A Brief Catalog of All the Very Valuable Things the U.S. Has 'Misplaced' Over the Years

A U.S. government van full of presidential gear that had been stolen from a Virginia Marriott hotel parking lot turned up recently — unscathed, apparently, with all its precious cargo accounted for — in a neighboring hotel’s parking lot. Packed with some $200,000 worth of audio gear, a few podiums and presidential seals, “behind which only the president himself can stand”, the would-be loot was ~~a beacon~~ bacon for thieves, the next target in a line of disappearing government property.

Mere days prior, you might recall, an ex-government worker admitted to stealing sound recordings from the National Archives to be slung around eBay. Dude’s little scheme had been going on for eight years. That’s a lot of recordings.

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So, what is going on?

Nothing out of the ordinary, really. For all its money and firepower and technological foresight, the federal government has always been pretty careless about keeping tabs on sensitive stuff. The U.S. has a long and storied history of losing its shit.

Below you’ll find a few of the more curious gadgets, hardwares and artifacts that have been jacked or have simply gone missing (“gone missing”) over the past century. Also, the top result after Google searching “list of stolen government property” is this list of all the people George H.W. Bush pardoned. (There were 75.)

A ship packed with raw ammunitions

It’s one of the sea’s great unsolved mysteries: Sometime between March 3 and 4, 1918, the USS Cyclops, a 540-foot ironclad collier en route from Rio de Janeiro to Baltimore and bearing 11,000 tonnes of manganese ore (munitions fodder), vanished somewhere. There were no survivors – over 300 officers, crew and passengers were lost to the waves, to this day the U.S. Navy’s single largest non-combat related loss of life – nor has any wreckage ever been recovered. The doomed vessel was 3,000 tonnes overburdened, and it was reported that her starboard engine had a cracked cylinder. Prevailing theory holds that she likely just fell apart.

Then again, her capricious captain was a suspected German sympathizer known for his past exploits shuttling illegal cargo (opium, possibly), patrolling decks in long-johns and derby, and chasing around his crew, barking orders with pistol drawn.

Two atomic bulls eyes

OK, not exactly cold, hard gizmo-y stuff, but Fat Man and Little Boy were. So we’ll count the Map of Target Area 90-30-748 and that of Target Area 90-36-542, better known as Hiroshima Area A-2 Section and Target Unit – Intell Section, respectively. Both are missing from the Archives.

Why anyone would want to recover the landing strips to arguably the darkest shit stains in American history is beyond me, though. Hopefully they were torched, or something.

The first timepiece worn on the moon.

Or, Buzz Aldrin’s Omega Speedmaster. Many call it the “Holy Grail of timepieces”, which was last seen, by Aldrin’s accounts, when he shipped it off to the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1970s. Years later, a fellow from Long Beach who claimed to own the watch filed suit to try and authenticate the thing. He’d bought it for $175 off a college kid who said his father found it in the sand at a beach in Santa Barbara. So it just had to be the real deal.

A San Diego judge dismissed the suit after “extensive investigation, including the deposition of a former NASA employee involved in the Apollo program … concluded that the watch was not the watch Aldrin had worn,” as an assistant U.S. attorney wrote to the judge. To which the guy’s lawyer replied: “The custody of our nation’s artifacts have been entrusted to the wrong people.” Exactly.

Lots of drugs, vehicles, laptops and other crap

As in untold billions of dollars worth of drugs, vehicles, weapons, laptops and other crap, most of which evaporated in Iraq.

According to a 2010 report (PDF) by the State Department Inspector General, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad had no accounting for 159 of the embassy’s 1,168 vehicles. The report also found 282 other vehicles ($40.4 million) being improperly registered and missing furniture and office equipment ($2.3 million). Auditors noted sloppy bookkeeping at the embassy’s pharmacy, where 7,196 items – including a bunch of morphine and oxycodone – were “missing.” And when the U.S. tried to donate 8,000 laptops to the children of Babil (modern-day Babylon) last year most of the machines went missing, too.

But the U.S. is really no better stateside — even pre-9/11. Between 1999 and 2001, according to the Inspector General of the Treasury, U.S. Customs lost 2,251 computers on top of 59 weapons, 613 badges, and 572 government credentials. In 2002 the FBI announced that it had “misplaced” 317 laptops shortly after the Justice Department said that 775 weapons and 400 computers had been lost or stolen from the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Marshal Service between late 1999 and early 2002.

Bill’s hard drive

A Western Digital 2TB external hard drive containing back up tapes from the Executive Office of the President from the Clinton Administration and a bunch of names and Social Security numbers has been missing from the Archives since 2009. If you know of its whereabouts, there’s a cool $50,000 with your name on it.

Not much to say to the beleaguered Archives on this one. Better get on that before the imminent hard drive drought.