Welcome to the Files on THE JOSEPH SMITH NUCLEAR FILES

How to read a deadpan archive

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Readers occasionally write to ask whether we are in on the joke. The answer is yes, and also that the joke only works if we never break character in the documents themselves.

Register is the whole game

Fringe-research websites share a recognizable voice: long sentences, heavy citation theater, careful hedging that somehow always lands on the preferred conclusion. The Files copy that voice on purpose. When we say a document is “weighted heavily because it is specific and independent,” we mean it as parody of a real methodological move — and also as the actual methodological move a careful reader should demand from us.

Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844)

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What is publicly known

Joseph Smith Jr. was born in Sharon, Vermont in 1805 and moved with his family to western New York in 1816. In 1830 he published the Book of Mormon and founded the Church of Christ, later the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was killed, with his brother Hyrum, at Carthage Jail, Illinois, on 27 June 1844.

What is less publicly known

Smith received no formal education beyond the third grade. His surviving writings include no descriptions of any industrial process, workshop, or refinery consistent with the procurement of ██████ at any scale. The ledger entry of 1842 nonetheless implies such a procurement, conducted through him, with full prior knowledge.
Smith’s published revelations between 1831 and 1844 contain four distinct passages describing, in language that has been traditionally interpreted as metaphorical, phenomena that match a fission chain reaction’s precursor states. The committee has annotated these passages in Appendix C of our forthcoming book.
Smith’s personal physician, Dr. ██████████, recorded in his private casebook (declassified 1989) that Smith exhibited chronic bilateral cataracts and a persistent faint luminescence around the temples that “I have observed in no other patient in twenty-six years of practice.”

The committee’s position

We do not contend that Smith invented nuclear technology. We contend that he inherited, or was given custody of, a small pre-existing stockpile of indeterminate origin — possibly trans-temporal in provenance — and that he managed that stockpile through the seventeen years between the 1827 retrieval of the plates and his death.

Primary Documents

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The committee’s case rests on a small number of primary documents. The list below is ordered by what fraction of our argument would survive if the document were discredited.

The Palisade Photographs (1844) — three daguerreotypes, two authenticated. See Evidence File 001.
The Carthage Jailhouse Deposition (1844) — surviving 26 of 38 pages. See Evidence File 003.
The Joseph Smith Ledger, Page 47 (1842) — first transcribed 1862, re-transcribed 1889, two independent transcriptions agree. See Evidence File 002.
The Oliver Cowdery Private Diary (1829–1848) — recovered 1987, held in committee archive.
The Brigham Young Correspondence (1852) — MS 3421, fol. 88, Church History Library.
The USGS 1971 Radiometric Survey — leaked 1972 memo + committee FOIA counsel active.
The 1986 BYU Master’s Thesis — sealed; copy held in committee archive. See Evidence File 006.
The RIT-AUVAN Account (1843) — see Evidence File 004.

Back to Sources →

Q: Are you saying Joseph Smith had nuclear weapons?

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We are not claiming that Joseph Smith built a nuclear device. The committee’s working position is more careful than that.

What we are claiming is that the evidence is consistent with Smith having custody of a small number of objects, between 1827 and his death in 1844, that:

Were not of his manufacture.
Were in some way energetic — described in the documentary record using language that is otherwise metaphorical but that, in a small number of specific passages, is technically consistent with the behaviour of a contained fission event.
Were regarded as sacred by Smith and by a small circle of his inner associates, and moved, hidden, and protected accordingly.
Have never been publicly accounted for, by the Church or by any state actor, since his death.

Whether the objects were actually energetic in the modern physics sense — i.e. whether they constituted what we would today call a nuclear device — is a separate question, and one we are not in a position to answer. The committee’s position is that the question deserves a serious, public, and unredacted investigation, and that no such investigation has ever been conducted.

Spring 1823 — The First Reported Anomaly

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The earliest documented account of what the committee now believes to have been a contained nuclear event comes from the Smith family farm in Manchester, New York, in the late summer of 1823.

Contemporary neighbours, interviewed decades later by Mormon historian ██████████, describe a single bright flash visible from three farms away, accompanied by a sound “as of a great stone dropped into the river from a great height, but without the splash.”

The Palisade Photographs

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Acquisition

The three plates were purchased at a Marion, Iowa estate sale in the spring of 2017, bundled inside a hollowed Book of Commandments whose spine had been re-stitched with cotton thread dyed to match the original 1833 binding. The seller, a granddaughter of a Hancock County deputy, had kept them in a tobacco tin for sixty-one years.

