The strange Cold War bar codes across America

The "bar code" at Walker Field, Maryland

Adjacent to the runway of a Navy airfield in Maryland is a paved rectangle.  And within that area are a series of quadrilaterals painted bright white, in pairs and ascending in size.

By itself its existence would be a mystery, or at least a curiosity.  Except that it is one of dozens to be known throughout the United States, with most of those found near military bases and other restricted facilities.  Some remote locations have entire arrays of the "bar codes" stretching for miles toward the horizon.

So what are these test pattern-ish arrangements?  Based on available evidence, they seem to have been put in place by the government during the first few decades of the Cold War.  With tensions high between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the advent of high-altitude aircraft reconnaissance - and then "spy" satellites - became an important asset of military intelligence.  And as with any other system of optics those high-flying cameras needed a means of determining that they were properly focused.

The rectanglular codes, therefore, are apparently intended to calibrate the zoom and resolution of aircraft and satellite photography.  F'rinstance: letting an SR-71 use one to adjust its precision camera before sending it to fly across the Iron Curtain.

From the original article at Mail Online...

Consisting of a concrete pad measuring 78ft by 53ft and coated in a heavy black and white paint, they are decorated with patterns consisting of parallel and perpendicular bars in 15 or so different sizes.

This pattern, sometimes referred to as a 5:1 aspect Tri-bar Array, is similar to those used to determine the zoom resolution of microscopes, telescopes, cameras, and scanners.
The targets function like an optician's eye chart, with the smallest group of bars discernable marking the limit of the resolution for the camera being tested, according to the CLUI.

'For aerial photography, it provides a platform to test, calibrate, and focus aerial cameras traveling at different speeds and altitudes,' the CLUI adds.

'The targets can also be used in the same way by satellites.'

Ironic, aye?  That military secrets from fifty years ago are now wide-out in the open because of that same technology and Google Earth.  Anyone with a desktop or tablet can now view what likely had been classified top secret by the CIA.

I wonder what else might be on the ground across the fruited plain, waiting to be discovered...

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Raoul Wallenberg and Dan Cooper: New clues in two massive mysteries

Sixty-six years after he disappeared into the prisons of the Soviet Union, new information has been discovered about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who became one of the most revered heroes of World War II. At the height of the Holocaust, Wallenberg was able to rescue and shelter tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who would have otherwise been dispatched to the concentration camps. When the Soviets liberated Budapest early in 1945, Wallenberg was taken into custody by the Russians on suspicion of being a spy for the United States. His fate remains unknown to this day. The Soviets reported two years later that Wallenberg had died in his cell... but there are reports that he was seen alive as late as 1987.

Now two researchers who have studied the case for decades have announced that they have discovered old Soviet files pertaining to Raoul Wallenberg: files which the Russian government has long claimed did not exist.

Meanwhile, there may (or may not) be new developments in the mystery of one of the most celebrated criminals in American history...

It was Thanksgiving eve
Back in 1971
He had on a pair of sunglasses
There wasn't any sun
He used the name Dan Cooper
When he paid for the flight
That was going to Seattle
On that cold and nasty night

-- from "The Ballad of D.B. Cooper"
by Chuck Brodsky

This coming November will mark the fortieth anniversary of Dan Cooper's daring skyjacking of that Boeing 727 between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. It was on the night before Thanksgiving in 1971 that a man calling himself "Dan Cooper" (often erroneously reported to be "D.B. Cooper") boarded the Northwest Orient Airlines flight, then claimed in mid-flight to have had a bomb. Upon landing Cooper demanded several parachutes and $200,000 in unmarked bills. The plane took off again and somewhere over the northwestern wilderness Cooper, laden with a parachute and the cash, jumped out of the plane into freezing rain and American legend. He was never seen again.

And now a woman has come forward with apparent evidence that Dan Cooper was her uncle. Federal investigators are looking into it.

The Dan Cooper mystery is something that I have been following since I was nine years old. Every few years it seems that there is a new development in the case. Personally, this is one mystery that I'd just as well prefer to see forever unsolved. Cooper never actually hurt anyone and his stunt... well, that took some serious brass ones to even conceive the plan for, never mind that he actually pulled it off, seemingly. Yeah he broke the law bigtime, but there aren't too many scoundrels that it can honestly be said were "heroic" in their misdeeds.

