It was. I think in 1998 congress released some sort of investigation into the incident at Area 51. And the military came back with "Weather Balloons".
Over the next several years, the military quietly revealed what the incident actually was was: high-altitude atmospheric nuclear detonation detecting barrage balloons.
Basically, the US needed to spy on the Soviet's nuclear test capabilities. Seismographs are always historically good for this, but only when the detonations are underground, or close to ground. They're not so good at detecting above ground detonations. These balloons carried very advanced sensor technology for 1948, and could detect lots of things like pressure waves, ionization, and radiation. In order to make sure that the equipment couldn't be just deciphered if lost, the CIA has long since developed very complicated ciphers for the equipment so that only people can read it that know what it already says. Hence the "alien language" on some of the equipment.
Now, why was the military keeping all that shit that secret? Well, the Soviets were steller at counter human intel. This is to say: all our spies kept dying. All of them. The Iron Curtain was no joke. Not only could the CIA not recruit agents from the Soviet Union, but the ones they planted into the Soviet Union had a life-span of days. This is why the intel and military moved heavily into Signal Intelligence. It's actually why Gary Powers had to go on his infamous voyage. Soviet SAMs were being placed all over Russia that could hit our high-altitude spy planes, and there was a last ditch attempt to get pictures of a Russian nuclear base before they were operational. Thing is, Russian counter-intel was so fucking good that they knew we'd give it a shot, and built one of the new SAMs exactly where they expected us to go. Which is why Powers was shot down in the first place.
This is also back in the day where the US was concerned about a "Bomber Gap". We had so little good intel on the Soviets that we bragged we had dozens of bombers in the event of a nuclear war, and Khrushchev just spouted off that they had hundreds. We panicked, built hundreds of planes, and then Khrushchev said he had thousands. So we built nearly 2,000 bombers as part of a round-the-clock 24/7 nuclear bomber deterrent. Eventually, one of those spy plane flights discovered a Soviet Nuclear Bomber base near the Arctic Ocean. It had 12 planes on it. Years more investigation revealed that... that was the entire Soviet nuclear bomber fleet. We were at a 2,000 : 12 advantage and had no idea. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Soviet military advisers were furious that Kruschev had said that shit and gotten the US into a huge and unbeatable bomber advantage. Worse, all of the Soviets were fucking stunned that the industrial and economic capacity of the US could just fly entire bomber fleets 24/7 for years, for literally no reason.
We had no idea how many bombers they had, meanwhile, they had stolen both the engineering plans for the Atomic and Hydrogen bomb from us. The intelligence gap was stunning. We needed every inch of SigInt that we could get. It gets a hell of a lot worse when you add in shit we found from the Venona chronicles: Hollywood was actively communist, the New York Times had been publishing Kremlin propaganda for decades, McCarthy was absolutely right about Soviet infiltration attempts in the US military, and the State Department had been heavily infiltrated with communist sympathizers and agents, Academicians had been actively sending nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviets for decades, the Civil Rights Movement was absolutely funded by Communist partisans stoking racial tension, the entire anti-war movement was built and funded by Soviet intel as the "Peace War Program" as a way of undermining US military activity, the anti-nuclear movement was another Soviet program to diminish the US's advantage in nuclear capabilities (and one of their greatest successes was pressuring the US to rescind the development of a neutron bomb), and of course the head of the FBI's conter-espionage program that was dedicated to looking for Soviet spies... was a Soviet Spy. American HumanInt was a fucking joke.
These observation balloons were part of that SigInt development, and we couldn't let the Soviets know our nuclear monitoring capabilities were as advanced as that in 1948.
We had no idea how many bombers they had, meanwhile...Venona chronicles...Hollywood...New York Times...Civil Rights Movement...anti-war movement...anti-nuclear movement...FBI...
Incidentally, this shit is why I am not as blackpilled as all the others on here. We went through all of that, even up to the point that in the 1970's you had Carter and the Dems all but saying they were going to surrender the Cold War and pave the way for the Soviet future and allow America to fall, and even keeping the House and Senate in the 1978 election (sound possibly familiar?).
And what happened? The American people shook themselves out of their stupor, said "FUCK! THAT!" And elected Reagan, who not only became one of the most popular presidents in US history, he gain a jump in approval when he joked that he was going to nuke Russia because "Commie Scum, LMAO". If you look at US History, we seem to actually do this more than you might think and seem to keep bouncing back from situations that have killed greater nations (something, something, Bismarck's quotes about America).
So why shouldn't I believe it will happen again, with the right amount of work.
Fundamentally, it's because they lean authoritarian, and authoritarians can't see why a more libertarian or chaotic system wouldn't just die.
Chaos begets order. Order begets chaos. Prolonged chaos generates new order. That's the benefit. The American people have probably endured the most prolonged assault by Leftism that has ever existed in the world. Liberal societies bend, but they do not break. This is the kind of thing that I talk about when I speak of a kind of Honey-comb defensive structure. You lose bits of ground (each comb) but the integrity of the structure is still generally solid.
Compare that to authoritarian systems. They are actually fragile. The breaking point is just much highers. When Franco died, Spain became a Leftist hell-hole. After the Argentinian Junta fell, it became a Leftist hell-hole. When Pinochet died, it became a Leftist shit-hole (one of the least bad ones, but a shithole none the less). The Chileans actually fought off another attempt by the Left to create a new constitution. They bend to a very small degree, and then completely shatter.
The value of Liberalism is how hard it is to actually break it because it bends so far, and is far more likely to simply bounce back. We can talk about Yuri Bezminov all the time, but fundamentally, he was wrong: The Soviet Union died before America could be conquered by Communists. It's under a new threat from a new regime, as well as it's older Fabian threat, but she's still bending around the pressure and pushing back. In fact, we're one of the only western nations that's actually pushing back. France is too, but the situation in France is far more serious than ours.
