In the early 1960s, Lockheed had developed the Mach 3 "A-12" spyplane that the CIA recognized as a possible mothership for an advanced reconnaissance drone. A program to launch such a drone from the A-12 took precedence after Power's U-2 was brought down in the Soviet Union. The highly secret drone was given the preliminary designation of "Q-12.". To limit its weight and cost, the Q-12 was designed to be expendable. Its camera payload and guidance system were constructed in its nose section to be ejected and recovered after a parachute descent. The Q-12, its name changed to D-21, was carried on the back of the A-12 launch vehicle designated as "M-21." ("M" designated "Mother" and "D" stood for "Daughter." The project now had the codename "Tagboard".

Lambright then requested the "goals" of Project Aquarius. The NSA replied that 'even the release of the project name could reasonably be expected to cause grave damage to the national security,' and therefore was properly classified. This language was straight out of the section on the Top Secret classification of the Executive Order which established the classification system, Executive Order 12356. Confirmation! Project Aquarius existed and was classified Top Secret!

Despite repeated attempts through the FOIA over the intervening years, nothing more about Project Aquarius was obtained from the NSA.

In 1996 we decided to take another tack in our pursuit of Project Aquarius. Although earlier FOIA requests citing information published in 1990 by Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera were unsuccessful, using this information, we were finally able to produce significant documentation on a Project Aquarius conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This broke a long silence on the matter. The nagging question is when and how did William Moore (or the fabricators of the Telex) know of this project and it's name - or did he?