Excerpt from the ColdwarComms Digest #1119 // Re: A Spy Satellite You've Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War (IEEE Spectrum article on the PARCAE satellite system. //
1 view
Skip to first unread message
Terry W. Colvin
Jan 30, 2025, 10:38:29 AMJan 30
to UFO-Collective
This is an excerpt from the ColdwarComms mailing list. It seems that some triangular UFO reports
stemmed from the PARCAE satellites in relatively low orbit, flying in formations of two or three.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_System
One reply cited the Byeman-Talent-Keyhole series of recon satellites. Up until Bamford's book,
The Puzzle Palace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace): A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Intelligence Agency, we in the
communications center could not say Talent Keyhole. We instead said a phonetic, Tango Kilo.
Terry in Thailand
.
.
.
1c. Re: A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War (IEEE Spectrum article on the PARCAE satellite system)
From: Sam Etler
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2025 12:27:57 PST
Alluded to briefly in the article, these apparently flew in sets of three,
hence the name. I found an interesting reference to these in the 2012 book
"Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures" edited by
Lisa Parks and James Schwoch on p. 244:
The illuminated hulls of reconnaissance satellites follow the
inverse-square law: objects closer to Earth are exponentially brighter.
Just visible to the unaided eye at an altitude of about 1,100 km are the
Naval Ocean Surveillance Satellites (NOSS) (code-named Parcae, after Zeus’s
three daughters), whose mission is to track naval vessels by eavesdropping
on shortwave and other transmissions. The NOSS satellites cruise across the
night sky in formations of twos and threes, appearing as points of light
moving across the sky in a triangular formation. In other words, they look
exactly like late-generation UFOs, or delta-winged aircraft using a
cloaking device. In fact, they are so easy to mistake for UFOs or “black”
aircraft that UFO researchers have come to realize that a number of “black
triangle” sightings can be explained by the Parcae constellations.
Thought that was interesting.
sam
On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 10:10 AM Marty Ftacek via groups.io (...) wrote:
Cool read on the USN Parcae recon satellite system. I had never heard of
it until today. I was able to close the membership pop-up to read the article.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/reconnaissance-satellite
stemmed from the PARCAE satellites in relatively low orbit, flying in formations of two or three.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_System
One reply cited the Byeman-Talent-Keyhole series of recon satellites. Up until Bamford's book,
The Puzzle Palace (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace): A Report on NSA, America's Most Secret Intelligence Agency, we in the
communications center could not say Talent Keyhole. We instead said a phonetic, Tango Kilo.
Terry in Thailand
.
.
.
1c. Re: A Spy Satellite You’ve Never Heard of Helped Win the Cold War (IEEE Spectrum article on the PARCAE satellite system)
From: Sam Etler
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2025 12:27:57 PST
Alluded to briefly in the article, these apparently flew in sets of three,
hence the name. I found an interesting reference to these in the 2012 book
"Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries, and Cultures" edited by
Lisa Parks and James Schwoch on p. 244:
The illuminated hulls of reconnaissance satellites follow the
inverse-square law: objects closer to Earth are exponentially brighter.
Just visible to the unaided eye at an altitude of about 1,100 km are the
Naval Ocean Surveillance Satellites (NOSS) (code-named Parcae, after Zeus’s
three daughters), whose mission is to track naval vessels by eavesdropping
on shortwave and other transmissions. The NOSS satellites cruise across the
night sky in formations of twos and threes, appearing as points of light
moving across the sky in a triangular formation. In other words, they look
exactly like late-generation UFOs, or delta-winged aircraft using a
cloaking device. In fact, they are so easy to mistake for UFOs or “black”
aircraft that UFO researchers have come to realize that a number of “black
triangle” sightings can be explained by the Parcae constellations.
Thought that was interesting.
sam
On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 10:10 AM Marty Ftacek via groups.io (...) wrote:
Cool read on the USN Parcae recon satellite system. I had never heard of
it until today. I was able to close the membership pop-up to read the article.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/reconnaissance-satellite
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages