This purging of the record happened across the world, in British Guiana, Aden, Malta, North Borneo, Belize, the West Indies, Kenya, Uganda – wherever Britain ruled. In the words of Ian Cobain, it was a subversion of the Public Record Acts on an industrial scale, involving hundreds if not thousands of colonial officials, as well as MI5 and Special Branch officers and men and women from army, navy and air force. All of them, whether they knew it or not, were breaking a legal obligation to preserve important official papers for the historical record, in the expectation that most would eventually be declassified. The British government took extraordinary measures to make sure that the fate of these papers remained a secret, whether they had been “migrated” to the UK or destroyed abroad. Many of the artifacts found will be studied to paint a better picture of Sally Hemings’s personal life. Almost nothing is known about her, and just four physical descriptions exist. During the 1850s, the resident owners of the Tudor mansion discovered a secret room in one of the watchtowers. But the priest hole’s ingenuity did not come to light until 2017. The men accused of Morgan’s disappearance were put on trial, but in January of 1827, they were handed relatively lenient sentences. Although they had been involved in a potential murder, the four defendants—Loton Lawson, Eli Bruce, Col. Edward Sawyer and Nicholas G. Chesebro—received prison terms ranging from one month to two years in jail, convicted, as Burt put it, of “forcibly moving Morgan from one place to another against his will.” The all-powerful Masons had, in the eyes of those who opposed them, gotten away with murder. A digital rendering of the Ark of the Covenant. The bible has detailed descriptions of this holy object, but it was lost millennia ago and will likely never be recovered. (Image credit: jgroup via Getty Images)

The Holy Grail is a chalice that Jesus and his disciples supposedly drank from at the Last Supper. Interest in this cup only emerged during the Middle Ages, at which point various legends about its powers emerged. (Image credit: zemarinho via Getty Images) Ancient writers claim that Cleopatra VII and her lover, Mark Antony, were buried together in a tomb after their deaths in 30 B.C. The writer Plutarch (A.D. 45 to 120) wrote that the tomb was located near a temple of Isis, an ancient Egyptian goddess, and was a "lofty and beautiful" monument containing treasures made of gold, silver, emeralds, pearls, ebony and ivory. The Culper Ring was a spy ring formed at the command of General George Washington in the summer of 1778, during the British occupation of New York City in the American Revolutionary War, as a response to the need to penetrate the secure city and gain vital intelligence on the activities and movements of the British Army. Organized by Major Benjamin Tallmadge, the spies – notably Abraham Woodhull and Robert Townsend – ferried information out of New York City and the surrounding region to the Continental Army at great risk to themselves and their families. a b c Kreizman, Maris. (15 September 2019). " Why Donna Tartt's The Secret History Never Became a Movie". Town & Country. Retrieved 31 August 2021. While Freemasonry is not itself a religion, all its members believe in a Supreme Being, or "Grand Architect of the Universe.” Members come from many faiths, but one denomination in particular bars any crossover. The Catholic Church first condemned Freemasonry in 1738, prompted by concern over Masonic temples and the secret rituals performed within them. In the 19th century, the Vatican even called the Masons "the Synagogue of Satan."

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There is something else. We like secrets. Cobain recounts the history of British state secrecy from 1250, when the members of England’s Privy Council first swore to keep their proceedings private. The oath has remained unchanged for the nearly 800 years since, while secrecy as a habit has grown via legislation (particularly the Official Secrets Act of 1911) and the confidentiality clauses contained in the humblest contract of employment. Cobain refers to it as “a very British disease”, and while he makes no comparison with other modern democracies – it would have been helpful to know, for example, how seriously the French state takes the duty of transparency – his conclusion that government secrecy in Britain is not “just an occasional necessity but the fiercely protected norm” is hard to refute. Here is strip 11 of the Copper Scroll, which describes a vast hoard of hidden gold and silver that likely is imaginary. (Image credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC By 4.0) Some 300 years after the tablet’s creation, people in what is now northwestern Peru painted a similarly eerie image on the wall of a shrine complex. Rendered in shades of ocher, yellow, gray and white, the mural of a knife-wielding spider god was likely made by members of the Cupisnique culture. The complex where it was found may have been built to honor water deities. Some fascinating finds revealed in 2021 didn’t quite fit into the aforementioned categories but still ranked among the most intriguing of the year. In northern China, archaeologists excavating more than 600 tombs at a cemetery in Shanxi province unearthed the skeletons of a man and a woman wrapped in an embrace. Likely dated to the Northern Wei period (386 to 534 C.E.), the burial’s “message was clear—husband and wife lay together, embracing each other for eternal love during the afterlife,” as the team wrote in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb”, Francis Gosling, United States Department of Energy History Division (1994) The Flood from Heaven: Deciphering the Atlantis Legend”, Eberhard Zangger, William Morrow and Company (1993) A diameter of 330 meters (1,083 ft) makes Avebury the largest stone ring in Europe. Why a Neolithic society decided to arrange 100 massive stones into three circles sometime around 2850–2200 BC remains hazy.

