Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2010, volume 28, pages 759 ^ 771 doi:10.1068/d5308 Goatsucker: toward a spatial theory of state secrecy Trevor Paglen Department of Geography, University of California at Berkeley, 507 McCone Hall #4740, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; e-mail:
[email protected] Received 1 May 2008; in revised form 6 April 2010 Abstract. While the question of state secrecy has become a topic of much political debate, relatively little attention has been paid to the topic in academic literature. Most of the literature adopts one of several frameworks. In the legal literature, state secrecy has been examined as a historical and constitutional question. Social scientists have tended to follow Weber in examining secrecy as a question of regulation and bureaucracy or have focused on the cultural play of visibility and invisi- bility that is often characteristic of state secrecy. This paper, by way of contrast, uses the development of the F-117A `stealth fighter' as a case study to give a spatial account of secrecy. I show how state secrecy gives rise to numerous spatial, political, juridical, and even ecological contradictions and propose that a spatial understanding of state secrecy foregrounding these contradictions provides a fruitful basis for a deeper understanding of state secrecy. Late one night during the summer of 1984, two fighter pilots saw a ghost in the sky above Las Vegas. A single two-seat F-16 `Viper' fighter was on a routine flight over the city that night, its pilots alternating between watching instruments, checking in with ground controllers, and scanning the skies above.