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These wooden shoes designed to look like animal hooves were used for secret border crossings during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its satellite countries within the Eastern Bloc took border security very seriously throughout their existence. Tens of thousands of heavily armed troops were deployed across all borders through Europe and Asia. These troops were essentially the military arm of the state security apparatus, and were subordinate to the NKVD, MVD, and KGB in their time. The border zones in some areas could be as wide as 12 kilometers on the Eastern side, where only citizens with special passes and “political reliability” could enter. A strategy used in Czechoslovakia for securing the border was to plow a section of earth near an electronic signal fence to allow for the easy discovery of footprints by roving guard forces. The deeply plowed land also slowed down anyone attempting to make a crossing on foot. With legal emigration from the Eastern Bloc effectively curtailed beginning in 1961, many people trying to leave became desperate. One solution used by defectors, refugees, and secret agents alike were shoes like these. A person wearing them would leave the hoof print of a pig or horse crossing to reduce their profile and lower their chance of being caught. These shoes could be used for infiltrating the Eastern Bloc as well as exfiltrating. A similar concept was used by moonshiners in the United States during the Prohibition era, to dissuade the revenuers from tracking them back to a moonshine still hidden deep in the woods. It’s not clear if one group learned of the idea from the other, or if this flash of creativity occurred separately. These shoes were on display at the KGB Spy Museum in New York City until it closed in 2020, after which they were auctioned off to a private bidder. #coldwar #border #footprints #easternbloc #borderwall

The Dome of Light is a still-unsolved Cold War mystery which may have been a developmental Soviet superweapon. The phenomenon has been known to the US government since at least 1986, based on declassified reports. In November 1988, a USAF RC-135S Cobra Ball aircraft was flying off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula to observe a scheduled Soviet SS-20 ballistic missile launch from the Kura Test Range. Pilot Robert Hopkins III witnessed an almost incomprehensible event. He looked west and saw a “translucent, milky white wall moving from the left, over the USSR, to the right, toward the Northern Pacific Ocean.” The wall extended from ground level up as high as they could see, and moved at a speed later estimated to be 6,200 mph. The wall of light passed over his aircraft and disappeared, leaving the pilot and Air Force analysts completely baffled. Other Dome of Light events were recorded as well, sometimes coinciding with the launch of Soviet SS-20 missiles. A now-declassified 1986 report indicated the domes could reach an unbelievable 1,900 kilometers in diameter, and a height of 1,000 kilometers, reaching well into Earth’s exosphere. One of the most plausible theories is that the Domes were a countermeasure intended to blind American satellites in the critical first moments of a devastating preemptive nuclear strike by the Soviets. It may also have been the result of creating chemiluminescent ethylene clouds for studying the atmosphere. There has even been speculation that the Soviets developed a device based on Nikola Tesla’s theory of scalar energy, which he described as one of the fundamental energy sources in the universe alongside electromagnetic energy. Whatever the origin of the Dome of Light, it is now clear that the intelligence community took it very seriously in the 1980s. But it is less clear what they ever learned about how the Soviets created and harnessed them. For episode 22 of the Spycraft 101 podcast I interviewed Robert Hopkins about his career as a Cobra Ball pilot and witnessing the Dome of Light. The episode is available now. #coldwar #nikolatesla #energy #airforce #pilot youtube.com/watch?v=N7I39WJ4…