Warning This Is Not A UFO Conspiracy Theory- Can Photography Be Blamed for UFO's Controversies?
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May the fiction be with you. Cultural fictions cannot be overrated and are heavily mixed into national identity,diluting the bad with hopes and dreams make for a very creative national outlook. When fictions turn into delusions, the problems begin in earnest.
My life long interest in aviation and photography especially around these two technologies that have been in constant innovation since their inception. With recent interest in UFO disclosures from official sources has caused me to realize the close cross connection between aviation and photography, secrecy and plausible denial regarding UFO sightings during the Cold War. The information used has come from common histories in several aviation magazines regarding the development of “X” plane (experimental) and spy plane technology in particular that is essentially the delivery system for state of the art photography.(there is a list of 62 “X” planes in Wikipedia)
Photography at both ends of the scale, both fuzzy and high definition helped create the UFO phenomenon arguing both fore and against at the same time.
Manitoba with large empty pathways to the north and Russia has also been a hot spot for UFO sightings. Or are they?
Why is it that fuzzy photos are the hallmark of controversy with the UFO's, the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot at the head of the pack.
I am not denying the possibility of our planet being visited by extra terrestrial beings because of the vastness of space and the probability that if human life exists on Earth it makes sense that highly developed life forms could exist elsewhere in space. Much of the documented sightings appeared by camera and during the cold war's secret and rapid advancements in jet aviation centered around Area 51, a well known secret test center for advanced one of a kind experimental aircraft as well as flight paths over barren, desert, mountains, farmland and Arctic tundra. Nevada,New Mexico and Arizona's also have many military airbases from the various branches of the US military that fly both day and night training.
As the UFO fiction grew the physical area of Area 51 was widened to keep UFO watchers at a greater distance.
I heard when I was a kid from an American student , that air national guardsmen could take jets out for cross country joy rides to get their flying hours in. Who knows what fun that could have created. While in high school I traveled to Duluth Minnesota and got a cool picture of a F-101 Voodoo popping a chute landing to slow the plane down. It was just something people did after supper,watching planes do touch and goes.
UFO observers often say their night sighting are flying objects that did things conventional aircraft could not do so they must be from another planet. Every new generation of military aircraft flies differently from the last generation.
I watched pairs F-15's show off at CFB Winnipeg in the 1980's takeoff and doing a tail stand with afterburners shortly after their wheels left the runway, flying vertically they disappeared quickly from sight. Also very cool.
Today you can see a pair of F-35's in a TV commercial do a peel off ,side by side snap roll dive, with a smoothness and precision no other aircraft could accomplish. The F-35 looks very different than any other fighter with it's diamond shaped wing and low visibility profile.
Canada was tasked to test a new propulsion idea and would try to develop what would become the Avrocar VZ-9 project for the US government and it looked like a flying saucer in 1959. It's original intention was to be a high speed high altitude fighter. The idea would be scaled back as costs and priorities changed to a helicopter lift for carrying jeeps when the project was taken over the the US Army. To this date I am fairly sure a working flying saucer has never worked in any practical sense.
In 1954 Avro took on Project Y, as it was called, was promising and credible futuristic spacecraft like design,way cooler than Amazon or Virgin's current projects. The project was canceled for cost but the Toronto Star found out about it and tried to save it. No wonder Canadian engineers went to NASA . The projects themselves had a lot of ambition, Canadians today might not recognize their post war selves.
Some UFO's would be described as tail-less flying wings, an idea still in vogue to created low visibility stealth aircraft from WW2, current designers have made into a practical design, stealth generation bomber. Some UFO's were seen as triangular that fits into modern stealth designs used in the Gulf Wars. One example of a UFO at night looks like tracer fire. Who knows but they all make great fiction and the movie business isn't far away in California.
*Jack Northrop's pet project built his first flying wing and testing it in the California Desert in 1940.The German's had a jet powered flying wing at the end of WW2. Today the Northrop B-2 Spirit is a heavy strategic stealth bomber currently in service. First flew in California in 1989 and had development prototype planes the F-117 called Have Blue and then Tacid Blue flying out of Area 51in 1979. Both B-2 and F-117 were considered “Black” or highly classified projects at the time.
The idea of UFO's have the ability to distract media from what people witness but might not always be able to understand. The UFO story captures cultural imaginations and is a bedrock of science fiction.
Bright lights in the sky have been reported as early as the 1600's, the Bible is full of apparitions and sightings attributed to religious upheavals of the time, cave drawings and ancient Mayan civilizations apparently have curios architecture that can only be made sense of from a downward view. I really doubt space travellers would need these markers at all.All fueling the belief in extra terrestrial visitations and landing strips. Some people may have been captured and released by space aliens. It is hard to separate fact from really good fiction and accompanies things that are not easily understood. America has very, very good fiction surrounding things that are very secret. Very good fiction and plausible denial of super secret aircraft, missiles and now drones. Just watching hundreds of drones in commercial formation displays at arena events, one might wonder what a similar AI displays in the Nevada Desert might look like years before anyone ever heard of drone swarms or Loyal Wingman.
