Ted Molczan

History

In February 2008 the front page of The New York Times hosted an article about an amateur satellite watcher Ted Molczan in relation to the story about falling American spy satelliteUSA-193. American officials were reluctant to provide information about the satellite, and instead, Ted Molczan, as the article says, "uncovers some of the deepest of the government’s expensive secrets and shares them on the Internet." Molczan participates with a group of other sky-watchers who have created a "network of amateur sky-watchers and satellite observers" who focus on "spotting secret intelligence-gathering satellites launched by the United States, Russia and China." As of 2017, the amateurs continue to make their sightings and analysis public on the internet via an electronic mailing list called SeeSat-L, just as they had a decade earlier, since they began the practice in the previous century in days of the early internet.