It was. I think in 1998 congress released some sort of investigation into the incident at Area 51. And the military came back with "Weather Balloons".
Over the next several years, the military quietly revealed what the incident actually was was: high-altitude atmospheric nuclear detonation detecting barrage balloons.
Basically, the US needed to spy on the Soviet's nuclear test capabilities. Seismographs are always historically good for this, but only when the detonations are underground, or close to ground. They're not so good at detecting above ground detonations. These balloons carried very advanced sensor technology for 1948, and could detect lots of things like pressure waves, ionization, and radiation. In order to make sure that the equipment couldn't be just deciphered if lost, the CIA has long since developed very complicated ciphers for the equipment so that only people can read it that know what it already says. Hence the "alien language" on some of the equipment.
Now, why was the military keeping all that shit that secret? Well, the Soviets were steller at counter human intel. This is to say: all our spies kept dying. All of them. The Iron Curtain was no joke. Not only could the CIA not recruit agents from the Soviet Union, but the ones they planted into the Soviet Union had a life-span of days. This is why the intel and military moved heavily into Signal Intelligence. It's actually why Gary Powers had to go on his infamous voyage. Soviet SAMs were being placed all over Russia that could hit our high-altitude spy planes, and there was a last ditch attempt to get pictures of a Russian nuclear base before they were operational. Thing is, Russian counter-intel was so fucking good that they knew we'd give it a shot, and built one of the new SAMs exactly where they expected us to go. Which is why Powers was shot down in the first place.
This is also back in the day where the US was concerned about a "Bomber Gap". We had so little good intel on the Soviets that we bragged we had dozens of bombers in the event of a nuclear war, and Khrushchev just spouted off that they had hundreds. We panicked, built hundreds of planes, and then Khrushchev said he had thousands. So we built nearly 2,000 bombers as part of a round-the-clock 24/7 nuclear bomber deterrent. Eventually, one of those spy plane flights discovered a Soviet Nuclear Bomber base near the Arctic Ocean. It had 12 planes on it. Years more investigation revealed that... that was the entire Soviet nuclear bomber fleet. We were at a 2,000 : 12 advantage and had no idea. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, Soviet military advisers were furious that Kruschev had said that shit and gotten the US into a huge and unbeatable bomber advantage. Worse, all of the Soviets were fucking stunned that the industrial and economic capacity of the US could just fly entire bomber fleets 24/7 for years, for literally no reason.
We had no idea how many bombers they had, meanwhile, they had stolen both the engineering plans for the Atomic and Hydrogen bomb from us. The intelligence gap was stunning. We needed every inch of SigInt that we could get. It gets a hell of a lot worse when you add in shit we found from the Venona chronicles: Hollywood was actively communist, the New York Times had been publishing Kremlin propaganda for decades, McCarthy was absolutely right about Soviet infiltration attempts in the US military, and the State Department had been heavily infiltrated with communist sympathizers and agents, Academicians had been actively sending nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviets for decades, the Civil Rights Movement was absolutely funded by Communist partisans stoking racial tension, the entire anti-war movement was built and funded by Soviet intel as the "Peace War Program" as a way of undermining US military activity, the anti-nuclear movement was another Soviet program to diminish the US's advantage in nuclear capabilities (and one of their greatest successes was pressuring the US to rescind the development of a neutron bomb), and of course the head of the FBI's conter-espionage program that was dedicated to looking for Soviet spies... was a Soviet Spy. American HumanInt was a fucking joke.
These observation balloons were part of that SigInt development, and we couldn't let the Soviets know our nuclear monitoring capabilities were as advanced as that in 1948.
Incidentally, this shit is why I am not as blackpilled as all the others on here. We went through all of that, even up to the point that in the 1970's you had Carter and the Dems all but saying they were going to surrender the Cold War and pave the way for the Soviet future and allow America to fall, and even keeping the House and Senate in the 1978 election (sound possibly familiar?).
And what happened? The American people shook themselves out of their stupor, said "FUCK! THAT!" And elected Reagan, who not only became one of the most popular presidents in US history, he gain a jump in approval when he joked that he was going to nuke Russia because "Commie Scum, LMAO". If you look at US History, we seem to actually do this more than you might think and seem to keep bouncing back from situations that have killed greater nations (something, something, Bismarck's quotes about America).
So why shouldn't I believe it will happen again, with the right amount of work.
Fundamentally, it's because they lean authoritarian, and authoritarians can't see why a more libertarian or chaotic system wouldn't just die.
Chaos begets order. Order begets chaos. Prolonged chaos generates new order. That's the benefit. The American people have probably endured the most prolonged assault by Leftism that has ever existed in the world. Liberal societies bend, but they do not break. This is the kind of thing that I talk about when I speak of a kind of Honey-comb defensive structure. You lose bits of ground (each comb) but the integrity of the structure is still generally solid.
Compare that to authoritarian systems. They are actually fragile. The breaking point is just much highers. When Franco died, Spain became a Leftist hell-hole. After the Argentinian Junta fell, it became a Leftist hell-hole. When Pinochet died, it became a Leftist shit-hole (one of the least bad ones, but a shithole none the less). The Chileans actually fought off another attempt by the Left to create a new constitution. They bend to a very small degree, and then completely shatter.
The value of Liberalism is how hard it is to actually break it because it bends so far, and is far more likely to simply bounce back. We can talk about Yuri Bezminov all the time, but fundamentally, he was wrong: The Soviet Union died before America could be conquered by Communists. It's under a new threat from a new regime, as well as it's older Fabian threat, but she's still bending around the pressure and pushing back. In fact, we're one of the only western nations that's actually pushing back. France is too, but the situation in France is far more serious than ours.