Talk:Pave Spike

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This article was nominated for deletion on 6 December 2024. The result of the discussion was keep.

MIA-POWs

Someone should make reference to this:

On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground--a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang--could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors--as US pilots had been trained to do--"no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, says the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.218.232.71 (talk) 13:52, 21 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

She stated it without any challenge from the committee because none of the Senators present had heard of "PAVE SPIKE" and thus had no idea that it was a laser designator, not an air-dropped motion sensor. The reality is that her story is complete fiction, no such device existed that authenticator numbers could be entered into. — Red XIV ^(talk) 06:45, 4 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]