The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [43]
The radar targets carried by the balloons were partly manufactured by novelty and toy companies in New York, whose inventory of decorative icons seems to have been remembered many years later as alien hieroglyphics.
The heyday of UFOs corresponds to the time when the main delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons was being switched from aircraft to missiles. An early and important technical problem concerned re-entry - returning a nuclear-armed nosecone through the bulk of the Earth’s atmosphere without burning it up in the process (as small asteroids and comets are destroyed in their passage through the upper air). Certain materials, nosecone geometries, and angles of entry are better than others. Observations of re-entry (or the more spectacular launches) could very well reveal US progress in this vital strategic technology or, worse, inefficiencies in the design; such observations might suggest what defensive measures an adversary should take. Understandably, the subject was considered highly sensitive.
Inevitably there must have been cases in which military personnel were told not to talk about what they had seen, or where seemingly innocuous sightings were suddenly classified top secret with severely constrained need-to-know criteria. Air Force officers and civilian scientists thinking back about it in later years might very well conclude that the government had engineered a UFO cover-up. If nosecones are judged UFOs, the charge is a fair one.
Consider spoofing. In the strategic confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the adequacy of air defences was a vital issue. It was item (3) on General Cabell’s list. If you could find a weakness, it might be the key to ‘victory’ in an all-out nuclear war. The only sure way to test your adversary’s defences is to fly an aircraft over their borders and see how long it takes for them to notice. The United States did this routinely to test Soviet air defences.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had state-of-the-art radar defence systems covering its west and east coasts, and especially its northern approaches (over which a Soviet bomber or missile attack would most likely come). But there was a soft underbelly - no significant early warning system to detect the geographically much more taxing southern approach. This is of course information vital for a potential adversary. It immediately suggests a spoof: one or more of the adversary’s high-performance aircraft zoom out of the Caribbean, let’s say, into US airspace, penetrating, let’s say, a few hundred miles up the Mississippi River until a US air defence radar locks on. Then the intruders hightail it out of there. (Or, as a control experiment, a unit of US high-performance aircraft is sequestered and sent in unannounced sorties to determine how porous American air defences are.) In such a case, there may be combined visual and radar sigh tings by military and civilian observers and large numbers of independent reports. What is reported corresponds to no known aircraft. The Air Force and civilian aviation authorities truthfully state that none of their aircraft was responsible. Even if they’ve been urging Congress to fund a southern Early Warning System, the Air Force is unlikely to admit that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to New Orleans, much less Memphis, before anybody caught on.
Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level technical investigating team, Air Force and civilian observers told to keep their mouths shut, and not just the appearance but the reality of suppression of the data. Again, this conspiracy of silence need have nothing to do with alien spacecraft. Even decades later, there are bureaucratic reasons for the Department of Defense to be close-mouthed about such embarrassments. There is a potential conflict of interest between parochial concerns of the Department of Defense and the solution of the UFO enigma.
In addition,