The Skylab-Area 51 Incident 334
IZ Reloaded writes "The Space Review has an interesting story written by Dwayne Day about the 1974 incident when astronauts onboard Skylab took photos of a facility that did not exist in the US called Area 51. From The Space Review: What the memo indicates is that there was a difference between the way the civilian agencies of the US government and the military agencies looked at their roles. NASA had ties to the military, but it was clearly a civilian agency. And although the reasons why NASA officials felt that the photo should be released are unknown, the most likely explanation is that NASA officials did not feel that the civilian agency should conceal any of its activities. Many of NASA's relations with other organizations and foreign governments were based on the assumption that NASA did not engage in spying and did not conceal its activities."
A fun little theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Government Secrecy (Score:4, Insightful)
There are numerous reasons why the general public has to be kept in the dark about certain issues. It could be so that your average uneducated person does not form irrational beliefs that could cause civil disorder. It could be because the government themselves do not have all of the info yet, and do not want to spread disinformation. It could also be because the information has to be kept hidden from foreign governments.
While any powerful organization has the ability to abuse power, people have to understand that they cannot know everything. There is a reason why information about Area 51 has been kept secretive. It may very well be for the wrong reasons, but there is no proof of that. I for one will just sit back and be comforted that if there are facilities in this government that I cannot learn about, it must be pretty hard for other governments to learn about them too. If I wanted to know more I would join the Air Force and try to get into intelligence, and maybe excel enough to get clearance to these secret government projects.
--
Re:A fun little theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Closer Look (Score:2, Insightful)
Oldest trick in the book (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:3, Insightful)
There is also no proof that they have a good reason. Trusting your government is not a good idea, at least not until they've earned it, and then only two years at a time.
Re:A Closer Look (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a valid reason. Follow that path far enough and the government can keep you deliberately uneducated to prevent civil disorder. A government that does this is evil.
It could be because the government themselves do not have all of the info yet, and do not want to spread disinformation.
That's semi-valid, though in most cases it would be preferable for the government to release any information that only fell into this category couched in phrasing that makes it clear that the information is not reliable or incomplete.
It could also be because the information has to be kept hidden from foreign governments.
That's valid, though a well designed government should require that such information be reviewed regularly, so that it can be released as soon as it is stale.
In general, the government should keep as few secrets from its people as possible, otherwise you're on your way to fascism.
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Closer Look (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to buy sub 1-metre resolution satellite pics just go the SPOT consortium in
France. Any interested parties will BUY their data at FAR greater resolution than what
Google supplies.
Meh
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably it's the most common reason. For the same reason private companies protect their secrecy. If you are developing some new digital gizmo, you don't want your competitors to know too much as it would allow them to develop their own counter-gizmos. The same goes for new design of fighter planes. I think it's as simple as that with Area 51 - it's just a government-level equivalent of automobile industry reluctancy to reveal too soon the look and features of their new models.
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:5, Insightful)
So, what... do we declassify everything every two years just to make sure it's all completely benign by everyone's standards, everywhere? The whole point of intelligence committees made up of your elected representatives is to regularly rotate in some people that can do a sanity check on the policies that are at work, here. Likewise, you can't operate a place like Area 51 without the bugetary approval of a lot of people. And it's not like they get one big bank transfer every year... their funds are approved/disapproved on a project-by-project basis.
The whole point of being able to quietly work on things like the SR-71 (and its more recent offspring) is to have the ability to actually use it for a while before the people it's intended to help watch fully understand the capability. Don't you think it's helpful to know as much as possible about where North Korea and Iran are parking specific pieces of their nuke infrastructures? Sure, we're getting more of that from orbit than from things being flown out of the Nevada desert, but the principle is the same: operational details made public to every citizen are thus made public to every person in the world.
I'm intensely curious about this sort of stuff, and know people in the intel line of work, but I'm very glad that I can't personally get all the details... because I don't want the guys running Taiwan-aimed Chinese missile batteries knowing them, either.
