Ten Weirdest Military Investigations in the World

VIVA – The military has rules and regulations that are overseen by military courts. Sometimes, the military justice system is outside the system that applies to all of us and the military handles their problems internally.

Investigators in the military are usually tasked with investigating issues that they think could threaten the security of the country or the integrity of the military and its members. But sometimes, these investigators have to investigate the strangest things.

Here are some of the weirdest military investigations in the world that people rarely imagine, as reported by various sources.

1. The Navy Investigated Friends of Dorothy

Some issues have a long history in the US military, homosexuality is one of them. Gay in the military has been a popular term for people for years. Before that, the military had Don't Ask, Don't Tell rules that were in place in the 90s. This rule said that it was okay to be gay as long as no one knew about it.

Before the Don't Ask and Don't Tell rules, things were pretty bad with the military actively working to eliminate the idea of homosexuality in the military. Thus, the Navy decided to investigate Friends of Dorothy. Friends of Dorothy is a term that dates back to the 1940s and 1950s. It was a disguised way for someone to identify as gay.

They learned that gay men referred to themselves as Friends of Dorothy and thus began an investigation into who this mysterious Dorothy was. They believed that Dorothy was a real woman who was running a secret underground cabal of gay military men in Chicago. 

Naval Investigative Service officers hunted down Dorothy in 1981 in an attempt to get a master list of gays in the military.

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Ilustrasi bom rakitan.

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• Pixabay.

In 2001, the military raided an Al-Qaeda safe house and discovered plans to build nuclear weapons. Back then, US officials had to take the time to admit they were aware of the joke plans and dismissed their significance.

A Pentagon spokesman said the media needed to better check the credibility of their sources when asked about it. Jose Padilla, was arrested for trying to build a bomb to destroy buildings in the United States in 2022.

At that time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had to once again investigate the document to determine its source. 

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• VIVAnews/ Faddy Ravydera

The military has dedicated a lot of time to investigating homosexuality and, apart from Friends of Dorothy, there have also been extensive undercover operations. Known as the Newport Sex Scandal, the events overseen by Franklin Roosevelt's assistant secretary of the Navy in 1919 were purportedly carried out in an attempt to eliminate gays in the Navy.

A report from Newport, Rhode Island stated that homosexuality was a serious problem at the military base there. Secretary Roosevelt read the report and agreed that a thorough investigation was necessary although he later disavowed knowledge of the methods used in such investigations to absolve himself of responsibility.

A team of over 40 investigators, all of whom needed to be in their teens or early 20s, good-looking, and willing to put themselves in compromising positions for their country were enlisted and promised that they would not be prosecuted if they should be implicated in a crime.

Captain Will Swenson was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2013 for his heroism during the Gangjal Battle of 2009. There aren't many Medals of Honor winners in the world so this is a pretty big deal for someone who gets it.

Even so, the army is still investigating Swenson because of an Amazon book review. The review was for a book called "The Wrong War," by war correspondent Bing West.

The review was left by a man named Mathew Golsteyn, an army major. In his review, he referred to Swenson as a friend. That single mention prompted the Army Criminal Investigation Division to pick up Swenson's trash and question his neighbors, friends, and family about his life. Swenson criticized how the military leadership handled the battles that won him medals.

The Ashley Madison website rose to prominence a few years ago due to a security breach. Back then, many people discovered there was a website dedicated to facilitating secret connections, arguably for married people. But the site also had ties to the military.

In 2012, the site was issued a subpoena because the military was investigating claims of adultery, a possibly unforeseen result of the data breach by members. In addition to potential divorcees, military members on the site were potentially at risk of court-martial because they may have used military computers to access the site.

The investigation then fell apart when it was determined that military members were allowed to use computers to communicate with friends even if those friends were the ones having the affair. 

Propaganda is a powerful tool relied upon by militaries in many countries to spread discord and spread misinformation and boost morale. In Canada, it is used to scare civilians. 

As part of an exercise, a letter made to look like an official government document warned Nova Scotia residents that a pack of wolves was on the loose. It started with a loudspeaker-testing exercise, in which the soldiers involved did use wolf sounds for no particular reason. Then another soldier decides to up the ante by creating a fake document, which is not part of the test at all. 

Someone else saw the document and thought it was real and showed his wife the wrong one. It then spread like, a pack of wolves and caused panic in the nearby community.

Well, the investigation established that the officers involved were not trained in how to properly conduct their exercises, and also took too many liberties with what they were allowed to do.

The Colombian military had to investigate soldiers and high-ranking officers who killed civilians and then dressed them up as guerrillas to increase their kill count. Twenty officers were dismissed as a result of the investigation, three of whom were generals. In total, 6,402 people were found to have been killed over 6 years to make the military look more efficient.

A shopkeeper was found to be selling computer flash drives containing sensitive military information including things like the Social Security numbers of generals working on the base. You can get a list of soldiers who have undergone nuclear, chemical, and biological safety training for about $20.

As for the shopkeeper, he said that he doesn't sell stolen data, only stolen hardware. He doesn't care what's on the drives, but workers keep stealing them from the base to sell to him and he sells them to others.

Thousands of locals work at the base as cleaners and in other capacities and, even if searched, the drives are so easy to hide that it's hard to tell who the thief is. 

The Air Force still has to investigate how a B-52 bomber managed to fly across the country accidentally armed with six nuclear warheads. Seventy airmen were punished for their role in the disaster which shows many rules had to be ignored for the event to happen.

It turned out that the warheads were meant to be removed according to very strict rules that included disarmament, removal, and transportation but the crew ignored them, made their schedule, and forgot that part. 

The military assured everyone that no one was in danger but that offered little comfort and, as has been pointed out, the fact that they could be moved accidentally still caused concern.

 The Navy was forced to investigate a giant sky penis in 2017. It was discovered that jets leave contrails in the sky. Conspiracies aside, they are like big, fluffy pen marks on the blue canvas of the sky and Navy EA-18G Growler crews noticed that when they flew around with time to spare that they managed to turn those contrails into a rough but enormous sketch of a penis.

People said the contrails would soon fade away. They didn't. The penis remained visible for quite some time. People took pictures, and they were shared on social media. The Navy was investigating the incident within hours, and Washington had prepared for the bad media attention. 

An investigation was conducted, but the results were kept secret. Even a Freedom of Information Act requests two years later yielded only heavily redacted documents that hid the names of the crew and the punishment they received, despite some sort of reprimand being given.

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2. The Military Investigated the Journal of Irreproducible Results when Al-Qaeda Had Their Fake Bom Plans