The fact I was tracking satellites did not escape the attention of the
U.S. Government. They took interest, because if I could track a classified
military satellite with low cost equipment from my back yard, so could
some nearby third world country. I heard that an internal memorandum was
circulated within the government about all this. Shortly thereafter,
I received a phone call from someone identifying himself as a friend of
a friend in the CIA. He wanted to know if my system might be able to track
"uncoordinated targets". This was his terminology for "UFO's". I admitted
that my system wasn't likely to catch one, but I promised him I'd let him
know if I ever did.
In October 1994 I was invited to the Pentagon to give a briefing about
my "shoestring" system capable of tracking satellites. The meeting was
attended by people from Naval Space Command, the Naval Research Lab, an
office for Advanced Projects, and the CIA. They weren't overly surprised
it turned out, and had predicted years ago that someone would do this whenever
adequate compute power became easily affordable to the public.