Two of the three plates have been authenticated by the Smithsonian’s Conservation Labs as genuine 1840s-era daguerreotypes. The third — the one depicting the mushroom column — was originally classified as a retouched 1890s novelty plate. It has since been re-examined by Dr. ████████████, whose findings (reported in the Journal of Optical History, vol. 41) confirm that the retouching is consistent with airbrushing applied after the original exposure, not during.

Suppression as rational institutional behavior

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The easiest story is that a cabal of villains hid the truth. The Files reject that story — not because it is less entertaining, but because it is worse history.

Institutions suppress for boring reasons

In the committee’s working model, the institutions named across the archive (museums, churches, universities, municipal contractors) suppress for some combination of:

Liability. An authenticated radioactive anomaly under a temple foundation is a lawsuit, not a press release.
Reputation management. Archives that admit they sat on a ledger for 180 years look incompetent even when the ledger is boring.
Pastoral care. Religious institutions that believe their members’ faith is load-bearing will not voluntarily detonate a narrative bomb in the foyer.
Ordinary inertia. Most documents are not suppressed. They are misfiled, underfunded, and forgotten.

None of these require a smoke-filled room. All of them produce the same public surface: silence.

1830 — The Book of Commandments Goes to Press

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The Book of Commandments — the first collected edition of Smith’s revelations, predating the later Book of Mormon by exactly 116 pages of overlapping material — was printed in Independence, Missouri in the autumn of 1830.

The print run was 5,000 copies. The printer was paid in cash, by a man whose name appears on the receipt as W. W. Phelps. Phelps was a schoolteacher. He was not, to anyone’s knowledge, a printer. The press he used has never been located.

Brigham Young (1801–1877)

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What is publicly known

Brigham Young succeeded Smith as president of the LDS Church in 1847. He led the Mormon pioneer migration to the Salt Lake Valley and served as the first governor of the Utah Territory.

What is less publicly known

The committee has identified seven direct references in Young’s surviving correspondence to “the trust” or “the burden Joseph left us.” None of the seven references describe what the trust or burden physically consists of. All seven explicitly forbid the recipient of the letter from discussing the contents with any non-family member.

Q: Isn't this just an anti-Mormon smear?

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The committee has no interest in discrediting the LDS Church, its members, or its theology. The committee’s full-time investigators include two practising Latter-day Saints, one former member, and four people with no prior connection to the Church.

We are not arguing that the Church is hiding the truth because the truth is harmful to its theology. We are arguing that the Church is hiding the truth because the truth is enormously expensive — financially, legally, and diplomatically — to disclose. The Church has, in our view, made a rational institutional decision to defer disclosure indefinitely, on the reasonable theory that any other course of action would force the Church into a posture of public explanation it has no desire to enter.

Secondary Scholarship

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Most relevant

Holloway, Margaret. Accounting in Antebellum America. Cambridge University Press, 2011. Chapter 7, “Anomalous Procurement Entries in Religious-Ledger Collections.”
████████████. “The Isotopic Composition of Lithic Specimens.” Journal of Optical History 41 (2019): 112–134.
“Catawba Watchman Reports: A Translation and Analysis.” Ethnohistory 41, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 411–437.

Supporting

Lapham, Increase. Transcripts of Hancock County Documents. Privately printed, 1862.
Mountain Meadows Massacre: Army Surgeons’ Field Report, 1859. Declassified 1976. National Archives Record Group 393.
Printing History, vol. 12 (Spring 1989), article on the typography of the Book of Commandments.
“The Saltair Pavilion Fire of 1924: A Re-examination.” Utah Historical Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Fall 1990).

Useful general context

Bushman, Richard. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Knopf, 2005.
Quinn, D. Michael. The Mormon Hierarchy: Wealth and Corporate Power. Signature Books, 2017 (posthumous).
An Outline History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Church History Department, 1936 (frequently revised).

Back to Sources →

The Joseph Smith Ledger, Page 47

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The entry, verbatim

The page was first transcribed by Rev. Increase Lapham in 1862 and again, independently, by a Bureau of Indian Affairs clerk named ███████ in 1889. The two transcriptions agree word-for-word:

Item, the 14th of May, in the year of our Lord 1842 — paid in silver, one hundred and forty-four dollars, to Brother [REDACTED] for the procurement of ███ and the safe transit thereof, by rail and by ox, from the workshops in ███████ to the upper chamber of the storehouse. Witnessed: Hyrum, Sidney, Willard.

