Ten FBI Facts You Won’t Believe Are True

The FBI is definitely one of the most interesting organizations of any involved in the United States government. They are the nation’s most powerful (and arguably most well-known) law enforcement arm. And the more you read about them, the more it seems like they have their hands mixed up in every major thing that occurred in recent American history. From Bonnie and Clyde to the Unabomber, the FBI has investigated it all.

But what about the weird stuff? Not everything the FBI has done has been, uh, normal. In this list today, we’ll tell ten absolutely wild tales of the FBI’s strangest and least-known connections to bizarre and unexpected moments in history. You’ll have trouble believing some of these are true, but every single one of ’em checks out. Who knew?!

Related: 10 Bizarre Events Involving Prosthetics and the Police

10 Internet? What Internet?

Since the FBI is one of the departments most involved with national security, you might assume that they are on the cutting edge of using technology to track suspects and persons of interest or to monitor the general goings-on around the country. And… you’d be wrong. As it turns out, the FBI didn’t actually go online until 2012! Up until that year, they were still using a paper-only filing system to track their cases. Can you even imagine that? If you’d said that was happening in 2002, maybe we’d understand. But 2012? Come on, guys…

See, the FBI had been intending to install a stunning and then-new electronic case-tracking and file management system in 2009. The thing was going to be state-of-the-art in all ways and cost $425 million. However, there were major problems with the programming, and the system didn’t actually go online until nearly three full years later. Oh, and it was also $26 million over budget. But at least they’re online now, and the system works. We hope…^[1]

9 Falafel Bureau of Investigation

The FBI once caught a case involving falafel and started tracking terrorists through grocery store data centering on the delicious treat. The years were 2005 and 2006, so the country was very much in its post-September 11 headspace while dealing with military moves in both Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, the FBI had gotten busy searching for domestic and homegrown terrorists and possible secret terror cells operating right in the United States. And so, that landed the bureau at a series of grocery stores in San Francisco and San Jose looking for falafel data to mine for further information.

The FBI called the program “Total Falafel Awareness.” Seriously. Its purpose was to track all the sales of falafel at dozens of grocery stores in northern California’s Bay Area. Then, once they got a baseline for how much falafel was typically being sold at those stores, they would wait patiently for a spike in sales. If the spike came, their intention was to investigate the source of the purchases with (no joke here) the hopeful discovery of Iranian secret agents operating quietly in NorCal. Seriously. In the end, the FBI shut down the program pretty quickly after realizing there were, uh, just a few problems with the idea.^[2]

8 Looks Matter

The FBI’s Most Wanted List is world-famous, and for good reason. After all, who wouldn’t want to know which criminals and fugitives are the biggest dangers to society and need to be caught as soon as possible, right? But here’s the crazy part of all this: the criminals who are placed on the Most Wanted List aren’t just chosen based on the crimes they (allegedly) committed. They are chosen based on their looks, too! That’s right: the FBI is so image-conscious that it very purposely wants to choose criminals based on their appearance in the hopes that people will better remember to be looking out for them.

According to a report from a few years ago in the New York Times, the newspaper’s journalists were able to confirm that the bureau purposely selects fugitives for its list who can be recognized by the public due to distinctive physical features. So, people with scars or multiple tattoos go right to the front of the line. Similarly, those with strangely shaped or unique faces might pop up on the list, too. What’s the moral of the story here, then? Clearly, if you’re going to rob a bank and hide out from the agency, make sure you look average and forgettable. (We’re kidding about that, FBI! Don’t start tracking us!)^[3]

7 FBI to ESP

Between 1957 and 1960, the FBI seriously tried to use extra-sensory perception (ESP) as an interrogation tactic. Back then, there was all manner of science fiction floating around in popular culture. And evidently, somebody at the FBI felt like they might be able to use that supposed ability to channel interrogations into the heads of suspected criminals. It would make things so easy, right? If only the agency could wiggle its way into people’s brains and have access to their thoughts, then nobody would ever be able to lie and get away with anything ever again!

So, for that fateful three-plus-year period, that’s exactly what the bureau did. It spent months investigating whether ESP was real and whether its agents could use ESP to more effectively interrogate criminals. Unfortunately for the bureau, the results turned out to be less than ideal. By 1960, agents had failed to find any scientific evidence suggesting that ESP was a real thing, and they summarily scrapped the project. But oh, what might have been!^[4]

6 Booing Borat

Who remembers Borat? The movie is an all-time classic and still gets quoted very often, even though it’s been out for well over a decade. And who needs reminding about its plot, which follows the supposed real-life Borat in a mockumentary-slash-reality format led by the incredible comedic actor Sacha Baron Cohen. But here’s where the FBI comes into play on this one, and it has to do with Cohen: they trailed and tracked him the entire time he was filming the comedy flick about the farcical reporter from Kazakhstan! That’s what he says, at least.

