When did satellite imaging get good enough to capture images of animals?

Just a quick question regarding a story set a few decades in the past. The idea is that a lot of mythical creatures, mostly humanoid, exist, and there's an elaborate memory-manipulating organization keeping them from being discovered. However, there's only so much this organization can do, so once human technology gets good enough to, say, get a good picture of a werewolf from space, then that means that werewolves can't safely be outdoors even in the middle of nowhere unless there's a ton of tree cover. I'm trying to figure out when that tipping point for the technology would be, if it's already happened by the time of my story's setting, and if not, how much time they have before "judgment day", so to speak.

 

First, I'm no expert. It's my understanding that some of the high quality 3D views you see from Google are taken from cars and/or aeriel shots pieced together. I don't think they use satellites for those high quality images of basically every densely populated area.

Also, don't werewolves mostly come out at night?

So I don't have an answer but my point is that getting images of every area a werewolf might be is not just a technological question but also a cost/logistic question. The images on Google aren't updated that often, and one photo of a werewolf looking dude might not be enough to convince everyone.

Personally, if I were on a werewolf council and the technology was close to posing a threat, I'd pay some humans to dress up like werewolves and 'spoof' the satellites so the real ones will be ignored.

 

Does this memory manipulating organization have any members with top secret security clearances? I believe satellite imagery at this level of resolution has probably existed for a while, but at first its existence (to say nothing of any werewolf images it produces) would be a closely held government secret.

That also raises the question of whether some nerdy analysts realize they are looking at werewolves, and what the national security bureaucracy does with that knowledge...

 

After reading your post more carefully, I'm not sure satellite imagery would necessarily be a huge game changer. It's controlled and monitored by a select group of military or civilian analysts, which would be far easier to manipulate than the tons of cctv and cell phone videos that could expose the werewolves. What do you do when someone broadcasts it on Facebook live?

Haha now I have an image of some annoying "I want to talk to the manager" type holding up their phone on a lycanthrope mid-transition yelling "You're on live!" with a predictable conclusion.

 

Yes, they will be aware of government dealings all over the planet. I can't explain why because it's something of a very long-term spoiler (like multiple books away), but they will know about what the government's doing.

 

We're already there. I took a graduate level course in aerial photo interpretation and mapping back in the 1970s. The instructor told us that the U.S. military and spy agencies had software that could blow up a satellite photo large and clear enough to read the license plates on automobiles. That was over 40 years ago, and both cameras and software have improved tremendously since then.

 

Oof, that's a blow if true. The story's set in 1998.

 

This type of capability has been around for awhile, it was referenced in 'Patriot Games' I think (or maybe Clear and Present Danger).

But I think you may be overestimating it's influence. In 1998 they weren't monitoring every possible GPS coordinate 24/7 looking for anything unusual.

Unless there is something I'm missing, the probability is much greater that amateur video (think Rodney King) or CCTV footage will blow the lid on the existence of werewolves.

There's a website you can go to called something like 'Creepy Things Google Earth Caught'. Nothing illegal or supernatural, I think, but still strange stuff that doesn't lead to some deep investigation.

 

Right, so it seems that this isn't going to be the point beyond which the masquerade becomes impossible. It's just going to be one of the annoyances the "veilkeepers" have to be equipped to deal with, and if there is a breaking point in technological development that makes the masquerade nigh-impossible, it can't be here or there'll be no way to tell the story I wish to tell.

Thanks for your help, everyone.

 

If there are mythological creatures, why no magic? Can't some of them cloak themselves against surveillance?

I mean, vampires don't show up in mirrors, couldn't the same kind of ability apply to cameras as well? And many creatures just naturally have the ability? Or are you doing a strictly rational/materialist take on mythology?

 

What's the farthest you've ever walked in a day? I know my answer to that question is 34km, about 20 miles, from Umeda in Osaka to Sannomiya in Kobe. Boot camp taught me to take a full thirty inch step with the left foot aye aye sir! so I probably took around 40-45,000 steps in that journey over the course of seven or so hours.

How many steps in a satellite picture of a resolution sufficient to identify me as....a white male, middle-aged, with long hair? Because to identify your werewolves as such, you're going to need to be able to distinguish them from hairy bikers and/or stray German shepherds (either type) in a population that's full of both. Even police helicopter cams can have trouble finding and keeping track of a suspect on foot if he gets into a built-up area (not to mention the difficulty Predator drone pilots have telling the difference between terrorists and aid workers).

So unless your werewolves are being specifically targeted by an intelligence agency, any collateral spotting of them is unlikely to be noticed or actionable.

 

Probably about the mid 1970s. There is an anecdote in space nerd circles that when the Hubble telescope was being put up, someone from the DOD told them about a problem with solar panel flexing that NASA was not aware of. The implication being that they’d had telescopes the size of Hubble in space for a while at that point.

Although, who exactly would have access to this data? You can not identify animals on regular Google image satellite data unless you already know what you’re looking at. You can’t see what looks like a bunch of horses and determine that they’re actually unicorns. Civilians can’t zoom into license plates from space like the cia can.

Also, arial photography existed long before satellites did. The whole point of satellites in the first place was that they were too high and fast to shoot down. They weren’t pointing at vast wilderness environments, they were honed in on Soviet/US military installations.