The Mystery Satellite of the North and South Poles


        The discovery, when it was made, caused consternation in the
United States Defense Department; and no wonder.  One of the North
American Air Defense System's tracking radars had picked up what
appeared to be a huge space satellite in orbit around the earth.

      What worried the Americans was that the satellite had not been
launched by either the United States or the Soviet Union.  For a start,
it was in the wrong kind of orbit.  The mystery satellite's path took it
over the North and South poles, whereas the orbits of satellites
launched from the Soviet Union were invariably inclined at 65 degrees to
the equator, which took them over South America and North Africa. Quite
apart from that, there was no booster rocket in existence at the time -
February 1960 - that could possibly have been powerful enough to put
such a satellite into orbit.  American space scientists had calculated
that its weight was around 15 tons (15.25 tonnes).  For three weeks, the
Americans kept the satellite under surveillance; then it vanished, as
mysteriously as it had appeared.

        The "mystery satellite" of February 196O was the first in a
whole series of strange space phenomena which have been baffling
scientists all over the world for three decades.  On 3 September 1960,
several months after the first sighting, it was revealed that an
unidentified object had been photographed in the sky over New York by a
tracking camera at the Grumann Aircraft Corporation's Long Island
factory. The object, which appeared to give off a reddish glow, had been
seen several times during the preceeding two weeks.  It was 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
satellites that they set up a special committee to gather as much
information as possible about them.  But the committee's findings - if
indeed there were any at all - were never made public, and the whole
affair was forgotten for the time being.

_UFOs_ by Robert Jackson, (c) 1992 by Quintet Publishing Limited,
ISBN 0-8317-9056-3, pg. 20-21.