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We discovered a most unusual covert operation in a McDonalds todayโฆ What could it be?
(detailed answer, here)
31 responses to “Pirate McDonalds”
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Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Skulls, and we’d love to have this added to the group!
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Somebody finally decided to get rid of the old DEC PDP8 that was down in the basement, and which they used to use for inventory control – so it was brought upstairs where staff could bid on it and the winner gets to take it home.
The tape unit (back left) could mount a 2400 foot reel of tape, 600 bits-per-inch with 1 1/2 inch gaps between data blocks. Because no block could be larger than a portion of central memory, in practical terms say 4K bytes, figure about 500 blocks would fit on a reel, or 2 megabytes…
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jitze: hmmm… you are getting close… that tape drive is very special, as are the tapes; both are one of a kind these days…. Now why would they have gone to all the expense of a 256K memory array, 40 years ago…
biotron: the tapes do come from three different international listening stations…
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Ok, I give…haven’t a clue why this older equipment is there, but very interesting! Maybe an actual reason to visit a McDonalds, out of curiosity…
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What amazing work these guys are doing. I am not saying a word more until โthe cat is out of the bag,โ then ‘ll post some sweet supporting images =) Steve – Thanks for letting me tag along.
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My guess is that the tapes are telemetry data from a space mission or missions from the past.
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Could it possibly be that it is no longer an active McDonalds and it was a convenient place to convert 48,000 pounds of mission tapes to a more modern format for posterity purposes? Sort of a pirate takeover?
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Mariner and/or Voyager (or V’ger ๐ imagery data? Data recorded by NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) at Goldstone, Canberra and Madrid?
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Ahoy ahoy! Me late for the partey?
Avast! me thinking… Jim Rees above me has connected Talk like a pirate day with recording tape… mmm, suspicios indeed… that could be a clue, but I think it’s just casual. (the mission was going on there apart form the fact yesterday was TLPD) …me guess.
From all the guessers, I am close to guess something like pirate roketeer dropped in his first post…
At first glance/imagination… my guess is that they are digitalizing/masterizing old tape with those first recordings done in the 60’s (60’s?) to "hear"space from the first time to try to find anything abnormal that could be endorsed to ET activity and/or the first hearings of the universe, when the scientists discovered (accidentally by catching strange radsio emissions it was?) that the universe actually made "noises", it was not silent.
Possibly these tapes are of the past what today is the SETI project, that you can offer your computer to become a space ear when it’s idle….
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/06/24/space_noise/print.html
something related to this?
Aliens are no far from space pirates anyway, aren’t they? And these people are trying to listen to aliens "talk" in those tapes…. is that a very alegoric way, joining ideas, to celebrating Talk Like a (space) Pirate Day!
(Jim?)
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Bingo Rocketeer for spotting mission tapes and jerryfi_99 for guessing that imagery data would take this much space.
The Pirate flag is purely motivational, methinks, for a skunkworks improvising what was thought to be impossible.
Forty years ago, unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon taking extremely high-res photos of the surface to plan landing spots for Apollo 11 onward… In this McDonalds, the only copy of that data is about to be resurrected. Erik and I dropped in for a visit after the LUNAR rocket launch at NASA Ames.
And gosh, Alieness may be right too when they look at those images carefully for three-toe footprints…
They have never been seen by the public because at the time, they were classified because they would reveal the extreme precision of our spy satellites. Instead, all we have ever seen are the grainy photo of a photo images that were released to the public.
The spacecraft did not ship this film back to Earth. Instead, they developed the film on the Lunar Orbiter and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/millimeter resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using yet-to-be-patented-by-others lossless analog compression. Three ground stations on Earth (one was in Madrid) recorded the transmissions on these magnetic tapes.
Recovering the data has proven to be very difficult, requiring technological archeology. The only working version of the Ampex tape player ($300K when new) was discovered in a chicken coop and restored with the help of the original designer. There is only one person on Earth who still refurbishes these tape heads, and he is retiring this year. The skills to read this data archive are on the cusp of disappearing forever.
Some of the applications of this project, beyond accessing the best images of the moon ever taken, are to look for new landing sites for the new Google Lunar X-Prize landers, and to compare the new craters on the moon from 40 years ago, a measure of micrometeorite flux and risk to future lunar operations.
And yes, the conspiracy continues, with McDonalds’ long and sordid history with the Apollo program…
P-) 
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incredible. i had a look at all sorts of Ampex reel-to-reels, but couldn’t find that model – what is it called?
i was desperately trying to place the Labview book, the Greenlee case, the Ampex unit – and wondering if the acetone was for either splicing humourous edits of declassified NSA intercepts together a la [ ***NB profanity alert – NSFW*** ] Cassetteboy or Evolution Control Committee – or for dropping onto acoustic sensors in resonance frequency tracking with potential use for detecting narcotics or tumours, as in this paper…
i keep thinking of Jim Finn’s hilarious movie Interkosmos…
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Apollo’s orphans…
biotron: this might help; I just uploaded a video tour of the tape player and environs. (There is a bit of background noise as the tape drive was operating.) The speaker is the "technical archaeologist" who lives in the McDonalds it seems. The other voices midway are from NASA spacecraft designers.
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