Open secret

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An open secret is a concept or idea that is "officially" secret or restricted in knowledge, but is actually widely known; or refers to something which is widely known to be true, but which none of the people most intimately concerned are willing to categorically acknowledge in public.

Examples of military open secrets:

• Area 51 until July 14, 2003
• Camp Mirage
• Delta Force^{[citation needed]}
• DEVGRU^{[citation needed]}
• ECHELON^{[citation needed]}
• Electromagnetic bomb^{[citation needed]}
• Nuclear weapons and Israel^{[citation needed]}
• Numbers stations
• SOSUS^{[citation needed]}

Completed in 1964, the BT Tower, despite being a 177-metre (581 ft) tall structure in the middle of central London, was an official secret and did not appear on Ordnance Survey maps until it was officially revealed by Kate Hoey under parliamentary privilege in 1993.^[1]

Kayfabe, or the presentation of professional wrestling as "real" or unscripted, is an open secret, kept displayed as legitimate within the confines of wrestling programs but openly acknowledged as predetermined by wrestlers and promoters in the context of interviews for decades.

An example of an open secret in politics is that it may be widely known that an individual government minister holds a particular opinion, but is at present unable to express that opinion publicly because it is contrary to the formally expressed view of the government of which he or she is a member.

In television, the primary real-world identity of The Stig, a costumed and masked television test-driver used by BBC Television for Top Gear, was an open secret^{[citation needed]} until the unofficial embargo was broken by a newspaper in 2009.^[2]

References

1. ^ Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1993-02-19, column 634.
2. ^ Foster, Patrick (2009-01-19). "Identity of Top Gear's The Stig revealed as Ben Collins". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/driving/article5548705.ece. Retrieved 2009-01-19. "The identity of the white-suited Stig ... has been an open secret within the motoring world for some years, with newspapers refraining from publishing his name, to uphold the spirit of the programme." 

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