23 Jan 2024 – Missing bombers and spy satellites
Welcome to Outsider Art, a weekly newsletter about literature, history, and the anomalous and unexplained.
Japan’s missing B-17s
Over the course of World War II, Japan captured several American B-17 bomber aircraft from airfields in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. They were flown to Japan and exhaustively examined by technicians. So far, straightforward enough – the capture of flight-worthy enemy aircraft happens from time to time.
But it gets more interesting. Later in the war, a US reconnaissance flight captured photographs of one of the B-17s, which were mis-identified as a new Japanese model. At least one of the bombers was intact at the end of the war, but when Allied forces occupied the Home Islands, the bombers were gone.
The explanation is likely mundane – Wikipedia suggests they were scrapped – but the lingering mystery is still tantalizing to me. I’d like to imagine that the planes were taken on some cloak-and-dagger final mission – ferrying a secret Japanese peace delegation to a remote landing strip in Sakhalin, perhaps, or flying behind enemy lines to land saboteurs in the Canadian Arctic.
I’m reminded of the by-now-well-known case of the Boeing 727 that disappeared from an airfield in Angola in 2003 and has never been found.
For more on the B-17s, read Robert C. Mikesh’s excellent article on the subject: “The Surprising Story of Japan’s B-17 Fleet”
Links from the archives
“The Big Void” – a large cavity in the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered by radiographic scanning in 2017; purpose unknown.
Tappi-Kaitei Station – a former Japanese railway station built underneath the ocean.
Libyan desert glass – an attractive mineral found in the deserts of Libya that may be of extraterrestrial origin.
Quote of the week
Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.
From Libra by Don DeLillo (p. 77)
A friend who worked for an imaging-technology company informs me that modern surveillance satellites are capable of capturing a photograph of a person’s face from low-Earth orbit. It’s why I prefer to live underground.