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r/HistoryUncovered

Found this during a house clearance in Peterlee last week. Not sure what to make of it. [LONG]

Posted by u/NorthernClearances_84 · 847 upvotes · 312 comments ·
Shared to r/ConspiracyNE, r/FolkloreAndFringe

Right so I’ll keep this as straightforward as I can because I know how this kind of post looks and I don’t want to come across as a lunatic.
I do house clearances for a living. Mostly County Durham, sometimes into South Tyneside, and occasionally North Yorkshire. I see a lot of stuff. Old photographs, war medals in carrier bags, Bibles with family trees written inside the covers. Most of it goes to charity shops or the tip. Occasionally
something turns up that’s obviously worth something.
Last Tuesday I was clearing a terrace on the Sunny Blunts estate in Peterlee. An elderly woman with no surviving family on the local authority records, property passed to the council. Pretty standard job. In the back bedroom, under a bed, inside a metal document case of the sort you’d see in an office from the seventies, I found a document. Or rather, a very neat typescript of a document. High quality paper, watermarked, the kind that doesn’t yellow easily. It was inside a sealed plastic sleeve of the sort archivists use.
I’ve reproduced the whole thing below but, because it’s long, here’s the TLDR: #
The document appears to be the formal minutes of a classified internal meeting held at the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Peterlee on 14th March 1978. For those who don’t know, IBM had a research centre in Peterlee from 1969 until it relocated to Winchester in 1981. The centre was genuinely significant, it produced early work in relational database theory.
The document reference is IBM/PRTV/PETERLEE/INT/1978/047 and its classification header reads MOST SECRET — UK EYES ONLY.
Here is what the meeting was about, as best I can summarise it.
IBM had been running something called the Peterlee Relational Test Vehicle , the PRTV , a prototype relational database system. As a stress test, they fed it every available piece of information about
Peterlee and its surrounding area: Ordnance Survey maps, coal mining records going back to the 18th century, census returns from 1841 onwards, constabulary incident logs, social services data, and — this is where it gets unusual — a large archive of folklore and oral history from east Durham mining communities, collected by a Professor Dakin from Durham University.

The system’s findings were as follows. And I’ll just type these out plainly because I don’t know how
else to do it.

1. There is an unmapped subterranean void approximately 800 feet below the Sunny Blunts estate in Peterlee. The Coal Authority records confirm it, no mining was ever successfully extended into it. The official explanation was water table behaviour. The geologist at the
   meeting said this explanation was inconsistent with the actual geological surveys.
2. The system modelled the void as predating the Carboniferous coal seams. Its minimum estimated geological age was 320 million years.
3. There’s a noted population departure from Peterlee since 1971 was statistically strange compared to other New Towns of equivalent size and development stage. The geographic origin of this pattern of departure mapped to within half a mile of the Apollo Pavilion on the
   Sunny Blunts estate.
4. The folklore archive contained seventeen independent traditions, from seven separate mining communities, referencing a subterranean presence predating human settlement.
5. The Apollo Pavilion designed and built by artist Victor Pasmore was positioned, according to Pasmore’s pre-construction geometric drawings, in precise correspondence with the subterranean epicentre.
   There are also references to a local brass band called the Emeralds, whose Spring Equinox performances are described in constabulary incident logs in terms I genuinely can’t paraphrase without sounding completely unhinged.

The document ends with the line: THIS DOCUMENT DOES NOT EXIST.
I found it under a dead woman’s bed. I don’t know who she was. I don’t know why she had it. I don’t know if it’s genuine. I’ve scanned it and I’m posting the full scan below. Make of it what you will.