Molczan had been up until 3: 3. Toronto apartment, riveted by the televised images of Tomahawk missiles raining down on Baghdad, so he was groggy when the phone rang. A male voice with a thick accent said: . I'm interested in doing a trade. In exchange, he wanted to know the orbits for the CIA's KH- 1. Contact wiredlabs@wired. The man made no apology for the early hour and wouldn't say why he wanted the information. Of course the return of 'The Walking Dead' is on our radar this month. See which other movies and TV shows we're excited about in IMDb Picks. But one thing was clear: He had found the right guy. Molczan, an energy conservation consultant, was just becoming known for his skill at a most unusual hobby. In his spare time, he likes to take binoculars and a stopwatch onto the balcony of his high- rise apartment and track clandestine US spy satellites. There are thousands of amateur satellite observers active today, but Molczan is a leader of an informal group of 2. Molczan and his band of associates monitor some 1. US satellites, like the Lacrosse radar imaging satellites, which can see through cloud cover and darkness and produce photo- quality images of targets on Earth. The observers, who congregate on a Web site called Heavens- Above and a mailing list called See. Sat- L, have amassed an impressive collection of information and expertise. For two decades, they have played a high tech game of hide- and- seek with the US's National Reconnaissance Office, a secretive satellite agency. By coordinating their efforts, amateur observers in Europe, North America, and South Africa monitor satellites at different phases of their journeys and extrapolate the precise dimensions of their orbits. Astonishingly, despite the hobbyists' modest resources – most observe part- time from their balconies and backyards with equipment available at Radio. Shack – they are good enough to spot almost anything the NRO, with its estimated $7. That, of course, is why the mystery caller wanted to chat. Molczan told the man that he didn't have current information on KH- 1. Northern Hemisphere and Keyholes were . For everyone in the UK and Europe, 1978 was the year we finally got to see the BOC laser show. We'd read stories about them with envy for the past couple of years and.It made him begin to think about what would happen if the information collected by those . Fifteen years after that unsettling experience, Molczan and the network have developed an almost zoological catalog of the many secret creatures that streak across the evening sky – and they've posted everything online. Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Elyesa Bazna was an Albanian from Kosovo who spied for the Germans during the. Espionage (colloquially, spying) is the obtaining of information considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Industry information at your fingertips. Over 200,000 Hollywood insiders. Enhance your IMDb Page. But there's one satellite whose information Molczan says he might not disclose. As it happens, it's also the one he cannot find. Since the early '9. Capitol Hill. Codenamed Misty, it's a multibillion- dollar stealth photoreconnaissance device that took the CIA and the NRO a decade to develop and was designed to be untrackable by Soviet adversaries. It began orbiting Earth in the spring of 1. At 5. 2, Molczan is a large man, 6'5'' and fleshy, with long silver- blond hair and bangs in a sharp fringe over his brow. Moving with the exaggerated care of a giant afraid he might break things, he adjusts his Swift 1. Lake Ontario, which appears swallowed by mist. It's about 3. 0 miles from here. When Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in April 1. Molczan's father cut the Russian cosmonaut's picture out of the newspaper and gave it to 7- year- old Ted. Even before Molczan knew the constellations by name, he knew them by sight, and he discerned in the Rorschach of the night sky his own menagerie of shapes and creatures. I mean, it was something people had dreamed about over the centuries, but here I was, a kid, and it was happening right then. He saw a brilliant satellite low in the western sky, tracing a north- to- south arc. The object was so vivid that he thought he could recognize it if it passed by again, and he grew determined to . Through a series of crude calculations, Molczan figured out the duration of a single orbit and the number of degrees Earth would rotate during that period. Guessing the longitude of the previous night's pass, he forecasted that the satellite would traverse the sky just east of Hamilton about 1. At that exact time, Ted Molczan stepped outside and looked up. There it was, blazing high in the southeast. A satellite observer was born. US spy satellites photograph targets on the ground, intercept communications, and search for signs of nuclear testing. In the 1. 96. 