of the world due to an “absence of official containment protocols,” and China seems to be the global winner throughout the simulation. As is written, “A few countries did fare better—China, in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing-off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”^[5]

5 The Unnamed U.S.-China War Simulation

As of this writing, the name of this simulation hasn’t been released to the public. What we do know, though, is that it was performed in the fall of 2020.

This simulation begins with a biowarfare attack by China against U.S. Navy vessels. Then, as the Navy is reeling under the infection and trying to figure out just what is going on, China publicly states they’re engaging in a massive war game, positioning their assets for such. Of course, this is a cover, and an invasion of Taiwan quickly follows—unhampered by the debilitated U.S. Navy.

The end result was yet another wargame showcasing a U.S. defeat at Chinese hands.^[6]

4 SPARS

We live in a world with more modes of communication than ever before. Recognizing such, public health officials created the SPARS simulation in 2017. This simulation was designed specifically to determine the best methods of communication in the event of a pandemic.

In this case, it was the discovery of a new respiratory virus—SPARS—brought to the United States after a small Baptist church returned from doing missionary/humanitarian aid work in the Philippines after a flood.

The exercise strove to enhance interagency message consistency and media relations but also had a special emphasis on determining the best way of dispelling the spread of rumors over social media. You can read through the entire exercise book online.^[7]

3 CONPLAN 8888

Is U.S. Strategic Command preparing for a zombie invasion? Sounds a bit far-fetched, right? Actually, no. This whole situation was actually war-gamed extensively back in 2011, reportedly as a means of training students at the Joint Combined Warfighting School without offending or alarming foreign nations should it be found a plan for fighting against a Chinese invasion was currently in the works.

Various types of zombies possible, best weapons and tactics for destroying zombies, and locations within the U.S. that are bound to survive a zombie apocalypse can all be found in this report.^[8]

2 Event 201

Performed in October 2019 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Economic Forum, and others, Event 201 examined the global response to a novel strain of the coronavirus raging across the planet.

The scenario has the novel coronavirus pass from bats to pigs and, eventually, to humans at a wet market before making its first appearance in South America. From there, it rapidly spreads throughout the rest of the world, promptly killing 65 million people worldwide.

Concluding remarks of the tabletop exercise found that there needs to be stronger “public/private relationships.” Just three months later, the word coronavirus would become a part of the daily lexicon of people worldwide.^[9]

1 Cyber Polygon

Hosted by the World Economic Forum in early 2021, Cyber Polygon was a massive simulation involving game players from throughout the world. In this exercise, a “cyber pandemic” was ravaging the globe, leaving much of the internet infected and cyber structure unusable.

Billions of dollars in damage have taken place, and game players had to determine the best means of not only stopping the virus from progressing but also from keeping such an event from taking place in the future.

One of the main methods used to fight the cyber pandemic was the disconnecting of all devices from the internet (perhaps with an internet kill switch?).^[10]

We like to believe we live in an idealized version of democracy with a government that values our privacy. Well, I think it’s pretty clear by now that that’s not the case. The United States government actually runs the biggest data collection program on planet Earth, and you can bet your bippy that you’re an indexed individual. 

Some of this indexing isn’t that insidious, more like business as usual. The federal government has over 24 agencies such as the IRS, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Social Security Administration, etc., that keep records on U.S. citizens. 

But for more clandestine endeavors, our government engages in advanced spying techniques and surveillance to keep tabs on us. This means they keep lists upon lists of notable individuals. And any one of us can land on these lists for a myriad of reasons. Of course, the U.S. government must abide by the law regarding collecting information, meaning, in many cases, they have to get a court order.

But there’s a convenient workaround.

If the government hires private contractors and doesn’t use government employees to gather information, they don’t need court orders. Pretty creative. So you might as well just accept you are on any number of government lists, some that you’re aware of and maybe a few you’re not.

Related: 10 Things You Won’t Believe Can Spy On You (But Do)

10 Terrorist Watch List

If you type certain terms into Google, you may end up on our government’s watch list. For instance, if you type in “how to make a bomb,” the possibility exists that you might be placed on a domestic terrorist watch list. Don’t be surprised. It’s Google. You kind of painted the target on your butt for that one. 

If you are known or suspected of being a terrorist, it’s probably a certainty that you have been placed on the Consolidated Terrorist Watch List of the United States government. Again, don’t be surprised (dummy).

9 Sex Offenders Registry

I’m prefacing this section by saying that if you’re caught peeing or doing the nasty in public, you’re, technically, by law, a sex offender. So you could end up on this list for hilarious reasons. Mostly, though, people are rapists, pedophiles, and sexual assaulters. 

That said, if the courts have legally found you to be a sex offender, your name will be listed on the National Sex Offender Registry in coordination with the Department of Justice. This registry lists every person designated as a sex offender in all fifty states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and also Native American tribal lands. This information is public, and anyone can search the database.

