The crystal ball from U.N.C.L.E.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which aired on NBC from 1964 to 1968, starred Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as secret agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, employed by U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law Enforcement) to thwart the terrorist and criminal plots of THRUSH.
The TV series displayed an uncanny knack for predicting current events and advances in science, even as it descended into farcical clichés in its third season. Consider these three capers:
The Super-Colossal Affair A Mafia family plans revenge on Las Vegas after being expelled from its casinos when “the whole town gets legitimate.” Using the cover of a movie production, a local mobster first aspires to create an atomic bomb, but his uncle steps in with a more practical alternative: A plane will drop a giant stink bomb on the gambling mecca.
Similarly, while a jihadist in the US may aspire to acquire a nuclear bomb, al-Qaeda would likely pursue a more realistic plan: using a “stinky” biological or chemical weapon, dropped in a bomb or sprayed from a plane. A year after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI recovered video tapes from Detroit and Madrid that apparently showed al-Qaeda operatives casing Las Vegas as a possible terrorist target.
The Monks of St. Thomas Affair THRUSH takes over a monastery in the Swiss Alps to use as a platform for a super laser gun that will destroy targets throughout Europe, starting with the Louvre in Paris. When Solo notes that the curvature of the earth will put the targets out of the range of a straight beam of light, the villainous abbot cites Einstein’s finding that gravity bends light, and boasts that the laser gun employs a gravitational field that bends light waves to any desired angle.
Scientists in April 2009 announced the creation of laser “light bullets” that can curve through the air. According to physicist Pavel Polynkin, the short-duration, high-intensity laser pulses create “pancakes” of light, in which the brightest part of the patterns, called Airy beams, bends.
According to the National Geographic News article, the bending laser light may help scientists monitor air pollution in the upper atmosphere without the need for airplanes or weather balloons.
While Polynkin dismissed any weapons application for the technology, a May 21, 2009 article in Air Force Print News Today suggested military uses. The curved beams “may make it possible to someday accelerate charged particles and guide high power microwaves and radiofrequency waves in the air . . . tools for detecting explosives and chemical/biological agents at remote locations.”
Polynkin said the light is bent only a small degree, but only a small degree would be necessary to follow the curvature of the earth, the prerequisite for the “fictional” THRUSH weapon.
The Concrete Overcoat Affair Bad guy Louis Strago and a former Nazi scientist plan to redirect the Gulf Stream in order to make Greenland a semi-tropical paradise run by THRUSH, while turning most of the Northern Hemisphere into an icebox. New York, Paris and London will suffer through blizzards in the middle of July.
In fact, scientists today are concerned that if global warming melts Greenland glaciers, the addition of large amounts of fresh water to the Atlantic Ocean will disrupt the themohaline circulation, the process that keeps parts of North America and Europe warm and habitable. The disastrous effect of disrupting the Gulf Stream was portrayed, to an exaggerated degree, in the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow.
In 1966, when this U.N.C.L.E. episode first aired, one would have assumed that anyone planning to freeze major cities or even risk such an outcome would be considered criminally insane. Now, many consider taking such a risk essential to preserving our economy.
The My Friend the Gorilla Affair The most ridiculous of U.N.C.L.E. episodes offered the most credible prediction. Every hoary Africa cliché is unleashed in this show, including a female Tarzan living in a tree house with a gorilla and a great white hunter taking his afternoon tea break.
In the opening sequence, Kuryakin discovers a dying tribesman who was assaulted by warriors who “run fast, jump high.” A doctor has invented a serum that turns natives into muscular supermen in a THRUSH plot to conquer all of Africa. The story accurately foretold the use of steroids and other drugs to give athletes the edge to “run fast, jump high” and enhance their performance in many sporting events.
McCallum (Kuryakin) developed a second TV career as Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard on the CBS series NCIS, which, coincidentally, included an episode in which a soldier takes drugs that turn him into a super warrior. The campy antics of the villains on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. would now be considered serious threats on NCIS.
If you want to know the secrets of the past and future, you might learn something from the established pundits and professors. But to get the real inside story, you need to watch more TV: Study the secret agent dancing with the gorilla.