0s, Corona satellite images convinced US officials that they had overestimated Russia's progress in the arms race. During the current conflict in Iraq, US satellites have been making hourly sweeps over the region. Traditionally, spy- in- the- sky operations are cloaked in secrecy: Though the US has spent some $2. For starters, there's the matter of putting them into orbit: The launch of an Atlas rocket or space shuttle from the customary sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base or Kennedy Space Center is a spectacular event, visible for miles around. Details of many of these launches are published well in advance by Aviation Week – or Av Leak, as it's known to the hobbyists. Furthermore, the average spy satellite is the size of a school bus and blanketed in Mylar or some other shiny thermal material that regulates its temperature. Once in space, it tends to reflect sunlight. Thus, even as the NRO launched black satellites hoping that Russian radar observation stations would not detect them, those same satellites were occasionally spotted by kids like Ted Molczan, or anyone else who happened to look up at the night sky. For America, having others know the precise time its eyes will be overhead poses a huge strategic problem. India's nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert in 1. US intelligence unawares because the Indians had ascertained the orbits of US satellites and hid their operations accordingly. In Afghan caves abandoned by al. In 1. 97. 8, a young CIA employee named William Kampiles sold the Soviets a technical manual describing the design and operation of KH- 1. Molczan's mystery caller sought. Kampiles was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 4. When Molczan was recovering his first satellite, he had little idea that, an ocean away, a fledgling group of professional and amateur observers in the UK was already monitoring the increasingly busy thoroughfares of space. One of them was British observer Russell Eberst, who worked in the satellite tracking section of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Thirteen years older than Molczan, he has recorded more data on secret satellites than any other tracker alive. Once the skies got crowded and the satellites began to cross one another's paths, the US started publishing the orbits of most of its military and intelligence satellites. Eberst and his colleagues monitored those and others for scientific research, trying to evaluate the densities of the upper atmosphere and to refine their understanding of Earth's shape and gravitational field. But in 1. 98. 3, the US changed the rules. That June, the Reagan administration stopped revealing most of these orbits, hoping, unsuccessfully it turned out, to hide them from the Soviets. But the decision had a conspicuous unintended consequence: It . This left an international fraternity of highly skilled satellite trackers with time on their hands itching to find out what had just been hidden. And with the advent of Internet bulletin boards, far- flung observers could swap notes and post their observations in real time. The game was afoot. On February 2. 8, 1. NASA launched the space shuttle Atlantis from Kennedy Space Center, with a top- secret payload known as USA. Aviation Week reported the launch, and a posse of amateur observers set out to try to glimpse it, spotting the shuttle and its satellite cargo on each of its final three days in orbit. In Scotland, Russell Eberst saw it, as did a group of observers recruited by Molczan to watch from Alaska and Canada's Yukon and Northwest territories. Aviation Week said that the payload was a large digital- imaging reconnaissance satellite; the observers assumed it was similar to a Keyhole. But when they spotted the satellite itself, they noted that it was unusually bright, giving them their first hint that they were onto something very special. On March 1. 6, Soviet media reported an explosion associated with USA 5. On several mornings following this news, Molczan stood for hours on the roof of his high- rise, scanning the horizon for the satellite. It was a new class of stealth satellite codenamed Misty and designed to orbit undetected. In fact, Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, suggests that the . But they saw it only briefly after its launch, and it wasn't found again until October, when Eberst noticed a very bright object in an unfamiliar orbit over Edinburgh. He spoke to Pierre Neirinck, an observer in France who had seen a similar unknown entity. Neirinck then checked the path of the mystery object against the orbits of hundreds of nonsecret satellites, but he found no match. The satellite sleuths have no official organization or meetings, and their revelations are often based on this sort of casual interaction – a phone call or email describing some odd occurrence, the swapping of notes and interpretations. Using their combined observations, Neirinck worked up a preliminary orbit and asked his fellow observers to check it against their lists of objects they had observed but could not identify. When Molczan went back and compared the mystery orbit to the trajectory of the satellite launched in February, he realized that the unknown object that Eberst and Neirinck had seen was none other than USA 5. The amateurs were eager to get another look, but bad weather prevented observation for the next two days. If left undisturbed at high altitude, a satellite will continue its orbit for thousands of years. According to Desmond King- Hele, the author of several books on satellite spotting, if nuclear war ever destroyed civilization, . He wasn't sure what the object was; Molczan ID'd it as Misty. Many experts also believe that a satellite launched in 1. USA 1. 44 but unspotted so far, is a second- gen version of Misty.
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