About the game
Reports reach Hal Hunt’s desk before anyone else reads them. Each one holds a secret, a cover story and a reader waiting on the other side: a reporter, a press room, a panel of scientists. You have a black pen, a clock and only so much ink.
How to play
- Read your orders: what to hide, and the cover story you must leave readable.
- Drag across words to black them out. Tap a word to flip it, or drag across black to lift it. On a keyboard, the arrow keys move between words, Space blacks one out, and Shift with an arrow key paints.
- Too little black and the secret leaks. Too much black and the black bars become the story. Black out the cover story and nobody believes it.
- Send the file before the clock runs out. A piece of gum buys twenty more seconds, once a file, and you can turn the clock off.
- The reader goes through what you left, and red rings show what they found. Then you choose whether to take another file.
What really happened
The Roswell wreckage
The air base at Roswell, New Mexico, announced it had recovered a “flying disc” from a ranch, and within a day the Army said it was a weather balloon. A 1994 Air Force report traced the wreckage to Project Mogul, a secret balloon program built to listen for Soviet atomic tests.
Radar targets over Washington
On two weekends, radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked unknown targets over the capital, and jets were sent up. The Air Force told the biggest Pentagon press conference since the Second World War that the likely cause was temperature inversions.
The Robertson Panel
Scientists called together by the CIA and chaired by the physicist H. P. Robertson met for four days, found no threat in the sightings and recommended teaching the public to take them less seriously. A cut-down version of their report was made public in 1958.
Hal Hunt and the people and papers in these games are made up. The history notes are real.