I served in the US Air Force from
1900 from January 18,
1964 to October 18,
1968 I left the Air Force 4 months
early to essentially continue
my studies my rank when I left was
Sergeant and I had the clearance level
Top Secret Crypto I worked in
Tactical Air
command at Langley Base, Virginia,
in the technical reconnaissance group
4444, the group was engaged in photographic
reconnaissance. We worked with
U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites even before
anyone even knew that we had them;
no one knew that we were engaged in
spy photography from satellites
then of course no one knew that we
had an O2 reconnaissance program or
what it was capable of then
and it happened in
1965, I think it was in June or July of
sixty-five, somewhere around this
period my boss approached me I was
working in development labs I
was a technician I worked with photographic equipment
I understood electronics I received
a qualification in repairing electronic
photographic equipment in Colorado at the RI
Air Force Base and the entire training took one year
the organization I ended up in was a
completely new facility it was
created to serve the
troops against the background of the escalation of the war in
Vietnam That is, it was a new Base. I
arrived there in January six years ago,
to get it started,
we installed all the
equipment, there was everything from printing
presses,
we were engaged in mapping, part of our
work
was automatic terrain sensing,
we had simulators that created that
is, a huge map a
simulator map of the area was placed and then the camera
was moved along this map which
recorded the area and then this recording
was installed on a set of aircraft and so the aircraft
could fly under radars, no one knew
then what the bulls had.
In short, I worked in a laboratory
once and the head of the staff was Sergeant
Taylor came up to me and said that they
had a problem with some kind of device
on the territory of the
base, it was connected with one of the first
lunar devices, a lunar arbitrator, the purpose of
which was essentially to find the first landing sites
for a
future lunar mission with
astronauts in
the year. In short, he said that they
had a problem with the equipment it
was similar to what We were working with
computerized
printing equipment and He asked me to go there and
do an inspection and he said it was an
NSA facility and then I didn't know what the
NSA was I was very green I thought that he
said nas because in English it
sounds similar to NS or NASA I thought it
was NASA I remember him saying nsa and
in my head I immediately turned it into the word
NASA and for the audience What is the
National Security Agency, is it a national
security agency And what is the most interesting at
that moment when my boss approached
me I only had
Top Secret access I received my
Crypto level access only after
a few weeks it takes years to
get a high level of access and it all
starts when you are studying and only
students of specific institutions then
receive a high level access they
can also choose where they will be
assigned to work and this is very
cool and moreover, I was simply
well prepared for such
work and so I took the tools with me
I went to this
object when I approached the object I
saw that there was almost no guarded and
of course the entire territory of the base was very well
guarded and years later I was still surprised
that there wasn’t much
security outside I entered the building with low level pits
I had high level
access two employees took me into the
hangar It was a very large hangar And
when I entered there were people there from different
countries there are a lot of people from other countries in
civilian clothes with translators and Zhih
level of access hanging from isha The first
thing I
thought is if this is NASA what are all
these foreigners doing here all these people from other
countries speaking other languages
I didn’t understand what was
going on there it was a big
surprise, that is, the Air Force. It was very
strange what the Air Force were doing. These people were doing here, they
sat very quietly, very thoughtfully, and
as if there was some kind of tension hanging in the air,
they looked very worried.
So they brought me to the laboratory,
I began to examine the equipment, there was an Air
Force Private. second class I was also a
private second class, he turned on
the equipment, went through the operating procedure,
it didn’t work as it should and I realized what was
wrong with it. I told him we need to
take this thing out of the laboratory for
repairs, we can’t repair it
here. In a dark
room, so he I called someone
to have this device taken out and it was
about the size of a small
refrigerator, that is, it couldn’t
just be taken out and so everyone left the
laboratory from the dark room. Except for
this private second class and me and
we are waiting for someone to come to
take it out
apparatus and while we were waiting I started talking to him.
