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From: Ufojoe1@aol.com [Joe Murgia]
Date: Sat, 7 Feb 1998 15:01:21 EST
Fwd Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 17:29:10 -0500
Subject: Re: Naval Records Shredded

Well, it took them long enough, but the mainstream media has
finally picked up on this story. This story was first reported
last year by Linda Moulton Howe on Art Bell's Dreamland.

Joe Murgia


New York Times Page One - 2/7/98

Interagency Snafu Causes Scientific Records to Be Shredded

By Malcolm W. Browne

  A huge trove of scientific records from the Naval Research
Laboratory has been destroyed because of snarled communications
between another federal agency and the laboratory, which calls the
loss a calamity.

  An investigation by both agencies is to be concluded this month.
But although the investigators expect to pin the responsibility for
the loss of the irreplaceable documents, which spanned half a
century, nothing can be done to recover them. All were shredded
last year, in a mistake that attracted little public notice until a
recent account of it in a Washington newsletter, Science and
Government Report.

  Dr. David van Keuren, the naval laboratory's historian, said in an
interview that the destroyed records included some 42,000 scientific
notebooks and 600 cubic feet of letters and other correspondence.
All had been stored at the Federal Records Center in Suitland, Md.

  Although some of the lost records were as recent as the mid-1980s,
 about 80 percent predated 1950. While they had little value for
scientific research, they were nonetheless prized, as historical
documents.

  Over the course of decades, the Naval Research Laboratory,
which has a staff of about 3,500 and is based in Washington,
has made a number of major contributions to the nation's science
and technology, in the development of American radar,
astrophysics and radio astronomy, the study of underwater sound,
the invention of sonar, the investigation of matter under enormous
pressures like those found within giant planets, and the chemistry
of carbon cage molecules, among other fields.

  One major loss from the documents' destruction was that of many
of the records covering the laboratory's role in launching Vanguard,
one of America's earliest space satellites. Vanguard made it into
orbit in March 1958, just months behind the Soviet satellite Sputnik
and America's first satellite, Explorer.

  Although many records of the Vanguard program were lost,
van Keuren said, some private records kept by relatives of
scientists who worked on the project have been recovered.
There are hopes, he said, that other private sources may
be able to fill in a few of the gaps.

  Van Keuren discovered the shredding last August, when he
asked the laboratory's archivist to retrieve some documents
about materials science from the Federal Records Center
and was told that they had been destroyed.

"As you can imagine," he said, "we're very unhappy."

  The National Archives and Records Administration, which
runs the records center, does not question the value of the
destroyed papers, said Dr. Susan Cooper, spokesman for
the agency. Dr. Cooper said a "fail-safe" system for protecting
valuable federal documents had evidently failed.

  Under that system, she said, before documents from federal
agencies are placed into storage, they are provisionally assessed
as either permanent or temporary, depending on the records
center's perception of their importance.

  "The archives of a Cabinet secretary are always designated
as permanent, for example," Dr. Cooper said, "while my
correspondence would, in general, be temporary."

  Then, when temporary files have been stored for a long period
and are about to be consigned to the shredder, the records
center must give the federal agency from which they came
90 days' notice, in case the agency wants to preserve them.

  The Naval Research Laboratory contends that it never received
such warning last year before its temporary records were destroyed.

  But Dr. Cooper replied, "We have the evidence that the laboratory
received notification but did not act on it."

  Dr. John Carlin, who as archivist of the United States heads the
National Archives and Records Administration, said the destroyed
documents had been judged by his agency to be "informal
laboratory notebooks containing technical data which is routine,
fragmentary or essentially duplicated in technical reports and papers."

  Moreover, said Dr. Cooper, "though the Navy responded to other
notices that came with this one, it raised no objection to carrying
out the scheduled disposal of the laboratory material."



Saturday February 7th, 1998
Copyright 1998, New York Times