Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 U-2 image overlays

I have collected a few CIA images of the Cuban Missile Crisis, beginning with the October 14, 1962 overflight of the U-2F piloted by Major Richard S. Heyser. Since the attached file explains a lot and is not normally searchable by search engines, here is one of the overlay descriptions. Let me know if anyone sees any gross errors in my placement of the images, or if there are tweaks to be made. This is not always an easy task. It appears to me that the Cuban government no longer controls the land in which the missiles were placed. Since everything I see has reverted to farmland, the exact placement of the images took a bit of trial and error.

The overlay file to download:
Cuban Missile Crisis Ver 1.00.kmz (989.84 KB)
Please use the latest updated file, which I will place here to keep you from having to scroll to the newest message:
Cuban Missile Crisis Ver 1.04.kmz (1.32 MB)

Here is the quote:

While a lot has changed in the last 50 years, this site for medium range ballistic missiles (nuclear weapons) was the one which catapulted the USA into a frenzy. This picture has the notorious "convoy" that indicated a major military operation was underway.

Perhaps someone should tell the new land owner that there are still a few contours of dirt that were left behind when the missiles were sent back to the Soviet Union.

Image source: Major Richard S. Heyser, USAF, flying a U-2F spyplane. Mission 3101, dubbed Brass Knob. Processing: CIA, NPIC, on October 15. Now in Dino A. Brugioni collection, National Security Archive, GWU. For print or commercial use, please contact: National Security Archive, GWU

nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/photos.htm

"This U-2 photograph taken Oct 14, 1962 shows a truck convoy approaching a deployment of Soviet MRBMs near Los Palacios at San Cristobal. Analyzed the next day, this photograph was the first identified as evidence of Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) in Cuba."

The photo is labeled with the approximate lat and long, which is located about a kilometer away to the southeast. Slight adjustments to the overlay will need to be made for historical imagery.

Hi, Uruiamme, and welcome.

Good post and some nice overlaying.  Looks like you've had a bit of practice before...

Cheers,

Frank

I have updated the file with a new site and overlay. This was another hard one to locate and adjust. This location appears to be still operated as a military base, although it might be a minor one.

It looks like there is a marked out football (soccer) pitch on the site of one of the missile launch pads as of 2014... I kid you not. In the 2013 imagery, you can see players on the field.

• 1962: nuclear missile launch pad, UN security council incident
  

• 2013+: football?
• The Exact. Same. Spot.
  

I couldn't make this up. Enjoy.
Updated File: Cuban Missile Crisis 1.02.kmz (1.32 MB)

Interesting stuff thank you for sharing.

Thanks. Although I speculate on a lot of the things going on at the former missile sites, I think I can come out and say definitively that there is a football pitch painted on the flat ground of an old missile launching pad. This is like Photo Interpretation 101, the first day of class, and the professor calls in sick, and he leaves us with a substitute instructor to teach this lesson... that's how easy it is to interpret.

I will see if any more public photos show up. The CIA took a lot of them, but none of the other ones are as famous and republished as the ones I have shown so far.

How can I overcome the problem of the file size limitation? I am now using a higher resolution image set that makes the file larger than the maximum 4 MB. How can I upload now?

The easiest way to reduce the size of your files is to host the graphics online. When you insert a graphic from your computer, it is inserted into your file when it is saved (in just exactly the same way that the sound data is also inserted into a recorded .kmz tour). I use Photo Bucket (photobucket.com) to host the images in most of my files, but PB and most other image hosting reduce the resolution of the images, so occasionally I have used Drop Box, which doesn't reduce the size of the image, when I have a high resolution image that I want to be crisp when seen by others. Please be aware, however, that the larger the resolution of your image, the slower it will load.



Before I discovered Drop Box, I resorted to breaking my image into several parts so the resolution would not suffer. (See dl.dropbox.com/u/66820951/Makimuku%20Part%202.kmz#useeng;balloonFlyto for an example), but this is tedious and difficult to do, and I recommend the Drop Box alternative.



The URL for Drop Box is dropbox.com .

So I have the regular image linked to my Google Earth overlay right now. Would I be able to link it to the identical file that is hosted on DropBox and then the view from Google Earth will be the same? Or will I have to re-make the overlay all over again?

In other words, will switching to a URL mess up the overlay parameters I have setup? There's a lot of tweaks that took place.

I wonder if I should just host the entire KMZ file on DropBox?

In either case, I hate it when I go to an old thread and find dead links to non-existent files. Like someone might discover this in 2020 and my file is gone.

As long as you use exactly the same image in your overlay, hosting it online will not create a need to reposition it. Just replace the location of the graphics file in your computer with the URL of the online-hosted file in the Properties dialog box. Revising the file with a different online host will also have no effect, a condition for which I am grateful, because I had many hundreds of images hosted on Image Shack (scores of which were for Ground Overlays), when IS began charging an outrages storage fee, and I had to hastily find another service which was still free.



I see no advantage for you to put your whole file on Drop Box. I post many of my files on DB to make them downloadable from my Links file and from the Non-member Download button that appears in some of my posts.  Unless you have similar motives, it may not be worth the effort, and the GEC is probably your best single opportunity for finding an audience. 

In the case of the example I sent, Part 2 contained many elements -- mostly Ground Overlays -- which could not be displayed in the Google Earth Community Layer.  Part 2 was, and still is, downloadable from Part 1 blue "I" placemarks in GEC Layer.  Since the Layer is now frozen, there is no longer a need to devise workarounds to accommodate content that will not display.



Believe me when I say I understand how much work it is to create a decent KML file. When I started doing it 10 years ago, I hoped that what I was doing might have some enduring consequence. From what I have seen, it seems uncertain that any of our work will last until 2020. Of course we can always hope.