A 55-year-old mystery has been solved, thanks to several tipsters who called into a Canadian television station reporting Tuesday on a mysterious object found in the woods.
The CBC ran a story on Tuesday about the mystery behind the large, white box attached to a parachute a lumberjack found in the woods of New Brunswick, Canada, in 1962 when viewers started calling with tips leading to the mystery’s solving.
The lumberjack, David McPherson Sr., and his family discovered two cameras associated with the box in 1962. The Canadian military seized the box a few days later, and McPherson and his family never saw the box again.
The McPhersons filed two access to information requests with the Canadian Department of Defense over the next few decades but received no answer from the government on the origin of the “thing in the woods.”
Viewers directed the CBC to the Military Communications and Electronics Museum in Kingston, Ontario, and to the CIA’s declassified documents on their website for clues.
Both the museum and the CIA had photographs of an AN/DMQ-1 gondola, which contained cameras that Americans used to spy on Soviet Russia and Communist China in the 1950s during the Cold War.
The operation, which was called Project Genetrix, ran alongside another project involving the use of weather balloons that served as a “front” for Project Genetrix.
According to the National Reconnaissance Office, most of the 516 balloons that contained these cameras were never recovered by U.S. intelligence officials. The office added that intelligence officials only gained “useful” information from 34 of the balloons.
Unfortunately, David McPherson Sr. died 18 months before he could learn the true purpose of the “thing in the woods.”