Talk:Pave Spike
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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)
- 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)