You wouldn’t believe it just by looking at it, but this slice of 60s Americana is located three feet underneath a New York City park. Or, at least, it was back in 1964. Whether it’s still there remains a mystery—one almost as fascinating as the reason it was constructed in the first place.
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The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 off the coast of Vietnam has prompted a massive multinational maritime search for hints of the plane’s fate. Among the growing armada of surface and aerial search vessels is the US Navy’s venerable P-3C Orion, a long-range surveillance platform still just as effective today as it was in the early Cold War.
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In the 1980s Irina Margareta Nistor worked as a translator of TV programs in Romania under the Communist regime. But in her spare time she secretly dubbed over 3,000 banned movie titles, all VHS tapes smuggled in from the West. These tapes quickly spread throughout Romania. Nobody knew Nistor’s name. But everybody knew her voice.
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The tumbleweed, which seems so at home rolling down an American highway, is actually an invasive plant from the Russian steppes. In the relatively short time it’s been invading the plains—just over a century—the tumbleweed has managed to establish itself as an indelible symbol of the western landscape. It is the ultimate sleeper cell, we might say, an enemy plant, if we were to resort to Cold War metaphors.
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In 1969, Günter Zettl was a 18-year-old student in Waren an der Müritz, a little town in East Germany. Zettl liked to listen to prohibited Western radio stations and one day he decided to participate in a music contest by sending a postcard. Unfortunately, the communist version of the NSA got it first.
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By the end of WWII, the basics of helicopter technology as we know it had generally been worked out—and we’d begun to reach the aircraft’s physical limitations. For the US Air Force, the solution to the issue running up against these performance walls was simple: Combine the best parts of a helicopter and jet together, creating the chimeric delta-wing Convertiplane.
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Quests for scientific knowledge and military superiority often go hand-in-hand. And nowhere is that more exemplified than in the nuclear-powered NR-1 research vessel. When it wasn’t busy exploring the wonders of the deep ocean, its crew engaged the Soviet Union in a dangerous cat-and-mouse game of sub-sea espionage—much of which is veiled in secrecy even today.
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Soviet engineering is often derided as effective but crude and simplistic, but that’s a bum rap. The USSR produced a number of technologies that were as visually arresting as they were effective. Just look at the sleek, humongous, flying hammerhead named Ekranoplan.
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When US-Soviet relationships were at their frostiest in the 1980s, there was no telling what sort of exotic threat was about to come roaring through Russia’s Iron Curtain. That’s where the Defense Intelligence Agency came in.
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Space may be the final frontier of exploration, but there’s plenty of Earth left unmapped, too—from the giant canyon recently discovered beneath Greenland
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
