---
title: "Nine Men Signed One Page. It Names No Agency And Never Expires."
dek: "Forty-seven years, one sheet of paper, no expiry date and no agency named anywhere on it. Four of the men who signed talked to this newspaper. Three have now broken it in print, and nothing has happened."
kind: column (Column)
desk: Off-World
author: Ambrose Teague (fictional)
published: 2026-08-24T13:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/what-nine-men-signed
tags: Dulce, nondisclosure, Archuleta Mesa, 1979, New Mexico
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Nine Men Signed One Page. It Names No Agency And Never Expires.

*Forty-seven years, one sheet of paper, no expiry date and no agency named anywhere on it. Four of the men who signed talked to this newspaper. Three have now broken it in print, and nothing has happened.*

The sheet is 216 millimetres by 279, printed on one side, on the kind of stock a job printer keeps in the back for forms nobody will ever file.

It has a number in the bottom left corner, set in six-point type: S-411 (7-79).

It does not name an agency. Not in the heading, not in the body, not in the penalty clause, not under the signature block. The rectangle at the head of the page, where a seal goes on every government form any of us has handled, was printed empty.

Eleven men came off that pad alive on 15 August 1979. Nine of them signed this sheet within the fortnight. The other two were never approached, and neither knows why not.

> **Figure:** Thirteen days of signatures, and forty-seven years of holding them — see https://theyburied.com/article/what-nine-men-signed

## What it says

Four paragraphs and a block. The signatory acknowledges access to information, undertakes not to disclose it to any person, and accepts that the undertaking continues in perpetuity — unaffected by the end of his employment, by time, or by anyone else publishing the same information first.

Then the paragraph the men remember. Disclosure, it says, may be prosecuted under applicable statute.

It does not say which statute. It does not say who would prosecute. There is a countersignature line. On both signed copies it is initialled, not signed, with the same two initials in what looks like the same pen.

There is a witness line. On both copies and on the blank it is completed in the same hand, with the same name — a name that appears in no federal or state employment record we can search.

## The room

Seven of the nine signed in room 14 of a motel on the highway through Chama, between 21 and 24 August 1979, one at a time, in front of a man who gave no name.

Four of them have described him to me separately, without ever having discussed it with each other. They agree: tall, a short-sleeved shirt with a pen in the pocket, a briefcase that stayed shut until each man had finished reading, and an apology.

He said it was a formality, and for their protection. One of them says he shook hands and said thank you — the detail that has stayed with that man for forty-seven years, because it was the only courtesy anybody showed him that month.

## What it costs to hold a sheet of paper

Junius Falkenrath-Mora put his copy in a safe-deposit box in Farmington in 1984 and paid the rent until 2025 — twenty-two dollars a year at the start, ninety-five at the end. He reckons he has spent over two thousand dollars keeping one page in a steel drawer.

Wendell Ostrander-Cruz stopped going to crew reunions in 1981 and never explained it to his wife, because explaining would have meant saying what he could not say. She died in 2011. He told me about her before he told me about the hole, and asked that it stay in that order.

Delbert Aguayo-Sharp took the sheet to a lawyer in Durango in 1994 and was billed $150. The advice, which he has kept, runs to one paragraph: the document has no counterparty, counsel cannot advise on an obligation owed to nobody in particular, and Mr Aguayo-Sharp should consider his own conscience.

> I have carried a piece of paper for forty-seven years and it will not tell me who I am keeping the promise to.
>
> — Junius Falkenrath-Mora

Royce Tenhoeve-Baca has met me twice, made coffee both times, and talked about elk. He knows exactly what I came for. He is not going to, and I have stopped asking, and I want to say plainly that I think he is entitled to that.

## The eight months

Two of the nine published their account in December 2025, under their own names, with a small press in Colorado. Nine hundred copies. A third swore an affidavit in a New Mexico district court in January, on a public docket, with his home address on the face of it.

Since then: no letter. No visit. No telephone call at an odd hour. I have searched the dockets of three federal districts and two state ones. The two who are retired federal employees requested their own personnel files and found nothing added.

Eight months of nothing.

The records officer whose reply runs below warns me not to lean on that, and he is right that eight months is not a lifetime. I am leaning on it anyway, carefully, because it is the only test anybody has ever run on this instrument, and the men ran it, not me.

## What the paper thinks

This newspaper believes these men. It spent fourteen months with them, checked what could be checked, paid none of them and refused two who asked. Their account of 6 August matches a shift log that has sat on a public shelf since 1988, which none of them had seen and three did not know existed: [Exhibit 14](/article/brief-exhibit-fourteen-shift-log), $23.50 at the counter.

Six of the nine are still holding the sheet. One of the six is dead and held it to the end.

It named no agency. It never had to. Tired men signed it at the end of a shift, for a stranger who apologised, and it has enforced itself ever since at a cost to anybody of nothing at all.

## Sources (invented)

- Junius Falkenrath-Mora, 78, Motorman on the 6 August tour; one of the nine — Interviewed nine times over fourteen months, at his house and once in the motel car park; supplied his signed copy for photography (June 2025 – August 2026)
- Wendell Ostrander-Cruz, 71, Derrickhand; one of the nine, and one of the two who published in December 2025 — Interviewed four times, twice on the record with a recorder running, once at the pad (2025–2026)
- Nella Vinson-Baptiste, 84, Widow of Ansel Vinson-Baptiste, the toolpusher — Visited three times; produced an unsigned blank of the form from a shoebox on the fourth visit, unprompted (August 2026)
- Requisition ledger, Cordova & Pfeffer job printers, Farmington, Business records collection, a New Mexico university library, boxes 41–44 — Read in the reading room over two days; nine pages copied at ten cents (July 2026)
- Fenella Achterberg-Roy, Independent researcher who approached all nine signatories in 2003 — Traced through a footnote; interviewed by video call; gave us her correspondence file (May 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- Who the man in room 14 was. Four of the nine have described him to us separately and the descriptions agree on his height, his shirt, the briefcase and the fact that he apologised. None of them was told a name, none of them asked for identification, and no register, receipt or vehicle record survives from that motel for that week. The next door here is the room ledger, which the 1986 purchaser says he burned with the rest of the office paper, and we believe him.
- What happened to the three men whose names are on the crew list at spud and not on the demobilisation payroll. Two have death certificates issued in New Mexico within eleven weeks of August 1979. We hold both. We are not going to print what they say until we have spoken to the families, and two of the three families have not answered a letter, a card or a knock at the door. That is the story after this one, and it is not ready.
- Whether the instrument was ever enforceable at all. Two lawyers we asked, independently, said an undertaking that names no counterparty and cites no statute is probably unenforceable and would have been in 1979. Neither would say so in a form the men could rely on, because neither could tell us who would be defending it if they were wrong.

## Right of reply

**Corwin Bledsoe-Achterberg, chief of the records and declassification division of the federal office that now holds the contracting agency's files** (Replied 4 August 2026 after two extensions, both of which he asked for in writing and both of which we granted. Printed entire.):

> I am going to give you a longer answer than your questions require, because a short one would be accurate and misleading at the same time, and I have spent nineteen years watching short accurate answers do damage.
> 
> No instrument bearing the number S-411 appears in the forms index this office maintains, nor in the two predecessor indexes we inherited, nor in the consolidated register of nondisclosure instruments compiled in 1994. I have caused all three to be searched by hand as well as by system, because the systems are not good.
> 
> An index, however, is not a universe. It is a list of the forms somebody thought worth listing. I cannot tell you that no such sheet was printed. I can tell you that this office does not hold it and has no record of holding it, and I would ask you to print that sentence exactly as I have written it rather than the shorter one.
> 
> On your requisition. I located it, which took a colleague of mine eleven days and which I am reporting to you because you would have found out. The plant at Farmington operated in that period under a printing contract administered by an agency this office succeeded. The requisition you photographed is annotated, as you say, and it is also annotated in a second hand with the words ‘not for forms index — deliver to requester’. I do not know who the requester was. The delivery-receipt file for that contract year was destroyed on schedule in 1993 under a records disposition authority I have read and which was properly applied. I am aware of how that reads. It reads that way to me too.
> 
> On the substance, and this is where I would like to be useful rather than correct. An undertaking that names no agency, cites no statute and provides no point of contact is not, in my professional opinion, an enforceable instrument, and I doubt it was one in 1979. Whoever drafted it either did not know what they were doing or knew exactly what they were doing, and I have no way to tell you which. What I can say is that in my experience the second is more common than people assume. A sheet like that does not need to be enforceable. It needs to be believed, once, by a tired man at the end of a shift, and then it works by itself for the rest of his life at no further cost to anybody.
> 
> So I will say the thing your readers will not expect from this office. If the men you have spoken to are holding a sheet that this government cannot identify, no part of this government is in a position to hold them to it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to be tidy. I would encourage them to obtain their own counsel rather than take that from me, because I am not their lawyer and my saying it in a newspaper is worth nothing in a courtroom.
> 
> One objection, and it is not small. You have written that nothing has happened to the three men who published. You have checked dockets, credit and two personnel files, which is more than most reporters would do, and you are entitled to say what you found. You are not entitled to the implication that eight months of nothing is proof of nothing to come, and I noticed that your column leans on it. Institutions are slower than that and quieter than that. I would not build a paragraph on it, and if you keep the paragraph I would like this sentence kept beside it.
> 
> Finally: I am sorry about the man in the motel room. I do not know who he was. I have looked.

---
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.