Forbidden Knowledge: The Vela Incident

Well, here we are: one tier down, and two more to go.

The more astute of you may notice that we’ve downgraded a touch, from a Youtube video to just a series of website articles (for now). The reason for this is I find it a lot easier to put this sort of information into writing first, then maybe use the writing as a prop for a video later. Anyway, I’m going to assume you did watch the first tier, and just continue from where we left off.

[Image omitted]

On September 22nd, 1979 (exactly 19 years before I was born! Sorry I’m one of those guys who has to point out any time his birthday is mentioned) a US satellite named Vela Hotel picked up a peculiar double flash of light near the South African territory of the Prince Edwards Islands in the Indian Ocean. This double flash was strange because of how big it was — far too big to be some sort of static noise from the satellite, and far too big to be any known natural occurrence.

What made things even stranger is that this double flash lined up almost exactly to satellite imagery the United States had taken of its own nuclear blast tests.

An official story of what the Vela satellite captured that day has never been made. The project for identifying the flash is considered “an unknown event of low priority” by the Department of Defense (or Department of War, whatever the fuck they’re calling it these days). But the unofficial story — gathered by news outlets, independent researchers, scientific organizations, and foreign governments — is all universally agreed upon.

The story goes that, a few years before the Vela Incident, an agent of Israel’s Mossad Intelligence Agency reached out to the South African government to make a confidential deal. The exact terms of this deal are, to this day, unknown — but it is believed that part of this deal was that the South African government would allow the Israeli military to test and experiment with a series of nuclear weapons deep in the unpopulated waters of South Africa’s legal territory. It is said that, as part of this partnership, South Africa and Israel did a combined three tests. Vela spotted the last one. The results of the first two are unknown.

This was worrying for a few reasons. The first was that Israel was not supposed to have nuclear weapons, and South Africa was not supposed to test them. Israel had not been one of the allied nations given the privilege of having a-bomb schematic details shared by the United States, and South Africa was outright banned by the United Nations in 1977 from the production and co-development of any sort of weapons (as a retaliatory measure for the Apartheid). This meant that Israel and South Africa had somehow stolen nuclear schematics (from either the United States or the Soviet Union — it is unknown who) and then utilized South Africa’s remote territory to conduct tests away from prying eyes (or so they thought).

The second reason was that Israel was still in the midst of a heated on-and-off conflict with neighboring Arab states. The Yom Kippur War and Suez Canal blockade had only happened a few years prior, and Israel was still in the middle of occupying the Sinai Peninsula. The Camp David Accords had been written a year prior, but many considered their success to be primarily an American marketing scheme to show off the United State’s diplomatic power, and that neither party had any intention on keeping the agreement.

Because of all this, there was a deep concern that Israel had intended to use nuclear weapons to “even the odds”. A combined Islamic military alliance against the state would be overwhelming in its numbers, and therefore something Israel would only be able to combat with a damning super-weapon. It was assumed that, if Egypt had found a way to rope more nations into the war and recapture the Sinai peninsula, Israeli would — quite literally — take out the nuclear option.

But nothing happened. Israel would quietly withdraw from Sinai over the next three years, and there would never be another flash spotted near Prince Edwards ever again. Arab-Jew relations as a whole would begin to lighten until the 2020s. And, as far as anyone knows, Israel never built its nuclear weapons programme.

[Image omitted]

The post Forbidden Knowledge: The Vela Incident appeared first on Jacob Robinson.