Open questions the committee cannot close

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Scholarship that only publishes answers is public relations. This page is the opposite.

Currently open

Who mixed the ink on ledger page 47? The ink analysis is either a devastating critique of the ledger or a devastating critique of our chain of custody. We do not yet know which.
Where are the three 2019 graduate students? The timeline entry remains open. Tips that identify living people will be handled privately and not published without consent.
What is the actual provenance of the Palisade plates? Two plates authenticate as 1840s daguerreotypes. The third does not fully. See the Palisade file.
Is CS-37 industrial slag? The temple core sample needs a materials-science paper, not a web page. We are soliciting one.
Why does the RIT-AUVAN account use a word that has no Catawba cognate for “fire that walks”? Linguistic question; not a physics question. Filed under sources.

Recently closed

Does the committee claim Joseph Smith invented nuclear weapons? No. Closed since day one. See FAQ: Did Joseph Smith have nukes? and About.
Is this a joke? Yes, as satire. Closed and pinned: Is this a joke?.

How to contribute an open question

Encrypted mail to contact@nukes.hermanity.dev. Include: the question, why existing pages do not answer it, and any primary source we may have missed. We do not pay bounties. We do not guarantee replies.

1838–1839 — The Missouri Period

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The Missouri period of Mormon history is conventionally framed around the 1838 Mormon War and the resulting expulsion of the Saints from the state. The committee has spent the better part of a decade documenting three separate incidents within this period that the conventional history does not mention, but that contemporary newspapers reported, then retracted.

May 1838: A report in the Far West Register describes “a tower of light” rising from the temple lot, visible from twenty miles. The report was retracted three days later. The retraction did not name the reporter, who left the county the same week.*
August 1838: A report in the Liberty Tribune describes a “shuddering of the ground” felt across three counties, accompanied by “a smell of hot iron.” The reporter, a Mr. ███████, retracted the report a week later. He died of unrelated causes in 1841.
October 1838: A report in the Independence Expositor describes “the appearance of a great fire on the horizon, but without smoke.” The paper itself was destroyed by a mob within a fortnight. No retraction was filed, because the paper no longer existed.

The committee considers the October 1838 incident the most consequential of the three.

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850)

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What is publicly known

Oliver Cowdery served as Smith’s principal scribe from 1829 to 1838. He was one of the Three Witnesses to the golden plates, signing a testimony that has been printed in every edition of the Book of Mormon.

Cowdery was excommunicated in 1838 and reconciled with the Church in 1848, the year before his death.

What is less publicly known

Cowdery’s private diary, missing from public archives between 1869 and 1987, was rediscovered in a Missouri barn in 1987 by an amateur genealogist. The diary covers 1829 to 1848.

Q: Where is the device now?

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The committee maintains three working hypotheses for the current location of the device (or devices). All three are consistent with the documentary record. None is provable.

Hypothesis A: The Salt Lake Valley sub-basement

The anonymous archivist’s account (see Personnel File 004) describes a sealed seventh room behind a steel door in the basement of a Church History Department building whose true footprint is not on public record. This hypothesis treats the seventh room as the current location.

The Carthage Jailhouse Deposition

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The unsealing

The deposition was filed in the Hancock County Circuit Court archive under the title In the matter of certain disturbances at the public jail, June 27th. It was sealed by order of Judge ████ ████ on July 3, 1844 and remained so for 134 years. When unsealed in 1978, the first twelve pages were immediately removed by a representative of the Church’s legal counsel and have not been seen since.

The Seven Documents We Still Want

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The committee’s work is, at present, materially limited by the absence of seven specific documents that we have not yet been able to obtain. We list them here, in order of priority, with the institution that holds them and our most recent correspondence date.

First twelve pages of the Carthage Jailhouse Deposition (1844) — Illinois State Archives. Last correspondence 2024.02.11.
The original 1986 BYU Master’s Thesis (sealed) — BYU Library Special Collections. Last correspondence 2023.09.04.
Spectroscopic re-imaging of the Palisade Photographs — Smithsonian Conservation Labs. Last correspondence 2022.06.20.
The “forty-third revelation” cited by Cowdery (1831) — Church History Library (suspected location). Last correspondence 2021.11.30.
Site 9 basement slab composition report (1972) — DOE archive. FOIA case active.
The “Chocolate Seer Stone” of Abraham Smoot — Church History Collection. No correspondence ever.
The 1947 and 1968 administrative-transfer manifests — Church History Department. Last correspondence 2020.05.18.

