Here's a good story about the radio-mad Italian brothers who snooped on Cold War space missions. Hollington catches some of the eerie moments very well:
[O]n 28 November 1960, the Bochum space observatory in West Germany said it had intercepted radio signals which it thought might have been a satellite. No official announcement had been made of any launch.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.
“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.
“Our reaction was to immediately switch on the receivers and listen,” said Achille. After almost an hour of tuning in to static, the boys were about to give up when suddenly a tapping sound emerged from the hiss and crackle.
“It was a signal we recognised immediately as Morse code – SOS,” said Gian. But something about this signal was strange. It was moving slowly, as if the craft was not orbiting but was at a single point and slowly moving away from the Earth. The SOS faded into distant space.
And:
somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
There's a fine Warren Ellis passage here:
It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.
Somewhat off-topic: Have you ever seen a Brazilian movie called O homem do Sputnik (The Sputnik Man -- 1959)? I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't; Brazilian B-movies are hard to come by outside Brazil. There are torrents out there, but I won't link to them out of abject fear. But I trust you know how to find bittorrents.
It's a classic Cold War comedy, in the mode of Rocky & Bullwinkle or Dr. Strangelove, but from the perspective of a major non-aligned nation. I watched this a couple of weeks ago, and I can't get it out of my head. There's a real richness in that film, and a lot of gallows humor, that I think you'd be interested in.
Italy, as a NATO member, was never a non-aligned nation during the Cold War, but the Italian people were never completely on board with the official government position. That's what reminded me of O homem do Sputnik.
Posted by: HP | May 02, 2009 at 00:08
Neat thought, HP. News to me - and I can't get enough Coffin Joe. Will see what I can dig up.
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | May 03, 2009 at 22:40