Dreamcatcher

In February 1960 a station of the North American Air Defense System picked up a radar echo from an enormous space station orbiting the Earth. This intercept caused panic and alarm throughout America’s and the Soviet Union’s Defense Departments. It was the wrong kind of orbit for a Soviet launch. The space station was in a polar orbit, whereas the orbits of Soviet satellites were invariably inclined at 65 degrees to the equator, which took the satellites over South America and North Africa.

Apart from that, there was no booster on either side of the Atlantic capable of putting such an object into space. American scientists had calculated that the weight of the orbiting station was around 15 tons. For three weeks the Americans kept track of the space station, then it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

The February intercept was just the first in a series of strange space phenomena which have baffled scientists worldwide for over three decades. On September 3, 1960, seven months after the first intercept, it was revealed that an unidentified object had been photographed in the sky over New York by a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation’s Long Island factory. The object, which appeared to emanate a red glow, had been seen several times during the preceding two weeks, apparently following an east-to-west orbit, whereas most satellites were launched in the opposite direction, and its speed appeared to be about three times that of America’s Echo 1 “metal balloon” satellite.

The Americans attached so much importance to these mystery sightings that they organized a special committee to gather as much information as possible about them. But the committee’s findings, if there were any, were kept secret and the sightings were forgotten.