That being said, I vote every chance I get, and think long and hard about each candidate's posture on intel, degrees of budget transparency, etc. It's a fine line to walk. I don't like wasting money, I don't like pointless power grabs... but I also like knowing that, when guys on the ground in northern Pakistan sieze a laptop from a local Al Queda franchise office, that we can be - in very short order - listening in on the calls to/from the phone numbers that were stored that same day in someone's cheesily encrypted ZIPped jihaddi speed-dial spreadsheet that includes Long Island zip codes. And park a drone over the little hut in the Afghani countryside (or Syrian suburb) that's handling the calls.
Or, if you're not into that sort of thing, how about knowing that there are undercover cops infiltrating urban gangs? My city has a huge problem with central American gangs. Rapes, murder, robbery - the whole gambit. I do not want the general public knowing the names, faces, and addresses of the men and women who are tasked with breaking up those little fiefdoms. So, I trust my city and county governments with some somewhat more localized secret stuff. I have to. So, I vote for decent people to run the show. And I vote for decent people to have a hand in the legislative process that funds the executive people. It's not perfect, but it's necessary.
Damn straight! (Score:3, Insightful)
Pity your opinion is held by such a large number of people.
Re:Timely piece (Score:4, Insightful)
If we weren't detaining people, tapping their phones, and beating information out of someone, I'd be pissed. I'm paying the government to protect me.
Careful now.. if and when they come for you, there may be no one left to say anything.
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oldest trick in the book (Score:3, Insightful)
Protect and Serve (Score:3, Insightful)
If what's going on now is protection, count me out. I try to live a moral life. If the government does something in my name, it damned well better be done in a moral fashion, and not the immoral and illegal current activities.
The "war on terror" is a strawman, to start with. The US was attacked by a single group, with known leaders. It was with them we have issues, not some undefined group of "terrorists," but a very well-defined group originally trained up by the US to fight in Afghanistan in the '80s. We know who the enemy is; we just aren't fighting him very effectively.
Now, how far should the government's protection go? Since the number of people who die in auto accidents is orders of magnitude greater than the deaths in the US due to terrorist activities, should we spend orders of magnitude more money patrolling the roads, just to protect you from a potential accident? Or maybe we should just give up cars entirely. That way, we couldn't die due to accidents on the road.
You are more likely to die from the flu than a terrorist attack. Shouldn't the government spend more money on flu vaccines? You are more likely to be shot by someone you know than shot by a terrorist. Shouldn't the government protect you by taking away all firearms?
Finally, the US government's current actions are increasing the likelihood of dying at the hands of terrorists, not decreasing the risk. If the US government had not betrayed us (and I mean everyone in the world, not just US citizens), if they had behaved morally instead of selfishly and evilly, we would be less likely to suffer a terrorist attack.
Instead, they chose the route to US military dominance and empirialism in the Middle East, no matter the cost. The economic and social and moral fallout from this little adventure will follow the US for many, many years.
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:3, Insightful)
Where there's power, humans will abuse it, plain and simple. It's human nature.
Pardon the cliché, but someone needs to be watching the watchers.
Re:Not as big as some other projects tho... (Score:3, Insightful)
I was being serious....
Re:Area 51 is not Unidentified (Score:3, Insightful)
For one thing, it's in the form of the classic "friend of a friend" urban myth.
For another thing, of course that's what a responsible Area 51 staffer would say, whether it was true or not.
For another thing, it's entirely possible that the alleged staffer was not cleared to know about the non-man-made things that may or may not be there, and so may not actually know what he's talking about.
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:3, Insightful)
"You say you don't know him, but you trust him to national security matters?"
She replied:
"I don't know you, but I kinda have to trust you, now don't I?"
Re:Oldest trick in the book (Score:2, Insightful)
A. Not everything is about Iraq.
Q. And what is the conspiracy there?
A. To divert U.S. taxpayer dollars into the military industrial complex, and secure oil supplies and contracts for the likes of Haliburton.
