In 1947 the C.I.A. was founded, its sole responsibility to watch and survey tens of thousands of Americans suspected of doing communist things. This orchestrated stalking epidemic went on for almost 5 years, and few were found guilty of any real crimes. However, it became clear in the early 1950s that the threat of communism was only going to rise, and a broader system was needed to track any individual who was suspected of such activity. The fears were only encouraged when in 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested and convicted of espionage against the United States- accused of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union (the big boy communist people.) This highly publicized event gave the government a small window to implement a new program that would place the first CCTV surveillance cameras in areas with a high Russian immigrant concentration.

This went on for a few years or so, when in 1953 Allen Dulles was made the first civilian director of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and made it his mission to ramp up the surveillance program; hiding cameras in thousands of locations and ordering his staff to plant them in areas that would be impossible to detect (although let’s face it, in the 1950s you could walk into a bank with a slingshot and steal thousands of dollars. Security was one big joke.) He knew that the possibilities for this camera program were endless, and on April 15th, 1956 met with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and proposed a plan that would put cameras in the sky. Dulles knew that the sky was the future for his surveillance program, as you could truly track someone with a moving camera- much easier than having to switch between cameras on street corners and hidden in storm drains. One camera in the sky could do the work of hundreds on the ground…

Eisenhower approved the initial idea and asked him to return when he had figured out how to make it possible. Dulles left the oval office and immediately flew to an undisclosed location- meeting with various members of his inner circle, to discuss the plan in more intricate detail. It is believed that the initial plan for killing all of the birds and replacing them with flying cameras was thought up one weekend in May of 1956. They did not need to kill all of the birds, and could have launched a quarter of the robot birds that they did, but the pigeons in D.C. at the time were absolutely ruthless… they were eating very well, as American moral was high- people were feeding them much more in public parks and on the street. This in turn created huge amounts of pigeon feces, that would inevitably find its way to the windshield of many men and women- all of whom grew to not only hate pigeons, but all birds. In a stolen transcript from an ex-CIA deputy, she says,” yeah, the higher ups were so annoyed that birds had been dropping fecal matter on their car windows that they vowed to wipe out every single flying feathered creature in North America.”

In this meeting they sought to kill two birds with one stone and remove all birds from the United States (thus eliminating their fecal problem), but also replacing these birds with billions of sophisticated robot look a likes- capable of mimicking real birds in every way. Dulles and his team wanted to create the greatest surveillance system ever imagined, with the capability of tracking someone on foot, in a vehicle, or even in their personal home.