![]() government declassified many U-2 images in 1997, making them freely available to researchers and the public. These images both show the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur in present-day Iraq. ![]() U-2 spy plane photos (left, October 1959) offer imagery at a much higher resolution than CORONA spy satellite images (right, May 1968). But buried within the film rolls were high-resolution photos of historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sites and landscapes. They aimed to cover places of interest for military intelligence such as foreign bases, airfields, and potential nuclear weapons facilities. In the late 1950s, U-2 spy planes flew at around 70,000 feet over Cold War hotspots in Europe and Asia, capturing images that could show details as small as a person. These images come from a special collection of footage. Among these rural and urban scenes, a careful viewer can also find traces of ancient and historical settlements and land use. Our gloved hands slowly turn heavy metal rolls of 9.5-inch-wide film, unspooling our way back in time to the Middle East of the late 1950s and early 1960s.īlack-and-white negatives offer a bird’s-eye view of sinuous rivers lined with date palm tree gardens villages ringed by agricultural fields the occasional city, crowded with houses, markets, and mosques and vast tracks of barren steppe-desert punctuated by dirt paths, isolated sheepfolds, or remote air strips. ![]() National Archives, we stand over a light table, a special backlit surface for viewing film.
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