Station HYPO

By John Brady

In the fall of 1948, after three years in the Navy, I received orders to Cheltenham, Maryland where I became acquainted with the acronym SESP, short for “Special Electronic Search Project.” Before reporting to Cheltenham, we were put up in temporary buildings at West Potomac Park, right behind the Lincoln Memorial. This was a New Navy to me. There were no fences, no marine guards, you could go “ashore” any time you liked and there were no watches.

By Bruce Ames

1969 – I was a freshly minted mat-crank Third Class just graduated from KY-8/28 & KW-7 “C” schools at Portsmouth, Virginia Naval Shipyard with orders to proceed to California and then on to Saigon to await transportation to the USS JAMESTOWN (AGTR-3).

In late 1961–early 1962 a series of U.S. Navy patrols off the east coast of Communist China was proposed. The purpose of these patrols was to be three-fold. In the first place they would establish and maintain the presence of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the international waters off the China coast; second, they would serve as a minor Cold War irritant to the “Chicoms”; and third, they would collect as much intelligence as possible concerning Chicom electronic and naval activity.

Louis Braille inventor of raised-dot writing for the blind, got his idea from a secret communications system devised for military purposes by a French army officer, Nicholas-Marie-Charles Barbier de La Serre.