I Smell A Nicolas Cage Sequel

Lots of things to see in D.C. All sorts of history happening all around you. You can visit any number of museums and see space shuttles and lunar modules, gowns of the First ladies, Archie Bunker's chair, Monet, Manet, Wyeth. If you go to the National Archives you can see the the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but what you won't find is odd.

• You won't find the patent file for the Wright Brothers' Flying Machine. It was passed around multiple Archives offices, the Patents and Trademarks Office and the National Air and Space Museum and hasn't been seen since 1980.
• And there are maps for the first atomic bomb missions. In 1962, military representatives checked out the target maps for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and they have been missing ever since.
• In May 2004, one of FDR's grandsons asked to see a portrait of his grandfather at the Roosevelt presidential library in Hyde Park, N.Y. It couldn't be found, and hasn't been seen since 2001.
• Shaun Aubitz, a former employee at the Archives' facility in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 21 months in prison in 2002 for stealing, among other items, 71 pardons signed by Presidents James Madison, James Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and Lincoln. The Archives recovered 59 records. They had been sold to manuscript dealers and collectors.
• In 2005, researcher Howard Harner was sentenced to two years in prison, two years probation, and a $10,000 fine after pleading guilty to stealing more than 100 Civil War-era documents from the Archives between 1996 and 2002. Fewer than half were recovered.
• A 40-year-old National Archives intern, Danny McTague, stole 160 Civil War documents. About half were sold on eBay. The documents included telegrams about the troops' weaponry, the War Department's announcement of Lincoln's death sent to soldiers, and a letter from famed Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown Stuart. Sentenced to 15 months in prison, McTague told a psychiatrist that he was angry his internship was unpaid.

"We do not have item-by-item control," said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper. "We can't. We have 9 billion documents. We don't know exactly what's in each of those boxes. There's no point in preserving materials that cannot be used."

Maybe you ought to work harder, Susie, before it's all gone, sold on eBay or to a private collector.