Thanks to Dawnee for sending this in! This site has lots of interactive features!<\/p>\n
\n\u201cAREA 51\u201d \u2014 a term taken from old test-site maps of the Nevada desert \u2014 refers to a complex of classified military facilities spread across thousands of square miles around the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range.
\nAlthough the Pentagon barely acknowledges the existence of the facilities and severely limits access to the area, it\u2019s generally recognized that \u201cblack-budget\u201d aircraft ranging from the U-2 high-altitude surveillance plane to the F-117A stealth fighter and the B-2 stealth bomber have been tested in Area 51. The area\u2019s hangars also are thought to harbor Soviet-style aircraft borrowed, bought or stolen for further study. There have been more dramatic claims as well, to the effect that technologies from alien civilizations are being studied there. Such is the stuff of TV shows like \u201cThe X-Files\u201d and movies like \u201cIndependence Day.\u201d<\/p>\nMore on Area 51<\/p>\n
\u2022 See the pictures at the TerraServer Web site
\n\u2022 Local news coverage from Raleigh’s WNCN-TV<\/p>\nThe pictures released Monday by TerraServer.com didn\u2019t provide any smoking guns for the conspiracy theorists, but there were plenty of new details to mull over. The images cover more than 12,000 square miles (31,080 square kilometers) with a resolution of 2 meters (6.6 feet) per picture element. That resolution is sharp enough to make out buildings, runways, roads and vehicles, but not to spot people or license plates.
\nThe photos were taken by the Russian Kometa satellite two years ago and provided to the North Carolina-based company a year ago under a commercial agreement, said John Hoffman, TerraServer\u2019s chairman and founder. It\u2019s taken another year to process the images and make the necessary preparations for putting them on the TerraServer Web site, he said.<\/p>\nCONNECTION REFUSED
\nThe company said Internet users could view the photos for free, and purchase the digital files at prices starting at $7.95. But that assumed you could connect with the Web site in the first place.
\nAdvertisement<\/p>\nQuick Gifts Books Music & Video Flowers Software Hardware More . . .<\/p>\n
The pictures could be easily viewed Monday evening, just before the publicity hit full force. However, by Tuesday the Terraserver site was virtually inaccessible, and the situation didn\u2019t improve until Thursday.
\n\u201cIt seems very suspicious,\u201d one Internet user wrote Wednesday in an e-mail message to MSNBC. \u201cI hope it\u2019s just that the server couldn\u2019t handle the traffic and not the military shutting it down.\u201d
\nAt first, TerraServer spokesman David Mountain said the meltdown was merely due to high traffic, rising to 10 times normal levels. But on Thursday, Mountain said there was another factor: \u201cWe were subject to a hacker attack.\u201d<\/p>\nAs early as Tuesday, Hoffman had hinted that a denial-of-service attack might have played a role in the Web traffic jam, but Mountain said it took until Thursday to confirm the nature of the attack. In a denial-of-service scenario, the attackers do not actually gain access to files on the computer server; rather, they flood the Web server with so much data that the site stumbles.<\/p>\n
Mountain said online security measures were beefed up to counter the attack, and \u201cthere is an investigation ongoing.\u201d But he declined to provide more details.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Read the Rest of the article and check out the other interactive features by clicking
here<\/s>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thanks to Dawnee for sending this in! This site has lots of interactive features! \u201cAREA 51\u201d \u2014 a term taken<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[211],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roswell","tag-area-51"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}