8 The IRS

Have you ever filed a tax return? If yes, then you are listed in the IRS database.

Any law enforcement agency that conducts an investigation must ask the IRS for information on your tax returns. To receive this information, they must first get a court order. However, the IRS itself uses surveillance techniques if you’ve been deemed worthy of an investigation for some reason. They even use what are called Stingrays, which can simulate or impersonate cell phone towers. When someone uses a stingray, it can grab information from any cell phone within its range, such as text messages, data downloads, and calls.

In addition, the IRS can expand on its data about you by contacting your state’s department of revenue and asking them to share their information about your income tax forms and history. For example, suppose your state has fined you at some point for not reporting your income accurately, supplying false information, or not paying your taxes. In that case, the IRS can use that information to build a profile and case against you for their own internal investigation. 

Filing online with the IRS is convenient once you have set up an online account with them. But to do this, the IRS uses the opportunity to gather more information about you for their list. When you set up an online account with them, the IRS requires that you submit the account number of your home mortgage company. Using this, they can confirm your identity and request and acquire more financial information about you regarding your payment history and other details.

However, to access your mortgage information, the IRS must use one of the major credit reporting agencies. If your mortgage company isn’t affiliated with the reporting agency the IRS uses, the IRS will ask you for your credit card number. The card number permits them to study your payment history and your purchases there instead.

Sneaky and convoluted.

7 National Gun Background Check System

Even though we don’t have a national gun registry, I find it very hard to believe that when someone has a background check done on them to purchase a gun, the buyer’s data isn’t stored somewhere. It’s a known fact the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) does keep some databases related to guns. Some of the data include the owner’s name and address on sales reports with specific types of firearms, especially guns the ATF suspects of having been used in a crime (or any gun reported to the ATF as being stolen).

6 Regional Passport Office (RPO)

If you’ve ever applied for a passport, especially if you’ve traveled internationally, you are listed in the database. You see it all the time in suspense-action movies. A traveler gets off a plane and must clear customs. The agent at the window looks at the picture in the passport and then studies the traveler’s face. The agent types into his computer and sees the traveler’s passport has been flagged. In other words, his name is on a list for whatever reason. Next, the poor guy is being led into an interrogation room.

Let’s be honest. We all get a little nervous when it’s our turn to get our passports stamped.

5 Military

The NPRC (National Military Personal Records Center) is located in St. Louis, Missouri, and holds all service records starting with World War I to the present. The National Archives (called the archives for a reason) in Washington D.C. holds all service records from the Revolutionary War to 1912. The military is meticulous about its record-keeping.

And let’s not forget our local draft boards. Even though we have an all-volunteer military, teenage boys still have to register for the draft with their local draft board when they turn 18.

4 Department of Transportation (DOT)

If you have a driver’s license, you are listed in a database. If you’ve had driver’s infractions, in other words, you’ve been pulled over and ticketed. There’s a record of it in the police department database. 

You can not escape it. Unless you “disappear” from the system. Then all they have is your last known whereabouts and car make and model. Heck, unless you do anything that requires a credit card, hooking up to city utilities, or registering your identity through the DMV, you could be living in a cabin in the woods as a survivalist for all we know.

Those databases (well, any database!) can be searched using keywords. If the police are looking for a crime suspect and have a description of the car, they can search their databases for that car’s make and/or model.

3 Social Security Administration

There’s a song by Jefferson Airplane called “A Child is Coming.” In it, our singer expresses his concern over Uncle Sam coming around asking for the kid’s name and assigning him numbers. It’s the original off-the-grid campaign—except in a super hippie way. Anyway, those numbers refer to the child’s social security number.

If you have a social security number, you are in the system, and there’s really nothing legal you can do about it. There’s a reason kids are encouraged to get a social security card. For a teenager, it’s a sort of right of passage. For the government, it’s a way to keep track of every one of us. That number we are so innocently assigned will be with us throughout our lives. It is a way for the government to monitor us when they deem there’s a logical reason to do so.

2 Credit Reporting Agencies

These agencies may not be government agencies, but they are overseen by the government’s FTC (Federal Trade Commission). This is the same commission that administers the Telemarketing Sales Rule, Identity Theft Act, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act. If you have a credit card, if you’ve applied for credit, taken out a student loan or a car loan, or purchased a home, you are in the system, and the government can access your records for whatever reason.

1 Banking

If you have a checking or savings account, once again, you are in a database that lists your personal information. The government, with a court order, can access bank accounts to survey your financial activity. Quite often, however, it’s not the banks we have to blame for people accessing these databases. Security breaches can result in leaked lists on the Deep Web. These secondary lists mean people can attempt to infiltrate your accounts, hack into your social media, and attempt identity theft.