There are some historical events where it may be impossible for ordinary people to learn the truth. For example, there are situations where more than one nation state has a good reason to circulate a false history — complete with credible-seeming historical documents.
One such case may be the 1979 Vela incident, in which an American satellite may have detected a clandestine nuclear test in the Indian Ocean. Some analyses have concluded that no nuclear explosion took place and that the satellite malfunctioned. Historian Richard Rhodes, who has written a series of excellent books about the history of nuclear weapons, thinks that it was a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently published a long discussion of the issue.
Related:
The Vela double flash
Given the mounting evidence, including the most recent analyses relating to the 1979 explosion’s radioactive fallout, the question now is whether the the U.S. government might finally share what it knows about the event. This would seem to make sense, as it would help discourage future violations of pledges not to test by countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, and other aspirational nuclear states.
The bureaucracy isn’t likely to back it, though. Although the Trump administration is a stickler for compliance and enforcement of nuclear understandings and treaties, Israel is a special case. Every U.S. president since Richard Nixon has refused to acknowledge Israel had a serious nuclear weapons program or arsenal. It would be risky at best for any U.S. official’s career to confirm Israel should be shamed as a violator of an international nuclear agreement it signed and ratified. That, after all, is what Israel accuses Iran of doing.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/22/blast-from-the-past-vela-satellite-israel-nuclear-double-flash-1979-ptbt-south-atlantic-south-africa/
The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: Radionuclide and Hydroacoustic Evidence for a Nuclear Explosion
https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs26degeer.pdf
This article offers a new analysis of radionuclide and hydroacoustic data to support a low-yield nuclear weapon test as a plausible explanation for the still contentious 22 September 1979 Vela
Incident, in which U.S. satellite Vela 6911 detected an optical signal characteristic of an atmospheric nuclear explosion over the
Southern Indian or Atlantic Ocean. Based on documents not previously widely available, as well as recently declassified papers
and letters, this article concludes that iodine-131 found in the thyroids of some Australian sheep would be consistent with them
having grazed in the path of a potential radioactive fallout plume
from a 22 September low-yield nuclear test in the Southern Indian
Ocean. Further, several declassified letters and reports which
describe aspects of still classified hydroacoustic reports and data
favor the test scenario. The radionuclide and hydroacoustic data
taken together with the analysis of the double-flash optical signal picked up by Vela 6911 that was described in a companion
2017 article (“The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: The Detected
Double-Flash”) can be traced back to sources with similar spatial
and temporal origins and serve as a strong indicator for a nuclear
explosion being responsible for the 22 September 1979 Vela
Incident.