Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2021

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2021 go far beyond, as well as the Beatles music, featured in an episode with “Get Back.” In some episodes, verti- cal take-off airplanes are seen, with a design rather similar to that of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey converti- plane, released in 1989. SHADO’s staff make extensive use of futuristic wireless phones, another right anticipation. In fact, although the prototype of the first cordless phone was patented in 1966, it was only in the ‘70s that models simi- lar to those used in SHADO were patented, which then arrived on the market in the ‘80s. Access to the command of SHADO and other op- erational structures of the agency is via voice recognition and finger- print scanning, technologies already sketched in the ‘50s, but which only long after the creation of UFO were applied as shown in the TV series. Fi- nally, a couple of curiosities with a typically English flavor. The first: in the road scenes, recurring in various episodes, the right-hand drive (steering wheel on the left) is evi- dent because the writers had imag- ined that within a decade even Great Britain would have adapted to the European and American driv- ing standard; one of the few predic- tions that did not come true. The second: Moonbase’s housing struc- tures are shaped like soccer balls, with hexagons and pentagons, an architectural choice perhaps influ- enced by the world championship won by England in 1966, thanks to a famous nonexistent goal. Episode 12, “Court Martial”, is a true science fiction anomaly, as it does not include any reference to that genre − an episode with a plot and a screenplay more typical of the Spy Story genre than the Sci-Fi one. Much less “terrestrial” is episode 13, “Close Up”, in which SHADO devel- ops a spacecraft equipped with a sort of space telescope, whose task is to chase the aliens to their planet, to photograph it, and to send the images to Earth. The launch is car- ried out by NASA, and the installa- tion of the photographic instru- ment on the spacecraft takes place in lunar orbit. In this case too, we