During World War II, U.S. officials were worried that the Japanese would bomb Lockheed’s aircraft factory in Burbank. Their solution was an amazing act of military deception: They got the Army Corps of Engineers to disguise the entire massive plant as a bucolic rural subdivision. “Another person who lived in the area talked about as being a boy, watching it all be set up like a movie studio production. They had fake houses, trees, etc. and moved parked cars around so it looked like a residential area from the skies overhead.”
It gets even better: According to accounts, Lockheed and the government got Hollywood’s help to further the ruse by making a fake Lockheed plant as a decoy. Warner Brothers disguised a nearby studio so that it looked like an aircraft plant from the air, in case the Japanese had intelligence that there was a military facility in the area. “For many years after one of the sound stages bore the leftover letters ‘HEED AIRCRAFT COMPANY,’ obviously the remanants of a fake Lockheed sign.”
(Barnstormers via Boing Boing)
