Unknown Knowns

One place to look would be somewhere that is getting big datasets. So I think Ocean Dynamics, or something similar from Navy acoustic data from the seafloor. Perhaps knowledge of ecologic collapse or explosion of ceertain species changing acoustic patterns in the ocean. Atmospheric data up to exosphere from radar. Is there any skywatch cameras that could somehow have cosmic ray data in them?

Those are ones that popped into my head.

In The Hubble Wars, Eric Chiasson tells the story of USAF's Keyhole satellite specialists reviewing NASA's plans for grinding the Hubble's mirror. He indicates that they could potentially have helped NASA avoid their optics problem but decided to keep quiet for the sake of secrecy.

This wasn't much like, say, public-key crypto, though; those were things that they invented, used, and kept secret. This is a case of something they noticed, but didn't follow up because it wasn't their job to follow it up.

Maybe Aviation Week & Space Tech's spaceplane rumour..

I have two words for you: Ros Well

An Earth-like extrasolar planet. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a clear shot of one buried in all the unprocessed Hubble imagery that's been shot. It'll be announced as discovered in a few years with the lead buried in the twelfth paragraph that the image was shot back in circa 1998.

What do you propose that an Earth-like extrasolar planet looks like in Hubble imagery?

Not possible for HST to have imaged an earth-like planet; the contrast is too large if they are near a star, and if they are far from a star, then they are too faint in the optical.
If there are a lot of free floating low mass planets, then a few could be relatively close to the Sun and we could in principle have serendipitously caught one in an infra-red image, but I don't think any Hubble NICMOS images are deep enough.

On the other hand, if any of them were deep enough, then the odds are not bad that I was a co-I on the proposal that took that image...

hos! you're a trouble maker!
But I do wonder why the USAF didn't jump on the variable radio sources as "Little Green Men" sources, that ought to have been a conjecture if they had thought about it.
One easily proven to be unlikely to be true, but still, it should have got their interest.

It's unlikely there will be any wonderful scientific "things" buried in classification. High levels of classification are often used to hide bad science. I think it's more likely that the discoveries will be like the pulsar incident, where some interesting phenomenon is hidden in a gigantic data set and unnoticed because it is subtle, not the subject of main interest or just outside the experience of the data collectors.

Stuff about the ocean is an obvious one. Lots of information gathered there and kept more or less entirely secret. I also think that the feds still have a big advantage in computer security, but this is eroding in the same way crypto did. Spaceborne IR sensors should be better at detecting inner solar system asteroids than anything on the civilian side. Not clear who has the lead on massive computer installations, as Google is almost as tight-lipped as the NRO about these things.

After the Cold War ended, the US Navy started giving researchers access to their SOSUS underwater passive sonar systems.

I heard something about this years ago, and googling on:
whales sosus "cold war"
turns up a bunch of liely-looking hits.

One place to also look would be where suppression of data/discoveries helps the profit margins/corporate control of oil producers, weapons manufacturers, telecommunications giants, and, as always, the ongoing coverups/disinformation wars regarding UFOs (whatEVER they are).

Historical note: the term "SETI" and the phrase for which it is acronym (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was coined by astrophysicist Yoji Kondo (who writes Science Fiction as Erik Kotani).

I just saw this distinguished NASA Goddard expert at a book signing in Pasadena, this afternoon, after a reception at Caltech's faculty club with Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Tim Powers, and almost 400 other writers, illustrators, and fans.

At the signing, though not the reception, was Dr. Thomas McDonough, student of Carl Sagan, author of 3 books (2 science fiction, and "Space: the Next 25 Years) formerly head of SETI for the Planetary Society.

Here's another one for you: the military had known (from mil. satellite observations) about upper atmosphere 'flashes' since, say the 60's or 70's. It is now known that these flashes had been produced by meteoritic atmospheric entries. I believe these formerly classified datasets are now released.

=============================

Total Lunar Eclipse, from my Altadena Garden

=============================
.
.
.

UNDER THE ORANGE

GARDEN, ORANGE TREE, ECLIPSE

ORANGE MOON: CRICKETS!

.
.
.
.
.

4:00 A.M.
28 Aug 2007
Jonathan Vos Post