Image: The NRO’s original Hexagon satellite.

Editor’s Note: this is excerpt #2 from a magazine length article on the astrology of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a black budget counterpart to NASA that is the NSA’s (silent) partner in surveillance and possibly the most secretive intelligence agency on the planet. Excerpt #1 can be read here. An audio/video version has been uploaded to YouTube. -Matt

The NRO’s Sun (identity), Venus (love, self-worth), Pluto (extremes, power, terror) and North Node (destiny) are all in Virgo (analysis, technical wizardry), all in the 12th House (hidden matters, secret societies). Virgo is the sign of precision while a 12th House emphasis is often seen in the charts of those who work at night. (Source) Take a close look at the NRO mission patch featuring a pair of mesh covered owl eyes that reads “We Own the Night”. In the lower half of that patch you’ll see four triangles, three filled in and one hollowed out, which appear to be flying over the Southern Hemisphere. The triangles in the patch are believed to represent four of the NRO’s Onyx class spy satellites, three of which are still in orbit and one of which deorbited in 1997. Whoever created this patch did so with a real Virgoan eye towards precision because, according to Mr. Paglen, the four triangles in the patch are depicted in the precisely correct orbital orientations to the planet as the NRO’s Onyx satellites are in real life. (Source)

The caption “We Own the Night” on this patch is a reference to the fact ONYX satellites are equipped with an imaging technology known as “Synthetic Aperture Radar” (SAR), the development of which was pioneered by the NRO in partnership with the U.S. Air Force. SAR uses the echoes of radar waves to create incredibly detailed images of a target without any need for an on-board optical camera. (Source) Night vision cameras, by way of contrast, simply magnify light already being reflected off the moon or that’s generated via other ambient sources. SAR technology requires absolutely no light whatsoever. It thus allows whoever possesses it to see as accurately (Virgo) during the night (12th House) as the rest of us see during the day.

An example of SAR in action should help illustrate just how powerful this technology is when it comes to discernment (Virgo) of the unseen (the 12th House). Back in 1978 NASA launched an oceanographic satellite equipped with SAR known as “SeaSat One”. (Source) SeaSat’s onboard SAR enabled it to remotely detect what was going on deep beneath the ocean’s surface by using radar wave echoes to sense through the water, loosely akin to what a medical intuitive does when they detect what is going on with your body by sensing into it. As a result, SeaSat collected more information about the conditions of the oceans in 100 days than all of humanity had collected in the previous 100 years. (Source) This isn’t meant to imply that SAR equipped satellites like those built by the NRO are “psychic” in the literal sense of the word. Their astonishing imaging capabilities can, however, be reasonably analogized to a technological version of extrasensory perception — the exact sort of phenomenon we astrologers associate with the 12th House.

About the Author: Matthew David Savinar is a California licensed attorney (State Bar #228957), voluntarily inactive as of June 2013. He can be reached for questions, comments, or astrological consults at his contact page.

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