Aerial search is primarily the task of planes which can fly low and slow. Air Intelligence requires speed, since the kind of tactical information an enemy wreck may offer can grow cold .within a few hours. The CAP’S planes, most of them single-engine, private-flying models, had already been proven ideal aerial search instruments; the CAP’S radio net, with its more than seventy-five hundred fixed, mobile and airborne stations, was more than fast enough to get information to wherever it was needed while it was still hot.
But the expected enemy, after all, was Russia; and how many civilians, even those who know how to fly, navigate, or operate a radio transmitter, could ask anyone an intelligent question in Russian, let alone understand the answer?
It was the astonishingly rapid development of electrical methods for probing the brain which provided the answer in particular the development, in the late fifties, of flicker-stimulus aimed at the visual memory. Abruptly, EEG tech-nicians no longer needed to use language at all to probe the brain for visual images, and read them; they did not even need to know how their apparatus worked, let alone the brain.
A few moments of flicker into the subject’s eyes, on a frequency chosen from a table, and the images would come swarming into the operator’s toposcope gogglesthe frequency chosen without the slightest basic knowledge of electro-physiology, as a woman choosing an ingredient from a cookbook is ignorant ofand indifferent tothe chemistry involved in the choice.