This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Government Body gathers five state or formerly state bodies whose relevance to the atlas ranges from funding paranormal research to governing as a religious state outright.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency share a single episode: together they funded and administered a classified program of remote viewing research conducted at SRI International, publicly known since declassification as the Stargate Project, which the CIA terminated in 1995 after an evaluation found no operational intelligence value in its results. The Food and Drug Administration's relevance is a single enforcement case, its action in the mid 1950s against the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose orgone energy accumulators the agency enjoined and destroyed after Reich was found in contempt of court and imprisoned, where he died.
The remaining two are states rather than agencies. The Papal States were the territories of central Italy ruled by the pope as a temporal sovereign from 756 to 1870, a claim long supported by the Donation of Constantine, a document Lorenzo Valla demonstrated in 1440 to be a forgery; their loss produced the Roman Question, settled by the 1929 Lateran Treaty and the smaller Vatican City State that followed. The Taliban is a Pashtun Islamist movement formed in 1994 that has twice governed Afghanistan, applying its own interpretation of Sharia through instruments including a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
What unites the five is only that a government body, rather than a private, academic or religious one, is the acting party the atlas records, whether funding research, taking enforcement action or ruling as a sovereign.