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#u-2
2 articles
The U-2 Incident: The Spy Plane That Wrecked a Summit
On the morning of 1 May 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft — a strange, glider-winged spy plane built to fly higher than any fighter could reach — was cruising at some 70,000 feet over the heart of the Soviet Union, its cameras photographing military installations, when a Soviet surface-to-air missile exploded near it and sent it spinning out of the sky. The pilot, a CIA contract flyer named Francis Gary Powers, parachuted to earth and was captured alive near the city of Sverdlovsk. What followed was one of the most humiliating episodes in the history of American Cold War diplomacy. Believing the pilot dead and the plane destroyed, the United States put out a cover story: that a NASA 'weather research' plane had strayed off course after its pilot reported oxygen trouble. Then the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sprang his trap, revealing that the pilot was alive, had confessed, and that the wreckage — cameras, film, and all — was in Soviet hands. President Eisenhower was exposed in a lie before the world, and, breaking with precedent, ultimately acknowledged that the United States had been conducting espionage overflights. The incident detonated days before a long-planned summit in Paris, which it duly destroyed, ending a fragile thaw and plunging the Cold War back into deep freeze. This is the story of the U-2 incident — the secret program, the shootdown, the collapsing lie, and the summit it took down with it.
Roswell 1947 & Area 51
On July 8, 1947, the public information office of the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release stating that the 509th Bomb Group had recovered the remains of a 'flying disc' from a ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico. The release was carried on the front page of the *Roswell Daily Record* that afternoon under the headline 'RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.' Four hours later, General Roger Ramey at Fort Worth held a counter-press conference identifying the debris as a weather balloon. The story disappeared from the national press within a day. It stayed disappeared for thirty-one years. In 1978, the UFO researcher Stanton Friedman tracked down a retired Army officer named Jesse Marcel — the intelligence officer who had originally examined the ranch debris in 1947 — and recorded an interview in which Marcel said the material had not been a weather balloon. From that single interview emerged what is now the most-told American conspiracy story of the postwar period. In 1994 and 1997, after a Congressional inquiry, the U.S. Air Force published two reports identifying the 1947 debris as part of the classified Project Mogul — high-altitude acoustic balloons designed to detect Soviet atomic tests — and the supposed alien bodies of later witness accounts as anthropomorphic test dummies used in high-altitude parachute experiments between 1953 and 1959. Separately, in August 2013, the CIA's declassification of the U-2 spy plane history formally acknowledged the existence of Area 51 — the remote Nevada testing facility at Groom Lake — by name, for the first time.
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