In 1976, 22 million Americans signed approximately 917,000 scrolls to be placed in an aluminum time capsule in Pennsylvania to celebrate the nation's bicentennial. Today, those scrolls—a stack of paper as high as a 20-story building—have vanished, leaving their exact location a mystery.
The Vanishing Bicentennial Scrolls
The Bicentennial Wagon Train (BWT) was a massive logistical undertaking that saw five caravans of up to 300 horse-drawn wagons travel across the United States to Valley Forge. Along the route, citizens signed 'rededication scrolls' promising to uphold the precepts of the Founding Fathers.
While the scrolls successfully reached Pennsylvania and were even signed by President Gerald Ford, they disappeared amid the fanfare of the bicentennial celebrations. Fifty years later, there is no record of where the massive collection of signatures ended up.
“Roughly nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing—lost, stolen, or simply forgotten—according to Paul Hudson, a retired Georgia State University history professor and the cofounder of the International Time Capsule Society (ITCS), a global registry of time capsules around the world.”
— Burying the Evidence - Longreads
The Psychology of Legacy and Preservation
Paul Hudson, cofounder of the International Time Capsule Society, notes that while people are intensely interested in the 'heady buzz' of designing a legacy, they often forget about the capsules the next day. This is partly due to a human tendency to view time capsules as a way to see our trivial existence through the exotic lens of the future.
Hudson suggests that the desire to be remembered is often overshadowed by the practical reality of short-term memory. This creates a paradox where the very act of 'burying' an artifact is a way to seek permanence, yet the artifacts themselves are frequently neglected by the people who placed them.
Historical Examples of Preservation Failure
The Crypt of Civilization, intended to house the accumulated knowledge of 6,000 years of human history, serves as a primary example of this phenomenon. Even though it was dedicated with great pomp in 1940, the memory of the vault faded almost as soon as it was sealed.
Similarly, the 1876 Centennial Safe—a 5,000-pound fireproof safe filled with miscellanies like a temperance manual and an inkwell—was eventually opened in 1976. Observers were largely unimpressed by its contents, which were described by some as a 'dud' of unidentified bureaucrats and mundane items.
Uncertainties in Long-Term Archiving
While the source establishes that a vast majority of time capsules fail to reach their intended destination, it does not provide specific data on the primary causes of these failures, such as whether they are lost to theft, administrative oversight, or physical decay.
The mystery of the Bicentennial scrolls remains a specific case of this broader trend: a massive public effort to create a permanent record that was lost to the very 'oblivion' it was intended to resist.