I’ve got a new conspiracy theory: the United States is for sale to aliens.
Why, you say?
Well, because if you take a picture of the United States from space, you’ll see that
it actually has a giant barcode on it: right down here in the desert of southern Arizona.
And in case you missed it, there are actually a few of them; you can find them here in the
Florida panhandle, in Maryland, in California…
they’re all over, and they’re always the same: evenly-spaced sets of three white lines,
descending in size, painted onto black concrete.
For decades, the American government has offered no explanation for them, and so I can only
be left to conclude that America is being sold to—wait, hold on, did I just receive
a declassified CIA document from the Cold War that provides hard evidence for an interesting
explanation of this decades-long mystery that will take about 4 to 6 minutes to explain?
Well, would you look at that, I did.
The year was 1957, and all anyone could talk about was this shiny little ball.
The Soviet Union had managed to successfully launch the world’s first satellite into
space, and the American public was being understandably unchill about the whole thing: the New York
Times managed to mention Sputnik 279 separate times in the following three weeks, making
it the world’s first ever transgender athlete.
But, for all of the fear and hysteria surrounding Sputnik, the satellite itself couldn’t actually
do much: its primary purpose was to beep and boop and fundamentally disprove the myth of
American exceptionalism—but it did, however, represent a scary possibility: photos… from
space.
Up until that point, actually photographing another, hostile country—especially the
middle of that country—was incredibly difficult, expensive, and likely to get someone killed.
Unless you were going the whale route, or the pigeon route, or the kitten route, you
were going the plane route, and planes simply couldn’t fly high enough; anything below
45,000 feet could get intercepted by modern fighter jets, and anything below 65,000 feet
would show up on radar.
At the time, the US’ best high-altitude planes were the B-29, with a service ceiling
of 31,000 feet, the B-47 at 42,000 feet, the English Electric Canberra at 48,000 feet—that
doesn’t mean that the US wasn’t strapping cameras on them and flying them over the Soviet
Union anyway, it just means that they kept getting shot down.
So, naturally, the US spent several years and several million dollars developing a plane
that could fly high enough to not get shot down, which was then immediately shot down.
It became clear that the only reliable way to get a photo of the Soviet Union was to
take it from much, much further away, and where is the furthest away?
Well, it’s a place I like to call “spa-che.”
I hope I’m pronouncing that right.
Anyway, enter: the Corona satellite program.
These were the first spy satellites ever designed; massive, heavy, and crammed with thousands
of feet of black and white film.
They solved America’s biggest surveillance problem—namely, taking photos from far enough
away that the photos wouldn’t immediately be exploded by a fighter jet—but taking
photos from 100 miles instead of just a few thousand feet presented some new problems.
For example, how do you actually get the film from the satellite back to good folks at the
CIA?
Well, easy, you simply eject the film from space in a specialized return vehicle that
flies towards the Pacific Ocean, and then, simultaneously, launch a plane from Honolulu
with such perfect timing that it can catch the film mid-air before it hits the ocean,
but in case it misses, construct the return vehicle to look like it can house a monkey,
so if anyone else finds it first, they’ll think, “oh, nevermind, it’s just a monkey
from space, I almost thought it was going to be something interesting like grainy black
and white photos of Russian tarmacs, I guess I’ll just carry on then.”
This is actually how they did it, and it worked perfectly.
But there was another problem, and that was the film itself.
The first photos taken from the Corona satellite were grainy and largely out-of-focus, but
they were also, importantly, really difficult to measure.
Like, is this runway 5,000 feet or 10,000 feet?
Is this smudge one building or a bunch of buildings?
Is this rectangle a small, harmless shed, or a large, very harmful shed?
Answering these questions—and getting reliable data from these photos—required having a
really, really accurate measurement of the camera’s resolution.
But how do you measure the resolution of a film camera?
Well, you do it with this: this is the 1951 US Air Force resolution test chart, and it’s
how the Air Force would calibrate things like cameras and microscopes before cameras and
microscopes became…
good.
The way it works is this: there are 11 groups of lines ranging from -2, all the way up to
9, and each group has 6 elements, meaning one set of vertical and horizontal lines.
So, say, this is element 3 in the set -1.
To test a camera, you’d take a picture of this whole chart, and find the first element
where the lines start blurring together.
So, let’s go ahead and blur this chart a bit…
Now, you can see that everything in group -2 is still clearly visible, but once you
get to group -1, it seems like the camera gives out at around element 5.
From there, you’d go ahead and plug those numbers into this equation, and thanks to
our friend math, you’ll end up with a number of line pairs per millimeter: basically, the
number of black and white lines that could be distinguished in one millimeter of film;
the higher the number, the higher the effective resolution.
Now if these lines look familiar—which I really hope they do, I mean it’s pretty
obvious where I’m going with this—it’s because this same system was used to measure
the resolution of the Corona satellites; just instead of the lines being painted on a little
piece of glass, they instead were painted on the Earth.
And by taking an image of these lines in the desert, the satellite now had a standard to
judge the scale and detail for all of its other photos, which the CIA’s image interpreters
could use to take an otherwise sludgy mess and turn it into a detailed map of a test
facility or explosives plant.
And those very same lines remain there to this day because… well, the government is
just really lazy.
So, if you made it to the end of this video, I’m gonna make two assumptions about you.
One: you are a giant dork.
And, two: you like—or can at least tolerate—my voice explaining random stuff to you.
And if either of those things are the case, then you should come join us on Nebula.
For those of you out of the loop, Nebula is an independent, educational streaming service
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We wanted a place where we could develop and share the sort of big, exciting, and risky
projects that wouldn’t work on YouTube.
It was the incubator for Jet Lag: The Game, where we developed an exclusive pilot season
called Crime Spree to test out the concept before bringing it to YouTube.
It’s also where I publish longer passion projects of mine, like our documentary about
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Signing up for Nebula not only gets you access to this massive library of content, but it’s
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