Dan Cooper... or whatever his real name might be... is one of them :-)

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How did a thirty-year old scrap of Richmond newspaper get into my driveway?

For two days now this has been wigging me out. Think y'all will understand why as you read on...

Saturday afternoon my girlfriend arrived at my house. It's about a hundred miles or so between where we live (only an hour and a half of drive time, and less if the Virginia state troopers aren't looking :-P). She came at 2 and we were hanging out here when a short while later in the afternoon we noticed something on the front bumper of her car.

At first we thought it might be part of some animal that she had hit (though she couldn't remember ever hitting one, which is better than can be said about Yours Truly, but anyhoo...) But when we went out to look at it, it wasn't long before we had wished that it was a piece of roadkill, 'cuz we can not figure out how this ended up stuck in her car's bumper and then survived the trip down here.

That's a photo of it. "It" being a scrap of newspaper from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. And from the April 14th, 1981 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch at that.

How does a piece of newspaper from thirty years ago make a few hundred miles' worth of journey across the state of Virginia and along the highway to arrive at my house in north-central North Carolina, and not only that but in remarkably intact and un-faded condition?

But that's not the craziest thing that we found about this newspaper fragment. It's from the op-ed section. The lead editorial is an essay about the space shuttle Columbia. The Columbia launched on the very first space shuttle mission, a test flight, on April 12th 1981. It landed a few hours after this edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch was published.

Just over thirty years later, this piece of newspaper with the complete essay about the first shuttle flight arrived in my driveway, a day after the orbiter Atlantis launched the very last space shuttle mission.

Quite the peculiar coincidence, aye?

There are numerous other aspects of this piece of newspaper that make it quite fascinating. A column by William Safire (who died in 2009) addresses the role of the marketplace in the freedom of speech. Below that is an editorial cartoon about the Columbia launch, poking fun at the Soviet space program (note the "CCCP" Cyrillic initials for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) evokeing especially strong reminiscing of those days when we were still embroiled in the Cold War. Nestled between that and another cartoon - an incomplete one about the Warsaw Pact - is an essay by one John Chamberlain warning why Russia would be making a mistake to intervene in Poland's Solidarity movement (Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, is noted). At the very bottom of the page is the start of a piece about gun control. Still another piece notes the passing at age 88 of General Omar Bradley: one of the United States' most honored commanders of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II.

The reverse side of the Times-Dispatch page is no less intriguing, despite it being filled with nothing but advertising. The most interesting is an ad for Radio Shack's TRS-80 home computer: you can buy a TRS-80 with built-in 12" monitor, two 5 1/4" floppy drives and expandable to 48K of memory... all starting at just $999! The ad also makes sure to inform you that Radio Shack has other TRS-80 computers priced between $249 to $10,000.

In so many ways, the arrival of this piece of newspaper from three full decades ago has... totally mystified me: how far away it has come in both distance and time, the beautiful condition of the paper (apart from the tearing around the edges), the irony of it featuring an editorial about the first space shuttle mission even as the final one is currently underway...

...and how did it come to be stuck in the front bumper of my girlfriend's car?

We haven't a clue. But it is quite the neat mystery! Maybe someone reading this can suggest a hypothesis for how it came to be here, 'cuz I'm all out of ideas.

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Why are fish and birds mass-perishing all over the world?

Awright, so at this point we've got...

...Thousands of dead fish and birds in Arkansas

...Thousands of dead fish in a river in Florida

...Bunches of dead birds in Kentucky

...More dead birds in Louisiana

...Thousands of dead fish in the Chesapeake Bay area

...Dead fish in New Zealand

...Countless birds found dead in Sweden

...Tons of dead fish washing ashore in Brazil

...Thousands of dead birds found in eastern Texas

So, what's going on here? This kind of thing worldwide, I'm rather reminded of what Goldfinger told James Bond: that first is happenstance, a second time is coincidence, a third time or more is... something else?

No, don't go calling me a "conspiracy theorist" or anything like that. But any person would be hard-pressed not to admit: that is a rather peculiar (and disturbing) pattern going on lately.

EDIT 4:29 p.m. EST: Add 40,000 dead crabs washed ashore in Great Britain to the list of weird animal deaths over the past several days.

