On December 2, 1948, House Un-American Activities Committee investigators were at the farmhouse of Whittaker Chambers with a subpoena. Chambers led them out of his bucolic home and to a pumpkin patch. There he took the top off of a hollowed-out pumpkin and presented them with film wrapped in wax paper.

Although there were no papers, only film, the treasonous treasure trove would be forever after known as the Pumpkin Papers. Two cylinders were of developed film and three were of undeveloped film. It turned out that some of the undeveloped film was worthless as evidence. It had been overexposed and came out blank. Others parts of the film were developed only to find that they were about trivial matters like the painting of fire extinguishers that anyone could find at the Federal Bureau of Standards of Library.

However, there were documents on that film that were of a highly sensitive, classified nature or at least it had been so when taken from the State Department. All of them were dated in the early months of 1938. Chambers claimed that most of them came from Alger Hiss. On December 6, Nixon and Stripling held a press conference at which they showed off the microfilm that had been lifted from Whittaker’s pumpkin.