February 18, 2012

Charlie Chaplin is one of the most well-known comedic actors of all time. But was his name really Charlie Chaplin? And where did he come from? The Mysterious Charlie Chaplin? Back in 1952, during the height of McCarthyism, the U.S. government was convinced Charlie Chaplin was a communist. They asked the British Secret Service, MI5, to investigate…

February 17, 2012

In the 1960s, the CIA embarked on all sorts of strange espionage projects to spy on the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was none stranger than America’s first cyborg spy cat…the Acoustic Kitty. The Acoustic Kitty Project? The Acoustic Kitty project, which cost a whopping $25 million, wasn’t for the squeamish. Agents literally sliced open a…

September 21, 2011

In 1990, a strange sculpture known as Kryptos appeared in the courtyard outside CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It consisted of a wavy copper screen covered with 1,732 letters, 4 question marks, and 2 spaces. These characters represent four encoded messages, one of which remains unsolved to this day. What is this famous code that’s…

September 13, 2011

On April 19, 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency declassified six secret documents from 1917 and 1918. These were America’s oldest classified documents and believed to be the last of their kind from World War I. So, what great secrets could possibly require nearly a century of security? Political intrigue? Government conspiracy? Something even worse? Secret…