Trevor Paglen

I have a pretty good idea what a lot of the things probably mean, but I encourage anyone who wants to take a crack at deciphering it to try to see it with unbiased eyes. I made the image relatively big here because there are some interesting small details. The patch was sent to me anonymously with a return address near Fort Meade, MD.

My initial interpretations/guesses about the symbolism:

- The patch is probably for some kind of classified spacecraft.

- As Dwayne Day showed in his excellent series for the Space Review, dragon symbolism is often associated with SIGINT payloads. The return address on the envelope obviously comes from a place where there's a lot of interest in SIGINT payloads.

- The dragon's golden wings underlines the connection (golden dragon wings often symbolize the massive gold-foil covered dish antennae characteristic of SIGINT spacecraft.)

- The red arrow’s trajectory suggests a Molniya orbit similar to those associated with JUMPSEAT and TRUMPET spacecraft.

- As Dwayne Day showed, stars often represent the number of spacecraft in a given “constellation.” The stars here may suggest that this spacecraft if being added to a preexisting constellation of five other craft with similar missions.

- The meanings of the red point in Asia and the snake-like figure in the lower part of the patch are unclear. The Latin phrase Omnis Vestri Substructio Es Servus Ad Nobis recalls a 2001-2002 internet meme from a poorly translated Japanese video game: “All Your Base Are Belong to Us.”

Those are my ideas. Of course, they could be completely wrong. If anyone knows anything about this patch, I'd really love to hear about it.

Here's an interesting document that showed up recently. It reports that the existence of several formerly "black" satellite ground control stations can now be acknowledged. Everything about them seems to remain classified.

If you've seen any of my recent exhibitions or read my piece in the March 2009 issue of Art Forum, you know that I've been photographing iconic "frontier" landscapes with reconnaissance satellites in the skies above them. These photos are ridiculously difficult to pull off, each requiring days of preparation and countless production photos. Here are some of the production photos I took while experimenting.

With this week's shoot-down of USA 193, the failed ultra-secret-billion-dollar spacecraft, spy satellites have been very much on people's minds. I thought we'd take a few moments to look at the symbols and patches from some of the more than 100 secret "moons" in earth orbit.

Let's start with a look at the launch patch from USA 193 itself:

Not much to look at on this one. NROL-21 stands for "National Reconnaissance Office Launch 21." The NRO is like a secret twin to NASA. It's the US' "other" space agency. The agency is about as old as NASA, but its existence was secret until 1992. USA 193 was by no means the 21st NRO launch, it's just the 21st since they started using the newer launch names in the 1990s. SLC-2W refers to the launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base that they launched the rocket from.

Other patches from classified spacecraft are, in my opinion, a lot more interesting.
Recent NRO launches use constellations to signify different launches.

Here's the payload patch from a recent naval surveillance satellite (NROL-30):

And some others that I'll leave to you to research and decode:

August 2007

The good people from North Carolina's STOP TORTURE NOW have taken to plane spotting. Here's a picture they took of N196D at the Aero Contractors compound at Johnston County Airport.

This plane was also recently seen by the LAZYGRANCH sleuths at Base Camp, the weird airfield in the middle of Nevada where lots of spooky stuff goes down.

In other news, SOURCEWATCH has started publishing the real names of rendition pilots...

Want to see their passports? Go see the DARK MATTERS show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts....

The evidence keeps piling up that I actually work in the black world:

January 19, 2007
A couple of pretty interesting documents have come into the public domain recently. Right now, I'm relatively obsessed with the National Reconnaissance Office's Congressional Budget Justification Book for Fiscal Year 2006. The good folks at the Federation of American Scientists had to jump through some pretty intense hoops to get this unclassified document from the secret space agency. The NRO insisted that the document was an "operational file" and thereby exempt from FIOA requests.

In other news regarding the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, Portland lawyer Scott Caplan is being investigated by the Oregon State Bar's Disciplinary Counsel. Caplan is the registered agent for a paper company called "Bayard Foreign Marketing" that owned the "Guantanamo Bay Express" (see below). Bayard's President is a guy named Leonard T. Bayard, who's a CIA "sterile identity" - not a real person.

From Michael Munk, a retired political science professor who filed the complaint against Caplan: "In a January 18 letter, the Disciplinary Counsel asks Caplan to respond to specific questions about "Bayard," including: Who contacted you about about the representation? When did this contact occur? How was this contact made? Who paid you for your services? The Counsel also asks him to explain the basis on which he told an Oregonian reporter (Dec 29, 2004) "you were 'positive Bayard does exist.'"

December 10, 2006
A lot of people have been asking where the signatures from the "Missing Persons" piece come from. They come from lots of different places, but one interesting place is the registration records from various aircraft. Here's the registration history for the Gulfstream V with the old tail number N379P that plane spotters nicknamed the "Guantanamo Bay Express"... DOWNLOAD PDF

Here's another registration file for N8183J, a cargo plane operated by Tepper Aviation for the agency. Lots of interesting stuff in this one.... DOWNLOAD PDF