Decades-Old Mystery Put To Rest: Why Are There X's In The Desert?October 11, 20164:46 AM ET
Pez Owen was flying over the desert in her single-engine Cessna airplane when she spotted a huge "X" etched in the desert below. She says it was the strangest thing.
"It's not on the [flight] chart," Owen says. "There just wasn't any indication of this huge cross."
Then she spotted another one.
"There had to be some reason," she says. "So, of course, I immediately thought I had to get Chuck in on this."
Chuck Penson is her former colleague from the University of Arizona. Penson worked in facilities, and Owen worked in the planetarium. Now, they're adventure-seeking friends. That's how Scott Craven from The Arizona Republic described them in a recent article.
Their version of hanging out is exploring abandoned mineral mines and military radar bases. Mysterious X's plotted in the desert was too good to pass up....
...The CORONA satellites orbited 100 miles above Earth with the objective of taking spy photographs of the Soviet Union and China.
Spy photos were flooding in — but the pictures were blurry. That's what the concrete X's were for. That grid out in the Arizona desert was used to calibrate the cameras on board the satellites.
Suddenly, the images were coming back crystal clear.
"[We saw] all their SAM sites, all their airfields, all their nuclear weapons testing and storage sites," says Arthur Lundahl in the film. He was the director at the National Photographic Interpretation Center....
http://www.npr.org/2016/10/11/496567104/decades-old-mystery-put-to-rest-why-are-there-xs-in-the-desert
