February 2008
With this week's shoot-down of USA 193, the failed ultra-secret-billion-dollar spacecraft, spy satellites have been very much on people's minds. I thought we'd take a few moments to look at the symbols and patches from some of the more than 100 secret "moons" in earth orbit.
Let's start with a look at the launch patch from USA 193 itself:
Not much to look at on this one. NROL-21 stands for "National Reconnaissance Office Launch 21." The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the US' "other" space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992. USA 193 was by no means the 21st NRO launch, it's just the 21st since they started using the newer launch names in the 1990s. SLC-2W refers to the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base that they launched the rocket from.
Other patches from classified spacecraft are, in my opinion, a lot more interesting.
Recent NRO launches use constellations to signify different launches.
Here's the payload patch from a recent naval surveillance satellite (NROL-30):
And some others that I'll leave to you to research and decode:
August 2007
The good people from North Carolina's STOP TORTURE NOW have taken to planespotting. Here's a picture they took of N196D at the Aero Contractors compound at Johnston County Airport.
This plane was also recently seen by the LAZYGRANCH sleuths at Base Camp, the weird airfield in the middle of Nevada where lots of spooky stuff goes down.
In other news, SOURCEWATCH has started publishing the real names of rendition pilots...
Want to see their passports? Go see the DARK MATTERS show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts....
The evidence keeps piling up that I actually work in the black world:
January 19, 2007
A couple of pretty interesting documents have come into the public domain recently. Right now, I'm relatively obsessed with the National Reconnaissance Office's Congressional Budget Justification Book for Fiscal Year 2006. The good folks at the Federation of American Scientists had to jump through some pretty intense hoops to get this unclassified document from the secret space agency. The NRO insisted that the document was an "operational file" and thereby exempt from FIOA requests.
In other news regarding the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, Portland lawyer Scott Caplan is being investigated by the Oregon State Bar's Disciplinary Counsel. Caplan is the registered agent for a paper company called "Bayard Foreign Marketing" that owned the "Guantanamo Bay Express" (see below). Bayard's President is a guy named Leonard T. Bayard, who's a CIA "sterile identity" - not a real person.
From Michael Munk, a retired political science professor who filed the complaint against Caplan: "In a January 18 letter, the Disciplinary Counsel asks Caplan to respond to specific questions about "Bayard," including: Who contacted you about about the representation? When did this contact occur? How was this contact made? Who paid you for your services? The Counsel also asks him to explain the basis on which he told an Oregonian reporter (Dec 29, 2004) "you were 'positive Bayard does exist.'"
December 10, 2006
A lot of people have been asking where the signatures from the "Missing Persons" piece come from. They come from lots of different places, but one interesting place is the registration records from various aircraft. Here's the registration history for the Gulfstream V with the old tail number N379P that planespotters nicknamed the "Guantanamo Bay Express"... DOWNLOAD PDF
Here's another registration file for N8183J, a cargo plane operated by Tepper Aviation for the agency. Lots of interesting stuff in this one.... DOWNLOAD PDF
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