During a 2012 interview on NPR with “Fresh Air” host Terri Gross, Sacha Baron Cohen claimed that the FBI sent agents to secretly (or not-so-secretly) tail him while he was filming the funny flick. “Sometimes it was the police, then the FBI were following us for a while,” Cohen explained during the radio interview. “They had so many complaints that there was a Middle Eastern man driving through America in an ice cream van that the FBI assigned a team to us.” Well, when you put it like that…^[5]

5 Hairy Happenings

The FBI keeps quite a few things on file. It’s not just the digital stuff where they (uh, possibly) track you online and follow where you go at every website, either. They also have your hair! Okay, maybe not your hair, personally… but a lot of people’s hair. According to the FBI themselves, they have more than 5,000 hair samples on file. The samples are from both humans and animals, and they are used to assist the bureau with criminal investigations.

Basically, every time that a crime occurs in which the FBI is involved in the aftermath investigating it, they collect any hair samples they find at the scene. Investigators then catalog those hair files and study them further back at the lab. That way, they can pick up on little details about criminals’ ethnicities and from which body part that hair came. So, what we’re saying is, if you really like hair but don’t have the hand-eye coordination to become a hairstylist, you should consider joining the FBI and working in their hair lab!^[6]

4 Singin’ Like a Canary

Lots of people join the FBI because they have high and mighty ideas that they are going to fight against terrorism, espionage, and criminals that cross international boundaries. That may be true in a great many cases, of course. However, in many other cases, the bureau also investigates and monitors individuals who are… slightly less dangerous. And by slightly less dangerous, we mean incredibly less dangerous. Take, for example, the Kingsmen. They were a rock band in the 1960s, and they were investigated and tailed by the FBI for nearly a full year.

The reason for this was the band’s song “Louie Louie.” Released in 1965, the song quickly rocketed to popular fame among young people. But it also rocketed to infamy in the not-so-good way with older people, too. To that end, dozens of people filed complaints with the FBI about “Louie Louie.” Their concerns? The lyrics contained secret pornographic mentions and verses. (Yes, seriously.) The bureau spent months listening to the song hundreds of times and eventually issued a 120-page report concluding that the lyrics were fine.^[7]

3 How’s That Gluing Going?

By far, the most interesting (and, for some, probably a little boring) department within the FBI is the Department of Forensic Document Examiners. Those people live in a very small lab in a dark, overlooked corner of the bureau and spend their time reconstructing all kinds of old and contested documents. Sometimes, that means trying to perilously and carefully glue together decades-old wills and other legal documents to determine veracity. Other times, that means examining cases of sports memorabilia fraud or analyzing suicide notes to try to determine their authenticity. Creepy, right?

There are plenty of other ways that forensic document examiners work to support the bureau, too. Most notably, this includes examining burned and water-soaked documents for clues related to crimes. They also analyze shoe prints and tire treads that have been found at the scenes of murders and other crimes. And they do all kinds of office document forensic analysis in support of the bureau’s fight against white-collar crime, too. It’s a very technical job, but a very interesting one—and somebody’s gotta do it!^[8]

2 It’s a Horrible Life?

Who here hasn’t seen It’s a Wonderful Life? The 1947 movie, helmed by James Capra behind the camera and starring actors Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, is a Christmas classic. And you’d think it would be one of the least controversial movies of all time. Wouldn’t you? Well, maybe, but the FBI wouldn’t think so. At least they didn’t back then. After the movie came out, the FBI was in the midst of its post–World War II heyday, trying to crack down on communist sympathizers that were supposedly rampant in Hollywood and around America. So, they took a long look at Capra’s film using that highly suspicious perspective.

In a memo late that year to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau chief’s assistant D.M. Ladd wrote that “the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” That, according to Ladd’s memo, was a very strongly anti-capitalist move that necessitated a full investigation by the bureau into whether the filmmakers were communists. And we can’t have that, now, can we?^[9]

1 Work-Life Balance

The bureau may be an old-school crime-fighting outfit, but it has also been forced to adapt to the modern world. That occurred in many ways, including dropping some of their virulently anti-communist witch hunts that were commonplace in the 1940s and 1950s, as we’ve seen with the It’s a Wonderful Life investigation. However, the agency has also come through in surprising ways. Take the issue of work-life balance. The bureau supports career-oriented individuals who want that and is committed to reducing workloads to support their agents who are starting families.

In recent years, the agency initiated a program that offers their agents employment in a part-time job that runs anywhere between 16 and 32 hours a week. The agency has recognized (correctly, in our opinion) that agents have lives outside of work—and want to balance their careers with their family responsibilities. So, like many other private companies across various sectors in the modern world, the FBI has come through. Honestly, we kind of like it. It makes the agency seem more human.^[10]

fact checked by
Darci Heikkinen