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                                                           Unmasking Root In 1942, the Smithsonian Institution endorsed the Wrights as first to fly--and the first even capable of flying. Thirty four years later, Freedom of Information Laws revealed that a secret contract in 1948 had become part of the deal. In it, the Wright family dictated the wording of pertinent museum labels and forbade the Smithsonian from ever investigating the issue, however compelling the evidence might be to the contrary.. The bombshells kept coming. In 1978, highly respected Caltech (California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena analyzed the Wrights’ 1903 airplane, casting scientific doubts on many of the brothers’ claims. And in 2003, a meticulously researched "replica" of their 1903 plane failed to fly on all four attempts. Historical doubts arose, too, when the family members of a star witness, Amos I. Root , released his correspondence with the Wrights to the Library of Congress. Key elemen