The Dart Incident

Filed by Jimmy — findings disputed. PHASE 2, WEEK 4.

Let the record show I am filing this under protest, because one party to this incident has never accepted the official conclusion.

I found a dart. A real one, the heavy kind with the metal tip, which to a kid is not a game piece—it’s ordnance. The test program was simple: toss it in a high arc and make it stick in a stump. Pure ballistics research. Launch angle, arc, terminal impact. I was making progress.

What the test program lacked was airspace control. My sister had wandered inside the perimeter—a perimeter I admit existed only in my head—and one launch came down off-target.

It stuck in her leg.

Now. I want to be precise about the findings, because she has maintained for decades—to this day, at every family gathering where this file gets reopened—that the strike was intentional. That she was the target. I maintain, and this is the truth: she was not the target. The stump was the target. She was an uninvolved party who entered an active test range. The dart did what falling darts do.

She has never accepted this report. There were no witnesses, no flight data, no impartial review board. Just two accounts, frozen in permanent dispute for fifty years.

Lesson logged: If you don’t log it when it happens, the incident stays open forever. Every disputed claim in my family is a missing audit trail. I record everything now—and I would like the record to show that a perimeter existing only in my head was not much of a perimeter.

More field reports declassified soon. —Jimmy, who was aiming at the stump