Editor’s Note: this is excerpt #1 from a magazine length article entitled “Deep Cover, Deep Space: The Astrology of America’s Black Budget Space Program”. -Matt
By now you’ve no doubt heard of the National Security Agency (NSA), the massive intelligence agency whose astrological chart was the subject of the October/November 2013 issue of The Mountain Astrologer. Unless you make it a point to follow the world of covert operations you probably haven’t heard of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the NSA’s partner-in-surveillance that’s “in charge of designing, building, launching, and maintaining America’s intelligence satellites” according to its website. As far as the capabilities of these satellites, Gene Hackman’s character in the 1998 film Enemy of the State might have been on to something when he explains to the Will Smith character that they can the “read the time off your f—king wristwatch”. Forty years ago the NRO built a class of satellites capable of producing imagery with a maximum resolution of six inches or better, accurate enough to tell if somebody was carrying a lunchbox or not. (Source) The capabilities of today’s satellites are classified.
While it’s the NSA whose supercomputers are capable of knowing whether a person checks a magazine’s website or discusses its articles on the telephone, it’s the NRO whose unblinking “eyes-in-the-sky” are powerful enough to spot them coming back from their mailbox with the latest issue in their hands. The NSA is responsible for listening, the NRO is responsible for watching. Financially, the two agencies are essentially peers. Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate the NRO’s budget request for fiscal 2013 was $10.3 billion, just behind the NSA’s request for $10.8 billion. (Source) While it’s the NSA that’s been getting all the press lately, it’s the NRO that may be the more secretive of the two outfits. According to Professor William E. Burrows, author of Deep Black: The Startling Truth behind America’s Spy Satellites, the NRO operates “under a cloak of secrecy so tight that it is the blackest of all the nation’s covert intelligence related operations”. (Source) In short, it’s the biggest spy agency the 99% are still completely in the dark about.
The NRO has been referred to as America’s “other” space program, a black budget version of NASA whose Corona, Hexagon, Jumpseat and Vortex missions are to the Gemini and Apollo missions what Mr. Hyde is to Dr. Jekyll. The mission/morale patches featured throughout this article, originally brought to public attention by geographer Trevor Paglen in his 2008 book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World, make it clear that, unlike NASA’s space missions, the NRO’s operations are not intended for public consumption.
While the three vipers in this patch are believed to represent the NRO’s Trumpet class of satellites that have orbited the planet since the 1990s, they also offer a good approximation of the reaction you’ll likely elicit should you mess with a Virgo’s filing systems:
Of the 16 intelligence agencies that comprise the American surveillance state it’s the NRO whose work is likely to be of greatest interest to practicing astrologers. Our jobs are not all together different. Astrologers utilize the position of the stars to discern the meaning of events down here on Earth while the NRO utilizes crafts lofted to the stars to accomplish the same goal. The satellites managed by the NRO go through phases just like the heavenly bodies that we astrologers study. (Source) The information we discern by studying the stars on behalf of our clients is often of a highly confidential nature, the same is true for the information the NRO discerns on behalf of its clients. Finally, both astrological reconnaissance and satellite reconnaissance require advanced knowledge of highly technical information that often mystifies the non-initiated.
Excerpt #2:
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