I had originally planned to title this week’s column, “Politics,” but we have learned not to discuss that matter if we want to keep friends (or readers here). Since those of us of a certain age clearly remember the Watergate affair and since Deep Throat recently revealed his identity, what better time to browse the Internet and dig for secrets.
White House Tapes . The nonpartisan Miller Center at the University of Virginia has a staff that reviews and posts transcripts, with audio highlights, of some of our past presidents. The website is a service for historical researchers and journalists and represents one of a larger family of sites that focuses on American politics. Those include AmericanPresident.org, the Scripps Library, and AmericanPoliticalDevelopment.org. Those links are easily accessed from the White House Tapes website, and the very curious may find themselves surfing deeper and deeper into lesser-known barrels of information. While all of us worry about spyware tracking our every move in cyberspace, we can at least do a little retrograde spying ourselves by listening to once clandestine recordings made by Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.
National Security Archive . There are many interesting items to peruse here, whether you are interested in politics or not. I never knew that Elvis Presley wrote a letter to then-President Nixon asking to visit the White House and requesting that he (Elvis) be made a Federal Agent at Large. It should come as no surprise to cynics that the photos of Elvis with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office are the most requested items from the National Archives—much more so that requests for copies of the Declaration of Independence. But back to politics. You can read a ream of materials from the September 11 Sourcebooks, or the Deep Throat Files, or Nuclear Policy or dozens of other items dealing with past and current national security issues, including quite a lot about Afghanistan. This website is the project of an independent, non-governmental research institute and library located at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Think About It . In my search for sites about secrets, I suppose it was inevitable that I would run across a few websites dealing with the Men in Black, the Grays, Area 51, and the numerous, deep underground tunnel-worlds that some say exist under U.S. soil. The secret information here is said to have come from a national security insider who remains unnamed, of course. This discourse talks about the very top secret moon and Mars bases, the Human Genome project gone awry and genetically altered creatures that exist deep below the earth. I quickly scanned much of the material here, having read or heard about it years ago. But if you keep reading, you will come to a paragraph that warns us that because we now have knowledge of these very secretive activities kept from us average Joes and Janes—that our own lives can be in peril because of our discovery. A creative mind can take this material and fashion some very entertaining novels or movies based on the stuff here. In fact, some creatives have done that already.
Secret Files from Ghost Village . There are no political secrets here that I could find. Just ghost stories submitted by people who found this website. Some of the stories might cause the hair to rise on the back of your neck, or maybe not.
