Isegoria

The phenomenally low radar cross section on the Oxcart had to be lowered even further, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

In a hangar not far from the radar range, Edward Lovick got to work on a one-eighth-scale model of the Oxcart. In what became known as Project Kempster-Lacroix, Lovick designed a system straight out of Star Trek or James Bond. “Two giant electron guns were to be mounted on either side of the aircraft,” Lovick recalls. Remarkably, the purpose of the guns would be “to shoot out a twenty-five-foot-wide ion cloud of highly charged particles in front of the plane as it flew over denied territory.” That gaseous cloud, Lovick determined, would further absorb radar waves coming up from radar tracking stations on the ground.

Using the small-scale model, the scientists were able to prove the scheme worked, which meant it was time to build a full-scale mock-up of Kempster-Lacroix. Testing the system out on a full-size aircraft, the scientists discovered that the radiation emitted by the electron guns would be too dangerous for the pilots. So a separate team of engineers designed an X-ray shield that the pilots could wear over their pressure suits while flying an Oxcart outfitted with Kempster-Lacroix. When one of the pilots made a test run, he determined that the thickness of the shield was far too cumbersome to wear while trying to fly an airplane at Mach 3. Then, while Lovick was working on a solution, the Air Force changed its mind. The Oxcart’s low observables were low enough, the Pentagon said. Project Kempster-Lacroix was abandoned.

[…]

Finally satisfied with the radar cross section, the CIA decided to set up its own electronic countermeasures office at Area 51. In 1963, the first group consisted of two men from Sylvania, a company better known for making lightbulbs than for its top secret work for the CIA. “The first jamming system was called Red Dog; later it became Blue Dog,” explains Ken Swanson, the first official ECM officer at Area 51. The Red Dog system was designed to detect Russian surface-to-air missiles coming after Oxcart and then jam those missiles with an electronic pulse.

[…]

With Red Dog, the CIA wanted to see how the Oxcart would show up on Soviet radar, and so, at the southern tip of Groom Lake, on EG& G Road, Sylvania built two ECM systems, one to simulate Russian SA-2 radar and a second to simulate the Fan Song surface-to-air missile system that was showing up in North Vietnam. The goal was to see what Oxcart looked like, or hopefully did not look like, on these radars.

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