Cold War spy planes photographed a lot more than Soviet military sites, including ancient buried ruins [U2 surveillance flights]

Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | August 20, 2022 | Stephan Salisbury

[SunkenCiv]

U2 surveillance aircraft criss-crossed the globe photographing everything from 70,000 feet. The pictures, now on display at the Penn Museum, reveal a wealth of archaeological information...

Images taken from on high to observe what may be buried underground have been used by archaeologists for more than a century, and researchers at the Penn Museum have embraced the technology since at least the 1920s.

But no one has ever utilized the most famous trove of aerial images from the Cold War, those produced by high-flying U-2 spy planes, first deployed by the CIA to photograph all over the world beginning in 1956, a point documented in a small exhibit at the museum, "U-2 Spy Planes & Aerial Archaeology," on view until the fall of 2023...

"Hundreds of U-2 missions took place all over the world, but we were only working with the Middle Eastern missions because that's the part of the world where we work and that we know well," said Hammer in a telephone interview. "You need to know the geography well in order to be able to figure out from these photographs where the plane flew. And not all of the Middle Eastern missions were declassified because the U.S. government doesn't declassify images of Israel."

... Nowadays, archaeologists have access to multiple sources of post-U-2 aerial imagery — from drones to satellites and images from Google Earth.

But the U-2 spy images from the 1950s are unique in almost every way. Their resolution is very high, and, thanks to the Cold War hunger for surveillance, American spy planes flew everywhere in search of military installations and photographed everything, providing images of ancient archaeological features in the process.

[Norski]

Forgot, sorry. Ping to previous post. Thank you.