The patch as disguise. Or no patch at all.

November 22, 2013 2:42 AM

The crypto-patches of Five Classified Aircraft are covert, “in-house” advertisements. They are best viewed as “industry” marketing tools, as each of these occluded, unmentionable, quiveringly secret crafts is the product of a given contractor.

–William Gibson on artist/cultural geographer Trevor Paglen's Five Classified Aircraft
posted by timshel (18 comments total)

These are interesting but the image is so tiny!
posted by Zarkonnen at 2:54 AM on November 22, 2013

Trevor Paglen: Semiotics of the Hidden Empire (pdf)
posted by timshel at 2:57 AM on November 22, 2013

Larger image at Design and Violence.
posted by cenoxo at 3:14 AM on November 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

My grandfather was an engineer at Northrop (or Boeing - I can never remember which and they all blurred together in a haze of low flat buildings by the Long Beach Airport) and worked on the B2 Stealth Bomber.

So he couldn't tell anyone what he was doing for years on end. We just knew it was something to do with airplanes.

But once it was launched to the public in 1988, he comes home with a pile of marketing merchandise that's just been sitting by his desk for months.

We had one of those thermal paint mugs, where there was a cloud, but then you pour in the hot liquid and boom - there's a stealth bomber! Which, when you're 11 and a bit of a dork, is pretty goddamn amazing.

I wonder what other formerly top secret merchandise he has hiding around his house. Both him and my grandmother aren't too fond of keeping a load of knickknacks, but I hope there's something in there.

Along with all the accouterments he had around his minibar. Man, I hope he kept hold of those tiki mugs.
posted by Katemonkey at 3:26 AM on November 22, 2013 [3 favorites]

Here's a 2010 Wired article: Secret Insignias From the ‘Black Ops’ World, with more patches from Panglen's collection (large images).
posted by taz at 3:41 AM on November 22, 2013

I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World, Trevor Paglen 2007
posted by cenoxo at 3:42 AM on November 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

The first one looks like a gray, the third one is Baphomet-ish, the fourth and the fifth are obvious.

WTF is the second one?
posted by bukvich at 5:19 AM on November 22, 2013

Huh. It hadn't occurred to me that the development of velcro patches would create a shift in the meaning and usage of patches. But, sure, there's a shift if you can just add and remove it as opposed to sew and then rip/resew it.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:30 AM on November 22, 2013

I can totally see how this would be catnip for Gibson. And now there's a jacket to put those patches on.
posted by gwint at 6:19 AM on November 22, 2013

I just realised, after looking at the Wired article, that I actually saw a bunch of Trevor Panglen's patches in the Nottingham Contemporary's Small Collections Room.

Which, by the way, if you're ever in Nottingham, you should totally check out, because it's a set of Victorian-era cabinets and each one holds a different collection of small items and pieces of art, and you can easily spend at least an hour pulling open all the drawers and looking inside and being amazed at what you find.

(Also, if you are in Nottingham, you should totally get in touch with me and we can go for drinks in the former Unitarian church turned fancy pub next door.)
posted by Katemonkey at 7:01 AM on November 22, 2013

Classified satellite launches also have cryptic patches.
posted by kiltedtaco at 7:13 AM on November 22, 2013 [2 favorites]

The second one has the Roman numerals for 9 11. WTF?
posted by Devonian at 7:56 AM on November 22, 2013

Paglen's book is quite worthwhile. Among other things, he points out that in at least once case, the emblem includes an image of the unit's classified aircraft, disguised to resemble a sword, iirc. I don't know if that 's the case for these.
posted by mwhybark at 8:05 AM on November 22, 2013

HOLY SHIT these are seriously so fucking cool I cannot get over it. You can get these on Ebay? I want all of them. This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.
posted by gucci mane at 10:28 AM on November 22, 2013

WTF is the second one?

It appears to be a skull wearing a bat for a hat.
posted by axiom at 12:39 PM on November 22, 2013

Trevor Paglen is really great at the fascinating niche activity of interpreting sparse, externally visible artifacts of an incredibly large body of secret government activities and putting them in a cultural and artistic context. I feel like we need three or four of him, at least.

My greatest hits list of Trevor Paglen projects/stories:

• The orbit of a secret NRO surveillance satellite actually being revealed in a patch.
• The critical role that planespotting nerds with binoculars and radios played in uncovering the CIA rendition flights.
• The time he attended a convention for retired military personnel who had worked on classified aircraft, where they handed out awards for things that everyone in the room knew about but could not actually be stated. "And this award for best test pilot goes to Ted, for... well, you all know what it's for."
• The documentation he's done on the Janet flights that shuttle workers between Las Vegas and Area 51 (reminds me a little of Stamen's investigation and documentation of Google shuttle buses, only more... significant).
• Piecing together bits of public information, including budgets & resumes, to determine that there have been several significant classified aircraft in the past 10 or 20 years that the public still has no knowledge of (his takeaway from that was that it's a fallacy that the government can't keep a secret).
• The amateur Canadian satellite-spotter who noticed a mysterious object overhead that wasn't listed in the Space Track catalog, and eventually put together all the clues and guessed that it was a secret NRO surveillance satellite, suspected to have stealth capabilities, that the U.S. government claimed had blown up. After publishing his suspicions, the satellite was no longer visible to him--but it was still visible to friends of his in other locations. "Molczan is convinced that after reports of the observers' USA 53 sightings, the [satellite's stealth mode] was reprogrammed with the coordinates of every area where skilled hobbyists live."

His book Blank Spots on the Map is a few years old, but it's interesting and relevant in that it's basically about how much larger the dark budget is than most people realize. And it's impressive in that it involves a lot of first hand, bold investigation by Paglen--He does things like fly to Afghanistan and drive up to the complex that he's scouted out in Google Earth and suspects is a CIA prison, and asks the guards what it is.
posted by jjwiseman at 1:17 PM on November 22, 2013 [12 favorites]

Gibson gets it wrong. It's subdued, not "suppressed." All unit patches come in full color, as a machine-embroidered left-shoulder identifier (or right-shoulder, to indicate that one has been a part of a particular unit in combat) for the dress uniform worn in garrison, and in subdued color schemes, worn with camouflage uniforms in the field.

And subdued color schemes pre-date velcro patches by at least 20 years. I had all my subdued patches sewn onto my BDUs. With the advent of the velcro ACUs, there was the interesting phenomenon with velcro rank (rather than pin-back) where sometimes one was no longer "pinned" up to the next rank but simply had the SPC velcro rank ripped off and the SGT velcro rank slapped on.

Interesting confusion on Gibson's part, though, mistaking "suppressed" for "subdued," and perhaps his mis-remembering or mis-hearing says something indicative about his attitudes.
posted by vitia at 2:49 PM on November 22, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thanks axiom! I was trying to pattern recognize an octopus in there and it was making me feel a little crazy doing that.
posted by bukvich at 6:54 AM on November 23, 2013