Mystery Satellite


In February 1960 a station of the North American Air Defense 
System picked up a radar echo from an enormous space station 
orbiting the Earth. This intercept caused panic and alarm 
throughout America's and the Soviet Union's Defense 
Departments. It was the wrong kind of orbit for a Soviet 
launch. The space station was in a polar orbit, whereas the 
orbits of Soviet satellites were invariably inclined at 65 
degrees to the equator, which took the satellites over South 
America and North Africa. Apart from that, there was no 
booster on either side of the Atlantic capable of putting such 
an object into space. American scientists had calculated that 
the weight of the orbiting station was around 15 tons. For 
three weeks the Americans kept track of the space station, 
then it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

The February intercept was just the first in a series of 
strange space phenomena which have baffled scientists 
worldwide for over three decades. On September 3, 1960, seven 
months after the first intercept, it was revealed that an 
unidentified object had been photographed in the sky over New 
 York by a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation's 
Long Island factory. The object, which appeared to emanate a 
red glow, had been seen several times during the preceding two 
weeks, apparently following an east-to-west orbit, whereas 
most satellites were launched in the opposite direction, and 
its speed appeared to be about three times that of America's 
Echo 1 "metal balloon" satellite.

The Americans attached so much importance to these mystery 
sightings that they organized a special committee to gather as 
much information as possible about them. But the committee's 
findings, if there were any, were kept secret and the 
sightings were forgotten.

Then, on May 15th, 1963, a Mercury capsule carrying Gordon 
Cooper blasted into space from Cape Canaveral on a 22-orbit 
mission around the world. During the final orbit, Cooper 
informed the Muchea, Australia tracking station that he could 
see a glowing, greenish object rapidly approaching his capsule 
from directly ahead.

Whatever Cooper saw was solid and large enough to be picked up 
travelling east to west by Muchea's radar. Cooper's sighting 
was reported by NBC, which was broadcasting live coverage of 
Cooper's flight, but when Cooper landed, reporters were not 
allowed to ask him about the sighting. The "official" 
statement was that Cooper had been hallucinating due to 
release of poisonous carbon dioxide from an electrical short 
in the capsule.

But Cooper, who is a firm believer in UFOs and later made the 
UN speech in which he had referred to aliens, UFOs and 
interstellar travel, had 10 years earlier seen a UFO while 
piloting his F-86 Sabrejet over western Germany.

In June 1965, astronauts Ed White_the first American to walk 
in space and who was later to die with Gus Grissom and Roger 
Chaffee in a launch-pad fire during a test of an Apollo 
capsule_and James McDivitt were passing over Hawaii in a 
Gemini capsule when they observed a strange metallic object 
some distance away. It appeared to have arms or projections. 
McDivitt took pictures of it with a motion picture camera. 
Those films have never been released.

The "official" Air Force explanation was that the two 
astronauts had seen a Pegasus satellite, which was equipped 
with broad protruding "arms" to register hits from 
micro-meteorites. But the Air Force forgot to mention that 
while the astronauts were over Hawaii, the Pegasus was over 
1,000 miles away and could not have been observed.

In December 1965, Gemini astronauts Jim Lovell and Frank 
Borman also saw something strange in space during the second 
orbit of their record-breaking 14-day flight around Earth. 
Borman reported that he was observing an unidentified 
spacecraft some distance away from their capsule. Gemini 
Control at Kennedy suggested that he might be seeing the final 
stage of the huge Titan booster which had lifted him and 
Lovell into orbit earlier that day.

Borman confirmed the sighting of the booster shining 
brilliantly in the sunlight. But what he was observing was 
something different; something he could not explain. Later 
NASA claimed that Borman had seen the wreckage of a U.S. Air 
Force rocket that had been blown up during a launch several 
days earlier. But the Air Force rebuked the claim when they 
insisted that no wreckage was in that particular orbit. They 
were placing a series of military recon satellites into orbit, 
however, and those launches were cloaked in secrecy.

There may be rational explanations for all the NASA sightings 
and for many of the sighting which occur in America almost 
daily. For years flying saucer scares were carefully fostered 
by the Soviet Union to draw attention from sensitive areas and 
secret experiments. Anything unusual seen in the skies above 
Sverdlovsk, a town barred to all foreign visitors because it 
is an important center of Soviet missile production, was 
attributed to UFO activity.

We suspect every other industrialized nation does the same to 
protect their "black" projects and secret weapons.