Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency release, dated 2012-06-01, contains an English translation of a 1948 Soviet article by S. P. Tolstov and M. A. Orlov on archaeological aerial surveys in Khwarazm, Uzbekistan, during 1945 and 1946. It describes flight altitudes, lighting and camera methods for photographing ruins. The authors report flights of more than 9,000 kilometers that doubled the number of known monuments, located medieval cities and irrigation networks, and produced an archaeological map. It contains no UFO material.
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plane flies over the monument in a direction opposite the sun and the object is viewed from the side of the shadows which determine its form. If the monument has low relief, the objective survey of the plan should be done from a low altitude with the camera at a 30°-70° angle. Surveying against the sun by changing the angle of the camera in the manual camera was one of the fundamental methods of work which permitted the discovery of new objects and obtained the best results in photographic complicated surveys. To bring out details in roller and to cut through sand in the atmosphere a red filter was helpful. Thus, were located the individual buildings in the medieval city of Vazar (Lov-Kosken) on Crasturt Plateau. Former gardens, impossible to locate on the ground unless guided by aerial photographs, played an important role in determining the extent of large complexes. however, standing walls or towers should not be photographed early or late because the long shadows hide the area around the building. Different exposures throughout the day produce excellent composite photographs. The optimum medium altitude of flights in archaeological research varied from 200-600 m., which is the cruising height at which monuments are easy to describe and discover. For a planned topographic survey of a region and of more complex monuments, a higher altitude is necessary. Luring the Kizil-Kum explorations in 1846, we came
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.