From a bird’s eye view, one can find black and white stripes across the field. Somewhere the gap between the two colours is small, elsewhere it is big. The black and white stripes across the field look like barcodes, at a glance. These barcodes are located near the Mojave Desert in California, the US. They are painted on asphalt.

There is also a US Air Force base near the Mojave Desert. Usually, the US Air Force does not use barcodes. Many believe that the US officials painted those barcodes in the middle of the desert to send signals to aliens. Others are of the opinion that there is a mystery behind these stripes. According to the Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), these giant barcodes were created between 1950 and 1960 (during the Cold War).

At that period of time, the US Air Force was developing various types of security cameras for clicking perfect pictures from a long distance. The US Government claimed that these barcodes were painted to determine the performance of the lenses of special types of aerial cameras, microscopes, telescopes and satellite cameras. However, the CLUI opined that the barcodes were used as eye charts or to test how clear an aerial shot could be from the camera despite various changes in altitude and speed. A camera would be considered better, if its lens clearly captured the smaller gaps in the barcodes.

The area over which the barcodes were painted in the desert is the size of a basketball court. According to sources close to the CLUI, power measurements of aircraft, such as the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2 spy plane, were also determined by these barcodes. Apart from California, such barcodes can also be seen in Ohio, Florida and South Carolina.

Netizens noticed square or bumpy barcodes in the middle of a desert in central China through Google Maps in 2011! In recent times, the process of determining the capability of cameras through such barcodes has become obsolete. The CLUI has stressed that more advanced technology tools are now being used to determine the capability of cameras mainly because of computational difficulties.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das