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I’ve got a new conspiracy theory: the United
States is for sale to aliens.

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Why, you say?

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Well, because if you take a picture of the
United States from space, you’ll see that

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it actually has a giant barcode on it: right
down here in the desert of southern Arizona.

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And in case you missed it, there are actually
a few of them; you can find them here in the

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Florida panhandle, in Maryland, in California…

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they’re all over, and they’re always the
same: evenly-spaced sets of three white lines,

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descending in size, painted onto black concrete.

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For decades, the American government has offered
no explanation for them, and so I can only

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be left to conclude that America is being
sold to—wait, hold on, did I just receive

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a declassified CIA document from the Cold
War that provides hard evidence for an interesting

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explanation of this decades-long mystery that
will take about 4 to 6 minutes to explain?

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Well, would you look at that, I did.

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The year was 1957, and all anyone could talk
about was this shiny little ball.

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The Soviet Union had managed to successfully
launch the world’s first satellite into

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space, and the American public was being understandably
unchill about the whole thing: the New York

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Times managed to mention Sputnik 279 separate
times in the following three weeks, making

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it the world’s first ever transgender athlete.

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But, for all of the fear and hysteria surrounding
Sputnik, the satellite itself couldn’t actually

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do much: its primary purpose was to beep and
boop and fundamentally disprove the myth of

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American exceptionalism—but it did, however,
represent a scary possibility: photos… from

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space.

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Up until that point, actually photographing
another, hostile country—especially the

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middle of that country—was incredibly difficult,
expensive, and likely to get someone killed.

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Unless you were going the whale route, or
the pigeon route, or the kitten route, you

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were going the plane route, and planes simply
couldn’t fly high enough; anything below

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45,000 feet could get intercepted by modern
fighter jets, and anything below 65,000 feet

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would show up on radar.

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At the time, the US’ best high-altitude
planes were the B-29, with a service ceiling

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of 31,000 feet, the B-47 at 42,000 feet, the
English Electric Canberra at 48,000 feet—that

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doesn’t mean that the US wasn’t strapping
cameras on them and flying them over the Soviet

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Union anyway, it just means that they kept
getting shot down.

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So, naturally, the US spent several years
and several million dollars developing a plane

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that could fly high enough to not get shot
down, which was then immediately shot down.

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It became clear that the only reliable way
to get a photo of the Soviet Union was to

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take it from much, much further away, and
where is the furthest away?

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Well, it’s a place I like to call “spa-che.”

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I hope I’m pronouncing that right.

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Anyway, enter: the Corona satellite program.

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These were the first spy satellites ever designed;
massive, heavy, and crammed with thousands

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of feet of black and white film.

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They solved America’s biggest surveillance
problem—namely, taking photos from far enough

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away that the photos wouldn’t immediately
be exploded by a fighter jet—but taking

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photos from 100 miles instead of just a few
thousand feet presented some new problems.

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For example, how do you actually get the film
from the satellite back to good folks at the

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CIA?

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Well, easy, you simply eject the film from
space in a specialized return vehicle that

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flies towards the Pacific Ocean, and then,
simultaneously, launch a plane from Honolulu

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with such perfect timing that it can catch
the film mid-air before it hits the ocean,

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but in case it misses, construct the return
vehicle to look like it can house a monkey,

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so if anyone else finds it first, they’ll
think, “oh, nevermind, it’s just a monkey

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from space, I almost thought it was going
to be something interesting like grainy black

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and white photos of Russian tarmacs, I guess
I’ll just carry on then.”

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This is actually how they did it, and it worked
perfectly.

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But there was another problem, and that was
the film itself.

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The first photos taken from the Corona satellite
were grainy and largely out-of-focus, but

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they were also, importantly, really difficult
to measure.

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Like, is this runway 5,000 feet or 10,000
feet?

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Is this smudge one building or a bunch of
buildings?

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Is this rectangle a small, harmless shed,
or a large, very harmful shed?

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Answering these questions—and getting reliable
data from these photos—required having a

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really, really accurate measurement of the
camera’s resolution.

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But how do you measure the resolution of a
film camera?

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Well, you do it with this: this is the 1951
US Air Force resolution test chart, and it’s

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how the Air Force would calibrate things like
cameras and microscopes before cameras and

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microscopes became…

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good.

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The way it works is this: there are 11 groups
of lines ranging from -2, all the way up to

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9, and each group has 6 elements, meaning
one set of vertical and horizontal lines.

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So, say, this is element 3 in the set -1.

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To test a camera, you’d take a picture of
this whole chart, and find the first element

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where the lines start blurring together.

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So, let’s go ahead and blur this chart a
bit…

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Now, you can see that everything in group
-2 is still clearly visible, but once you

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get to group -1, it seems like the camera
gives out at around element 5.

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From there, you’d go ahead and plug those
numbers into this equation, and thanks to

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our friend math, you’ll end up with a number
of line pairs per millimeter: basically, the

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number of black and white lines that could
be distinguished in one millimeter of film;

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the higher the number, the higher the effective
resolution.

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Now if these lines look familiar—which I
really hope they do, I mean it’s pretty

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obvious where I’m going with this—it’s
because this same system was used to measure

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the resolution of the Corona satellites; just
instead of the lines being painted on a little

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piece of glass, they instead were painted
on the Earth.

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And by taking an image of these lines in the
desert, the satellite now had a standard to

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judge the scale and detail for all of its
other photos, which the CIA’s image interpreters

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could use to take an otherwise sludgy mess
and turn it into a detailed map of a test

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facility or explosives plant.

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And those very same lines remain there to
this day because… well, the government is

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just really lazy.

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So, if you made it to the end of this video,
I’m gonna make two assumptions about you.

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One: you are a giant dork.

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And, two: you like—or can at least tolerate—my
voice explaining random stuff to you.

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And if either of those things are the case,
then you should come join us on Nebula.

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For those of you out of the loop, Nebula is
an independent, educational streaming service

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that I started with some of my creator friends.

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We wanted a place where we could develop and
share the sort of big, exciting, and risky

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projects that wouldn’t work on YouTube.

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It was the incubator for Jet Lag: The Game,
where we developed an exclusive pilot season

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called Crime Spree to test out the concept
before bringing it to YouTube.

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It’s also where I publish longer passion
projects of mine, like our documentary about

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the remote airport of Saint Helena or our
new show about the logistics of things like

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commercial fishing or search & rescue.

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And it’s home to a rapidly-growing list
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Just Bikes, PhilosophyTube, and Johnny Harris,
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Signing up for Nebula not only gets you access
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