User:Carguychris/sandbox

On September 24, 1959, a Lockheed U-2 spy plane made a forced landing at a small civil airstrip in Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan, after it ran out of fuel trying to reach Naval Air Facility Atsugi. A small crowd of civilian onlookers gathered, some of whom carried cameras. Within minutes, a plane arrived carrying a U.S. military security team, who ordered the civilians to disperse at gunpoint and cordoned off the U-2. This provoked even greater curiosity among the bystanders, and press coverage of the incident and photos of the U-2 (which did not display civil aircraft registration markings) were published in Japanese newspapers and Japanese aviation magazine Aireview. At the time, the U.S. government had not acknowledged that the U-2 was intended for military surveillance; the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) said it was designed for weather research. The unusual response of the U.S. military to a seemingly minor incident involving a supposedly non-military research plane stoked speculation that the NACA story was disinformation; the U-2's actual mission was increasingly becoming an open secret.