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Has the Poe Toaster gone "Nevermore"?

Very unusual and perplexing news coming out of Baltimore this morning: the Poe Toaster did NOT show up to make his/her annual tribute to Edgar Allan Poe! For the first time since the ritual has been recorded - at least since 1949 - it simply didn't happen.

Every year on Poe's birthday of January 19th, in the very early morning hours, a mysterious figure has come out of the darkness to visit the original burial site of Poe. The Poe Toaster leaves roses and a bottle of cognac, and then disappears just as quickly as he (or she) arrived? Nobody knows who this person is. And thankfullly the Poe Toaster has been left un-harassed during the course of the tradition: there should be some mystery still left in this world, yes?

But this year, for the first time ever, the Poe Toaster failed to come.

Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House, said this morning that he'll give the Poe Toaster two more years to come again before declaring that the tradition has apparently been concluded.

Here's hoping that the Poe Toaster, wherever he or she is, is well and that the commemoration of Edgar Allan Poe will continue for years still to come.

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Mystery: Swiss watch found in 400-year old Chinese tomb

Shades of Michael Crichton's Timeline, or television's Lost: archaeologists are stumped at the discovery of a Swiss watch within a Chinese tomb that was sealed more than four hundred years ago. While excavating the Ming-era tomb in southern China, researchers heard a metallic object hit the floor. When they picked it up they discovered, encrusted with the detritus of time, a tiny watch stopped at 10:06 and with the word "Swiss" engraved on the back.

Four hundred years ago there were no watches. And Switzerland didn't even exist as the country as we know it today. The watch itself is thought to be around one hundred years old.

The archaeologists have stopped with the dig until experts from Beijing can arrive to help unravel the anachronistic riddle.

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Sign of the times: Spam production can't keep up with demand

The New York Times is reporting that Hormel is pulling out all the stops to keep up with a sudden demand for Spam. The classic "mystery meat in a can" was first introduced over seventy years ago and ever since has become a staple food for hard economic times, having cemented that status during the lean years of World War II. And now as many seriously wonder if we might be on the cusp of another Great Depression...

Hormel declined to cooperate with this article, but several of its workers were interviewed here recently with the help of their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 9. Slumped in chairs at the union hall after making 149,950 cans of Spam on the day shift, several workers said they been through boom times before — but nothing like this.

Spam "seems to do well when hard times hit," said Dan Bartel, business agent for the union local. "We'll probably see Spam lines instead of soup lines."

The article further reports that Kraft is another company seeing an upswing in the demand for its "low-budget" products, particularly macaroni and Velveeta.

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Romanov mystery solved: DNA testing ends ninety years of speculation

It was one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the Twentieth Century. And had I not been so busy with other things, I would not have missed the announcement about three weeks ago that the last members of Tsar Nicholas II's family had finally been found...

Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and his family in a photo taken in 1911

Nicholas and his family, along with several faithful servants, were executed by the Bolsheviks in the town of Yekaterinburg on July 17th, 1918, a little over a year after his abdication from the throne. Rumors and legend have persisted over the decades that at least one of the Romanov children survived the slaughter. Most fancifully, it's been suggested that Nicholas' only son Alexei and youngest daughter Anastasia had somehow been secretly spared.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the remains of Nicholas II and most of the Romanov family were found. After exhaustive research it was discovered that two of his children were still missing: at least one daughter, and Alexei. The Romanov enigma would endure for nearly another two decades.

And then in the summer of 2007 the remains of two children were found in the area of the Romanov execution. They matched a report by the Romanovs' executioner, who said that two of the bodies had been burned and buried separately from those of the family. For the past several months the remains have been undergoing DNA analysis.

And now we know for certain: none of the Romanovs escaped execution. It has been confirmed that the remains are those of Alexei and his sister Maria, the third oldest of Nicholas II's daughters.

I'll admit: I was one of those who ever since first reading about the Romanovs had secretly hoped that at least one of them had yet survived. And it would have been neat for there to have been this one great mystery of the previous century left unsolved, which would have always left a little room to have a glimmer of hope.

There is no hope now. Nicholas, his wife and all their issue were massacred, leaving no survivors.

But at least now, with no more doubt, they will soon be together as a family again: on Earth as they are in Heaven. As it should be.

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CLOVERFIELD ending: Where was it and who saw what?

