Tag Archives | USSR

Military’s Best Secret Weapon: Dolphins

By JacobSloan on June 30, 2011 in News 8

Assassinating enemy divers with CO2-filled syringes? Parachuting from the sky and blowing up enemy ships kamikaze-style? Acoustically detecting a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness? All this and more as Skeptoid covers the James Bond’s of the sea, deployed first by the USSR and today by the Indian Navy and U.S. Navy Marine Mammal System:

Dolphins and sea lions have advantages that are hard for navies to ignore. They swim far faster than divers, and are much easier and cheaper to deploy than remote underwater vehicles. They can dive hundreds of meters and return, with no concern about decompression, quicker than a human diver could even get suited up. Dolphins’ underwater acuity is such that they can acoustically detect a 3-inch ball 200 meters away in complete darkness, and even discriminate between different kinds of metal. A dolphin’s brain is famously larger than a human’s, in part because so much of it is dedicated to processing sonar signals.

… Read the rest

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Roswell ‘Was Soviet Plot to Create U.S. Panic’

By ralph on May 18, 2011 in News 9

This is even stranger to me than the famous “it’s aliens!” conspiracy theory we all know and love. Thomas Harding writes in the Telegraph:

Devotees of science fiction have been convinced for decades that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico – and that the American government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies. The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 spawned conspiracy theories by the score.

But now, sadly for UFO spotters, a new book offers an entirely man-made — and some would say even more bizarre — explanation, featuring two of the greatest villains of 20th century history: the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr Joseph Mengele.

During a powerful storm in July, 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico.

Roswell army air base initially said that a “flying disc” had come down, but hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.

… Read the rest

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2 To 3 Minutes In Hell: Cleaning Chernobyl

By JacobSloan on April 7, 2011 in News 8

A gripping, short documentary video of the horrifying challenge confronting the Soviet Union’s “biorobots” — soldiers, scientists, and civilians who were tasked with the emergency cleanup following the explosions at Chernobyl. Radio-controlled robotic machines were used at first, but their circuitry broke down from the radiation, leaving humans with shovels as the only option.

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Soviet Sci-Fi Animation Of The 1980s

By JacobSloan on June 9, 2010 in News 8

Rhizome.org has a collection of animated adaptations of sci-fi stories produced in the Soviet Union. Apparently studios in the USSR churned out these eerily films, based on stories by American authors such as Stephen King and Ray Bradbury, throughout the 1980s. Bradbury’s “Here There Be Tygers” works perfectly as a fable warning of the destructiveness of evil capitalist greed.

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Latvia Sells Secret Soviet City

By JacobSloan on February 10, 2010 in News 2

skrunda Lavtia has auctioned off an entire city to a private bidder. Skrunda-1 has built by the USSR in the ’80s and kept off all maps and records. “It is not immediately clear” what plans the mysterious investor has for it. From the Boston Globe:

Latvia sold a deserted town built around a Soviet-era radar station to a Russian investor who bid $3.1 million at an unusual auction yesterday, officials said.

The town formerly known as Skrunda-1 housed about 5,000 people during the Cold War. It was abandoned over a decade ago after the Russian military withdrew from Latvia following the Soviet collapse.… Read the rest

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