Q.Oh I know what you'll say... "O!L!!!! Bu$h is getting rich off oil!!! That's why he has become the most hated person in the world so he can have money and power!!!"
A. Not really. It's the puppeteers that gain.
Q. Too bad most people that hate the current person in office don't think of a few simple facts:
(1) He was already rich.
(2) If he really wanted power he would be doing things EVERYONE liked... or at least not pissing off the world (i.e. any past liberal president).
A. We don't hate him, just think he's a gimp.
Q. Maybe, just maybe, the actual conspiracy is that, although unpopular, we are in Iraq to help the Iraq people. That may not be why we went there in the first place, but that is why we are there now. No conspiracy... move along.
A. Unlikely. If we were there to help, we wouldn't have massacred 100,000 civilians and built up resentment for the future.
Q. *sigh*
A. *sigh*
Q. Wow that was offtopic...
A. Not really.
Read "Class Warfare" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567510922 [amazon.com]), and realise that this event (Iraq) had been planned for more than a decade.
Wakey wakey! Hello CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6. keywords: Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, muppet, puppet, stoppit.
Crash debris (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad assumption. I've been involved in two private aircraft crash investigations, including securing the scenes for one of them. Debris from the first was isolated to the hole it dug. The other was spread over a mile, with the key components in explaining the crash being found half a mile from the spot where the majority of the aircraft impacted.
A previous incident at the same airport (AF tanker exploded overhead) rained debris over many square miles. Catastrophic failures, which can happen when pushing aircraft to their limits, do not make for compact crash sites or easy recovery of all debris.
Re:Area 51 is not Unidentified (Score:2, Insightful)
You know, for someone who knows you can look at it from above, you appear to never have actually done so.
It quite clearly has a concrete runway extending across that dried lake bed. There are even lines painted on it, and there are X's painted on it at 1000 foot intervals.
According to Google Earth, that length of concrete is slightly more than 24,000 feet, with 13,000 of it paved on normal ground and 11,000 paved on the lake bed.
However, looking that the markings of the arrow, and the fact the X's mark off 1000 feet from the arrow, and the fact there is sand that has blown over the edge at one end, it looks like only the 18,000 feet past the arrow are used, about 11,000 feet on normal ground and 7000 feet on the lake bed. Which still beats everything else. (And, on top of that, it has an unpaved 2500 foot area that is clearly for planes that go off the end.)
Now, there are two other runways of 10,000 and 11,000 feet, respectively, that are merely outlines on a lakebed. And there is a 14,000 foot runway on normal groud, and something that's 7500 feet that might be a runway, or might just be a taxiway, I can't tell. (There's a plane parked there on Google Earth! It looks like a standard airplane, but has something weird going on with a wing.)
Re:A Closer Look (Score:4, Insightful)
Your biggest rivals are not your only rivals, and what they think they know may not be 100% correct.
Re:Government Secrecy (Score:3, Insightful)
"Insightful"? Not only is this not insightful, but it makes absolutely no sense when you think about it. Seriously -- I'm an editor, and it's my job to understand the meaning of words. I've read this several times and I still don't understand it.
What the comment seems to be suggestiong is that, by keeping some information secret, the government is causing "average uneducated person[s] [to] form irrational beliefs that could cause civil disorder
Huh? What secret is the government keeping that would cause this -- that Jesus has appeared to them, and told them he approves of abortion? And even then, you would have to postulate that the government simply *withholding* this information is somehow enough to lead people to "form beliefs that make [them] violently protest, say, against abortion clinics"
"Insightful," indeed.
- AJ
Re:Timely piece (Score:3, Insightful)
Torture is about expediently forcing someone to sign a bit of paper so you can tell everyone the crime is solved, it isn't about law enforcement.
Re:Area 51 not on FAA maps (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me the civilian pilot community is much better off being absolutely clear that Area 51 isn't an option, and getting in the habit of having other contingency plans besides landing at Groom Lake.