There is so much history to learn, there’s no surprise there are obscure facts that many of us have never heard of. On Reddit, there is a specific forum dedicated to revealing surprising facts called r/TodayILearned. Here, people can share amazing facts that they had no idea about until now. Honestly, if you tune into this board, you may learn more browsing than you ever did in history class. But to make it easy and interesting, we’ve compiled some of our favorite facts from this forum and expanded on the history there. So you can rest assured that these history fan-fueled facts are obscure and fact-checked.
This Person Who Discovered the History of Watching for Soviet Bombers
This person discovered that in the 1950s, the US didn’t really have a hi-tech way to make sure that the Soviets wouldn’t attack from the sky. So they came up with a strange idea. “TIL that in the early 50s, before national radar system and satellites, the US surveyed the skies with Operation Skywatch: a million civilian volunteers in rickety towers with binoculars and a telephone, watching for Soviet bombers.” – Obscure Fact by jackconnery79
It’s pretty impressive that the US could mobilize such an amazing force of volunteers to fuel this initiative. Let’s look at the numbers. 800,000 volunteers comprised the Ground Observer Corps. At its height, in the 1950s, volunteers manned more than 16,000 observation posts and 73 filter centers. Recruited by local civil defense authorities and the Air Force, civilians vowed to watch the sky for potential hostile aircraft intent on attacking their homeland. The volunteers consisted of women and children as well as the typical young man you’d expect for the job. It was dissolved by the late 1950s.