Call it the Zapruder Film of monster movies: right now the Internet is buzzing with discussion about what might have happened in the very last shot of Cloverfield, which opened yesterday.

I went to see Cloverfield yesterday afternoon, and last night I posted my review of it. It wasn't long afterward that an anonymous reader made the following intriguing comment...

In case you are wondering where the monster came from in the closing scene where it is one month previous and they are at the beach if you look out over the ocean in the distance an object (presumably the monster) falls from the sky and right as it hits the water the camera turns to beths face. This is the only hint that the director said he put in there as to where the monster/creature came from. If you are going to see it again this weekend look for that in the final scenes.

I didn't remember seeing anything like that when I watched Cloverfield, and I like to think that I'm a pretty attentive guy to details like that. Unless it was something so incredibly obscure, and I don't believe that J.J. Abrams and the Bad Robot guys would obfuscate so major a detail that much.

Then I started reading the blogosphere, and it turns out that other people are saying the same thing too: that in the final shot of Cloverfield, in the footage from Coney Island a month before the attack, that something huge and often described as "dark" lands in the ocean, just before Beth tells Rob that she had a good day.

It bugged me enough to decide that I wanted to see Cloverfield again. And today.

So a bit before noon, Lisa and I got in my car and we went to the Brassfield Cinemark on the northwest edge of Greensboro. After hearing me talk about it, she decided that she wanted to check out what the hullabaloo is about too. We got our tickets and went in and watched the movie. It was just as good a second time around, if not better. As for what Lisa thought about it, ummmm... she might write a review for her own blog, so I won't spoil her thoughts on it :-)

The final scene was approaching. I literally pried my eyelids open with my fingers, doing my darndest not to blink at all. I kept my peepers focused on the much-discussed right-hand side of the screen, looking at the sky and the water off Coney Island.

Okay, I must say: there is something there all right. But the only thing I saw, at all, was a large patch of white foam in the water, like the wake of something massive. I did not see a "big and dark" object fall out of the sky and hit the water. But there is something out there kicking up the surf off Coney Island. What that is, I don't know. But right now I'm not convinced at all that it was something that came falling out of the sky. Out in the water, it doesn't take much to make a plenty big enough wake.

So I personally did not see the "thing" from the sky. And yet, there are lots of people who are swearing quite vehemently that they did see something. If it's a delusion, it's one that's being shared by quite a large number of movie goers this weekend.

At the same time I'm also hearing from other people who reported that they looked for this, but didn't see the falling object either.

Curiouser and curiouser...

A few problems I have with this, if it is indeed supposed to be the arrival of the Cloverfield monster. For one thing, Coney Island was a month before the night of Rob's party: what was the monster doing during all of that time? The more obvious question in my mind though is that if the monster was that enormous, then how in the world did its crashing into the water not get noticed by not only Rob and Beth, but by everyone else at Coney Island? I mean, if a skyscraper came hurtling out of the blue and into the ocean off-shore from a major amusement park, it seems like somebody would have taken note of it, right?

In light of how many people claim to have seen something fall out of the sky and into the water, and how many claim to have seen nothing at all, I have to wonder: is it at all possible that on some prints of Cloverfield there is a falling object, and it's deliberately missing on others copies? Cloverfield has already arrived at the box office after months of staggering hype fueled by massive speculation on the Internet. Would it really be past Abrams and Reeves and the rest of Bad Robot - the same gang that gave us Lost and Alias, mind ya - to do something this devious with the final film itself, so as to "pour gasoline" on the already out-of-control wildfire that is Cloverfield?

What if some prints of Cloverfield have the monster crashing into the water, and other prints of the movie don't show it at all? It would then become a game of wondering which theaters have which prints of the film.

Hey, Clue did something like this way back in 1986, with multiple endings (I think there were 3 or 4 different endings and which one you saw depended on which theater you went to). It was quite an innovative gimmick at the time. Maybe that's what's up with Cloverfield.

Okay so, now I'm hoping someone else will write in and tell me: what did you see at the end of Cloverfield? Where and when did you see it exactly, too: was it at the very beginning of the final bit of the Coney Island footage, or is it elsewhere in that scene?

I guess I'll have to see this again sometime soon (hey, another reason to play tricks with the ending, eh? :-)

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