The most maddening clue in the Watergate investigation was a mysterious 18.5-minute silence in one of the White House tapes. President Richard Nixon curiously recorded all White House interactions, but we'll never know what was said during that period that was later erased. The erasure itself was suspicious, so Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods took the blame, and explained the accidental erasure.
In testimony, Woods claimed that she had been transcribing the Oval Office conversation in question, when, due to the set-up of her desk, she reached over to answer a phone call, and in doing so, accidentally hit the erase button, keeping her foot on the transcription machine’s pedal, which forwarded the recording. The press dubbed this unlikely move, “The Rose Mary Stretch.”
But her story gets even stranger. Read about the "Rose Mary Stretch" at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Ford Library Museum)