The Government Warehouse is a plot device used in movies, television series, and novels, a scenario used in role-playing games, and a belief of some conspiracy theorists. The concept is that there is a secret government warehouse where various items are stored of whose existence the government wants the general populace to remain ignorant.
An early and significantly notable appearance was in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Since then a version of that warehouse has been the primary focus of a number of independent fictional works:
The government warehouses of fiction and conspiracy theories have a number of analogues in the real world, although some are not run by official national governments. Historically, the template is the Great Library of Alexandria, which held an extensive collection of written works but was repeatedly destroyed during the first millennium AD. The Vatican Secret Archives[2] are alleged to hold many secrets, such as unpublished records of the Knights Templar. The Vatican's archives are a main plot element in Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons. Many prominent museums have extensive archives which often lay undisturbed for decades, such as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which was found in 2002 to have 80,000 items—more than half the museum's collection—stored away in its vaults.[3]
In the United States, the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress both have numerous government warehouses to store historic items and documents.
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