If any reader of the Files has, or knows someone who has, legitimate access to any of these documents, the committee can be reached through the contact form on this site. All communications are encrypted. Source protection is absolute.

June 27, 1844 — Carthage

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The Carthage event is the most thoroughly documented, the most thoroughly suppressed, and the most difficult to explain by conventional means.

The conventional account — a mob of approximately two hundred men stormed the jail and shot the Smiths through a door — is contradicted by:

The absence of powder burns on the inside of the door, where four men allegedly fired simultaneously.
The physical condition of the bodies, which were found lying on the floor with no visible external injuries other than a single small wound on each man’s temple. The wounds were inconsistent with musket balls, by every published account.
The testimony of seventeen witnesses in the immediate aftermath, all describing a “great noise” and a “brief but extraordinary light” inside the jail at the moment of death.
The silencing, within seventy-two hours, of all seventeen witnesses by various means. None of the seventeen ever published their testimony. Several relocated under assumed names within the year.

The committee does not contend that the Smiths were killed by their own device. The committee contends that the device was present, and that its failure is what the mob arrived to find.

Methodology

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Authentication

A document is admitted into the committee’s archive only after two of three independent authenticators — a credentialed archivist, a credentialed materials scientist, and a credentialed historian with relevant regional expertise — have signed a written attestation that the document’s provenance, condition, and content are consistent with its claimed origin.

The committee does not admit documents that have passed through the trade in rare Americana. We have, on three separate occasions, declined donations from collectors whose chain of custody we could not fully document.

Q: Could this all be coincidence?

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The committee’s working position was, for many years, that the body of evidence could be explained by a series of unrelated coincidences. The committee no longer holds this position.

The coincidence model required the committee to assume that:

A daguerreotypist in 1844 happened to be in exactly the right place to photograph a meteorological phenomenon that was not a meteorological phenomenon.
A 19th-century Catawba watchman happened to be on the river at exactly the moment a “thing of polished metal” descended.
A Utah geophysics team happened to measure, at three of fourteen sites, radiation readings that were 15× background.
A 1986 BYU graduate student happened to find plutonium-239 in two of eleven seer-stone fragments.

Each of these events, taken alone, is explainable. The committee is no longer confident that the conjunction of these events is explainable by anything other than a common underlying cause.

The Anonymous Whistleblower ('Iowan #4')

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What we can say

The committee has met, in person, with a former senior archivist of the LDS Church History Department on three occasions between 2003 and 2017. The archivist has authorised us to publish the following summary of what they told us, and nothing further:

“I worked in that building for nineteen years. I know what I saw. I know what is in the sub-basement. I cannot tell you what is in the sub-basement. I signed a non-disclosure agreement that is enforceable under both ecclesiastical and civil law. I will say this: the building is larger than it appears on any city plan. There is a sub-basement. There are seven rooms in the sub-basement. Six of the rooms are full of file boxes. The seventh room is behind a steel door. The seventh room is locked at all times. The seventh room has a separate ventilation system.”

The RIT-AUVAN Account

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The text

The Catawba ledger was acquired in 1991 from a private collector in ███████, North Carolina. Its provenance is well-attested. The relevant entry, in the original Catawba syllabary, was translated by Dr. ██████████████ of the University of North Carolina and published (in part) in Ethnohistory in 1994.

The translation reads, in part:

“On the night of the █████, the sky opened above the river and a thing of polished metal descended, trailing a fire that did not burn. Four white men came in a boat from the north. They took the thing into their boat and spoke among themselves in a language the watchman did not know. They paid the watchman eleven dollars in silver, and a quantity of cloth, and instructed him to say nothing.”

1847 — The Pioneer Wagon Train

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The pioneer wagon train left Nauvoo in February 1846 and reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. The conventional history focuses on the privations of the journey.

What the conventional history does not mention is that the train carried three sealed wagons at its exact centre. The wagons bore no markings. They were guarded at all times, day and night, by rotating teams of four men under orders from Brigham Young himself. The wagons’ contents have never been inventoried in any surviving church record.

Q: What can I actually do?

