The existence of Project A119 remained largely secret until the mid-1990s, when writer Keay Davidson discovered the story while researching the life of Carl Sagan for a biography. Sagan's involvement with the project was apparent from his application for an academic scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley's Miller Institute in 1959. In the application, Sagan gave details of the project research, which Davidson felt constituted a violation of national security. The leak consisted of Sagan revealing the titles of two classified papers from the A119 project—the 1958 paper "Possible Contribution of Lunar Nuclear Weapons Detonations to the Solution of Some Problems in Planetary Astronomy", and the 1959 paper "Radiological Contamination of the Moon by Nuclear Weapons Detonations". A 1958 paper titled "Cosmic Radiation and Lunar Radioactivity", credited to I. Filosofo, was also named by Sagan in a 1961 paper written for the United States National Research Council. These were among the eight reports created by the project, all of which were destroyed in 1987.