I'm a space program veteran and a spaceflight historian [www.jamesoberg.com]. My own conclusions are:
1. There is no way — and no reason — for the Pentagon to put a secret remote-sensing device on Mercury-9 to seek Soviet missile bases. Miklos says it was trolled on a line like his underwater magnetometer — that doesn’t even WORK in the vacuum of space.
2. Cooper had scant time for sight-seeing and only had one available daylight pass over Turks & Caicos, when he was fully occupied with other experiments.
3. Cooper only took a few dozen photographs [the “five thousand” quotation is bogus, faked from separate comments on unrelated subjects]. There wasn’t room inside the spacecraft for film cartridges holding thousands of exposures.
4. None were over the Caribbean. And none showed anything smaller than cities.
5. There was no way Cooper could glance out the window, see something anomalous, and write down the latitude/longitude for later reference [Miklos says he used GPS, which hadn’t been invented for decades yet]. Nor was there any cockpit display of latitude/longitude.
6. There was no way Cooper could keep a secret notebook in flight and not show it to NASA.
7. There is no way on Gemini that a 35-mm camera out the window could take a photograph straight down that allowed auto license plates to be read.
The sad story of Cooper’s wild imaginary stories in his final years. Loss of Faith -- Gordon Cooper’s post-NASA stories http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3…
Congratulations on a very informative and level-headed article.
Your treatment of the CLAIMS of a space map from astronaut Cooper is very fair, nobody in the spaceflight industry believes such a map was EVER made from space, these are fabulous stories Cooper told in his old age, and the evidence for them was apparently later contrived by the television program.
jamesoberg says...
I'm a space program veteran and a spaceflight historian [www.jamesoberg.com]. My own conclusions are:
1. There is no way — and no reason — for the Pentagon to put a secret remote-sensing device on Mercury-9 to seek Soviet missile bases. Miklos says it was trolled on a line like his underwater magnetometer — that doesn’t even WORK in the vacuum of space.
2. Cooper had scant time for sight-seeing and only had one available daylight pass over Turks & Caicos, when he was fully occupied with other experiments.
3. Cooper only took a few dozen photographs [the “five thousand” quotation is bogus, faked from separate comments on unrelated subjects]. There wasn’t room inside the spacecraft for film cartridges holding thousands of exposures.
4. None were over the Caribbean. And none showed anything smaller than cities.
5. There was no way Cooper could glance out the window, see something anomalous, and write down the latitude/longitude for later reference [Miklos says he used GPS, which hadn’t been invented for decades yet]. Nor was there any cockpit display of latitude/longitude.
6. There was no way Cooper could keep a secret notebook in flight and not show it to NASA.
7. There is no way on Gemini that a 35-mm camera out the window could take a photograph straight down that allowed auto license plates to be read.
My debunking of the ‘secret sensor’ and ‘five thousand photos’ -- http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3…
The sad story of Cooper’s wild imaginary stories in his final years.
Loss of Faith -- Gordon Cooper’s post-NASA stories http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3…
On Discovery Channel treasure hunters had permits to film and research only
Posted 24 July 2018, 10:45 a.m. Suggest removal
jamesoberg says...
Congratulations on a very informative and level-headed article.
Your treatment of the CLAIMS of a space map from astronaut Cooper is very fair, nobody in the spaceflight industry believes such a map was EVER made from space, these are fabulous stories Cooper told in his old age, and the evidence for them was apparently later contrived by the television program.
On Discovery Channel treasure hunters had permits to film and research only
Posted 24 July 2018, 9:31 a.m. Suggest removal