This brings us to the origin story of the U-2 spy plane originally called the CL-282 ( a deceptive “C” prefix standing for cargo ex. C-130 Hercules)walk on design by a brilliant Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson,who heard the CIA had contracted two other companies to design along distance high flying airplane to keep an eye on the Soviet Union. The Lockheed super secret “skunk works” team took 8 months to design a plane that had an exceptionally long wingspan like a glider to accomplish the exceptionally long range it needed to travel. It also needed to fly higher than any enemy fighter. To save weight it carried no armor, nor pressurization, nor ejection seat, it flew 3,500 miles and fly above 70,000 ft. Some pilots suffered from hypoxia but refused to say so, until one had to admit he forgot how to land the plane.
A specially designed camera had to be built from scratch by Polaroid inventor Edwin Land and James Baker,the 300 pound camera had a mile of Eastman Kodak film on two tandem spools running in opposite directions, and a 60 in lens. The lens could see a basketball from13 miles high four times better than anything used previously.
This is a film camera with images so clear, the U-2 has been in use until very recently and still using film. This wet film process is said to produce higher quality images than today's digital options used in other spy planes and satellites.
The U-2 was originally test flown in the Nevada Desert with shiny metal skin and not the signature black paint job. Funny story, French artists camouflage colours studies, determined that battle ships and airplanes should be painted in pastel colours going back to WW1. The response, sailors and combat pilots don't sail or fly in pink!
Funny thing, they always seem to ask the US Air Force to investigate UFO sightings, but it seems the CIA has commissioned from Lockheed some of the most innovative aircraft of the Cold War. Area 51 has always been questioned but Lockheed has it's own area in the Desert called Area 52. Geez this is starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.(tongue in cheek firmly)
It also recorded that a secret and very quiet helicopter called “the Quiet One,” rush commissioned by the CIA to plant a listening device on a hard wire telephone line in North Vietnam during the peace negotiations helped gauge the sincerity of the North's intentions. A Howard Hughes helicopter,the Hughes 500P was modified, already in design for police helicopter market in California (1972), flew low level flights at Area 51 prior to it's successful mission. Did someone see that as a UFO, not sounding like any helicopter anyone had ever seen before. Just a light in the darkness, hovering and moving forward and backward, up and down? Quiet.
Aviation histories are often secretive and photography has a magic quality with a historic soul stealing mystique, that are well recorded throughout their recent past.
It is possible extra terrestrials looking for intelligent life did some research into human history noting a strong perpencity for war, genocide,conquest, humiliation and slavery culminating in not only WW1 but also WW2 with it's atomic ending and mutually assured destruction pact, would not have considered the human species as intelligent nor worth making contact with at all.
The deal is, the invention of the airplane as a weapon of war was not to enhance combat but rather to see the battlefield and report on enemy trench designs and activities in France during WW1.Prior to WW1 reconnaissance was a function of horse cavalry. A French general at the time saw no value in aviation at all. But, it was not long before biplanes with cameras flying at 6,600 ft. could record the entire trench system of the enemy by using photography.
A recently found book, Notes on the Interpretation of Aeroplane Photographs by Captain Carl Burger issued in 1918 by his son Knox Burger who flew B-29 raids on Tokyo in WW2.
By comparing those WW1 battlefields photos shot a 6,600 ft. to today's digital photos by today's early version of Predator drones, the WW1 photos clearly much more detailed (4x5 negs). Aerial photography changed the course of WW1 on at least two occasions, one saving Paris from capture.
The contest between aerial cameras and military targets would lead to the development of camouflage, then decoys ,to today's Russian cloud making planes to obscure sensitive military movements from satellites.
Cameras on planes would continue through WW2 but it would really get interesting after the first nuclear bombs were dropped and the beginnings of the Cold War would set the world to a new level of secrecy. UFO sighting also increased around the same time.
When the old Soviet Union began it's nuclear program with aircraft and then ICBM delivery systems the United States began to consider ways to surveil the vastness of Russia turning to aircraft. Over 200 American pilots an crew were shot down doing surveillance flights in the 1950's on many different aircraft that gave way to the design of specialized aircraft with specialized cameras and now sensors.
Kelly Johnson the CIA and Lockheed would also produce and design the SR-71 Black Bird that first flew in California in December of 1964.Funny thing, exotic metals for the skin of the SR-71 would have to come from Russia. Soviet missiles flew high enough to shoot down the U-2 so flying fast would be the next strategy to get a good picture of Soviet missiles and airbases, and for 30 years it overflew North Vietnam, the Arab Israel War, and Gulf Wars.
A SR-71 flight from the 1973 Yom Kippur War and refused landing in England for political reasons (England bought oil from the Middle East), and on it's sixth refuel,with the throttle set to “near after-burn,” was challenged by a Canadian air traffic controller of a plane flying at Mach .98 asking to identify itself in Canadian airspace. I wonder who besides caribou saw a UFO that night over Manitoba, or where ever. The declared flight plan listed a much slower KC-130. The good pictures from SR-71 would show the Israeli's movements were much further into Egypt than intended causing the Israeli prime minister to call a retreat.
The truth is really out there.
Some information gathered from Air & Space Smithsonian- Spy Planes Magazine Summer 2016
Topic: Not A UFO Conspiracy-Good Photography and Great Fiction (Read 3651 times)