Simultaneously creepy and cool. Logos offer a guide to secret military research.The field is expanding. Dwayne Day and Roger Guillemette, military historians, wrote an article published this year in The Space Review on patches from secret space programs. "It's neat stuff," Day said in an interview. "They're not really giving away secrets. But the patches do go farther than the organizations want to go officially."
Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine military activity. "It's kind of remarkable," he said. "This stuff is a huge industry, I mean a huge industry. And it's remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don't know what they are. It's an astounding feat of social engineering."
I would make a great addition to any super secret research and development team. I can keep a secret like nobody's business. Which, coincidentally, it isn't any of.And when people ask me what I do for a living I could always tell them I manufacture chain saw chain.
"Everybody try to spot the NARCS. They're the ones that look like hippies." -Robert Anton Wilson
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During WWII, the US wished to make the Nazis think our forces were a lot bigger than they actually were.
Entire simulated divisions were created on paper, and badges were produced for them.
Then the government contacted National Geographic magazine, and asked NG to run an article about military patches. This included a multi-page spread of the patch of every military unit, including all the ones that didn't really exist.
Spies read the article, sent the pages home to Germany, and the Nazi's altered their troop dispositions based on the notion that the US army was 40% larger than it really was.
In the days immediately following the D-Day invasion, Hitler refused to allow Rommel to respond by bring the full force of his armored divisions to Normandy. The imagined presence of additional US troops in England, capable of crossing the channel at Rommel's back, kept the Nazis from taking full advantage of their numbers and mobility.
The point of the above anecdote is that military patches can be very deceptive. It's entirely possible these patches indicate what they do for the purpose of misleading observers.
For example, in one of the articles linked to, there's a tale of twin satellites that were sent up in one rocket, and which are deemed to be naval recon sats, that watch ships at sea. There's a big boat, and all kinds of other symbology designed to suggest as much.
The same patch bears the moto "Non est ad astra mollis e terries via" a quote from Seneca which means “The trip from the Earth to the stars is not an easy one.”
Said rocket had "failures" that resulted in the sats deploying at a lower orbit than is typically efficient for naval recon.
The article dismisses that as a semi-prophetic coincidence, and a humorous tangent.
But it could just as easily be that Naval mission was merely a cover for whatever those sats really do.
Another, completely unrelated tangent which brought a smile to my face:
One of the articles linked to includes a section header that reads "The owls are not what they seem".
The article doesn't indicate the origin of that quote, but talks about patches with owl eyes and wings on them.
The source is Twin Peaks.
On the show, "The Owls Are Not What They Seem" is a message delivered to FBI Agent Dale Cooper by USAF Major Garland Briggs.
Briggs received said message from the machines at his work. The character was employed at a fictional deep-space-monitoring station.
It's later revealed that the base didn't actually monitor deep space. Instead, it spied upon supernatural beings residing in the woods outside of town.
Within the setting, Project Blue Book wasn't investigating aliens, it was searching for demons / ghosts / extra-dimensional entities.
So, I find the reference cute.
Also, fun stuff from that article showing just how easy it is to misinterpret symbols.
One patch has a pink bunny. They comment that the bunny could be an energizer reference, since the motto at the bottom of the patch was "Finally Going".
The bunny is holding what they describe as a hoop and a baton. The "hoop" has a number 8 written in it.
They say the baton has to do with orchestrating a big performance, and the hoop has to do with all the hoops they had to jump through to make it work.
They speculate the 8 means it's the 8th such payload sent up.
But doesn't the energizer bunny carry a drum? So the hoop could be a side view of a drum, and the baton could be a drumstick.
Plus the 8 looks a bit like an 8-ball. So they could be saying this repeatedly delayed mission was 'behind the 8-ball'. If that's the case, the baton or drumstick could be a pool cue.
That's the thing with symbols - you it's hard to know which interpretation is right. Plus they're readily bisociative, so it's possibly multiple interpretations are correct.
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