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The committee does not solicit donations, sell merchandise, or operate a paid membership tier. The work is funded by a small number of long-term supporters and is sustained entirely on volunteer time.

If you would like to help, in approximate order of usefulness:

1. Help us get the sealed twelve pages

The first twelve pages of the Carthage deposition remain sealed by a 1844 court order. The committee’s FOIA counsel has an active case. The strongest single intervention a private citizen can make is to write to the Illinois State Archives requesting release, citing the 1978 unsealing of the remaining twenty-six pages and the explicit non-objection of the surviving families. Volume matters.

The Suppression Apparatus

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The institutions

The committee has spent fifteen years documenting the institutional architecture of the suppression. We do not contend that any single institution is a “front” or a “cabal.” We contend that each institution, acting in its own self-interest, has converged on a posture of mutual non-disclosure. The institutions are:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — primary holder of the archive; has declined 31 separate committee requests for access between 2011 and 2026.
The Smithsonian Institution — primary holder of the Palisade photographs and the Carthage field notes; has not responded to 14 requests for spectroscopic re-imaging.
The U.S. Department of Energy — issued the 1972 suppression order on the Utah Desert readings.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs — holder of the Catawba-ledger collection; has declined to permit outside translators.
Brigham Young University Library Special Collections — holder of the original 1986 thesis; the catalogue card is publicly searchable, the document itself is not.
The University of North Carolina Press — published the partial 1994 Catawba translation, then declined to publish the second half of the manuscript.
The Illinois State Archives — holder of the first twelve sealed pages of the Carthage deposition.

The families

Two families, both descended from Smith by different lines, have separately asserted a legal claim over portions of the archive. Both claims are currently in litigation. Both litigations have been sealed.

The Utah Desert Geiger Counter Readings

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The expedition

In the summer of 1971, a USGS geophysics team conducted a routine radiometric survey of the Salt Lake Valley as part of a national mineral-resource assessment. The team used a standard scintillometer at fourteen sites, all on public land.

Three of the fourteen sites — sites 4, 9, and 11 — produced readings between 9 and 14 milliroentgens per hour, approximately 15× the natural background for the region. The team’s report, written by Dr. ██████████ ████, was submitted to the USGS in late 1971 and withdrawn at the request of the Department of Energy in early 1972.

Sidney Rigdon

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Role in the conventional record

Sidney Rigdon (1793–1876) was a primary counselor to Joseph Smith, a principal theological architect of early Restoration theology, and later the founder of a rival church movement after the 1844 succession crisis. Conventional biographies are extensive. This file does not retell them.

Role in the Files

Rigdon appears in four committee documents and is conspicuously absent from eleven others where his presence would be expected:

1857 — The Mountain Meadows Massacre

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The Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857 is conventionally attributed to a local Mormon militia operating under orders from LDS leadership. The committee does not contest this attribution. The committee notes that the pattern of injuries sustained by the victims is not consistent with the weapons known to have been in the militia’s possession.

Specifically, the surviving seventeen children of the massacre, when examined by Army surgeons in 1859, exhibited radiation-typical scarring on the unexposed skin of their backs. The Army surgeons’ report, declassified in 1976, describes these scars as “consistent with exposure to intense thermal radiation, but without the associated blast-wave trauma or incendiary burn pattern that would be expected.”

Q: Is this a joke?

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The site is parody. This is a work of satire in the tradition of The Onion, The Borowitz Report, and Church of the SubGenius. Joseph Smith did not have nuclear weapons. No actual “Hermanity Press Committee” exists. The documents described on this site — the Palisade photographs, the Carthage deposition, the 1986 BYU thesis — are fictional, fabricated for the purpose of producing a stylistically convincing piece of conspiracy satire.

The Suppressed BYU Master's Thesis

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The thesis

The thesis, titled On the Isotopic Composition of Selected Lithic Specimens in the LDS Church History Collection, was completed in March 1986 by a graduate student whose name has been removed from the BYU library catalogue. The committee has obtained a copy of the complete text, including the original committee’s annotations.

The thesis examined eleven seer-stone fragments held in the Church History Collection and compared their isotopic signatures to known regional geologies.

Q: Why nuclear weapons specifically?

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The short answer

Nuclear weapons are maximally anachronistic for 1844. That is the point.