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Perhaps, this is notably the most highly protected information in the world. The nuclear facilities by themselves are a secret and only specific people know where they are located. The nuclear launch codes are the most secretive information of the U.S. government, such that only top officials in the U.S. department of defense have access to these codes. The amount of nuclear weapons and the type of nuclear weapon that USA possesses remain undisclosed to the public. The public will never get to know of the nuclear information.

During] Operation Mincemeat, the British SOE created a fake ID for the corpse of a homeless man cleaned up to look like a naval officer and attached a briefcase full of fake plans for an invasion of Greece to his wrist before having the body wash up on shore in [Spain]. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the GermanAbwehr(military intelligence), had been feeding Britain intelligence information since 1939 and made sure that the plans were taken seriously by the German military command. The Western Allies next move would be the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky) instead on 9 July 1943. Iraqi forces recaptured the hill on which it stood in 2017, and archaeologists were allowed to assess the damage. The ancient building had been blown up, but a remarkable find waited underneath the rubble.Greek fire” was an incendiary weapon of unknown composition employed by the Byzantine Empire as early as 672 CE. Commonly deployed in naval confrontations, continuing to burn atop the waters rather than being extinguished by them, the flammable liquid was discharged using pressurized nozzles, “siphōns”, akin to the distribution method of a modern-day flamethrower. The discovery of Greek fire was critical to the survival of the Byzantine Empire, with the use of the weapon paramount to the successful defeat of the first and second Arab sieges of Constantinople in 647-678 and 717-718 respectively; Greek fire was also used to great effect by the Imperial Fleet during the Byzantine civil wars, obliterating the opposing ships of Thomas the Slav in 821. However, the weapon also possessed notable limitations, with its successful use depending on favorable winds to direct the flamethrowers. President John F. Kennedy riding in the presidential motorcade near Dealey Plaza in Dallas just before he was shot. (Image credit: Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Some archaeological discoveries revealed this year raised more questions than answers. On the Mediterranean island of Corsica, the remains of adults buried in giant amphorae between the third and sixth centuries C.E. puzzled researchers, as the practice of interring the deceased in jars was more often reserved for infants and children. In Transylvania, people buried with urns placed over their skulls or feet similarly baffled scholars, who theorized that the vessels contained food or drink intended as nourishment for the afterlife. An Egyptian port city on the Mediterranean Sea, Thonis-Heracleion served as a major trading hub prior to the founding of nearby Alexandria around 331 B.C. Mythical hero Heracles and Helen of Troy both supposedly spent time there. Around the second century B.C., however, the city center collapsed due to soil liquification, possibly triggered by earthquakes, tsunamis, or floods. Eventually, all of Thonis-Heracleion sank underwater, where it remained lost to time until being rediscovered in the early 2000s by marine archeologists. Since then, large statues, animal sarcophagi, temple ruins, pottery shards, jewelry, coins, and even 2,400-year-old fruit baskets have been pulled from the waves, thus shining new light on this real-life Atlantis. 2. Plain of Jars The Secret History is an inverted detective story narrated by one of the six students, Richard Papen, who reflects years later upon the situation that led to the murder of their friend Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran– wherein the events leading up to the murder are revealed sequentially. The novel explores the circumstances and lasting effects of Bunny's death on the academically and socially isolated group of classics students of which he was a part.