--- title: "They Proposed Shooting Down An American Airliner. The President Said No." dek: "The memorandum is dated 13 March 1962, signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and sat classified for thirty-five years. It is at College Park. It is not evidence for any of the claims it made plausible." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: The Republic author: June Halloway (fictional) published: 2026-08-10T10:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/northwoods-they-wrote-it-down tags: Northwoods, false flag, Joint Chiefs, declassification, Cuba genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # They Proposed Shooting Down An American Airliner. The President Said No. *The memorandum is dated 13 March 1962, signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and sat classified for thirty-five years. It is at College Park. It is not evidence for any of the claims it made plausible.* It is a real document. It is signed. It is dated 13 March 1962. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent it to the Secretary of Defense under the subject line "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba", and its annex proposes, in numbered paragraphs, sinking an American ship, staging terror in American cities, and blowing up a drone aircraft dressed as an airliner while holding funerals for passengers who never existed. Anybody can read it. It is at College Park, it is free, and a reader could order it up this week. > **Figure:** What the annex actually proposed — see https://theyburied.com/article/northwoods-they-wrote-it-down ## The second sentence Nothing in it happened. The President rejected it. The chairman who signed it was moved to another post within the year. No ship was sunk, no aircraft was destroyed, no funeral was held for anybody invented. Reporting the first half of this story is easy and it is what everybody does. Reporting the second half — and giving it the same size type — is the hard part, and it is the whole job. ## Why it matters more than the things it is used to prove Professor Delphine Marchetti-Osei put the thing our correspondent had been circling for two months. A state that can produce this document is a state in which somebody, in a room, with a rank, thought it was a reasonable thing to type. That is a real and permanent fact about institutions and it should frighten a reader more than it usually does. And a state that then **rejects** it is also a real fact, and it is the one that gets left out. "You are allowed to hold both," she said. "Most people writing about this cannot, and the ones who can are boring, and that is a problem for democracy and not for me." > A thing proposed once and refused is not a thing done routinely. That sentence has to be in the story, at the same size. > > — Prof. Delphine Marchetti-Osei ## How it got out Not a leak. Not a whistleblower. Not a hack. It came out in 1997 through a records review board set up by a statute about the Kennedy assassination — a body with a legal mandate to open files, a staff, and a deadline. A Cuba planning document fell inside the net because of who signed it and when. The former board member we interviewed was blunt about the lesson: "People want the story where somebody smuggles it out in a coat. The story is that Congress passed a law with teeth and a deadline, and then thirty-five years of paper came out. That is available to you again any time you want it, and nobody wants it, because it is not a film." ## What this document is not It is not evidence about any event after 1962. This newspaper receives letters citing it as proof of four separate modern events. It is not proof of any of them, and it cannot be, because a proposal that was refused in 1962 tells you what some officers thought in 1962. What it does do — and this is the reason it belongs on this desk rather than in a history journal — is destroy a particular lazy argument. Nobody can say such a thing would never be contemplated. It was contemplated, in writing, with numbered paragraphs, by the highest uniformed officer in the country. The question after that is not whether it is thinkable. It is whether it happened, and that question needs evidence, and this document is not evidence of it. ## Sources (invented) - The memorandum itself, Public record, National Archives, College Park — Read in the original over two days (May 2026) - Prof. Delphine Marchetti-Osei, Historian of civil-military relations — Interviewed by video call twice (May and June 2026) - A former member of the records review board, Named in our notes; on the record — Interviewed by telephone (June 2026) - Archival reference staff, Named in our notes — In person (May 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-2023: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2023 ## What we could not confirm - Nothing about the document. It is signed, dated, catalogued and public. - Whether anything comparable was proposed later. We do not know, and the honest position is that a thing declassified in 1997 tells you about 1962. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.