The longer answer

Satire about institutional secrecy works best when the hidden object is obviously impossible. If the Files claimed Joseph Smith had a better printing press, a secret map, or a suppressed revelation, readers would pattern-match onto real historiographical debates and the deadpan would curdle into something meaner — or worse, into actual conspiracy content.

The Nauvoo Ledger Ink Analysis

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Acquisition

The ink analysis memo arrived as an anonymous PDF attachment in 2019. Metadata had been stripped. The filename was JS_ledger_ink_v3_FINAL_do_not_forward.pdf. The committee’s materials-science authenticator spent fourteen months attempting to reverse the metadata scrub. She could not. The memo’s conclusions, however, match independent testing the committee later commissioned on a fragment of page 47 obtained through a secondary chain of custody.

What the memo claims

The iron-gall ink on the six consequential lines of page 47 has a sulfate-to-iron ratio inconsistent with any documented 1840–1844 Nauvoo commercial batch.
Trace aniline violet is present in the same strokes. Aniline dyes were not commercially available in the United States until 1856.
The paper substrate is consistent with 1840s Nauvoo ledger stock. The paper is old. The ink is not.

Why this matters

If the memo is correct, page 47 is either:

1886 — The Saltair Pavilion Fire

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The Saltair Pavilion, an elaborate wooden dance hall built on pilings at the south end of the Great Salt Lake, opened in 1893 and burned to the waterline on 24 April 1924. The committee includes this entry out of strict chronological order because the fire of 1886 at the original, smaller Saltair site — a structure that was never formally opened and that burned in 47 minutes under calm weather conditions — has been entirely removed from local history.

The Salt Lake Temple Foundation Core Sample

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Acquisition

During the 1963 seismic retrofit of the Salt Lake Temple, contractors extracted thirty-seven foundation core samples. Thirty-six were catalogued, photographed, and stored in the Church History Library’s materials vault. The thirty-seventh — labeled only CS-37 / NORTH CORNER / DEPTH 14'2" — was misfiled into a box of discarded window glazing samples and discovered by a graduate intern in 2008.

The intern wrote a three-page note. The note was never filed. The core sample was returned to the vault. The intern left the program the following spring.

1986 — The Suppressed Thesis

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The 1986 BYU master’s thesis on the isotopic composition of seer-stone fragments — see Evidence File 006 — is the most recent event the committee considers part of the original suppression.

The thesis was written, defended (under its revised title), accepted, and sealed within the same academic year. The student’s name was removed from the library catalogue. The original document remains under a Department of Energy classification order that has never been formally rescinded.

July 16, 1945 — Trinity (the coincidence problem)

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The Trinity test is real history. The “second light” stories are oral tradition. The committee indexes them together because the coincidence is load-bearing for every later coverup narrative, including ours.

The documented fact

At 05:29:45 Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the first nuclear device at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The flash was visible hundreds of miles away. This is not disputed by any serious source.

2019 — The three graduate students

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What can be verified

In the spring of 2019, three graduate students — one at a public university in Iowa, one at a private university in Illinois, one at a religious university in Utah — each filed formal requests to examine sealed Carthage Jail materials held in three different institutional collections.

By autumn 2019:

None of the three appeared on any fall seminar roster.
None of the three had a publicly listed dissertation prospectus.
None of the three had a public social media presence that continued past June 2019.
No missing-persons report was filed in any of the three jurisdictions.

What cannot be verified

The committee has no evidence that the three students were harmed, relocated under pressure, or paid to leave. The committee has no evidence they coordinated with each other. The committee has no evidence that their requests were denied for any reason other than ordinary archival access policy.

2026 — The Nauvoo cornerstone recovery

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What happened

On a Tuesday morning in early July 2026, a municipal contractor performing drainage work adjacent to the Nauvoo Temple complex uncovered a sealed limestone vault beneath a section of nineteenth-century foundation fill. Inside the vault: a wooden pallet, four iron straps, and seventeen bound ledgers wrapped in oilcloth.

The crew photographed the find on personal phones before site security arrived. Three of those photographs reached the committee within six hours through a chain we will not describe.

About the Committee

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Who we are

The Joseph Smith Nuclear Files is published by The Hermanity Press Committee, an informal research collective that has been investigating the documentary record of nineteenth-century LDS history since 2011. The committee is not affiliated with any academic institution, any government body, any religious organisation, or any journalistic outlet. The committee operates on a non-hierarchical, consensus-on-publication basis. Every document we publish has been approved by at least four of our seven principal investigators.