I was very interested in how they transmit
images from the Lunar station here to the
laboratory and he described to me the whole process,
how different radio telescopes around the world
are connected to this and they telemetry
data to the base,
and at that moment I didn’t know in the World Cup was the
true purpose of this work of this dark
room and the object itself. I thought that they
were collecting data here and then
publishing all the pictures they received. I
had no idea that they
were doing other
things at this object and so he begins to tell
me all this, I knew that all our work
was classified in any case And that he
could only reveal to me a little of what
he was doing then they worked with
35 mm photographic films which were assembled into
what were called mosaics measuring 45 by
30 cm and each film represented one
flyby over the moon and they they took them and
glued them together into a photograph, they
scanned one stripe on the moon, then
another third and created a large
photograph, so he shows me how
it all works, we went to one end of the
laboratory and he says, by the way, we
discovered a base on the far side of the moon,
I say Whose In sense Whose He says Yes,
we discovered some kind of base on the back
side and at that moment
I was scared and very
much thinking to myself that if
someone came here now we would have problems
because he should not share this information with me
I was very interesting but I
also knew that he was crossing a boundary
that should not be crossed and then he
pulled out one of the mosaics and showed me this
base where there were geometric shapes there
were towers there were
spherical structures very tall towers
what looked like radar stations
radar dishes But they were large
buildings and
I didn’t ask anything else because
I was Worried that someone might come in
at any moment. I understood that He told
me about this. Because he simply
had no one to
discuss it with and most likely in this
laboratory he was one of few
ordinary employees and he was a
performer and of course he had a
fairly high level of
security clearance, but he could not
share this information with anyone else and in those
days it was rare if they
trusted you a secret you must keep the secret,
it’s not like these days when people don’t
take it seriously, we had
different morals and different values, that’s how we were
raised and we were bound by such
promises, so it was rare when
someone could
spill the beans, but he and I were of the same
rank and it seemed to me that he had a very
worried look on his face there was the same
shadow that the scientists had in the big
hall, they were all very
nervous and it looked like He needed to
tell it to
someone and that was the end of it. I
didn’t ask him anything else.
I just put it aside,
which is interesting every day when I
came home. when will they talk about
this on the
news so I turned on the TV and
waited for them to announce it on the news we
discovered a base on the far side of
the moon out of our naivety
of course and now 30 more summers have passed and we
still haven’t heard anything about it
another interesting one The point is that I
don’t know what resolution was in these
pictures, but I know that during the satellite
photography that we were doing in my
laboratory, it
was possible to see the license plate number of the car from the
satellite even then, so I knew that
we had such a level of technology. Was there the
same level on the Lunar Station I don’t
know, this always raised a question in my
head: why do we get such low
resolution on the images that we
get from Mars and all other missions?
The resolution on these images is very low,
while we
had much higher resolution in the beginning So I
don’t know in the World Cup, here it is, in one of the rooms in
our laboratory there was a map of the Sinai
Peninsula And it was a mosaic
made up of satellite images and it
was 18 Meters long and 18 Meters wide
it was huge with incredible
detail it was amazing I personally
I saw cars on satellite
images with license plates on them and they
showed it to me so I knew for sure
that it was
at that base they were very
tall and thin buildings I don’t know
how tall they were but I think they were very
tall Have you seen profile or
angular pictures photographs with a shadow, these were angular
photographs with a shadow Yes, there
were
spherical and dome-shaped
buildings that were very large, they
must have had a scale of about a
kilometer
because on the scale of the entire large photograph they
stood out very much, that is, they were very
large objects on some buildings it
seemed that they were very the reflective
surfaces of a couple of buildings that I
saw reminded
me of cooling towers at
thermal power plants, they were shaped like that,
others were just very straight and
tall with a flat
roof, some were round, others
looked like a round hangar or greenhouse,
that is, an arched roof in the shape of a
greenhouse and all these buildings stood next to
each other with a friend in the picture that I saw
They were next to each other against the backdrop of a
very large open landscape
Yes there was one building that looked like a
parabolic
dish but it was small it
looked like a radar station
it was a building maybe it was a
radar that
is next to there was another building with a
truncated roof, that is, a flat roof
with corners, I didn’t want to look at the picture
for too long because I felt
that I
was being exposed to sharing it with someone, he
couldn’t tell anyone about it, discuss
it with anyone,
and he didn’t this is with some
ulterior motive but only because
I think it was very hard to carry
around and so he decided to share